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The problem with saving the world was that people wanted to know things about you. Worse, they recognized you. Bruce had tried to return to India after the invasion and come fleeing back as people stopped him on the street to thank and embrace him. Back to the tower where Tony waited with open arms, open lab and firmly closed doors.
It was exhausting, being Tony’s partner, but exhilarating too. Once they got through the first few kinks of their working relationship, Bruce had learned when to listen and when to take Tony's chatter as white noise. If it got too bad, there was the elevator waiting to whisk him upstairs and cocoon him in blessed silence.
It had probably been Pepper who had designed Bruce’s suite. It was all clean lines and serene watercolor paintings. Only the bedroom was dark, a deep restful blue and a four poster bed sunk via three graceful steps into the floor like the world’s most decadent cave. Bruce fell in love with the bed long before he gave thoughts to any other kind of romance.
“Pepper,” he said quite seriously over last night Chinese. “Did you design that bed?”
“What bed?”
“My bed.”
She sat on the sofa, bare feet beside tall heels and her hair tumbling out of its bun. Her nose scrunched up as though he’d asked a very difficult question.
“I made sure you had something you’d like.”
“You hadn’t even met you yet.”
“Was it a bad guess?” She arched an eyebrow.
“No. It’s perfect.”
“Good,” she expertly slotted lo mein into her mouth.
The bed was perfect. The empty room for meditation was perfect. The small kitchen, already stocked with familiar ingredients, was perfect. It was the apartment he would have made for himself if he had infinite funds. Pepper scared him more than he dared to articulate.
“Oh, she scares the shit out of me too,” Tony admitted through a yawn. “But she keeps sleeping with me, so I figure I’m safe enough for now.”
It took Bruce three weeks to realize that Steve had moved in. Apparently he wasn’t around much.
“I’ve got something to do,” Steve muttered with a cagey expression that lent him the air of an anxious border collie.
“Need some help?”
“No, no,” Steve twitched. “Sam is giving me a hand.”
“Who’s Sam?”
Sam turned out to be another young, energetic and fit man that made Bruce painfully aware of his slouchy posture and greying hair. He was an affable enough addition to the group though he didn’t live in the tower, citing certain requirements for ongoing sanity. He appeared on a semi-regular basis and was happy enough to join in takeout dinners with Tony, Pepper and Bruce when Steve’s workouts ran too long. Sometimes he came by the lab when Tony was tinkering with his wings. There’d been five prototypes so far and each one came with rave reviews.
“If you don’t tell me which adjustments work better, I can’t actually make improvements,” Tony bitched.
“I love being up there,” Sam shrugged. “So anything that gets me there is going to make me happy.”
When Sam left, Bruce turned to Tony,
“You have anything like that? Something that makes you that happy that easily?”
“Pepper,” Tony replied lightening fast. Then he frowned. “I used to feel that way when I was making a sale. It’s not an emotion I put a lot of faith in.”
“Same here.”
Still, it would be nice to have it. Uncomplicated joy. Bruce couldn’t recall if he’d ever been capable of it. His childhood certainly hadn’t allowed for it and his adulthood had been shadowed by his past. Maybe the perfect bed came close, but even there he had a tendency to brood and dream dark dreams.
Bruce comforted himself with tea and fresh baked cookies. He had turned into someone’s spinster aunt in his middle years, but he figured that was preferable to giant green rage monster.
“Do you think I should get a cat?” He asked Pepper.
“Do you want one?”
“I don’t know. It would fit in with the general image I have going.”
“I’m not sure the ASPCA would approve of that reasoning. Also, cat pee smells.”
“Fair enough.”
Bruce had gotten used to the tower. It took months, routine slowly sanding away his rough flighty edges. He had a favorite bodega for newspapers, a drug store for his necessities and all of Central Park to ramble in when the city got to be too much. Gradually, he forgot about his go bag in the closet, though he never went so far as to unpack it. The world became a more predictable place, occasional laboratory accidents aside.
It knocked him off kilter then when a shadow took up residence in Steve’s apartment. Bruce assumed that the shadow was a man, but it was difficult to tell. He was always standing just out of sight or using Steve’s bulk as a wall between himself and the world. It was only through gradual conversation with Steve and Tony’s gossip that Bruce put together the story of James Barnes.
“Bucky’s stable,” Steve repeated over and over as if saying it could make it so.
“I don’t think I’m in any place to judge,” Bruce reassured him.
It said something that Natasha and Clint returned and invaded the tower full force weeks before Bruce properly met the elusive shadow. He hadn’t even know they’d made their come back until they appeared at his threshold.
