starkingenuity | (no subject)

Relationship is a charged word and neither of them are the poster children for good mental health. Bruce has literally had to have an alien suppress the background noise of anger and its underlying fear. Now his head feels like a stadium that for his entire life had been filled to overflowing with screaming football hooligans until less than a day ago when all at once they were just gone, and now the rest of his emotions are standing out on the field wondering what the hell to do with themselves.

Why did he think it was a good idea to make relationship decisions right now? Tony's on the rebound from a six year committed relationship with Pepper; Bruce is on the rebound from a forty year committed relationship with rage.

He rubs his forehead to ease a headache that is entirely psychological. "And I'm pretty good at leaving, but I think you've noticed I'm not so good at getting pissed off lately."

It's easier in this body, but even now his stadium of rage has gone from jam-packed to having only a few seats occupied by an audience of marginally incensed croquet enthusiasts.

"We're going to have to work on trusting each other, and if we can't make that work, the rest won't either. If that's how it works out, I'm going to call that a no harm no foul, because face it, we were both fucked up long before we met."

Everything that Bruce says is comforting, even if it’s not in the voice that Tony remembers hearing. Bruce has always had a kind, but disused gravel to his voice but the Hulk is pure muscle building upon muscle.

“You should be very glad that I’m not a size queen,” Tony quips, Hulk doll still under his arm, “or I might join you in bed right now.” He won’t. Of course he won’t. He’s in mechanic mode and that mode has absolutely no room at all for sexual escapes or bedsports of any kind. “And I really think you should go into psychiatry. You’d make a good therapist.”

Tony will leave Bruce to roll his eyes again and he’ll keep his talking to the innocuous. FRIDAY is happy to oblige.

Even if she catches her Boss nodding off someone consistently over the next few hours. The armor is mostly finished, the connections complete, but it needs a good remolding that will take a lot of heat and effort on Tony’s part and that will require rest.

So she cuts him off for the night, or at least for five hours. He needs approximately thst amount of rest. Tony isn’t sure if he’s going to find Banner in bed or if he’ll be cuddling up to the Hulk. He’s hoping for the former.

"The last thing I want is to listen to strangers' problems." He barely listens to his friends' problems. Dr. Bruce Banner, shrink to the world's superheroes, maybe? He'd rather be homeless in South America again.

He waves Tony off and sprawls out on the bed again. It takes time to get to sleep, but eventually he does, lulled by the familiar rhythms of Tony's voice from the other room, even if he still misses the counterpoint of JARVIS's replies. FRIDAY's clearly competent, but JARVIS had been, in his way, a friend, and he was closely linked to Bruce's experience of Tony.

Once he sinks into slow-wave sleep, his body fully relaxes and Kiara's block reasserts itself on the anger that Bruce had been forced to pull past it in the name of survival. He barely groans as his body reshapes itself, leaving him lying in a Hulk-shaped depression in the mattress that slowly decompresses without the weight on it.

The moment that Tony makes any sound in the bedroom or gets onto the bed, he'll wake and lie there silently while he tries to remember where he is and whether there's any immediate risk.

It’s hard to be an immediate risk when there’s a person willing (and able) to wrap their arm completely around you. Tony isn’t a cuddler and when he falls asleep, he’ll drift over towards an edge of the bed, but it’s amusinf for him to lay with Bruce now in the Bedsheet Hulk-Angel and he’s pretty sure that Bruce might like the comfort of knowing he’s back to normal size in some way.

He sets his head between shoulder and neck, cradled by a shared pillow above and let’s exhaustion take its toll. He’s been fighting real sleep for awhile now. Cat naps help but Tony is more cat than he realizes and naps aren’t so great for either. Not when the animal can sleep for as many hours a day as Tony is awake.

His breath is soft and even, but he’s too self aware to notice when other people have woken up and he says and does nothing to indicate that he’s aware of Bruce’s change in state. There’s just that breath. And the arm. And the scratch of the beard.

It might not be enough to lull Bruce back to sleep but it ushers Tony to the land of Nod easily enough.

For an insomniac to feel comfortable enough to sleep this close to him, Tony either feels very secure, or he’s just really dumb. Both are debatable.

