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At some point in this fandom, I'm going to stop peeling them back to find the wounded places. Really. I am. Just ... not right now. *smiles lopsidedly*
Title: Some Small Illusion
Rating: R
Fandoms: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Bruce. Tony & Bruce, Tony/Pepper, Tony & Rhodey, Tony & JARVIS
Summary: Tony wasn't quite ready for it, the day Bruce let the first dam break. He'd thought he would be. He wasn't
Wordcount: 4142
Warnings/Notes: PTSD. Canon body modification. Suicidal thoughts. Angst. Platonic Kissing
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Some Small Illusion
Rating: R
Fandoms: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony, Bruce. Tony & Bruce, Tony/Pepper, Tony & Rhodey, Tony & JARVIS
Summary: Tony wasn't quite ready for it, the day Bruce let the first dam break. He'd thought he would be. He wasn't
Wordcount: 4142
Warnings/Notes: PTSD. Canon body modification. Suicidal thoughts. Angst. Platonic Kissing
Disclaimer: Not mine
Some Small Illusion
Safety was an illusion. Wow, that was a depressing thing to say. Unfortunately, didn’t make it untrue.
Tony had figured it out with Obie. That sometimes, no matter how safe you thought you were, no matter how safe you’d made yourself … Sometimes, people slipped through. Sometimes people came in. Natasha. Loki. Fucking Obadiah fucking Stane. Sometimes … there was no such thing as ‘safe’.
But you had to have somewhere, didn’t you. Some place, some time, that even if it wasn’t impregnable, was still … that place where you let go, a little. The fear, the control. That place where, whether it deserved it or not, you could let yourself feel safe. Safer. Something. There had to be a place, or you’d tear yourself apart before long.
For him, it had been the workshop, mostly. Alone, down among the machines, and the plans, and the smell of metal and fire. Even after Afghanistan, even after the other things that smell had come to mean … The workshop was where he was safest. In the heart of JARVIS’ power, surrounded by people he actually understood, and who understood him. None of the perils of humans, of trust so often wrong, of promises he so often couldn’t keep. Just … him, and his thoughts, and the quiet, sarcastic voice of his friend.
There was another, later. When he and Pepper … there was another, curled beside her in the dark, watching her sleep-soft face in the glow of the arc reactor. But that one … there were other fears, in that one. Not that his safety was an illusion, but that hers was. That someone would come for them here, the way Obie had come for him in Malibu, and he wouldn’t be the one to fall. He wouldn’t be the one lying there with a gape in his chest, and terror in his eyes.
He didn’t stay with her, sometimes. Slipped away to the workshop, slipped away from the rawness of that, from the terror of that. He didn’t always stay with her. And she … understood that. She did. She followed him, sometimes, slipped downstairs to watch him, to stand in a pale robe in the corner of the shop and watch his back. Sometimes, when he was planning and not forging, to wrap her arms around him from behind, rest her chin on his shoulder. Not saying anything. Just … reminding him. That she was there, and always would be.
Holy fuck, she terrified him. She was joy and comfort and raw fear intermingled, an electric tangle that he had never before felt in his life, a surging, living thing that scared the fuck out of him. He loved her more than life, and there were days when he thought that was just as well, because he wasn’t at all sure that kind of love was survivable.
Pepper wasn’t ‘safe’, was his point. She was just the part of not safe that … kind of made the whole thing worth it.
The workshop was what ‘safe’ meant. That one place where, even if it was an illusion, he could let go, a little bit. The workshop, and the interior of the suit. Where he could put himself in JARVIS’ hands, and know that whatever happened, someone had his back. Someone was watching over him, enough that he could let go, that little bit. Drop down the public face, the pretense, the part that was always calculating who, and what, and why.
And there were days, weeks, hours when he needed that. Holy shit, did he ever. Days where, without that, he would have … well.
Everyone needed that. Something like it. Some part of it. Some place to hide, someone to trust, somewhere you could just … let go. Not be you, for a while. Or maybe be more you, the real you. Not be always watching. Not be always waiting.
It took him a while to realise that Bruce didn’t. That Bruce didn’t have that place, that Bruce didn’t ever let go, that Bruce was never not controlled. That what Bruce feared was seeping under his own skin, and there was no-one, not one, that he could trust to manage that. To keep that. Who the hell could you trust, to keep you safe from the things inside your own head?
… No, really. Because Tony … wouldn’t mind knowing that, either.
And, okay, so Tony’s first instinct, faced with that, faced with a control that deep, was to want to break it. Tony’s first instinct, faced with a control like Bruce’s, was to take it as a challenge. And maybe he could lie to himself, maybe he could tell himself it was for Bruce’s own good, that the man needed to lighten up some, but …
Tony wasn’t actually as blind as he sometimes seemed. He knew, he did know, that that would be one of the biggest lies he’d ever told himself, and trust him, he’d told himself some whoppers. He mostly recognised them via JARVIS. The little lies he told himself, JARVIS responded with sarcasm. The big ones … would be met by silence, as if JARVIS couldn’t even process that magnitude of stupidity.
It did occur to him, that most people didn’t leave their self-understanding up to their AIs, but he consoled himself with the fact that he was the only person in the world who had an AI like JARVIS, so it wasn’t like they could.