The duo appeared on his doorstep along with the first truly chill day of autumn. On a broad ceramic plate, Natasha had piled up a collection of candles, good beeswax in a dozen bright colors. This offering came first, it’s giver extending it outward like a sacrifice to an angry god. There was probably less metaphor in there than Bruce was strictly comfortable with.
“We were in Seattle,” Clint half-explained. “We brought back coffee for everyone else.”
“Do you want something to drink?” Bruce took the plate, finding it far heavier than Natasha’s steady hold had suggested.
He could feel both sets of eyes on his back as he turned on the electric kettle. Years of being attuned to attention had made him over wary. Yet, he found something inexplicably friendly in their intense regard. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.
“What do you think?” Clint challenged, the conversation having wandered into strange territory while Bruce was brewing.
“I’m not entirely sure what a hipster is,” he set down steaming cups and sat between them. “Trends tend to pass me by.”
“It’s a moving target,” Natasha picked up her mug with care, fingertips delicate around the rim. “A certain look among a certain age bracket. A tendency towards nostalgia caged in wry acknowledgement about the time it came from.”
“By that definition, you’re calling Steve a hipster,” Bruce pointed out.
Clint burst out laughing. It was a good laugh, a deep chuckle that went far to smooth away the somber lines of his face.
“I’m telling him you said that,” Clint said through his grin.
“He’ll just add to his list,” Natasha shook her head. “And when he figures out you didn’t mean it nicely, he’ll give you the Disappointed Eyes.”
“Disappointed Eyes?” Clint snorted.
“She’s right,” Bruce blew the steam off the top of his mug. “It’s like the combined weight of every authority figure you ever respected saying, ‘I know you’re better than this’.”
“Worse than Fury’s ‘Your mother should’ve drowned you at birth’ look?” Clint asked.
“Far worse. At least Fury never had any respect for you to begin with.”
“Hey!”
Bruce decided that the visit was a bizarre welcome wagon ritual on their part and didn’t think much of it once they were gone. Except they came back. Three nights later, it was with an array of cheeses that Clint had picked up at some upscale grocery store because,
“This one was fifty dollars! You have to try fifty dollar cheese at some point in your life.”
“Stark gave us an expense account,” Natasha smiled faintly. “I bought custom boots. Do you know how hard it is to find combat boots for a narrow foot?”
“I could take a guess,” Bruce rifled in his drawers for crackers and only came up with some stale Wheat Thins. “I might have invested in a 3D Printer recently.”
“What’s that do?” Clint asked.
So they ate expensive cheese on stale crackers while Bruce printed Natasha a delicate bracelet from a pattern he’d found online and then brain stormed with Clint to come up with a workable arrowhead.
“It’s only a prototype,” Bruce tossed it to him when it came off the plate. “I could probably fabricate it with metal if you wanted.”
“I figured I’d just wear it as an earring,” Clint posed with it against one ear. The plastic was a cheery yellow at odds with the livid red scar under one ear.
“You look like a demented pirate.”
Natasha snorted and Bruce felt weirdly proud of himself.
The next time, it was Clint by himself. He looked worn under the eyes and he half-heartedly put a DVD case in Bruce’s hands.
“Cap mentioned you hadn’t seen it either and the thought depresses the hell out of me.”
Which was how Bruce watched the new Muppet movie with the world’s foremost archer on one side and the most idolized man in American history on the other. It was a cute movie. Even if Steve did get more of the pop culture references than Bruce did. He waited for Steve to go home before complaining about it. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised that Clint stuck around even as the credits ran into darkness.
“He’s making more of an effort,” Clint said, not entirely harshly. “Not to mention, he might be ninety, but he’s also the baby of the group. He’s hip to the lingo or whatever”
“He can’t be the youngest,” Bruce said automatically.
“Sure, he is. The dates may be a bit blurry, but at most he was 28, more likely 26, when he was deep frozen. Which you can’t count as living, so let’s not even go there. He’s only been back two years. Maybe Natasha can get dates out of Barnes and we can do a thirtieth bash for him.”
“Wow, okay, but you’re-”
“Nearly forty.”
“No,” Bruce laughed. “I mean I’m a pretty bad judge of age, but-”
“Want to see my license?”
“Is it your real one?”
“Far enough,” Clint grinned. “But it’s true. Thirty-nine as of three months ago. Tony is what...fifty?”
“Never say that to him,” Bruce shuddered. “He’s forty-seven, I think. He edits his own Wikipedia page and apparently most journalists are lazy, so articles call him thirty-nine.”
