quotidian
HI THERE. Um, yes, I vanished from the internet for ahem mumble however many months because…
REASONS
but I am back now, and I bring you Avengers fic! I am nothing if not full of random. This is mostly movie-based Avengers, but I’ve cherry-picked details from various canons because that appears to be what all the cool kids are doing, and I have always had a deep and abiding desire to be like the cool kids. Clearly.
While the past few months may have given the impression that I’ve been twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, or perhaps having a Real Life, I assure you neither of these things is true. I’ve just been starting dozens of incredibly obscure fics and then failing to finish them. (Possibly the most obscure is the Supernatural/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo crossover that I started because Lisbeth Salander as an angel would pwn Dean Winchester so hard that I actually needed to gaze at that in print. It is just as beautiful as I thought it would be. Maybe I’ll even finish that fic some year-I give it about even odds.)
Also! I have an AO3 account now, and am slowly moving all the fic over there, as well. I had no idea how much fic I’d written. It’s kind of ridiculous.
But back to the fic actually appearing in this post:
This is a day in the life of Bruce Banner, mild-mannered scientist, unlicensed doctor, and occasional green rage monster. He tries so hard to mind his own business and stay below the radar. He does try. There should probably be a cautionary proverb about the best laid plans and Tony Stark.
Spoilers for the movie, and nothing Avengers-related belongs to me. Thank you so much to sae and zephy_magnum for the beta! ♥
Quotidian
He dreams of fire, of shattered glass and twisted, screaming metal, of the terrified, bloodied faces of his loved ones.
Even in the dream, he can’t believe his subconscious is doing this to him a-fucking-gain. Is it really not enough that he has to deal with his horrible memories when he’s awake? He couldn’t, oh, give himself a break when he’s unconscious?
Obviously not, because if there is one person guaranteed to be a total jerk to Bruce Banner, it is Bruce Banner. He has to hand it to his father; bastard’s been dead for decades, but damn, he did good work.
Apparently ranting at the subject of his dream woke him up, because he is definitely awake now. It’s 5:30 a.m., which is really sleeping in by his standards. Great. Another exciting day at Tony Stark’s house. Oh wait, no, at Tony’s mansion, that’s right, because some geniuses with daddy issues end up with mansions, while others end up squatting in glorified cardboard boxes in, say, Kibera.
Not that Bruce envies the mansion. The sad truth is that he really misses Rocinha; Rocinha is off the grid done right. He always had construction workers and electricians and plumbers living nearby, so he managed to get himself a house, running water, electricity, and even WiFi without ever putting his name on a piece of paper. It’s a very can-do, peace-enforced-by-drug-cartel, fuck-em-if-they-can’t-take-a-joke kind of place, and it was perfect for him. Too perfect-even before Ross found him, it had become a mistake to stay. He was dangerously comfortable there.
It’s best for everybody when Bruce starts each day with a crushing sense of futility, when just the act of living seems impossible. He found that in places like Kibera, Kolkata, and basically anywhere in the Russian Far East, most people were too burned out and worn down to act on their anger, him included. It was amazing, in that awful way his life has of being amazing.
Besides, in places like that, even if Bruce did hulk out, it wouldn’t be the worst thing that had ever happened to his neighbors. If he’d told them his life story, they’d have said, Yeah, and? It was nice. It’s tough to fly into a rage when you’re surrounded by people whose lives are as bad or worse than yours. You’re more likely to shut up, resign yourself, and learn to use your anger for fuel. Nothing about that encourages the other guy.
No, what’s rage-inducing is living within spitting distance of people who have it much better than you do, and, like an idiot, Bruce walked right into that. He just doesn’t have the strength of character to turn down a man who’s offering him an apartment and a lab and an unlimited budget. (He didn’t know that about himself until now; it’s kind of disappointing.) Looks like he’ll have to trade in crushing futility for bitterness, and in view of that, it’s good for him to experience a little class rage before breakfast. Sets the tone for the day, staves off any abrupt emotional changes.
So he hauls himself out of his luxurious bed and deliberately resents every piece of ridiculously fancy furniture or tech he runs across during his morning routine (and there are so many). Once he’s sufficiently irritated, he goes running. He runs ten miles a day when he’s not feeling too hostile, fifteen plus when he is. His resting heart rate is 35 beats per minute. It’s hilarious that that isn’t good enough.
After his run, he showers, then wanders down to the ridiculously fancy kitchen in the ridiculously fancy clothes Pepper Potts bought for him. He’s not sure whether she and Tony see him as a charity case or some kind of indentured lab monkey, but either way it pisses him off.
Clint and Natasha are already in the dining room, curled together on a couch, eating breakfast and staring silently at each other, like they’re communicating telepathically. Maybe they are. They’re impressively creepy, those two, but Bruce still envies their closeness more than is strictly…healthy. For anybody.
They glance up at him, nod in synch, then go back to their what-the-fuck staring contest. Bruce smiles vaguely in their direction and goes on a hunt for breakfast. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Tony stocks twenty different kinds of cereal, but nothing Bruce likes. That’s probably deliberate.
“G’morning, Natasha, Clint, Bruce,” Steve mumbles, wandering in and squinting unhappily at the light. Captain America is not a morning person. Even his flaws are adorable, right? Of course Bruce would end up living with the successful twin to his own failed experiment. Of course. Irony, he loves it. But not as much as it loves him.
“Morning, Steve.” He smiles pleasantly enough that Steve is inspired to smile back. Not bad, for the morning. Bruce would like to thank the Academy.
God, it’s only 9 and already he’s sick of himself.
“Have you seen Tony lately?” he asks, mostly as an apology for what he’s thinking. “We’ve been working on some improvements to your suit, and I know he wants you to test it out at some point.”
Steve looks surprised and a little nervous, the way he always does when people do nice things for him. “Thanks, Bruce. I know Tony loves tinkering, but you didn’t have to trouble yourself.”
“Why else is Tony putting me up, right?”
Steve shakes his head; Captain America disapproves of self-deprecation. “You’re a good man.”
Bruce manages a smile before turning away, his stomach twisting. This right here, this is what’s wrong with good men: they look at the world and all they see are reflections of themselves. Bruce is actually a terrible person, but Steve Rogers doesn’t have it in him to get that.
“Good morning, everyone!” says Pepper, arriving in the doorway and beaming around the kitchen. Bruce isn’t normally a fan of cheeriness, but somehow the knowledge that Pepper’s happy because Tony makes her happy changes the whole situation. It’s just such a mind-bending idea, resentment can’t get a hold on it.
Besides, Pepper makes Bruce happy, in a way. He admires her persistence and cool competence and the way she shamelessly loses her shit when she’s had all the Tony she can handle. At the same time, he doesn’t want what she has, so he doesn’t begrudge her any of it.
And she reminds him of someone.
He grabs a bagel and an apple and sneaks out before she sees him. He avoids Pepper, generally. Better safe than…giant and green.
After breakfast, he heads up to the roof and meditates for half an hour. He always does unless they’re busy avenging. Half an hour just breathing in and breathing out, carefully refusing to think about anything but breathing.
He used to wonder if meditation might be dangerous the same way happiness is, but no, it works out. Meditating leaves him a little numb and disconnected, and that’s definitely a good thing.
Jarvis sounds the (quiet, soft) alarm when time is up, and Bruce opens his eyes to find Clint on the roof with him. Clint meditates most mornings, too, and sometimes shares Bruce’s roof for it. Not that Clint would call it meditation. No way. He’d have to hand in his badass card if he admitted to doing something that non-violent. Bruce hasn’t pointed out that it’s still meditation, whatever Clint wants to call it. He plans to let somebody else-Natasha, say-make that observation for him.
After meditation comes lab time with Tony. It’s the best part of Bruce’s day, and if that isn’t a sorry commentary on his life.
“Are you still working on the new suit for Hawkeye?” he asks as he walks in, Clint on his mind.
“I wasn’t.” Tony appears from behind Dummy, who’s holding a giant, metal cage. Bruce doesn’t even want to know. He’s a biologist; he doesn’t have to keep track of Tony’s engineering shenanigans. Which he’s supposed to be keeping in his workshop, anyway. “But I can. Why? He maim himself again? Because I’m starting to think he secretly likes it.”
“Not seriously injured, I don’t think. Just sore. Still, he and Natasha are the, ah.” Bruce isn’t stupid enough to say delicate ones when there’s even a tiny possibility that somebody’s in the ceiling listening. “The most physically normal ones. And they think admitting to pain shows weakness. We should at least make sure their suits are sturdier than, you know, Captain America’s.”
