Warnings: language, general unhappiness and angst.

Many thanks to my beta, irite, for helping me clear up some lingering plot issues...

I do not own The Avengers.

In the end, the team decided against the ambulance—how could they possibly explain this situation to the paramedics? More pressingly, how could they keep this from the government? Tony knew that they were monitoring the Tower, were keeping track of everyone coming and going. An ambulance would draw their attention, and that would just lead to Bruce being declared 'unstable,' and he'd end up right back where he'd started.

And, well, fuck that.

So they took turns sitting by Bruce's bed through the night, making sure that he kept breathing, that his heart kept beating, and relying entirely too much (in Tony's opinion) on the assertion that Bruce had once made that he could not be killed.

Tony's shift started at 3:00 AM. The room was silent, except for Bruce's slow, quiet breathing, and the calm allowed Tony to focus. Which was good; he needed to consider a few things.

First, he needed to figure out exactly how bad this whole thing really was. It had just become apparent that he was laughably, woefully unprepared for this situation. Tony would never have considered himself an optimist, but even his particular brand of realistic pessimism hadn't been dark enough to account for how this was going down. He had thought it would be bad, that it would be hard, that Bruce's readjustment to life on the outside was going to be arduous and perhaps even miserably lengthy. He had felt prepared for that.

But not for this. Whatever this was.

And that was the second thing that he had to consider—What the fuck had just happened? Tony didn't think that Bruce had been trying to kill himself, because Bruce believed that he couldn't be killed. So why would he try to end his life? Of course, it was possible that Bruce's capacity for that kind of logical thinking had been destroyed by his time with SHIELD. They'd certainly destroyed other things. Maybe after everything that had happened to him, Bruce had just completely lost it, had decided it was time to shove off the mortal coil, disregarding any and all obstacles to that goal.

Tony didn't think that was true, though. Although, what it really came down to was that Tony didn't want to think that it had been a suicide attempt, and until Bruce regained consciousness, that was all he had to go on. So if it hadn't been that, then what the hell had happened? Tony didn't know.

The third thing that he had to think about was, "What now?" And that was the one that Tony was struggling with the most. Because it required action, and if he took action, then he could fuck something up. Fucking up was something that he could not do.

In fact, he was so stricken with the horrible possibility of doing something wrong that it was tempting to do nothing, to wash his hands of this whole affair. He was in so far over his head that he was drowning. Tony had been prepared to rescue Bruce. He had made that decision, had acted upon it, had accepted the consequences. But he hadn't been prepared to keep rescuing Bruce, though, and he hadn't even imagined that he'd have to save the physicist from himself.

But now Tony knew that was something he was going to have to do. Because, somehow, he'd ended up taking responsibility for another person. Legally, yes, but it was also something he wanted to do. That kind of commitment was unprecedented, and it was frightening and huge, but he was determined not to buckle under it. What had happened to Bruce wasn't fair, and it wasn't right, and it could not go unaddressed. Someone needed to advocate for him, to hold him up while he learned how to stand on his own again.

If he even could.

But Tony hoped it could be done, and thought that they might just be the right group of people to try it. Really...who better to do this than me? Than the others? We're fucking superheroes.

It was as simple as that. Tony made the decision, that moment, to get over his doubt, his guilt, his lingering worries. Doing nothing was not an option. Tony Stark did not do 'nothing.'

Tony would not leave Bruce in his quagmire of misery. It was time to pull him out. Whether Bruce was ready for it or not.

Tony just had to figure out how.

Just before dawn, Bruce cracked his eyes open. A wave of dizziness rushed over him, and he clenched his eyes shut again, waiting patiently for the world to stop spinning, tilting, reeling. When his equilibrium had been restored, he opened his eyes again, and slowly managed to maneuver so that he was sitting upright.

In the dim light cast by the lamp next to the bed, he could see Tony lounging in the corner, sprawled in the single chair in the room. Hearing Bruce's movement, Tony peered over the top of the tablet he'd been working on.

"Morning. Idiot."

Tony's tone was more resigned than angry, though, and the incongruity between his words and the way that he said them was more than Bruce could process in his half-drugged, half-asleep state.

