Chapter Two: Cheery Domesticity
x
Tony's own debriefing with SHIELD went very, very badly.
He smothered the paperwork agent assigned to him under an avalanche of relentless quippage, unfollowable digressions and a few interspersed threats of legal action against her employers. He almost got her to break down, but then she was rescued by her catsuited comrades.
Rather than risk the mental health of another agent, Fury himself took the seat opposite Tony, glared, and said: "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't cuff you to Loki and let Thor take you to Asgard."
"Because then Pepper would be in charge. She doesn't like you now – wait till she hears about Coulson's death. She's going to take SHIELD apart, dime by dime." Tony placidly stared back.
He had saved the world recently. There was footage. Fury owed him, and Tony could actually prove it this time.
"I hear tell she does not like you much either lately," Fury pointed out.
It was all Tony could do not to laugh. Pepper had never really liked him, per se, but she knew how he worked, and she knew what she could expect from him. There was trust between them, even if it wasn't the nebulous, romanticized type of limitless trust that people extolled, as if that was an actual thing that happened.
No, Pepper and Tony had had a social contract – he was found in breach, so it was voided, as per the pertinent clause.
If Fury thought he could play them against one another, Tony was going to have a good laugh in the near future.
He leaned back in his uncomfortable chair and crossed his legs. "You had questions, Director. Not that I mind wasting a day lounging around SHIELD offices and drinking sludge that does not actually pass for coffee no matter how hard it tries, but you may not be entirely happy with the bill. I am, after all, on the clock, and my consultation fee-"
"See that you subtract the cost of Agent Perry's therapy-"
"You sent her to meet opposition she wasn't qualified to handle. Wasn't that the exact same thing that happened to Coulson? Tsk. Shoddy leadership, Director."
There was movement behind the door, and Tony half-expected a gun-toting bodyguard to burst inside and threaten him with perforation for mouthing off to Fury.
That didn't happen. What did happen instead was Fury offering Tony a new contract.
x
"Stark!"
Tony halted, swayed by Captain America's dulcet tones rising above the din of the SHIELD building's lobby. He was in a mildly homicidal mood – honestly, the only reason why Fury was still alive was that Tony didn't feel like being shot by the bastard's bevy of bodyguards – and a confrontation with the paragon of American willful blindness was not going to end well. For anyone present.
"Can we postpone this powwow, Cap? I'd love to stay and chat – actually no, that's a lie, I'd love to ditch – so how about you sit on this one and we'll set up an appointment sometime in a not too close future?" Tony put on his sunglasses in the middle of the monologue, despite the relative darkness of the hall.
Rogers came to a halt in front of him, transitioning from the one-two, one-two march directly into parade rest.
"Are you in a hurry?"
"Yes," Tony blurted. "Absolutely in a terrible hurry. I'm hurrying – in fact, I'm already out of here-"
"It won't take more than a couple of minutes – surely whatever very important matter you need to attend can wait that long."
Tony frowned. People who wanted things from him either paid him exorbitant amounts of money or refrained from sarcasm. It seemed as if Rogers hadn't yet noticed that Tony wasn't a soldier under his command.
"Fury has the number for my office," he said, meeting the Cap's eye over the top of his shades. "Ask for it. Set up a meeting with the P.A.-"
"Stark, this would take far less time if you could just stop interrupting for a moment and hear me out-"
Tony wasn't nearly so focused on the super soldier in front of him that he would have missed the crowd behind Rogers' back parting for a newcomer and subsequently falling quiet. He had apparently taken too long needling Fury's hired help and explaining to the Director himself what would happen to anyone trying to extort Tony Stark – spoiler alert, he illustrated the explanation with pictures of a Ten Rings base in Afghanistan taken in 2008. Boom.
"-involved in the Initiative, and we are agreed that you cannot continue breaking the cohesion of the team," Rogers finished whatever he was nattering on about.
Tony hadn't been listening, but he hadn't needed to. He had caught enough. 'Cohesion', Cap had said, like a sad little well-coached drone. And 'we'. What 'we'? SHIELD? The SHIELD-nominated Avengers?
Tony didn't know Barton, beyond the fact that he had been important enough to Coulson that Coulson got himself killed for the guy, like a complete idiot. He didn't really know Romanov, either, but a couple of months of their perfunctory acquaintance convinced him that he didn't want to.
