3: Scene Two

When Bruce came to the second time he was sitting in his lab – his former lab and not the one he buried himself in in the basement – bowed over the desk in crippling pain. It was easier when he had slipped into his former reality as he was transitioning into the Hulk. The Hulk's regenerative power eased the pain but this – this was unbearable. It felt like his brain was being split in half. It felt like –

He swallowed, suddenly nauseous, sweating and shaking even though it shouldn't have been surprising. The amount of energy needed to transport him through time was obviously of a similar level to the amount of energy needed to create a physical split personality within him.

The pain of his fingernails digging into his arms brought him back and he tried to fight off the feeling of time travel and reorient himself with this time and place. There was no exact science to how far he could send himself back – there was only a rough guess. Hence why the first trip through he'd actualized at such an inconvenient moment. Theoretically, if he could find the exact position of the universe for the moment he wanted to return to as well as the moment he ran the program in then he could be more precise but –

He shook his head and grit his teeth, taking a deep breath and letting it out as he sat up, the residual effect of the time travel experience humming through his veins, momentarily displacing even the Hulk. Which was a disturbing experience but –

Fuck! He needed to think. The experience was distracting, sure, but –

He glanced around to refocus himself. The lab seemed to be in perfect order, the way it always was. There was a box of Chinese take out cold and abandoned to his right but that wasn't particularly uncommon. Bruce swiped his hand over the computer screen to reveal the date – the same day as the attack. It must've been that morning. The Chinese having been left overnight. He really needed to get better about that but –

It was like his very essence wanted to fall back into this existence with merely a whimper of deja vu and he had to fight to remember what he was doing here.

"Uh-oh – sleeping on the job eh?" Tony's voice was like fire in his veins and he shot upright, turning towards the door. "What do we pay you for?"

"I –" The words started and then was a response on the tip of his tongue and it was strange – like something wasn't right – like it was and yet it wasn't the right thing to say. Shit. He needed to push through this fog.

"Should've negotiated sleep into your contract." Tony leaned against the desk, flat hips and stomach right in Bruce's line of sight and impossible to avoid with the thin-cotton single-layer tees he insisted on wearing specifically to show it off. "Tough break – you look like you could really use some."

He was grinning and Bruce looked up into his eyes and his situational amnesia seemed even worse than before. There he was, his best friend, his crush, the man he loved, well and alive, as if nothing had ever happened because, well, it hadn't. And Bruce struggled to remember that it was only a matter of time before it would.

"Hey I –" Bruce started, stumbling, trying to figure out what he should say. Should he just blurt it all out, the whole thing, before he forgot? Would Tony even believe something that ridiculous?

Well. Ridiculous was subjective, Bruce supposed.

"You okay buddy?" Tony asked, doing that stupidly adorable thing he did with his eyebrows when he was genuinely concerned and fuck it was cheesy but Bruce would've been okay just to relive these few moments over and over and over again for the rest of his life. He didn't think he had before but now he realized just how he'd taken that smile for granted so many times, those casual jokes, those damn eyebrows and the brown eyes that sat beneath them.

"You're going to die." The words just fell straight out of his mouth when he opened it, unable to stop them any more than he could stop the quickening of his heart every time Tony walked into a room.

"Excuse me?" Tony went straight from sympathetic to shocked and clearly amused. "Look, I'll let you take a nap if I have to drag you to your room yourself – no death threats needed."

Bruce looked away, rested his elbows on the table and let his head fall into his hands, rubbing at his eyes underneath his glasses. This was going to go oh-so well.

"I built a time machine and came back to tell you that in hopes of avoiding it."

"Well, we all gotta go someday, right?" Tony joked, surprise fading into pure amusement and Bruce's frown deepened.

He removed his glasses and looked Tony dead in the eye. "I'm serious."

Tony chuckled but not much – one of the qualities Bruce always liked about him, never completely dismissing anything, always open to the truth. "Look, even if time travel were possible –"

"I'd prove it if I had the time but it's going to happen today," Bruce interrupted, not willing to deal with skepticism right now. The longer he let it go the more skeptical he knew he would become himself.

"First I'm going to die – now I'm going to die today?"

"Yes."

There was a moment where their eyes were locked, Tony feeling Bruce out, obviously still not totally convinced this wasn't some kind of prank, and Bruce not backing down. Finally, Tony looked away, laughing and scratching at his goatee a little, clearly not completely convinced but at least convinced that Bruce believed without a doubt in what he was saying anyway.

"Okay okay, so how is the dashing hero going to avoid death, then?" Tony said, still jokes but there was a serious undertone that was unmistakable.

"In about an hour, there's going to be a power fluctuation. You're going to get all pissy because 'nothing could possibly be wrong with your beautiful arc reactor' and –"

"There isn't anything wrong with my beautiful arc reactor," Tony argued as Bruce took a breath and pinned him with a look for the interruption.

"And –" he emphasized, "you're going to investigate and yes, there is nothing wrong with your beautiful arc reactor. There is however a mutant with the ability to source energy trying to bait you out there to kill you."

"And how exactly would he do that?"