“And you’re forty-five.”
“Studied my file?”
“Natasha...well. That’s another mystery,” Clint side-stepped. “But she calls herself an old woman all the time.”
“She looks young.”
“She’s looked the same since I met her ten years ago and she’d been an active asset for years by then. Anyway, that makes Steve the youngest. He’s even a year younger than Barnes.”
“And he’s our leader. What does that say about us?”
“I prefer to think about what it says about him.”
The conversation did make Bruce think a little differently about Steve. He was a natural leader and obviously older than his years, but he so often did seem overeager and earnest compared to his more cynical team. It probably wasn’t fair. Steve had his own dark streak, it was just so light in comparison that he tended to wear a false halo.
A week later, Natasha returned and she too made a solo pilgrimage to Bruce’s door. She had a bottle of water with her.
“From the Fountain of Youth,” she said wryly.
“Clint talked to you.”
“Thank you.”
“What for?”
“Keeping him company. He needs it more than I do.”
“Oh. Um. It’s fine?”
“Good. Are you making dinner?”
They drank the souvenir water with his penne arrabiata. The water tasted a little chalky.
“Feeling younger yet?” She waggled his fork at him.
“Um. Hm,” he closed his eyes then reopened them. She was waiting patiently, “You know, I do. At least three days. You?”
“Maybe four or five, but I’ve had a little more.”
She smiled and he ducked his head back down to his plate. They lingered over dessert, Chips Ahoys with colored candies. He’d picked them up when buying a pack of socks and now he thought it might be his most genius moment ever. Because he got to watch the Black Widow, infamous assassin/spy/hero/villain, nibble around every single knock off M and M like they personally offended her.
“I could just get regular chocolate chip cookies from Tony. He keeps a horde somewhere in the lab,” he offered as he watched her work.
“I like the candies. I just prefer to eat them last.”
She systematically destroyed three cookies, then delicately decimated each candyshell, her teeth flecked with blue and yellow shrapnel. All the while she easily held down her end of the conversation about the Kern facility and SHIELD’s potential involvement in its construction. She was danger and warning from the sharp cut of her hair to the economic gestures, but Bruce had long ago learned how to stand close to potential disaster. How to enjoy it.
“I may have a problem,” he confessed to Tony the next morning.
“If you adjust the ratio in the the equation, you’ll be fine. I keep telling you to double check your math.”
“That’s not-” He looked down at his work and made the correction irritably. “Not what I meant. Huh. That would mean we could half the amount of the alloy without losing integrity.”
“We’ll get this bitch under fifty pounds,” Tony scratched his hairline, leaving a charcoal smudge behind. “Sam’ll be able to check it in at Laguardia without paying the baggage fee by the time we’re done.”
“When was the last time you actually paid a baggage fee?”
“I fly privately.” Miming Ironman thrusters, Tony made ‘pow-pow’ noise and drifted to the other side of the lab.
Bruce reapplied himself to his work. Clearly, Tony wasn’t the best choice for talking about interpersonal relationships.
“Jane?” He tried later, when Tony had been drawn away to get ready for some kind of gala.
“Hm?” She had emerged from her office to do her caffeine deprivation dance while the machine issued her a third large cappuccino.
“How did you bring up the idea of a romantic relationship with Thor?”
She blinked owlishly at him then grabbed up her cup and drank down half of it.
“Didn’t. It was more of a series of events that led to me being stranded in London for two years. We still haven’t really talked about it, actually,” she sighed. “I think he might propose soon. Or something. I’m not sure they have marriage the same way we do here.”
“Do you want to get married?”
“I love him,” she gave an uneven shrug. “But I love my work too. Not to mention, his people look at us as slightly above farm animals.”
“I don’t think Thor would make you quit working. He’s always talking about how smart you are.”
“Maybe,” she sighed. “I dunno. Some days, he makes me believe in soulmates. Others, I’m sure we’re not speaking the same language.”
“I think that’s just a relationship thing.” He could recall long stretches of conversations where he’d wondered if Betty where it seemed they were as remote from each other as moons and then falling together more intimate than twirled strands of DNA.
“Ugh. Let’s not talk about it. I’ve only got an hour or two of decent work let in me and I’ll never get it done if we go down the emotional rabbit hole.”
So Bruce didn’t talk to Jane about it either.
“What’s up, doc?” Steve asked him over a post-mission lunch, clearly pleased with this new bit of pop culture.
“I liked Marvin the Martian best,” Bruce replied.
“I think we just got done beating him to a pulp. Sorry about that.”
