Post-"Strands in the Rope" kick-off. Reading that series/story will give you the best background for this, but theoretically you could also assume we pick up where Infinity War would start, but then don't do any of that.
Bruce Banner returns to earth (with Thor, and part of his people) and reunites with Tony Stark at the Compound. A certain Spider-kid hears about the Avengers' return and manages to show up as well. Conversations and realizations ensue.
So basically, this happens in the same week Infinity War starts in the MCU, but we're totally ignoring canon from here on out, and doing what we (I mean, I) want. Thanos still intercepted the refugees from Asgard post-Ragnarok, but Thanos didn't have the power stone yet, because Carol Danvers got wind of what he was up to and went to Xandar ahead of him, talking them into giving her the stone. They're able to defeat Thanos and his minions. She escorts them to earth, which is where our story picks up...
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The expansive Avenger's Compound glistened in the early morning sun, and Bruce hadn't seen anything that beautiful in as long as he could remember. Which, honestly, wasn't very much from the last two years. Thor had gone out an airlock as soon as they entered earth's orbit, so he could make contact with whoever was at the Compound and try to convince the Avengers (and the U.S. Military) not to shoot them down when they tried to land. Apparently it had worked, because they touched down without issue, and the damaged gangplank slowly lowered, letting in filtered sunlight and blissfully fresh air.
Thor was standing there grinning; the Vision was waiting with unnatural stillness (so he hadn't gone completely off the rails afterwards—that was good news) and there was Rhodey in his War Machine armor, as well as—
"Bruce!" Tony nearly dove at him, grabbing him in a giant hug and… was he crying?
"Who are you, and what have you done with Tony Stark?" Bruce laughed, his eyes getting a little wet themselves in the face of his friend's emotion.
Tony pulled back, gripping his shoulders and grinning. "Man, we thought… Well, I thought maybe you were just laying low after everything, but after we still hadn't heard from you in six months, I worried you'd gone with Thor, or worse, and we just… I just didn't know if I'd see you again!"
No quips, no pretended indifference? This Tony Stark, two years later, had changed a little. Bruce didn't mind, but it was a little unsettling. What else had changed while he'd been gone?
A lot. A lot had changed.
After a quick tour of the (new to them) Avengers Compound, and after making sure all the refugees were fed and getting medical attention (himself included), Bruce and Tony ended up in Tony's lab.
"This is… this is impressive , Tony. It's huge!"
"Yeah, well. It's amazing what you can do with a little money, when you're not limited by the space of the City. There's a lab for you too, you know."
Bruce felt a little blindsided. "Uh, that… that wasn't in the tour."
"No, it's in the next building over. Full chemistry set-up. All the toys. In case we needed it, I guess. But I was mostly hoping you'd be back soon."
"Sorry I wasn't," Bruce said softly.
"Hey, no. Not your fault, obviously. I'm just glad you're here now, buddy," Tony said, his expression still a little amazed when he looked at Bruce, like he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. This Tony seemed… softer? What exactly had happened in the last two years?
"So, I remember you had talked about maybe building the place before… well, before we left. But you thought you'd move here when you did. But you don't live here?"
"That was the plan. Even tried to move," Tony said with a smirk. "But it didn't work out. And by the time we had it all sorted, this was a little too far from the city for me."
Bruce knew Tony wasn't actually a big fan of the city. What did that mean? Hadn't he given Pepper the reigns to SI?
"How's… how's, uh, Pepper?" Bruce asked carefully, knowing how rocky their relationship had been at times, but looking for more clues about what was going on. He sipped carefully at his tea, taking a moment to appreciate just being safe and still.
"She's good," Tony said with a smile.
Bruce let out a relieved breath. It was so weird to think about how much time had passed for most people.
"We're engaged, actually. We're getting married in two months," Tony said happily, as he manipulated some numbers on the holo-board.
"Whoa! When did that happen?"
Tony huffed out a little laugh. "Well, it's kind of a long story, but we've been engaged for like a year and a half, and we're still both in it to win it, so wedding's happening." He glanced up and smiled at Bruce. "You're invited, of course."
