starkingenuity | The Not So Silent Hill

"If all the scanners say you can. How do you feel?" Bruce watched the healers' hands dance over their scanners out of the corner of his eye, but for once, he didn't care about technology (okay, maybe he cared a little). He only had eyes for Tony at the moment, terrified that he'd suddenly start speaking backwards again.

Alessa, for her part, propped her head in her hands and rested her elbows on the table next to Tony's arm. "We came here because Thor said they could fix the body. It's in the other room."

"Then something happened and you were cursed."

"And I think we just fixed it." Alessa looked over Tony's head and gave the apprentice a little nod of approval. That was tantamount to her giving him a hug.

"I feel like I've been slapped," he grumbled and when he grumbled again, the healer released the hold that the bed had on it's patient. Tony was not pleased as he sat up and wrapped his hand around one of his wrist marks. "By Thor. Speaking of, where's Fabio's more thunderous brother at? No, don't tell me, playing house on Earth with that star gazer...? Playing poker with Rogers? My head is killing me. Would it be a faux pas if I throw--"

Yep, there it came. Lunch and all of it's glory was left on the floor between his legs. He wasn't proud of that. In fact, he looked pretty damned embarrassed.

"Send me the bill," he groaned, trying to get off of the table without stepping in his own sick.

Bruce looked completely unfazed by the vomit. He had seen far worse in his adventures doctoring.

Instead, he immediately took Tony's arm, giving him support as he tried to get up from the table. "Be careful. You're still recovering."

As for Thor...

He and Alessa exchanged quick glances. "We're going to talk to Thor later. What's the last thing you remember?"

He needed to gauge how much he needed to fill Tony in on. Hopefully, it was just a few days, like the apprentice said. A few days, they could handle.

What was the last thing he remembered? There was a moment of noticeable uncertainty as Tony scanned through several conflicting thoughts. "Shaving," he finally settled on, but there were a few images of him shaving. "And I think I was having eggs?" It was fuzzy. His brain was never fuzzy. That was...horribly disturbing.

A sudden closing of his throat made Tony attempt to clear it twice before he smiled, only to have that smile fall away like petals in the wind.

"Actually... I really don't remember, Banner. I was buying you a pair of stretchy pants... And shouldn't you be in India dodging my sat phone calls?" But he knew Alessa?

How was that possible.

"I need a mint."

"In... India?"

There was no way that could be good.

"No. No, I came back from India after you invited a terrorist to your house. That was a while ago."

Alessa's face was neutral as she walked closer, but in her head, she was wondering if she would just go ahead and curse the shit out of things even if Thor killed Loki.

"That was before you met me." She looked up at Tony, her expression blank as ever. "Do you remember how we met?"

He didn't like the looks they were giving him and he didn't like having people so close to him. Tony didn't step back, that was weakness, but he did push slightly with his hand as if that might keep him from getting too close to them. He knew he cared about Alessa and Bruce, but that didn't mean he really wanted to be touched right now. That Bruce had steadied him seemed strangely horrible. Really, people had no respect for personal space.

Alessa's question didn't quite make him flinch, but it was somewhat disturbing just the same.

"We... Banner and I, we met you in Silent Hill," he said, glancing at Bruce. "But that happened-- Okay, did I get hit on the head or something? Did someone drug my drink? Not. Cool. Just so you know, it's also illegal."

Bruce backed off at the little push. Sometimes Tony needed space, but... usually, that was only when he was having a panic attack. Maybe he just needed air because he was feeling sick.

Alessa, however, was right up in his space, however. She has no sense of personal space.

"No, someone cursed you and you started touching everything like a little kid when we went into a magic store." Yes, Alessa's tone was curt, but that was how she expressed worry. She had a bad feeling she knew exactly what Loki had tried to take away. "Tell me what happened when we both talked alone for the first time. What were we talking about?"

"Chess," Tony replied immediately, happy that he'd gotten at least one question right without realizing that he had glossed over a very important chunk of that conversation. "I taught you how to play." The human mind was ridiculously complicated and worse, capable of fooling itself to filling in details that hadn't happened.

Alessa knew how to play chess already. Tony gave her pointers but he hadn't taught her anything. Even so, his mind now clearly supplied him with memories of sitting down at a table going over how pawns moved and what castling meant.

In reality, he'd been in a cage for his own protection, under the courthouse, in Alessa's domain. And yet, he remembered none of that.

"That's not what we talked about. I already knew how to play."

