(no subject)

[ahollowman]

Well. That's ... weird.

Tony checked his refrigerator that morning, getting together ingredients for a smoothie. His frozen bananas were in evidence, his Cape Cod chicken salad was not. But that could be explained by the fact that Panoptes was on the way between the library and the park, so Peter passed it nearly daily in the summer. And the kid was a bottomless pit.

But the shoes. That was weirder.

About a fourth of his shoes were missing. It was only the left shoes. Somebody was leaving him a message. A very stupid one. A stupid one that was making Tony far too goddamned paranoid, given the vampire situation and the fact that Panootes and his penthouse sat directly on top of the armory. Tony knit his brows in consternation, pulled on a pair of Converse and moved back to the kitchen to finish making breakfast.

He jerked back, startled, when he rounded the corner.

"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!"

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[speed_of_dweeb]

Leaning against the counter, Pietro is mostly concerned with the delicate task of picking all the chicken out of his stolen salad. The walnuts are also deemed acceptable and picked out. But the celery? Celery?! Who bothered with that hard, crunchy water? It was, at best, texture. At worst?

Although his smirk is immediate at having garnered such a reaction from Stark, Pietro feels like being a pain enough to take a moment longer to poke around in the salad before he gives any reply.

“Why do you bother with such things?” he asks, spearing a piece of celery and holding it up. “Of all the food?”

[ahollowman]

"Um, because it's good for you and contains vital nutrients? Because it's low in calories and high in fiber?"

Tony glowered suspiciously for a moment. Until, at last, it occurred to him that his security system wouldn't have been able to track Pietro on the thermal, or the motion senors. He took a few steps forward and took the bowl of chicken salad back.

"Why are you here, Maximoff? Where are my shoes?"

[speed_of_dweeb]

Had the salad been any more interesting or, really, his having stolen as anything but an option to annoy the old man, Pietro would have blurred it out of reach. Hell, he thought, he could have held it over his head and made the shorter man jump for it.

"Is this a problem for you? Fiber?" With his hands suddenly free, he blurs out of the room to retrieve himself a coffee (dumping money on the counter in exchange for the coffee he took out of the hand of the person first in line) and back in again. It takes a moment, at most. Less to be leaning against the counter again with all due disrespect.

"Most of them are there," he assures him, but only in the way that suggests the rest of them are in danger of lethal damage. He holds up his phone in his free hand, thumb pointing at one of the icons on the screen "You are good at these app things, yes?"

[ahollowman]

The headache was already building behind Tony's eyes. He pressed his fingers to them. The last thing the kid needed was coffee. Tony put his frozen bananas in the blender pointedly.

"And you didn't get me any."

He turned on Pietro to pull protein powder, spirulina, and chia seed from the cupboard.

"And yes. I am very good at those app things. I am very good at most things. Even when my shoes aren't being held hostage. What do you need, kid? I think we both agree I owe you that much."

Which was really the least of it.

[speed_of_dweeb]

From a basic understanding of biology, caffeine added to the system of a speedster should have been like that scene in Mad Max where they spit gasoline directly into the engine. With Pietro, however? He genuinely enjoys the dark bitter taste of the stuff but gets no kick out of it. No more than he can get by being a pain in Tony's ass in the man's own kitchen. Which is considerable.

Which would explain why he blurs off and back, returning to set a bran muffin with deliberate care on the counter beside the older man's elbow. "There," he says, "Fiber."

He refrains from mentioning what Tony Stark of Stark Industry owes him, as far as he is concerned. Not because Pietro shies away from snarling at the figure who had stood as proof of too much horror in his life so far, but because of the dreams. He does not want to remember how often he has dreamed of dying lately.

"You can put together app for my delivery service," it comes as only half a question, half statement. Stark, he is sure, is capable of the basic structure Pietro imagines would be required for such a thing. "I do not need much. They will enter address, what they want, pay. I will deliver whatever it is. Even your fiber."

[ahollowman]

Tony gave a very, very large roll of his eyes at the muffin, but picked it up anyway and peeled the wrapper back before taking a bite. He was a busy man, and breakfast was breakfast.

"An app?" He cleared his throat and swallowed, before spooning some of the additives he'd pulled into the blender, and going to the refrigerator for the plastic bowl of sliced mangoes that Peter so eschewed.

"For a delivery service? That's all you want?"

Well, that would be easy.

[speed_of_dweeb]

If anything could be declared true or real on this planet...Stark would wake up to find his fridge full of prune juice sometime in the coming weeks. The fact that it would be his money used to pay for it would just be the extra bonus.

Pietro steals a slice of mango with ease and eats it leisurely with his fingers. He shrugs. "All I need now."

It's not a promise to stop with one favor, nor is it a suggestion that they'll be anything like even for this. But it's more relaxed than he's been around the older man before. "I eat more than the City gives me," he tells him, referring to his bank balance. "It's not fair to steal from the places here."