starkingenuity | (no subject)

"Please don't," Bruce says quickly. "He grows on you if you let him."

Zero, who's surprisingly humanoid barring the luminescent blue skin and snakelike eyes shoots Tony an alarmed look and starts to raise his weapon.

"Not literally!" Bruce waves his hands to get Zero's attention away from Tony. "I just meant he gets more likable when you get to know him."

The brick is still thudding around the penthouse, and if Bruce could spare some attention away from Zero, he might be bemused to see him lifting the bed with one hand to look underneath. Between that and the cracks he's leaving in the tiles hint that he's from a heavy gravity planet.

"What's this?" he calls back to them, flicking one of the suits with a finger that makes its servos whine as it compensates for the impact and stays upright. "Is he hiding inside this thing?"

"Crack it open," Zero calls. "Get at the sweet meat inside."

Tony’s face goes through a remarkable transformation in the span of just a few seconds. It expresses all sorts of things like: ‘wow, man, that hurts’ to ‘oh great, now I’m a fungus’ to ‘thank you, I love you too,’ to ‘what the hell, not my suit!’ It might even have been comical if life and death aren’t literally on the line right now. He opens his mouth to likely make a comment about the armor when the living brick does as its told and the suit Bruce had worn through the anus spills its contents all over the floor.

“Aw,” Tony says, though Bruce can likely tell he’s heartbroken. “My chips.”

“Only garbage. No sweet meats. And no credits either,” the brick laments, kicking through the packaged snacks like a really weird piñata. The armor is in ruins on the floor, jagged like a can opener. “But the Grandmaster left his things behind. Throw these two out and help me gather the goods, Z!”

Tony’s head whips around. “I really hate being thrown off of penthouses!” Zero doesn’t seem to care what Tony wants, though, because one moment there are three people on the balcony, and the next, the grows on you fungus is gone.

Bruce doesn't even get to enjoy the whiplash run of Tony's expressions with the majority of his attention on Zero until the brick destroys one of the suits.

Well, shit. There goes my ride home.

Which promptly becomes the least of their worries when Tony goes for a fall.

"FRIDAY!"

Good thing there are two suits.

Bruce has barely enough time to shout for FRIDAY - and he's going to count on her to prioritize Tony's safety - before he's backing away from Zero's terrifyingly fast advance and getting some airtime of his own.

Anger might be suppressed, most of the fear tied to it might be suppressed, but when it comes to survival, that particular fear is tied to instinct too fundamental to life to be suppressed, and Bruce grabs onto it like the literal lifeline that it is.

Fear - he knows just how much it's going to hurt to hit the ground.
Fear - Tony's falling now, too, and all he has just that moment is hope that FRIDAY will get to him before the brick destroys that suit, too.
Fear - that goddammit again he gets close to someone and it leads to them being hurt or maybe even killed.
Anger - that this is his life.
Rage - that this is his life.

And there's that trigger, right in his grasp. He reaches for it, and starts to change.

Tony’s got a whole different process here. Mostly, he’s not thinking of anything of much relevance, just that he’s fibally decided how to rebuild one of the pneumonic joints in the engine of the motorcycle he’s still working on for Cap even if he hates his guts and now he won’t be able to install it and show that asshole up with his mad mechanic skills.

That thought turns quickly into how he wishes he could pick up the archaic dinosaur phone he was given and dial the only number saved in the address book and listen to the guy that picks up say hello as if his voice is made of rays of sunshine. Tony never answers back. They just stay on the phone for five or ten minutes before Tony hangs up, finally letting go of s breath he’d been holding.

It’s complicated between himself and Rogers. It’s complicared, and not in a good way, because he’s falling to his doom and he’s thinking only about him.

The ground comes up startling quickly before a red and gold bullet shoots by him and wraps him up with enough automatic pressure to keep his bones from breaking when the suit and not the ground stops his tumbling mass mid-tumble.

He’s a little sick to his stomach when he opens his eyes. The world is right side up, at least. “FRIDAY? Where’s Banner?” He doesn’t like the answer. He rarely does. Because even if he doesn’t hit the ground, something else way larger does.

Just look for the rising cloud of dust and debris, and the huge green figure lying in the crater at its heart.