Bruce looked down and covered his mouth, furrowing his brow and trying not to let onto how concerned he was by this.

"You wanted something from me. You kept asking for it, then decided if you maybe did something for me, I would give it to you." Information about Bruce and if he was okay. He had asked over and over, and Alessa had been stone cold in the face of his fear and concern. "You were right. What did you keep asking me, Tony?"

Bruce knew what it was, even if he had never heard the details of what happened. Tony was very single-minded, and had probably been just as worried about him as he had been distraught.

Tony's brow furrowed and he just shook his head at Alessa. It didn't take any effort to put two and two together. He was missing more than a few days. He was missing whole chunks of something. Was it isolated? "I don't know." That was hard for a know-it-all to admit. "Like I said, things are a little spotty."

He remembered giving Alessa her companionship. He remembered befriending her and riding out of dodge with a fireball behind them. He remembered her body--

"How about you fill me in? That might jog something."

Bruce was not stupid. He could put two and two together.

He backed up a little further, shutting himself down and sincerely hoping his theory was wrong. He took off his glasses, looking to the healers around them and softly saying, “Can we have a moment, please?”

This was going to get intensely personal and he would like the three of them to talk alone.

“You wanted me to tell you that Bruce was okay.” Alessa, on the other hand, didn’t really care about company. To her, talking around the healers was closer to talking around monkeys than actual people. Actually, talking around anyone she didn’t really care about was like talking around a monkey. Usually an annoying one. “You were in the graveyard, but you were pulled underground into the jail. You wouldn’t stop asking me about him. It was really annoying, actually.”

Back then, he was also just a chattering monkey to her. A chattering monkey that was obsessed with another monkey who chattered slightly less.

“Then we played a chess game. I had to make the pieces. When you won, I said you could ask a question and I’d answer honestly. I would have answered your questions even if you didn’t play, but you were really rude about asking so I decided to make you work for it.”

Had this been any other situation, Bruce would have chuckled at her. Yeah, that sounded like Alessa. And that also sounded like Tony.

“Can you remember what you asked me?”

He couldn't. The blank look in his eyes was enough to prove it, though he tried his best to play it off. "Why wouldn't he be okay," Tony asked, smirking. "He's probably the strongest out of all of us."

But Banner couldn't access the Hulk there. The thought was puzzling, just as puzzling as being unable to understand what was going on with his own mind.

"Instead of playing these games and making me feel like an idiot savant, how about you just tell me?" The twenty questions were actually starting to upset him. It was all in the way he stood, despite the projected confidence. Despite the swagger. Despite the smirk. He was afraid.

Someone fucked with his head, took something important away from him. He wanted it back.

Unfortunately, Alessa had all the sensitivity of a sledgehammer. She was already working out in her head how they would fix this, how they would exact proper retribution, and she wasn’t one to consider how to delicately handle a frightened man.

“You asked me how the both of you could get out. I told you Bruce needed to open the puzzle box—you remember the box? The one you found under the Christmas tree?”

Bruce looked down at her with a frown. “How do you know about the Christmas tree? You weren’t there for that.”

“I’m aware of everything that happens in the town.”

A little bit of color crept up his neck. “Everything?”

She took a moment to look at him with the flattest expression she could manage. “Everything.”

He cleared his throat uncomfortably. Alessa rolled her eyes—what, did he think she just guessed what was going on in the various layers and reached of her realm?—before looking back at Tony and continuing with her thought. “But I told you that you could leave whenever if you just asked nicely. You didn’t ask even then.”

Bruce looked at her again, this time with a furrowed brow and previous embarrassment forgotten. Tony could have just left? Neither of them had ever told him about that.

Tony's eyebrows lifted and furrowed as he watched the exchange between the two. Bruce's words, the flushing-- Yeah, he really didn't understand and that was more annoying than anything else he might be faced with here. His whole lot in life was, incidentally, understanding. Languages came easily, complicated scientific subjects could be learned over night-- Without his mind, he was nothing.

Tony took two steps back, just missing the vomit, and sat on the edge of the table again before he fell over.

Everything. Just what happened to them? He remembered the box, he remembered the trials. Those memories, however, were not entirely accurate.

He couldn't begin to voice the reasons why. The mind was... The mind was a dangerous place, though it was his playground too.

"Well that sounds...right. You don't leave people in combat situations. I've been around enough military guys to know that."

“Silent Hill isn’t combat. Silent Hill is hell. You always are trying to walk out of hell.” Especially since there is never any other escape, as Alessa was intimately aware.

