Author's Notes: Saw a prompt about postcards on tumblr, and this is what happened. I don't own Marvel or the Avengers. I just like to write about Bruce.
All the other members of the team had moved into the tower long before Bruce finally caved in and joined them. Everyone had been there for about a year by the time Bruce showed up with his worn duffle bag and rumpled purple shirt, walking across the kitchen as if he'd always been there and helping himself to a slice of toast right off of Tony's plate. Bruce settled right in, and the others settled around him, and everything was just the way Tony had wanted it to become for another year following Bruce's arrival.
But Bruce had been on the move and underground for nearly ten years, and staying in one place was hard for him. He never got used to calling the tower his home, never really adjusted to the stagnancy of tied-down living. He was restless and anxious and needed a change of scenery.
Natasha was the first to notice his restlessness, and was the first to realize that the good doctor was gearing up to slip away. She watched him with sharp eyes and a tight hold on her tongue, and made sure to brush her fingers over his shoulder whenever she passed him. He belonged here, and she wanted him to feel that, but she would never ask him to stay. She could only hope he would decide that road for himself.
Clint and Thor realized what was happening at the same time. They were walking from the gym to the pool when they passed Bruce in the hall, all flittering hands and averted eyes. "Just need some air," he'd murmured noncommittally when Clint had asked him what was up. He'd then skirted around them and had apparently spent the rest of the day on the rooftop patio, only coming back inside when Tony had nudged him back in for dinner. The archer and the Asgardian shared a quiet look, and resigned themselves to waiting for the alert that they knew would soon come, stating that Banner had left.
Steve was next. He was sketching in the shared living room, stretched out over the couch, when Bruce plopped himself down on the floor, his back against the couch and head near Steve's knee. They sat silently like that for almost two hours before Bruce asked in a quiet voice, more of a statement than a question, "Your life is better now than before you went under the ice?"
Steve paused, putting his pencil down and studying the back of Bruce's head. He was starting to go grey, and Steve wondered why he hadn't noticed. "In many respects, I suppose it is," he'd replied after a long moment.
"But you miss the way it used to be."
"Yeah. I do."
Another long stretch of silence passed between them, and Steve picked up his pencil and started back in on his drawing. Nearly forty five more minutes passed before Bruce asked, "If you could go back to the way it was, would you?"
Steve's eyes were once again on Bruce, but this time were closely watching the set of the physicist's shoulders. "I... don't know."
Bruce nodded and then slowly pulled himself up off the ground. He'd given Steve a small, tired smile and shuffled out of the room, and Steve was left with a sense of melancholy foreboding in the pit of his stomach.
Tony was the last to piece it together, and when he did figure it out it had less to do with his observation skills and more to do with Bruce asking him to drive him to the airport. Tony had looked bewildered and as he listened to Bruce explain his need to roam, he'd felt terrible and overwhelming disappointment. He'd tried so hard to make everything comfortable for Bruce here, and offered him everything he could have ever desired, and that it wasn't enough really felt like a slap in the face. He had nothing left to give, nothing left to tempt his friend with, and so did as was requested of him without a snarky comment or persuasive wag of the eyebrows.
The drive to the airport was quiet, the only sound between them the soft hum of the radio. Tony watched Bruce out of the corner of his eye, and Bruce looked out the window, a small frown tugging at the corner of his lips. He didn't look at Tony, and Tony wanted to scream, to thrash, to grab Bruce's attention. Why won't you let us in? he wanted to shout into Bruce's face. Why can't we be enough? What are you running from? But Tony kept his mouth shut and his hands still on the steering wheel, even after he'd pulled into the parking lot.
Bruce let himself out of the car without a word, but paused before closing the door. And then, before either of them could really figure out how it happened, Tony was standing in front of Bruce, trapping him in a bear-like hug. The breath was crushed from Bruce's lungs and whooshed past Tony's ear in a warm gust, and just made the billionaire hold on tighter. It felt like an eternity before Bruce's arms dropped around his shoulders and his hug was returned. "Thank you for everything," Bruce whispered, his words scratchy.
"Take care, Big Guy," Tony whispered back steadily, opposing the desperate grab of his hands.
Then Bruce disentangled himself from Tony and was walking across the asphalt, hands in his pockets and bag slung over his shoulder, and he never looked back. Tony stood, leaning against an expensive car that he'd never drive again, staring after the other man's back, until the sun started to set behind him.