“He was a second rate pretender at best. Not even a centurion helmet to his name.”
“You’ve got something on your mind though.” Gentle prodding was becoming Steve’s speciality. Maybe he’d taken lessons from Pepper. Perish the thought.
“I usually do.”
“Something more than usual.”
“It’s a pointless thing,” Bruce shrugged it away.
“Girl thing,” Steve determined eerily.
“Sort of.”
“I guess I don’t have much experience in it. But I can tell you one thing.”
“Hm?”
“There’s never enough time,” Steve sighed. “Never. So you might as well go for it now.”
From Steve, the normally trite sentiment took on a deeper, textured meaning. Hesitantly, Bruce reached out and patted Steve gently on the arm.
“Thanks,” he gave Bruce a half-grin. “Wasn’t looking for sympathy though. Just figure someone should get something out of all of it.”
“How is Peggy?”
“Better. Worse. I mean, it isn’t going to get better, but she had a good day when I visited last month.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
“Yeah?” Steve frowned. “Why?”
“Why not?”
Mostly though, it was because Bruce thought that maybe someone should go with Steve on these pilgrimages, at least once and a while. It wasn’t exactly a hardship to meet a woman that had appeared in Bruce’s history textbooks anyway.
The visit was even pleasant in a disconcerting way. Peggy was having what Steve termed a ‘good day’. She talked happily with Steve as though he’d just returned from a mission and patted his hand over and over. Bruce, she acknowledged with a smile, though she kept referring to him as George for some unknown reason.
“Steve mentioned you liked ginger snaps,” Bruce offered as Steve reluctantly gathered up his coat. “I baked some for you.”
“Thank you,” the smile fell away from her face. “It’s good to see you so well. There was footage of a desperate young man in desperate straits. You’ve got a healthy look about you now. Someone must be taking care of you.”
“It’s a team effort,” Steve murmured.
“Did she know who I was there at the end?” Bruce asked in a hushed whisper as they left her to listen to the record Steve had put on a creaky turntable.
“Maybe,” Steve’s eyes were fixed on some distant mark as if he too had begun to wander back and forth in time. “She had a remarkable memory once. And SHIELD certainly kept tabs on you.”
“That would have been years after she retired.”
“People like us never really retire.”
“Which us? The military? Spies? Superheros?”
“The people in charge of getting things done.”
“You’re including me in that?”
“We’re awful short on candidates,” Steve opened the door and let the sunlight burst in. “Guess you’ll have to step up to the plate.”
It was a thought to carry on the train ride home. Bruce liked trains as much as he could enjoy any enclosed space. He’d jumped cars like an old fashioned hobo during his running days and he’d grown to appreciate the slow certain way of travel. Trains lumbered on, despite their anachronistic ways, pulling people and cargo through a shriveling network of veins.
Steve spent the entire ride staring out the window, white earbuds leaking out strains of music. In his hoodie, baseball cap and jeans, he could’ve been any twenty-something. God, Clint was right. Steve was the youngest of them and he hauled the world on his back like a patriotic turtle. Maybe Bruce hadn’t been cut out to be a hero, but he was damned if he was going to let this kid get crushed by the weight of the world all on his own.
For the first time, Bruce dared to approach Natasha and Clint on their own territory. JARVIS led him to Clint’s suite and he waited patiently with his offering of leftover ginger snaps and the bottle of blackberry wine he’d picked up on a whim.
“Hey,” Clint let him in. He looked freshly woken up, loose pants clinging to his waist, no shirt and hair rucked all over to one side.
“Sorry, if you were sleeping...”
“Nah. I shouldn’t be. Jet lag just caught up with me.”
The kitchen in Clint’s suite was empty, but the living room had been crammed full of magazines, piles of laundry and disconcertingly, a basket full of yarn in varying shades of purple. Natasha was curled into one corner of the couch, her hair caught back in a tight ponytail. She was swathed in a terrycloth bathrobe from neck to ankles.
“I can come back tomorrow,” Bruce hedged.
“Nah,” Clint crumbled over the arm of the couch, legs akimbo over the side.
“Sit down,” Natasha gestured him into a rocking chair that creaked a little as he settled into it. “We got back from Beirut last night. There’s an underground complex there that Hydra was using, but it’s vacant now. Another one for Tony’s map.”
The map was a sprawling hologram that only Tony could summon up through JARVIS’ deep protocols. Blue dots for destroyed bases, black dots for abandoned ones and red dots for suspected live cells. There were a distressingly large amount of red and black bases on it.
“Do you want to have a team briefing?”
