6: Interlude

Bruce stared at Pepper. His knees were tucked up to his chest on the chair and his hand moved the fork around on his plate but he never lifted it to his lips. He'd spend weeks ignoring the siren song of the time machine because what did it really matter?

He had failed absolutely and he didn't have a plan. Sure he had managed to keep Tony from the scene but later he'd learned that his car was passing by the building at the same time as the confrontation occurred. Obviously the mutant had a range that was wider than he'd anticipated or could even calculate. So – what was he supposed to do? There was no chance he was going to convince Tony to skip town – he'd had to sabotage his suits just to get him to stay away from the mission. It was hopeless – hopeless.

Instead he stared at Pepper. She had brought him chicken alfredo, sat with him in the basement lab, and ate in that highly deliberate manner with which she did most things. But this was different – automatic. Bruce in some ways understood her – her facade was merely a way of protecting herself from the vulnerability of her pain.

She had visited him almost every night since the funeral. Often they exchanged no words at all, barely even looking at each other but for her tight smile as she was leaving and her sad, red-rimmed eyes.

It was curious to him how in this reality she visited him. It was so different from the original and then – maybe not. He had attended the funeral, sat in the front row and watched her speech. Stood at Tony's coffin with his hand pressed into the mahogany and tried not to break down all over again as the tears rolled down his face. Wondered why he hadn't become numb to it yet, watching Tony die. Maybe the disappointment of his failures made it more poignant, more impossible to let go.

But then, she had said it, didn't she? I know you loved him too. The words had rattled around his skull until he couldn't stand it. Bruce had loved him, loved everything about him, one of the few people who had ever shown him unconditional acceptance, had ever suggested that it was possible that affection would be returned, even if it could only ever be in another life.

Another life. Bruce hissed at his own stupidity. You only get this one life. He was just too stupid to realize it.

Yet he'd experienced several lives now, or at least pieces of lives. The memories of them may have been fading, the similarities all blurring together, but then the differences stood out. And he remembered that it was in this life that Pepper had come to visit him for the first time since his initial trip through the time machine and that... that puzzled him. Why this time? Why now?

"Why are you here?"

The silence was deafening. He had stopped his fork over the middle of the plate and looked up at her, watching as she chewed slowly, swallowed, and with a purposeful lack of hesitation brought her eyes up to meet his.

"Having dinner." Her face remained completely neutral, nothing to give it away. "Attempting to get you to eat."

"That's not what I mean." Bruce paused and stared back at his plate. What – was he really going to ask her why she didn't visit him in realities she'd never experienced? But she was licking her lips and trying to regain composure and it didn't seem like he would need to say anything else.

"Why must you make me say it?" she asked, casting her eyes to the side and lifting a shaky fist to hold tears back ineffectively with her knuckles. "You're the only person who remembers him – the real him. You're the only person who cares."

Bruce stopped moving completely, could hardly breath. Why? Why did she believe it this time? What had changed? Fuck but if only the memories didn't bleed together so badly... It was worse now that he had tried to ignore them, let time move on in this reality with no thought to going back. It was so difficult to separate the experiences.

Pepper laughed and it was painful – short and pointed and her eyes were just a little mean as they turned back to him, red and tired.

"It's so ridiculous," she said, fingers running beneath her eyes as she collected herself through the act of talking.

Bruce's brows furrowed as he stared at her in shock. How could she ever think...?

"You must know I would never have –"

"I know," she started, cutting him off as her fork moved through the alfredo with no intention of picking it up. "It's just... He showed you more of him than anyone else – well, as much as he would ever let anyone see."

Bruce looked back down at his plate. What was he supposed to say to that? Tony was the kind of man who carefully choose what parts you saw of him and what you didn't. Bruce often felt like Pepper saw more of the "real" him than anyone else.

"I'm sorry," he finally settled on, not really sure what he was apologizing for and she waved it away with her hand.

"It's – I wasn't jealous or threatened or anything," Pepper replied, pushing the plate away from herself a bit and Bruce had a feeling that this conversation turned her stomach as much as it did his. "But we fought... a lot. And sometimes, I just – I wondered if he wouldn't be happier with... with someone else."

Then Bruce laughed, shaking his head but keeping his eyes cast downward. "That's ridiculous."

"Why?" Pepper asked, somehow instantly turning on the CEO, her eyes scrutinizing. "He cared about you. A lot."

