So @kingloptr put the idea of Thunderfrostiron in my head and I started writing a thing, but then THIS little ditty popped into my mind and I couldn’t not.
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“Goddamnit!”
Bruce glanced over, mild and placid as ever in the face of such dramatics. “Tony, what’s eatin’ you?”
“I’ll tell you what’s eatin’ me. Jarvis discovered that Tall, Dark and Stormy have been playing hide the hammer in my goddamn suite!” Tony whirled to face him, letting the tablet clatter to the worktable in disgust. “Yeah. Just let that sink in. What the hell am I supposed to do about this? Call Fury? Tell their mom? Film it and put it on the Internet?”
“Huh.” Bruce looked perturbed, but not for any of the right reasons. “Is that really what you’re calling them? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s funny…”
Tony leveled him with a glare. “Do you have any better ideas?”
Bruce considered this question with the gravity it deserved, before hesitantly offering, “ThoLo?”
Tony sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Thou only livest once?” He snorted, then added, “And when thou livest upwards of several millennia, thou might as well schtup thy psychotic little brother? Right.”
Bruce grimaced. “Maybe it’s not that weird for aliens? I mean, we don’t really know anything about the Asgardians, when it comes down to it. Who knows what else they get up to.” He didn’t sound terribly convinced of his own words.
Tony gave a disbelieving huff, spinning petulantly in his chair. “They’d just better not break the bed. I didn’t exactly reinforce that room with magnitude 8.5 earthquakes in mind.” He paused, realizing that wasn’t entirely true. “At least, none with the epicenter on the goddamn mattress.”
Bruce’s eyes widened, as if the mechanics of the situation had just finally sunk in. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”
Tony’s lips pressed tight together as he picked up his tablet, resigned to stewing about the problem alone. Bruce turned back to his papers. A few minutes slipped by in silence.
“What about ‘Thorlok?’ Cuz one of them’s a wizard.”
Bruce: When I moved in, he insisted on funding all of my research. Except, you know, ever since The Incident, all my work’s been theoretical. It’s not actually that expensive. I’ve started just spending all the extra on fruit pies, just to see if he was keeping track. He isn’t. There are a lot of unused rooms in this building, and at least three of them are stacked floor to ceiling with fruit pies. He hasn’t said a word.
Natasha: It turned out Pepper and I both speak French. Tony doesn’t. Now, whenever he walks in, we just start whispering in French and giggling. Half the time we’re just exchanging recipes. He pretends not to be eavesdropping, but the other day I caught him asking JARVIS what ‘des oeufs’ meant.
Clint: I bought this big bag of little plastic flies, right? And whenever he’s not paying attention, I throw them into his drink. Half the time he doesn’t even notice and just drinks the damn things, but the other half? He starts checking all the house filtration systems, the exterminators, the works. He can’t figure out where all these flies are coming from. He’s fumigated three times in the last month.
Thor: I attempted to provide assistance with a project, but Stark assured me that it was ‘very technical’, and that I would not understand the intricacies. I can see why he would think so, as I am a mere Prince of Asgard, taught such basic engineering when I was a child and his ancestors could not yet walk. It has been five weeks, and he still has not corrected the misaligned condenser coil causing the problem.
Steve: I don’t know what Howard taught that kid, but he seems to be under the impression that homosexuality was invented in 2000. He keeps leaving magazines and pictures lying around like the sight of two men holding hands is going to give me a heart attack. I don’t have the heart to tell him about the Greeks.
Interviewer: So how are things in Avengers Tower?
Tony: How are things? I have no idea. I really don’t. There’s some kind of insect infestation in the vents and I think a spy is trying to seduce my girlfriend into moving to France. I tried to prank Captain America with gay porn, but him and Thor just started trying to reverse-engineer workout routines. The other day I went into one of the spare rooms, and I found some kind of one-armed sex hobo sitting on a throne of empty fruit pie boxes. I just walked out and closed the door. I don’t even wanna know.
OK, that answers my question about what was going on with the Ben & Jerry’s joke…
More importantly, though, Bruce Banner’s wording is interesting: “He sent Loki.” One possible interpretation of what was going on in The Avengers was that Loki wanted to invade and rule Earth anyway, and Thanos offered to help him in exchange for the Tesseract. Bruce’s wording, if it’s deliberately chosen (rather than just being imprecise), suggests that instead, Thanos was the one who chose the target because Earth was where the Space Stone was. Incidentally, that’s consistent with my fanfictional account of how things went down…
Loki is the Philosopher King 