Chapter 2
The logical and accepted understanding of nightmares is that they are false – nothing but images crafted by your brain, born from worries or horrors of your conscious life. They aren’t real, they have never happened, and are reasonably unlikely to ever happen. The less commonly spoken of assumption of nightmares, though also born of majority agreement, is that they are for children, that at a certain age, people should stop having them, and those that don’t, have something inherently wrong with them.
Bruce knows a thing or two about nightmares.
To say that they are nothing more than images and irrational fear is to say that life is nothing more than images and irrational fear – true to an outsider’s first observation, but wrong on every other level; a hypothesis with no sought after proof; words on the internet that everyone believes simply because they’re there. Images alone don’t grab you, don’t pull you inside of them, don’t surround you in the blanket of nothing, the empty feeling of fog and unease, the way that nightmares do – you can’t feel the claws of an image digging into your arm, can’t feel the lashes of a belt against the skin of your back if it doesn’t exist, can’t drown under words that aren’t being said. You can’t suffocate if the pillow over your face isn’t actually there, can’t feel the hatred raining down on your if there’s no one around to throw it. Irrational fear? Fear is only irrational to the person not suffering from it, unable to be understood by most others and in that, dismissed. For children.
Beside him, Tony jerks in his sleep with a near-inaudible sound, and Bruce starts counting the seconds.
To believe that nightmares aren’t real is to wear entitled ignorance.
Because something that isn’t real doesn’t leave a black eye on unhealthily pale skin; doesn’t leave bruises so dark they look like unwet blood dotting along fragile, aching ribs. Something that isn’t real doesn’t reduce a high-spirited, affectionate twenty-year-old to a shaking mess of reluctantly accepting touches in his lover’s arms. Something that isn’t real can be turned off, walked away from, doesn’t swarm you in both your waking hours and your sleep.
Tony jerks again, a little harder this time – twelve seconds.
Bruce hums a little under his breath, not enough for any real sound but enough to make his chest, pressed carefully against Tony’s uninjured side, rumble with the vibration. It won’t be enough to break through whatever fog he’s fallen under, and Bruce won’t pull him up from it, knows from personal experience that it won’t solve anything, can make it worse – but it can soothe the terror of it, balm the loneliness, enough that he can eventually wake from it, blistered and broken but still breathing.
For a good man, it should be enough.
When the frown on Tony’s forehead releases, face still bruised and pale but smoothed from worry, he carefully eases himself from the bed, puts the pillow he’d been leaning on up against his lover’s side (the rush of fondness he feels as it’s immediately latched onto is just an increase of what already trickles through him, around this man). He backs away, keeps his eyes on the shivering figure on his bed until the doorknob lightly punches his back, and slips out in silence to the view.
Bruce has long since come to peace with the fact that he is not a good man.
They’re all in the living room, as he had known they would be. All three couches (excessive, but Tony had insisted on buying the furniture for him, once he’d noticed how often company was around) are empty, but they’re here – Thor leaning against the wall, arms folded in solemn anger; Clint sprawled on the floor, twirling a sharpened pocket knife between his fingers like a toy; Natasha stands in the entryway of the kitchen, eyes sharp on him even as her hand rests gently on Steve’s shoulder; Steve, tense and shaking against the frame – he’s had a rough time of it lately.
“Thor,” Bruce says quietly, has had years to get used to the weight of the focus of that attention on him. “I need you and Clint to pay a visit to Obadiah Stane. I don’t believe there will be any immediate problem, but I’d like if you would … impress upon him the benefits of there being no problem at any time in the future, as well.”
Clint flips to his feet with grace born of his circus training, a stolen gift. “Gonna do it, then?” He poses with a smirk, flipping the knife closed and tucking it into his pocket. It’s rhetorical. “Fucking finally.”
Thor shoves him. Bruce would have smiled if not for the string of chill tying him to the bedroom.
“Nat, I know it’s not exactly corporate espionage, but if you would come with me-.”
“Of course,” the redhead cuts him off, still watching him evenly, because she knows him better than he knows himself, most days. Her hand moves a little further across Steve’s shoulder, squeezes so tightly that the white of her knuckles are screamingly obvious.
“I could help you,” Steve offers softly, glancing up. Bruce’s fists tighten.
Steve is the second youngest in this group of pieces of broken glass he’s collected, seven months older than Tony, but it’s only apparent on nights like these, in the aftermath of a blow, when it rains too hard and gets too cold and the novelty of what they do wears off to reality. In another world, Bruce thinks Steve would have been the leader – he’s got the mind for it, when he focuses; definitely has the heart. But here, in this world, he’s been torn just a little too much, stretched just a little too far, grown faster than he should have, and while one day he may be able to stand beside his memories instead of under them, it’s not now. He could help, certainly, and would without hesitation if Bruce would say the word.
“I wouldn’t ask that of you, Steve,” he says kindly, steps forward so that he can put his hand against the younger’s jaw – he’s nearly as touch starved as Tony, relishes in the tenderness of their affection. “Not tonight, not this soon after what happened. Another time. Soon,” he throws in quickly when he feels a protest forming. “Tonight, though, I need you to stay here with Tony, because he’ll need you if he wakes up. You’re his best friend anymore, these days.”
