AU Ask 17

[arukou]

 (From Reioka:  Just tell me when you get tired of these buddy: Tony in a pick-your-own tulip field, carefully cutting the stems with scissors like his mother taught him so long ago, and glancing up just in time to see this scrawny little blond sneeze so hard that he drops his armful of flowers. Tony stares, torn between laughing and offering help. "I'mb allergic," scrawny blond explains, wiping his nose. Tony is horrified. "Then why are you here?!" "I bean. Gotta ged flowers somehow." Tony is charmed. Somehow.)

No worries. I took a dinner break. And as some of my long-time followers can tell you, sometimes I take forever to get to an ask.

This hearkens to the flowershop/tattoo dichotomy for me, and I always love it when people assign Tony as the florist and Steve as the tattooist. I always want to push it a little further and say that Tony has a bit of plant magic in him, just enough that plants flourish under his care and the herbal tinctures and concoctions and teas he makes from them are always just a little more potent, and there’s something about them. Some ineffable thing.

Steve’s had Tony’s lavender tea. The first time he drank it, he said it tasted like laying on the grass on the first warm day of spring, and Tony laughed and said that was silly. The second time he had it, he said it was like helping his mom make cookies around Christmas time. Every time it tastes a little different to him, and he can never describe what that taste is like without going to some bizarre fuzzy metaphor.

Tony cultivates plants with trimmed stamens for Steve so that there’s never any pollen to worry about. They still produce nectar, so they still smell sweet and fresh, and Steve always asks him how he does it. He just shrugs a little and says he’s always had a knack.

His shop is light and green and sunshine and it always smells amazing, like earth and life, even in the dead of winter. He brews up tea after tea for the Rogers, anything to ease mother and son’s persistent coughing, aching ears, wheezing lungs. Mrs. Rogers swears she’s never seen anything like it in all her years as a nurse, watches with all the intent of a scientist making hypotheses as Tony makes the tinctures for her again and again, but she can never figure out just why his plants would be more potent than others, just why his teas and herbs have such a profound effect where others are mediocre at best.