Bruce rubbed at his closed eyes with a groan of frustration, waiting for his tear ducts to provide some scant lubrication before opening them again and focusing back in on the computer screen in front of him.
Behind him he could hear Jane Foster moving around, the light tapping of her keyboard seeming overly loud in the otherwise quiet room as she downloaded the programs she needed and searched up the coordinates of Maximoff's energy dome to take readings.
He felt like he'd been staring at the same screen for hours, although according to the clock it had only really been about forty five minutes...if he was including the time before Doctor Strange had taken them on their little field trip to Sokovia.
It felt like they'd been waiting around for days.
Inside of him, he could feel the Hulk's restlessness.
After having to run from Thanos not once, but twice, the beast was furious. It wanted to pound the titan into the ground and be done with it. But thankfully Bruce's calm reminders that Thanos was a creature that even Thor feared seemed to be enough to stay the monster's hand.
However, that didn't mean that the Hulk was happy about it. Or, for that matter, that he was happy about said trickster circling the room behind him like a shark, looking for trouble to cause.
Bruce let his gaze wander to the side for a long moment, tracking Loki as the dark-haired Asgardian pretended to study a chart on the wall, his fingers woven neatly together behind his back and seeming to be the picture of calm.
The demi-god had been silent since his earlier scolding, but Bruce could sense something simmering just beneath the surface, waiting for the opportunity to boil over.
He knew better than to trust that facade of calm disinterest.
Bruce glanced at the screen once more, noting with a sigh that the bar hadn't even increased by a full percent yet.
This really felt like it was getting him nowhere...
"So," Loki's voice purred suddenly from nearby, making Bruce involuntarily tense up a little. "I hear that you and Thor had a… How did he put it…? A 'mutual dumping,' I believe…?"
Bruce turned around quickly, his eyes darting across the room to locate the trickster, and he found the man hovering over Dr. Foster's shoulder.
Bruce frowned at that, something like unease prickling in his chest. He'd barely looked away for a second, how had Loki already moved?
"That's none of your business," Jane replied rather sharply, something tense in her voice.
"Oh, I don't mean to pry," the trickster responded, his wicked smile coming through in his voice. "I'm merely curious as to whether your split was quite as mutual as my brother implied, or if he was simply trying to save face after having been rejected. After all, it's not like you're the first female that he's had failed relations with…"
"Loki," Bruce sighed before the trickster could bait poor Jane any further. "Doctor Foster is trying to work. Do you mind?"
The man glanced back over his shoulder, giving Bruce a strained smile.
"Very well, then...I suppose we will have to catch up later."
Bruce watched until Loki had moved away from Jane once more before turning his attention back to his computer with a sigh.
The trickster was clearly reveling in the tension between the remaining heroes, and Bruce really didn't want anything to do with it. But unfortunately, Loki was getting them all riled up, and Bruce - with the backing threat of the Hulk - seemed to be the only one that Thor's brother would actually kind of listen to.
Which left it up to him to keep Loki from causing any more trouble among the remaining team members than he already had.
Hell, Stark hadn't even been back to the lab since the trickster's last conversation with him.
Hulk, of course, hadn't been happy at the mention of General Ross being involved with the Avengers in any capacity, but Bruce was smothering that train of thought for the moment. After all, he had no proof that Loki wasn't simply making things up to get under their skin.
It wouldn't have been the first time.
Still, it was a nagging worry at the back of his mind that was drawing his attention away from his work, and it was very much not something he wanted to be dealing with right now.
He had bigger fish to fry than his one-time father-in-law to-be.
Bruce tapped on his computer screen for lack of anything better to do, well aware that doing so would not speed up the energy scan that it was processing but unable to quite help himself.
Sitting still and staring at a loading bar for so long was winding up his tension like a spring.
The last thing any of them needed right now was for that spring to pop.
Before he could even start to relax, however, a shadow of movement caught his eye, and he glanced to the side in time to see Loki slinking his way across the room once more, under the pretense of seeing where one of the many hanging wires traced back to.
Bruce tracked the demi-god's movement with a frown as he watched Loki approach Jane once more, the man leaning in close as if looking over her shoulder at the screen.
"Do you need something?" Jane asked tersely, making a point of not looking away from her monitor.
"Merely observing," the trickster purred.
They both lapsed into silence for a long moment, Jane studying her work and Loki not-so-subtly studying the back of her head as Bruce kept an eye on them both.
Jane - or rather, Dr. Foster, he reminded himself sharply - continued to type calculations into the computer with surprising speed, her fingers darting pointedly over the keys while her eyes stayed fixed unwaveringly on the screen before her.
Bruce wasn't quite sure how she managed to make sense of it. Just watching the scrolling numbers was enough to make his head spin.
She had explained it to him briefly when they'd arrived, of course, but the gap between Nucelar Physics and Astrophysics was gigantic, and he'd only retained a fraction of it.
As far as he could tell, she was going to be analyzing the barrier surrounding the area and comparing the...pressure?...on one side of it to the other, and that would tell her if it was simply a magical wall, or a break in the dimension.
In truth, it had made a lot more sense when she was explaining it.
Dr. Foster's estimate had been an hour to get her mobile lab fully set up and running, and about three hours to take the readings that she needed, which she could get a jump-start on the second her program installed on their computers. It was a surprisingly quick turnaround, if he was being honest, but this type of thing was her specialty.
However, that estimate hadn't factored in additional time for certain...distractions. Like Loki.
Bruce felt himself frowning as the dark-haired trickster leaned in close once more, his bright green eyes darting toward Bruce almost knowingly.
"I do wonder…" Loki murmured to Dr. Foster with a shark grin. "Was the 'dumping' before or after you had sex with him?"
Jane immediately whirled around, slapping the trickster across the face, but to Bruce's surprise her hand went right through the man, leaving his image to shimmer a little before re-forming.
"Missed me," Loki's voice called from the far side of the room behind him as the image beside Jane dissolved away. "Really now, is such violence necessary?"
Bruce turned to find the man lounged back across a table, his feet kicked up on a stack of books as he played with one of Tony's Iron Suit reactors that he must have found lying about.
"Loki I swear to God-" Jane growled.
"Hey, put that thing down," Bruce scolded, crossing the room to confiscate the arc reactor from him.
The trickster blinked up at him with wide, innocent eyes and a mildly surprised expression as Bruce plucked the reactor from his hands, and promptly treated him to a saccharine smile in response to his frown.
"My apologies. I was under the impression that things left lying on the floor were expendable."
"Everything in here costs more than both of our lives combined. Don't play with anything," Bruce scolded, returning to his computer.
"Unless your life has a rather immense negative worth, I rather doubt that," the trickster called after him. "You forget that I'm a prince."
"You're a damn nuisance, is what you are," Bruce muttered under his breath, setting the reactor on a shelf. Adjusting his voice up so Loki could hear him as he headed back to his computer, he added "don't play with anything else!"
"Yes, father," was the irritated sigh from behind him.
Bruce sank into his chair and rubbed at his temple with a groan, shooting a glance at the door to the lab.
Why the hell was Strange taking so long?