To Ghibligirl91: Yes, this will be slash. But I don't consider changing Pepper and Tony's relationship to be cheating or oversimplifying. I'm not pushing her aside, and there will be more details about their history later. I just didn't think full exposition was necessary at the start when it has nothing to do with the plot. I hope that makes sense. :)
Tony followed the chopper across the border and the jeeps that then carried the group of agents and their newly-rescued charge up to the US Embassy in Djibouti, which was the closest spot SHIELD could commandeer on short notice. He let jumpsuited, expressionless SHIELD lackeys scour his suit with some chemical wash, laughing when a masked agent asked if he could kindly remove the suit and take a decontamination shower with the others. Like the thing popped right off.
Once Tony's metal shell was clean enough to be deemed safe he set out to explore the embassy, finding Natasha, damp haired and wearing slim shorts and a man's undershirt that she'd found God knows where, on a remote video call with Fury.
"We're destroying that hut they were holding him in, since his blood is all over the place," she was saying as Tony walked in, nodding at him when she noticed him there.
"And the men who took him?"
"Sick, dying, every one of them," she reported, including Tony in the update with a glance. "The ones that were in the hut might have associates in the village who've gotten sick too; we've got men on the ground and we'll update the doctor here in case she sees any cases back at her clinic. I don't know if the Army still monitors for cases of gamma poisoning, but we'll keep it contained."
Radiation sickness. Bruce's blood was flooded with gamma radiation. Tony didn't think about that when he saw the unfamiliar sight of blood on Bruce's clothes and skin. Bruce had never been beaten enough to bleed before, not since his initial accident. The Hulk always protected him. When those assholes beat him bloody over a course of days they were unknowingly spattering themselves in radiation. If they didn't do more than just wipe or rinse his blood off of them, they were basically killing themselves slowly.
Justice was a fucked-up thing sometimes.
Tony liked it.
Content that all necessary official things were being handled, he went up to the office of the Embassy that had been turned into a makeshift doctor's office.
Doctor Sahra turned out to be one of those pretty amazing civilians who, when confronted with the weirdness of SHIELD, somehow didn't even blink. She didn't ask why they demanded she wear gloves while patching Bruce up, or why every last rag and sheet and article of clothing that contained his blood was swept away for immediate incineration.
She seemed to be mostly done when Tony showed up, looking up from a clipboard and taking in the suit as Tony came clanking into the room.
He really had to make the damn thing quieter.
She barely raised an eyebrow at him, though. "Mister Stark," she greeted, her voice low and accented and really kind of lovely. Hell, she was lovely herself, in her early sixties maybe, regal and calm-eyed the way people were when there were a lot of hard years survived in their past.
Tony grinned, setting his helmet down on a desk that had been showed out of the way to make room for a cot and medical supplies. "Hi, doc. How's he doing?"
"Bruises, lacerations, nothing that won't heal in a few days' time. He is exhausted and dehydrated: I'd like to put him on a drip, but..." She gestured around at the office around them, both lavishly decorated and completely useless. "Ironically, I lack the most basic equipment."
"I'll take care of that," Tony said confidently. His jet had left New York for Africa hours ago, and he made sure it was well-stocked for any kind of emergencies.
He approached the cot and squinted down at Bruce. Bruce looked haggard, which made sense, but it was worse than a few days getting slapped around would cause. His hair was too long, curling and messy and more gray than Tony remembered. Stubble so long it was almost a beard, eyes sunken in even in unconsciousness. His lips seemed pale, his skin sallow. He was even less substantial than Tony remembered, lean in a way that said he skipped meals regularly.
"Damn it, big guy." Tony sighed. If he knew that Bruce leaving meant that he was also going to completely forget how to take care of himself, Tony would've fought harder to keep him in New York.
"You will take him with you?"
He looked up, remembering the doctor. "Yeah," he answered without hesitation.
Bruce would be lucky if Tony let him out of the tower again. They were friends, they were...well. There was something there, had been from the start. Even before they met. He read Bruce Banner's file and felt a draw. He didn't let things like this happen to his friends. The beatings, yeah, but also the general neglect.
If Bruce wouldn't take care of himself then Tony would damn well do it for him.
Tony studied the woman, this doctor that Bruce had been working with. "How long have you two...?"