“No,” Clint turned on to his side, a cushion smashed under his head. “Well yeah, but you know. Not now.”
“It can wait,” Natasha agreed. “You brought wine?”
They stayed on the couch while Bruce rummaged in Clint’s cabinets for clean glasses. They yielded up a jumble of jam jars. He filled them each halfway and bore them back.
“I’ve never seen you drink before,” Natasha held the jar in both her hands.
“I usually avoid it,” Bruce took a sip and found it sweeter than he’d expected. “But the alcohol content is low enough that I think I can deal with a glass of it.’
“The first time I had a drink that I ordered for myself it was a very dark beer in a bar in London,” she said, almost dreamily. “I nursed it for two hours and no one paid me the least bit attention because it was a quiz night.”
“Fifteen, Cleveland. The strongman let me try his whiskey.” Clint rested the jam jar in the center of stomach. The muscles were taut and flat. The jar settled uneasily on them.
“I think I was in college.” Bruce tore his gaze away from the purple shadows the wine threw over Clint’s rough skin. “Maybe late high school. A friend’s father mixed me a martini for some reason. I thought it tasted like poison.”
They chatted aimlessly for a few more minutes, before Bruce could bring himself around to the point.
“I want to be more useful. To the team.”
The couch went quiet. Clint tilted back his head to Natasha and they had a quick silent conversation.
“You should teach Bucky to meditate,” Natasha said. “Help him find his center a bit. That’d take some pressure off Steve.”
“I said the team.”
“But you meant Steve,”Clint smiled, upside down and still charming. “He’s wooed you with his old fashioned charm.”
“Something like that,” Bruce grimaced. “But he’s not really my type.”
“What is your type?” Natasha looked at him through the distortion of her glass.
Bruce didn’t have an answer for that. There’d only been Betty and a few careless dates before her. Then a long stretch of no one at all. He’d ruthlessly cut away that part of his life, after parting from Betty for the last time. Under layers of emotional detritus, he still loved her with a throbbing ache, but he’d long ago accepted that they were over. That his life was a jagged path only wide enough for one.
“Shorter,” he determined when the silence had gone on too long. “I’d need a stepladder to get close to Steve’s lips.”
Clint tiled back his head and his upside down smile sent a shiver down Bruce’s spine.
“Shorter,” Natasha repeated and finished off her wine.
He left when they both began to yawn and stretch. They needed sleep and he needed to escape the trust they showed him. The flash of weakness, of fatigue, felt too intimate just then.
The next morning found him in Steve’s apartment, offering up his precious sanctuary to a volatile young man. The metal arm was disconcerting, but the face was haggard and drawn. They reached the meditation room and Bruce had to fumble through some kind of explanation. He kept waiting for an explosion, for fidgeting, for annoyance.
Instead, he had a perfect follower. He watched with envy as limbs twisted obediently through poses that had taken Bruce months to get right. After, he went through the ritual of boiling water and choosing tea bags. Dark eyes followed each motion, the flesh and blood hand took the mug with delicacy.
“Thanks,” the voice was rough, dragged through a rusty, cut up throat.
Nothing about this man was the buck toothed child that the nickname ‘Bucky’ conjured. To call him only ‘Barnes’ was an insult. Too distancing.
“Can I call you James?”
“James,” the word sounded alien on those lips.
“Yes.”
“James,” repeated again, slower. “Yeah. Sure. Why not?”
James came every day after that. Bruce grew used to the new routine. He didn’t even mind when their after yoga tea became a shared lunch. James was good company, quiet and mindful of Bruce’s state of mind. When Bruce started to offer him books, James took to them like water in an endless desert.
“Do you believe there are endless dimensions?” James cradled ‘Hyperspace’ by Michio Kaku in his hands. “Nested into each other?”
“I think that there’s more than is dreamt of in any of our philosophies.”
“We saw Hamlet once,” James smiled faintly. “It was in French, done by burlesque girls, but you got the gist of it.”
“That must’ve been some performance.”
“Ophelia ripped off her dress when she went mad. I think it was the first time any of us saw pasties.”
Bruce didn’t disturb this offered memory, adrift without context. James had so few and they were more precious than diamonds.
“You’re spending a lot of time with the deadly trio,” Tony commented in the wee hours of the following morning. They were hunched together over a diagram, numbers swimming together.
“Hm?”
“You know, the assassins.”
“They live here.”
“I had noticed that, shockingly enough,” Tony’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You like them.”
“Is that a problem?” Bruce set down his stylus to look at Tony over his glasses.
“No! I just thought you didn’t really like people as a general rule.”