"That's… that's amazing, Tony. Congratulations!"
"Thanks. Uh, a lot has changed. But lots of it's good."
Bruce nodded, remembering the look on Tony's face when he'd asked where Steve, Natasha, and Clint were. ("They're okay, as far as I know. But they're not here.") Yeesh. Apparently that was going to be a whole conversation. One he didn't think was happening tonight.
"So, the Asgardians? Did you guys settle on a plan?" he asked instead.
"Hmm?" Tony looked up, obviously interrupted in some deep thought or calculation already. "Yeah, yeah. I offered to put them up in hotels for a few nights, but they decided they didn't want to be parceled out and separated, and said anything was more comfortable than that ship you've all been on for weeks."
Bruce snorted his agreement.
"So we're having simple mattresses and bedding mass-delivered, and they're all camping out in the Compound's gym tonight, after a few of the families with babies and kids got first pick of the guest rooms here."
"I'm happy to sleep in there too, if needed. They're so right about it being better than the ship. Or pretty much anywhere I've slept in recent memory."
Tony's gaze was sympathetic, but his words were firm. "Yeah, no. I have a residential wing here, and I want you in it, Jolly Green. If there was a need, sure, we could use it, but I think everyone who's sleeping in the gym is fine there."
"And tomorrow?"
"Surprisingly, the U.N. already sent their approval for the temporary amnesty Norway has offered. They cited "shared history" as their claim to harboring the refugees, and have already indicated they'd like to offer them a permanent place if it's working out for everyone."
"Wow. Just like that, huh? You guys work fast while a guy takes a shower." Bruce tried not to think about how that amount had been nearly double before Thanos had waylaid them.
"I know, I'm as surprised as you. Usually anything along those lines moves at a snail's pace, but I think Thor's little visit to the U.N. headquarters this afternoon sped up the process. To be fair, it was a long shower," Tony teased lightly.
"You try not remembering showering pretty much ever, and see how long you stay in there," Bruce grumbled good-naturedly.
Tony laughed, but it was tinged with sadness. "Gonna need that whole story, soon, I think."
"Yeah, I feel like there are a lot of stories that need swapping," Bruce muttered, thinking of his missing teammates. Tony just nodded, tweaking something else on the plans he was drafting to get all the Asgardians and what they might need to Norway the next day.
"He's going with them?" Bruce asked, feeling an unaccountable twinge as he thought about being separated from the god.
"Yeah, but he said just to help them get settled. He said he'd be back before long," Tony assured, his gaze more discerning than Bruce was used to.
"What about… what about Loki?"
"That might be more complicated. Even with explanations about the scepter, and how he was being manipulated too, he still killed lots of people. It's going to be rough going. They've granted Thor very temporary secured custody, and Norway is allowing him in, but only accompanied, and not long-term. I'm not sure what's going to happen there."
Bruce grimaced. He had gotten to know the trickster god a little more in the last few weeks, and though he still didn't trust him, he also knew he wasn't the controlling interest in what had happened on earth. He was a victim, as well.
Tony sat back and rubbed his hands on his pants legs. "Well, I think I'm done here. I'm gonna send this to the assistants and have them set it up. FRI?"
"Yes, Boss. Sent."
Bruce winced a little at the almost-unfamiliar voice. Tony seemed comfortable with and used to his new AI, but it was still jarring to Bruce to hear FRIDAY's voice instead of JARVIS's, since Sokovia didn't seem that long ago to him. Another missing member of the team.
"Let's go get you squared away. Of course you've got a room in the Avengers' wing, but we'll work that out tomorrow when the Asgardians are out. Pep has meetings until late tonight because we're getting close to the end of the fiscal year, but she's going to be here as soon as she can. Happy will bring a bunch of your boxes down tonight from storage."
"You still have my stuff?" Bruce said, blinking a little to keep the tears at bay. A good night's sleep. He just needed a solid eight hours, and hopefully all these emotions would stabilize. He picked up the very small bundle of stuff he'd accumulated just since he got to the Compound that day.