"A week," she answered. "Only six days he was here before they took him. We have spoken before, of course. He first contacted me years ago, after a news organization reported on one of my clinics. He had ideas for how to do good things with very little. Helpful suggestions. I think he does this very often, travel to new places and try to help the people there." She looked down at Bruce. "He's a good man. Sad, but good."
Tony smirked faintly. That was Bruce in a nutshell: sad but good. "Why did they grab him?"
She looked back up at Tony. "My work is not popular with many men. They have always tried to stop me. Sometimes they have succeeded, but only temporarily. When they can't strike out against me, they will go after those who help me. Having a foreign man to target was, I think, hard for them to resist."
"So if he wasn't helping you he wouldn't be hurt right now," he said.
"No, he wouldn't." She regarded Tony. "Do you seek to lay blame on someone?"
Tony met her gaze evenly. "Just stating facts, doc."
"It is my duty to inform those who would help me about the dangers. It is their responsibility to make a choice. Doctor Banner understood the risks."
"Easy as that, huh?"
She chuckled, the sound deep and rich and strangely comforting. "Is he a child? Should I have made his choice for him?"
Tony shrugged. He looked down at Bruce, scowling at the thinness in his features, the roughness of his beard and wildness of too-long hair. Every feature seemed to broadcast that this was a man who had no one to care for him, and Tony didn't like that. He didn't like what it said about Tony, that it took a visit from Coulson to even alert him that Bruce was in trouble. The woman in front of him, the one he was apparently trying to blame for all this, was the person who was responsible for SHIELD being alerted and Bruce being helped. If not for her he would have gone on not knowing, and for how long?
He spoke after a moment, oddly hushed. "If I hadn't let him leave six months ago, he wouldn't be hurt right now."
"Ahh." She nodded at that. "You are seeking to assuage yourself from blame, then."
Tony didn't bother to answer. He was a cocky little shit most of the time, he knew that about himself. But when it came to guilt complexes his ran almost as deep as Bruce Banner's did.
"A tiger in a cage is still a tiger, Mister Stark."
He looked at her, brow furrowing.
"You might say to yourself: a tiger is a beautiful animal, but dangerous. I will put bars around it so that people can enjoy its beauty and be unharmed. The only one who suffers is the tiger, who has not lost the instinct to roam and hunt but has had the ability taken from him. Whether you build a cage to keep the people safe or to keep the tiger safe, the result is the same: everyone will be safe, but the animal will slowly go mad." She lay a hand on Bruce's shoulder as he slept on. "You must let people be who they are. Better he be injured from his own choices than made helpless from yours."
Tony studied her, her warm, calm eyes and unflappable gaze. "You ever wanted to live in New York?"
Her eyebrows rose again.
"Seriously. I could use a doctor on staff full-time, and this whole folksy-metaphor talk kinda works for me. All the high-tech equipment you could want, no guys with guns...well, sometimes guys with guns, maybe, but probably a lot less often than here." He flashed his most charming smile, patting the chest plating of his suit. "You'll see a lot of weird stuff. That'd be exciting, right?"
She smiled after a moment. "Men like Doctor Banner, they are good men, but they come and they go. My people need someone who stays."
He returned the smile with a shrug, unsurprised. "Can't blame me for trying."
Doctor Sahra endeared herself to Tony further by not asking questions, and being a decent lookout when the jet arrived in Djibouti and Tony needed to get Bruce away from SHIELD before Fury showed up throwing around words like 'debriefing' and 'investigation'.
He asked her to pass on a message to Natasha thanking her for the help, and then it was just a matter of lugging Bruce out to the balcony of that office and taking off, flying low and slow to the nearby airport and trying not to aggravate Bruce's injuries.
Natasha must have understood and approved of sneaking Bruce out the back door, because they were close to US airspace by the time Fury found out and contacted him.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Stark?"
Tony appreciated having a private jet in times like this. He loved that he could have his people set up an entire portable hospital room on one end and still be able to open a display for a video call from his leather chair with a glass of scotch in hand, all playboy as far as Fury could see.
"You wanted us to get Banner out, right?"
"I told you to work with my people, god damn it. That means start to finish, not just until you get what you want." Fury scowled at him through the screen. "Bring him to the carrier, and that's an order."
"Is it? Really?" Tony sipped his drink. "See, the way I understand it, Bruce wasn't on SHIELD business when he got taken, and it wasn't enemies of SHIELD that took him. That makes him just another US citizen running into trouble on vacation, and that makes me free to take him wherever I want to take him."
