kore_logs | it's a blacked out blur

Since he got him into bed, Tony’s been listening for Bruce to wake up. As far as he knows, there’s no time limit on how long he can be unconscious after a transformation and while he is capable of sitting in one spot for a prolonged period, he recalls more than a week spent obsessively watching Bruce as he slept. It’s not quite crystal clear, there are still some fuzzy spots in his memory, but enough has come back that he remembers the vampire incident and the way he acted during it.

He’s in the kitchen when he hears the footsteps that either mean that Bruce is awake or someone broke into the house. He suspects the former, and that suspicion is confirmed a moment later when he hears him say his name.

“In the kitchen,” he calls back. “I’m making tea. Come in here and have some.”

That’s true. He is making tea. What he doesn’t say is that he’s been doing it for the last hour, heating and reheating the water, wanting to make sure that it was warm and ready whenever Bruce finally regained consciousness.

Tea? That sounds really nice and might help the pressure in his head. Once it calms down, he should try to poke at it and see what he can remember, but not right now. He shuffles into the kitchen and digs up a groggy smile for him as he leans on the counter near him.

"Hey," he says thickly. "Mm. What happened?" Reaching up, he rubs his hand over his hair, which is more of a rat's nest than usual before he's had time to comb it and try to tame it with gel. He drops his hand and squints, but he's not really looking at the room; he's trying to backtrack.

"I don't remember... Did I Hulk out?" ...should he be panicking? That's a question that should make him panic. He doesn't remember Hulking out? Now that his brain is working again, it's connecting how bad that is.

Tony glances at him when he walks in, then does a double-take as he realizes what he’s seeing. For a moment that seems far longer than it actually is, he stares at him, watches him rubbing his hair through his hair – his hair that he has again like he never buzzed it off – like he’s never seen him before. He knows that time is funky here. He knew it before he went home and he knows it now, but seeing it like this makes it real in a way that it hadn’t been before. He’d just seen Bruce a few days ago, and he most definitely didn’t look like this.

“Uh… What?” Tony’s brilliantly eloquent contribution to the conversation is so lackluster that even he realizes it. Clearing his throat, he tries again, shooting Bruce looks that are meant to be nonchalant and are so blatant that his attempt fails dramatically. “The—Yeah. The Hulk was here. He…”

Why did he shave his head?

“Listen. Bruce, I need you to promise me something.” Tony’s voice sharpens, becomes grave with the import of what he’s about to impart. “This haircut? I need you to keep it. Trust me. This is like, life or death, okay?”

Bruce is still foggily working through what maybe happened, but Tony's confusion draws his attention. He relaxes, he thinks, at the compliment(?) to his hair and gives a short laugh, but he's getting the impression that something is wrong. He doesn't remember Hulking out; that's huge, that's bad.

He's still confusedly laughing at Tony, when his eyes fall to his chest and he freezes. He should be able to see the reactor through his shirt. Eyes flicking up to Tony again, Bruce's frame tightens and he can't even fight the suspicion in his eyes. This isn't Tony.

"Who are you?"

God, he feels like he's going to be sick, but he isn't. He's not going to be sick until he figures out who this person is and what they did with Tony, where Tony is, what's going on. And if he has to, he'll Hulk out again to find him.

“What?” Blindsided by the question, Tony takes a step backward. He doesn’t feel his hip bang into the counter, doesn’t even realize that his momentum has been stalled, as the unreality of the question leaves him reeling. He thought Bruce was okay. The Hulk was fine. A second ago, Bruce was fine too. Now he doesn’t remember him?

“What do you mean, who am I? Who do you think I am?” Confusion and alarm vie for dominance in his voice. Almost viciously, he shakes his head, refusing to believe that this, whatever this is, is happening.

He pushes off from the counter and crosses the distance between them in three large, quickly taken steps. “It’s me. You just said my name like two seconds ago. Tony. Tony Stark. Iron Man?” His lips thin for a second, the frown so automatic he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. “Sometimes. Not so much any—”

Squashing the rambling, he leans forward, worry replacing his disorientation. “Bruce, are you okay?”

Now he moves, changing his body position to something far more defensive, not allowing Tony any in because this isn't Tony. Sure, it sounds and walks like him, but -- he doublechecks quickly, but Tony's only wearing one shirt, and there's no glow of the reactor. Bruce isn't buying it, and he leans away from him.

"No, you're not Tony Stark. You look and sound like him, so kudos to however you figured that out, but you forgot something." He makes a face, wrinkling his nose. "Something pretty easy to fake too, so you should feel bad about that. Seriously, you couldn't have put some LED lights under your shirt?"

But enough ribbing of the Tony Imposter. He sets his jaw.

"So who are you? Or, if you don't feel like answering that, where's Tony?" The defensiveness slips away, replaced by determination.

