LOST AND FOUND
a Bruce Banner & Natasha Romanoff fic
from Lullabies for Selfsame Monsters
by blueincandescence
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Chapter One: Misery, Company
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Prompt — 8/1/15 jenalope — If you're still taking prompts, post AOU Tony and Nat are the two most effected by Bruce's escape act. Both being similar in that they have a very small circle or friends/support/people they trust. Some sort of confrontation between the two (good/bad/sappy/uplifting whatever works). I just love Bruce's relationship with both of these characters and would love to see how you interpret them interacting while grieving Bruce's absence. Thanks! And it's nice to see pro brucenat blogs as lovely as yours
Continuity — Post-AOU, Pre-speculative CA:CV — Follows AOU canon, basically.
Rating — Teen
Note — This was such a great prompt, jenalope! It ended up a mad mesh of good/bad/sappy/uplifting that I hope works for you! Originally part of Experimental Design, but it got long and multi-part-ish.
•
They had it out on the Helicarrier.
Around the main conference table, Natasha gave her debrief, detached and professional. No edits, no editorializing. Just did her job.
Clint spoke first. "Jesus, Nat. I'm sorry." The regret in his voice sent a tremor through her hands.
"I want to hear that from her." The blazing recrimination behind Tony's words made her snap up to meet his glare.
Several voices spoke up to quiet him, but Natasha lifted her hand. The tremors had stilled. "Let him get it out."
Tony's face twisted into something ugly, irresistible. "Tell me, Ms. Moral High Ground, before you threw Bruce down a well, did you get that he only came for you? Did that even register?"
"We needed him. You'd have done the same thing."
With sneer, Tony leaned across the table. "I would've left out the kiss, Judas."
More protests, but they were nothing but background noise. Natasha stood, leaned into Tony's wrath, calmed herself in it.
"And when you didn't need him, you just let him go. One word from you, and I could have followed him before he got out of sight."
"He made a choice." Her voice was as flat as her expression. "I respected that."
"Really? 'Cause it sounds to me like you made a choice."
Those words were a release. Natasha sat back down. "Yes. I did."
"Are you even capable of remorse?"
"Layoff, Stark," Clint said, and Steve said, "Take a breath, both of you."
Tony walked away, looked back twice. Natasha lost his glare around a corner and wrung her hands underneath the table.
•
The first time he reached out, it was the middle of the night.
The sudden, harsh buzz of her phone yanked Natasha from a deep, mindless sleep she'd paid for in sweat and aching muscles. Sitting up, she drew her legs to her chest and cradled her phone against them. The display read 'Private Number.' Her chest constricted so tight she gave up breathing. She swiped to answer and leaned in as she brought the phone to her ear.
The line was all tense silence. Her breath came out in a gasp that she sucked back, eleven days worth of compressed tight emotion threatening to escape her lips. Movement on the other end sent a rush of white hot fear through her.
"Bruce." A command, a plea. That son of a bitch. She was so sorry.
The movement stopped. "No," said another man's voice. "It's Tony."
Numbness followed adrenaline, the sudden shift turning her blood to ice. "What the hell do you want?"
"I had a question." Tony sounded petulant. "I guess you answered it." Tony sounded lost. Ever the goddamn child.
The echo of Tony's voice grated on her nerves. 'Was she even capable?' "Yeah, I miss him." Natasha sounded vindicated. She sounded broken.
"I knew that. Misery, company. That whole thing."
"That whole thing," she agreed. "Go to sleep, Tony." Natasha hung up, head on her knees.
•
The first time she reached out, it was sunset.
Tony was on the roof of what, when all was said and done, would be the New Avengers Facility. He was winding down a conversation with a contractor when Natasha approached him.
They gravitated to the edge of the roof. He was looking out over the construction. She was watching the red of the sunset for a flash of green. What she wouldn't give to have Bruce's voice in her ear, atmospheric refraction that and scattering effects this.
"What made you call me that night?" Natasha asked from the safety of two months out.
Tony put his hands in his suit pockets. "There was this equation we couldn't get right. We'd go back to it whenever we needed a brain break from whatever else we were blowing up. I'd just figured it out." Awe weighed down by guilt. Bruce was gone, and they were moving forward. "We were at our most brilliant in the middle of the night. And that's saying something."
A long moment later, Natasha said, "I miss him at sunset." She missed him all the time, but that went without saying.
"I get it. All those times he left to watch the sunset. I thought it was some suicide attempt recovery thing — cherish each day, that sort of deal. And he was sneaking off to see you." Tony put on an air of disapproval, belied by the soft smile he gave her.
"We were working on the lullaby." The urge was still there to protect what she and Bruce had, keep it close to her chest.
"And you love your work." The side-eye Natasha gave him slid right off of Tony. "You and Bruce have that in common. Me, too." Said in the present tense, said like a blessing. The Tony Stark seal of approval.
Despite the patented self-aggrandizing, Natasha found she could appreciate the sentiment, that stab of hope it inspired.
•
They had it out at the Tower.
Natasha would have been fine leaving things as they were. Not Tony. He needed to dig and prod and examine. At least he gave her a drink first.
"I owe you an apology."
"You really don't." There was a postcard folded and tucked away in her jacket pocket. She had come here feeling generous.
"Don't start being nice to me now, Romanoff."
She spun the ice in her glass. "You needed someone else to blame."