Tony looks interested. Probably more interested in Bruce than in the project, but still, getting Tony’s interest at all is an accomplishment. “But you want me to design one for Clint, not Natasha,” he says.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before Natasha Romanov lets you test anything out on her; she has a long memory.” Bruce reaches out and taps the arc reactor, in case Tony’s forgotten about the time he almost killed himself with palladium. (Back in the nineteen-teens, they used palladium hydroxide injections to treat obesity. The side-effects included, yeah, drastic weight loss, with a side of fever, euphoria, and sometimes necrosis at the injection site. That’s why everybody but Tony was avoiding intravenous palladium by the time Steve was a kid. He’s lucky the arc reactor didn’t rot right out of his body.) “Our best bet is getting Clint to talk her into using the finished product once he’s tested it out. She trusts Clint.”
“But us, not so much, right. She is a suspicious spy person,” Tony allows. “So you’re thinking, what, just sturdier materials? Hey, I could make them suits-I mean Iron Man, War Machine type suits.”
“No, that’s the dumbest idea you’ve had since the time you tried to make Fury a bionic eye with x-ray vision.”
“That could’ve worked!”
“The only way that could possibly have been more like a nightmare is if it had worked.”
“Ouch. Don’t pull your punches or anything, Bruce, I can take it.”
“They’re assassins; they need to be able to sneak around. They won’t want anything bulky or loud. Weren’t you working on some kind of improved Kevlar?”
“Yep. BTK.”
BTK. Better Than Kevlar. Tony’s acronyms, God. “Well, why don’t we focus on that? When we come up with something feasible, I’ll see if I can synthesize it small-scale-maybe we can swing micro-repairs.”
“So in this scenario I would install…basically tiny sensors throughout the suit that register when it’s damaged and then automatically repair it?”
“Right. And maybe repair it thicker, like a pressure bandage. They’d like that-no blood trail.”
“Yeah, sure, it’ll be awesome if it works. As long as it doesn’t, to pick a random scary possibility, take on a life of its own and grow up over the face of the person wearing it and suffocate him. Or her. Like the Blob.”
“That’s…not really how the Blob worked.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t. But you’re right otherwise, so we’ll test it out a lot before we send someone into the field with it. And we should have Steve try it before Clint. I mean, he survived the ice, he’ll probably survive our experimental suit. Oh, and we’ll need to be able to turn the repair function off, in case we have to cut somebody out of the suit. Or in case there’s something jammed in the wound and a pressure bandage would be a bad idea.”
“Huh.” Tony’s got the wild light of invention in his eyes now. It’s a look that sometimes leads to amazing breakthroughs, but more often to explosions, screaming, and stern lectures from Nick Fury. “If we’re going that far, we might as well try something that automatically repairs the people themselves.”
“You mean like a super-soldier?” Bruce asks incredulously. “My God, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?”
Tony blinks, leveling a finger in his direction. “Fair point, well made. We’ll stick to the suits.” And he dives back into his computer. (The expression is more literal with Tony than with most.) Bruce shakes his head at Tony’s general…Tony-ness, and moves on to planning out a few hela cell experiments while trying not to feel too much empathy with Henrietta Lacks, RIP.
Despite the ever-present possibility of chaos, Bruce finds the lab soothing. The work is useful, the toys are great, and he can be as much of an asshole as he wants because Tony, if he bothers to notice at all, genuinely doesn’t care. It’s the best (and most dangerous) part of the day. Bruce is almost happy in the lab, and that means he might become angry when he leaves.
“Think they’re fucking?” Tony asks out of nowhere, staring intently at a series of circuit diagrams floating in midair.
“I don’t even know who you’re talking about, and already I know I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Clint and Natasha. I can’t decide if it would be outrageously hot or weirdly incestuous, because they almost seem like twins. Freaky assassin twins. Then again, twin fantasies! Everyone has twin fantasies.”
Bruce was right about not wanting to have this conversation. He’s so often right, and so rarely happy about it. “I don’t think it matters.”
“Of course it doesn’t matter, but I still want to know. Don’t leave me gossiping all by myself over here, Bruce, that is the saddest thing ever. Isn’t it, Jarvis?”
“It is indeed, sir. The saddest thing ever.”
Tony squints suspiciously at the air, probably trying to decide if the AI he programmed himself is making fun of him.
“No, that’s not…” Bruce sighs and starts reorganizing slides, just to give his hands something to do. “I don’t think it matters to them. I’m guessing the most important thing for them…” Is he actually going to embarrass himself horribly by talking about this in front of Tony Stark? Well, what the hell, it’s not like he has any dignity left to lose. “I think they’re home for each other. Whatever else they are, when one of them is in trouble and needs a place to go, the other one is that place.” He remembers having that. He remembers that it meant everything.
And it still does; it’s not something you ever really lose once you’ve found it. Bruce knows he could turn up on Betty’s doorstep tomorrow, and she would take him in. That’s why he owes it to both of them to avoid ever putting her in that position.
Which doesn’t mean Betty will never come for Bruce. In fact, knowing Betty, she’s bound to, sooner or later. Even though that would be insane and dangerous and Bruce would probably get her killed-
He crashes that train of thought right there and takes a couple of seconds to breathe. Once he’s pretty sure he’s back to baseline anger and won’t hulk out, he checks on Tony, because the lack of running commentary from that corner is worrying. And yeah, looks like he’s earned himself Tony’s undivided attention. That never, ever ends well.
“Tony? Bruce?”
Pepper. Among her other charms, she has great timing.
“What are you two up to?” she asks, leaning against Tony, who absently tugs her closer.
“We’re saving the world with our brilliance, the usual,” Tony informs her. “Also, Bruce is being deep.”
“Really?” Pepper eyes Bruce speculatively. If there’s anything worse than having Tony’s undivided attention, it’s having Tony and Pepper’s collective attention. Bruce would like to retract all of his positive thoughts about Pepper’s timing. “A science-related kind of deep?”
“No, no,” Tony says. “Human relationships, today.”
“I had no idea Bruce was deep about things other than science.”
“Sometimes he is. Usually when you’re least expecting it. Which is surprising, you know, when you think that he’s a guy who doesn’t like surprises.”
“Well, it makes sense that I wouldn’t know,” Pepper murmurs, “since he tends to bolt the second I walk into a room.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. I have never heard this before. Bruce, Bruce, that’s terrible. That could really damage a person’s self-esteem, Bruce,” Tony says, doing lousy job of pretending to be shocked because he’s a dick.
“Mm, it really could,” Pepper agrees. She is dating Tony for a reason.
Bruce says nothing, enduring the Tony-and-Pepper laser stare in stubborn silence. He wonders what they’d do if he started laughing hysterically. Most people don’t take well to emotional outbursts of any kind from Bruce, but, well, Tony and Pepper. You never know.
“Look at him,” Pepper says. “He’s thinking about running right now.”
She’s not wrong.
“Coincidence,” Bruce says. “Leaving the room when you come in, I mean. It’s coincidence.”
The intensity of the Tony-and-Pepper laser stare holds steady. Pepper likes to combine her laser stare with a small, pleasant smile, and that definitely makes it scarier.
“My apologies for interrupting,” Jarvis interrupts, not sounding all that apologetic, “but Agent Coulson and the rest of the Avengers are gathering in the main living room. They are requesting your presence, Mr. Stark, Dr. Banner.”
“Thanks, Jarvis. Tell them we’ll think about joining them. Eventually. In our own time,” Tony says, giving Bruce a this talk is not over look. He and Pepper head out the door without complaining, though. Coulson tends to have that effect on people now; it’s hilarious. Not least because Coulson finds it hilarious.
Bruce will never stop resenting SHIELD for screwing around with everybody’s emotions by pretending Coulson was dead (which, seriously? Making the Avengers even more unstable? Who thought that was a good idea?), but he’s pretty fond of the man himself. For one thing, he has to love that they have so many anger management techniques in common.
Bruce is pretty sure no one else has noticed this (except Clint and Natasha, who have advanced degrees in Coulson), but Coulson breathes rage. And yeah, he’s the king of microexpressions, but he can’t fool a guy who uses the same tricks. Of course, that probably means Coulson is onto Bruce, too, which is just. Irritating.
And because spies apparently can’t help playing with fire, by the time Bruce and Tony get to the living room, Clint and Natasha are already well into one of their silent campaigns to wind Coulson up. This one involves rubber bands, pencils, and peanut butter. Coulson is patiently watching the door and ignoring it all like a pro, but Bruce gives them points for creativity.
They give it up when Steve marches in looking all serious, though. Steve’s not a spoilsport, but he does make them clean up their messes, and they’re not about that.
That means everybody’s arrived except for Thor, who’s either the first to show up, full of enthusiasm and eagerness in the article of battle, or else dead last to show up. Dead last, and looking pissed off about being there at all. That happens when someone drags him away from Dr. Foster for a cause he doesn’t judge worthy.
It’s easy to forget most of the time, but where he comes from, Thor is heir to the throne. Heir to Odin’s throne, just to add to the surreal. And yeah, Asgard seems to have a pretty democratic flavor of monarchy, but there are still limits to how much Midgardian bullshit Thor is willing to put up with.