"Hadn't given up on you," Tony said quietly as they left the lab. Bruce followed him into another wing that hadn't been part of the tour earlier.
They passed through into a large living area, and Tony frowned at a flashing sensor light in the kitchen area. "Let me check on that. You're going to be down that hall to the left."
Bruce walked into the softly lit hallway. The whole "residential suite" as Tony called it had a different feel than the rest of the Compound, and even from the Avengers' living area that he'd seen (which was currently occupied with Vision and several Asgardian families). It was even different than Tony's penthouse in the Tower had felt. It was a little more homey, with warmer lighting, and more colorful decor.
Uncertain where he was going, Bruce passed two closed doors on the left, assuming maybe the open door towards the end of the hall is where Tony intended for him to stay tonight. But when he reached that doorway and the light automatically turned on inside, he was confused. This room belonged to someone, but it wasn't Tony. The color palette was bold: dark blues, with a lot of red accents. The bed was a queen or maybe even a double, and its dark red bedspread was topped with a few pillows with some kind of character pattern on them. His eyes strayed to a pair of scuffed sneakers on the ground, and he noticed an assembled LEGO set on top of a white desk. Were those glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling? He was just taking in the TV and gaming console on the other end of the room when Tony appeared at his side, tugging on his arm.
"Whoops, you passed it!" his friend said, his voice a little high and fast. "If you'll just come back here," he said, steering Bruce out the door and back down the hall a little ways, "there's a real room for you." He opened the door to reveal a completely normal-looking guest room, all neutrals and calm lighting.
"The en-suite is through there," Tony continued, gesturing to the left, and the closet's that other doorway."
"Tony, whose room was that?"
Looking a little flustered (which was not something Bruce was used to seeing), Tony's eyes jumped to a random spot on the ceiling as he said, "Uh, that's Peter's room. He's my intern."
"Your intern has a room in your private suite?" Bruce said doubtfully.
Tony sighed, with the air of someone giving up. "Yeah. It's… complicated. Do you… do you want a nap or anything, or should we go find Thor and see what he wants to feed his little horde tonight?"
Bruce eyed him carefully, wondering what "complicated" meant. But he assumed he'd find out eventually. "I'll wait to sleep until tonight. It's not that long, and the faster I get back on the right circadian rhythm, the better." He set his stuff down and followed Tony out the door.
Bruce found out what "complicated" meant sooner than he thought, when he stumbled out of his room the next morning and found a real-life teenager sitting at the kitchen counter. Speaking of real life. Was that actually Tony Stark flipping pancakes behind him?
The boy was talking. "—if they're back, I worried about the others showing up, and I just kinda thought about you being here by yourself, and the next thing I knew I was in Happy's car." None of that made sense, but Bruce filed it away.
"They're not coming, bud, besides, that's nothing you need to—"
"Um… hello?" is all that came out of Bruce's mouth. Two sets of big brown eyes turned to stare at him, frozen for a moment. Then the silence was broken by the teenager jumping up off his stool.
"Dr. Banner, I… hi! Um, I'm Peter, I guess. It's just… Wow, I'm so excited to meet you, sir. Your work on gamma radiation and the decay-rate of certain isotopes under sub-deal conditions is just mind-blowing! Your paper about controlling the energy of excitation and how it changes the rate is—"
"Pete. Breathe. And dial down the hero worship, you're gonna give him a complex," Tony said with a smile.
Bruce shook his head slightly, trying to make sense of this scene.
The boy with the tousled bed-head glanced reproachfully at Tony, but did take a deep breath, then continued, still rapidly"—was just so cool, and I thought about trying to replicate your initial findings, but I wondered if I could ask you about—"
"Kid."
"What?" the teenager spun around, the word coming out as an annoyed inhale.
"Just got back to earth. Spent most of two years as the Hulk. Probably hasn't slept or eaten normally in weeks." Tony's tone was chiding, but not unkind.