“Do you remember fighting HYDRA?” Time for her own personal experiment. Were the memories that didn’t involve Bruce somehow still intact? “The hospital room. The woman who died in front of us before they came.”

Bruce was conspicuously quiet, allowing Alessa to move through the memory tests on her own. After all, magic was her area of expertise, not his.

And, in a small part of himself, he could admit he didn’t want to confirm his theory: that Loki had specifically stolen memories of their relationship from Tony.

Tony recounted all of it. Some of it wasn't right exactly but people couldn't remember every detail like Alessa could. For the most part, Tony had a grip on the majority of the reality Alessa had experienced as well. He noted Bruce's role as well but it was muted. Just about everything concerning Bruce was.

The localized memories, the specific emotions tied to, and anything truly meaningful with Bruce seemed to have vanished. Their history was gone, though Tony still seemed affectionate towards the man.

But did that mean that Tony was always going to feel that way or did their going to die sex start something that never would have happened otherwise?

Bruce was good at controlling his feelings, hiding them and burying them and pretending they weren't there. He learned to do it with his father, he learned to do it with the Hulk, and he knew how to do it now. He was hurt and angry and cynically unsurprised (he had expected something to ruin them sooner rather than later).

So he stayed carefully professional and put his glasses on again, melting into his doctor persona and forgetting what feelings were for a moment.

"Well, we figured out what you're missing. You--"

"Alessa, not right now. He just woke up." Bruce's voice was stern in a detached way, eliciting a frown from Alessa. "First, let's just make sure you're okay. How are you feeling? Any more nausea, dizziness, fatigue, anything?"

He wouldn't like to have a relationship he didn't remember forced on him, especially not in Alessa's patented blunt way. That would be handled far more delicately, and after all the other pressing matters were dealt with.

As typical of any human, genius level or otherwise, Tony assumed the worst. He'd blocked something traumatic from his mind. Immediately, his thoughts went to his hands and he wrung them just to be sure that he had all of his bones in place and nothing had damaged them. He couldn't exactly do work if his hands weren't pristine. That done, relief on his features visible for a moment, he moved on to other things that could have happened.

Pepper left him. He knew that, but he wasn't sure why. She left him quite a long time ago, long enough to know she would not be the cause of his memory loss.

Had he killed someone while he was in Silent Hill? Had something more nightmarish than he could remember have happened-- Rape? Oh God, he was raped!

Tony's hands started to sweat.

"Of course I am experiencing nausea, dizziness and fatigue, Banner!" he said, voice raised and on edge. "Something happened to the last few days of my life and erased something else from my memory so yes, I'm feeling like I might pass out."

Bruce's face was impassive, and that startled Tony. Bruce had never looked at him like that. Never.

So then...it wasn't rape. It was something that had to do with Bruce. Had he witnessed something Banner did...or maybe something that happened to Bruce? Was that why he'd been asking Alessa if he was all right? No wonder Banner refused to talk about it. Tony shrunk back in himself, lowering his gaze and stood up once more.

"I feel a lot better now. Uh... Yeah, the vomit's getting to me a little. Did I at least get some cool sight seeing in? It sucks coming to an alien planet and not remembering it."

Alessa was still looking at Bruce disapprovingly when she said, “Yes, we did. You wanted to get me a boat. Bruce said no. We got books instead.” They still needed to get something to translate the damn things. She looked at Tony, her expression smoothing out and becoming neutral again. “Maybe we can look around again later.” If the whole ‘Loki is king and Thor may or may not be killing the shit out of him right now’ thing didn’t make them leave in a hurry. Speaking of… “But we might need to leave soon.”

Bruce glanced at Alessa, his disturbingly dispassionate face mirroring her own. “Alessa, you should make sure your body is somewhere safe.” It was a weak spot of theirs. Alessa’s body was vulnerable. “Then meet up with us.”

They had to do something about Loki. Alessa nodded her head sharply before vanishing.

Bruce turned his eyes to Tony, face still blank. “Why don’t we go outside so you can get some air? I’ll explain what’s going on.” And by ‘what’s going on’, he meant ‘explain about Loki.’ He’d keep tight-lipped about their relationship as long as he could.

Without any idea at all how he and Bruce use to be, Tony just nodded at his friend and leaned on him a moment to get around the vomit and the table. The grand balcony off of the pavillion, overlooking the beautiful river, took Tony's breath away. He went immediately to the handcarved banister and gripped it with both hands to lean over. There was a wistful smile on his face before he looked back over his shoulder at Bruce. His grin was...well. Beautiful.