So he couldn’t just break Bruce’s control willy-nilly. It was sort of like breaking a firewall, he told himself. Sometimes you could brute-force it, but most of the time, it required a little … finesse. Something that would leave the best part of the defense upright, so things like, you know, the hulking great rage monster didn’t break loose, but at the same time, something that let … the right things through. Something that would let you at least feel like you were letting go, something like that small slump of his shoulders when he stepped into JARVIS’ domain, and felt the knots in his spine slip gently loose.
Something that would let the illusion in. Just for a moment.
And to do that, he needed to lure Bruce out. The real Bruce, not the public face. (And not the Hulk, either - the Hulk was also Bruce, but being the real you didn’t necessarily involve dropping right to id-level. And yes, he realised the irony in him saying that).
He figured he’d start with sarcasm. Hey, it worked with JARVIS, with Pepper. Rhodey, too, back in MIT when everyone had thought he was this stuck-up little rich shit who’d crumble if you said a word against him. He’d riled Rhodey up to the point where Rhodey couldn’t stop himself, and then he’d grinned at him. Honestly happy, because Tony’d been surrounded by false smiles and false faces since he was four, and he honestly hadn’t cared if Rhodey thought he was an utter little shit, he’d just wanted something real. And Rhodey, after a moment of incandescent rage (wow, no, seriously, Rhodey in a temper was impressive) and about five days of belligerent sulking, had … Well. Become Tony’s first real friend.
Nothing like encouraging people to be sarcastic to your face to make them feel better about you, was his point. None of that polite deference, rigid control. Make them feel like they could call you an idiot to your face. Like they were allowed to be smart around you. Nothing like letting people know they could argue with you without consequence to draw out what they really thought.
The results weren’t always good, of course. Sometimes pushing people for what they really thought wasn’t the best plan, when it turned out what they really thought was that you were a horrible, worthless piece of shit that they’d sooner stomp on than anything (or, sometimes, a worthless piece of shit that they would cheerfully murder, Obie, fuck). But, hey, better to know that than not, right?
And Bruce … Bruce, when you pushed him, when you let him feel he was allowed, had a sort of awesome sarcastic streak. Honestly, we were talking JARVIS levels, here. No, really. JARVIS was impressed, that’s how on-the-nose Bruce could be. And sometimes that was worrying, because sometimes you could see it coming from somewhere black and bubbling, a flashpoint wrestled down into dry wit, instead, but …
Well. That was the point, wasn’t it? That Bruce could start letting go, letting some of that out. And when it came to matching things that bubbled up out of a place of pain, of black anger … well. He was Tony fucking Stark, wasn’t he? He knew all about that.
That being said, he hadn’t been prepared for what happened the day the first dam broke. Not the one that washed all the way back to the Hulk, never that one, given a choice Bruce would go to his grave before letting that one go, but … A dam nonetheless. A barrier, rigid control, across what turned out to be mostly anger. Mostly pain. Locked down in layers, shimmering through everything Bruce saw and said and did.
Holy shit, when he said he was always angry? He wasn’t kidding.
And Tony honestly had faltered in the face of it, for a moment. Probably not for the reasons Bruce thought, though.
“Do you think this is easy?” Bruce snapped. Sheared past patience, for once, and Tony’d honestly been proud of that, of reaching in that far, for a second. Look. He wasn’t always on the ball, okay? “Look, for some reason, maybe you’re honestly not afraid of me. Good for you. I am, okay?”
Tony blinked at him, for a second. Not answering, because … well. Aside from ‘what do you mean’, which was never a good question to ask, what was there to say?
Bruce just looked at him, for a long, long minute. Scrubbing his hand through his hair, visible anger. Frustration. Exhaustion, too. “Do you have any idea?” he asked, eventually. Turning away, shoulders locked solid, so tight they had to be painful. “Do you have any fucking clue, what this is like? Having this thing inside you, this thing you never asked for, this thing you can’t ever get rid of, this thing that won’t fucking let you go! This is not a privilege, okay! I don’t … I don’t care, I …”
Tony ... felt his jaw set. Felt the air change, felt something immovable lock itself into his spine, something icy seeping into his chest. Under the reactor. Under that … exact place. That … hadn’t been what he expected. He hadn’t been ready. Not for that.
“Do you think you can make this better,” Bruce snarled, exhaustedly, to an empty corner of the lab (well, save for JARVIS, but JARVIS was taking this opportunity to be very, very silent). “Do you think just because you’re not afraid of me, that you can … can make it bearable, having him inside me?”
Tony ... swallowed. Hard. “I thought … Didn’t you guys, you and him … I thought you’d reached a compromise, or something. With the … you know. Alien invasion, and stuff.”
Bruce turned to him, then. Turned, and maybe faltered, a little, at whatever was on Tony’s face, whatever was showing in him, that moment, but … “A compromise,” he said, with a black little curl of a lip. Dark, dark humour. Bruce had a lot of that, too. “Yes. But that doesn’t … I didn’t want this. I never wanted it.” A strange toss of his head, trying to look away, shove something back, something. Some aborted, impossible gesture. “I don’t want this,” he said, soft and low, shaking with old rage, and so much pain. “This thing under my skin. I don’t want it. I don’t want to have to … to reach a fucking compromise, okay? I don’t want … to have to be glad, when one stupid person lacks the survival instincts to be scared of me. I don’t want this thing, under my skin. I want it out.”