"Or if you don't want to talk to me, I can let the other guy back out." There's a viciousness to the glittering in his eyes, almost like he's too eager to threaten that. "You probably want to stick to dealing with me."

Edited 2013-05-14 02:40 (UTC)

The situation goes from surreal to Twilight Zone so fast that it leaves Tony’s head spinning. Bruce is leaning away from him. Bruce is insisting that he’s not him. He’s talking about the—

“The arc reactor?”

It’s a touchy subject. It shouldn’t be. He should be over it by now. He’s the one that decided to do it in the first place, but something sick and uneasy twists in his gut at Bruce’s reaction to its absence. Something that feels like the shame and embarrassment that comes from letting someone down in the worst way.

The hand he’s lifting to touch Bruce drops to his side, and despite the threat, Tony gives him a smile that’s all weary resignation. “See? That’s why you shouldn’t fall asleep on me when I’m telling you a story. You miss the whole point.”

Feeling just as uncomfortable as he had three years ago when he’d shown Obadiah the reactor, Tony pulls up his t-shirt, revealing the pale circle of newly grafted skin that’s replaced the circle of light. It’s still healing, there’s still some redness around the edges, but it’s been long enough that it’s not a gruesome sight.

“It’s gone. I had the shrapnel removed, so I didn’t need it anymore. And with the suits destroyed, there wasn’t much point in keeping it."

He's still resisting, skeptical even as Tony lifts his shirt up, but that is undeniably a healing chest wound. He studies it carefully, not budging from his space, and he'd like to think he's keeping his expression blank, but a whole host of emotions is flickering in his eyes. Shock, first of all, and then doubt, and then concern, and confusion.

"I'm still working on remembering what happens when I Hulk out. Whatever you told me, I don't remember." That's what Tony had meant when he said Bruce slept through it, right?

"What are -- " He shakes his head. "There are no suits. What are you talking about? Either you're someone pretending to be Tony, or you're a Tony the scientists have screwed with. So which is it? And don't lie to me because, boy, did you pick the wrong person in my life to mess with."

“I’m not—What?”

He lets the shirt fall, abandoning it for raking his hands through his hair. He’s feeling just unsettled enough that Bruce’s insistence that he’s not himself is starting to get to him. What if it’s the scientists? What if he’d never been home? He’d been hallucinating JARVIS and his workshop before. It’s possible that everything that’s happened – the Mandarin, Killian, Extremis – could be a trick.

Maybe it has been only four days. Maybe he and the Hulk have been prisoners of the scientists. Maybe they’ve fucked with his head, ripped out his arc reactor, left him with a collection of memories that are completely fake.

“It’s me. I swear, it’s me. I’m just—I’ve been gone. We’ve both been gone. Everyone I’ve talked to has told me that. That it’s been days and we’ve been gone. The Hulk said it was scientists, that they took us and…” Trailing off, he holds out his hands, palms up in surrender, and takes a step backward.

“I thought… I was home. I thought I was home, but I swear, I’m still me, Bruce.”

Bruce is still hesitant until Tony says that, and then he relaxes -- just a fraction. Galen went away and came back having said time passed for him back home, and that before that happened, he and Jesse were from different points in time. Is that what this is? Did Tony go home while Bruce went to -- to what? To the scientists?

"You went home?" His eyes fall to where his reactor used to be, and he bites his lip. Tony got rid of the reactor? That's -- That's good, better for his health, but Bruce can't help but feel marginally more alone now. That's terrible and he resolves never to admit it.

"How long were you there?"

“About a year? It’s a little—I wasn’t keeping track. Especially toward the end. Everything got so bad, I…” He shakes his head, skirting away from the topic of home. It’s possible that it’s a moot point anyway. If he hasn’t been home, if it’s all just an illusion, then none of it matters.

The likelihood of that, Tony knows, is slim. It would be good if it had been an illusion, and he’s coming to learn that he doesn’t get good things in his life. Not for long. Somehow, some way, they get taken from him. By life, by old enemies he never knew he had, by his own foolishness.

He doesn’t want to think of home.

“You shaved your head.” There’s accusation there, as Tony finds it easier to harangue him on this point than to address his conflicting feelings about everything else. “Why would you do that? It was like looking at a mid-mid-life crisis. Don’t do that. You look so nice with hair.”

His eyebrows lift when Tony says it was a year. A whole year away from here, and everything was bad? If Bruce didn't go back, if he didn't remember, then what happened between them back home? Did Tony remember his time here? This is so much to take in that Tony rambling about his hair is a relief, a break in the tension that lets Bruce step forward. He's not unwinding yet; there's still tension in his frame as he closes the distance Tony put between them.

"I was probably tired of combing it." Slowly, he reaches out to touch Tony's arm, lightly at first before he winds up sliding his hand down his forearm to take his hand.