“Doombots,” Coulson announces, straightening up and managing to make the stupidly comfortable couch he’s sitting on look uncomfortable. It’s a gift he has.
“Wait, aren’t we waiting for Point Break?” Tony asks, startled.
“Thor isn’t coming. He says that he’s bored with Doombots, and he thinks you can manage them without his help. If you need his help, he promises to…ah…‘fly immediately to the aid of my shield-brothers.’”
Natasha snorts. Clint leans over and nudges her shoulder, teasing or comfort or both.
“I bet he was making his ‘puny mortals’ face when he said it, too,” Tony grumbles. “As a puny mortal, I am very offended by that face. And that elitist attitude! I don’t think we should sit around and take this kind of treatment. Occupy Asgard!”
“So,” Bruce cuts in, because otherwise this could go on all day and might actually end with somebody killing Tony. “Doombots. Again.”
“Unfortunately,” Coulson sighs, electing to pretend Tony never spoke. “Not one of the intelligent types, either. They seem to be marching around causing chaos and destruction at random. I have to assume they’re being used as a distraction from the master plan, whatever that is. At a guess, it’ll involve body-swapping, betrayal, world domination. The usual.”
“Kind of a one-trick pony, this guy,” Clint observes.
“Doom? No, he’s got at least three tricks,” Tony corrects. “Where’s this happening?”
“The bots are in Queens. Captain, Mr. Stark, Dr. Banner, if you’ll take care of that mess, Agents Romanov, Barton, and I will try to find out what the mess is meant to be distracting us from.”
“Okay, but…Queens? I mean, we care about Queens now? Really? Queens?”
“Tony!” Steve is scandalized.
“Stark, someone’s gonna break your face someday, and I really hope I’m there to watch,” says Clint. It’s basically impossible to scandalize Clint.
“Already been done,” Tony assures him. “Sorry you missed it.”
Coulson visibly thinks about a few responses, then turns abruptly to stare at Steve. This is a serious warning sign, right up there with Bruce taking deep, calming breaths. Hard to tell what’s going on in Coulson’s head when he does it, but at a guess, it’s something like: What would Captain America do? Captain America would definitely not rip the heads off of everyone annoying him. Therefore, I cannot rip people’s heads off, either. QED.
Tony must recognize the warning for what it is, because he finally stops talking. Steve just looks confused.
“The problem will quickly spread beyond Queens,” Coulson says eventually with a creepy lack of inflection. “Think of it as saving the world, if that helps with your motivation, Stark.”
Tony shrugs unrepentantly. Probably just as well. Bruce has seen Tony trying to repent, and it’s a train wreck that leaves no one unscathed.
“Any more questions?” Coulson asks, giving all of them a stern, take-this-seriously-or-suffer look. Well, all of them except Clint and Natasha, who are a sure thing in Coulson’s world.
As far as Bruce can tell, loyalty is more fierce the more reluctantly it was initially given. If he’s right, that explains everything about Coulson and Clint and Natasha. He wonders if there are studies to support his theory, and, if so, if there’s a brain chemistry-based reason for it. He wishes he could ask someone, but unfortunately he alienated every neuropsychologist he knew that time he turned green and destroyed his lab.
“What does the World Security Council have to say about all this?” Tony wishes to know.
“You don’t need to know that. It would make you angry and you would rant, and I get headaches when you rant. Let it go.”
“So tell Bruce. He wouldn’t mind, right?” Tony pokes at Bruce demonstratively with all the fearlessness of the insane. “Man’s always angry.”
It’s almost true. Being angry takes a lot of energy, hence the heart rate issue. Being angry means wanting to do something, and Bruce hasn’t always got the strength for that. But bitterness, now, that’s anger’s worn-out cousin, and Bruce can keep it going through almost anything. Bitterness, resignation, and black humor are his solutions to every problem.
He has actually become his grandmother.
“Be that as it may,” Coulson says repressively, “Dr. Banner doesn’t need to know either, and we have to act on this quickly before the WSC gives Director Fury any direct orders. It’s always…troublesome when we’re forced to evade direct orders.”
“Agent, I never knew you were such a rebel!”
“This is actually him trying to behave,” Clint corrects, smirking. “You really don’t want to see what he’s like when he rebels.”
Natasha smiles. “Athens,” she says, and Clint laughs.
“Thank you, Agents Romanov, Barton,” Coulson cuts in, faintly exasperated.
“Oh no,” says Tony, “this story I have to hear.”
Coulson favors him with a blank stare. “It can be your reward for saving the world. So go save it. Go on.”
“I feel my efforts are being undervalued, here.”
“I dunno,” Clint muses. “It is a pretty good story.” Natasha hums agreement and Coulson gives a minimalist nod, as if to say, Yes, it is a story I rate about equal in value to the world’s salvation.
“Throw in a few pizzas and I’m game,” says Steve. The more he gets over being depressed and stunned by culture-shock, the more he’s turning out to be a charming jackass. If he keeps this up, Bruce’ll probably wind up liking him, and that’s just adding insult to injury.
“Right. So today we’re saving the world for pizza and storytime,” Clint declares, banging his fist down on the coffee table in place of an auctioneer’s gavel. “Sold!”
Coulson sighs, but he thinks they’re cute, really, and everybody knows it. They can all spot his micro-smiles by now.
This, Bruce thinks, is why the Avengers would never have made it if Coulson hadn’t. They all like Sitwell, sure; they even respect him, but Sitwell is handicapped when trying to deal with the Avengers by being almost normal. Coulson doesn’t have that problem.
“Suit up,” says Captain America.
“Seriously?” Tony demands, incredulous. “Seriously? We’re saving the world-starting with Queens!-for pizza and stories?”
“We’ve saved it for less,” Natasha reminds him.
“We saved it for shawarma,” Steve agrees, “and that is some weird stuff.”
“Shut up, Rip Van Winkle, I love shawarma. Shawarma is awesome!”
“Okay, Tony.”
“Don’t you okay me. I didn’t notice you complaining at the time, Captain Killjoy.”
“I was really hungry. I would’ve eaten boot leather.”
Tony’s violent protests fade into the distance as he and Steve head down to the Iron Man launch pad. Steve could ride in the quinjet with the rest of them, but he likes it better when Tony flies him around. Captain America is a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie, who knew.
Everybody else climbs up to the roof and piles into the quinjet (that’s right, piling into a quinjet with superheroes, Bruce lives in the Twilight Zone), and they all head to Queens-to the distraction. When they get there, Coulson opens the side door so Bruce can hop out like a suicidal duckling.
He peers out at Queens, alarmingly far below. And yeah, there are Doombots, all right. Doombots everywhere. Blowing stuff up here and there, no apparent goal in mind.
Just. What the fuck is wrong with people?
“You ready, Hulk?” Steve asks over comms, coming over annoyingly Captain America like he always does before a mission. (And Bruce thinks of them as missions now, fuck his life.)
“Ready,” Bruce says. He takes a breath, savors his last few coherent seconds, and jumps. As he falls, he thinks about how much this is going to hurt and fucking Doom and his fucking bots and why the hell can no one ever leave him alone because, yeah, his life is a train wreck anyway but it would really help if these assholes could mind their own goddamn business and stop trying to take over the world for a fucking month or two-
He has no idea what happens after that. It’s all bright lights, weirdly distorted images, pain, noise, and the rage, burning him up, burning him out. The other guy. The guy who is what Bruce would be if he let himself go. The guy who is Bruce, at his lowest and worst.
It’s something he’s never told anybody (though he thinks Natasha and Clint have worked it out, which is probably why they look at him the way they do), but he loves the rage. It kicks him out of his endless loop of self-recrimination, and for a short, wonderful time, he doesn’t care what is or is not his fault. The rest of the world? It doesn’t matter. Pain? It doesn’t matter. Probability that he’ll regret everything later? It doesn’t fucking matter. Screaming and throwing shit around is just a lot more fun than controlled bitterness. It’s endless and exhausting and a relief while it lasts.
Coming down, though, really sucks. And it always involves public nudity, which can be extremely embarrassing. At least this time he’s managed to make himself a crater in the street to hide in, so his naked ass will not be appearing on CNN. This time.
“Hey,” Clint says, dropping seemingly from the sky to crouch beside him. “We won. No more bots. Passed Doom off to the Fantastic Four before he could steal a senator.”
“What did he want a senator for?”
“Identity theft, world domination, blah blah blah. Told you, one-trick pony. Want some pants?”
“…That would be great, thanks.”
Clint hands over spare pants. Bruce loves that his coworkers designate a spare pants guy for him. On the upside, at least Clint isn’t staring with anything more than his usual eerie, detached interest; the other guy must not have killed any of theirs today.
“I’ve seen you naked more often than some people I’ve fucked,” Clint observes idly.
Great. Maybe there is no upside. “Was that an offer?”
“Nah,” Clint laughs. Bruce has no idea what he’s thinking, ever, at any time. “I hear you hulk out, and I mean, I can do kinky, but not, like, big green kinky. No offense.”