"...What?" His throat felt dry and raw, and the word lacked all substance, was more of a ragged breath than a legitimate attempt at communication.

"Good morning. You're an idiot."

Strangely, that did not clarify anything. "...I don't understand—" Mumbled, barely comprehensible, but Tony got the gist and interrupted him.

"You know what I don't understand?"

The lingering stupor of sleep was clearing away, but Bruce still felt sluggish and stupid. Despite that, he managed to answer with more coherence, "No?"

"What the fuck did you do last night?"

Bruce tried to remember, but he drew a complete blank. That was concerning, and it seemed like something he should share. "I don't know, Tony, what—"

"And don't you dare say you don't know."

Bruce wondered why Tony kept interrupting him. It was annoying. At least, it should have been. Being interrupted that many times in a row should have been annoying. It actually wasn't, though.

Through the thick fog lying across his mind, Bruce could not figure out why that was.

Tony looked at him expectantly. Slowly, with a concerted, deliberate effort, Bruce began to connect the pieces.

This fog in his mind was familiar, and that was bad. Now that he was thinking about it, this was how he had felt when SHIELD had still been adjusting the dose on the meds. In the beginning, when the dose had been way too high, he had felt this same blank numbness. Like he was floating, maybe, or like having a physical form had ceased to matter.

So...I've been drugged. Again.

Okay. That was clear. Obvious, now. But by whom?

Tony's words replayed in his mind. What the fuck did you do last night?

And then it clicked, and he remembered. "Oh."

Tony had waited with remarkable patience while Bruce tried to jump start his memory. But his patience had apparently run out. "Oh. Oh? That's all you have? What the hell, Banner?"

Bruce was kind of wondering the same thing. He was remembering his panic-not-panic, how his sympathetic nervous system had betrayed him, had lapsed into complete ineffectuality. He remembered feeling like he was losing control, that he was slipping, that he needed to make it stop before someone got hurt. He remembered deciding that the best way to do that was...

To drug himself. Nearly into oblivion, apparently, if Tony's concern was anything to go by.

Tony was talking again, had been for the last several seconds. Bruce tuned back into the billionaire's diatribe. "...I thought you knew how concentrated that shit was, but apparently not, or were you trying to kill yourself? I honestly don't know what the fuck else you could have been trying to do, but I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but that's really, really hard when you take enough of a sedative to put a fucking elephant into a coma!"

Bruce was momentarily distracted by the mental image of a comatose elephant. Refocusing, he decided to address what he perceived to be the most important part of Tony's speech. "I know how concentrated it is—"

"—Fucking great, Banner, that's just what I wanted to hear!"

Someone needs to tell him it's rude to interrupt. "—I just, um, forgot?" Bruce finished lamely.

"You forgot?"

Bruce found suddenly that he was feeling quite loquacious. "Well, yeah. I wasn't thinking very clearly."

With that as an introduction, he launched into a thorough and lengthy explanation of how the events of the previous night had gone down.

The look that Tony was giving him said to Bruce that Tony did not believe he was thinking very clearly now. And, well, that was true—he was pretty much stoned, hence the way he had just started blathering. But it wasn't so bad. And he was definitely thinking better than he had been the previous night. His thoughts were calm (completely absent), and he was actually feeling pretty great. None of those pesky feelings bothering him now, so he was safe, and so Tony was safe, and everyone was safe, so wasn't that good?

He tried to express all of this to Tony, but the billionaire went from looking mildly disbelieving to completely dismayed to downright sickened, and Bruce trailed off somewhere in the middle of elaborating on how he was a dangerous monster who kept putting his friends at risk for stupid, selfish reasons, and how he thought he felt guilty about it, but he couldn't risk getting emotionally involved in his own life to tell for sure.

"...What's wrong?" he asked, instead of finishing his attempt to give voice to the insistent truth yearning to be released from his mouth.

Tony swallowed once, then twice. "Are you listening to yourself?"

Honestly? "Not really."

"You just said about fifteen things that make no goddamn sense."

