Thanks to my beta, bequirk, for looking this over.

I've literally been working on this story since January. It was pretty much the last thing I started before I decided I should never write anything again. Eight months later, it's finally finished.

Warnings: bad fiction tropes, odd formatting choices, mild angst.

Bruce hadn't meant to break the mirror.

Okay, honestly, there were only so many things he could have meant to accomplish by throwing a drinking glass at it, sure, but he hadn't consciously set out to break the mirror.

It'd just kind of...happened.

...After he'd thrown the glass at it.

So it didn't 'kind of happen' at all, Banner.

Ugh. Bruce hated it when he was right.

The worst part was that it wasn't just a mirror. Nothing in Stark Tower was ever 'just' anything. No, it was more than a mirror. It had wifi. And apps. Though Bruce had never figured out why it might be useful to have Twitter and Facebook in his bathroom, that apparently didn't really matter. Tony had installed the 'smart mirrors' in every private bathroom in the Tower.

Tony had bragged that he'd managed to get them down to less than two grand apiece, an impressive feat given the reflective touch screens and all the other crap loaded into them.

All the other expensive crap loaded into them.

So Bruce hadn't broken just a mirror, no, he'd broken a $1500 Stark Mirror with wifi and 4G capabilities. And network access. The thing even had USB ports for god's sake. Regular and micro sized.

Why on earth would anyone want something like that in a bathroom?

Bruce sighed, rubbing his brow and staring at the broken glass in the sink. $1500 worth of glass and other components.

He sighed again.

$1500 worth of broken glass, and seven years' bad luck to boot. Just what he needed.

But wasn't that what always happened? He broke things (he was broken) and then other people had to fix them. Had to clean up his mess.

Bruce wasn't used to getting angry. The Other Guy got angry. Bruce hadn't needed to deal with that emotion in years. He'd experienced the aftermath of it, on more than one occasion; he'd dealt with the fear of it for years, but actually becoming angry? Nope.

He'd been working on control since his last run in with Ross, certainly, but there was a difference between controlling Hulk and controlling the emotion that most commonly triggered his arrival. And it hadn't even been until after Manhattan that Bruce had felt truly confident in his ability to control Hulk, had begun to think that maybe he could control his anger, too.

So Bruce had decided to try letting himself feel anger when provoked instead of automatically launching into calming breathing patterns or yoga poses.

And he had been surprised to learn that, yes, he could feel anger. Slow, creeping anger, even hot flashes of sudden rage. The anger didn't make him change. Bruce was sure there was some point at which the anger would take over, some point where he couldn't control it, but he hadn't found that point yet.

It was liberating, in a way, to feel freely again.

And yet...it had its drawbacks.

Mostly, the drawback was that now he got angry.

And threw things, apparently.

That was new.

"Are you well, Dr. Banner?" JARVIS asked, a note of concern in his inhuman voice, interrupting Bruce's extended reverie. "I am detecting a catastrophic hardware failure in the mirror."

Catastrophic hardware failure, that's a nice way to put it.

"I'm fine, JARVIS," Bruce ground out, resisting the urge to throw something at the AI. Granted, doing so would be a futile endeavor—JARVIS was omnipresent and noncorporeal.

Anyway, throwing things didn't help.

As he'd just learned.

Typical.

Bruce sighed and looked down into the sink at the broken glass, picking up a shard and holding it up to the light. It reflected his face back at him; there were more frown lines and gray hairs than he remembered, but no green.

No rage monster, just a man well into middle age.

For now.

He was well into middle age, and so Bruce knew he shouldn't be self-centered enough to think that there was anything particularly unique about his life (obvious things notwithstanding, god damn it). He knew he wasn't the only person in the world who'd ever looked in a mirror and been overcome with a deep, visceral urge to break it.

Breaking mirrors was a stereotype, after all. A trope. The kind of thing you'd find in bad fiction.

And it wasn't like it was a completely random thing, like he'd caught sight of his reflection and decided to obliterate it out of nowhere. He'd been

(catastrophic hardware failure)

watching the news in the common room and there had been a report about the latest Avengers mission, about how they'd taken out a wannabe supervillain in a residential area

(about how it had gone wrong)

and Bruce had seen how Hulk had taken out two sides of an elementary school

(no injuries but that was just a fluke they said since the kids had all still been inside)

and the news anchor had been questioning whether or not Hulk should be locked up in some ultimate-maximum security lab

(or did he say prison?).