"Tony..." Now that he's starting to accept it as possible that this Tony is really Tony, he has to wonder if he's still his Tony or if... Who knows what happened?

"It's been a year?" He breathes in slow and exhales.

“Okay? You know I’m not a pod person now?”

For a moment, Tony’s hand is limp in Bruce’s as he looks at him, waiting for him to start accusing him of not being him again. There’s only so much of that he can take before he starts believing it, before he wants to believe it, and he has a feeling that that will just end up causing more problems than it will solve. Then the moment passes.

His fingers tighten and he finds himself clinging to Bruce’s hand like it’s a lifeline in the middle of a storm. “Yeah. Something like that. I lost a little time with the whole—The surgery and the—”

Leaning forward, he takes in his hair, the lines around his eyes, all of the tiny little details that he’s been categorizing and storing away in his memory since he met him. “It hasn’t happened yet for you, has it? That’s what’s with your hair. Listen. When you see on the news that they blew up my house and the whole cliff face fell into the ocean? I’m not actually dead, okay? I’m just. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Edited 2013-05-14 22:52 (UTC)

He feels bad for reacting the way he did, but then he thinks it's justified. Who knows what this place can do, and they just had a wacky everyone-is-something-else thing. He's -- okay, maybe he's still scared or nervous and is going to take the rest of the day to make sure this is really Tony, but he'll do it quietly and while letting Tony cling all he wants.

When Tony asks him if "it" hasn't happened, Bruce really has no way of knowing, but the last thing he remembers is going to bed here, with Tony, so he's pretty sure the answer is no and he starts to tell Tony as much when he keeps going. Now it's Bruce's turn to cling.

"You -- oh, okay. That shouldn't be a problem." He needs a second to start to absorb this, and he thinks Tony could need one too maybe, so he nods at the tea.

"Let's get the tea and we can talk on the couch."

“Is that the new code for smelling each other?”

He realizes that it’s neither the time nor the place to make jokes. Not after dropping a bizarre bomb on Bruce like that. But these are the moments when he can’t help himself, and he remembers suddenly, very vividly, a conversation they’d had in the kitchen after the vampire incident. About what he’d done – he’s not prepared to deal with that yet and mentally skirts around it – and about vampire aphrodisiacs.

“Sitting on the couch? Okay.”

The mugs are on the counter and there’s a teabag in each, but the water’s still in the kettle and that’s on the stove. Giving Bruce’s hand a tug, Tony moves over to get it and pour the water, unwilling to let go.

“I made a lot of really stupid mistakes in my life, and in the last year, they all came back and bit me in the ass. That was just one of the most explosive moments. Pun intended.”

"The last thing I remember was going to sleep with you. I haven't had time to miss how you smell."

Jokes are okay, in Bruce's opinion; they release pressure and tension that could otherwise reach a dangerous breaking point. He follows when Tony tugs him, though he's still unsettled. This is Tony, but is it even his Tony, what could've changed while he was gone? What was he himself like? Were they together? What about Pepper? Plus, also, everything about how Tony almost died and his house is in the ocean and how everything was terrible. He has too many questions, so it's better if he lets Tony start speaking first.

"But only one of?" He takes his mug and starts them toward the sofa.

“Yeah? That’s probably a good thing.” Picking up his mug, he stares down at it for a moment, then follows Bruce into the living room. “Actually that’s a really good thing. I wish I could say the same thing.”

Where does he even start with this? The last time he told him, Bruce had fallen asleep. Granted, this isn’t the same situation. Tony doesn’t intend to dump all of his emotional problems on him on top of the story of how his life fell apart. If he gives him the Cliff Notes version, chance are good that maybe he won’t pass out from boredom.

“You want the tally in chronological order? Um, let’s see. Killian’s people blowing up the Chinese Theater and almost killing Happy. My house. Some diner in Rose Hill, Tennessee. Air Force One. A shipyard rig off the coast of Miami. My suits.” Reaching the sofa, Tony slumps down into it, managing not to spill the tea, and tugs at Bruce’s hand to make him sit with him. “I’m sure there were a couple more explosions. It’s kind of a blur. There were a lot of them.”

That's definitely an impressive amount of explosions. Tony's been involved in more separate explosion incidents than the Hulk, and that's saying a lot. He sits next to him and takes a sip from his mug before he sets it on the coffee table and gives Tony his attention back, and the whole while he doesn't let go of his hand. Bruce maybe still needs some personal space while he adjusts, but he can hold Tony's hand; that one's very doable.

"Okay... Let's stick with that chronology." He lifts his eyebrows. "Who's Killian? Why'd they blow up the theater?"

“A weasel who tried to get me to fund his stupid think tank thirteen years ago.” If he could go back, he’d have gone up on that roof and pushed the bastard off. Let him see desperation then. “Aldrich Killian. Formed a group called AIM. I wasn’t impressed by his work, I was actually drunk at the time, and I stood him up for meeting he tried to badger me into attending. So he got a little crazy, got some help from an old one-night stand, and he branched out. Formed the Ten Rings.”

