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Nov 08, 2015 20:39

Looking through my PageFour WIP morgue and I found this, which was in an MCU fic I started and then restarted, and I doubt it'll make its way into the new version, if I ever finish that. But I like this bit so here:


Having Bruce around, Tony had to admit, was pretty great. Even if it meant Barton and Natasha started appearing more often, napping on his couches or servicing weapons on his coffee table or eating at his kitchen counter (once or twice, showing up in the dead of night and staggering into the spare bedrooms without a word, and JARVIS let Tony know that it didn't look like they'd need immediate medical attention so Tony let it go and just snarked at them in the morning, so they could feel reassured that they weren't welcome). Even if Bruce being on the premises meant that Pepper had to have a conversation with Tony about the insurance on the building and liability vis-a-vis his employees in the labs. Even if to make Bruce himself stop wringing his hands, Tony had been forced to install tranquilizer guns next to the fire extinguishers on the R&D floors. Tony didn't mind. Bruce had game. They were doing things with the arc reactor technology after three beers that would make Justin Hammer cry himself to sleep at night. More than he already did.

But Tony was, at this point, mostly waiting around for the day that Bruce announced he was going to Haiti for a while and packed all his oxford shirts and chinos into a military surplus bag and hit the road. It hadn't happened yet but Bruce had stuck around a few months and it was only a matter of time. It didn't really strike Tony as a social anxiety thing, either, although Bruce had his days (easily marked by how many times Tony could catch him staring at one of the tranquilizer guns). Really, it just seemed to Tony like Bruce was one of those people who was addicted to altruism. If he could be helping people then he was going to be doing that. Probably it didn't hurt that building cisterns and treating tropical diseases was more constructive than Hulk smashing supervillains. Bruce was like some kind of zen master, as far as Tony could tell.

Which made it more surprising when Tony walked into his personal gym at six o'clock on a Wednesday morning and found Bruce going to town on one of the punching bags.

Tony just hung back and watched for a while; Bruce had one of those hard and fast, cop-trained kind of styles, with no wasted or showy movements. He was wearing leather gloves to protect his knuckles and the bag swung and clanked on the chains with every thump of impact from his fist or knee or elbow.

All Tony could think as he watched was to wonder whether Bruce had trained the Hulk or the Hulk had trained him, or if they shared these skills inside Bruce's messed-up head in some strange, symbiotic way.

Finally, Bruce moved to a spot where he noticed Tony leaning on the wall, and he froze, his upper body still tense with the anticipation of hitting the bag, and then Bruce dropped his fists all of a sudden, sagging back into his usual sheepish posture like his strings had been cut. They stared at each other for a second before Bruce reached up a forearm to push his hair back off of his face and walked over to the edge of the mat to grab a water bottle.

"Bad week?" Tony asked.

Bruce shook his head; he was gulping water. Tony pushed off the wall to approach him.

"You were hitting the bag like you had ways of making it talk, that's all."

"Lets the pressure off," gasped Bruce when he finished drinking.

Tony shot a look between Bruce and the bag as he turned that over in his head. "How often do you let the pressure off?"

"Depends."

Tony was at a loss for words. "Really, have you tried weed?" he managed finally.

Bruce snorted. Then he dropped down onto the mat in some kind of yoga pose, apparently stretching. "I've tried everything you can try, in every corner of the world. The only things that work are mental."

"Like what?" Tony sat on the mat and watched Bruce contort himself; the treadmill could wait a few minutes. He was suddenly desperate to know the secrets.

Bruce took a minute to answer. "It's hard to describe. Anger management is a thing you have to experience to get, I think. Mine moreso."

"Did you learn this shit from swamis on mountaintops, or what?"

"They taught me a little. Improved my meditation techniques, which helped for a while. But everything I learned that really helped, I had to figure out for myself."

Tony couldn't imagine meditating. But when Tony got angry, he either reveled in it and let it carry him away, or (when it was the scary kind of helpless anger) he drowned it. "I don't suppose you're counting to ten," he joked.

Bruce gave him a flat look that cut right through the bullshit, which was impressive considering Bruce's face was currently upside down. He sighed a little and then unfolded from his yoga pose, sitting cross-legged in front of Tony. "Acceptance is a big part of it."

"Acceptance? The, uh, the final stage of grief?"

"I had to accept that I get angry. That I'm never going to stop getting angry, that's just not who I am. How can I stop getting angry when the world's so full of injustice? It was too much to expect from myself. And when I get angry enough, the other guy comes out, and I had to accept that, too. When I was too busy being in denial about it, like I could beat it or something if I could only figure out the answer, the right formula, I couldn't cope. And when there were no answers, that made me angry, too." Bruce paused for a moment. "It's still hard to say it but it's true: the other guy's a part of me now. He's always in there. And once I accepted that, what it did to my life, the things it meant for me, suddenly it was all a lot easier to deal with. Now I can keep him at bay. Most of the time," he amended.

Tony mulled that over. It made about as much sense to him as yoga did, which was to say: very little.

"Shit happens," said Bruce, who was staring at Tony, now. Not Tony's face, but the faint blue glow visible through his shirt. "And once you accept that it does, really accept it--I'm telling you, it's like a weight just... lifts."

"Those swamis clearly did a number on you," pointed out Tony, before getting up to go hit the treadmill.

This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/87909.html. (
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fandom: avengers movieverse, fanfiction, length: under 1k

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