“None taken,” Bruce sighs, pulling on the pants and giving up on the conversation. But he’s not offended, that much is true. He’s too confused for that. See, with Tony, you know he’s just talking shit to get a reaction. You can’t be sure of that with Clint. There’s always the horrifying possibility that he’s serious.
“Heads up, here comes trouble in a tin can,” Clint murmurs, glancing over Bruce’s shoulder, presumably at Tony. Speaking of. “Think I’m gonna go find Tasha, because, y’know, I don’t like to stand between you two and your…science. Or whatever.” And he disappears, ninja-like.
Bruce sits in the rubble and tries to decide whether or not that comment was filled with awful innuendo. He still hasn’t come to any conclusions by the time Tony arrives.
“Clint messing with you?” Tony asks, helping him up.
“You know, most of the time I can’t tell.”
Tony snorts. “Yeah. I think he’s bored, I think we need to find him something to do outside of work before he starts shooting at us for giggles. I told him to make bird noises when the superspy team found out what Doom was actually up to, and, okay, I acknowledge that that might’ve been kind of a dick thing to say, sue me, I am kind of a dick. But Bruce, Bruce, they found Doom and he screamed. This high-pitched, inhuman scream. I will have nightmares. I am traumatized.”
“…He screamed?”
“According to Coulson, it’s the sound hawks make. They scream. According to Natasha, the pitch wasn’t high enough. I can’t really weigh in on this one, I’m a city boy, I tend to stay away from birds of prey.”
There are actually urban hawks, but Bruce isn’t surprised Tony hasn’t heard them, what with being hermetically sealed inside his tower all the time. (Bruce is also pretty sure there are hawks in Afghanistan, but he’s definitely not bringing that up.) “Why?” he demands.
“What? Why what? Why do I avoid birds of prey?” Tony asks, distracted now, trying to keep an eye on everybody. Tony Stark, secretly adorable.
“Why Clint Barton?”
“Like…in general?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Tony gives the closest thing to a shrug he can manage in the suit, then guides Bruce over to the nearby quinjet and settles him into a seat in the back. “I think he spends so much time up high watching people and waiting and not interfering that every once in a while he snaps and has to go push all the buttons to see what happens. When you’re as freakily good at predicting things as he is, sometimes you have to mess up your own predictions to prove you aren’t-you know what, never mind. Eat this,” Tony interrupts himself abruptly, fishing a jar of something out of the cooler he’s apparently got stashed behind the pilot’s seat. (He stashes coolers on military jets. Of course he does.)
His Clint theory is interesting, though. Mostly because it also works as a Tony theory. Huh. “What is this?” Bruce asks suspiciously, peeling the tin foil top off the jar to reveal a weird, gray-brown goop inside. Tony helpfully hands him a spoon. Bruce refuses to do anything with it. Tony rolls his eyes.
“Jarvis says you’re malnourished.” He sounds personally offended by this.
“Well, Tony, I promise I won’t die of it.” Haha, if only. “So it doesn’t really matter.”
“Yeah, whatever, I don’t have time to talk my way around your self-destructive crazies right now, so I’ll just put it this way: eat that, or I will tell Steve. And he will make the face. You know the face I’m talking about; you have been warned.” And with that decisive threat, he goes to chase down Coulson, who’s limping but trying to pretend he isn’t. That won’t end well.
Out of fear of Steve’s face, Bruce eats a cautious spoonful of the goop. Turns out he must be malnourished, because it tastes like the best damn stuff he’s ever eaten in his life. He cleans out the jar; Tony will be smug at him forever.
He finishes eating just as Tony drops Coulson down beside him (Coulson doesn’t approve), and Clint straps them both in like kids (Coulson approves even less). Tony then goes to collect Steve, but not before noticing the empty jar and treating Bruce to his smug face.
Clint flies them back to Stark Tower (Avengers Tower? Whatever they’re calling it this week), and the second they land, he drags Coulson away with a determined scowl, either to medical or to supervised bed rest, so apparently the debrief (with pizza and storytime) isn’t happening until tomorrow. That being the case, Bruce should probably rest-the big guy takes it out of him. But if he rests in the early evening like this, he’s looking at a maximum of three hours of sleep tonight. Best to just keep pushing, at this point. He knows he’s not mentally up to lab work, though, and probably not even up to running outside, since that would mean navigating traffic. So he goes to the gym.
He’s more of a cardio guy than a strength guy, for obvious reasons, so he tends to use the treadmill and nothing else. He’s been running for about an hour (with plans to keep going until he drops, boring as it is), when Natasha wanders in and gives him a judging look. That takes a lot of nerve, because she should be resting just as much as he should. More, in fact-she’s a real human.
He likes that she’s not afraid of him, though. He’s only seen Natasha honestly scared twice that he remembers, and that wasn’t about him, it was about the big guy (a fine distinction not many people make). Still, that must make Bruce one of the few people alive who knows what Natasha looks like when she’s scared.
She goes blank. She runs straight to a bad, dark place inside her head, and she loses herself there. Bruce understands the whole process much too well.
Natasha, like Bruce-and like Clint, actually-doesn’t react well to angry, dangerous men. The good news is that only a tiny number of men are dangerous to them anymore, given what they’ve made of themselves. Bruce guesses that’s a kind of progress. But even now, whenever a legitimately dangerous man gets angry, they’re right back there, back in that same old dark place. Like they never grew up.
And Bruce did that to Natasha.
He still hasn’t forgiven himself, but that’s okay, because she hasn’t forgiven him either. She’s surprisingly willing to work past it, though.
“Good evening,” she says, unfailingly polite. It’s much easier to be polite than it is to be sincere.
“Hello, Natasha.”
When Natasha suffers the horrible childhood regression thing, she reacts by pulling a weapon and looking for someone to kill. Clint disappears, sometimes for days. Bruce, well, Bruce hulks out. Obviously he is the best adjusted of them all.
“Would you like to spar?” Natasha asks, and she’s so bland about it that it takes a second for Bruce to figure out what she’s asking.
“What-you mean with the other guy? Are you serious?”
“Yeah. It’ll be fun.” She smirks.
She and Clint both have a tendency to abuse the word fun. “Tony says the other guy likes you.”
She lifts an eyebrow at him, a silent And?
“I don’t think we should risk confusing him, if he’s decided he likes you.”
She rolls her eyes, mutters something that sounds like coward, and stalks off to do her workout.
Natasha is a firm believer in exposure therapy. If that exposure kills everybody involved, well, that’s the price you pay for weakness.
Bruce runs until he doesn’t have the will to run anymore, then he evades Natasha’s disappointed glares and heads straight to his room, skipping dinner. He already ate the gray goop, and hulking out makes him queasy, anyway. Truth is, he’s had kind of a weird relationship with food since the whole other guy thing started. Not that it matters. Sooner or later Jarvis will rat him out to Tony or Pepper or, worst of all, Steve, and they’ll force him to eat, so he plans to make the most of his freedom while it lasts.
Extreme hunger, like extreme exhaustion, causes a kind of floating euphoria that makes a nice change from bitterness, and it’s equally unlikely to turn into rage. Back in the day, Bruce did a few experiments on how long he could go without eating or sleeping. He can survive a week on no sleep and nothing but water (at which point, the other guy eats and sleeps whether Bruce likes it or not). The euphoria kicks in at around 48 hours. It’s pleasant. And since there are no health reasons not to do it, there’s no reason not to do it.
No, that’s not quite true-it does affect his ability to work. His math and logic skills, in particular, take a dive. That’s why he saves up his starvation/sleep deprivation for special occasions, and wow, Betty would beat the crap out of him if she knew.
He locks himself in his bedroom with a sense of either relief or disappointment (he can never tell which one, see above re: well-adjusted), showers, and spends an hour catching up on the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, just for general interest. That done, he checks his email (for his real name and all three aliases), but there’s nothing too exciting there.
Finally, he picks up the notebook he keeps beside his bed for scribbling down late-night ideas and theories, and he studies the article taped to the inside of the front cover. It’s a series of interviews about the Harlem fiasco, and features a pretty good picture of Betty looking like she’s a breath away from stabbing the interviewer in the eye with a pen. It makes Bruce smile every time he sees it.
Or at least, that’s usually true. Today, not so much, thanks to the note scrawled under the picture in Tony’s handwriting. It reads, Bruce, Bruce, this is not healthy, Bruce. Keep this up, and we are talking Pepper intervention. !!! No one likes Pepper intervention, Bruce.
Bruce’s watch helpfully beeps, although, actually, he’d already noticed that his heart rate was climbing. He closes the book very gently, takes a deep breath, and sets it down. Then he throws open a window and forces himself to focus on and sink into the sounds of the city until he hardly remembers that anyone named Bruce Banner exists. Once his watch stops beeping, he climbs carefully into bed, holding on to the lifeline of city sounds, and tries really hard to think about nothing.