He starts to lift his free hand, intending to tap his finger against the reactor, only to remember that it isn’t there and drop it again. “He came back, tried to pitch his idea to Pepper. And woo her or something, I don’t know. Happy said he was showing her his brain. I wasn’t listening. Anyway, he was pedaling a faulty supersoldier serum and backing a terrorist organization that was attacking America. Swell guy. He’s dead now. Pepper killed him. But he made a huge mess before he kicked the bucket.”

"Aldrich Killian," he murmurs, frowning. "Sounds familiar. I definitely think I've heard of AIM."

All of that sounds awful, and he squeezes Tony's hand while he takes it all in and sorts it. The supersoldier serum was maybe the worst thing to happen to the world, in Bruce's opinion, no offense to Steve. But every attempt at recreating it in the time since has blown up successively in everyone's face, touched so many other lives, corrupted so many men.

"I take it there's no more AIM to hear of, though. What are the Ten Rings?"

“Honestly, I don’t know. AIM’s big. It’s not just a think tank anymore. Now they’re making stuff for the government, redoing War Machine and turning it into Iron Patriot. What I don’t know is how deep AIM’s involvement with Killian’s terrorism goes. I would’ve looked into it, but between making the reversal serum, surgery, trying to get my shit out of ocean, I just didn’t have time.”

The resources he once had at his disposal are gone. In time, without interruptions, he’ll be back to working order, but he’s not there yet and it galls him.

“Ten Rings was the group that captured me in Afghanistan. I don’t know how much Killian had to do with it. He’d probably like to say he masterminded the whole thing, but I never saw him when I was there. Just a, I don’t know, a grunt.”

"Wow." Bruce shakes his head, and he thinks he's finally processed this enough and accepted him as Tony enough to move a little closer, pulling their joined hands into his lap as he leans against Tony's side. "He really knew how to hold a grudge, didn't he?"

But what he heard in there was something that he thinks Tony may have left out in the telling of everything else, and he looks at him carefully, eyebrow raised.

"What's that about a reversal serum?"

“Maya, the one-night stand from thirteen years ago, couldn’t get the formula right. That’s why it was so unstable. But I did back then. I was drunk and didn’t really remember it, but once I got to thinking about it again, I reworked the code, fixed the broken equations, added the missing pieces. Once I did that, had a viable, stable, actually working version of the serum, reverse engineering it was easy. That and I had incentive.”

There’s only so long Tony can go before cracking a joke, and since this is somewhat of a maudlin, morbid topic, his attempt at humor is too. “If I didn’t do it, Pepper would’ve exploded eventually. I’d’ve been out a CEO, would’ve had to go into work again like a normal person. That wasn’t happening.”

Looking at Bruce in considering silence for a second, Tony squeezes his hand. “You know, the last time I told you about all of this, you fell asleep. Right at the beginning. Are you doing that now? Are you getting sleepy?”

Bruce hears two things. One, that Tony found a way to reverse the effects of an attempted super soldier serum; and two, that he perfected a super soldier serum. After that he's pretty sure he hears that Pepper had been injected with the unstable serum, but at that point there were dozens of alarms and a high pitched wailing noise in his head that he's just imagining. It's the sound of everything he's been afraid of and everything he hoped for merging into one moment and exploding.

"Am I -- " He blinks and shakes his head, and if he looks like he's just been smacked and then kicked and then pushed around on the ground for a little while, well, that's how he feels.

"You have a working super soldier serum." He looks up again, fear written on his features, but the mask slips for a second. "And a way to reverse it?"

He has no way of knowing what this serum is or what it does. It's probably miles away from Bruce's research. But what if it could be applicable? What if -- what if it could cure him, too?

There’s something flippant and irreverent hovering on his tongue, but one look at the expression on Bruce’s face and Tony knows that he can never say it. Because he knows what this is. He knows what that is lurking beneath the surface of Bruce’s eyes.

“Yeah. I do.”

He doesn’t have a sample here, but with time and effort he could make it. The formula itself is stored in his mind, locked tightly in the vault where nothing truly important is ever forgotten.

“Extremis recodes the body’s genetic structure, rewrites it to the specifications of the author. AIM was using it like a B-movie. Super strength, super speed, breathing fire. But it’s more than that. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination, which, in retrospect, is good that Maya never realized it. The reversal works. I used it on Pepper. She’s fine. One hundred percent normal human.”

And by the way, I promised the Hulk that I would make a batch of it and take it. No, that isn’t something he’s going to say. Not now. Possibly not ever, until it’s too late and he’s already dosed himself with it.

“I have it with me, if you want to take a look at it.”

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