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t go there, Tony thought, silently. Don’t go where you’re going. Don’t.
“It saved my life,” Bruce said, softly. “It saved your life. I get that. I do. And you’re not afraid of it. Him. I … don’t get that, as such, but okay. Fine. But I still …” He shook his head, smiling soft and wet. “I had a life, once, you know? I had a life, and it was good, and people weren’t afraid of me, and I could stay anywhere I wanted to stay, and there wasn’t this thing crawling under my skin that I can’t. Get. Out. And I want to, sometimes, I just want to claw the Other Guy out from my skin, but I can’t, because he comes, he does come, then, but he doesn’t leave, and there are times when I wake up and there are bodies, and I just … I had a life. Once. I had that. I had …”
“I didn’t,” Tony interrupted. Hard and wet, through a jaw still locked stiff. Chest heaving slightly. He could feel the weight of the arc reactor moving with the flexing of his ribs. “I didn’t.”
Bruce … paused. Looked up at him, brows wrinkling a little in confusion. Tony … shook his head, hands fluttering in vague, stabbing motions around him.
“I didn’t have a life,” he explained, hushed, savage. “That’s what I thought. Just this … empty thing. I had a week to live. In Afghanistan. I had a week. And I was fine with that. Just a week, and people would stop … clawing at me, and hurting me, and the thing, in my chest, would go away.”
He kept his hands down, kept them away from his chest, from the sensation, the vivid sense memory, of clawing at it. In Afghanistan. In Malibu, while it was poisoning him. He kept his hands down, and met the suddenly alarmed look in Bruce’s eyes head on. Because that was the thing, wasn’t it, when someone was free to argue with you. You could argue back. You could be angry back.
“Do I have any idea?” he asked, stalking forward a little bit. He wasn’t sure what was in his face. Not a threat. Never that. He could never. But something. Something that made Bruce shy nervously. Not in fear. Something, shame, pain, desperation, something. Don’t. Don’t tell him this. Please.
Too late.
“Do you know how many times I wanted it out?” Tony whispered, soft and venomous and pleading. Because yes, he understood, yes, he had an idea. And yes, Bruce did too, and for some reason, right now, Tony wanted that. He wanted that angry thing inside Bruce, because he felt it too, and he wanted someone. “Do you know how many times I thought about just … clawing it out, pulling it free? You tried to shoot yourself in the head. Mine, it’s so much easier. I could do it in a second. And I know what it feels like, what it felt like, I know what it feels like to die, but still. Because I didn’t ask for it. Because someone put it there, inside me, and I can’t get it out.”
“Tony,” Bruce said, softly. Soft and raw, and this was pain, not anger. This was raw understanding, and Tony could understand why Bruce shied from it, because it was painful, the most blisteringly painful thing he’d ever felt, something not safe, but still. But still.
“We didn’t ask for them,” he said. Hard and savage. Because he’d wanted the thing underneath Bruce’s control, he’d wanted something real, and it cut him through, but it was still better. Like Rhodey, like Pepper. Things that weren’t safe, but still better. “They saved our lives, but we didn’t ask for them, and there are times when you can hear it humming under your skin, the thing shoved inside you, and all you want is to pull it out, but you can’t. So you fucking live it, make it something useful, make it have a reason, because what else can you do? You think I don’t know that? Of all people. You think I don’t know?”
“No,” Bruce said. Cut in. Sudden, quiet. Hard. “No,” he said, and there was … something surprised in it. “I knew you knew,” he said, as if he was only just figuring it out. “I … knew it.” Almost wondering, and suddenly there was a strange smile, floating over the anger, the pain, the flinching thing. A strange smile, because it wasn’t quite as black, as Bruce’s usual.
“What?” Tony asked. Feeling the anger stagger, feeling the black surging falter. The icy thing in his chest ebb, a little bit.
Bruce shook his head, backing off a bit, retreating back from Tony. Which … hadn’t been part of the plan, hadn’t been what Tony meant. The point wasn’t to make Bruce afraid of him. Tony started to move after him, and then Bruce stopped.
“Every moment,” he said. Voice shaking, chin firming. “Every moment, every day. Whenever I remember. That I didn’t choose this. That I can’t stop it. That it’s never … never going away. Every moment I remember that. I can’t … I can’t.”
Tony … flinched, and growled, and came forward on the balls of his feet. Leaned towards Bruce, shifted instinctively as though to lunge for him. Bruce looked at him. Bruce smiled at him.
“I want to trust him,” he said, softly. “I want to be able to trust him, to feel like he’s part of me, for him to be … something I can control. I want that. But … I want him gone, too. I want the thing, the radiation, the monster, him, out of me. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop wanting that. And … he knows it. That’s why we can’t … why we’re not …”
He stopped, for a second. And Tony would say something, would do something, but … what the fuck do you say to that?
