Work Text:
He doesn’t deliberately set out to search Tony’s archives for technology that would suit his purpose; he just keeps an eye open.
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He jumped in front of a moving train. He woke up naked, five miles away, without a scratch on him. As the news reported a rising death toll from "a freak train accident" he vowed to make his next attempt far away from other people.
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He tried to slit his wrists. Took out a scalpel from an individually sealed package, and watched it press into skin that turned green instead of bleeding. He stopped before he completely lost it.
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Once, when he was working at a clinic, he swiped enough drugs to kill, well, a Hulk. He lost control before he could inject the entire syringe and while the other guy was slightly less destructive than usual, he didn’t die.
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The next time he tried euthanasia he planned it out a little more. He hung an IV bag full of morphine, inserted a large bore needle and set it for a fast drip. He downed a fist full of Xanax with a glass of alcohol, and closed his eyes. He woke up again. Naked. He still doesn't know how the other guy survived, but the shattered lab had morphine puddled on the floor.
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Every once and a while he wakes with the taste of metal in his mouth. The other guy may have spit the bullet out, but the memory of the gun on his tongue is all his.
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Tony's lab is everything he promised it would be. Cutting edge research and tech all over the place. If it weren't for the other guy he would have found nerd heaven and never left the lab again. And even better than all the tech is Tony himself, wandering in and out, getting caught up in those mad bouts of genius. That wonderful feeling of, how did Tony put it, "Finally, someone who speaks English."
He finds it digging around in the mainframe one day. Palladium cores. Maybe the slow heavy metal poisoning will work. The other guy doesn't have enough awareness to stop something steady and long term.
"It won't work." Tony says suddenly from behind. “JARVIS, clear these screens, transfer everything to a different server and pull up the latest readings." He jumps, and has to work to steady his heart, hands clenching, and knuckles green. So wrapped up in trying to determine what levels of metals would be needed to poison the amount of blood the Hulk has, he didn't hear Tony enter the lab.
"It won't work because Fury has a way to reverse the effects. Yea, he got Agent Romanov to stab me in the neck with the stuff. Saved my life and that's not really what you're going for here is it?"
Tony glances at him from the corner of his eye, but keeps talking and gesturing back to the screens, holograms of data expanding out and around them. He shakes his head, “This has nothing...”
Tony talks over him, "But come on, enough of that. You can find another way to kill yourself later. Take a look at these numbers."
So he takes a deep breath, unclenches his hands and looks at the readings.
Besides, it's not like the palladium was going to work either.