The arm across him serves as a welcome reassurance that he's back to whatever passes for normal for him. He's appreciated his human body for a long time, but having literally walked around in Hulk's body for a few hours, he wants nothing more than to stay squishy and puny and so very human, regardless of whether he can be the one driving the Hulk bus or not.

Bruce is comfortably familiar with the idea of obsession trumping sleep. He and Tony are far too alike in some ways - too smart for their own good, too driven to leave a better legacy than they think they deserve, too willing to try the thing that has caught their imaginations because they have to see what happens. That's exactly why what they're trying is a bad idea, and probably why they're going to try the thing anyway.

They aren't the happiest of thoughts to follow Bruce back down into sleep, but he's had worse. He pulls Tony's arm over him a little more and sleeps until the sun is up and Tony has migrated off into his own zone, then gets up and go in search of clothes.

His backup shoes didn't survive the destruction of the suit and Tiny had carelessly shredded Bruce's clothes in his search for valuables. That leaves Bruce wearing a pair of stretched out stretchy pants or...

...enlisting FRIDAY to help him pull out the Grandmaster's pop-out closet that isn't doing much popping with the power cut off.

When his pants fall off for the third time while he's trying to find something he can tolerate wearing, it's entirely likely that Tony will find Bruce, naked, trying to choose between a robe or a jumpsuit, both of which are clearly from the early Flash Gordon era of fashion and made for someone eight inches taller than he is.

“When in doubt, go with red,” Tony calls from behind him, utterly amused. “Or purple. Actually go with purple.” He probably should be making jokes about complimentary colors but there’s never been a time when joking about the Hulk has not been on the table. No one can stop Tony. He’ll do whatever the hell he wants, thank you.

He moves to stand beside Banner and flicks the fingers of the hand not currently holding a cup of coffee (he brought it and took a few minutes of his time to jury rig a keurig) through the presenting clothing. The material is soft, like silk but more capable of holding its shape. Needless to say, Tony is a fan.

“Just get FRIDAY to shorten a robe into a shirt, or knot it like high school do with this big stupid shirts they all seek to want to wear.” He’s never understood female fashion. Why wear a dress when you can put on a waistcoat? Oh well.

One of the things that had initially endeared Tony to him was that he didn't tiptoe around Bruce as though he'd erupt into a mindlessly destructive beast at any moment. Hell, Tony's the only person who will literally and figuratively poke at him, not despite of Hulk, but almost because of Hulk.

In other words Tony's obnoxiousness is part of what endears him to Bruce.

"I just want something that I don't have to hitch up every ten seconds." He manages to find a pair of lounging pajamas (he thinks they're lounging pajamas? what does he know about alien fashion?) with a drawstring waist, and with a little help from Friday to shorten sleeves and pants legs, he ends up wearing purple alien silk pjs that make him look like a low rent Hugh Hefner wannabe.

"Did you make me some coffee while you were at it?"

“Are you back on caffeine now?” Of course Bruce is. He’s got absolutely nothing to worry about when it comes to a little molecule meant to stimulate the system. There’s nothing awake in there to stimulate other than a powerfully healthy and well tuned heart and maybe some hair folicles so that the scientist will grow those curls back.

Tony hands over his coffee, the very one that he’s been sipping as he watches FRIDAY tailor Bruce into a Pajama Party Ken and steps over the remains of fabric clippings to fiddle around in the armored backpack his AI is wearing.

He’s got another pair of shoes. Why? Because Tony Stark never leaves home without a change of clothes. Or six changes of clothes. He doesn’t know his mood, okay? He knows better than to offer Banner his pants again though. Besides. The Champion might pop out to play again and he really loves his jeans.

Bruce won't even ask about pants from Tony. They both know how poorly that worked and how grateful Bruce was to get out of them.

"Just hand it over."

He takes the coffee and takes a sip like he's finally been granted a cup of ambrosia. Yes, decaf is a thing, but it's a lying, cruel thing that can't bring the kind of bliss to Bruce's face that comes with that first taste.