Just an average day, all in all.
REASONS
but I am back now, and I bring you Avengers fic! I am nothing if not full of random. This is mostly movie-based Avengers, but I’ve cherry-picked details from various canons because that appears to be what all the cool kids are doing, and I have always had a deep and abiding desire to be like the cool kids. Clearly.
While the past few months may have given the impression that I’ve been twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, or perhaps having a Real Life, I assure you neither of these things is true. I’ve just been starting dozens of incredibly obscure fics and then failing to finish them. (Possibly the most obscure is the Supernatural/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo crossover that I started because Lisbeth Salander as an angel would pwn Dean Winchester so hard that I actually needed to gaze at that in print. It is just as beautiful as I thought it would be. Maybe I’ll even finish that fic some year-I give it about even odds.)
Also! I have an AO3 account now, and am slowly moving all the fic over there, as well. I had no idea how much fic I’d written. It’s kind of ridiculous.
But back to the fic actually appearing in this post:
This is a day in the life of Bruce Banner, mild-mannered scientist, unlicensed doctor, and occasional green rage monster. He tries so hard to mind his own business and stay below the radar. He does try. There should probably be a cautionary proverb about the best laid plans and Tony Stark.
Spoilers for the movie, and nothing Avengers-related belongs to me. Thank you so much to sae and zephy_magnum for the beta! ♥
Quotidian
He dreams of fire, of shattered glass and twisted, screaming metal, of the terrified, bloodied faces of his loved ones.
Even in the dream, he can’t believe his subconscious is doing this to him a-fucking-gain. Is it really not enough that he has to deal with his horrible memories when he’s awake? He couldn’t, oh, give himself a break when he’s unconscious?
Obviously not, because if there is one person guaranteed to be a total jerk to Bruce Banner, it is Bruce Banner. He has to hand it to his father; bastard’s been dead for decades, but damn, he did good work.
Apparently ranting at the subject of his dream woke him up, because he is definitely awake now. It’s 5:30 a.m., which is really sleeping in by his standards. Great. Another exciting day at Tony Stark’s house. Oh wait, no, at Tony’s mansion, that’s right, because some geniuses with daddy issues end up with mansions, while others end up squatting in glorified cardboard boxes in, say, Kibera.
Not that Bruce envies the mansion. The sad truth is that he really misses Rocinha; Rocinha is off the grid done right. He always had construction workers and electricians and plumbers living nearby, so he managed to get himself a house, running water, electricity, and even WiFi without ever putting his name on a piece of paper. It’s a very can-do, peace-enforced-by-drug-cartel, fuck-em-if-they-can’t-take-a-joke kind of place, and it was perfect for him. Too perfect-even before Ross found him, it had become a mistake to stay. He was dangerously comfortable there.
It’s best for everybody when Bruce starts each day with a crushing sense of futility, when just the act of living seems impossible. He found that in places like Kibera, Kolkata, and basically anywhere in the Russian Far East, most people were too burned out and worn down to act on their anger, him included. It was amazing, in that awful way his life has of being amazing.
Besides, in places like that, even if Bruce did hulk out, it wouldn’t be the worst thing that had ever happened to his neighbors. If he’d told them his life story, they’d have said, Yeah, and? It was nice. It’s tough to fly into a rage when you’re surrounded by people whose lives are as bad or worse than yours. You’re more likely to shut up, resign yourself, and learn to use your anger for fuel. Nothing about that encourages the other guy.
No, what’s rage-inducing is living within spitting distance of people who have it much better than you do, and, like an idiot, Bruce walked right into that. He just doesn’t have the strength of character to turn down a man who’s offering him an apartment and a lab and an unlimited budget. (He didn’t know that about himself until now; it’s kind of disappointing.) Looks like he’ll have to trade in crushing futility for bitterness, and in view of that, it’s good for him to experience a little class rage before breakfast. Sets the tone for the day, staves off any abrupt emotional changes.
So he hauls himself out of his luxurious bed and deliberately resents every piece of ridiculously fancy furniture or tech he runs across during his morning routine (and there are so many). Once he’s sufficiently irritated, he goes running. He runs ten miles a day when he’s not feeling too hostile, fifteen plus when he is. His resting heart rate is 35 beats per minute. It’s hilarious that that isn’t good enough.
After his run, he showers, then wanders down to the ridiculously fancy kitchen in the ridiculously fancy clothes Pepper Potts bought for him. He’s not sure whether she and Tony see him as a charity case or some kind of indentured lab monkey, but either way it pisses him off.
Clint and Natasha are already in the dining room, curled together on a couch, eating breakfast and staring silently at each other, like they’re communicating telepathically. Maybe they are. They’re impressively creepy, those two, but Bruce still envies their closeness more than is strictly…healthy. For anybody.
They glance up at him, nod in synch, then go back to their what-the-fuck staring contest. Bruce smiles vaguely in their direction and goes on a hunt for breakfast. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Tony stocks twenty different kinds of cereal, but nothing Bruce likes. That’s probably deliberate.
“G’morning, Natasha, Clint, Bruce,” Steve mumbles, wandering in and squinting unhappily at the light. Captain America is not a morning person. Even his flaws are adorable, right? Of course Bruce would end up living with the successful twin to his own failed experiment. Of course. Irony, he loves it. But not as much as it loves him.
“Morning, Steve.” He smiles pleasantly enough that Steve is inspired to smile back. Not bad, for the morning. Bruce would like to thank the Academy.
God, it’s only 9 and already he’s sick of himself.
“Have you seen Tony lately?” he asks, mostly as an apology for what he’s thinking. “We’ve been working on some improvements to your suit, and I know he wants you to test it out at some point.”
Steve looks surprised and a little nervous, the way he always does when people do nice things for him. “Thanks, Bruce. I know Tony loves tinkering, but you didn’t have to trouble yourself.”
“Why else is Tony putting me up, right?”
Steve shakes his head; Captain America disapproves of self-deprecation. “You’re a good man.”
Bruce manages a smile before turning away, his stomach twisting. This right here, this is what’s wrong with good men: they look at the world and all they see are reflections of themselves. Bruce is actually a terrible person, but Steve Rogers doesn’t have it in him to get that.
“Good morning, everyone!” says Pepper, arriving in the doorway and beaming around the kitchen. Bruce isn’t normally a fan of cheeriness, but somehow the knowledge that Pepper’s happy because Tony makes her happy changes the whole situation. It’s just such a mind-bending idea, resentment can’t get a hold on it.
Besides, Pepper makes Bruce happy, in a way. He admires her persistence and cool competence and the way she shamelessly loses her shit when she’s had all the Tony she can handle. At the same time, he doesn’t want what she has, so he doesn’t begrudge her any of it.
And she reminds him of someone.
He grabs a bagel and an apple and sneaks out before she sees him. He avoids Pepper, generally. Better safe than…giant and green.
After breakfast, he heads up to the roof and meditates for half an hour. He always does unless they’re busy avenging. Half an hour just breathing in and breathing out, carefully refusing to think about anything but breathing.
He used to wonder if meditation might be dangerous the same way happiness is, but no, it works out. Meditating leaves him a little numb and disconnected, and that’s definitely a good thing.
Jarvis sounds the (quiet, soft) alarm when time is up, and Bruce opens his eyes to find Clint on the roof with him. Clint meditates most mornings, too, and sometimes shares Bruce’s roof for it. Not that Clint would call it meditation. No way. He’d have to hand in his badass card if he admitted to doing something that non-violent. Bruce hasn’t pointed out that it’s still meditation, whatever Clint wants to call it. He plans to let somebody else-Natasha, say-make that observation for him.
After meditation comes lab time with Tony. It’s the best part of Bruce’s day, and if that isn’t a sorry commentary on his life.
“Are you still working on the new suit for Hawkeye?” he asks as he walks in, Clint on his mind.
“I wasn’t.” Tony appears from behind Dummy, who’s holding a giant, metal cage. Bruce doesn’t even want to know. He’s a biologist; he doesn’t have to keep track of Tony’s engineering shenanigans. Which he’s supposed to be keeping in his workshop, anyway. “But I can. Why? He maim himself again? Because I’m starting to think he secretly likes it.”
“Not seriously injured, I don’t think. Just sore. Still, he and Natasha are the, ah.” Bruce isn’t stupid enough to say delicate ones when there’s even a tiny possibility that somebody’s in the ceiling listening. “The most physically normal ones. And they think admitting to pain shows weakness. We should at least make sure their suits are sturdier than, you know, Captain America’s.”