And Rogers? Brainwashed, baby.
"It's funny," Tony mused, torn between pity and the urge to mock, "I am one hundred percent sure that you never spoke to Howard the way you speak to me, because you didn't mysteriously fall out of his plane somewhere over the German trenches." He huffed at the expression on Cap's face and talked over his feeble attempt at protesting. "Yes, it is funny. You start out by comparing me to him, and then treat me like something you scraped off your shoe? That tells me a lot about you."
Mostly it told him that Steven Rogers was another one of the mass of people not worth his time, much less actual effort.
There weren't many people left in the lobby by now, and those that were seemed to be watching the scene and unwilling to interfere. Tony was fine with this; he was a trained entertainer.
Incidentally, so was Captain Rogers. It was shaping up to be a good show.
"We have got off on the wrong foot, Mr Stark," Cap implored, "but if you are to be a member of this team-"
"Hey, whoa!" Tony raised his hands, palms out. "Who said anything about being a member of any teams?"
Maybe, once, Tony would have gone along with the sales pitch – but Pepper wasn't here to blackmail him into playing nice with the government, and Tony honestly couldn't see why he should roll over for an idiot who thought a man's worth could be measured by his willingness for self-sacrifice.
"Look, I came to pull your flaming asses out of the fire because Agent Agent made the eyes at Pep, and she made the eyes at me, but I'm not so pathetic that I would sell my soul for a handful of fake friends. You go on playing soldiers, Capsicle. I'll go back to being awesome, that suits me much better than getting ordered around by a guy whose idea of intel is 'I've seen the footage' and 'it runs on some kind of electricity'. Face it, Cap, unless you've spent an exciting night watching the footage of my sex tapes on the internet, you have no clue who I am. Let me help you here: I'm the guy not fond of the idea of lying down on any wires." Much less so a behemoth like Rogers could crawl over Tony's humanly fragile back.
Captain America turned out to be just as susceptible to Tony Stark's patented verbal barrage as any other self-important schmuck.
Credit where it was due, though, he recovered pretty fast. Not that he had understood a quarter of what Tony had just told him. The dope simply picked what he wanted to hear and reacted to it from his high horse.
"Agent Coulson died for-"
"Whatever he died for was his decision," Tony cut in. Oh, look, a radical thought. "Did you notice? He didn't get ordered by Fury to put himself bodily in Loki's way. Which I, personally, also find kinda funny. Whatever, Captain. I've got another piece of news for you: I'm a civilian. I didn't volunteer; I didn't get drafted, and if you try to do anything of the sort-" Tony briefly stepped closer to the guy, not quite crazy enough to believe that his admittedly vertically challenged self could have an intimidating effect, but simply to make it clear that he wasn't intimidated either, no matter how hard the Cap had polished his shield and how strictly he had parted his hair that morning. "-I'll give you a crash-course on the workings of the contemporary American legal system. Cheers."
"It says in your file you went after terrorists. By yourself."
Tony had to admit that at a glance it might have looked like he had volunteered for the 'good fight', but that was only because Rogers wasn't familiar with how billionaires worked.
"That's just a hobby. Someone crotchets; someone plays golf; someone hunts. And if you're a member of one of the really exclusive hunting clubs, the game runs on two feet and occasionally waves guns around."
Rogers lifted his chin so high it was practically pointing straight up. Once he judged that everyone present noticed he was being more restrained and forgiving than could be reasonably expected anyone, he did an about-face, discovered Banner standing there and watching him, tried to recoup, and finally strode off toward the staircases.
Leaving Tony brokenhearted in his wake, because how could anyone live after the Captain America gave them the silent treatment?
"You still get rambley when you're mad," Banner muttered, watching Tony with rueful fondness.
"He's a dick," Tony pointed out.
Banner rolled his eyes. "You know, Tony… I actually know you a little, but for a moment there I believed you."
Tony walked by his side, letting himself be led to the parking lot. "You think I never participated in a hunt on a human? Aside from going all Iron Man on some terrorists, I mean."
Banner considered the possibility with some seriousness. Eventually, just as they stepped into the glare of the afternoon sun (Banner squinting, Tony glad for his eyewear) he said: "…yes. Yes, I think you never did."
Tony shrugged. "Okay, that's possible. But, honestly, a lot of my memory of the past two decades is just blank space, so I might have. Keys?"
