Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You know you can just not put that on in the first place, right?” Clint finally asked as he watched Bruce take the cilantro off his tacos for approximately the hundredth Taco Tuesday in a row.

Well, not the actual hundredth. He’d only known Bruce for a year and they’d just started this tradition a couple months ago. But it sure felt like the hundredth time he’d seen this little maneuver and been very, very confused.

Bruce squinted at him.

“Authentic tacos have meat, onions, and cilantro,” he said.

“Yeah, I know that,” Clint replied, because… yeah. He knew that. He knew Bruce knew that and he knew Bruce knew that he knew that so why restate such a well-known fact? “But if you don’t want to eat one of the ingredients, you can leave it off the taco in the first place? Instead of putting it on just to take it back off?”

 “It wouldn’t be authentic that way,” Bruce said, frowning slightly.

Clint should’ve kept his mouth shut. Who cared if Bruce was weird about tacos? Fuck knows Clint had plenty of his own deep-seated idiosyncrasies around food that he’d rather no one ever dig into, and if this was that kind of thing then it was totally fine for Bruce to keep doing it. 

“Do you not like it because it’s green?” he asked, aiming for vaguely nonsensical and clearly hitting his mark based on the way Bruce was now staring at him.

He looked at Clint. 

He looked at the plate of jalapenos they’d both been munching on. 

He looked back at Clint. 

He looked at the bowl of salsa verde they’d been dipping their tortilla chips in. 

He looked back at Clint.

“No?”

Clint took an ostentatiously large bite of his own taco.

Bruce looked down at his carefully picked-off pile of cilantro and sighed heavily.

“It tastes like soap,” he muttered.

At least, that’s what Clint thought he said. It had been only just loud enough for Clint to hear over the sound of his own chewing. Still didn’t make any sense though.

“Does it?” Clint asked, bewildered. Cilantro was delicious. Definitely tasted nothing like soap. Not that Clint had any experience with that, no sir. “Eat a lot of soap, do you?”

Bruce stuck his tongue out at Clint and they both burst out laughing. 

Clint loved being able to get Bruce comfortable enough to let his guard down. That had been one of the reasons he’d started their Taco Tuesday tradition after all. They’d been living and working together for nine months by the time he figured out why that look on Bruce’s face was so familiar. 

He was always halfway to fleeing, one foot out the door just like Clint was most days.

It had been startling to realize he didn’t want to lose Bruce.

So he’d started talking to him, late one night, when it was just the two of them still awake (or awake again). Just small talk, just conversation about places they’d visited, things they’d seen, foods they’d eaten. 

They’d discovered a mutual appreciation for, of all things, tacos. From there things had spiraled. Clint dragged Bruce around the city, hunting down any taqueria or food truck that might remotely have genuine, authentic tacos. Bruce, generally averse to going out, countered with making their own tacos, once he’d sourced an appropriate supplier of the meat and spices they needed. 

And with spending so much time together… Clint really shouldn’t have been surprised that his feelings for Bruce had moved past just friends. Natasha had always scolded him for being attracted to danger, after all. Not that she had any moral high ground on that.

“No, I have never eaten soap,” Bruce said, once they’d both calmed down a bit. “It’s a known phenomenon though,” he continued, pushing up his glasses absent-mindedly like he didn’t know exactly how much Clint loved it when he went full Dorky Professor About To Explain A Thing. Maybe he didn’t. Clint filed that thought away as possibly something to bring up at a later point and turned his attention back to the lecture.

“There’s a subset of the population, maybe fifteen percent or so, who have an allele of a particular gene that makes the cilantro leaf taste very sharp and chemical, almost like the way unscented soap smells. The vast majority of people do not have that allele of that gene and therefore do not think cilantro tastes like soap, though I don’t know whether everyone in that 85% specifically enjoys the taste. That is more likely to be naturally variable like it is for other tastes.”

“Huh, weird. So you have this soap gene?”

“Allele,” Bruce corrected lightly. “And yes. I haven’t genotyped myself because it doesn’t matter, but considering cilantro tastes like… soap… I assume I must.”

“Does Hulk have the allele too?” Clint asked. He didn’t know the specific science behind Bruce’s alter ego – was pretty sure Bruce didn’t want anyone to know the specific science behind his alter ego, to be honest – but he was about 60% sure it wasn’t based in genetics.

“I… don’t know,” Bruce replied, slightly stunned. “I’ve never tested that.”

“Do you want to?”

“Probably a bad idea.”

“Probably.”

—  

“Barton, why is the Hulk throwing tacos all around the containment cell?”

“Cause they taste like soap.”

“NO. MORE. LEAVES!!!!”