Tony looks interested. Probably more interested in Bruce than in the project, but still, getting Tony’s interest at all is an accomplishment. “But you want me to design one for Clint, not Natasha,” he says.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before Natasha Romanov lets you test anything out on her; she has a long memory.” Bruce reaches out and taps the arc reactor, in case Tony’s forgotten about the time he almost killed himself with palladium. (Back in the nineteen-teens, they used palladium hydroxide injections to treat obesity. The side-effects included, yeah, drastic weight loss, with a side of fever, euphoria, and sometimes necrosis at the injection site. That’s why everybody but Tony was avoiding intravenous palladium by the time Steve was a kid. He’s lucky the arc reactor didn’t rot right out of his body.) “Our best bet is getting Clint to talk her into using the finished product once he’s tested it out. She trusts Clint.”
“But us, not so much, right. She is a suspicious spy person,” Tony allows. “So you’re thinking, what, just sturdier materials? Hey, I could make them suits-I mean Iron Man, War Machine type suits.”
“No, that’s the dumbest idea you’ve had since the time you tried to make Fury a bionic eye with x-ray vision.”
“That could’ve worked!”
“The only way that could possibly have been more like a nightmare is if it had worked.”
“Ouch. Don’t pull your punches or anything, Bruce, I can take it.”
“They’re assassins; they need to be able to sneak around. They won’t want anything bulky or loud. Weren’t you working on some kind of improved Kevlar?”
“Yep. BTK.”
BTK. Better Than Kevlar. Tony’s acronyms, God. “Well, why don’t we focus on that? When we come up with something feasible, I’ll see if I can synthesize it small-scale-maybe we can swing micro-repairs.”
“So in this scenario I would install…basically tiny sensors throughout the suit that register when it’s damaged and then automatically repair it?”
“Right. And maybe repair it thicker, like a pressure bandage. They’d like that-no blood trail.”
“Yeah, sure, it’ll be awesome if it works. As long as it doesn’t, to pick a random scary possibility, take on a life of its own and grow up over the face of the person wearing it and suffocate him. Or her. Like the Blob.”
“That’s…not really how the Blob worked.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t. But you’re right otherwise, so we’ll test it out a lot before we send someone into the field with it. And we should have Steve try it before Clint. I mean, he survived the ice, he’ll probably survive our experimental suit. Oh, and we’ll need to be able to turn the repair function off, in case we have to cut somebody out of the suit. Or in case there’s something jammed in the wound and a pressure bandage would be a bad idea.”
“Huh.” Tony’s got the wild light of invention in his eyes now. It’s a look that sometimes leads to amazing breakthroughs, but more often to explosions, screaming, and stern lectures from Nick Fury. “If we’re going that far, we might as well try something that automatically repairs the people themselves.”
“You mean like a super-soldier?” Bruce asks incredulously. “My God, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?”
Tony blinks, leveling a finger in his direction. “Fair point, well made. We’ll stick to the suits.” And he dives back into his computer. (The expression is more literal with Tony than with most.) Bruce shakes his head at Tony’s general…Tony-ness, and moves on to planning out a few hela cell experiments while trying not to feel too much empathy with Henrietta Lacks, RIP.
Despite the ever-present possibility of chaos, Bruce finds the lab soothing. The work is useful, the toys are great, and he can be as much of an asshole as he wants because Tony, if he bothers to notice at all, genuinely doesn’t care. It’s the best (and most dangerous) part of the day. Bruce is almost happy in the lab, and that means he might become angry when he leaves.
“Think they’re fucking?” Tony asks out of nowhere, staring intently at a series of circuit diagrams floating in midair.
“I don’t even know who you’re talking about, and already I know I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Clint and Natasha. I can’t decide if it would be outrageously hot or weirdly incestuous, because they almost seem like twins. Freaky assassin twins. Then again, twin fantasies! Everyone has twin fantasies.”
Bruce was right about not wanting to have this conversation. He’s so often right, and so rarely happy about it. “I don’t think it matters.”
“Of course it doesn’t matter, but I still want to know. Don’t leave me gossiping all by myself over here, Bruce, that is the saddest thing ever. Isn’t it, Jarvis?”
“It is indeed, sir. The saddest thing ever.”
Tony squints suspiciously at the air, probably trying to decide if the AI he programmed himself is making fun of him.
“No, that’s not…” Bruce sighs and starts reorganizing slides, just to give his hands something to do. “I don’t think it matters to them. I’m guessing the most important thing for them…” Is he actually going to embarrass himself horribly by talking about this in front of Tony Stark? Well, what the hell, it’s not like he has any dignity left to lose. “I think they’re home for each other. Whatever else they are, when one of them is in trouble and needs a place to go, the other one is that place.” He remembers having that. He remembers that it meant everything.
And it still does; it’s not something you ever really lose once you’ve found it. Bruce knows he could turn up on Betty’s doorstep tomorrow, and she would take him in. That’s why he owes it to both of them to avoid ever putting her in that position.
Which doesn’t mean Betty will never come for Bruce. In fact, knowing Betty, she’s bound to, sooner or later. Even though that would be insane and dangerous and Bruce would probably get her killed-
He crashes that train of thought right there and takes a couple of seconds to breathe. Once he’s pretty sure he’s back to baseline anger and won’t hulk out, he checks on Tony, because the lack of running commentary from that corner is worrying. And yeah, looks like he’s earned himself Tony’s undivided attention. That never, ever ends well.
“Tony? Bruce?”
Pepper. Among her other charms, she has great timing.
“What are you two up to?” she asks, leaning against Tony, who absently tugs her closer.
“We’re saving the world with our brilliance, the usual,” Tony informs her. “Also, Bruce is being deep.”
“Really?” Pepper eyes Bruce speculatively. If there’s anything worse than having Tony’s undivided attention, it’s having Tony and Pepper’s collective attention. Bruce would like to retract all of his positive thoughts about Pepper’s timing. “A science-related kind of deep?”
“No, no,” Tony says. “Human relationships, today.”
“I had no idea Bruce was deep about things other than science.”
“Sometimes he is. Usually when you’re least expecting it. Which is surprising, you know, when you think that he’s a guy who doesn’t like surprises.”
“Well, it makes sense that I wouldn’t know,” Pepper murmurs, “since he tends to bolt the second I walk into a room.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. I have never heard this before. Bruce, Bruce, that’s terrible. That could really damage a person’s self-esteem, Bruce,” Tony says, doing lousy job of pretending to be shocked because he’s a dick.
“Mm, it really could,” Pepper agrees. She is dating Tony for a reason.
Bruce says nothing, enduring the Tony-and-Pepper laser stare in stubborn silence. He wonders what they’d do if he started laughing hysterically. Most people don’t take well to emotional outbursts of any kind from Bruce, but, well, Tony and Pepper. You never know.
“Look at him,” Pepper says. “He’s thinking about running right now.”
She’s not wrong.
“Coincidence,” Bruce says. “Leaving the room when you come in, I mean. It’s coincidence.”
The intensity of the Tony-and-Pepper laser stare holds steady. Pepper likes to combine her laser stare with a small, pleasant smile, and that definitely makes it scarier.
“My apologies for interrupting,” Jarvis interrupts, not sounding all that apologetic, “but Agent Coulson and the rest of the Avengers are gathering in the main living room. They are requesting your presence, Mr. Stark, Dr. Banner.”
“Thanks, Jarvis. Tell them we’ll think about joining them. Eventually. In our own time,” Tony says, giving Bruce a this talk is not over look. He and Pepper head out the door without complaining, though. Coulson tends to have that effect on people now; it’s hilarious. Not least because Coulson finds it hilarious.
Bruce will never stop resenting SHIELD for screwing around with everybody’s emotions by pretending Coulson was dead (which, seriously? Making the Avengers even more unstable? Who thought that was a good idea?), but he’s pretty fond of the man himself. For one thing, he has to love that they have so many anger management techniques in common.
Bruce is pretty sure no one else has noticed this (except Clint and Natasha, who have advanced degrees in Coulson), but Coulson breathes rage. And yeah, he’s the king of microexpressions, but he can’t fool a guy who uses the same tricks. Of course, that probably means Coulson is onto Bruce, too, which is just. Irritating.
And because spies apparently can’t help playing with fire, by the time Bruce and Tony get to the living room, Clint and Natasha are already well into one of their silent campaigns to wind Coulson up. This one involves rubber bands, pencils, and peanut butter. Coulson is patiently watching the door and ignoring it all like a pro, but Bruce gives them points for creativity.
They give it up when Steve marches in looking all serious, though. Steve’s not a spoilsport, but he does make them clean up their messes, and they’re not about that.
That means everybody’s arrived except for Thor, who’s either the first to show up, full of enthusiasm and eagerness in the article of battle, or else dead last to show up. Dead last, and looking pissed off about being there at all. That happens when someone drags him away from Dr. Foster for a cause he doesn’t judge worthy.
It’s easy to forget most of the time, but where he comes from, Thor is heir to the throne. Heir to Odin’s throne, just to add to the surreal. And yeah, Asgard seems to have a pretty democratic flavor of monarchy, but there are still limits to how much Midgardian bullshit Thor is willing to put up with.
“Doombots,” Coulson announces, straightening up and managing to make the stupidly comfortable couch he’s sitting on look uncomfortable. It’s a gift he has.