"Oh, right. Uh," he turned back to Bruce, expression contrite. "Sorry, Dr. Banner, sir. Would you like some pancakes?"
"Tony," Bruce said, his brain finally putting all the pieces together. "Your intern is a child ?"
Peter opened his mouth, his expression already a protest, but Tony cut him off with a look. "He's almost seventeen, Bruce, a junior at Midtown Tech, and he was just about to ask you about replicating the results of that crazy paper that I could barely understand." Tony shrugged in a "what more do you want?" manner.
"Uh, okay… but he has a room here? Do you live here, Peter?" He kept his question light and curious.
"No, sir, of course not. I live in Queens, with my aunt. But I kinda spend a lot of time with Tony for, uh, internship stuff, so he said it made sense to have a room here, as well as at the Tower."
"You have a room at the Tower, too?" Bruce asked conversationally, eyes mentally bugging out. Suddenly he thought he knew why Tony hadn't moved to the Compound, if he was up this early making pancakes for a kid who lived in Queens. But when had this happened?
"Uh, yeah," Peter said, also keeping it light, and focusing on his pancakes, which had freaking whip cream and strawberries on them. "Our lab hours go late on Fridays lots of the time, so after a while it just made sense for me to have a place to sleep."
Yeah, that did make sense, Bruce guessed. But still…
"Plus when May's out of town, it's nice to have a place to stay, or if I get something on my clothes in the lab, it's good to have a bunch there, and there's really not room for all my LEGO sets in my apartment, and it's so much quieter when I'm trying to study or do homework, but…" Peter trailed off, probably reacting to the thoroughly surprised look on Bruce's face. Tony was carefully keeping his back to Bruce as he poured more pancakes.
"Tony," Bruce said, not trying to hide his grin. "You didn't tell me that you adopted your intern."
"What? No, he—" Peter protested at the same time as Tony's quick denial.
"It's nothing like that, he just—"
"It sounds like it's very much like that, and I think I approve," Bruce said, chuckling, some of the puzzle pieces of Tony's slight personality change falling into place. "Tell me, how is co-parenting going?"
Bruce got to see Tony's "intern" in action later in Bruce's(!) lab, after they got the Asgardians packed up and on their way to the site in Norway. Despite his protests, Tony hadn't allowed Peter to join them in that, citing his need to do the homework he was missing that day.
"Did you get all your school stuff done?" Tony asked Peter skeptically before he'd let Peter join them at unpacking and setting up the stored equipment.
"It took me like an hour," Peter scoffed, still annoyed. "I can't believe you didn't let me meet Thor, Mr. Stark. Thor . An actual god."
Bruce watched Tony brush the boy's shoulder briefly. "You'll meet him, kiddo. Relax about it. What I can't believe is that your aunt let you ditch today so you could stow away with Happy. How did you even find out about them coming back, by the way?"
"Aunt May owed me a favor. And um… it's possible that FRIDAY told Karen, and Karen told me. Maybe. It's not like I missed much. There's only a few weeks of school left, and the only class I'm even worried about is English."
"Who's Karen?" Bruce asked, arms deep in a box of paper-wrapped beakers. Tony really had thoroughly stocked this place. Bruce's fingers itched to work on something again.
"Uh… my AI?" Peter finally answered, sounding unsure.
Bruce turned and looked between the boy and Tony. "You have an AI? Did you make it?"
"Her. And, uh, no. Tony made her for me?"
Bruce could feel his eyebrows jump. "I have so many questions."
"We'll answer them later, Brucie," Tony said, brushing him off. "Peter, I want you to come calibrate this trinocular microscope."
"By myself? Are you sure? That thing is like six thousand dollars, Mr. Stark…"
"Closer to eleven. It's a special order. But you can handle it."
The teenager looked nervous, but nodded and moved to work on the equipment. Bruce watched him from the corner of his eye, a little nervous himself, but Peter seemed to know what he was doing, only consulting FRIDAY once or twice. That was a job usually left to senior lab techs or even Bruce himself, so he was impressed.
