La pasticherie de Petra

DVD commentary for everbright. Original text here.

Title: Nutritious high protein

From the Rocky Horror Picture Show, happily giving away the punchline, which is also the traditional callback at this juncture of the song "I Can Make You A Man." Which is a Steve Rogers song and no mistake, if you ask me, though Dr. Erskine was less lascivious than Frank. But then, so's everybody except Jack Harkness.

Fandom: The Avengers (2012)
Summary: How do you tailor a shirt to hug pectorals as tightly as Steve's undershirt does?
Rating: Good clean comics biology

Or in other words, "Not even close to clean, but something like gen."

Notes: For liviapenn, who asked the question in the summary.

Livia is dangerous amazing amazingly dangerous.

( Materials science is hot )

Well, it is. Right? Right.


Steve thinks something happened to people's sense of touch in the last seventy years. Most clothes feel wrong, too plasticky.

Steve completely missed the era of "Do you know how many polyesters they had to kill to make that suit?" but he might appreciate the joke. If not leisure suits.

When SHIELD gives Steve a new undershirt, he's reluctant to touch it. If it's woven out of petroleum like everything else, it won't fit right under the uniform.

This one's different. It clings to his fingers like silk, and to his chest like a second skin. It won't chafe under the weight of a pack, no matter how long he wears it in blistering sun, he can feel that. "What is it?" he asks, but the agent who gives it to him shakes her head.

If he were a slightly different kind of geek, he'd say it had a nice hand. If he knew what he was touching and he was Tony Stark, he'd say it had a nice handjob.

"Classified, sir."

Steve consults with his backchannel and tries to ignore Tony's whistle as he walks in, like he's one of the chorus girls out on the town in her only pair of stockings. "What is this undershirt made of?" he asks.

"I'm going to need you to take it off for analysis." Like most of Tony's deadpan, it has a smirk and a leer underneath.

I don't ship it. Honest. I just believe in Tony's equal-opportunity perving on everyone who's anywhere near him and anything like as pretty as Steve (or as smart as Bruce, or--).

He takes his shirt off anyway--it's a little harder than he expected, as if it doesn't want to let him go--and sets it on a table.

His shirt loves him like the camera loves him.

For once, he doesn't have to ignore the way Tony's looking at him, because he's looking at the shirt, picking it up immediately and running his fingers over it like they're the most delicate sensors in the lab.

Which they are, sort of, maybe.

"Well?"

"It's organic." Tony puts it on an inset plate that might be a scale or might be anything else.

The worst words are the ones that mean something new on top of their old meaning. "Organic as in no pesticides, or organic as in really long name only Bruce can pronounce?"

"You know, I want some lettuce that doesn't contain carbon. Just as an alternative to see what non-organic food is really like.

"--I was kidding, Tony. Jeez."

Tony taps at his display. "Both, probably."

"Is it expensive?" Steve only set it down a moment ago, but he's already used to how it feels. "I'd like more clothes made out of it, if it's not."

Steve knows a good thing when it's hugging his pecs.

"It's priceless." Tony peers at the screen and whistles. "Literally--even for me."

"Oh."

Tony's smirking again--nothing new there. "Looks like one of the new materials scientists came up with it. Somebody deep in a bunker with nothing to do and nobody to talk to."

Obviously Tony's kind of guy. Or gal.

Steve has been in enough science bunkers that he has a sense of what they used to cost. He mentally adds a head-spinning number of zeroes. "Never mind, then."

"If you talk to this Parker, he'd probably make you more."

Inadvertently, even.

Tony flicks his fingers and opens up a display of something Steve recognizes as a really big molecule, rotating slowly. And then Tony's sniggering at him. "Especially if you want it for underwear."

The silly factor goes to eleven riiight around here, as if there's one mappable molecule that makes seminal fluid obviously seminal. Comic book science! I said it to start and boy, did I ever mean it.

"It's a little too close-fitting for anything else," Steve says, and Tony loses it, laughing outright.

"Tell him that," he says, and closes out the windows like Steve has any chance of figuring out what the spinning molecule means, let alone why it's funny. "Bet he'll make you briefs. Leotards. A red-white-and-blue G-string."

Hiding the data and bringing up a G-string is dirty pool. But it's Tony.

Steve frowns at him. "Why would I want one of those?"

Of course I looked up when G-string started meaning underwear. Steve would have understood it, not least because he hung out with chorus girls.

Tony blinks at him, then gives him the smile Steve classifies as "Look who's a big boy now and gets dirty jokes!" "Parker's material--it's biological."

That word means about as much to Steve as "organic."

This joke, it is très mal--the French for "organic" as in "without pesticides" is "biologique," which is just as meaninglessly double-meaninged as "organic." Mmm, biological food! Much superior to the alternative.

"And?"

"Based off of--" Tony waves his hand and brings the giant molecule back. "Secretions."

"What?"

"Bodily secretions."

"Like--hair? Or silk?"

"Kind of. Sort of. Sort of--no, not really. At all." Tony breaks into a string of biology words, out of which Steve manages to understand "mucus" and "seminal fluid."

Technobabble is obfuscation for fun and profit. Well, just fun in this case.

Steve would leave the shirt where it's sitting, except Tony's petting it like he wants it and isn't disturbed by its material. "You know people used to use urine to dye clothes, right?" he says, and picks it up.

The things we learn from Quite Interesting are often helpful in pulling out random data.

It clings to his hand, not at all like seminal fluid.

Fun fact: silk shirts stick to brick walls, so if there's a garment you're not sure of the material of, throw it against a wall. You know, like spaghetti.

Tony looks a little heartbroken. "Yeah, but that's--you know--" He makes a timeless gesture with his hand. "Seminal fluid?"

It hurts Tony when Steve doesn't go YUCK. With the pumping motion and everything! Sometimes the Corn-fed American Boy motif overwhelms the Soldier Who Went To War truth.

"It's comfortable. And that might be sexual harassment." All these new words, but he's getting the hang of some of them. Steve shrugs on the shirt and smooths it down over his stomach. "Where's the materials lab?"

"Subbasement forty-seven C," JARVIS says.

"Why?" Tony asks, his voice hollow.

"I want to go congratulate them on their work," Steve says, and manages not to start laughing until he's in the elevator.

I trust JARVIS not to tell Tony that Steve lost it giggling.

Peter Parker indubitably falls all over himself fanboying.