“Wait, aren’t we waiting for Point Break?” Tony asks, startled.
“Thor isn’t coming. He says that he’s bored with Doombots, and he thinks you can manage them without his help. If you need his help, he promises to…ah…‘fly immediately to the aid of my shield-brothers.’”
Natasha snorts. Clint leans over and nudges her shoulder, teasing or comfort or both.
“I bet he was making his ‘puny mortals’ face when he said it, too,” Tony grumbles. “As a puny mortal, I am very offended by that face. And that elitist attitude! I don’t think we should sit around and take this kind of treatment. Occupy Asgard!”
“So,” Bruce cuts in, because otherwise this could go on all day and might actually end with somebody killing Tony. “Doombots. Again.”
“Unfortunately,” Coulson sighs, electing to pretend Tony never spoke. “Not one of the intelligent types, either. They seem to be marching around causing chaos and destruction at random. I have to assume they’re being used as a distraction from the master plan, whatever that is. At a guess, it’ll involve body-swapping, betrayal, world domination. The usual.”
“Kind of a one-trick pony, this guy,” Clint observes.
“Doom? No, he’s got at least three tricks,” Tony corrects. “Where’s this happening?”
“The bots are in Queens. Captain, Mr. Stark, Dr. Banner, if you’ll take care of that mess, Agents Romanov, Barton, and I will try to find out what the mess is meant to be distracting us from.”
“Okay, but…Queens? I mean, we care about Queens now? Really? Queens?”
“Tony!” Steve is scandalized.
“Stark, someone’s gonna break your face someday, and I really hope I’m there to watch,” says Clint. It’s basically impossible to scandalize Clint.
“Already been done,” Tony assures him. “Sorry you missed it.”
Coulson visibly thinks about a few responses, then turns abruptly to stare at Steve. This is a serious warning sign, right up there with Bruce taking deep, calming breaths. Hard to tell what’s going on in Coulson’s head when he does it, but at a guess, it’s something like: What would Captain America do? Captain America would definitely not rip the heads off of everyone annoying him. Therefore, I cannot rip people’s heads off, either. QED.
Tony must recognize the warning for what it is, because he finally stops talking. Steve just looks confused.
“The problem will quickly spread beyond Queens,” Coulson says eventually with a creepy lack of inflection. “Think of it as saving the world, if that helps with your motivation, Stark.”
Tony shrugs unrepentantly. Probably just as well. Bruce has seen Tony trying to repent, and it’s a train wreck that leaves no one unscathed.
“Any more questions?” Coulson asks, giving all of them a stern, take-this-seriously-or-suffer look. Well, all of them except Clint and Natasha, who are a sure thing in Coulson’s world.
As far as Bruce can tell, loyalty is more fierce the more reluctantly it was initially given. If he’s right, that explains everything about Coulson and Clint and Natasha. He wonders if there are studies to support his theory, and, if so, if there’s a brain chemistry-based reason for it. He wishes he could ask someone, but unfortunately he alienated every neuropsychologist he knew that time he turned green and destroyed his lab.
“What does the World Security Council have to say about all this?” Tony wishes to know.
“You don’t need to know that. It would make you angry and you would rant, and I get headaches when you rant. Let it go.”
“So tell Bruce. He wouldn’t mind, right?” Tony pokes at Bruce demonstratively with all the fearlessness of the insane. “Man’s always angry.”
It’s almost true. Being angry takes a lot of energy, hence the heart rate issue. Being angry means wanting to do something, and Bruce hasn’t always got the strength for that. But bitterness, now, that’s anger’s worn-out cousin, and Bruce can keep it going through almost anything. Bitterness, resignation, and black humor are his solutions to every problem.
He has actually become his grandmother.
“Be that as it may,” Coulson says repressively, “Dr. Banner doesn’t need to know either, and we have to act on this quickly before the WSC gives Director Fury any direct orders. It’s always…troublesome when we’re forced to evade direct orders.”
“Agent, I never knew you were such a rebel!”
“This is actually him trying to behave,” Clint corrects, smirking. “You really don’t want to see what he’s like when he rebels.”
Natasha smiles. “Athens,” she says, and Clint laughs.
“Thank you, Agents Romanov, Barton,” Coulson cuts in, faintly exasperated.
“Oh no,” says Tony, “this story I have to hear.”
Coulson favors him with a blank stare. “It can be your reward for saving the world. So go save it. Go on.”
“I feel my efforts are being undervalued, here.”
“I dunno,” Clint muses. “It is a pretty good story.” Natasha hums agreement and Coulson gives a minimalist nod, as if to say, Yes, it is a story I rate about equal in value to the world’s salvation.
“Throw in a few pizzas and I’m game,” says Steve. The more he gets over being depressed and stunned by culture-shock, the more he’s turning out to be a charming jackass. If he keeps this up, Bruce’ll probably wind up liking him, and that’s just adding insult to injury.
“Right. So today we’re saving the world for pizza and storytime,” Clint declares, banging his fist down on the coffee table in place of an auctioneer’s gavel. “Sold!”
Coulson sighs, but he thinks they’re cute, really, and everybody knows it. They can all spot his micro-smiles by now.
This, Bruce thinks, is why the Avengers would never have made it if Coulson hadn’t. They all like Sitwell, sure; they even respect him, but Sitwell is handicapped when trying to deal with the Avengers by being almost normal. Coulson doesn’t have that problem.
“Suit up,” says Captain America.
“Seriously?” Tony demands, incredulous. “Seriously? We’re saving the world-starting with Queens!-for pizza and stories?”
“We’ve saved it for less,” Natasha reminds him.
“We saved it for shawarma,” Steve agrees, “and that is some weird stuff.”
“Shut up, Rip Van Winkle, I love shawarma. Shawarma is awesome!”
“Okay, Tony.”
“Don’t you okay me. I didn’t notice you complaining at the time, Captain Killjoy.”
“I was really hungry. I would’ve eaten boot leather.”
Tony’s violent protests fade into the distance as he and Steve head down to the Iron Man launch pad. Steve could ride in the quinjet with the rest of them, but he likes it better when Tony flies him around. Captain America is a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie, who knew.
Everybody else climbs up to the roof and piles into the quinjet (that’s right, piling into a quinjet with superheroes, Bruce lives in the Twilight Zone), and they all head to Queens-to the distraction. When they get there, Coulson opens the side door so Bruce can hop out like a suicidal duckling.
He peers out at Queens, alarmingly far below. And yeah, there are Doombots, all right. Doombots everywhere. Blowing stuff up here and there, no apparent goal in mind.
Just. What the fuck is wrong with people?
“You ready, Hulk?” Steve asks over comms, coming over annoyingly Captain America like he always does before a mission. (And Bruce thinks of them as missions now, fuck his life.)
“Ready,” Bruce says. He takes a breath, savors his last few coherent seconds, and jumps. As he falls, he thinks about how much this is going to hurt and fucking Doom and his fucking bots and why the hell can no one ever leave him alone because, yeah, his life is a train wreck anyway but it would really help if these assholes could mind their own goddamn business and stop trying to take over the world for a fucking month or two-
He has no idea what happens after that. It’s all bright lights, weirdly distorted images, pain, noise, and the rage, burning him up, burning him out. The other guy. The guy who is what Bruce would be if he let himself go. The guy who is Bruce, at his lowest and worst.
It’s something he’s never told anybody (though he thinks Natasha and Clint have worked it out, which is probably why they look at him the way they do), but he loves the rage. It kicks him out of his endless loop of self-recrimination, and for a short, wonderful time, he doesn’t care what is or is not his fault. The rest of the world? It doesn’t matter. Pain? It doesn’t matter. Probability that he’ll regret everything later? It doesn’t fucking matter. Screaming and throwing shit around is just a lot more fun than controlled bitterness. It’s endless and exhausting and a relief while it lasts.
Coming down, though, really sucks. And it always involves public nudity, which can be extremely embarrassing. At least this time he’s managed to make himself a crater in the street to hide in, so his naked ass will not be appearing on CNN. This time.
“Hey,” Clint says, dropping seemingly from the sky to crouch beside him. “We won. No more bots. Passed Doom off to the Fantastic Four before he could steal a senator.”
“What did he want a senator for?”
“Identity theft, world domination, blah blah blah. Told you, one-trick pony. Want some pants?”
“…That would be great, thanks.”
Clint hands over spare pants. Bruce loves that his coworkers designate a spare pants guy for him. On the upside, at least Clint isn’t staring with anything more than his usual eerie, detached interest; the other guy must not have killed any of theirs today.
“I’ve seen you naked more often than some people I’ve fucked,” Clint observes idly.
Great. Maybe there is no upside. “Was that an offer?”
“Nah,” Clint laughs. Bruce has no idea what he’s thinking, ever, at any time. “I hear you hulk out, and I mean, I can do kinky, but not, like, big green kinky. No offense.”
