"You're making yourself paranoid," Bruce Banner's voice is quiet and gentle, and the television set is loud, blaringly obvious and angry and filled with the sounds of helicarriers crashing into the river and explosions ripping the D.C. SHIELD headquarters apart. It's a wonder Tony can hear him at all, but there's something about the placid doctor's voice that makes it ring across the room and the country and the world and all of the nine realms, so far that Thor wherever he is can probably hear it. Tony Stark is making himself paranoid, and he knows it, but he can't tear his eyes from the wide expanse of his 60" flat screen television. He can only tighten his grip on the remote.
He does so, and the plastic casing cracks. "Doctor Banner," he says in way of greeting, despite that the two geniuses having been staying together at Stark tower for the many months following the siege on New York brought to them by aforementioned thunder god's kid brother. The only time they had been separated was when Tony and Pepper had flown out to Malibu together to tie up some ends with the company. Tony, who didn't trust people easy, had grown even more secluded after the Mandarin and Extremis and AIM. And yet even after that, Bruce had been the first person Tony had opened up to. "I appreciate the concern. I always knew you were a soft one under that tough green hide."
Bruce sighs softly, but ventures closer to the television. "Tony, this worries me. Turn it off, please."
"I can't. This is SHIELD, Bruce."
"I know Tony. That's why we shouldn't watch it. Because it's SHIELD."
God, does Bruce know SHIELD. He knows them well. How they followed him, tracked him down in the most remote of countries, acted like they didn't have any need for him, let him live under the false pretense he was forgotten about. But they did need him, and Agent Romanoff â Natasha, now that he knows her better â proved that. Even if they didn't want the Hulk, they wanted him. And the cage was a precaution in case they demanded too much. They had hurt him, and somewhere inside of him, he cheered to see them burst.
And at the same time, this was their downfall, a sharp and halting decline to an agency that had done some respectable things. HYDRA had been fused into it from the beginning, but Coulson, Fury, Hill even, they has been honorable people, are honorable people, in Hill's case. It didn't seem right to ogle them the entire way as they fell.
Tony doesn't share his sentiment, and Bruce sees this, but watching a helicarrier almost identical to the one the Avengers first met on plunge nose first into the Potomac stirs his stomach and makes him turn his head. There are three helicarriers, two are down, and the third one is listing dangerously far to the right.
"You don't have to, but I do."
Tony sets the remote down on his leg, the casing damaged, but he doesn't care. Watching this organization, something his father poured his life and soul into almost as much as he did finding Steve, God, that burns his soul like a son of a bitch. And he refuses to turn away, no matter how much anyone pleads, because his father wasn't perfect, he sure as hell wasn't great, he wasn't even nice, but he did save Tony's goddamn life and he was his father and without his father he believes Steve would never have been here and the man might be a controlling bastard but he's one of the best friends Tony has ever had. He owes his father something, so by default he owes SHIELD something, just not HYDRA, and goddamnit, he will not turn his back on the television now.
He owes them something. It goes unspoken but Bruce gets it anyways, and he's never been one to let people suffer alone. Gingerly, the timid doctor lowers himself onto the workbench.
"God, it's hell out there," Tony bites into his palm, because he knows some good agents. Agents like Romanoff and Barton. People he hopes are on missions, aren't caught up anywhere near this devastation.
"I know, Tony," Bruce says, soft and laden with grief.
They watch as debris rains from the only helicarrier left. Unknown to them, the timer ticks aboard closer to zero, when targeting systems labeled specifically with their names will track them down and blow the entirety of Stark tower sky high. Clangs and explosions ring through the stereos. A crashing noise, like a support beam collapsing, permeates the air. The tension is tangible.
"SHIELD leaked all of its secrets," Tony says all of a sudden, not sure if Dr. Banner is even listening, but he has to tell someone what happened and what he did. "I had JARVIS steal everything important and incriminating and store it all away. Anyone who wanted that information only had a minute before I took it. I'll delete anything you or any of the rest of the team doesn't want me keeping." Tony risks a glance at Bruce, whose knuckles are white and clenched in the hem of his shirt. "I promise."
"Tony," Bruce says, and his voice sounds thick and clotted and exhausted from the scene in front of them. His eyes are glued to the screen, watching as the helicarrier lists. They don't know that Steve has just been shot for the fourth time, through the stomach, that he is struggling to save their lives and forty thousand others. "I didn'tâ" He stops.
They both stare at the screen. Something is falling out of the last helicarrier, which has finally lost its steering and balance and is going to hit the SHIELD headquarters, a tall and modern building in downtown D.C.
"What is that?" Bruce's voice cuts through the thickness of the room, but he thinks they both already know what it is from the glint of a sunny smile it throws their way before it plummets into the water.
It's hard to see, but the news crew has zoomed in on it. A scraped and dirty silver disk, with etchings of the stars and stripes.
"No," Bruce says, furrowing his eyebrows and veins popping out on his neck and forehead, at the same time Tony realizes with wide-eyed horror what has followed it.
"Jesus, Banner, that's Rogers, goddamnit," he says, and their eyes simultaneously lock onto a prone and battered figure hurtling away from the ship towards the river. The body hardly seems to splash, and suddenly it's like the universe believes Steve is so insignificant that it believes he needs no recognition even in his dying moments. Tony doesn't recall what happened after that, but Bruce says he screamed. Maybe he did. He's not ashamed to admit it if he did, because this is goddamn Captain fucking America they're talking about, and if both he and the good Dr. Banner didn't both have incredible eyesight, they would have missed him altogether. A pawn in a chess game, that's what heroes really are, almost worthless to the player, but a life and a soul, with friends and emotions just the same as the most important of the pieces. Even though they all go down with a fight, the queens and the knights and the kings are remembered and the pawns are forgotten in the scramble to honor the higher-ups.
Tony and Bruce, two teammates, two friends, lock gazes simultaneously, because that is not happening to Rogers, to Captain America, to Steve, not on their watches. They scramble for Tony's car collection without words, and in seconds they are roaring out of the garage and down the street on their way to Washington, D.C.
a/n: graduated today, though you'll never know what (college, high school, middle, maybe even elementary C;)! summer time is here! my gift to you guys is this, which i am very pleased with. please enjoy it as much as i did.