Bruce might have gotten offended, if he could have actually remembered what he'd been saying. He couldn't, though, so he just shrugged instead.

Tony shook his head. "Okay. Point taken. We're not doing this right now. Go back to sleep, we'll try this again later."

Bruce wasn't sure if he wanted to try again later, wasn't sure that this conversation was something he could face if he wasn't drugged nearly to the point of stupefaction. But he was amenable to more sleep. Too tired to protest the second part of Tony's plan, Bruce embraced the first part with vigor and flopped back down onto his soothing navy blue sheets, rolling onto his side.

Tony went back to his tablet. A few seconds passed before he said, "Bruce?"

"What?"

Several more seconds passed, and Bruce had nearly dropped off into sleep before Tony asked, "It's just...I need to know. For sure. Were you trying to kill yourself?"

Bruce sounded bemused when he answered, "...No. I can't. I thought I told you that?"

"Yeah. You did. Okay. Okay, good."

The relief in his voice was almost tangible, but Bruce was too out of it to pay that much mind.

Tony lapsed into silence, and Bruce was asleep within minutes.

Bruce slept until almost noon, and in that time Tony managed to get a lot figured out.

First, he'd had JARVIS summon the others to the kitchen. The fact that it was 5:30 AM was largely irrelevant to him, but when Clint stalked into the room wearing nothing but Avengers themed pajama bottoms and looking nearly homicidal, Tony put a pot of coffee on.

He was getting so good at having roommates.

Steve and Thor came in next, and Natasha was last. She looked at Clint's attire and snorted, "Really, Barton? Couldn't even find a shirt?"

She, of course, was completely put together.

Tony waited for them to get their coffee, and even managed to dig up half a dozen stale donuts. He was commending himself on his newfound hosting abilities when Steve asked, "What's wrong?"

Tony looked up from the donut he was examining for mold. "What do you mean, 'what's wrong?' Nothing's wrong."

"...Oh. I just assumed...you're acting so weird, is all, and you're not with Bruce..."

Tony ignored the implication that his attempts at being a good host were "weird," and instead replied, "Bruce woke up."

That got their attention.

"And?" Natasha asked.

Tony shrugged. "He was kind of, uh...high. He said some stuff..." Everyone looked at him, waiting. But Tony didn't know if he should relay exactly what Bruce had rambled, didn't know if it would be useful. But then, Tony thought, it'll probably be better if they know what we're dealing with.

So he laid it out. "It was pretty confusing. He blames himself for...just about everything. Um, he thinks he's a monster, and he's selfish. And he's worried that if he actually has an emotion or something he's going to fall apart. Like he hasn't already. He's afraid he's going to hurt someone. That was the gist of it. Oh, but he did say he wasn't trying to kill himself. So, there's that, right?"

There were several beats of silence before Clint said, "I guess? That's not much of a consolation."

"How can he even think that kind of stuff?" Steve asked, incredulous.

Thor agreed. "It does not seem...logical."

Tony thought that was an awfully mild way to put it—Tony had been leaning towards 'completely fucking crazy.' He shrugged again. "Bruce isn't...right. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about."

They all waited, and Tony wished suddenly that he had put a little more preparation into his 'Bruce is crazy and we need to help him' speech. Because now he wasn't quite sure how to begin. And he wasn't even sure how effective they could be, didn't know what they should do, what they could do.

That seemed like a good place to start. Honesty never hurt. "I have no idea what we should do about this. But we have to do something."

Tony was pleased to see that everyone looked as helpless as he felt, even if that meant that they were all probably feeling as useless as he was, as well.

"Like what?" Natasha asked, after a moment. "We're not psychiatrists, and I don't know if one of those would even be helpful."

It was harsh, but Tony had to concede the point. "That's true. I think you're right—I don't think Bruce needs a shrink, or meds, or anything like that. That seems like the worst possible way to handle this, after...everything. No, I was thinking..." he trailed off as a plan finally began to coalesce in his mind. About time that genius-level intellect kicked in, Jesus Christ.

After a pause, he spoke again. "Okay, I lied, I wasn't thinking anything before, but I am now. And I'm thinking that the first thing we need to do is get him off that SHIELD shit."

