Chapter Text
Excerpts taken from Dr. Rappaccini’s personal files, dated throughout March of 2017.
This is taking far too long. Bruce is mildly intelligent, but he’s still a man. I should have had him eating out of my hand weeks ago.
If this was just anxiety on his part, he would’ve snapped one way or the other by now. I’m missing something. Not something obvious, but something important all the same.
I just have to find what I’ve overlooked and compensate. It shouldn’t be anything too complicated. I’ve confirmed he’s single and attracted to women; everything else is semantics.
I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. It’s Barton. I brushed him off as a mere acquaintance of Bruce when we met and left it at that. My fault, of course. I know better than to make assumptions like that. But you can hardly blame me. Barton is so…unlike Bruce, to put it kindly. To put it unkindly, he’s a complete idiot. Bruce barely tolerates Stark, who I can begrudgingly admit is intelligent in his own right. The fact that he’s developed romantic feelings for Barton is shocking, to say the least.
My shock notwithstanding, the bond is there. Along with a…tension, which I now see is the source of Bruce’s hesitancy to accept my advances. He’s waiting for Barton. It’s pathetic, but easily exploitable. The plan goes forward. Barton poses no significant threat.
This situation has become incredibly irritating to me. I don’t like making mistakes. Barton has been the cause of two in the short time I’ve known him. I find I constantly have to remind myself why I’m going through this troublesome process, lest I do something to the detriment of my goals in my frustration.
The most humiliating part? It wasn’t two separate mistakes – I made the same error twice. I underestimated Barton. He is not nearly as stupid as he pretends to be. It’s impressive, if I’m being honest, that he was able to trick me for this long.
No, he’d have to be very much the opposite of stupid in order to operate at the level he does, apparently constantly. His job is to see everything, and he does so exceptionally. Which makes my trying to separate him from Bruce that much harder.
But it's no matter. He’s human. It will be only too easy to use his feelings for Bruce to cloud his judgement.
I now know, finally, that caution is of the utmost importance going forward. The smallest error could be enough to alert Barton. It will take time, far longer than I had originally anticipated, but I’ve come too far to stop now.