“After you,” the blonde mumbles, but the fight drains from him immediately.
“It’s because you’re not screwing him,” Clint offers from behind him. “If you were banging him, I’m sure he’d favor you over Ban-ah!” The squawk is quiet, the following whines tiny over the cynical chuckle that rolls over it.
“We’ll be going to see Stane now,” Thor intones, and Bruce glances over his shoulder to see the taller man drag Clint out the door, closing it gently behind them. Tony thinks they’re a riot.
He turns back to Steve, who’s now looking him straight on. “I gave him something to help him sleep.” He doesn’t need to tell Steve of all people that it doesn’t help with the nightmares. “Just be here with him. You can do that, can’t you?”
The eyes turn steely with determination. “Yes.”
Bruce knocks their heads together lightly and doesn’t watch as Steve pulls away to move toward the bedroom.
And then it’s just him and Natasha and the string that ties him to Tony.
“What are you doing?” She asks him.
It’s not “what are we doing?”, not “what’s going to happen when we walk out that door?” Bruce had known Natasha first, before any of them, and though sometimes it feels like life hadn’t really started before Tony Stark had ambled into his life without invitation, it had, and Natasha knows. What is he doing?
“He’ll know, after this,” she warns, stepping away to grab her jacket from a kitchen chair – he can see the glimmer of her pistol as her shirt rises at the action. “You’ve managed to keep him in the dark this long because we haven’t done anything big, but Bruce – this is big.” She turns back toward him. “A different scale of big. And Tony Stark is as far from stupid as they come.”
“I know.” What is he doing? It’s not that it’s personal – it is, but with him, with this group, it almost always is. Bruce has no thirst for flamboyant power, for the infamy that can come from playing this game – it’s half of the reason he’s left people like Howard Stark alone for so long. A necessary evil. But that’s not what she means either. They can afford to lose Howard Stark. They can even afford to lose Stane (though he’ll hold off on that for as long as possible, another round of responsibility that he doesn’t want).
It’s Tony.
Tony who has situated himself into the lives of his group as much as he has into Bruce’s. The son of a competitor who hadn’t had an interest in taking up the pedestal, whose main concern in life had been building robots and making technology and coming up with ways to make the world better as a whole. Tony who Bruce had taken one look at two years ago and had ridiculously become instantly enamored with. Tony who can’t shut up, who can’t stop moving, who gives so much of himself while pretending that it’s not what he’s doing at all. Tony who loves a version of Bruce that Bruce has let him see; who doesn’t know what he does on the nights they’re not together, on the afternoons where he has to break a date. Tony who has come to abhor the existence of violence.
(Tony who had shown up at his door tonight with more than just the one bruise he would occasionally have (“Relax, Banner, I fell off the couch in the lab when Dummy woke me up. I bruise easy. You know I bruise easy.” A smirk. “Sure it hurts. Give me another one to focus on instead?”), breath hitching on every inhale because he hadn’t been able to breathe, hunched in on himself to hide his bruised, bloodshot eye. (“Don’t take me to the hospital. They’ll tell him.”). Tony who had fallen apart on the bed, overwhelmed from the exhaustion of being awake for thirty-nine hours, from the pain of binding his ribs, from the slow descent into muffled sleep from the concoction Bruce had coaxed down his throat (“Please don’t be mad at me, Bruce.”). Tony who had broken his heart tonight, now trapped in nightmares on his bed, and all Bruce wants to do is go back in there and hold him).
“If he leaves, he leaves,” he says, gritting his teeth. “But at least if – when, whatever – he walks out that door, it’ll be into a world where there is no Howard Stark there to hurt him. If I can give him at least that, Natasha, I’ll die a happy man whether he stays or not.”
It’s the truth, and Natasha sighs, coming to him again, crowding enough that they’re touching – personal space has never been a concern of hers when making a point. “It’s been a long time since you’ve hurt anyone as badly as you’re planning to, longer since you’ve killed anyone, and I’m going to do my best to make sure that you walk away from this one somewhat whole, so that you can be there when Tony doesn’t run away. So listen,” she stresses harshly. “When you do this, and you’re going to do this, you think only of Tony. I know that rage inside of you, I know that you’ll want to let it swallow you up, but you’re not going to let it. You’re going to think of Tony, of his smile, of his laugh, of his stupid robots and unhealthy caffeine addiction. You’re going to think about how worn down he’s been lately. You’re going to think about how he came to you tonight. And you’re going to use your anger; you’re going to make it work with you, for Tony. Because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to leave him something worth the price of a funeral, so that he can have that closure.” Her fingers slip into the waistband of his jeans and pulls out his revolver – he’ll hear about that later. “To everyone else in the city, this is business. To us and to you, this is for him.”
Natasha waves the gun in front of his face. With each swing, Bruce pictures Tony’s teasing, taunting grin.
He takes it from her, nudging her away as he puts it on the table.
He won’t need it.