starkingenuity | The Not So Silent Hill

How was he feeling? Tony gazed at Bruce's face and ignored the lack of eye contact he was being met with. It was disturbing. Bruce had never looked away from him before. From Natasha, yes, he still felt guilty about that, but he and Banner use to be equals. Now that they weren't--

Tony swallowed and then nudged Bruce's leg with his bare foot. "That's not the weirdest thing I've woken up to. But to answer your question, I feel a little out of the loop. I really-- I want to know what you and Alessa are keeping from me." Because it was driving him up a wall. If he were Spider-Man, that might be literally.

He tried to look more earnest than annoyed, but truthfully, he couldn't help the underlying flash of anger and worry to his voice and his face.

"It's twisting me up." But not enough to get a drink...so that was something.

Bruce did his best to not wince at the casual, affectionate contact, immediately trying to hide the motion with another sip of tea. What was he supposed to say? ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just that our friendship is ruined because I love you and you completely forgot we have a relationship’?

“I’m sorry about that. I just figured… you might not want it thrown in your face so soon after waking up.” And he still had no idea how to explain it.

He paused, staring down at his tea, trying to compose some kind of explanation in his head. “Has Alessa told you anything?” Hopefully, the question would give him just a little more time to think. He himself had had barely any time to process it all.

"No one is telling me a damned thing!" He wanted to give Bruce his space, but enough. "There's a huge whole in my life and whatever you and Alessa are keeping from me, or trying to protect me from, you can just stop it, okay?" He grabbed the tea from Bruce's hands and dropped it somewhat carelessly on the desk.

He was tired of distractions.

He was tired of Bruce treating him like he was a patient.

"Can you please just-- Just tell me. I don't need to be protected. I'm a big boy, Banner."

Bruce resisted the urge to tell Tony it wasn't just him that he was protecting.

Instead, he just took a deep breath, uncomfortably looking anywhere but at Tony.

"We slept together in Silent Hill." He couldn't figure out how to say it tactfully, so he was going to take a leaf from Alessa's book and say it. "And we've been together since then."

He winced, waiting for some reaction. He was too sober for this.

Of all the things it could be, of all the reasons that he and Bruce might have had a falling out or secrets might have been kept, 'we slept together' was very likely the last thing to come to his mind. 'We've been together since.'

Tony wasn't sure what to feel so he let himself feel everything. The disquiet, the cringe factor, the elation, the disbelief, the fear, the amusement, the utter confusion... It was all sort of beautiful when he stepped back from it. And it made the most sense.

Bruce Banner-- Well, he had told him before that he was his soul mate. He hadn't been lying.

"Well," he said, finally having to vocalize it. "So that's why your things are in my closet."

Bruce avoided looking at Tony's face. He didn't want to see what might be there. He didn't want to look, just in case it was something that would break his heart more than it already was.

(How dramatic, he reprimanded himself. You're not a teenager, Banner. You can deal with a breakup.)

"Yeah, I..." He picked up the tea again. He needed something to do with his hands. "I can move all that out."

He didn't expect Tony to want to pick up where they left off, and he understood. It was hard to even want to start something if there wasn't history, and Tony had forgotten their history.

"You don't exactly have a whole walk in closet worth of stuff, Banner. I might but I can give you a little space." It was only half a quip and not all that much in the grand scheme of things. He just wanted Bruce to know that he was all right with it. Maybe not all right completely, sure, but it didn't really gross him out either.

He was mostly trying to picture it. All of it.

"I want to remember," he blurted out suddenly, head tilting back against the wall. "It seems really stupid that everyone else gets to remember all of the juicy bits but-- JARVIS!" Oh ho ho! He might be able to see it yet!

"JARVIS should have recordings of everything that happened in the tower. That includes us." Bruce took a long sip of his tea. He didn't know how to feel about Tony offering to let him keep his clothes there. He wouldn't, of course, because it'd hurt too much to sleep apart and then go to Tony's room to get his clothes in the morning.

"What do you want me to do?" Did Tony want him to go? To stay? To pretend nothing happened? He didn't know how to act in this situation, so he was leaving it in Tony's hands. He was, after all, the one who had had his memory stolen from him.

"Move over." It was an odd request. Tony retrieved the tea from the desk and returned it before climbing into bed beside the other. The AI responded and Tony had him queue up shots from his room when Banner was in there with him. Mostly there was talking, laying together in bed, laughter. Sometimes there were serious discussions, work done half naked, Tony constantly trying to steal Bruce's glasses-- He let it all run through at five times the usual speed, skipping over sleeping, and felt his heart sink into his stomach.