“I don’t trust humans as a rule. Individuals can be fine.”
“I’m just saying that it’s weird that you isolated yourself for like a million years and then take to your bosom some of the most dangerous people in the world.”
Bruce leaned back in his chair. Tony stared steadily at him, still as it was possible for him to be. They had built a fragile bridge between them in those first post-invasion days. Sometimes it had been nearly impossible for Bruce to meet Tony halfway, but that never seemed to bother Tony. Despite himself, Tony was good at friendship. Not in the normal way maybe. Still. He was willing to work at it. Even if it exposed the soft truth of his now unprotected heart.
“You’re still my best friend,” Bruce said softly.
“Of course I am,” Tony waved that away, even as the tense line of his shoulders bled into ease. “You still have to come after Rhodey unless you can beat him in an a jello wrestling match.”
“Noted,” Bruce rolled his eyes.
“Anyway, it’s not about that. It’s about you making friends from the wrong side of the tracks.”
“Tony, I built the wrong side of the tracks.”
“But-”
“Are you suggesting that they could somehow be a bad influence on me? You actually tried to wipe Latveria off the map with explosive tuna fish cans last week.”
“It was for the greater good,” Tony muttered darkly.
“Uh huh.”
Tony tinkered with the settings on the hologram. Bruce waited for it. It took five minutes, short for a Tony emotion, to work its way to the surface,
“I’m worried they’ll break your heart and it’s already frankensteined together. There’s only so much I can fix with particle accelerators and free housing.”
It was Bruce’s turn to be silent. He found the beginning of a few thoughts, but couldn’t follow them to the end. Tony set cogs spinning outward into a galaxy that made little sense from an engineering sense. Instead, it existed only for beauty and only for these few moments. That was Tony.
“I’m ready to try,” Bruce said when the last cog had danced into oblivion and the lab fell into darkness. “What’s the point of getting this far if I don’t keep advancing?”
“Okay,” Tony shrugged carelessly. “But I’m not sitting on the couch with you, eating ice cream and watching girl power movies.”
“That’s what I’ve got Steve for,” Bruce grinned and was rewarded with Tony’s laughter.
If Tony had figured it out, it meant it was probably time to do something. Unfortunately, Bruce had forgotten any game he might once have had (and the once was mostly theoretical). Then again, even if he had it, game probably wasn’t the right way to approach.
The sun rose and set. James came to him with his hair in his eyes and left shorn, scraped down to a naked essential self. It seemed everyone around him was becoming braver or stupider. Or both.
“Heard you’re going to go meet with the legendary Agent Carter again,” Clint fell into step with Bruce, appearing as if from the brickwork as Bruce made his way to the grocery store. “She came by when I was a recruit once. Steel grey hair and eyes that could still cut you clean through.”
“I hate living with spies.”
“We could pretend not to know if that would help. Natasha is better at that than I am.”
“But I’d know that you knew.”
It was raining softly, a clinging mist that fogged up Bruce’s glasses and wore at his nerves. He wanted to hunch into his jacket and let the world slide off his shoulders. He wanted to glare at Clint, warn him away.
“The thing about Natasha and me,” Clint kicked at a puddle, sending up a cascade of dirty droplets. “We’re not a couple.”
“Um,” Bruce choked. “I...figured? You don’t act like it.”
“We don’t,” Clint gave him a tight smile, “But the rest of the thing is, we’re not not a couple either.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Sometimes, doc, I feel lost too.”
They reached the shelter of the grocery store and Bruce picked up a basket, headed towards the produce out of sheer habit. Clint trailed along, eyes cutting the aisles into grids and vantage points. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Bruce wondered if Clint had eidetic memory. Certainly Natasha seemed to, if only in some areas. It’d be murder playing Trivial Pursuit with them.
“I’m guessing you began this conversation for a reason?” Bruce sounded testy even to himself. The melons did not quite give under his over effusive squeezes, but it was a near thing.
“Because Natasha delegated it to me. She’d rather handle it herself, but Steve asked her to investigate potential Hydra activity somewhere off the grid. It didn’t seem like a thing that should wait.”
“Why not? If you’re together, then I’m sure I could’ve waited a few days for her to reject me personally.” The melon made it safely to the basket. He headed to less bruisable items.
“It’s not a rejection. It’s more of a Groupon. A BOGO.”
“What?” Bruce tossed the broccoli in with the melon. It made an unsatisfying soft ‘whump’.
“We’re a package deal, I mean. For a lot of reasons.”
Bruce stopped, turned. Clint was looking at him with apparent serenity. Only the twitch of his fingers gave away whatever he was trying to mask. Anxiety? Fear? Or was Bruce projecting?