“And then there’s you,” Bruce managed, eventually. “You, and Betty, and maybe some others, and you … You look at him. And you see me. And I … hate that, I hate it, but …” His fists clenched, silently. “Have you ever … had someone look at the worst parts of you. Look right at them. And still … think them, think you, worthwhile?”
Tony flinched. Down to the bone. He flinched, for that.
“Yeah,” he said. Soft, and torn loose. Pepper. Rhodey. Yinsen, back in that cave. JARVIS, who Tony could trust to know him better than he did, and protect him anyway, sarcasm and all. Yeah. He knew. And yeah. It was fucking terrifying. How could you be worth that? How could you possibly be worth that?
“I knew you’d know,” Bruce said, quietly, still with that strange smile. “It’s just … sometimes hard to want you to.”
Because that was the problem, with trying to build a safe place, when you weren’t sure it was, yet. That was the problem with letting your control slip, with letting the dams break, with letting yourself show. Because sometimes it backfired, something they hurt you, and sometimes it didn’t, they didn’t, and that was nearly worse.
And Tony had broken Bruce’s control. Not willy-nilly, not all at once, not just for himself, not just as a challenge. But still. But he had. And he was proud of it, he was glad of it, but still.
“I told you first,” he said, quietly. Feeling the weight of the reactor flex with his ribs, feeling the weight in his chest that was always more than physical, now. “I told you what it was, back then. Because you’ve got to … It has to be worth something, you have to make it mean something, or you just … And I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to know I knew. I wanted you to know why.”
Bruce looked at him. Calmer, and watchful, and the anger was gone, now, or at least faded, but not … not because the walls were back up. Not because the control was back. Because … Tony hoped, because right here, right now, the control wasn’t needed.
“Why?” Bruce asked him, softly. “Why me?”
And Tony smiled, lopsided and crooked, the smile that never fit right on his face, the smile that was still the realest one he had. “Because I knew you’d know,” he said. “Not the worth it part. The reason it had to be worth it. I knew you’d know … why you’d have to be so desperate, to make it matter. And I just … wanted. Someone who did. Someone who would.” A quirk of his lip, and fuck, he didn’t know what Bruce was seeing, now, what he was showing, now, but … “I wanted someone who could.”
Because Pepper didn’t, Pepper wouldn’t, he would tear the fucking world apart before he ever let her have to know that, her or Rhodey or JARVIS or any of them. And he’d have done the same for Bruce, if he could have, if he’d known in time, if he could have stopped Bruce from knowing, from having to know, but he couldn’t, he didn’t, he wasn’t, and now … You lived with it, you made fucking compromises, you made it worth it because there was nothing else you could do, except claw it out, claw it open, let yourself fall, let yourself die, and it was fucking horrible, and fucking selfish, but sometimes Tony just wanted someone who knew. Someone who could look at that dark, horrible thing inside him, and know what it felt like.
“You’re not afraid of me,” Bruce said again. Different, now. Soft and knowing. Tony smiled.
“You’re dangerous because you have to be,” he said, quietly. “Because you’ve no choice but to be. I built the armour. Yeah? I made it. I met my id, too, and it burned the world down, and it did it because I chose to. Because I built myself something that was able to.” He smiled, and he thought there was something shining in it, something like the burn of the arc reactor, something like the glowing thing that never let him go. “The Hulk may be the strongest thing in the world, but he’s not more dangerous than me. He’s not worse. And you know.”
And there was Bruce’s smile, and there was something shining in it too, something tearing, that never let you go, and then he was there. Beside Tony, next to him, and his hand was resting on the reactor. His palm, cool and calloused, was pressed against the burning of it, the thing Tony sometimes, desperately, wanted to rip loose. Bruce pressed his hand to it, and watched the thing in Tony’s eyes that didn’t flinch.
“I do,” he said, softly, to Tony. “I do know.”
And Tony smiled, and grinned, and leaned in because he had to, because he needed to, and kissed Bruce on the mouth. Not sex, not desire, those things were for Pepper, and the places in the night where he watched her sleeping face and found it the most precious, terrifying thing in the world, but … Need, and love, another kind of love, and the black, dark things they held between them, and the shining, deadly things beneath their skin, and the thing in Bruce that knew him, that saw him, that wasn’t afraid of him. He kissed Bruce, and Bruce kissed him, and it was chaste, it was need, that was all it was, and it was everything.
“We’ll make it worth it,” he whispered, into the void under Bruce’s mouth. “We’ll fucking make it. Yeah?”
And Bruce didn’t say yes, he didn’t dare, he wasn’t there yet, but he moved to wrap around Tony, moved to hold Tony to him, and pressed another kiss to Tony’s mouth. Soft, dark. A compromise. A promise. We’ll try. At the very least, we’ll try.
Yeah. Yeah. Not safe, never safe. People never were, couldn’t be. But sometimes … you could have the illusion. Sometimes, in those little spaces you made, with someone to watch your back, you could let yourself pretend. And there were days, weeks, hours, endless and shining … where that, of all things, was what you needed. Where that, with the right someone, was what you could have.
He was keeping Bruce. He was saving Bruce. Even if he couldn’t. Even if no-one could. He was Tony Stark, and fuck him, he would. There were times illusion was all you had. But there were times, too, when it was all you needed. He was going to give Bruce that. One way, or another. He was going to make sure Bruce had it.