"This is-- Okay, probably having the exact same reaction I had a few days ago," Tony said with a laugh. The affection had never died, and that, likely, made it even harder for Bruce. Especially because Tony didn't try to touch him.

He turned to lean back against the railing and crossed his arms over his chest.

"So what's the latest? Other than Alessa's body getting repaired-- Great by the way. Saves us some time worrying about the other effects of Extremis--" Jesus, Banner's face... Tony hated it.

It hurt. It hurt to see Tony to laugh, to smile at him like that, and know that it was just friendship. Bruce wanted to break something, to snap it into little pieces with all the hurt and rage and frustration in his heart.

He had told Tony it would end badly. And, in some twist of irony, Bruce was the only one to see that it had.

But his face was carefully blank, no hint of his thoughts or feelings in his eyes or mouth. He looked over Tony’s head, avoiding the smile and the eyes and the laughter, and instead looked at the sky.

Asgard was gorgeous.

“Yeah, you’re reacting about the same way. You almost wandered off the bridge, you were so distracted. So did I, actually. Alessa kept us from falling off.”

That was just yesterday. Tony was touching and kissing him just yesterday. He hid his hands in his pockets before he started to fidget with them. “We’ve actually decided to try to use Extremis on her anyway. Her body is… functional, but it doesn’t have any muscle mass. She can’t even lift her head.” Even his voice was less expressive than usual. It wasn’t quite to Alessa’s level of blankness, but it certainly wasn’t giving anything away.

This was not the Bruce he knew. The chunks of what he remembered from the last few weeks didn't really exist within the frame of this person in front of him. It was horribly wrong, but Tony wasn't sure if that he could bring it up. Bruce kept his silences to himself for a reason. Anger issues probably didn't account for it entirely either.

"So..what? They just reverted all of her cells to a prenatal state? Huh. Never even thought of that," Tony said, trying to engage with Bruce...only to have it flop completely. His smile was plastered to his face because he knew how to keep on smiling through pain. Why make things worse?

The talk about Alessa was short. It had to be considering, in the distance, something terrible was going on at what Tony assumed was the palace.

He turned bodily towards the building.

"Uh...is that the situation then...?"

Bruce avoided looking too long at Tony. He was glad, in some twisted way, that there was a crisis making sure their conversation was short.

“Loki’s alive. He posed as Odin. Alessa only just told us.” Bruce took his hands out of his pockets, slipping off his jacket and taking off his glasses. “Thor went to deal with it. Let’s give him some backup.”

Today seemed like a good day to smash things. He kept his jacket in the crook of his arm and started walking towards the palace.

Tony wouldn’t be able to help, but Alessa and Bruce would. That should be enough.

"Oh c'mon, I thought that guy was dead!" Tony followed Bruce from the balcony to the pavilion again and quickened his pace when they got to the street. It was chaos. It was New York all over again. It was insanity. Tony could actually feel his heart skip in his chest before he grabbed Bruce's arm.

He didn't have armor. Bruce couldn't just unleash the Hulk without knowing how dangerous things could get. He was smacked into twice, shoving him against his friend, but Tony just righted himself and tried to ignore the whole crush of bodies thing he really wasn't all that cool with.

Two guards came to join them, trying to direct the panicked crowd and Tony wondered if those scepters were like the one Loki had had. He could always act as backup fire power!

Maybe...not.

"This is crazy, Banner."

Instinctively, Bruce touched the hand on his arm, as if to make sure Tony was there and safe. Trying not to concentrate on the closeness.

“Tell me about it.” They were being pushed further and further to the side by churning Asgardians. Bruce looked over their heads, trying to see where the commotion was. “You shouldn’t be here.” Even if Tony hadn’t just been thrashing in a neurological spasm an hour or so ago, he didn’t have any armor or weapons to hold his own against any kind of Asgardian attack. “Find someplace safe. Alessa could probably—”

Speak of the (perhaps literal) devil. Alessa appeared next to them. “Body’s with Valtiel. What did I miss?” A fleeing Asgardian passed right through her. Alessa took a moment to frown in mild irritation at the man. “Never mind. Just general chaos. Are we going to go kill Loki now? Because I’d like to do that.”

“Get in line,” Bruce said with far more darkness in his voice than usual. Alessa was rubbing off on him.

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