"Stark." Fury glowered at him, but actually seemed temporarily stuck for an argument. "Something compromised my Hulk, and I want answers. You either bring him to me or you'll have me knocking on your door wherever you do end up."
"I'll set another place for dinner." Tony smirked and leaned in, but hesitated before cutting off the connection. "Look, Director, my doctors are overpaid because they're the best. I can make him comfortable and get the story out of him easier than you can. He doesn't really dig authority, you know that. Just give me a couple of days to figure out what's up, and I really will bring you over. Dinner, drinks, and all the debriefing you want."
Fury glared at him, arms folding across his chest. It wasn't an entirely unimpressive display of testosterone, but not as effective over a screen as it would have been in person.
"You have forty-eight hours," he answered finally, nodding his head at someone off screen to cut the connection off before Tony could.
Tony sat back with a chuckle, pushing the display back and sipping his scotch, looking over at the set-up Pepper had arranged as he was flying out to the Helicarrier at the start of this mess. One of those aforementioned overpaid doctors was earning his keep, monitoring machines and taking notes while Bruce lay sleeping, IV in his arm to hydrate him and gamma radiation monitor humming softly beside it to keep everyone aware of the hazards of the poor guy's bodily fluids.
Tony wasn't about to mention anything to Fury about Bruce's slurred words back in that hut in Somalia. Wasn't any point spreading wild rumors before he knew what Bruce meant, and...if Tony was right, if 'he's gone' really meant that Bruce had somehow gotten rid of the Hulk, that was something that needed to be tightly contained until they figured it out.
The Hulk was a product of radiation exposure and the most bizarre case of good-bad luck in the history of scientific experimentation: he wasn't something Bruce could simply walk away from. He didn't take vacations, he didn't go away. He was in Bruce's blood.
Tony didn't trust that he was 'gone'. If that's what Bruce meant then there was a story behind it that Tony needed to hear and they needed to work to figure out.
Bruce was injured – that was new, and alarming, and it suggested that the Hulk might really be impaired in some way. That had to be figured out, too.
They were scientists. There was an order to things. Hulk being gone, that was just a hypothesis. One of a few possible explanations. Tony was an irresponsible, careless and cocky guy, but he respected the hell out of the scientific process: hypothesis only became theory over testing and experimentation and the ruling out of other hypotheses.
Nothing was true until it was tested.
Forty-eight hours wouldn't be nearly enough time to work all this out, but it would give Tony a clearer picture of the whole thing. Bruce would be back in his right mind by the end of the two days, at least, and together they'd figure out what to tell Fury and how to proceed.
The overpaid doctor reported the same as the lovely pro-bono Doctor Sahra had – exhaustion, dehydration, a few superficial wounds that would heal in a few days' time. He also pumped a few sedatives into Bruce's IV so they could drive him from the airport to Stark Tower without risking waking him up. Tony had more than a few unused residences in the tower, so he called ahead and had Pepper see to setting up whichever one was closest to Tony's rooms.
He trusted his people to move Bruce from the car up to the room they prepared for him. After getting the Mark 8 into the lab for recharging and the usual minor repairs, Tony headed up to his own rooms to check on the world and how it had moved in his few hours' absence.
First thing, he sent an email to Natasha in thanks and promising a ten thousand dollar dinner at the location of her choice. Within five minutes she responded: I updated the Cap on everything. You might have visitors soon. So I'll settle for a $5000 dinner.
Tony chuckled, sent her a quick 'You got it' response, and ignored the rest of his emails for a quick call to Pepper, since anything important she'd already know about.
No doubt the intrepid Captain Rogers would show up in a day or two, playing the role of concerned team leader looking after his possibly-damaged compatriot. An overbearing routine, his whole earnest leader-of-men thing. Tony used to resent it before he realized it was actually completely legitimate. Steve was a product of his time (and, of course, lots of experimentation), the ideal hero of World War Two America, trapped in the cesspool that was 2012.
Tony had no problem resenting the guy, the famous hero, the obsession that had thrilled Howard Stark so damned much that he couldn't be bothered to focus on his son. But it was hard to dislike him. Steve was a stranger in a strange land. Tony lost his dad's attention, Steve Rogers had lost everything and everyone he ever knew. Kinda put perspective on things.
When Tony was feeling generous enough to bother with perspective, anyway. Maybe it was easy to feel for the old man, but it was much more fun to poke at him and watch that 1940s Americana routine crackle into something more human.