"We're out of food and you're in suit repair mode. Do you have anything left on that credit stick?" As much as he doesn't really want to venture out into the city again, life goes on, and Bruce is feeling the metabolic after effects of forcing his body into two changes in the past day. He needs fuel.

Technically, Tony’s not in repair mode anymore. There’s be no coffee if he’s still working. Right now, the armor is running a self diagnostic to see where his corner cutting allowed for critical errors to creep in. Shocking, but it happens. And he’d rather there be a blow up now than when Bruce is in it.

The guy might not be able to die but blowing up the person he’s sort of and literally sleeping with just doesn’t sit right with him.

“I bought some pizza and a stuffed Hulk. I think there should be plenty left.” The doll was even discounted! What a find! “If you’re desperate, there’s always some powdered Zero? No? Okay, let me get a shirt on and we can see what Sakaaran brunch looks like. I am counting on a Bloody Mary.”

Bruce grabs a seat to put on Tony's shoes and jerks his head in the general direction of where he'd last seen their "pizza." "I think there's some powdered Zero on the pizza if you're looking for seriously exotic toppings."

He hasn't asked Tony for an update on the suit, which speaks to the level of his trust in Tony's abilities and his unwillingness to blow Bruce up. All things considered, that's a lot of trust.

"To go, right? For all we know all booze on this planet is like what you found in Hulk's room."

“I’ve almost died a few times in the last few days,” Tony says, buttoning up a shirt that has no right to look so good on him. He’s no where near as tall or as built as Steve Rogers is but he does fill out his clothes nicely. That’s the priveledge of having access to a tailor. “I think I’ll pass on the Hulk-booze and the exotic pizza.”

As interesting as this place is, Tony’s ready to get home. He love to travel but there are limits to that. He needs access to his own stuff, for one, and he’s about ready to start looking for a better place than the mansion to live.

It’s only fair to DUM-E. And Banner. No one wants to live in a dump like that.

“Let’s get you carbed up and then work on processing the hot tub.”

The mansion's a perfectly lovely museum. Unfortunately, it seems kind of shit as a place to go to relax and get away from the outside world's problems.

"Sounds like business as usual on the almost dying front or is that something special I brought back with me?" He gives his mostly repaired suit a pat before heading out, letting the elevator carry them in a controlled plummet back down to the ground floor, where the first thing he notices outside is a crowd of people once again waving around Hulk heads and pictures of the green guy.

"You know, I'm sure we can find something back up in the gladiators' quarters..."

Tony can’t help but fist bump some passersby sporting green paint powder and effigies. He’s easily swept up in these sorts of things but he does wipe his fist off on Banner’s garish robe. No one cares if that gets covered with grime and germs after all. He’s still grinning when he catches the look on Bruce’s face and he pulls him out of the lane of pedestrian traffic by a darkened stall.

Honestly, what’s with this place? There’s so much advanced technology and people still live in hovels and sell their wares like it’s the Middle Ages? He whole thing is just weird.

“Hey, you know what? Embrace this little bit of love. The reason doesn’t matter because that’s not you. And the Other Guy isn’t going to hear the chants and come bursting out of your chest to kick any more gladiator ass. It’s just you in there. Or as you as you can get when wearing... that. You know what, don’t worry about it. Focus on food. We have a lot to finish up before we can go home.”

There are plenty of places on Earth that show the same disparity between the haves and the have nots. Bruce has lived in many of them.

"They're celebrating murder," he mutters, but he leaves it at that. There are arguments worth having, and this isn't one. He might not have to hold back because of fear of Hulk, but picking his battles carefully is a habit too ingrained to shed easily if he even wanted to shed it.

He shakes it off and shakes his head, picking a direction that their earlier quest for alien pizza had made at least somewhat familiar. "I want something... I don't know. I want to eat something that looks like it was made for the old 70s Star Trek with weird geometric shapes and bright, unnatural colors." And hope that neither of them takes some alien virus or parasite home with them - Tony more likely, considering Bruce's inhospitable personal environment.

Now is not the time to talk about celebrating murder. Tony isn’t going to toss eggs right now with talking about human nature. In Bruce’s shoes, he’d be pissed off too. To have parts of his weapons hoisted around and praised for their killing power? Not cool.