He lies there, ears ringing and body screaming at him in quickly decreasing volume as it repairs itself and he can push himself up to sitting, rubbing a huge hand on his head while he tries to get his bearings.

Around him, a few citizens are venturing closer, one word penetrating the fading din in his ears - Hulk. They take a few steps back when he gets unsteadily to his feet and turns a slow circle, looking up at the shattered overhang he'd crashed through, and from there searching the sky for some sign of red and gold.

Some small part of Tony is afraid to see the creature pull himself from the rubble. He’s not afraid of the Hulk (he still loves his plush doll) but he’s worried about Banner. He keeps saying that one more good turn could lock him away forever and give the jolly Green Giant a forever turn at the wheel. As much as Tony likes him... he just really would rather have Banner. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just how he feels.

His brain catches up with the rest of his body a second alter and Tony realizes that the Hulk is locked away. Kiara made it so Banner can pull the Hulk’s strength out to save himself when needed but the Hulk shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.

He hovers in the suit, zipping across the dark sky, just out of reach.

“Hey. You.” Which one is it? He knows better than to call for Banner until he’s sure.

If he were so inclined he could pick up a piece of rubble and throw it at Tony with all the force of a howitzer shell. Fortunately, he isn't so inclined.

He opens and closes his hands, feeling the power there, feeling the potential for violence that his muscles almost seem to demand, then a bemused smile cracks his Hulk facade.

"So I'm kinda pissed off at Zero..."

FRIDAY doesn’t share the whooping and hollaring a certain inventor does behind his mask before he swoops down to land in front of the Hulk sized impact crater. Up comes the mask so Banner can see he’s grinning like an idiot, small compared to the way that Banner usually sees him.

Everything from the Hulk’s perspective has got to be really odd.

“Yanno, I’m not really happy with him either. I think I want to go and have a talk with him about messing with peoples’ stuff. And throwing people off of buildings.”

That didn’t work well for Loki either.

At the moment Bruce is just trying to get a handle on how the body works. He can only imagine the damage he'll do if he tries to apply Banner body expectations to Hulk strength and reflexes. The level of weirdness being conscious in this body really can't be understated. He's seen video of Hulk, but it really lacks the impact of kind of, sort of, in a weird way being Hulk.

There's also a crowd starting to gather, and they can't seem to decide whether they should be delighted to see the Champion back from out of the blue or if they should be pissed off that the Grandmaster's Champion is back from out of the blue. Sellers of Hulk paraphernalia are landing solidly on the side of delight and rushing to pull the masks out of storage. There are, however, a few people who actually cared about the people Hulk killed in the arena.

"I'm not too happy about Tiny - whatever his name is - ripping up my ride home, either." His voice sounds so weird.

Looking around, he raises a hand toward the gathering crowd and loses a lot of his amusement when some of them visibly flinch.

"Looks like an elevator's out of the picture for me right now." Looking up, he knows this body can get him up there, but can he do it without doing a huge amount of structural damage?

Only one way to find out.

He sets his sights on one of the faces sticking out of the building far above, muscles bunch in his legs as he psychs himself up for something he more than half believes he can't pull off, and then he jumps.

And way overshoots his target.

For a few moments, Tony’s willing to follow. He shoots up after the green blur before that blur disappears behind the Tower. Tony rolls his eyes behind the mask. “FRIDAY, remind me to make Banner a Hulk sized earpiece will you?” he asks her before he lands on the ship that’s sort of hovering like it would a balcony. He can see the pair inside, neither of whom are concerned at all about what they’ve done, and raises his arm to shoot a blast of his repulsive at Zero.

Could it kill him? Yes. Would it kill him? Hopefully. Tony’s not really changed in that particular stance of his. He’s not Steve Rogers. Hr doesn’t do his best not to kill people.

There will always be casualties. And though he blames himself for the innocent lives lost to his weapons, these two are not innocent.

Zero erupts into a mass of purple dust and Tony blinks, arm still extended. “Uh. Wow. Okay. Not what I planned but that’s cool.”

Banner would hopefully figure out his legs soon. Otherwise Tony will just dust Tiny too.