“None taken,” Bruce sighs, pulling on the pants and giving up on the conversation. But he’s not offended, that much is true. He’s too confused for that. See, with Tony, you know he’s just talking shit to get a reaction. You can’t be sure of that with Clint. There’s always the horrifying possibility that he’s serious.
“Heads up, here comes trouble in a tin can,” Clint murmurs, glancing over Bruce’s shoulder, presumably at Tony. Speaking of. “Think I’m gonna go find Tasha, because, y’know, I don’t like to stand between you two and your…science. Or whatever.” And he disappears, ninja-like.
Bruce sits in the rubble and tries to decide whether or not that comment was filled with awful innuendo. He still hasn’t come to any conclusions by the time Tony arrives.
“Clint messing with you?” Tony asks, helping him up.
“You know, most of the time I can’t tell.”
Tony snorts. “Yeah. I think he’s bored, I think we need to find him something to do outside of work before he starts shooting at us for giggles. I told him to make bird noises when the superspy team found out what Doom was actually up to, and, okay, I acknowledge that that might’ve been kind of a dick thing to say, sue me, I am kind of a dick. But Bruce, Bruce, they found Doom and he screamed. This high-pitched, inhuman scream. I will have nightmares. I am traumatized.”
“…He screamed?”
“According to Coulson, it’s the sound hawks make. They scream. According to Natasha, the pitch wasn’t high enough. I can’t really weigh in on this one, I’m a city boy, I tend to stay away from birds of prey.”
There are actually urban hawks, but Bruce isn’t surprised Tony hasn’t heard them, what with being hermetically sealed inside his tower all the time. (Bruce is also pretty sure there are hawks in Afghanistan, but he’s definitely not bringing that up.) “Why?” he demands.
“What? Why what? Why do I avoid birds of prey?” Tony asks, distracted now, trying to keep an eye on everybody. Tony Stark, secretly adorable.
“Why Clint Barton?”
“Like…in general?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Tony gives the closest thing to a shrug he can manage in the suit, then guides Bruce over to the nearby quinjet and settles him into a seat in the back. “I think he spends so much time up high watching people and waiting and not interfering that every once in a while he snaps and has to go push all the buttons to see what happens. When you’re as freakily good at predicting things as he is, sometimes you have to mess up your own predictions to prove you aren’t-you know what, never mind. Eat this,” Tony interrupts himself abruptly, fishing a jar of something out of the cooler he’s apparently got stashed behind the pilot’s seat. (He stashes coolers on military jets. Of course he does.)
His Clint theory is interesting, though. Mostly because it also works as a Tony theory. Huh. “What is this?” Bruce asks suspiciously, peeling the tin foil top off the jar to reveal a weird, gray-brown goop inside. Tony helpfully hands him a spoon. Bruce refuses to do anything with it. Tony rolls his eyes.
“Jarvis says you’re malnourished.” He sounds personally offended by this.
“Well, Tony, I promise I won’t die of it.” Haha, if only. “So it doesn’t really matter.”
“Yeah, whatever, I don’t have time to talk my way around your self-destructive crazies right now, so I’ll just put it this way: eat that, or I will tell Steve. And he will make the face. You know the face I’m talking about; you have been warned.” And with that decisive threat, he goes to chase down Coulson, who’s limping but trying to pretend he isn’t. That won’t end well.
Out of fear of Steve’s face, Bruce eats a cautious spoonful of the goop. Turns out he must be malnourished, because it tastes like the best damn stuff he’s ever eaten in his life. He cleans out the jar; Tony will be smug at him forever.
He finishes eating just as Tony drops Coulson down beside him (Coulson doesn’t approve), and Clint straps them both in like kids (Coulson approves even less). Tony then goes to collect Steve, but not before noticing the empty jar and treating Bruce to his smug face.
Clint flies them back to Stark Tower (Avengers Tower? Whatever they’re calling it this week), and the second they land, he drags Coulson away with a determined scowl, either to medical or to supervised bed rest, so apparently the debrief (with pizza and storytime) isn’t happening until tomorrow. That being the case, Bruce should probably rest-the big guy takes it out of him. But if he rests in the early evening like this, he’s looking at a maximum of three hours of sleep tonight. Best to just keep pushing, at this point. He knows he’s not mentally up to lab work, though, and probably not even up to running outside, since that would mean navigating traffic. So he goes to the gym.
He’s more of a cardio guy than a strength guy, for obvious reasons, so he tends to use the treadmill and nothing else. He’s been running for about an hour (with plans to keep going until he drops, boring as it is), when Natasha wanders in and gives him a judging look. That takes a lot of nerve, because she should be resting just as much as he should. More, in fact-she’s a real human.
He likes that she’s not afraid of him, though. He’s only seen Natasha honestly scared twice that he remembers, and that wasn’t about him, it was about the big guy (a fine distinction not many people make). Still, that must make Bruce one of the few people alive who knows what Natasha looks like when she’s scared.
She goes blank. She runs straight to a bad, dark place inside her head, and she loses herself there. Bruce understands the whole process much too well.
Natasha, like Bruce-and like Clint, actually-doesn’t react well to angry, dangerous men. The good news is that only a tiny number of men are dangerous to them anymore, given what they’ve made of themselves. Bruce guesses that’s a kind of progress. But even now, whenever a legitimately dangerous man gets angry, they’re right back there, back in that same old dark place. Like they never grew up.
And Bruce did that to Natasha.
He still hasn’t forgiven himself, but that’s okay, because she hasn’t forgiven him either. She’s surprisingly willing to work past it, though.
“Good evening,” she says, unfailingly polite. It’s much easier to be polite than it is to be sincere.
“Hello, Natasha.”
When Natasha suffers the horrible childhood regression thing, she reacts by pulling a weapon and looking for someone to kill. Clint disappears, sometimes for days. Bruce, well, Bruce hulks out. Obviously he is the best adjusted of them all.
“Would you like to spar?” Natasha asks, and she’s so bland about it that it takes a second for Bruce to figure out what she’s asking.
“What-you mean with the other guy? Are you serious?”
“Yeah. It’ll be fun.” She smirks.
She and Clint both have a tendency to abuse the word fun. “Tony says the other guy likes you.”
She lifts an eyebrow at him, a silent And?
“I don’t think we should risk confusing him, if he’s decided he likes you.”
She rolls her eyes, mutters something that sounds like coward, and stalks off to do her workout.
Natasha is a firm believer in exposure therapy. If that exposure kills everybody involved, well, that’s the price you pay for weakness.
Bruce runs until he doesn’t have the will to run anymore, then he evades Natasha’s disappointed glares and heads straight to his room, skipping dinner. He already ate the gray goop, and hulking out makes him queasy, anyway. Truth is, he’s had kind of a weird relationship with food since the whole other guy thing started. Not that it matters. Sooner or later Jarvis will rat him out to Tony or Pepper or, worst of all, Steve, and they’ll force him to eat, so he plans to make the most of his freedom while it lasts.
Extreme hunger, like extreme exhaustion, causes a kind of floating euphoria that makes a nice change from bitterness, and it’s equally unlikely to turn into rage. Back in the day, Bruce did a few experiments on how long he could go without eating or sleeping. He can survive a week on no sleep and nothing but water (at which point, the other guy eats and sleeps whether Bruce likes it or not). The euphoria kicks in at around 48 hours. It’s pleasant. And since there are no health reasons not to do it, there’s no reason not to do it.
No, that’s not quite true-it does affect his ability to work. His math and logic skills, in particular, take a dive. That’s why he saves up his starvation/sleep deprivation for special occasions, and wow, Betty would beat the crap out of him if she knew.
He locks himself in his bedroom with a sense of either relief or disappointment (he can never tell which one, see above re: well-adjusted), showers, and spends an hour catching up on the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, just for general interest. That done, he checks his email (for his real name and all three aliases), but there’s nothing too exciting there.
Finally, he picks up the notebook he keeps beside his bed for scribbling down late-night ideas and theories, and he studies the article taped to the inside of the front cover. It’s a series of interviews about the Harlem fiasco, and features a pretty good picture of Betty looking like she’s a breath away from stabbing the interviewer in the eye with a pen. It makes Bruce smile every time he sees it.
Or at least, that’s usually true. Today, not so much, thanks to the note scrawled under the picture in Tony’s handwriting. It reads, Bruce, Bruce, this is not healthy, Bruce. Keep this up, and we are talking Pepper intervention. !!! No one likes Pepper intervention, Bruce.
Bruce’s watch helpfully beeps, although, actually, he’d already noticed that his heart rate was climbing. He closes the book very gently, takes a deep breath, and sets it down. Then he throws open a window and forces himself to focus on and sink into the sounds of the city until he hardly remembers that anyone named Bruce Banner exists. Once his watch stops beeping, he climbs carefully into bed, holding on to the lifeline of city sounds, and tries really hard to think about nothing.
Just an average day, all in all.