Bruce had found it hard to listen, as he'd been trying not to throw up whatever he'd eaten for breakfast.

cat

a

stro

phic

So there was all that.

"Hey, Bruce, JARVIS said there's been a 'catastrophic failure' in the mirror hardware, whatever that...oh."

Bruce glanced up from his moody ruminations, looking briefly at Tony before fixing his gaze back on the shard in his hand, meeting his own eyes instead of his friend's.

God, when did he get so old?

"Uh," Tony said, "You left your door open, I thought..." He didn't finish, trailing off into awkward silence.

Whatever he'd thought, he didn't want to say.

Bruce nodded once, stiffly, setting the mirror shard back in the sink with its brethren. "Yeah. I. Um." The glass in the sink and on the floor was fairly self-explanatory, he felt, and he didn't want to insult Tony by talking.

His mere existence was enough of an insult, wasn't it?

"You left really suddenly. You weren't upset by that idiot on TV, were you?" Tony asked after a moment, leaning against the door frame. He was obviously aiming for 'casual,' but it felt forced. Which wasn't a surprise; Tony sucked at anything remotely tied to emotions. It was kind of impressive he'd come up here at all.

"No," Bruce answered, looking down, well aware of how the broken glass contradicted the lie.

"Ah," Tony said drily. "Gotcha." He idly toed at a shard of glass that had fallen on the floor near the door.

The two stood in silence.

It stretched on for eight endless seconds before Bruce muttered, "Fine. Yeah, I was. Upset."

"Kinda figured," Tony said with a half-smile. Then, factually, "That guy is an idiot."

"So you've said," Bruce said to the wall. Tony was aiming for some approximation of comforting, he could tell, and yet, Bruce somehow just felt worse, felt stupid for letting some stranger on TV get to him like this, make him so angry he broke Tony's stupidly expensive mirror.

"I could buy the station and fire him," Tony offered abruptly, straightening.

Startled, Bruce chuckled. "You'd do that?"

"For you, buddy? Anything." Tony shrugged. "Anyway," he went on, "I've always wanted my own news channel. Think of the possibilities; Stark TV: All Stark, All the Time."

Bruce groaned. Tony's irreverence was a good distraction, and almost against his will, Bruce felt himself smiling.

It was a strange feeling, calming down; for years, Bruce hadn't been conscious for it, and he relished the experience. He leaned back against the sink, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. The near-panic he'd been feeling started to settle, and he found himself struggling not to laugh at the mess around him.

Catastrophic hardware failure, indeed.

Bruce shifted against the sink, shaking his head.

"Watch the glass," Tony warned. Then, more cheerfully, "Come on, let's have a drink. Well, I'll drink. You can have tea or whatever it is you want to have instead of sweet, sweet alcohol."

"Sounds good," Bruce agreed, straightening, grateful for the invitation. He followed Tony towards the still-ajar door of the apartment, leaving his foul mood, his anger, behind him.

Was this what it felt like, to be a normal person? With emotions and anger and slow, slow calming?

Maybe it was.

Maybe it was as close to normal as he could get.

And maybe that was okay.

As the pair headed out of Bruce's apartment and down to the elevator, Tony said, "You do realize that mirror's gonna cost like $1500 to fix, right?"

"I'll pay for it," Bruce offered immediately, feeling guilty.

"I'm just screwing with you," Tony said, punching Bruce's arm. "Geez." He pressed the button to call the elevator. "I suppose I could just have it replaced with a normal mirror."

Bruce nodded eagerly. "You could. I mean, I don't really need social networking in the bathroom, Tony."

Tony looked scandalized. "What do you mean?" Then, disconcertingly, he grinned. "Of course, I could use this opportunity to design something better. Stark Mirror 2.0! I could integrate a media player. Speakers. A webcam. Why didn't I think of this before?"

Bruce groaned and stepped into the elevator as it opened in front of them.

Thanks for reading; please leave a review if you're so inclined.