It’s much better to talk about Star Trek and replicators and various brightly colored blogs of mush. Tony grins. He’s got crow’s feet but it doesn’t diminish how handsome he is.

Right now, all Tony wants is to never ever play host to another alien life form again. But he also wants to see if his strict regemen of bathing in anti bacterial soaps and sanitizer and eating anti oxidants will let him enjoy some more crazy space things.

Out comes the credit stick.

“Let’s drain this thing with as much take out as we can carry—. Oooh! That looks like blueberries.” None of the stuff at the stall he’s spotted is actual fruit at all, but these people certainly like their drugs and are more than willing to sell them anything they have the credits for.

And that includes something akin to a full course meal candy from Willy Wonka’s factory complete with some alcohol and a little chaser of feel good medication for dessert.

It’s a good think that Bruce is sort of a medical doctor.

His intent to redirect is at least successful. Two of the smartest men from their planet distracted by the visual equivalent of teletubby snacks.

The big problem with this planet's enjoyment of drugs in all their varied delivery methods is that they don't tell unsuspecting humans to expect effects above and beyond just getting a full belly. So Bruce? Who ate one bright green pyramid and enjoyed a meal that only cut into the calorie deficit of a Hulk transition? Eats a red and green polka-dotted cube as a follow-up and turns a 180 to start following a faceless woman - literally no face - solely because he wants to ask her how she breathes.

Wow. Banner. Not everyone can be the carefree risk taker here! Tony thought you were going to be the designated reasonable person and keep him from getting hurt or kidnapped or any of the other things he generally does to himself without supervision!

But Bruce is gone off, being stupidly selfish, and when Tony looks around again, he’s by himself in the middle of s lot of really weird strangers that look at him as if he’s nothing.

He can work with this, he decides and because he can’t help himself, manages to wander off too. He’s gone no where near anyone as nefarious as a faceless woman, but he does manage to get the remains of his credits stolen and somehow still feel reasonably good enough about himself to get swept up into a dance party.

Technically, it could have been much worse. Like someone without a face trying to eat him.

At least Bruce will get his answer before he’s digested. Faceless people are a lot like Pez dispensers.

This bears a lot of similarity to those Harvard psychedelic studies, but he does get his answer from the pleasant, telepathic, faceless lady: cutaneous respiration. As a bonus she even demonstrates for him her species' method of eating, engulfing one of the colorful cubes he'd shoved in his pocket before he'd wandered away from Tony.

She has pity on his incoherence and directs him back toward the tower where he can stumble inside and back up to the penthouse, but not before pressing a pass into his hand and making him promise that he'll come see the show at her theater that evening.

Of course, that might not have happened at all. He won't trust his memory of the experience later, but he does come away with all limbs intact, no new tadpoles, minus one dinner cube, and with a blinking dot stuck to his palm.

And the penthouse is empty.

"Hey, FRIDAY," he spends a little time looking at himself in the suit's reflective surfaces before remembering what he had started to ask. "Where's Tony?"

He peers blearily at the map she projects for him, showing Tony's location relative to the tower and mumbles to himself before he finds a stick of metallic blue something - eyeliner? - and draws a wobbly map on his hand.

It takes him about an hour to follow that map to a Sakaaran rave, where he gives up on trying to believe his eyes and just starts yelling, "Tony!"

Some of the dancers pick up the yell, then a few more. Soon everyone's shouting "Tony!" Which doesn't really help Bruce find him.

Even Tony’s in on the shouting right now, mostly because he’s really enjoying having his name lauded as he hops around. He’s got no idea how this culture works. It seems to have a slice from every Earth time period all happening at the same time and he just really loves it! He’s gotten wasted and gotten his rocks off and played video games and been nearly made into street pizza—

It’s been a pretty good time, really!

Luckily, and Bruce had been very lucky lately, Tony wasn’t exactly hard to find, not when he had spotted Bruce from a platform and was trying not to kill himself as he struggled to get to the other man. He lost shirt somewhere but that was all right!

The people here are much more friendly than Zero and Tiny has been.