He was Tony Stark, and if there was no safe place in this world, if there could be no safe place, screw it. He would build one. See if he didn’t.
Illusion. Dreams. But that was the thing. He was the maker of things.
He could make dreams reality.
A/N: You can probably read that last part as slash, if you want. It wasn't, in my head. It was just ... that moment, that has nothing to do with sex, where you need connection. Just for a second. *shrugs*
Safety was an illusion. Wow, that was a depressing thing to say. Unfortunately, didn’t make it untrue.
Tony had figured it out with Obie. That sometimes, no matter how safe you thought you were, no matter how safe you’d made yourself … Sometimes, people slipped through. Sometimes people came in. Natasha. Loki. Fucking Obadiah fucking Stane. Sometimes … there was no such thing as ‘safe’.
But you had to have somewhere, didn’t you. Some place, some time, that even if it wasn’t impregnable, was still … that place where you let go, a little. The fear, the control. That place where, whether it deserved it or not, you could let yourself feel safe. Safer. Something. There had to be a place, or you’d tear yourself apart before long.
For him, it had been the workshop, mostly. Alone, down among the machines, and the plans, and the smell of metal and fire. Even after Afghanistan, even after the other things that smell had come to mean … The workshop was where he was safest. In the heart of JARVIS’ power, surrounded by people he actually understood, and who understood him. None of the perils of humans, of trust so often wrong, of promises he so often couldn’t keep. Just … him, and his thoughts, and the quiet, sarcastic voice of his friend.
There was another, later. When he and Pepper … there was another, curled beside her in the dark, watching her sleep-soft face in the glow of the arc reactor. But that one … there were other fears, in that one. Not that his safety was an illusion, but that hers was. That someone would come for them here, the way Obie had come for him in Malibu, and he wouldn’t be the one to fall. He wouldn’t be the one lying there with a gape in his chest, and terror in his eyes.
He didn’t stay with her, sometimes. Slipped away to the workshop, slipped away from the rawness of that, from the terror of that. He didn’t always stay with her. And she … understood that. She did. She followed him, sometimes, slipped downstairs to watch him, to stand in a pale robe in the corner of the shop and watch his back. Sometimes, when he was planning and not forging, to wrap her arms around him from behind, rest her chin on his shoulder. Not saying anything. Just … reminding him. That she was there, and always would be.
Holy fuck, she terrified him. She was joy and comfort and raw fear intermingled, an electric tangle that he had never before felt in his life, a surging, living thing that scared the fuck out of him. He loved her more than life, and there were days when he thought that was just as well, because he wasn’t at all sure that kind of love was survivable.
Pepper wasn’t ‘safe’, was his point. She was just the part of not safe that … kind of made the whole thing worth it.
The workshop was what ‘safe’ meant. That one place where, even if it was an illusion, he could let go, a little bit. The workshop, and the interior of the suit. Where he could put himself in JARVIS’ hands, and know that whatever happened, someone had his back. Someone was watching over him, enough that he could let go, that little bit. Drop down the public face, the pretense, the part that was always calculating who, and what, and why.
And there were days, weeks, hours when he needed that. Holy shit, did he ever. Days where, without that, he would have … well.
Everyone needed that. Something like it. Some part of it. Some place to hide, someone to trust, somewhere you could just … let go. Not be you, for a while. Or maybe be more you, the real you. Not be always watching. Not be always waiting.
It took him a while to realise that Bruce didn’t. That Bruce didn’t have that place, that Bruce didn’t ever let go, that Bruce was never not controlled. That what Bruce feared was seeping under his own skin, and there was no-one, not one, that he could trust to manage that. To keep that. Who the hell could you trust, to keep you safe from the things inside your own head?
… No, really. Because Tony … wouldn’t mind knowing that, either.
And, okay, so Tony’s first instinct, faced with that, faced with a control that deep, was to want to break it. Tony’s first instinct, faced with a control like Bruce’s, was to take it as a challenge. And maybe he could lie to himself, maybe he could tell himself it was for Bruce’s own good, that the man needed to lighten up some, but …
Tony wasn’t actually as blind as he sometimes seemed. He knew, he did know, that that would be one of the biggest lies he’d ever told himself, and trust him, he’d told himself some whoppers. He mostly recognised them via JARVIS. The little lies he told himself, JARVIS responded with sarcasm. The big ones … would be met by silence, as if JARVIS couldn’t even process that magnitude of stupidity.
It did occur to him, that most people didn’t leave their self-understanding up to their AIs, but he consoled himself with the fact that he was the only person in the world who had an AI like JARVIS, so it wasn’t like they could.
So he couldn’t just break Bruce’s control willy-nilly. It was sort of like breaking a firewall, he told himself. Sometimes you could brute-force it, but most of the time, it required a little … finesse. Something that would leave the best part of the defense upright, so things like, you know, the hulking great rage monster didn’t break loose, but at the same time, something that let … the right things through. Something that would let you at least feel like you were letting go, something like that small slump of his shoulders when he stepped into JARVIS’ domain, and felt the knots in his spine slip gently loose.