"I'm driving," Banner informed him, and ignored the resultant pout with the aplomb of someone who had built up years' worth of resistance to it. "You never went hunting, Tony Stark. I know what you enjoy; I know how you act when you're drunk, and when you're high… as if anyone had the power to drag you that far away from your workshop."
Tony took the passenger seat and watched his old-new friend as he settled himself behind the wheel as if he had been driving cars worth half a fortune all his life.
Tony watched New York pass them by. Blocks and alleys and shops and coffee shops, all filled with anonymous, interchangeable, human-shaped props all mixed up into this fleeting, shallow impression of the mass of 'public' that shelled out for Tony's income. He was glad they were alive.
Pepper kept a close eye on S.I.'s bottom line, and if Manhattan had gotten nuked, she would have taken the stock price drop out of Tony's hide.
"Now I'm nervous," Banner said maybe five minutes later.
"Gimme a break, Doctor. I've just been wrung by SHIELD; I need a little quiet time. I'm not plotting anything too explosive."
Banner took the opportunity provided by the red light to lean over and kiss Tony.
It wasn't a very nice kiss. It felt more like a warning to not fuck up too badly.
Tony sank deeper into the leather seat, moved his wrist and watched as the face of his watch reflected the sunlight at different angles. He caught a cyclist in the eye, but the guy just squinted and pedaled on. He mulled over his most recent argument with Nick Fury.
"Did Fury offer you club membership?" he asked after a while.
Banner remained quiet, eyes darting to one side mirror, then to the other.
"Did you take it?" Tony inquired.
He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure. Maybe Banner was actually tired enough of running that he would settle for the lesser evil. Or he was confident enough that he could pull one over SHIELD if he needed to…
"I told him my answer would depend on yours," Banner admitted, "and your silence doesn't fill me with confidence. Should I hit the ground running?"
The thing was, Fury did try that gambit. Banner was a bit of an obvious soft spot for the Iron Man – of course SHIELD would try striking at it. But, as luck would have it, Fury's minions hadn't yet uncovered the whole sordid history, so they didn't know how vulnerable that spot truly was, and Tony had managed to head them off.
For the moment.
He would have to get on it. Get Pepper's school of shark-lawyers on it, too.
"No," Tony said decisively. "Stay. I won't lie in one bed with SHIELD, but they don't want me as their enemy either."
"Sentiment? From someone pragmatic like you?" Banner inquired dubiously.
He knew how Tony felt about suspending sound business sense for something as nebulous as feelings. Maybe Tony was being a hypocrite. And maybe it was a matter of principle.
Tony would borrow a strategy from Aunt Peg and plant himself at that line like a bloody tree. No government agency was going to extort Tony Stark, much less with the freedom and constitutional rights of his lover.
"What was it you used to say?" Robert, Tony wanted to add but refrained. "Once in a blue moon shit doesn't happen… but I wouldn't rely on it."
Banner echoed the second part of the sentence together with him.
Neither of them laughed.
x
They worked together peacefully for three weeks. Okay, to be specific, for nineteen days, but Tony was still proud of himself.
Tony managed to finish enough projects to earn an emailed commendation from Pepper – a peace offering that he wasn't sure was entirely deserved, but which he cheerfully accepted nonetheless. Banner had helped with the inventing process although, in hindsight, Tony had no clue how much. He was so used to JARVIS' input that he didn't notice if an idea came from outside of his brain, so long as it gelled.
JARVIS would have known the exact percentages, but Tony wasn't interested enough to ask. He had muted JARVIS after the third reminder that they should take a break for food. What were they – preschoolers? They would eat when they were hungry.
Banner's stomach growled. Dummy wheeled over with a smoothie in his claw.
Banner accepted it, thanked the bot, and stared at the cup of grayish green goo with dismay.
Tony fished a nutrient bar out of the 'nails-screws-rivets' drawer and tacitly exchanged it for the goo. A sniff test confirmed that this time there was no motor oil involved, so he drank it. Besides, if there had been anything too toxic in the mixture, JARVIS would have overridden the 'mute' command to warn him… seeing as it wasn't an actual command, but more of Tony throwing a tantrum and JARVIS giving him the time to cool off. A gentlemen's agreement, so to say, allowing for the fact that no gentlemen were involved.
