starkingenuity | (no subject)

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.”

Tony just gets him. Not many people in his life have, and at most there's been one other who got him and accepted even the ugly parts. It's really damn nice.

"Why else does he need three penises?" Three very small females with one vagina each? He really didn't need his chemically-enhanced imagination taking him there.

"I'm thinking we go and I get to sleep in a bed where no one butts in and throws us off a roof. Then I'll think about Thai and mini golf." Of course that's all predicated on the idea that nothing on Earth is going to blow up, but he's keeping his worst case scenario vision turned off for a while longer.

Once they achieve their goal of getting to the elevator without making any more of a mess, he braces himself in a corner and tips his head back, looking a little drowsy until Tony gives him his marching orders. "What about you, Mr. Stark? You're covered in so much pollen we're lucky we didn't get swarmed by bees on our way back."

He snickers and shoves himself out of the corner as the elevator slows and the doors slide open. "They might make you their queen."

“Why am I always the woman?” Tony scoffs. It’s a good thing that he’s very secure with himself and open-minded (to a degree) or else they might have some problems here. “What part of this,” he gestures to the scruff on his face, which has lost much of its definition in the last few days, “makes me look like a girl?”

With an exaggerated huff of exasperation, Tony follows Bruce into the ruins of the room that had been pristine before their arrival and pauses as he glimpses himself in the mirror. He takes a step back and turns to face it, pink pollen caked to his shoulders and chest thick enough for him to wipe his fingers through it to reveal the small scar where the reactor had spent years. He glances at his hands and then upwards, before he seeks FRIDAY out for a scan.

For all he knows, this is cancer inducing. Or stroke inducing. Everything on Sakaar is dangerous to touch or eat so it’s certainly an understandable worry. Of course, it’s also compounded by his standard set of neuroses, so that doesn’t help at all.

“Scan. Full body scan,” he demands of the AI in the armor but she can easily reassure him that the protein in that pollen is actually a moisturizing compound and might be fairly good for his skin.

And that doesn’t help matters at all.

Tony is getting first dibs on the shower.

“The pollen is jizz. We were jizzed on, Banner,” he says while rushing through the hall around the other scientist.

"According to someone--" It feels a little weird directly talking about Kiara. Maybe because Tony has already characterized Bruce's having sex with her as cheating, which was probably 95% joking, but that leaves 5% that isn't. "--it's that beard."

He skips Tony's need for a scan and is already mid-meander toward the bathroom when Tony decides to jump the queue, an outrage that Bruce responds to with raised eyebrows and a vague, discontented wave of his hands before remembering one thing. There's more than room enough for two. Everything in the Grandmaster's quarters seems to be on orgy scale.

"Good thing we left before that last guy finished his act." Should he be restraining a laugh at Tony's reaction? No, definitely not. Please forgive that soft laugh at Tony's expense. Yes, he's covered in jizz pollen, too, and it isn't something he'll be signing on for again, but it's too late to freak out now.

He strips and tosses his stolen clothes in a pile in a corner, giving zero thought to nudity at this point. He's not as high as he was down in the dance party, nor is he under the influence of alien hot tub vibrations; he's just not going to start playing modest after everything that's gone down with them recently.

"Make room and I'll make sure your back's thoroughly depollinated."

“Scrub deep,” he says nonsensically, letting Bruce butt in on his shower time. He’s much more concerned with decontaminating himself than any untoward hanky panky at the moment, and Bruce needs to take care of the residual toxicity from his blood smeared on his skin, but Bruce won’t be safe from Tony for long.

Scrubbing off the clumpy pollen is somewhat therapeutic, and not just for Tony’s inconsistent bouts of germaphobia. The heat from the water is relaxing and the memory of the last time they were in this shower together does bring a childish grin to Tony’s face as he turns his back to the other man to slosh the grime from his skin.

At least FRIDAY is right. It does make him feel moisturized and somewhat more youthful. That doesn’t mean he intends to market alien jizz the same way he hopes to give world leaders sonic hot tubs to chill out.

It's fortunate for them both that Bruce hadn't been the shirtless one. It's hard enough to get all of the pollen off of Tony's upper body without adding in Bruce's more extensive body hair as a pollen catcher. Offering to scrub Tony's back wasn't even some kind of come-on; he honestly needs the help.

For him the relaxation comes from the opportunity to finally decompress from the sensory overload of an alien city. He can stand under the hot water, scrub at Tony's back with his hands and blunt fingernails, and let the white noise of water bring him closer to sobriety and calm than he's been in hours.

"We need to work on getting all of humanity's eggs out of one basket. The universe is starting to come to us faster and faster, I think they need a good dose of homo sapiens in return."

“I will be long dead before anyone gets humanity to even identify what eggs are,” Tony says, the high leaving him and his aching muscles catching up after that much too long day. He’s really got to take it easy for awhile after this, he decides, eyes closed and chin nodding briefly with each circular press of Bruce’s hand into his back. It feels great, soothing in a way that it has no business being. Tony’s gotten massages by people that have made it their whole livelihood and yet this one more be the best.

Talking shop while they shower together is just one of the benefits to this relationship, and Tony is sticking to it. If he doesn’t talk Banner into the codification of what they’ve become, no one will. He certainly can’t be trusted to get that way on his own after all.

There’s the faintest snort before the other man glances over his shoulder. There’s just some pink swirl there to keep it interesting.

“You and I are pretty good at being accountable for our actions—“ Ha! “But the rest of humanity? I don’t think so, Banner.”

"You think the rest of the universe is better than we are? You do remember Loki, right?" Only the fact that he still needs to give himself a good scrub to get off both blood and pollen keeps him from wrapping his arms around Tony and holding him there. "Or the arena here?"

He gets the last of the pink that he can see and reach off of Tony and turns away to start cleaning himself up without splashing Tony. "Asgard thought one island in space was enough and now they're stuck asking humans for refuge. Whether it's a crazy giant or the sun's death, Earth isn't going to be enough forever."

“I’ve just seen the best and the worst we have to offer and the worst— That’s the whole problem.” Now was the time for munchies and maybe clumbsy sex but instead they’re here, talking about is humanity is ready to meet the Vulcans and join the Federation. With the oversight they all seem to need at all times, Tony is really going to guess that no. No one is ready to try to stay out of red and set phasers to stun.

He soaps himself up again to make sure that he’s good and clean and then scrubs at his hair to clean that too. It looks less gray when it’s wet and Tony looks more youthful all together. So does Bruce too, really. The water seems restorative, or at least awakening? Maybe it’s full of caffeine.

The asparagus jizz is absolutely not making them younger.

Tony picks the last bit of pink from under his nails, biting on the corner of his lip as if deciding on the right kind of pasta to have with dinner. “How can you still have so much faith in the little guy?”

Why on Earth would asparagus jizz make them younger? No one remind Bruce that they're not on Earth.

He's face first in one of the water jets just then and only shakes his head, taking his time to give himself a thorough scrub before turning around to continue. "Maybe because I have more experience with the little guy than you do, and I don't think we have the right to tell them that they aren't grown up enough to leave the nursery."

If Earth goes the way of Asgard, Bruce wants humanity to have family out in the stars who'll take them in.