It wasn't always romantic. They didn't have sex, Bruce kept stopping it. Their interactions, however, made him so very sad. He longed for it.

No matter how awkward Bruce felt about watching them digitally enhanced and dancing in some strangely cartoonish, affectionate jive across the holographic screen, Tony ate all of it up no matter how heavily it laid in his chest.

He was angry half an hour later when he told the AI to stop the video.

"You're the doctor, Banner. Tell me there's a way to reverse it." Whatever he use to have, he needed it back. Seeing it all was just a tease.

Bruce moved over, but he didn't watch. He couldn't. Instead, he stared at his tea, keeping his face blank even as the recording showed him smiling and laughing.

"Alessa mentioned something before you went under."

He sipped his tea, his tone and expression both flat to try keeping all the feelings inside under control.

"She said something about you leaving memories everywhere and it just being a matter of giving them back. I don't know how it works, how dangerous it might be, or even if she can do it on this scale. We thought you were only going to be missing a few days at most when she brought it up."

Though Tony got to his feet immediately to seek the little girl out, it was Bruce's blankness that finally ticked that anger up to palpable. He had chosen Bruce, an unknown, a genius with anger issues and no ability for sex over a woman wild in the bedroom who had been his right hand for five years. He'd chosen Bruce and Bruce looked...

Well. Like that.

"There's just one thing that I'm still not getting," Tony barked. His voice was rougher than it ought to have been, he knew. "You... Right now..."

He had no idea that this was how Bruce coped. He really ought to have.

"You don't even seem to care. I don't even remember and it's like I care more about you than you care about me!" Oh. Tony was just so... So selfish.

Bruce finally looked at Tony, his jaw locking and teeth clenching and eyes dangerously focused.

"You think I don't care?"

His tone regained inflection. It was soft and tense with an explosion he could feel coming.

Mathematical equations. Graphs. Not the way he felt like Tony had just stabbed him.

He stood up from the bed quickly and placed his tea aside, struggling to keep his composure. "I think I should get some air."

Finally. Something. Tony made as if to follow and instead, skirted the bed and stood in front of the door. Cornering a dangerous man wasn't his smartest idea but if he didn't get Bruce to stop-- What would be the point? He might want nothing more than to experience what loving someone like that would be like again but if Bruce just shut down, how could he possibly?

"So...what? I lose my memories of us and you...run away? You plan on never telling me? You just let it go? Are you crazy? Don't you think it might be important to me to know something like that?!"

Tony's heart was pounding, and not just because he was provoking Bruce.

"I wasn't planning on never telling you! In case you didn't notice, we had some other things to deal with up until now!"

Now his voice was rising. He was usually so good at keeping his temper, but god damn if he didn't feel the heat in his face and the hurt in his chest and he just wanted to break something--

"Get out of my way, Tony. I told you I need air."

"Do you want to know what I need?" Yeah, because it always was about him wasn't it? Tony liked to think so.

Though he and Bruce were roughly the same height out of shoes, Tony unconsciously puffed his chest up. Intimidating a man that could grow to ten times his own body weight and was completely indestructible was a laughable matter and yet that was exactly what Tony did, hands on his hips like a superhero from a comic.

"I needed you to look like this, Banner, not like I was just some patient!" He wasn't exactly good at not being the center of everyone's universe.

"God DAMN it, Tony!" Bruce punched the wall, shaking the furniture. He didn't need to puff his chest to be intimidating, his mounting temper was more than enough. "It's not YOU I'm protecting!"

It was him. Him and his broken heart. He could argue that it would have been too distracting and overwhelming to tell Tony about everything while Loki was being deposed, and there was truth in that, but that wasn't his real reason for not saying anything. It was his fear and his rage at the universe and understanding that everything good that happens to him inevitably crashes and burns and he was just sick and tired of being in pain.

"NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY!"

There. Finally. He found the breaking point. Tony's face softened as he calculated the cost of fixing that along with the mess Alessa and Thor made of his roof, but he wasn't afraid of Bruce. He might be the only man alive that didn't do as a rampaging bull behind very flimsy glass doors wanted him to.

No. Bruce could control himself. He'd seen it. And okay, he was just a little turned on by the flush to his skin and the anger too after he watched those sped up not quite memories on the floating screen between them and the wall. He couldn't deny that.

"No." Simple. Stupid. To the point. "Not until we fix this."

