starkingenuity | (no subject)

“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.]

“Talent?” Bruce, this is where you tell him no. This is where you take your reverse cricket by the band and lead him to the audience section. This is where you do not let a visibly high Tony Stark wander off to try and be some sort of talent. “What kind’re you looking for?”

The rhino-headed bouncer snorts. “Not you,” he says, thankfully negating the need for Bruce to have to do anything drastic to keep Tony in line.

They are ushered off to some seats, though not very good ones. The early birds had caught the best ones up front.

Tony, unused to being slighted like this, pouts twice as hard as usual and crosses his arms like a child over his bare chest.

“These people have no idea who we are,” he complains.

Bruce doesn't have time to be the sensible one, and that's likely for the best, because sensible would be going back to the penthouse, sobering up, and getting the hell off of Sakaar as quickly as possible.

He drops into his seat and shamelessly gawks at the other people in the audience, couples and small groups of people clustered around the venue, seated at small tables.

Scoots his chair closer to Tony, he leans in as though he's going to confide a secret. "I know who you are and we aren't eating anything else we find on this planet."

These are clearly two related thoughts.

The lights dim and the back wall of the room they're in disappears, showing the faceless woman who'd invited Bruce. "That's her!" He nudges Tony with an elbow. "The telepathic cutaneous respiration lady."

Her "voice" is clear and warm, appearing in each guest's mind, bypassing language to impart meaning rather than words.

Or maybe that's the drugs.

At any rate, what Bruce "hears" is a welcome, an invitation to enjoy, and a promise that the variety of performers will ensure that there's someone to appeal to even the most discerning tastes. If you're lucky, one of the performers will take a liking to you and ask you to join them.

"Nuh uh. I've had enough alien joining to last the rest of my life." Did he say that out loud? Really loudly? Maybe it was just in his head.

“You only had sex with one,” Tony complained out loud. “One was inside of me. Now that’s violating.” They are both promptly hushed before the curtains are once again drawn (they look poured honestly, cascading down to the stage and then across it) and a small creature that looks like a woman, but very tiny and very blue and very naked begins to sing.

Sing, however, really needs to be used loosely. Tony can actually feel his eardrums throb as he presses his hands over his ears at the shrillness of the tiny-elf-lady.

He can feel his nose start to bleed just before the song ends and everyone around them can be seen wiping at their faces.

“Banner,” he grunts. “What the hell kind of date is this?”

[Best line ever. All the weirdness!]

"I had a lot of sex with the one that had been inside of you," Bruce says before shushing, but not before he whispers, "A lot."

He's pretty sure that the sound that craggy brown guy makes is a snigger.

The first performer makes him wish he'd brought his glasses along, right up until he's jamming his hands over his ears and grinding his teeth while he waits for her to stop.

Wiping his face results in muted panic at the sight of blood on his hand, but it fully unmutes for Tony's question. "Is this a date?"

He misses the tiny blue woman's departure and the arrival of a pair of people who bear strong resemblance to ambulatory asparagus, and who immediately start an acrobatic routine that's one part Cirque du Soleil and one part Home Depot Garden Department.

So blood, Bruce’s blood, actually is a bad thing. Anything that isn’t kept inside of his body tends to do so much harm that there’s actually a whole other category for it. There’s part of Tony’s mind that understands that and while he might otherwise try to kiss that crazy look from Bruce’s face, self preservation (thousands upon thousands of hours of it that had been stuffed out of Tony’s usual consciousness) rears it’s head.

Luckily, Tony’s only lost his shirt and not his pants and he carries, among other things, wet naps and gloves with him. You just never know what you’re going to touch, okay?

They can contain Bruce’s blood easily enough, like a camping trip. You bring out whatever you bring in. And they can do that while Tony arches his eyebrows up at Bruce, utterly sincere.

“You asked me out, didn’t you?” Tony’s slept through better acts than this one. Sure. It’s fine, but Bruce is a thousand times better.