"Not that I'm not fine with living on goop and nutritional supplements," said Banner, "but I've been craving curry."
Tony grunted into the half-empty cup, typing one-handed. The New York power grid was inefficient and the losses of energy staggering. He hoped whoever had planned it had been fatally electrocuted.
"No," Banner replied to someone that wasn't Tony (JARVIS, presumably), "I don't know where that misconception comes from. Environmental consciousness does not equate vegetarianism."
"We talking carbon footprints now?" Tony mumbled, setting the almost drained cup down. The bitter-sour taste of the smoothie in the back of his throat didn't significantly differ from the taste of bile. A low level headache completed the semblance of a hangover. He felt ready for another day of binge-science.
"Just because you manage to offset your karma on pure accident, it does not mean the rest of us can take absolution for granted," Banner muttered.
Tony gave him the evil eye. The headache helped in this endeavor.
"Sir, you are aware that you have not slept for fifty-one hours, aren't you?" JARVIS inquired, proving one of the points Tony had thought of and then shelved. Whichever one it was. Whatever.
"Pep's proud," Tony pointed out.
Hah! See Jay come up with a counter-argument to that.
"Your past attempts to heal depression with workaholism have been so successful," Banner mocked.
Tony ignored him.
Or, would have ignored him, except then his laptop gave out an unhealthy buzzing sound. His screen flickered, winked out, and a moment later lit up again. When Tony touched the keyboard, it gave him a jolt.
"You asshole," he growled.
Banner, distanced to the opposite side of the lab counter, looked disappointed. He shrugged. "You didn't expect me not to bug your computer when you gave me these, right?" He let one of the FBs peek out between his fingers, before he made it disappear like a goddamn third-rate magician.
"You didn't expect me not to bug-proof my own laptop, right?" Tony mocked in return.
He should have expected this, honestly. Banner got off on control, had gotten off on control even before control became the sole purpose of his life.
(Had gotten off on having control wrested from him, too, but nowadays Tony was kind of leery of trying that. So much ow.)
"I'm going to sleep," Banner announced. "By which I mean-"
"Mi cama es tu cama," Tony assured him. "I'll finish this and come find you. Come being the operative word."
"You wish," Banner retorted. He did pause by Tony's side on his way out for just long enough to lean into him, squeeze his nape and cup his hip, thumb brushing just the right spot in the hollow of Tony's hipbone.
Tony shuddered, but a hard-on and science were never mutually exclusive, so he let Banner go and told JARVIS to bring up the man's thesis on the anti-electron collisions on one of the free holos.
x
All good things had to come to an end, though, so on the twentieth day Tony woke up to a cold, empty bed, a brand new tasklist in his inbox, and an email from Rhodey that read less like 'you free this weekend? 'cause I'm free this weekend' and more like 'Tony, you're doing things and not telling me and last time this happened I had to become a superhero on your behalf and the time before I nearly took a demotion 'cause you stopped manufacturing weapons' whine.
Tony was adlibbing very, very heavily here, but he had known Rhodey as an engineering student, as a dutiful son, as a cadet and as an officer. He could fill in Rhodey's side of the dialogue if he concentrated hard enough, but he tried not to, seeing as that way lay self-recrimination.
"Jay?" he said. "Babe, we both know it pours when it rains, so lay it on me."
There was a protracted while of silence, not because the A.I. needed it to come up with a response, but simply because he liked watching Tony stew.
"I take that to mean that you wish to hear the bad news first, sir," JARVIS said smarmily.
"That depends," Tony replied in a fit of uncharacteristic self-awareness. "If Banner skipped town, I'm liable to do something stupid, and I usually get destructive when those urges hit. Proceed with caution."
He knew how to deal with sleeping alone in a big bed.
He hated that point when he woke up, and there was another body's impression already cooled next to him. It felt like a rejection, and Tony had some serious issues regarding promises people gave him being broken.
"Doctor Banner is in his laboratory, sir. He appeared to be in minor distress when he exited your bedroom, but has since calmed down considerably."
Tony wondered how Banner did it. He would ask JARVIS, but the chances that JARVIS would tattle on Tony asking to Banner (whether he would actually answer Tony's question or refuse to) were far too high to risk it. Sometimes Tony regretted making the A.I. quite that independent.
Then he remembered that in making JARVIS somehow lesser he would not only have abused a thinking being, but also diminished his own creation.