"I thought you said he had to stay on it?" Steve pointed out.

"Yeah, or he could end up back with SHIELD and I could end up in jail. And, uh, fuck no. So clearly we need to figure out a way to trick SHIELD. I don't suppose either of you" he gestured at Clint and Natasha, "Know anything about how they do their drug testing?"

Clint shook his head. "Not really our thing. But...Wouldn't Bruce know that sort of shit? He's done some work with them."

It was a good point. "I'll ask him about when he's not high. But I think I'm getting an idea. Okay. The other thing I think we need to do is keep an eye on him, stick close. He can't be alone. He might not be trying to kill himself, but he's not thinking logically, and he's not exactly a stranger to self-destructive behavior."

The others nodded—as uncomfortable as it was, that was pretty obvious at this point.

Tony had one last point to make. "There's one more thing. And this is probably going to be the hard part. Bruce is delusional," he stated flatly, not liking the taste of the word, but unwilling to hide from the truth. "He has some pretty strongly fixed ideas about who he is and what he needs, and they are wrong. We need to knock those ideas down, and we have to be consistent about it. From what I've seen, it's going to be long, and hard, and I don't even know if it can be done. But we're going to try." He glared around the room. "This isn't your regular superhero shit. If any of you aren't prepared to see this through to the end, whatever. But get the fuck out. 'Cause I'm doing this."

His declaration was met with silence. Then Clint raised an eyebrow. "Don't be an ass. I think we're all pretty damn committed here."

"I am not quite sure what needs to be done, Stark, but rest assured that I will do anything in my power to aid Dr. Banner," Thor added, looking offended at Tony's lack of conviction in them.

Steve nodded. "Have a little faith, Tony, we're not going to bail out here. This is important to all of us, you know."

Tony was a little surprised by their vehemence, although he thought maybe he shouldn't have been. They'd stuck by him so far, had stuck by Bruce so far. Still, it was a relief to see that they were all on the same page, united and ready to act.

"...Okay. Great. Good to know." He clapped his hands together and stood. "So. I need to do some stuff in the lab. Someone should go sit with Bruce. And the rest of you—"

"Are going the fuck to bed," Clint declared, before standing. "I'm all for the team meetings and shit but can we do them over lunch?" He stuffed a donut in his mouth and headed back towards his room.

Natasha stood as well, grabbing her coffee and a questionable donut. "I'm already up. I'll watch Bruce." She turned towards the physicist's room.

Thor and Steve looked at each other and shrugged. They rose and made their way back to their own rooms.

Tony grabbed the last of the stale donuts and his huge cup of coffee. He didn't know how any of them could sleep right now, but whatever. He, at least, had work to do.

As a man who had once synthesized a new element, Tony didn't think that his current project would be all that difficult. But organic chemistry had never been his thing, and it actually ended up confounding him. In that his project took him more than the two hours he'd thought it would.

In fact, in the end, it took almost two weeks. But he made a pretty decent start on it before noon.

He started by kicking a group of chemists in R&D out of one of their labs and sending them downstairs to bother the biologists. His personal lab, more geared towards mechanical and electrical engineering, didn't have all the equipment for what he needed to do. The chemists had seemed pretty miffed, but when your eccentric-billionaire boss strides into your lab and sends everyone to work on an 'interdisciplinary project' for the rest of the week, you don't argue.

Then Tony had headed back upstairs. He'd grabbed one of the cartridges for Bruce's device and pried it open, taking the three little vials out. He brought them back downstairs and ran samples of the drug through the IR and GC-MS. He needed to get a picture of how this shit looked on paper.

Next, he pored through his files from when he'd hacked SHIELD and pulled up all of the information that he had on their special compound. Within a few moments, he had a rough set of instructions on how to make it, as well as detailed information about its structure and composition. He checked the lab inventory and placed an order for a few odds and ends with a nearby chemical supply company, using one of the head scientist's accounts.