The green blur yells, "Shit!" as soon as he recognizes that he got far more force behind that jump than he anticipated. From there, he's out of luck because he isn't flying; he's just on the upward swing of falling with style, which is a debatable term when he spends an unpleasantly long quarter of a second calculating whether he can even hope to hit the roof.

He can. He hits it with the force of a thousand pound mass that's thankfully not up to terminal velocity just yet and miscalculates his next jump somewhat less drastically, even if he does send a chunk of the balcony railing hurtling down toward the ground as it completely fails to hold him when he grabs for something to stop him from ping ponging back over the building.

He slides to a stop several stories below with his fingers dug into the structure of the building.

"This is ridiculous." Forget jumping this time, he just climbs back up hand over hand and pulls himself up onto this balcony to shoot Tony an embarrassed look that's only magnified by the sheer size of his face.

Tiny is, excuse the phrase, shitting bricks when the Champion shows up on the balcony. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was going to go this far."

"What? You mean the part where you and your pal threw a couple of guys to their deaths?" Bruce takes a heavy step off the balcony and Tiny throws up both hands in surrender. "Where'd Zero go?"

Tiny points at the purple dust coating a fair bit of the floor and some of the furniture and Bruce looks back at Tony, eyebrows raised.

Though Tony calculated the time it took for Banner to figure out how to Bambi himself up without falling on an ice pond, he’s not going to waste time taking him across the coals about it now. He will. And soon. But not now.

Instead, the Man of Iron shrugs at Bruce. “I didn’t know that the molecular composition of his body would literally dissolve when I shot at him, okay? Maybe you can just add a little water? Get him back up to snuff?”

He shouldn’t find this funny enough to make puns about. He shouldn’t. But he does.

“You sort of destroyed my friend’s ride anyway. Purple powder is the least of your worries.”

Tiny glances from Hulk to the suit and frowns.

“It’s bigger on the inside. It’s like a TARDIS,” Tony explains. “Listen. We don’t have time for this. Take your powdered friend and climb out through the window and leave us alone for another—. Day? Two?” He looks to Banner for the correct length of stay but decides on two anyway. “Two more days. Then you can have at it. Sakaaran style.”

[I just spit cackled my coffee everywhere!]

Considering Zero threw them both off that balcony with no expectation that they'd survive it, Bruce doesn't have enough sympathy for Zero to find the levity in poor taste.

"Sakaaran Roomba, maybe?" he suggests before turning back to Tiny. "You, whatever your name is, put the word out that what's up here is a lot worse than the Grandmaster, but all we want is to be left alone for a couple of days and then we'll be gone."

He hopes so at least. It's not 100% when it's predicated both on repairing the suit enough for a safe return to Earth, and on Bruce being better at getting his old body back than he is at using this one.

Tiny's ready to make a break for his ship when he gets that instruction, but Bruce blocks his path with a foot. He'd feel bad about the size difference if he hadn't seen the kind of casual destruction this little guy was capable of. If he were Hulk-sized, Bruce might even find him worrying. "We weren't kidding about cleaning up Zero."

[Hah! My evil plan bears fruit.]

Tiny complains the entire time about how awful and disgusting it is to sweep Zero up and take him away, but Tony isn’t letting up. Not even when the guy mentions how much fun it used to be watching the Champion in the arena. Evidently he hadn’t spoken much. Or at least not the way he was now. And he certainly never had anyone clean anything up!

He resists the urge to kick Tiny through the window and stands guard there as the ship flies away. Good enough. No one follows and so he has Bruce help him roll one of the crazy pieces of wall art over the hole to give them some privacy.

After that, he’s out of the suit, hands on his hips to survey the damage left behind. Their snacks are gone and while he laments this, he’s more upset over the armor that Bruce had come here in.

“FRIDAY, pick up the pieces. We’ll go into the shop in a little while. After Banner here stops looking like he’ll squeeze everything to death if he tries to help.” Tony pats Bruce-Hulk on the arm and grins. “So how about that aim?”

Bruce spends a few minutes shuffling his feet and trying to get out of the way without making a bigger mess before calling it a wash and sitting down in a spot that's clear of both furniture and Zero debris. He actually shows his teeth at Tiny when he mentions the arena before he catches himself and shakes his head.