"I love and hate how perfect you are," he concluded, and stopped by the kitchen.
"Your coffee is ready, sir," JARVIS snarked.
Tony grabbed the mug from under the drip and shuffled toward the elevator. A quick check in the mirror on the cabin's back wall confirmed that he was, in fact, wearing pants. He was even wearing a tank top. If anyone wanted to be offended by his bedhead or otherwise his general lack of grooming, they were welcome to stick their offence up their ass.
"How's the penthouse, Jay?" he inquired idly.
"Pending safety inspections it is ready for habitation, sir. Some of the decoration Miss Potts chose has been unsalvageable, although I would recommend not contacting her about interior design for your place of living just yet. Perhaps Dr Banner may be inclined to venture an opinion?"
The elevator came to a halt; its door slid open.
"He ventures his opinions alright," Tony replied. "But I don't think they extend to the color of my drapes."
"Only in the most figurative of senses, sir," said the world's most sarcastic robot butler, and prevented Tony's retaliation by opening the door to Banner's lab.
Tony stood in the doorway and surveyed his lover's kingdom. Well, fiefdom. Tony was still the king around here, and Banner was a favored vassal. Like Potts, except less likely to conspire with the other vassals and empty out the treasury while Tony wasn't looking.
There was a lot of chrome around the hall. Bits and bobs and thingamajigs and doohickeys and whatsits and various devices of dubious morality. It didn't seem like enough to build a huge walking spider out of it, but if Banner chose to ever conquer the world, he wouldn't go about it the steampunk way anyway.
"Hey, Kermit," Tony spoke, wandering in, examining the writing on the discarded boxes and other packaging materials, which formed a sprawling pile alongside an otherwise bare wall. "We both know I suck at squishy sciences, but even I know when the equipment you're asking for has nothing to do with your research proposals. Have a little faith in me, okay?"
Banner sighed. His shoulders slumped. He took off his glasses, reflexively cleaned them with the hem of his shirt, and then set them down on top of his keyboard. He still didn't turn. "I guess you want the other research proposal now?"
Tony came up behind him, stood on his toes to catch a glimpse of his screen – just a glimpse before JARVIS minimized the window, so he only caught an ongoing exchange of emails with the annoyingly non-descriptive subject 'Re: Hi'. "I'm just asking. Because I'm curious. I told you I'd equip you a lab according to your wishes, and I'm not backing out." He kissed the side of Banner's neck. "Indulge me?"
"You aren't giving me much space, here," Banner noted.
"On the contrary. I'm giving you a lot of space." Tony spread his arms, indicating the humongous room they stood in, which was as of now completely at Banner's disposal.
Asshole move, maybe, but the fact was that Tony had asked, not demanded, and he had not attached any conditions to Banner telling him no. Granted, Banner had his own issues, his own paranoia (justified – they were after him), and it made complete sense that he was looking for the clockwork behind every magic trick and for the trap behind every bait.
As if Banner's contribution to S.I.'s portfolio weren't well worth funding his private research. As if Tony had ever been stingy when it came to the people he actually liked.
"That's rather the point," Banner said, proving that Tony had read him right.
"You don't have to tell me," Tony pointed out.
"Oh, you've gotten better at this."
Meaning that Tony had improved at lying, not that he had improved as a human being, which wasn't entirely unfair, but wasn't at all nice either. Also, Banner was wrong.
Tony wasn't going to argue to point, though. If Robert wanted to be like that-
"Tony, I want to know what was done to me." Banner was not looking at him. He could have been – could have put on that imploring 'look at me I was an abused orphan' look that wasn't even a lie, except for how Banner had devised it and practiced in front of the mirror until he had it down to science.
Tony had seen it in action; it could inspire sympathy in a marble statue.
Banner didn't use it. His head was down, eyes trained on his hands, which were opening and closing as if he was trying to grab a fistful of air. "I survived a lethal dose of radiation, and let's face it – the precedents for such survival are Johann Schmidt and Steven Rogers."
"You think you were given the serum, too?" Tony extrapolated, and then cursed himself for being a damn idiot.
"It's the best theory I have."
Of course Banner had been given the serum. How had this not been obvious? Ross could crow about his gamma bomb research all he wanted to – when his two most prominent scientists were biophysicists, there was something rotten in the United States of America. Gamma bomb Tony's well-shaped ass.