He had no memory of being in love with Bruce but sometimes emotions didn't just come from memory alone. Tony still felt like he was in love. Bruce still had it.

He wanted to push Tony. Wanted to hit him and shove him and make him go away.

Instead, he reared back, turning away and clasping his hands together so they had something to do besides punch his friend, swearing a blue streak. As long as he lived, he refused to lay his hands on someone he loved, but sometimes he was so tempted that it terrified him.

"What do you want from me?!"

There was a roar in his head and color in his face and he just wanted to be alone. He wanted to punch and kick and smash. Why had he ever believed that this would end in any other way?

Bruce wasn't going to like the answer but Tony gave it anyway. At least he kept his hands to himself. He could be an idiot but he really wasn't that stupid. "I want everything," Tony said, letting his hands fall to his side. "I want everything from you."

He never questioned their relationship. They had had a fairy tale moment on the helicarrier. It was love at first sight. That they had made that physical--

It made sense. They were two sides of an equation.

Didn't Bruce realize that he was losing nothing? Tony hadn't stopped wanting him. He had just forgotten some of the points of it, but none of the reasons why.

"What does that even mean?"

Bruce was too wounded. He was too hurt and scared to think that Tony wanted to stay together despite not remembering any of their history. Too wary of having things snatched away from him to even consider it.

Bruce was a damaged man. He had been ever since his father started hitting his mother. The damage grew and grew over the years until he turned into little more than a cornered, wounded animal.

"What does everything mean?"

Fate as something Tony was incapable of believing of. He made his own fate. He made his own way. It was in his blood. He created everything that surrounded him...everything but Bruce. He'd been smitten on the helicarrier. He'd been enamoured when Bruce came back to see him after his operation. When he had agreed to go on a wild goose chase to a town not on any map following a letter from a dead woman, he'd been sold.

Whatever happened in Silent Hill, whatever let him leap over the boundary they both were keeping, Tony didn't care. If he never remembered their first moments as more than friends, he could even live with that.

But he couldn't deal with a life that didn't include Bruce Banner.

The moment he saw shy, wary brown eyes peeking up at him, even for just a moment, Tony took Bruce by the elbow. He still stared at Bruce as if he was the only thing of value in the room. And that was because, for a man who had everything, Bruce really was.

"Just stay with me, Bruce."

The touch. The way he looked at him, like he was the only person in the world. The words. It was too much.

"Goddamn it."

He reached up, brushing his hand against Tony's cheek before pulling him into a kiss. He didn't know how the man would react. He didn't know if he was ready to pick up where they left off or if he would spook at it or not. He just knew he had to do it, at least once.

Damn it.

Though Tony was not expecting that at all, he'd already been on the way to giving in when he didn't flinch from the touch to his cheek. He'd just spent half an hour watching Bruce do that very thing to him, and along with that, spent the last half an hour craving it. His body remembered how it felt to be touched like that. His body was eager to feel it again.

Tony exhaled seconds before the stubble of Bruce's cheek and upper lip hit him all at once. It was ridiculously hot, not just in temperature (which was intense), but because of the force behind it, because he could feel Bruce's body, harder than he would have thought, tensing and needy and still likely wanting to run.

Once the shock wore off, Tony's eyes closed and he yielded. His body sunk against the other man's. It remembered all of this too.

It was supposed to be a peck. Supposed to be quick, probably followed by an apology, but it felt so natural and Tony was melding perfectly against him and he wanted it so much...

The kiss became more forceful. Bruce threaded his fingers in Tony's hair and snaked one arm around his waist, as if holding him tight could keep him from slipping away or deciding last minute that their lack of history meant he wanted to go back to dating beautiful women with wild sex lives.

It was one of the many things he was afraid of. That Tony would realize that, now that he didn't have all the shared trauma clogging his head, he didn't really want a man, much less an emotionally broken one who couldn't have sex.

Hands freed up, Tony immediately sunk them into almost fly away curls, still warm from Bruce's long nap. He wasn't thinking about anything other than lips and tongue at the moment, though he might dwell later that his penchant for leggy blondes was simply a type for having fun with and not much more. Bruce didn't fit his traditional taste but he tasted good and he fit against his body perfectly.

There was nothing even remotely similar to a peck, no matter Bruce's original intention. Tony never did anything small anyway. He wasn't sure if he shuffled forward or pushed Bruce back but the result was the same. The wall just to the left of the door was a good place to trap him in, at least until they both couldn't breathe and their mouths were deliciously numb.

Learning all over again just how strong Bruce was, however--

It took very little time at all to find enjoyment in that.

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