Something that would let the illusion in. Just for a moment.
And to do that, he needed to lure Bruce out. The real Bruce, not the public face. (And not the Hulk, either - the Hulk was also Bruce, but being the real you didn’t necessarily involve dropping right to id-level. And yes, he realised the irony in him saying that).
He figured he’d start with sarcasm. Hey, it worked with JARVIS, with Pepper. Rhodey, too, back in MIT when everyone had thought he was this stuck-up little rich shit who’d crumble if you said a word against him. He’d riled Rhodey up to the point where Rhodey couldn’t stop himself, and then he’d grinned at him. Honestly happy, because Tony’d been surrounded by false smiles and false faces since he was four, and he honestly hadn’t cared if Rhodey thought he was an utter little shit, he’d just wanted something real. And Rhodey, after a moment of incandescent rage (wow, no, seriously, Rhodey in a temper was impressive) and about five days of belligerent sulking, had … Well. Become Tony’s first real friend.
Nothing like encouraging people to be sarcastic to your face to make them feel better about you, was his point. None of that polite deference, rigid control. Make them feel like they could call you an idiot to your face. Like they were allowed to be smart around you. Nothing like letting people know they could argue with you without consequence to draw out what they really thought.
The results weren’t always good, of course. Sometimes pushing people for what they really thought wasn’t the best plan, when it turned out what they really thought was that you were a horrible, worthless piece of shit that they’d sooner stomp on than anything (or, sometimes, a worthless piece of shit that they would cheerfully murder, Obie, fuck). But, hey, better to know that than not, right?
And Bruce … Bruce, when you pushed him, when you let him feel he was allowed, had a sort of awesome sarcastic streak. Honestly, we were talking JARVIS levels, here. No, really. JARVIS was impressed, that’s how on-the-nose Bruce could be. And sometimes that was worrying, because sometimes you could see it coming from somewhere black and bubbling, a flashpoint wrestled down into dry wit, instead, but …
Well. That was the point, wasn’t it? That Bruce could start letting go, letting some of that out. And when it came to matching things that bubbled up out of a place of pain, of black anger … well. He was Tony fucking Stark, wasn’t he? He knew all about that.
That being said, he hadn’t been prepared for what happened the day the first dam broke. Not the one that washed all the way back to the Hulk, never that one, given a choice Bruce would go to his grave before letting that one go, but … A dam nonetheless. A barrier, rigid control, across what turned out to be mostly anger. Mostly pain. Locked down in layers, shimmering through everything Bruce saw and said and did.
Holy shit, when he said he was always angry? He wasn’t kidding.
And Tony honestly had faltered in the face of it, for a moment. Probably not for the reasons Bruce thought, though.
“Do you think this is easy?” Bruce snapped. Sheared past patience, for once, and Tony’d honestly been proud of that, of reaching in that far, for a second. Look. He wasn’t always on the ball, okay? “Look, for some reason, maybe you’re honestly not afraid of me. Good for you. I am, okay?”
Tony blinked at him, for a second. Not answering, because … well. Aside from ‘what do you mean’, which was never a good question to ask, what was there to say?
Bruce just looked at him, for a long, long minute. Scrubbing his hand through his hair, visible anger. Frustration. Exhaustion, too. “Do you have any idea?” he asked, eventually. Turning away, shoulders locked solid, so tight they had to be painful. “Do you have any fucking clue, what this is like? Having this thing inside you, this thing you never asked for, this thing you can’t ever get rid of, this thing that won’t fucking let you go! This is not a privilege, okay! I don’t … I don’t care, I …”
Tony ... felt his jaw set. Felt the air change, felt something immovable lock itself into his spine, something icy seeping into his chest. Under the reactor. Under that … exact place. That … hadn’t been what he expected. He hadn’t been ready. Not for that.
“Do you think you can make this better,” Bruce snarled, exhaustedly, to an empty corner of the lab (well, save for JARVIS, but JARVIS was taking this opportunity to be very, very silent). “Do you think just because you’re not afraid of me, that you can … can make it bearable, having him inside me?”
Tony ... swallowed. Hard. “I thought … Didn’t you guys, you and him … I thought you’d reached a compromise, or something. With the … you know. Alien invasion, and stuff.”
Bruce turned to him, then. Turned, and maybe faltered, a little, at whatever was on Tony’s face, whatever was showing in him, that moment, but … “A compromise,” he said, with a black little curl of a lip. Dark, dark humour. Bruce had a lot of that, too. “Yes. But that doesn’t … I didn’t want this. I never wanted it.” A strange toss of his head, trying to look away, shove something back, something. Some aborted, impossible gesture. “I don’t want this,” he said, soft and low, shaking with old rage, and so much pain. “This thing under my skin. I don’t want it. I don’t want to have to … to reach a fucking compromise, okay? I don’t want … to have to be glad, when one stupid person lacks the survival instincts to be scared of me. I don’t want this thing, under my skin. I want it out.”
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t go there, Tony thought, silently. Don’t go where you’re going. Don’t.