Bruce will give thanks for Tony's not wholly atrophied sense of self-preservation if he remembers this later. Also for some of his neuroses, as he takes the wipes and one of the gloves to use as a biohazard container once he's satisfied that there's no blood left anywhere that anyone could come in contact with.

This is a commentary on the lives that they lead that they can both be half out of their heads and still remember the most important details to protect themselves and others. They aren't bad guys; they just have some serious lapses in judgment.

Incredibly serious lapses.

"In that case we've been on a date for days." The glove gets tied off and stuffed into the pocket of his appropriated pj's. "I don't remember who asked whom."

The asparagus are sprouting. Maybe. Probably. "Is this an alien cabaret? Do you think there'll be a fan dancer? An alien in a giant martini glass?"

“You asked me to come to the club with you. This is the date,” Tony insists, fully intent on winning this conversational argument. He doesn’t care what Bruce says. They have not been dating for days. If so, Bruce has already cheated on him with a green alien that tried to kill him after taking over his body and finding out that she couldn’t have kids with Bruce looking like Tony did.

Not cool, Kiara. Tony is a fine specimen!

Actually, he’s not sure that’s something he really ought to be arguing. It gets weird and dicey.

While they talk and the asparagus finish sprouting, a man with three penises plucks feathers off of his body and into the crowd. Bruce wanted a fan dance and this might be the closest thing that they can get to that. The audience seems to love it, but the shushing has brought the rhinoceros bouncer back over to them and the big mystery of when the date actually started has to be finished outside.

They’re disturbing everyone else’s good time with it.

Suddenly Sakaar cares about decorum?

Bruce meekly lets the bouncer show them out, but not without a feather for a souvenir. A feather and a flash of intense curiosity about the females of the current performer's species.

Once outside, he takes a few seconds to orient himself, which is pretty easy - walk toward the building with Hulk's enormous face sticking out of it.

"Okay, so it's a date." He looks back at the bouncer. "Was a date. Is it going okay or would this be an emergency text, 'so sorry, my dog died and I gotta go' kind of date?"

“Well,” Tony says as he thinks, scratching at the underside of his chin. “It’s pretty obvious that you’re rusty and you got me really high and wandered off before hand, but I’m having a good time. Maybe we can go on a second date if you play your cards right.”

Tony still has some blood smeared on his upper lip, they are a little sticky from the pollen that the flowering acrobats have covered them in, but Tony is the happiest he’s been in a long while. Sakaar has been crazy and dangerous and wonderful. It’s just been so unbelievably wonderful.

So he offers Bruce his arm.

“Can I walk you back, Doctor Banner?”

"I got you high?" He manages about a second and a half of affront before taking Tony's arm. "I'm not that kind of guy."

He can get back to identity crisis about what kind of guy he is later. He's not used to being a happy guy, but this unfamiliar mood might just be that. It's been an extremely eventful whirlwind since the moment he and Tony reunited, and just then some down time sounds miraculous.

"Second date's got to be on Earth. I'm not cut out for cosmopolitan Sakaar." He waves the feather he's clutching at Tony as they start their meandering stroll back. "It's just too weird for me, and that's saying a lot. You saw that guy on stage when we left, right? That wasn't just a hallucination?"

“Do you think the female of the species has three vaginas?” Tony’s once again tapped into Bruce’s thought process. They don’t need to have a telepathic connection to be connected. That’s what has always made them work. Maybe the hot tub pushed them into exploring this bond between them more robustly, but Tony will never deny that it’s there. And that it’s real. And that he does feel a giddy sort of contentment thinking that they can have a date back on Earth. “We’re leaving tomorrow. The stress test on the armor should be done by then. I’m thinking we go for a little Thai, maybe play some mini golf, get some ice cream?”

It’s almost mundane. If Tony doesn’t come down off of this weird high soon, the whole thing might get almost domestic.

“Doctor Banner,” Tony says as they enter the hacked elevator a few minutes later, Sakaar slowly dropping away from them, “I just want to say that... out of all the things we’ve done that have been morally questionable, this is by far my favorite. And you can quote me on that. Now go clean up so we can make out and dry hunk like teenagers.”