Title: Mellow Jazz, Bongo Drums, Huge Bag of Weed
Summary: Three drabbles about Bruce and Tony. That's all.
Mellow Jazz
Tony wakes slowly one morning to the breezy, lilting sound of a saxophone.
He lies in bed for a few moments. He recognizes the warm minor keys of a piano intertwining with a fluctuating sax melody.
He knows the tune. He's pretty sure he does. He swore he's heard it before on NPR, or some shit similar.
The song has no redundant pattern, besides the triad of piano chords that chime in during the first few measures.
He listens for a few more minutes and the piano continues to roll alongside the brush beat of a punchy jazz kit.
I know this, I fucking know this, Tony thinks.
He rolls to his side as the sax slowly rises to its climax, then quiets to allow the piano to flourish. His eyes closed, he pictures someone in a black suit running down a spiral staircase. The blankets twist around his torso, and then he feels a thin layer of sweat form against the sheet.
He doesn't want to push the blankets - no, rather the 800-thread Egyptian cotton sheets off his body. He waits for the vanilla monotone of some public radio DJ to say the name of the song, then plug some granola bar ad.
"It's Coltrane," Bruce says flatly beside him. He stares at the ceiling, his hands tucked firmly behind his head.
"I knew that," Tony answers.
Bongo Drums
"It's these, these are the ones." Bruce proudly holds the weathered instrument between his legs with unbridled joy. The small bound drums look almost comical between his legs, but Tony has to oblige his enthusiasm.
"Really?"
Bruce gently taps on top of the worn animal skin. Its sound is a convex pop, tuned high enough to resemble a thick twig hitting a timpani. He spreads his legs and grabs the two drums and hoists them onto his lap and bounces them up and down without reserve, smiling.
"These have got to be at least nineteenth century Central American. I've never seen a pair like them."
"I've seen nicer," Tony says, smirking.
Bruce frowns and swirls toward the wall on the stool. "So what if you don't appreciate antique instruments like I do."
"I wasn't talking about the drums."
Huge Bag of Weed
"Tony?"
"Yeah?"
"Have you ever thought about lasers?"
"Of course I have. I've built many things consisting of them."
"No, no, Tony. I mean, really thought about lasers. So, they're practically emissions of radiated photons that produce light, right?"
"...And?"
"You're not getting it. A beam of temporal coherence implies monochromacity, but when you see a laser beam...you're potentially looking at a myriad of colours. So a red laser...may actually be a blue, green, yellow, or purple laser too."
"No love for orange?"
"Never had a thing for orange."
Tony turns his head.
"How can you not like orange?"
"Not my bag."
Bruce packs the next bowl.
Admittedly, he hasn't done this since college, but the process is like second nature. He fondly recalls his old botany textbooks and instantaneously devises a punnett square in his head. He imagines the plants procreating, and he always thinks of the plant to inherit the set of recessive genes.
Maybe this strain produces a head high, he thinks. Maybe a recessive plant makes you feel it in your temporal lobes, another in the amygdala.
He packs the ground bits into Tony's cleverly engineered glass piece; it's blown glass shaped from remnants of Tony's latest revision to his suit.
It's long, blue, and resembles a beam of infinite light coming from his arc reactor.
A repulser blast.
He passes the piece to Tony, and he lights it and inhales slowly. The smoke erupts from his goateed lips like a skyward emission, and it intertwines with the sandalwood incense Bruce lit earlier - and he swears, Bruce swears to god, the smoke twists together, and it resembles a DNA helix.
He can't believe what he's seeing, but then he remembers. The smoke is enough to seep through his glasses. He imagines his eyes are an embarrassing crimson similar to Tony's, and he also remembers that if he were in high school, or even in vicinity of either of his parents, he'd be hastily rummaging through his belongings for a bottle of Visine.
"What else do you think about, Tony?" Bruce asks.
"Oh, I don't know. Thermonuclear physics. Eugenics. World hunger. The fact that you don't fucking like the colour orange."
"Pass the glass," Bruce says, rolling his head towards Tony. His head feels like it's about 50 kilograms heavy, but he's not prepared to take any scientific measurements into account. The hazy room smells like a Calcutta marketplace, his teenage bedroom closet, and Tony's bedsheets all at once, all at the same time.
"Fair enough."
Bruce's hand covers what he pretends is a source of everlasting life.
He inhales.