Sakaar has a surprising number of things to recommend it, which Bruce hadn't initially been expecting at all. He may never be able to decide whether the tadpoles fall into the pros or cons side of the list, but having a handle on Hulk, some long needed tension release, and seeing Tony actually enjoying himself have been in the pros column, definitely.

There's a lot that goes in the ??? column, but just then, working his way through an alien dance party to get to Tony falls more on the pros side of things.

He goes with it when his choice is fall on Tony or just fall, but he's laughing because this whole experience transcends surreality. "What happened to your shirt?"

Because clearly, that's the important question.

Tony doesn’t do clubs. They’re too noisy, forcing you to get right into personal spaces to shout vague things at people who probably have no idea what you’re selling. “Traded it for war paint!” for instance, shouted at Bruce to explain his waist up nakedness, had actually been ‘traded it for water.’ And technically, neither makes sense so there’s no matter about it.

Tony hates clubs for other reasons too. People tend not to respect your boundaries. They’re always running against you on purpose or in passing and both, when the experiment isn’t controlled, doesn’t please him in the slightest. Usually. He’s bumped into by a tall, purple squiggly line with eyes, which makes him bump into Banner, but there are worse things that could happen (and have already happened) so he just grooves on with it. It’s ridiculous. He doesn’t seem to mind.

And usually, there’s only young idiots in clubs who are as interesting as sand but he wraps an arm around Bruce’s neck, seeing as he’s the coolest guy he knows other than himself. So all in all, the rave isn’t really all that bad.

“I think you’re a Jew,” Tony shouts, a garbled version of the intended: ‘I was looking for you.’

Words really aren’t that important. Sakaar, and all of its hedonistic ways to forget that you’re in Sakaar, has made talking mostly obsolete. Kissing is better. And there’s nothing lost in transmission that way.

Bruce's version of participating in the dancing is a bit of bouncing arrhythmically on the balls of his feet while he keeps craning his neck to look at people.

He doesn't do clubs, but crowds can be very convenient for disappearing into. He could probably do it again without much trouble only there's Tony with an arm around his neck shouting nonsense at him that he assumes probably makes perfect sense to anyone who hasn't been eating all the wrong things.

Which is how Bruce ends up kissing Tony in the middle of a rave on a planet that almost no one on Earth has heard of outside of the Asgardian contingent. They really should get back to Earth before this gets much crazier.

Instead, when he comes up for air two seconds or an hour later, he isn't sure which, he shows Tony the blinking dot on his hand and shouts, "Want to see a show?"

Tony is about as much of a show sort of person as he is a club sort of person, but everything seemed all right when Bruce suggested it. In fact, it seems like the best idea ever and Tony agrees immediately to head to wherever the glowing dot wanted them to go.

With Bruce’s hand in his own, Tony tugs then both through a crowd that feels like wet leather and fabric streams towards the street again, the thumping and rhythmic music giving way to the quiet of the closed for the evening marketplace.

The rush of chill on bare skin makes Tony shiver involuntarily and he releases the other man so that they could both glance at the pink dot that pulsates weakly on Bruce’s palm. That pulse will speed up as they turn towards the correct direction and slow down the further away they get.

It’s exactly the game two very high middle aged geniuses might like to play.

Bruce could say that Tony's a bad influence, but there hasn't been a single thing that Tony has talked him into - including Ultron - that Bruce hadn't wanted to do in the first place. Tony's just his inverse Jiminy Cricket.

"It was the lady with no face," Bruce explains now that they're out of the crowd and can carry on a conversation at a reasonable level. "Either she was telepathic or I'm forgetting a really intense game of charades."

He holds his hand out as though he's asking for money, but sadly no one puts a credit stick in his hand. Less sadly, it makes for an interesting kind of treasure hunt, with their pot of gold brightly illuminated at the end of the trek, where Bruce's palm pulses in time with the projected alien characters at the door to an establishment that has the universal archetype of a bouncer standing outside. Rhinoceros-headed people make good bouncers, but Bruce isn't about to take a guess whether that's male, female, or other.

The bouncer takes one look at the two men, the glowing dot on Bruce's hand, and the shirtless biped and grunts as they stand aside to allow them entrance. "Guests to the left, talent to the right."

[Bless you, that's exactly how I pictured that thing working.]