When Bruce touched down in Tirana, Albania he found himself a small inn and collapsed onto the mattress. It was only after a fierce mental debate, pitting the cons of not brushing his teeth against the pros of going to sleep immediately, that he sat up and began rifling through his duffle bag for his toothbrush. He was perplexed when his fingers brushed across something unfamiliar, and confusion coursed through him when he pulled a stack of postcards out from the bottom of his bag. He hadn't put them in there, of that he was sure, but all his questions were answered when he saw the Post-It note stuck to the card on the top of the pile.
send it back blank if you want, just let us know you're there is scrawled in black ink in Tony's chicken scratch handwriting, and Bruce smiles as he flips through the postcards, all various images from around New York and all pre-addressed to Avengers Tower. He left the stack of postcards on the bedside table, then went to brush his teeth, his eyes drifting back to look at them in the reflection of the mirror.
After about an hour or so, Bruce crawled under the quilt on the bed and settled in for the night. Just as he was drifting off to sleep his body jerked awake, and he snatched a pen from inside the notebook he'd pulled from his bag. On the back of the first postcard he scribbled Tirana, Albania in printing that belied his sleep blurred vision. Then the pen dropped from his fingers and his head drooped down to the pillow, and he was asleep within moments.
The first thing he did in the morning was find a mailbox.
Bruce sent postcards to the tower from Bangladesh, Belize, and the Cocos Islands all blank except for his location. He'd been gone for coming up on two months, and every time a postcard came in, Tony stuck it to the fridge in the common kitchen. Steve had taken to researching all the places that Bruce had been visiting, and would give his teammates little tidbits of information that pertained to wherever it was that Bruce was. Their doctor was in the wind and not communicating with them beyond the blank postcards, but knowing where he was and learning a bit about the location made them all feel like he was a little closer to home.
He was in Tadjoura, Djibouti when Bruce deviated from his postcard routine. He wrote his location as usual, but scrawled in at the last minute, just before dropping it in a mailbox, Thor would love Skoudehkaris. Clint, not so much.
When the postcard made it to New York, Tony had practically flown through the tower, hooting and hollering and making a nuisance of himself. "What are you doing?" Steve had shouted at him before the postcard had been shoved into his face.
"Bruce is talking to us!" Tony had crowed. "You think it means he misses us? I think it means he misses us."
Steve studied the postcard quietly before taping it to the fridge door for the others to see. "JARVIS," he asked the room at large, "what's Skoudehkaris and where can we get some?"
The AI then sent a detailed description of the rice and lamb dish to Tony's Starkpad, along with the phone number and address of a restaurant that specialized in African cuisine that wasn't too far from the tower. When dinner had arrived and the postcard had been viewed by everyone, Bruce's prediction came true. Thor scarfed back most of what they ordered with an enthusiasm that left the others feeling more hungry than they would've liked, and Clint just pushed the lamb around his plate with his fork for a while before scraping his share onto the top of the mound of food Thor was accumulating in front of him.
They talked and laughed into the night, and the Bruce shaped absence in the room waxed and waned in size. His presence was with them in the food and slanted box letters on the back of the photo of the Baxter building, but his smile and lilting laugh, the laugh that fit in and chimed so nicely against Tony's, was missing in such a loud way that they had never missed him more than they did right then. But the missing him was less painful that it had been before. Bigger, but softer, and it wasn't perfect, but it was close.
The postcards from Eritrea, the Faroe Islands, and Grenada all had single sentences scrawled across the backs of them, and Tony was in the throes of accepting the fact that his science bro would forever be a man of little words the day they received the postcard from Honduras. Across the back of Lady Liberty was a small paragraph; five sentences about the climate and one saying that all the orchids reminded him of Natasha. When Tony had taken it into the common room to show the others, nobody mentioned the flash of infinitely soft fondness that flooded Natasha's expression as she read the note. It had only lasted a moment, and anyone not familiar with her may have convinced themselves they hadn't seen it, but it had definitely been there. Clint grinned at her but didn't say anything, and the others followed his lead.