Steve could be allowed access to Bruce, provided he came in less Normal Rockwell painting and more actual person.
Not yet, though, and Tony made sure to tell Pepper that he wasn't taking any visitors for at least twenty-four hours, however star-spangled they might be. He had work to do, and as much as he'd grown fond of those kooky Avengers they had a way of complicating things.
After hanging up with Pepper and finishing his second scotch, Tony turned his mind towards the possible problem of a Hulk-free Bruce.
"JARVIS, pull up all the files we have on Bruce Banner. Let's recap the details before we try to sort out this mess."
"On the display, sir. Might I ask what 'mess' we'll be sorting out this time?"
"You'll know as soon as I know, buddy." Tony leaned against his desk as the 3D display came up and scattered in neat sections around him. His personal history, his 'criminal' activity on the run, the accident itself.
He minimized the personal files and focused on the accident, doing a quick scan of the few details they had about it.
The US Army had claimed most of the notes had been destroyed in the accident, which was complete bullshit but unsurprising considering the source. Tony had met General Ross a few times back when he was in death-merchant mode, and he had no doubt that the man wouldn't give a hint to his own mother if they were playing a round of charades. Guys like him never met a secret they didn't keep. Add to that that Ross and a lot of his brethren seemed to regard Bruce as nothing more than stolen weaponry, and Tony was inclined to think no kind thoughts about any of them.
There were only a couple of pages of notes from Bruce himself, and they all seemed to be pretty superficial. A basic treatise outlining his theory about gamma radiation being the most promising way to recreate the results of the Supersoldier serum, and a report detailing his progress dated a few weeks before the accident itself. Nothing providing details of the actual parameters of the experiment. For those details Tony had to rely on the official reports, heavily redacted and entirely suspect as they were.
There was nothing new to learn from it, though. The basic scenario was just as Tony remembered it: a carefully monitored few seconds of guided gamma exposure followed by the accident itself, the blast of enough pure gamma radiation that Bruce should have died. Hell, he should have dropped into a heap of lifeless matter with a half-life measured in centuries, not decades.
Everything in that room was destroyed. Bruce? Bruce turned green and roared now and then.
Tony wasn't sure if he was fascinated by Bruce because he was the man who made it happen, or fascinated because he simply couldn't figure out what the hell was going on in Bruce's body to make him humanly possible.
The rest of the Avengers Tony could understand. Clint and Natasha were basically just incredibly brave and seriously fucking skilled at what they did. Thor didn't have to fit the standards of logic because he was literally otherworldly. Tony understood his own powers inside and out because he had built himself up basically from scraps. Steve was something of a marvel, but what he was was feasible enough to make sense.
Bruce simply defied all common sense. A person didn't walk out of a room after being exposed to that much radiation. He sure as hell didn't go on to live an normal life with one tick of a side effect. The scenario lacked any kind of logic, and taking a closer look at that side effect, at the basic fact of the Hulk, there were another dozen impossibilities to add to the list.
Tony had watched tapes, recordings from the incident in Harlem a few years back. Even then he had a hard time believing that the beast in those images would simply shrink back to a normal guy when he was done destroying cities. Half the reason he'd encouraged Bruce to embrace the Hulk was because he simply wanted to see it for himself, to prove that the reports were all accurate.
So where did all of that uncertainty leave him now?
Obvious answer: since the Hulk was a virtual impossibility, the idea that he might have just vanished couldn't actually be discounted just because it should have been impossible too. Impossibilities simply couldn't be ruled out.
Which didn't really help anything, but then the odds were slim that he was going to sort out anything without Bruce's input. He might have misunderstood him back in that chopper anyway. The whole problem might be moot.
He minimized the reports with a sigh. "JARVIS, where did they stash our guest?"
"Doctor Banner is directly below us, sir. There have been no change in heart beat or respiration, he is still unconscious."
"Mmm. Well, that's starting to bore me. Maybe we should change it."
"What do you suggest, sir? An airhorn?"
"Oh ha ha. Calm your gears, voice, I'll take of this myself."
"'Voice?'" JARVIS actually managed to sound offended. "Need I remind you that I am a-"
"No, you need not." Tony pushed back from the desk and headed for the door. "I know what you are. I designed you, you're my pride and joy."
"I should say so."
With his AI appeased Tony headed out of his room and to the elevator. Enough speculation and musing and theorizing. Time to wake Bruce up and get to the bottom of this.
tbc