“It saved my life,” Bruce said, softly. “It saved your life. I get that. I do. And you’re not afraid of it. Him. I … don’t get that, as such, but okay. Fine. But I still …” He shook his head, smiling soft and wet. “I had a life, once, you know? I had a life, and it was good, and people weren’t afraid of me, and I could stay anywhere I wanted to stay, and there wasn’t this thing crawling under my skin that I can’t. Get. Out. And I want to, sometimes, I just want to claw the Other Guy out from my skin, but I can’t, because he comes, he does come, then, but he doesn’t leave, and there are times when I wake up and there are bodies, and I just … I had a life. Once. I had that. I had …”
“I didn’t,” Tony interrupted. Hard and wet, through a jaw still locked stiff. Chest heaving slightly. He could feel the weight of the arc reactor moving with the flexing of his ribs. “I didn’t.”
Bruce … paused. Looked up at him, brows wrinkling a little in confusion. Tony … shook his head, hands fluttering in vague, stabbing motions around him.
“I didn’t have a life,” he explained, hushed, savage. “That’s what I thought. Just this … empty thing. I had a week to live. In Afghanistan. I had a week. And I was fine with that. Just a week, and people would stop … clawing at me, and hurting me, and the thing, in my chest, would go away.”
He kept his hands down, kept them away from his chest, from the sensation, the vivid sense memory, of clawing at it. In Afghanistan. In Malibu, while it was poisoning him. He kept his hands down, and met the suddenly alarmed look in Bruce’s eyes head on. Because that was the thing, wasn’t it, when someone was free to argue with you. You could argue back. You could be angry back.
“Do I have any idea?” he asked, stalking forward a little bit. He wasn’t sure what was in his face. Not a threat. Never that. He could never. But something. Something that made Bruce shy nervously. Not in fear. Something, shame, pain, desperation, something. Don’t. Don’t tell him this. Please.
Too late.
“Do you know how many times I wanted it out?” Tony whispered, soft and venomous and pleading. Because yes, he understood, yes, he had an idea. And yes, Bruce did too, and for some reason, right now, Tony wanted that. He wanted that angry thing inside Bruce, because he felt it too, and he wanted someone. “Do you know how many times I thought about just … clawing it out, pulling it free? You tried to shoot yourself in the head. Mine, it’s so much easier. I could do it in a second. And I know what it feels like, what it felt like, I know what it feels like to die, but still. Because I didn’t ask for it. Because someone put it there, inside me, and I can’t get it out.”
“Tony,” Bruce said, softly. Soft and raw, and this was pain, not anger. This was raw understanding, and Tony could understand why Bruce shied from it, because it was painful, the most blisteringly painful thing he’d ever felt, something not safe, but still. But still.
“We didn’t ask for them,” he said. Hard and savage. Because he’d wanted the thing underneath Bruce’s control, he’d wanted something real, and it cut him through, but it was still better. Like Rhodey, like Pepper. Things that weren’t safe, but still better. “They saved our lives, but we didn’t ask for them, and there are times when you can hear it humming under your skin, the thing shoved inside you, and all you want is to pull it out, but you can’t. So you fucking live it, make it something useful, make it have a reason, because what else can you do? You think I don’t know that? Of all people. You think I don’t know?”
“No,” Bruce said. Cut in. Sudden, quiet. Hard. “No,” he said, and there was … something surprised in it. “I knew you knew,” he said, as if he was only just figuring it out. “I … knew it.” Almost wondering, and suddenly there was a strange smile, floating over the anger, the pain, the flinching thing. A strange smile, because it wasn’t quite as black, as Bruce’s usual.
“What?” Tony asked. Feeling the anger stagger, feeling the black surging falter. The icy thing in his chest ebb, a little bit.
Bruce shook his head, backing off a bit, retreating back from Tony. Which … hadn’t been part of the plan, hadn’t been what Tony meant. The point wasn’t to make Bruce afraid of him. Tony started to move after him, and then Bruce stopped.
“Every moment,” he said. Voice shaking, chin firming. “Every moment, every day. Whenever I remember. That I didn’t choose this. That I can’t stop it. That it’s never … never going away. Every moment I remember that. I can’t … I can’t.”
Tony … flinched, and growled, and came forward on the balls of his feet. Leaned towards Bruce, shifted instinctively as though to lunge for him. Bruce looked at him. Bruce smiled at him.
“I want to trust him,” he said, softly. “I want to be able to trust him, to feel like he’s part of me, for him to be … something I can control. I want that. But … I want him gone, too. I want the thing, the radiation, the monster, him, out of me. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop wanting that. And … he knows it. That’s why we can’t … why we’re not …”
He stopped, for a second. And Tony would say something, would do something, but … what the fuck do you say to that?
“And then there’s you,” Bruce managed, eventually. “You, and Betty, and maybe some others, and you … You look at him. And you see me. And I … hate that, I hate it, but …” His fists clenched, silently. “Have you ever … had someone look at the worst parts of you. Look right at them. And still … think them, think you, worthwhile?”
Tony flinched. Down to the bone. He flinched, for that.
“Yeah,” he said. Soft, and torn loose. Pepper. Rhodey. Yinsen, back in that cave. JARVIS, who Tony could trust to know him better than he did, and protect him anyway, sarcasm and all. Yeah. He knew. And yeah. It was fucking terrifying. How could you be worth that? How could you possibly be worth that?