This is really messing with his head.

Once Tiny's gone and they have some measure of privacy, he gingerly lowers himself to the floor, putting himself more on Tony's level and avoiding doing more damage to the room. "Give me a break, there's a steep learning curve."

He inhales deeply and lets it out in a rush. "Let me tell you, my sense of smell is off the charts, too. Can I suggest a toothbrush?"

Edited 2018-01-06 00:07 (UTC)

“Rude. Between the hot tub rooms and the explosions, I haven’t had a lot of time for personal hygiene.” It’s just an excuse and Tony knows it enough to send him to the bathroom with a packaged toothbrush he’d brought with him and a parting remark, said under his breath, that Bruce doesn’t smell like roses either.

Tony takes some time to get himself right, which requires a lot more than just s teeth cleaning and that will provide Bruce some time alone with his new body.

Tony can’t break with his amusement of the whole thing, though.

Having a genuine conversation with the Hulk-body thst ends with a suggestion of being more liberal with his toothcare just tickles him pink.

So if Bruce hears him laughing to himself over the water? Well. He is.

"Uh huh." They both know it's an excuse. It does leave Bruce wondering how to brush Hulk-sized teeth.

One of the best choices Bruce has made today was picking a pair of Hulk-resistant pants. If he'd been wearing that pair of Tony's he'd gotten back to Earth in, they wouldn't have survived the fall and he'd have been showing the city a lot more of the Champion than they'd ever needed to see.

He doesn't even want to think about whether they'd want to see.

The longer Tony's away in the bathroom, the more restless Bruce gets, finally getting up to rearrange the room to clear more space for him to pace in, stopping to cock his head toward the bathroom and the sound of laughter. He's about 99.9% sure it's about him, and if he gives Tony a bit of a break, he can admit that this is just ridiculous enough to be funny.

Yes, he does take a moment to actually look inside those stretchy pants, give a low whistle, and seriously consider going downstairs to Hulk's old room for some of his booze.

When Tony finally emerges from the bathroom, Bruce is once again sitting on the floor in the closest thing to lotus position his overmuscled legs will allow, trying to meditate himself back into a body he actually knows how to properly use.

So far it's not working and he opens his eyes looking a little frustrated with the situation. "I don't know how to get back. Sleep or unconsciousness might do it, but I can't find a hook to pull the Bruce suit up on."

“I’m not secure enough with myself to attempt the Lullaby,” Tony remarks, hair a bit neater, breath much fresher, and a little more deodorant under his arms applied. Just in case. He’s changed too, back into soft black yoga pants and a tank top that shows off his arms. They might not be a match for Barton’s or Thor’s but he has some nice arms.

Tony settles himself dkwn across from Bruce, feeling incredibly small, and sets his chin on his palm.

“Actually, that might not do anything. That’s supposed to soothe a savage beast, and he’s asleep. I hope we don’t have to try to crack you on the head to get you to change back. Instead of meditating, how about you just uh... do the opposite of what you were doing when you kicked the Bruce suit into the corner?”

It's pretty weird seeing Tony as so comparatively small, particularly when Bruce is used to being the shortest guy in the room nine times out of ten.

"Literally going to sleep may be more productive."

He casts a glance in the direction of the balcony they'd been thrown off of. "I was falling toward a whole lot of pain. I've done the falling from a height thing and hitting before transforming is always the lowlight of my day. I can't unfall."

Tilting his head to the side, Tony glances over Bruce’s shoulder to the bed. “Good thing that’s current-you sized, huh? I hope that body doesn’t miss sleeping in a skull. I have to draw the line somewhere.” Not that Tony will sleep. He’s gotten a dozen hours in the last three days and that should hold him over pretty nicely for another day or so.

There’s a scattering of parts just about everywhere. He can’t sleep in messy places. Not even the hole in the ground if Afghanistan could be messy. Every rock and pile of gravel had a place, after all.

“I’ll get to fixing my stuff and you take both sides of the bed,” he says, because although he had liked very much to nap next to Bruce, he doesn’t want to get squished if he rolls over.

"Considering some of the places I've woken up, I don't think this body cares where it sleeps."