Fucking Ross of all people had gotten away with a bootleg supersoldier program right under Tony's – and SHIELD's – nose?
"Were there others?" Tony asked. "There should have been others. Ross didn't have the sorts of budget constraints Erskine had, no way he would have limited himself to one-"
"Not Ross," Banner muttered.
Tony froze. Blinked. Not Ross?
"In hindsight, I think Ross let me into the program because he thought I already had the serum," Banner explained. His arms came around his chest and fingers clutched onto triceps in a compulsive self-embrace. "I thought- He obviously hated me. I thought Betty had talked him around. But she had tried before, and nothing worked, until one day he just sent a contract, out of blue. I should have known something was wrong, but I just… wanted it so much."
So much that he had convinced himself it was fine, that he finally got a lucky break, that he was just being paranoid. He had willfully blinkered himself.
Elizabeth Ross' presence probably helped a lot in that particular endeavor.
Which gave Tony an idea about the identity of the mysterious sender of those Re: Hi emails.
"Yeah, okay," he said. "Research proposal accepted. But."
However much he hated the idea of Banner collaborating with any Ross on his project, he was first and foremost a scientist, so he wasn't going to put his foot down there. He was going to be smarter about it, and if either of these two had a problem, Tony was prepared to go Iron Man on their asses, too.
Banner looked at him expectantly (and that was a bit of a mindfuck, because Tony was fairly sure that any other person in existence would have already assumed the worst, so the modicum of faith felt heady).
"Jarvis," Tony said, "get two sets of gag orders and have both Banner and his secret colleague sign them. Whatever they discover – I don't want it to get out. To anyone."
Banner grimaced. "Tony-"
"See you later, Casanova. I'm in meetings all afternoon, so maybe dinner? Dinner." He waved his hand and sauntered off back the way he came.
"Tony-"
"Nuh-uh, contract breach, tootsie pop." The elevator doors closed on whatever protest Banner was about to mount.
Tony wasn't in fact nearly as jealous as he made it seem. He was too busy thinking about Banner's father. They had an agreement about not mentioning their fathers aloud, so he didn't ask, but it was getting too hard to keep his mouth shut. It was a pretty reasonable assumption. Also, if it had been someone else, Banner would have clarified.
"Get it out before you bust a battery," Tony said wearily.
"I have contacted Miss Potts, Sir," JARVIS replied primly. "She assures me that it is absolutely no problem to keep you busy for an afternoon, and seems delighted to hear that you have decided to venture out of your self-imposed exile."
"Traitor."
"I am merely lending credence to your story." JARVIS was an asshole. "By the time you are done, I shall have the file on Brian Banner's research ready for you."
JARVIS was an asshole, but Tony didn't want to imagine his life without him.
x
Tony refused to let the business world's odiousness bring him down, so he ducked into Pepper's office for a breather.
It occurred to him why this might not be sound strategy only after the door fell shut behind him. He had two seconds of hope while Pepper's presence in her office remained Schrödingered, before she dashed it by speaking: "And now I wonder why I ever wanted to date you."
Tony pulled himself away from the door and faced the firing squad. That was, faced his ex-girlfriend cum CEO.
She looked up from her work at him, part-amused, part-exasperated.
"I'm good in bed and it solved the plus-one problem," Tony replied, wagering at least a patch of his skin on the fact that Pepper's familiar expression meant that she had decided to pretend like their whole trainwreck of a romantic relationship had never happened. Aside from acknowledging that it did, like adult people ought to.
"It took me by surprise," Pepper said, beckoning Tony to sit down into one of the visitors' chairs. "You laughed in the faces of the socialites who tried."
And a lot of them had tried. Models and actresses and celebrities, journalists and bored trophy wives and corporate spies.
Tony sat down, scratched at his goatee and shrugged. "It's not as if I had ever been all that interested in any of them." Interested in fucking them, maybe – but mostly interested in just having sex. All those people were largely interchangeable and insignificant. If anyone had been anything but itch-scratching, Tony would have called them back.
"But you are interested in Banner?"
Tony could have given a hundred glib answers to that question, but Pepper was one of the very few people whom he actually trusted, and that trust was based on understanding, so it was good business practice to tell her the truth. Or, whatever was close enough to the truth.
It was an emotional matter, and as such frustratingly nebulous.