Bruce just shrugged his shoulders and wished he could sink a little further into the seat, maybe disappear altogether. Maybe in the back of his mind he occasionally longed against all odds to be object of Tony's affection – but talking about it as anything more than theoretical? Well, when you held it up to the light it was an ugly desire, wrought with impossibilities, selfishness, and pain.

"You're smart and beautiful and talented and... you don't come with a monstrous liability."

She clicked her tongue and shook her head and laughed a little. "You're an intelligent man, Bruce. At your age you should know you can't help who loves you – any more than you can help who you love."

Bruce snorted and looked off to the side, laying his head on his knees and hunching his shoulders protectively. "You can disabuse them of the notion."

Pepper made an indignant little noise and stood abruptly, gathering her plate and looking directly at him – though he was too much a coward to meet her gaze. "There are a lot of things I regret in my life – but if I had the chance to do it again, I would make sure he understood how much I loved him, anyway."

The words haunted him long after her heels clicked out of the room and the door slid closed behind her. They were the same words she left him with before his first trip through the time machine and often he'd felt they were a cross that he was forced to martyr himself on so that she might have the opportunity to resolve her regrets.

But what of his regrets?

They seemed so small and meaningless in comparison to everyone else's but he was forced to live through them over and over until they compounded into inaction because he was totally ineffectual. And that made him angry, being ineffectual. For so much of his life he had been weak – too little and too young to stand up to his father while he beat his mother to death, too scared of what he was and how it would destroy Betty's life to fight for her. This was just another failure, another loss to add to his ever-growing collection.

Of course he wanted Tony to know how much he'd loved him – it was ridiculous to think otherwise. All of his life he had been silently screaming it at people the way he had Tony, taught from a young age that that which he loved would eventually be taken away so he shouldn't admit it, shouldn't let the cruel world know.

Even then it was true what he'd said – he was a liability and Pepper wasn't. Pepper was safe. Pepper loved him. Pepper was the CEO of Stark Industries and he was Tony Stark – it couldn't be any more fairytale than that.

Bruce swallowed back a pitiful cry as he pressed his face against his knees, holding them tightly, because the fact was – none of it mattered. Tony was dead. Tony was just as dead now as he was a year ago when Bruce started on this venture. Months spent building and rebuilding time machines and constructing possible ways to keep him alive meant nothing. Tony was never going to see his wedding, Pepper was never going to get the chance to prove her love for him and neither would he. You only get this one life and apparently you couldn't change it as much as Bruce wanted to believe.

So... what was stopping him?

The thought hit him like a sledgehammer and he fought to control the pounding of his heart as the Hulk sprinted through his veins, begging to be let out to combat this overload of emotion – but there was nothing to fight. Nothing but his own frustration at taking so long to see the unrealized truth. Pepper regretted her inability to show Tony her affection because she was hindered by her ignorance – but Bruce was not limited by the same ignorance. He had the knowledge and foresight bestowed upon him by time travel. Bruce knew Tony was going to die – he died every time – and yet still he didn't say anything, didn't try to fix the one thing that was within his control to fix. And why not? What did it matter? Wasn't it better to let Tony know unequivocally how he felt about him while he still could?

Oh it was selfish, so selfish, he told himself, but there were no consequences – at least, none that mattered. In the end Tony would be dead. Even if it meant nothing to Tony to know how Bruce felt about him, at least he wouldn't have to live with the regret of never having said it while he was still alive. He couldn't spare Pepper that pain, but at least he wouldn't have to sit here with his knees drawn to his chest alone in the dark. At least he would know that he did all that he could.

The finality of the decision brought him an instantaneous peace, calming the inner storm inside himself in a way that no amount of yogi training had ever managed. Maybe he couldn't find it within himself to smile but he felt a sense of liberation knowing that he would no longer have to live with the burden of the whole of his unexpressed emotion for the other man. Truthfully the weight of a life's worth of regret would not be lightened much by this one confession but in that moment, it felt to Bruce like it might.

He stood and quietly crossed the room to sit before the bank of monitors he knew so well, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly before he pulled up the programs he needed to start over again for the fifth ime.

Maybe in another life, Tony had said. But there was only one life, there was only this life – and Tony's was cut short. Bruce had spent a lot of time wishing for a different life – it was time he stopped wishing for another life and taking advantage of the one he had.