“I knew you’d know,” Bruce said, quietly, still with that strange smile. “It’s just … sometimes hard to want you to.”
Because that was the problem, with trying to build a safe place, when you weren’t sure it was, yet. That was the problem with letting your control slip, with letting the dams break, with letting yourself show. Because sometimes it backfired, something they hurt you, and sometimes it didn’t, they didn’t, and that was nearly worse.
And Tony had broken Bruce’s control. Not willy-nilly, not all at once, not just for himself, not just as a challenge. But still. But he had. And he was proud of it, he was glad of it, but still.
“I told you first,” he said, quietly. Feeling the weight of the reactor flex with his ribs, feeling the weight in his chest that was always more than physical, now. “I told you what it was, back then. Because you’ve got to … It has to be worth something, you have to make it mean something, or you just … And I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to know I knew. I wanted you to know why.”
Bruce looked at him. Calmer, and watchful, and the anger was gone, now, or at least faded, but not … not because the walls were back up. Not because the control was back. Because … Tony hoped, because right here, right now, the control wasn’t needed.
“Why?” Bruce asked him, softly. “Why me?”
And Tony smiled, lopsided and crooked, the smile that never fit right on his face, the smile that was still the realest one he had. “Because I knew you’d know,” he said. “Not the worth it part. The reason it had to be worth it. I knew you’d know … why you’d have to be so desperate, to make it matter. And I just … wanted. Someone who did. Someone who would.” A quirk of his lip, and fuck, he didn’t know what Bruce was seeing, now, what he was showing, now, but … “I wanted someone who could.”
Because Pepper didn’t, Pepper wouldn’t, he would tear the fucking world apart before he ever let her have to know that, her or Rhodey or JARVIS or any of them. And he’d have done the same for Bruce, if he could have, if he’d known in time, if he could have stopped Bruce from knowing, from having to know, but he couldn’t, he didn’t, he wasn’t, and now … You lived with it, you made fucking compromises, you made it worth it because there was nothing else you could do, except claw it out, claw it open, let yourself fall, let yourself die, and it was fucking horrible, and fucking selfish, but sometimes Tony just wanted someone who knew. Someone who could look at that dark, horrible thing inside him, and know what it felt like.
“You’re not afraid of me,” Bruce said again. Different, now. Soft and knowing. Tony smiled.
“You’re dangerous because you have to be,” he said, quietly. “Because you’ve no choice but to be. I built the armour. Yeah? I made it. I met my id, too, and it burned the world down, and it did it because I chose to. Because I built myself something that was able to.” He smiled, and he thought there was something shining in it, something like the burn of the arc reactor, something like the glowing thing that never let him go. “The Hulk may be the strongest thing in the world, but he’s not more dangerous than me. He’s not worse. And you know.”
And there was Bruce’s smile, and there was something shining in it too, something tearing, that never let you go, and then he was there. Beside Tony, next to him, and his hand was resting on the reactor. His palm, cool and calloused, was pressed against the burning of it, the thing Tony sometimes, desperately, wanted to rip loose. Bruce pressed his hand to it, and watched the thing in Tony’s eyes that didn’t flinch.
“I do,” he said, softly, to Tony. “I do know.”
And Tony smiled, and grinned, and leaned in because he had to, because he needed to, and kissed Bruce on the mouth. Not sex, not desire, those things were for Pepper, and the places in the night where he watched her sleeping face and found it the most precious, terrifying thing in the world, but … Need, and love, another kind of love, and the black, dark things they held between them, and the shining, deadly things beneath their skin, and the thing in Bruce that knew him, that saw him, that wasn’t afraid of him. He kissed Bruce, and Bruce kissed him, and it was chaste, it was need, that was all it was, and it was everything.
“We’ll make it worth it,” he whispered, into the void under Bruce’s mouth. “We’ll fucking make it. Yeah?”
And Bruce didn’t say yes, he didn’t dare, he wasn’t there yet, but he moved to wrap around Tony, moved to hold Tony to him, and pressed another kiss to Tony’s mouth. Soft, dark. A compromise. A promise. We’ll try. At the very least, we’ll try.
Yeah. Yeah. Not safe, never safe. People never were, couldn’t be. But sometimes … you could have the illusion. Sometimes, in those little spaces you made, with someone to watch your back, you could let yourself pretend. And there were days, weeks, hours, endless and shining … where that, of all things, was what you needed. Where that, with the right someone, was what you could have.
He was keeping Bruce. He was saving Bruce. Even if he couldn’t. Even if no-one could. He was Tony Stark, and fuck him, he would. There were times illusion was all you had. But there were times, too, when it was all you needed. He was going to give Bruce that. One way, or another. He was going to make sure Bruce had it.
He was Tony Stark, and if there was no safe place in this world, if there could be no safe place, screw it. He would build one. See if he didn’t.
Illusion. Dreams. But that was the thing. He was the maker of things.
He could make dreams reality.
A/N: You can probably read that last part as slash, if you want. It wasn't, in my head. It was just ... that moment, that has nothing to do with sex, where you need connection. Just for a second. *shrugs*
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