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[starkingenuity]

[Tony volunteers for the worst sort of body take over ever: here.]

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[starkingenuity]

Not pizza looks like a science experiment and Tony’s been in places where it’s a delicacy to eat things raw and alive (looking at you, Japan). This is beyond the Japanese serving sushi on top of the suffocating fish they’d cut if from, however. This is something more intensely horrifying and interesting. Tony needs to be coaxed away from one stand, and then another, and another.

Bruce probably shouldn’t have to feel like a babysitter (or a substitute nanny), but he probably will by the time he can get Tony something to eat that smells relatively like fast food and isn’t still alive.

By that point, Tony’s already picked up some of the language and has bartered for god knows what to mess with later. He’s a magpie. Shiny pieces of metal attract him.

The sun’s gone down. All of the moons are out. There’s singing and there’s nightlife and Tony suddenly would rather be here then anywhere else.

Especially when he spots the plush Hulk doll.

“Oh. My. God. That’s mine.”

[hulkbusted]

Bruce can eat almost anything but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have preferences, and he's not nearly hungry enough to eat alien creatures that for all he knows could be sentient. At least if it's a dead sentient on a plate, it won't try to communicate with him.

And he can't help but feel somewhat responsible for Tony when he's the reason that Tony's here in the first place. Eventually he just ends up grabbing Tony's belt loop just to keep from being separated from him in the crowds. It's either that or a leash.

And then Tony spots the doll and all Bruce can do is roll his eyes and hand over the credit stick. "You realize it isn't going to fit in a suit to take it home?"

[starkingenuity]

Tony doesn’t need a leash, thank you. He just needs a best friend with benefits that can keep up with him. And who is willing to part ways with money over the most ridiculous things. He does end up shooting Bruce a look, as if the very notion that he can’t take the Hulk rag doll home is abhorrent to him. “These things are mostly air and the suit you wore in is mostly snacks. We just have to eat more.”

Because this is coming home with him one way or another. And he really thinks that they need to market the Hulk a little better back home. Halloween costumes and pajamas are one thing. But dolls?

Why did he never think of that? Especially since, in theory, the Hulk-As-Banner really could be cuddly now.

“For when you’re gone.”

[hulkbusted]

It isn't Bruce's money in the first place, and Tony had been able to talk him into helping create Ultron; he's not going to have much difficulty cajoling Bruce into giving him the credit stick for a Hulk doll, no matter how awful it is.

Maybe he can just "accidentally" forget it when they head back to Earth.

"I've barely even had a chance to be not gone and you're already planning for when I'm gone." He eyes the Hulk doll with all the pleasure and desire to cuddle that he'd give a cobra. "I guess I deserve that."

[starkingenuity]

Tony wrinkles his nose. “Two Years is a long time,” he says. He’s not forgetting snything. Not the two years of searching (shit, he’s turning into his dad) and not the constant running. He hugs the dolls that’s now his and not being left behind to his face and turns away from Banner. He suspects that the man is going to hook a finger in his belt loop again anyway.

A leash isn’t needed outside of the bedroom and Tony is pretty sure that Banner is going to need s lot of vanilla sex before they move it to the next level.

It takes ten minutes more to find likely non-sentient food that is vaguely pizza like. It takes fifteen minutes after that to get back to the penthouse. It takes half an hour to tease one another and eat.

And then right in the middle of a successful, offline game of Call of Duty, Sakaar has to go and throw another curve ball by turning all the lights out.

[hulkbusted]

"Only if you're awake for them." Would he have come home sooner if he'd been awake for those two years? Good question, but not one he has an answer to. Still, there's something about knowing that a friend has lost his entire homeworld to make a guy appreciate good old terra firma.

He's been lost in this city before, of course he hooks a finger in Tony's belt. The first time had been more than enough, and he can do it here without attracting the kind of attention that they'd get anywhere on Earth.

By the time Tony is once again kicking his ass at Call of Duty, Bruce is almost tempted to suggest that they should just emigrate to Sakaar and let other people destroy Earth without their assistance.

And then the lights go out and Bruce drops his controller to roll off the bed and check out the window to see if the power outage is widespread - it isn't.

"I think they finally noticed there are squatters in the penthouse."