"Hey Pete," Tony said, after a few minutes, "I forgot I didn't see you this week. How was your field trip? Was it at the MOMA?"
"Yeah. I mean, it was okay. Nothing too interesting, I guess. Well, except, Mr. Harrington somehow managed to get stung by a bee, and his hand got all swollen, and he had to go home early. That was rough. He's kinda unlucky with field trips, I think?"
"Yeah, I guess they haven't gone that well for him. Did you get your social studies paper done?"
"Mmm-hmm," the boy said absently. "Is this supposed to move like this? I feel like the arm is sticking."
"Lemme see."
Bruce just shook his head and grinned incredulously. Tony Stark had a kid. Who would have thought?
After that, Tony put Peter to work unpacking and organizing all the chemicals, pulling out the ones that needed to be in a controlled space, and Bruce finally had a chance to ask Tony some of the questions that had been prickling at him.
"Tony, what happened? Where are the others? You said everyone's okay, but obviously something's very wrong here."
Tony straightened up from where he was double checking the holo table's configuration and glanced back at Peter. The boy was on the other side of the huge room, and Bruce knew he couldn't possibly hear them.
"It's… it's complicated."
"I have seven Ph.D.'s and I've lived on another planet for the last two years. Try me," Bruce said firmly.
"You said yourself that you don't remember most of that," Tony teased lightly, obviously preparing what he wanted to say next. His eyes were trained on his shoes for another few moments of silence before he finally met Bruce's eyes. His face was passive, but his eyes glittered with pain.
"The Avengers broke up. We're toast."
Bruce had suspected, but hearing it out loud was jarring. "What do you mean, 'broke up?' Like… like a band?" Bruce asked incredulously, trying to keep his voice down.
"Cap and I fell out, hard. We're not on speaking terms. Nat switched sides halfway through, so there's a loss of trust there. Everyone just fell apart."
"But why?"
Tony sighed. Bruce didn't think he seemed angry, but definitely tired and sad. "If you ask later, FRIDAY will give you a whole run-down of the Accords, and how differently we all felt about them. I'm still working on them, and I think I'm making some progress. But I don't know if we'll ever be able to work together again or not.
"Who's we? Who was with you, and who's gone with Steve?"
Tony glanced at Peter again. "Rhodey, Vision, King T'Challa—that's a whole 'nother conversation, though—, Nat, and Spider-man, a local vigilante who's ridiculously overpowered, but inexperienced, were with me, trying to bring the others in." Peter dropped something on the other end of the room, making Bruce look up and Tony smirk.
"Rogers, Barton, Maximoff, Lang—who you also don't know; he has a crazy suit of Hank Pym's that lets him shrink and grow—Wilson, and Barnes were resisting."
"Barnes?"
"James Buchanan Barnes," Tony clipped out. "Rogers' dear old BFF from back in the day. He's alive. HYDRA made him a brainwashed assassin, and he's the main reason Rogers was willing to throw down, I think. It was all a big mess."
"Bucky Barnes is alive ?"
"Apparently," Tony said shortly. As far as I know, they're all in Wakanda, hiding from the U.N., but that was just last I heard."
Bruce sat quietly, absorbing the information. He replayed the image of the giant purple titan, bent on gathering all the… what did he call them? Infinity stones. And he shuddered.
"Tony. If Ms. Danvers hadn't shown up with what she called 'the power stone' and helped us kill the big purple guy, I don't like to think about what would might have happened on earth by now. Thor, Loki, the Hulk, and several of Asgard's best warriors couldn't take him. He knew there was a stone here, and he was headed here next. I don't think it matters who you're not talking to. He's not going to be the only one looking for infinity stones. We need a united front. A team , to protect earth."
Tony glanced over at Peter, for some reason, and Bruce found him watching them, a concerned, but resolute look on his face. Somehow he felt like this random teenage boy was very much a part of this conversation.
Tony sighed, and dug in his pocket. He pulled out a scuffed flip phone and tossed it on the table in front of Bruce. "You can talk to him if you want. They should know you're back."