The postcard from Indonesia only said, I found a new team and had a photo stapled to it. It was of a group of children, probably around ten years of age, all dressed in hastily assembled play costumes. The tallest boy of the group had a small bucket on his head, a red sheet tied over his shoulders, and an old hammer in his grip. The small boy beside him had the lid of a trashcan firmly in front of him, his eyes peering out over the top and crinkled in a way that indicated a grin. A third boy was in a red shirt, heavy work gloves, and had smudged a black substance over his chin and cheeks in what was clearly an attempt to recreate Tony's facial hair. A little girl with curly hair was pressed against the side of a boy who was wielding a very large stick that had a string tying the ends together, creating a makeshift toy bow. They were both dressed in black, and Clint laughed when he noticed the boy was wearing purple sneakers and the girl was holding her fingers in the shape of guns. The child in the middle of the photo had glasses skewed across his face, the frames too big on him, a button down shirt that was also too large, and a smudge of green under his left eye. His grin was the biggest of all.
Thor stuck the photo in the very center of the fridge door, and his eyes lit up whenever he saw it.
More postcards came from Jordan, Kuwait, and Latvia, and before anyone knew it Bruce had been gone for almost a year, had been away from them almost longer than he'd been with them. Clint was standing the the common kitchen, his eyes tracing over Bruce's postcards as he ate a bowl of half soggy Fruit Loops. Thor was leaning against the island, Steve was seated beside the prince and sketching, Natasha was sitting, perched on the counter beside Clint, and Tony was just shuffling into the room, his eyes heavy with sleep.
"When do you think he'll come back?" Clint asked the room at large, his eyes never leaving the postcards and leaving no doubt about who he was referring to.
Steve thought back to that last conversation he'd had with Bruce, about things being better, about the ability to go back, and he teeth ground together silently. He'd never told anyone else about that conversation. He wondered if Bruce's departure had less to do with an insatiable wanderlust and more to do with trying to return to things that he'd lost. He hoped Bruce was finding what he was looking for out there, but at the same time wondered if maybe what Bruce was looking for was something that wasn't out in the world, but something that could only be found within. Peace, maybe? He didn't know.
"Soon," Tony said as he reached into a cupboard and pulled out a mug.
"How soon is soon?" Thor asked, picking up on Clint's train of thought.
"Soon enough," Tony murmured, pouring himself some coffee and shuffling back out of the room, his eyes flittering to the photo of the Indonesian Avengers briefly before disappearing into the elevator. Steve wondered if that was what Tony actually believed, or if that was just what Tony told himself to keep the missing Bruce from dragging him under.
Bruce was in a tent in Malawi, eyes staring unseeingly up at the brown canvas 'roof' when he was struck in the gut by a sensation that almost made him sick. It was hot and heavy and settled over him rather suddenly, a tight almost achy feeling crawling up his stomach and squeezing his lungs. He only recalled ever feeling like this once before, after he'd left Betty bloody and broken in a hospital room without saying goodbye back in 2003.
He almost laughed at the thought, then ran a dark, calloused hand over his eyes. When he'd first felt this emotion it had almost swallowed him whole, and all he could do was hold on and ride it out until it eased up and he could breathe again. Now though, he doesn't have to fight it. He knows what he can do to make the clenching in his abdomen and the ache in his heart dissipate, and now, finally, after all these years of denying himself, he thinks that maybe now he can give himself something. Maybe he's allowed to give himself this.
It's dark and everyone else in the camp he's staying at is asleep. He grabs a postcard from his bag and straps his sandals to his feet, and is up is search of a mailbox or post office. He could wait until morning because it wouldn't make any difference, but he doesn't want to. And for once, that's enough.
It's raining when the postcard arrives, and Tony stares at it long and hard, almost disbelieving, before he asks JARVIS to assemble the team in the common room immediately. His voice is strained and his eyes are itching, but his grin is bright enough to light his way as he walks from his lab to the elevator.
The team all beat him to the common room, and when they see him they're surprised. JARVIS had made it sound so serious, but Tony looked happier than he had all year. His hand shook minutely as he held up a postcard that had a photo of the Avengers Tower on it and passed it to Steve. When Steve read the small note, a megawatt smile broke out over his face and suddenly he matched Tony, all barely repressed and quivering joy.
"Okay, the hell?" Clint pressed as he snatched the postcard out of Steve's hand. His eyes scanned it quickly, and then he laughed. "Atta boy, Doc!" Natasha peered over his shoulder, and when the note registered in her mind she smiled softly and rested her chin on Clint's shoulder.
"Let me see!" Thor boomed, and when the card was passed over to him, his only comment was, "Has he ever referred to our tower like that before?"
The postcard did not tell them where it was sent from, and had no observations or notes about anything. All that was written was four simple words in smudged ink, the letters shaky as if written by a trembling hand.
Will be home soon.