“Okay,” Tony gasped hoarsely in between hard coughs. “I’ll just…suffer in silence.” He let out another long series of coughs, but the corners of his mouth were turned up in a smirk, and he was looking at Carlos with a merry gleam in his eyes.
Carlos snorted softly and reached to take the offending cup of coffee away. “You want me to make you a new one?” he asked.
“That depends,” Tony grinned without coughing this time, “are you going to run a sample of it through the chem analyzer before you give it to me?” He was laughing silently, kind of enjoying Carlos’s unintentional knack of breaking him out of a rut.
Carlos smiled sheepishly, glancing away. “Uh… would you like me to?” he asked. It was a joke, obviously, but Carlos was playing along. Maybe he’ll do it just to make sure Stark knew that it hadn’t been on purpose… Carlos didn’t know what the hell happened. He suspected his own cup was also compromised.
Tony flashed a fond grin at Carlos and chuckled. “Either you’re stumped on something, have one of your not-fully-formed ‘Eurika’ ideas, or someone has become your latest distraction. Which one is it?” He asked teasingly.
“Huh?” Carlos asked. “Oh, no, I was just wondering if I have to make myself a new cup too. Probably… heh. I like my sugar.” What did Stark mean by ‘someone’?
“I’ll, uh… take this and be back in a bit,” he then told his boss, lifting the cup in illustration.
The Perfect Scientist 