"Pepper, if you asked me if I had ever been in love, this man would be the reason why I'd have to stop and think about the answer." He still wasn't sure if the answer was yes or no, but if not for Banner, Tony wouldn't have had any reason to believe himself capable of that sort of emotional investment.
Pepper regarded him with a dissecting laser gaze. Tony took it. He had not lied to her – there was nothing she could find that he would have been ashamed of.
Then she rolled her eyes. "This is so messed up, Tony. Your boyfriend whom you haven't seen for twenty years unexpectedly turns up in the middle of a potentially cataclysmic event, and somehow you're now both superheroes expected to save the world."
Tony considered this summary. He wanted to protest the superhero moniker – not so much the 'super' part, that was a given, but he still refused to be labeled a 'hero' – but otherwise it was on the nose. "It does sound like a comic book plot if you put it like that."
Pepper took a sip of her agave juice and set the glass back down onto her desk. A Newton's Cradle clacked irritatingly on the shelf behind her. Tony would never understand how she could tolerate that thing in the room with her when she was working.
"I've decided that this was an event neither of us could have foreseen. Vis maior." She pursed her lips and seemed to swallow whatever she was about to say. "He saved your life."
Tony shrugged. He had seen the footage, so he knew that the Hulk had caught him, but he didn't remember it. And it happened after the sex – well, after the first instance of the sex – although Pepper didn't know that, so it was easier to just let her think that Tony had given in to the post-battle victory-induced high when he had tumbled into bed with Banner.
It made for a nicer picture, and Pepper seemed so calm that it made no sense to upset her further with TMI. Refraining from TMI wasn't actual lying.
"I'm glad he did," she concluded. "You dying would be hell on the stock market."
"Also, you wouldn't have a new generation of StarkPhone to present to the Board next week," Tony pointed out. He pressed send.
The email arrived in Pepper's inbox with a quiet ping.
She turned to her laptop, opened the first of the attached files and, without looking at Tony, said: "That will be all, Mr Stark."
x
The picture of Banner cooking dinner was almost the perfect replica of the picture of Banner doing science in his lab. He stood at the counter, with his back to Tony, hand movements translating into shifts of his back muscles.
He seemed to be just as focused – and just as relaxed, as long as he was in his own space.
An animal part of Tony was overjoyed at watching Banner so at home in Tony's home – in his lab or his kitchen, it didn't really matter.
He stepped up behind Banner and put his hands on the man's hips.
Banner didn't instinctively react the way he once would have. It was maybe a little bit disappointing. Still, they were different men now (even if Banner kept curling in on himself exactly as he used to) and the sensation must have been quite dissimilar as well. Tony was a little more solid these days; he must have smelled different, too, and Banner didn't fit against him in the same ways anymore.
Banner tried to fake it a couple of seconds later. He leaned back, and pretended that the edge of the arc reactor wasn't digging painfully into his shoulder blade.
"You've been gone for a while," he pointed out with careful neutrality – which just meant that he had to try very hard not to sound accusing – as he finished chopping up a potato.
Tony ignored the accusation. He pulled Banner's shirt out of his pants, stuck his hand under it and finger-combed through the coarse hair of his treasure trail, delighting in the quiver of the flesh beneath his touch. "I jerked off over your research proposal. Like… ten times."
Banner let out a whisper-soft curse and let himself relax into Tony's hold for real. His head fell back onto Tony's shoulder; he swallowed compulsively and shivered in response to Tony's feather-light caress. "How are you real?" His fingers tightened around the handle of the knife.
"I think the universe probably really fucked up somewhere," Tony retorted, grinning.
It worked. It was going to work. He just had to be clever about it, and maybe a little patient, too. He couldn't wrest control from Banner, not anymore, but he could persuade him to hand it over.
The knife's blade glinted with every shift Banner made, up to and including his deep breaths. He was keeping as tight a hold on himself as he had on the weapon.
"Get this," Tony suggested, inspired by Pepper's proclamation, "we're superheroes."
Banner started soundlessly laughing; his shivering in Tony's arms turned into shakes. His hand shot out and deposited the knife on top of the cutting board, before he went boneless, letting Tony carry his weight. His hands fell, palms encountering and fitting themselves to Tony's thighs.
"I was so used to being nobody," Banner said raggedly. "In fact, if the topic of research grants came up, it was practically a competition who could pretend the hardest that I was not there."