He got an irritated phone call from Pepper around 9:00 that he seriously considered ignoring. Talking to her was just a little...awkward. Their relationship had ended on somewhat less than amicable terms six months ago when Tony had really begun digging his heels in against SHIELD. Tony conceded that the relationship had failed because of him; he hadn't been giving Pepper half the attention she deserved, and he knew it. It didn't change the fact that he couldn't manage a relationship on top of all the other shit.

So they had called it quits, and she stayed on to run the company, because no matter how much Tony had hurt her, she couldn't deny the importance of what he was doing. Freed from that duty, Tony had been able to dedicate all his time and effort to his battle against SHIELD and his other Avengers duties.

For that, he was grateful, and that overrode the awkwardness, so on the 20th ring, he did answer the phone. He patiently listened to her lecture on the misappropriation of company resources until just after 9:30.

The next two and a half hours were spent waiting for his delivery and reviewing the 'basics' of complex organic synthesis.

Steve popped into his lab at 12:15, shortly after Tony had forged one of his chemists' signatures on the delivery form for his supplies. The supersoldier peered into one of the boxes before deciding he didn't really want to know what Tony was up to, and said, "Bruce is up."

Well, that was convenient. "Good. I need to talk to him." Tony stood and stretched, and followed Steve back towards the elevator.

When Tony got to Bruce's room, his bed was empty, but Tony could hear the shower running in the bathroom. So he settled back into the uncomfortable chair in the corner to wait.

Bruce considered staying in the shower for the rest of his life. It seemed like a pretty good idea. It was warm, and quiet, and he didn't have to deal with...anything.

His earlier conversation with Tony had taken on a hazy, dreamlike quality and he could not tell if what he remembered had actually happened, or if he was even remembering everything that had.

The gaps in his memory were, frankly, inconvenient. And embarrassing.

Also rather embarrassing was the small fact that he'd freaked out and sedated himself. As effective as it had been (unconsciousness had been preferable to what could have happened without intervention, because You're a menace, Banner, you know that), even Bruce could see how his actions could be misinterpreted as having a more...fatal intent. Which, clearly, Tony had done. Bruce smirked to himself. He'd be lying if he said that the thought hadn't crossed his mind once or twice in the last nine months, but he knew it would be futile to try—futile, and far, far too dangerous.

He couldn't bear the thought of hurting another person while trying to end himself.

So Bruce knew that it was not an option, but apparently Tony didn't, and that had made him worry. And Bruce wasn't quite sure what to do with the billionaire's (and, for that matter, the whole team's) concern, had been struggling with that even before his detainment. It just seemed so counterintuitive; why did they care at all, when clearly they shouldn't?

He didn't get it. And trying to work that out, trying to deal with it, was overwhelming, and that was bad. Because he needed to stay even-keeled, he needed his apathy, and dwelling on anything for too long was a sure-fire path to disaster.

But then, Bruce was beginning to feel that just living here was going to be a sure-fire path to disaster. Being around the people he cared about, constantly putting them in the path of his monster, constantly letting them care about him when they should be running and screaming in the opposite direction...it was bound to go badly.

Could only end one way, really.

A hard, cold female voice echoed in his mind, repeating the truths that he had drawn into his core: You are dangerous, Dr. Banner.

Attacked without provocation.

Their injuries may yet prove fatal.

His stomach rolled. And then, Bruce knew what he had to do. There was only one safe option.

He shut the water off abruptly and stepped out of the shower. He dried off and dressed as quickly as he could manage, trying to ignore his burgeoning headache and the nausea creeping through his midsection.

God, but it made it hard to concentrate.

Still, Bruce would not be stopped. He threw open the bathroom door and strode to his closet, focused only on his goal, pulled out a duffel bag and hastily filled it with some of his ill-fitting clothing. He turned back into his bathroom and tossed in a few toiletries. He turned again and headed towards the door, thinking vague thoughts of Mexico or Brazil or Chile. Anywhere but here.

Bruce's hand was on the doorknob when Tony, who had been watching Bruce's frenetic packing from his corner, shocked into silence, finally spoke up.

"Are you going somewhere?"

Thanks to all my readers and reviewers and followers and favoriters.

Reviews are my raison d'être.

Yes, I just wanted to say "raison d'être."