Then he's dropping to his belly as a ship zips up into his line of sight and paints the entire penthouse in a sudden grid of green light.

[starkingenuity]

Tony turns to glance over his shoulder when the screen in front of him shifts from lack of anything to bright green. He’s a little more graceful than Banner getting to the floor, but that’s only because it’s easier to be graceful when you’re rolling off of s bed and not busting your knees up in a dead drop.

He no sooner army crawls over when the windows are shot out and he covers his head as best he can.

It’s not the best of days, that’s for sure, though one might argue that it had been pretty great right up until a few seconds ago.

“Grandmaster! Show yourself!”

The voice, obviously, is looking for the original occupant of the penthouse, and it sounds gruff and unhappy. “Not a well liked leader, huh? Common problem no matter where you go I guess,” Tony shrugs as if he isn’t about to be shot.

[hulkbusted]

"Vive la révolution," Bruce mutters from his place on the floor. "We really should have known this was going to happen." Nothing ever stays peaceful for long, and they are camping out in the penthouse of the deposed (but not dead?) ruler of this planet.

"Stay down and let's try not to kill anyone, okay? These people have a right to be pissed off." With that, he stands up, hands raised and open to show that he's unarmed.

The scanning green lights seem to cocoon him as he moves toward the balcony one slow step at a time until he's out in full view. There's a brief silence before the voice comes again. "Sending out a servant while you cower on the floor? Last chance. Show yourself!"

[starkingenuity]

“He thinks you’re my serving!” Evidently no one’s told Tony that joking when there is live ammunition pointed more or less in your direction is a bad thing. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. He sort of has that kind of attitude. It’s both amusing... and not amusing at all.

He pulls himself up, but his hands remain more or less down, hidden by the blackness around the focal point of the light.

“For the record, I’m not cowering. We were just trying out the hot tub. You’re not here for the are you? Shit, Banner, if they take our hot tub, what are we going to do for fun?”

“Hands up!” the man shouts and Tony, finally, seems to understand that fun and games have to be over for a little while. “Who else is with you?”

“No one. The door was open. We took advantage,” he calls back.

[hulkbusted]

Bruce gets gallows humor. He gets it exceedingly well, and there's no doubt that's one element of why he and Tony get along. He shoots a look over his shoulder at Tony, and he's tempted to tell Tony not to make them kill him before Bruce has a chance to maybe win a CoD match.

Of course, unlike Tony, Bruce is nigh impossible to kill.

"Send someone in to look around if you want. It's just the two of us." And FRIDAY in two highly weaponized suits, but let's not draw attention to that. "No one else was using the space."

Again there's a brief silence before the ship hovers closer and a hatch opens in its front to allow a small, hip-high being that bears a startling resemblance to a brick to jump down onto the balcony with an impact that manages to make the floor vibrate.

"If you move, Zero up there's going to shoot you both," the brick says in a voice that inappropriately reminds Bruce of a 1930s gangster movie tough guy. "I say go ahead and move."

With that he stomps into the penthouse to start searching for the Grandmaster.

[starkingenuity]

“There’s extra pizza on the table,” Tony calls. “Or something like pizza. Cheesy. Gee, I hope that’s cheese. You know what? How about we don’t do this show and tell sort of thing, all right? I’ll go on happily believing that’s a cheese pizza and you just keep on not shooting us for squatting.”

Zero looks about ready to shoot anyway, mostly because Tony is Tony. Anyone who doesn’t know him, his family, or his genius pretty much wants to kill him on sight. He snorts at Banner. “I can get rid of ‘em for yah,” he grunts, nodding at Tony, who looks offended.

The point is to play this up. To be distracting. If they’re idiots, squatters, just a couple of guys new to this place, they’re going to get off a lot more easily.

“It’d be quick. Ping ping. Not much mess.”

[hulkbusted]

"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."

[starkingenuity]

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.

[hulkbusted]

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.

[starkingenuity]

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.

[hulkbusted]

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.

[starkingenuity]

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.

[hulkbusted]

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..."

[starkingenuity]

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.

[hulkbusted]

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.

[starkingenuity]

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.

[hulkbusted]

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.

[starkingenuity]

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!]

[hulkbusted]

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.]

[starkingenuity]

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?”