Tony bit his earlobe. Not hard, just enough to confirm that he was listening and – although he didn't really empathize, since he had never suffered a shortage of funds – he understood.
"It was a terrifying moment when I realized that no matter how far I'd run, they would always find me and come after me."
They used to have opposite problems when they were young. Tony was meanly amused to have Banner join him on this side – on the side of the notoriously exploitable and the endlessly pursued. "Yes. They do that. They hunt."
"What I don't understand is how they got to you," Banner said. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to luxuriate in the connection between their bodies despite its relative chastity.
Tony relented and let the atmosphere of intimacy goad him into talking. He probably wanted to talk about it, just needed the excuse Banner had obligingly handed him. "They caught me at a bad time. Heavy metal poisoning. I wasn't exactly at my best."
"Shit." Banner grimaced, although his eyes remained closed.
"But then they forgot that I won't exactly remain hooked on their paltry bait after I got better. I walked it off. Once my head cleared, I was actually a little embarrassed for how easy I made it for them." And he had made it very easy.
Just the Rushman ploy itself – Pepper might have legitimately picked a promising girl from Legal as her P.A., but not a girl that had worked there for less than a month, no matter how promising she seemed. Not over a heap of candidates far more experienced and well-established within the company. Really, you didn't allow access to top-level management's confidential information to an employee that was still within their trial period.
Pepper and Tony had just been curious about who sent her and what she was after.
"Tony…" Banner pressed the edge of his shoulder blade against the rim of the arc reactor. "With this kind of toxication… I don't even know what to say here. Just, I'm amazed – and glad, but really just stunned – that you're even alive."
"Surviving's my shtick, porcupine," Tony returned easily. His thumb drew a circle around Banner's navel and playfully dipped in. He didn't think they would get to dinner any time soon. "Out of curiosity, how did they get to you?"
"To hear them tell it, they've been stalking me across three continents before they decided to bring me in. Knew me well enough to play me. No fuss, minimal risk of collateral damage – all in all a very tasteful abduction."
"Romanov?"
"Romanov."
"For me too. At least, most of the field work. They brought in Fury for the cinch."
"At first I thought they brought you in for my cinch. But it looks like they honestly didn't know."
"After years of stalking us both… for shame."
"To be fair, I don't think we've so much as mentioned one another since… twenty years ago?"
"I totally credited one of your papers in one of mine. Jarvis?"
"Since 1989 you have credited Dr Banner's various works in three of your articles and one thesis, sir. You have also referenced his work in your counter-proposal against the use of nuclear warheads in Af-"
"See?" Tony cut in. "I meant it-" Robert, "-your work is unparalleled." He didn't want to think about Afghanistan. He absolutely refused to talk about Afghanistan. At all. He had thought that the Jericho was a more elegant solution warfare-wise than deploying nuclear weapons, which at one point had been far more likely to happen than the public would ever know.
He sort of regretted getting involved sometimes, considering how that overture ended… but then again not.
It was just a bunch of emotional mire and he wasn't going to get into it.
He tugged on Banner to get him to turn around and pressed their mouths together. Banner's tasted tea-bitter, which wasn't nearly as pleasing as whisky-bitter, but their bodies were already sensitized and thrumming with incipient pleasure, so he pushed deeper, enjoying the slickness of Banner's tongue – faux reluctantly held back and then darting forward in a sneak counter-attack.
Tony didn't so much fight him for control of the kiss as let him decide that he didn't want that control after all. The groundwork he had laid worked wonders for keeping Banner pliant and suggestible.
They hadn't ever done this before.
Tony suddenly found himself burning with voracious hunger for this – for Banner's body so relaxed and accepting, for Banner's mind present in all its brilliance yet solely in observational capacity. He wanted to take his time with this and make it good. Make it so good that Banner would want to come back for more. Maybe even ask for more.
"I'm hungry," the man protested when Tony started maneuvering them in the direction of the couch.
"Priorities, Banner, for fuck's sake-"
He started laughing again, at Tony or at the not entirely intentional pun, it didn't matter. What mattered was that he didn't argue anymore and went along with whatever Tony wanted.
Whatever he wanted.
The terrifying thing about this turn of events was that, afterwards, Tony realized that Banner had actually never stopped being in perfect control.