“You’re buying me dinner.” Bruce threw down the basket which finally did make a good loud bang, before he stormed out of the grocery store. “After I meditate for seven to eight hours.”
Amazingly, Clint was still waiting when Bruce emerged from the blank room. There was even dinner waiting, covered in tinfoil.
“Just pasta,” Clint poured them both ice tea. “I figured you didn’t actually want to go out.”
“Thanks.”
“Natasha would’ve handled it better, probably. Sorry. There’s just not really an easy way to say it.”
“No, it’s fine,” Bruce stared down at his plate, the overlapping strands of spaghetti pulsing under the thick red sauce.
“I probably should’ve asked if you’re even interested in men. I mean, I know that’s-”
“I’m interested in you,” Bruce said carefully and picked up his fork.
“Really?” Clint frowned. “You barely know me.”
“I’m certain I know more about you than I do about Natasha.”
“That’s...probably true.”
“Sexuality has never been my strong point,” Bruce swirled his fork to collect up the pale strands. “Betty had to hold my hand through most of the early stages of our relationship and no one before her ever got far.”
“We’re not really hand holders,” Clint sat back in his chair. “More like cliff shovers.”
“I’ve jumped off scarier mountains than that now.” The pasta never made it to his mouth. “Just lay it out for me.”
“The bottom line is that Nat doesn’t really do sex. Once and a while, she can get there, but it’s mostly not her thing,” Clint waved vaguely as if her sexuality hovered in the air between them. “She likes having companionship though and she doesn’t trust...you know. Anyone. But we’ve always had an understanding. We keep our own spaces, but she mostly winds up at my place.
“We talked about it a long time ago. Made a deal. I don’t have sex with someone who could potentially knife me and they have to pass a Natasha sniff test. Guess with all of that and everything that happened, we started thinking about finding someone more permanent.”
“And I’m suddenly a candidate?”
“Not suddenly,” Clint shrugged. “I’ve always thought you were interesting. Nat was too freaked out by you at first, but she’s gotten to like you. You took care of Bucky right. That made a big difference.”
“We sit quietly in a room together. That’s about what preschoolers can manage.”
“You showed him something he needed to know, pretty much just because she asked without expecting anything in return. Or maybe it was some invisible other qualification. I’m not an expert in Natasha, but I’m the closest you’ll get.”
“What about the woman herself?”
Clint’s gaze shifted into the ether, maybe to the quiet place where he planned his shots.
“I don’t think anyone on this team is an expert on themselves.”
They ate dinner in silence. Clint got up when the food was gone. He approached carefully with the patience of a man used to waiting. He cupped Bruce’s chin, tilted his face upward. They regarded each other, man to man, animal to animal, for a swallowed pause.
Then Clint leaned down into a kiss that began awkward and ended with him straddling Bruce’s lap, their hands fisted in each other’s shirts. The zero to sixty sent Bruce’s head spinning. He clung to Clint and tried to regain himself.
“So that works,” Clint laughed into Bruce’s mouth.
“You’d better go,” Bruce muttered even as he tilted in for another kiss. “It’d be smarter to take it slow.”
“Nat would be pissed if she missed it,” Clint agreed and slide reluctantly away.
It took a week for Natasha to return. A week that returned Bruce to an adolescent fever stew of lust, anxiety and fear. The mixture would normally have seen the Hulk doing a star turn down Broadway.
Yet a strange thing happened.
The routine that Bruce had so carefully built for himself caught and held. With James coming every morning, Bruce simply couldn’t set aside mediation. He had to clear his mind and lead their joined breathing into something approaching calm. Their lunch required his full attention, not on his own emotional stew, but on James’ furrowed brow. Afternoons in the lab meant ensuring Tony’s well being and chasing down ideas of math and clean lines that left no room for other things. Even Clint’s nocturnal visits which added to the mess were interspersed with soothing rituals. They cooked together, ate safely opposed to each other and spent the rest of the night busy with teenage necking while the news played to their deaf ears. Then at night there was the bed Pepper had built for him, soft and safe to cocoon his fermenting feelings.
The week may have always felt a hair’s breadth away from disaster, but it never careened off the edge. He stared at himself in the mirror, watched the flecks of poisonous green surface and then dart away like koi fish when a rock dropped in the water. The Hulk was there, would always be there, a simmer below the surface, but for the first time Bruce thought that maybe they could reach an accord.