"By drawing the energy from your personal arc reactor and frying your suit," Bruce explained, keeping his voice as steady as possible after having witnessed it twice.

"And what would happen if I just didn't show up?" Tony asked, voice hard. "Would the team be okay without me there? Would you be okay?"

The door opened along with Bruce's mouth as he made to reply and the feeling of deja vu was back as Pepper walked in, him trailing her with his eyes and with the memories replaying in the back of his mind as she moved through the room in her soft white suit and patent red lipstick.

"There you boys are," she teased with a grin, leaning in to barely kiss Tony's cheek, red hair falling across her shoulder. "I looked for you in your office but I keep forgetting my fiance already has a husband he'd rather go visit."

Bruce cringed inwardly. The jokes were always said as though they were benign but he couldn't help but wonder if she didn't know, the way her eyes shifted and her smile dropped when she looked at him. Pepper was always too perceptive for her own good.

"Package deal," Tony teased back, feigning oblivious – the whole situation one big farce, the perpetually unacknowledged elephant in the room. "Two husbands for the price of one."

She just sighed and opened a portfolio pad with a stack of paper inside, asking him a few quiet questions Bruce didn't attempt to overhear and requesting a signature, which Tony dutifully supplied.

"Our meeting with Mister Richards of Venture United is in fifteen minutes so I'm going to need you to come with me and get ready," she told him as she snapped the portfolio closed.

Bruce could feel himself failing with every second and now Pepper was about to lure him away with a very real request while he fumbled with some bullshit about how Tony was going to die later in the day and he –

He couldn't think when Tony turned his eyes back towards him and smiled that warm, genuine smile that made him feel like for one tiny moment he was the center of Tony's universe. He hated how he'd been across the entire world and no where else seemed to compare.

"Don't worry," he said, as if that were all it took. "You know me. It doesn't matter what you say. There's nothing that would convince me not to join the team. I wouldn't leave you alone."

Bruce stared up at him with a panic stricken look to juxtapose Tony's self-assurance and he knew it was true. Even if Tony believed him, he wouldn't let any part of the team go out into a dangerous situation alone.

Pepper's eyes narrowed just a bit as she took a step away to indicate it was time for them to leave and Bruce wanted to say something – implore him not to go when the time came, to listen for once in his damn life, tell him that he cared too much to see him die again... But his throat was stuck and he couldn't make his mouth move. He just watched Tony walk out with Pepper, knowing that the next time he'd see him would be three hours from now as they headed out to the Price building.

And everything happened just as before – Tony didn't end up attending the meeting with Venture United because there were fluctuations in the readings from the arc reactor. Instead, he stayed behind and played in the basement trying to diagnose the problem. SHIELD contacted the Tower to say there was a belligerent mutant with CEO Cooper Price held hostage atop his own building. Bruce caught the beginning of a TV segment with a reporter in shiny lipgloss discussing the demands made by him – that he wanted the Avengers to just try to stop him. That he was a mutant, not simply the product of science, and that he was more powerful that anyone – even Tony Stark.

Then when they got on the scene it was the same story all over again. That there was nothing they could do to appease him. There was nothing he could do with money, with fame, that all he just wanted was to be loved by someone. That he would make them hurt.

The thunderclap. The feeling of his entire body being charged with electricity. The interruption in the beat of his heart. The moment he saw Tony from a hundred and ten stories down, smashed into concrete and dying – again.

It was so stupid – so fucking stupid. It wasn't like Tony was even helping. It wasn't as if his presence was somehow instrumental in saving someone else, in talking Mister Electric down. Hulk could just as easily save Cooper Price by grabbing him out of mid air the way he had done to Tony before. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say. The man pulled his heart right out of his chest and then killed him with it, without even needing to touch him. Tony simply didn't belong here. And as Hulk picked him up with his big green hands, he wondered if he would ever be able to convince Tony of that.

"Metal Man stupid," Hulk grunted out as he held him up, the repetitive scene doing a number even on the Hulk's limited intelligence and emotional capacity. "Metal Man should listen. Bruce say."

Tony chuckled weakly. "Yeah – I guess I shoulda. Stupid is kinda my thing big guy; Bruce was always smarter than me." His arm shifted that little bit, just like before, like he was reaching out to Hulk and wanted to touch him but his suit was so fried he just couldn't. "Wish I could lift this damn visor but... You should go help Steve."

Hulk shook his massive head as Bruce resigned himself to quietly falling apart in the back of his psyche, the explosive anguish of the previous experience not present this time in the face of his utter defeat.

"Not alone," Hulk said, holding him a little closer, like a big dumb kid with a doll and Bruce wanted to lay down and cry when he realized what Hulk meant – that he was reciprocating Tony's presence here, that he wouldn't let Tony be alone any more than Tony would let him be alone.

"Thanks, buddy," Tony whispered back, barely audible through his broken speaker box, a soft exhalation on his lips before he passed.

And Hulk didn't let the suit go for hours – not for Steve's pleading, not for SHIELD's demands. Not until Bruce had fallen so far away, hiding so deep within himself that he could no longer physically manifest that anger and he shrank back into Bruce, hunkered over and clutching that red and gold suit, never having felt more alone in his life.