Work Text:
"So, punching out airplanes, huh?" Tony said when Bruce walked into the workshop. There was no greeting, no preamble—Bruce had long since realized that the only time Tony wasn't blunt was when he was being avoidant. He glanced up at the computer screens suspended from the ceiling. The sound was muted but it wasn't hard to realize that Tony was replaying footage from the helicarrier, three different angles of the Other Guy fighting Thor. Around the two of them metal flooring crumpled and storage pallet splintered; SHIELD personnel scurried to avoid flying debris. Tony paused the video, replayed the Other Guy ripping the wing from a fighter jet once, twice, and Bruce looked away.
He walked back to his desk, checked the progress of the simulations he'd started before taking a break for lunch. "I'm going to take it that Fury doesn't know you have that."
Tony made a derisive noise. "What Fury doesn't know can't hurt him."
Bruce laughed a little, under his breath. "What Fury finds out can hurt you."
"Please," Tony said. Bruce could hear the squeak of his chair wheels as he pushed himself across the workroom floor. "As if I'm scared of—"
"By which I mean," Bruce interrupted him, "that he'll tell Pepper."
There was a pause. "Deviously played, Dr. Banner."
"Don't get NSF funding if you're not willing to think outside the box," Bruce said, frowning at the screen. The results were a fraction off from what he'd hoped—not much, but just enough to be statistically significant. Looked like he'd have to go back to the drawing board.
The chair wheels creaked again, as though Tony were pushing himself back and forth along the length of his workbench. "You're not going to ask me why I was looking at it?"
If it wouldn't have involved him losing his place in the stream of numbers scrolling across the computer monitor, Bruce would have rolled his eyes. "Well," he said dryly, "I sort of figured you were going to tell me anyway."
"That is... okay, that's actually an entirely fair characterization, but on the other hand I'd also like you to factor in that I didn't, you know, call you back from lunch to show it to you, which I think demonstrates real signs of personal growth and maturity. My therapist would be incredibly proud of me. If I had a therapist."
Bruce turned at that and cocked an eyebrow at Tony. It was an expression which had been known to chasten more than one grad student in its time, but it didn't seem to throw Tony at all. The chair continued its journey up and down the floor, wheels creaking, propelled by Tony's feet in their scuffed Converse. "I mean," Tony continued, "I have had a therapist. Well, therapists plural. Because Pepper made a threat, and there was the whole court-mandated yadda yadda, but did you know that a profession can disbar a patient? The entire American Psychological Association just—"
"Tony."
"Fine, fine. JARVIS, bring up the most relevant fifteen seconds of footage, play at one quarter normal speed and overlay with a data summary." In the air above their heads, a 3D composite of the Other Guy and Thor appeared, advancing towards one another with ponderous slowness over a wire-frame background. At that speed, it looked ridiculous rather than deadly; Bruce's stomach still lurched at the sight.
"Tony," Bruce began, because he didn't want this, not this again—not having bright lights shone on all the worst parts of him, not having people try to take his mistakes and make them weapons. He'd been contented living here, if never entirely happy, and the thoughts of having to strike out on his own again, of finding some uninhabited stretch of the Great Steppe or tiny apartment in Mexico City, were exhausting.
"Isn't it awesome? Incredible economy of motion, maximum impact," Tony said with a happy little sigh, gazing at the hologram of the Other Guy with the slightly moonstruck expression that Bruce normally associated with a teenager with a crush. Then he shifted forward in his seat, pointed. "But see, look, watch your left side here—see how you tend to leave yourself open just a little bit in a way you don't with your right? You need to close up there, big guy, no matter how quick you heal."
Bruce blinked at him, not sure if he was more taken aback by why Tony had been watching the footage or by the fact that Tony wasn't making a distinction between him and the Other Guy. "You're watching this to give me pointers on how the Other Guy should fight?"
Tony rolled his eyes. "No, I'm pointing out ways for you not to get hurt."
"Oh," Bruce said.
"Though, that said," Tony continued, spinning around in his chair, "you've got some definite room for improvement here, if you had the headroom to lift that plane, you could totally have weaponized it in a way that the warranty totally doesn't allow for—"
"Tony," Bruce said softly.
"Fine," Tony said, "fine, I just, you know—" His hands cut through the air, an ambiguous gesture that Bruce thought perhaps he could read anyway—something that said I waited a long time to realize I had people who could help me not hurt myself; let me pay it forward. It was much the same meaning Bruce had read into the gift of a luxury apartment in a Manhattan skyscraper, the eager offer of friendship; not too dissimilar from what had made Bruce take a deep breath and walk into a noisy, crowded clinic and say let me help.
"Yeah," Bruce said, because he could give that much, even if he didn't know yet how to give much more; because there were so many things he'd forgotten when he was running and he was going to have to start over. "I know."
There was silence in the room for a moment, broken only by the soft hum of the servers and the white noise that was JARVIS, until Tony finally said, "You're not actually going to say anything to Fury, right? Because he totally will tell Pepper, and after that time she and Coulson ganged up on me it's a little, you know, never did get a contractor to come in and fix the bullet holes in the drywall so—"
"Your interior design is safe with me," Bruce said with mock solemnity.
Tony pressed one hand to his chest, right over the arc reactor's steady glow. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, seriously," he said archly. The two of them went back to their respective projects—Tony digging out a welding torch, Bruce recalibrating his simulations—and the conversation moved to other topics, to composite modeling and the fries in the MIT dining hall and the weirdest places they'd woken up in the aftermath of cheap tequila.
"It was absolutely, one hundred per cent not my fault," Tony said, sounding wounded, "there was no way I could know that they were actually nuns, and besides, I was wearing a toga, just about—it's not like they could see anything." For the first time in longer than he could remember, Bruce laughed until his sides hurt, because of course Tony Stark would have a more embarrassing public nudity story than he did—and overhead, unnoticed, a holographic Hulk fought on, buttressed by a circle of five.