He stretches out an arm to snag one of the pieces and pull it in, but everything looks so small and delicate in his hands, he can't imagine what kind of help he can offer until he gets back to normal. "What are the odds that you actually can repair the suit to the point that it'll get me back to Earth without my exploding out of it?"

Tony gives Bruce a ‘what the fuck’ bug eye expression that is impossible to define but looks sort of like he’s seallowed a bee, is drowning, and might have just shit his pants, all at the same time. “Probably better than the odds of me happening to get myself kidnapped by terrorists with the one guy that remembered my dad had this unfinished near-infinite clean energy device he just couldn’t get right, and who worked with me to steal the parts of weapons of mass destruction so I could built one while there was a car battery stuck to my chest.”

Bruce Banner, the nerve of you asking Tony if he can fix something! He can crash land in a hot air balloon in a desert and McGuyver a twin jet engine plane out of cactus needles and sand to fly himself to safety.

And he knows it too. That’s why he’s so horribly insufferable.

“Put down the good. Let me get to work on my thing and you just work on shrinking. Try a little cold water. That works for a lot of people. Don’t know by experience of course.”

A Hulk eye roll is a magnificently huge eye roll. Bruce very, very carefully lays the piece on the floor in front of Tony and stands up.

Seriously, if he didn't do that carefully, too, he'd probably launch himself through the roof. He has to give Hulk some credit for some of the facility he's shown. Okay, all of the facility he's shown.

"I don't think the Arctic Ocean would provide enough shrinkage." Trust him; he's looked.

"Go on, be a miracle worker. I'll... try to convince this body it wants a nap. Just as a spoiler - it doesn't want a nap." It wants to do something. "If I can't get to sleep, I might try another soak. If that works, you're building me a hot tub when we get home."

“I’m already building you a hot tub when we get home,” Tony reminds him as he bends to collect that oh so carefully laid down piece and kicks a bunch of other ones in front of himself before FRIDAY can follow along and get the rest.

He misses DUM-E. DUM-E is really excellent for all of this menial labor.

While Bruce tries to nap and Tony welds with part of FRIDAY’s arm for the welding apparatus, his AI becomes his sounding board as she (and JARVIS before her) so often have been. “I still don’t know if it’s the hot tub or not. On his end. On my end, I’m—“

“Open. You’ve said that a few times now, Boss,” FRIDAY interjects as she holds part of the suit together with only the one arm Tony’s left her.

“He’s just special. I knew it the first time I watched the tapes of him destroying Harlem. And his papers? People don’t write like that anymore.”

“You skimmed those papers. And you don’t tend to do that for most scientists.”

Tony frowns at her and the mask she’s wearing to cover a bunch of air. “So you know it’s gotts mean something if I’ve read all of his stuff.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, Boss, you sound s bit smitten.”

Tony glances over his safety goggles (in place on because she’s gotten it through her head that it’s now part of mandatory safety protocols) and arches an eyebrow. “I don’t sound anything. I am.”

He’s not shouting. The repulsors aren’t loud enough for him to have to do that. But he’s forgotten one thing. Super soldier serum does more than increase sense of smell. It also increases ability to hear really well too.

“I think I have been since I met him. Shit. You know what, you’re distracting me,” he complains before he drops the arm all together. “But what if it’s the hot tub that’s making him feel anything for me?”

“You’re not usually this easily distracted by potential rejection.”

“I’m just tired of losing people I like.”

"If it works, you're building me a Hulk-sized hot tub when we get home," he amends, then goes to lie down and try to sleep.

Things he learns: 1.) The bed can support him, but something creaks worryingly when he isn't careful. 2.) His bulk makes sleeping on his side cumbersome, leaving him sprawled on his back. 3.) He can hear much more than he wants to.

He isn't trying to eavesdrop. Hell, he'd really rather not listen to Tony's thought process about him. It's invasive. It's unfair. It's making it impossible for him to calm his mind enough to try to sleep.

Finally he sighs and sits up and he doesn't care if this is going to be weird coming from a cranky green giant. "Do I need to get up and kiss you and remind you that this body shakes off pretty much everything to get you to stop this? I'll do it, you know, and that'll be on your head."