Natasha stepped in beside him, her face joining his in the mirror, the sharp point of her chin hooking over his shoulder. Slowly, her hands slid around his waist. He put a hand over her joined ones on his stomach. Her body was warm, even through layers of clothes.
She too looked into his eyes. They stared at each other through the safety of their joined reflection.
“Can I sleep with you?” She asked.
“I have nightmares.”
She made a scoffing sound. He read volumes in it.
He took her hand and led her into his bedroom. They descended the three steps together, but curled up on separate sides of the bed. He listened to her breathing for a long time and was shocked to find that she fell asleep before him, tucked neatly into herself. Then again, any wrong move and he was sure she’d be instantly awake and certainly armed. It was a nearly comforting thought and he let it lull him into sleep.
In the morning, she was gone, but Clint was stretched in her place on his stomach, arms folded under his head.
“Should I even ask how you get around JARVIS to get in and out?” Bruce asked through a yawn.
“We don’t. JARVIS said you told him we could come and go as we pleased.”
“Those weren’t my exact words,” Bruce frowned, trying to recall. Maybe they had been. It’d been an impulsive thing to say if he had.
“You could debate with him or you could be naked with me.”
Natasha returned right around the time they had both managed to shed their pants, their legs tangled together. She perched at the top of step, folded into her robe.
“You gonna watch?” Clint asked, his words whispering over Bruce’s neck.
“If you make it worth watching.”
There was a mug cradled in her hands.
“Never had an audience before,” Bruce tilted his head back to look at her.
“No?” She waggled her fingers at him in a tiny hello. “Don’t worry, Clint’ll take your mind off it.”
Bruce didn’t lay back and think of gamma rays. He turned Clint onto his back, grateful for Clint’s pliancy in the matter and worked out a few theories he’d been harboring.
Confirmed: Clint wasn’t ticklish. Blowjobs were almost always appreciated even if a bit sloppy and punctuated with gasps.
Disproven: Sex and laughter were mutually exclusive. Laughter ruined the mood.
Discovered and previously not even guessed at: If Bruce locked his gaze with Natasha, he could orgasm without even the slightest concern for the Hulk.
Come splattered and hair sweat plastered to his forehead, Bruce felt bonelessly please. Clint bore a matching smug smile, one arm flung over Bruce’s stomach. In silent slithering movements, Natasha insinuated herself between them.
“Hey, darling,” Clint murmured, hand settling on her waist.
“Hope it was worth watching,” Bruce risked joining Clint’s hand, lacing their fingers together on the sharp blade of her hip bone.
“I liked when you made Clint’s eyes roll back in his head,” she rubbed her nose along the curve of Bruce’s shoulder. “And you’ve got a very lovely cock. I don’t think I’ll be touching it anytime soon though.”
“Okay,” he was grinning far too much for a man who just got that news.
They mostly moved into his place after that. Their books and weapons started to clutter up the space. The rise and fall of their voices became the underpinning music of his life. Many days they were a closed society of two, a share of stories and blood that ran like a river in the way they touched each other. Other days, they were gone entirely on missions far reaching and dark. But Bruce had his own planets to orbit and tasks to complete.
“Empty house today?” James asked, slathering peanut butter over sticks of celery.
“Yes.”
“Stop by ours after you’re done with work then. Steve wants to marathon through more Disney movies and I need the moral support to make it through.”
“I guess some of them are kind of unbear-”
“No, you don’t understand,” James eyes were wide. “They all get me. It’s like...I don’t know. I’m just this exposed nerve sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah,” Bruce watched the carrot turn to mush. “I know.”
In Tony’s lab that afternoon, Bruce smiled bemusedly at his equations until Tony collapsed across his back like the world’s worst blanket.
“You look too happy for someone, who won’t get laid for a week at least.”
“I grew an exoskeleton,” Bruce patted Tony’s spiky, greasy head. Then wiped his hand on Tony’s shirt. Which was also greasy. “And you need a shower.”
“And slough off my own protective layer?”
“You smell like burning.”
“Ugh, fine. But talk to me while I shower.”
Two years ago, Bruce had been living on the ragged edge of sanity and health. Two years ago, he had imagined an endless life wearing thin the soles of his shoes and on the brink of disaster.
Now, Bruce was watching the leading mind of his generation scrubbing pink while Bruce told him about his epiphany.
“So I’m...happy.”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Tony tossed the loofah over the glass door of the shower and it smacked Bruce square in the face. The soap stung his eyes and tasted like chemicals. “I’m not sure your brain can handle too much serotonin.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to keep me in check.”
Bruce leaned back on the toilet, head against the cool wall. It was surprisingly comfortable.