"And what did you need? Someone else to hate?" He took a sip. "Besides yourself, I mean."
Natasha fixed him with a look, then downed her drink.
"I get self-loathing," Tony said. "That's another thing the three of us all have in common."
She unstoppered the vodka and reached over the bar for two clean sifters. She pushed one toward him, forcing him to take it neat.
Tony grimaced but lifted his drink in a toast. "For the record, I never believed it was your fault that Bruce left us. And I'm halfway to believing that you are, in fact, a human being with real, human emotions."
Natasha flashed teeth. "I'm feeling the full range of human annoyance right now. For example," she added, tone genial enough.
They clinked glasses and drank.
Tony put down his sifter and hers. "Come on up to Candyland." He ushered Natasha toward the stairs. "That formula I cracked? The upshot is, I can give your Widow's Bite a gigavolt of power with no added bulk and only a point-zero-five chance of your death by electrocution."
"A gigavolt," Natasha said, skeptical but interested enough to enter the lab. "I could zap through a tank with that."
Tony waggled his eyebrows, and unveiled the prototype. "I think I can rustle up a tank for us, if you're game."
"What, and miss another bang up Saturday night at the Facility?" Her expression went dead serious. "Please and thank you."
There was very little sarcasm behind Tony's laugh.
She ran her fingertips over the blueprint for her new gauntlets, trailing the scratches and loops of Bruce's handwriting the way she had on the postcard. Natasha missed Bruce more in Tony's company, that was definitely true. But it was a better, fuller kind of missing.
— • —
Bruce turned forty-six on the eighteenth of December. On the nineteenth, he gave in.
He took a ferry to the Big Island and bought a laptop. He spent several hours rigging up a VPN that would keep FRIDAY none the wiser, and then logged on with to his Tower access. Through the security feed, he saw that his suite of rooms was as unchanged as his passwords. The labs were empty.
What had he expected?
Sipping bottomless glasses of fresh lime juice and munching on yams, Bruce turned to the files Tony was sharing with what had been dubbed the New Avengers Facility. He read the roster, and Natasha's always entertaining assessments.
It was close to sunset when he finally felt prepared enough to open his inbox. Hundreds of messages, articles, and videos. Most were from Tony, a handful from Betty and Leonard, and the rest from Natasha. The most recent video had been posted yesterday.
Bruce's finger hovered over the play button but slammed the screen closed instead. He found a hotel with decent wifi and tried again in privacy.
Tony's grin filled the entire screen. "Happy birthday, you old, miserable so-and-so. This is a video about everything you're missing. Your favorite brunch spot, your favorite filmhouse. In the wee hours of the morning, I finished one of your prototypes without you and tested it this afternoon without you." The shot pulled back to reveal Tony in a tux. "I'm going so far as to take in an opera just to spite you. And I'm escorting your girl."
"Happy birthday, Bruce." It was only her voice, but he had to close his eyes anyway. He scrolled back just to listen to those five syllables again and again.
Her hand draped over Tony's shoulder, and he put his arm around her middle out of frame. "I'm not even going to show you how stunning she looks. Whoever said redheads shouldn't wear red — my God, were they wrong."
Natasha snorted. A wry but pleased snort. At something Tony said. She pushed him aside and stood in his place. Tony's warning hadn't been adequate to describe just how much of a shock to Bruce's system the sight of her was.
He paused the video. Her hair had grown out to her shoulders and the sleek curls were pinned away from her face, which was more flawless than ever. There was a bloom in her cheeks, a light in her eyes. Her smile was an invitation that made his lungs constrict.
Swallowing, he pressed play again. A flash of green caught his eye — she was wearing a red-gold necklace with an emerald center.
"I got your latest postcard last week, and I sent a message back. That makes nine." The corners of her mouth tucked up, and he was already making plans for a tenth. How he was still — ever, even — a contributing factor to the happiness of such a woman, Bruce would never know. "I'm here when you're ready. I can't promise I won't make you suffer a little, which you'll no doubt take comfort in. But I'll be here."
Tony mugged for the camera. "You turned the Black Widow into mush, and none of us knew. Clearly, your whole 'tortured nerd' game has grown too strong for this world. You must turn yourself in."
Natasha smirked and walked away from the camera in a way that made his pulse jump. She blew a kiss over her shoulder. Bruce gulped, and wondered about the content of some of those other videos.
His view was blocked by Tony, once again in close up. "Bottom line, buddy, we miss you. And if your disappearing act was all an elaborate scheme to get the two most important people in your life to stop hating on each other, guess what — it worked. You can come home."
Bruce felt a rumble in the back of his mind. 'Almost, Big Guy,' he thought. 'We're almost there.'
"But I have to warn you," Tony was saying. "Your plan might have worked better than you intended. Nat has elevated our penchant for workplace explosions into a true artform."
Natasha, pouring two drinks in the background, put on a French accent. "This artiste would like to thank her bountiful patron for the neverending supply of, how you say, good shit to blow to high heaven."
"Hear that? You never complimented me. I might like her better than you, Banner. Let that sink in. Think about the potential consequences. Think about what you've done. Then watch this 'Happy birthday, Bruce, minus Bruce' supercut and miss us like crazy. Toodles."
Bruce pressed pause again and did as instructed. As it sunk in how much trouble he was in for upon his return, he put his head in his hands and laughed until he cried and didn't worry for a second about turning green with anything but envy.
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