kore_logs | it's a blacked out blur

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.”

The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. In short, Bruce is terrified of this serum and what it can do, what it will do to society. How many Blonskys will there be? How many Killians? How much in-fighting and out-fighting, and what will happen when people start creating weapons to take on unkillable super-soldiers? This is the way the world ends, just like this.

But he could find a cure. It rewrites genetic code -- he'd have to run tests, but what if -- what if this is what he's been needing to rewrite his DNA?

Bruce can't breathe. He blinks slowly, and then sucks in a breath because he really, honestly, hadn't been breathing. Closing his eyes, he counts backward from ten.

"Tony, does anyone else have this serum? Are they producing it back home? What -- What's going to happen -- ?" He squeezes his hand tightly.

Embarrassing as it is to admit it, even if only to himself, Tony’s had a lot of panic attacks in his life. He recognizes the signs now, both in himself and other people. Bruce doesn’t look like he’s having an attack, but he looks like he is panicking, and the grip he has on his hand only serves to reinforce that belief.

“Hey, Bruce.” With his other hand, Tony grips him on the shoulder and gives him just the tiniest shake. “Breathe. I can’t remember where we keep the paper bags, but if we have some, I’ll go get one.”

It’s a bad attempt at humor, he knows, but it’s becoming clear to him that maybe he should have presented the good news before the bad news.

“No one has it but me. After Killian, I had JARVIS search AIM’s databases. Maya’s. Anyone connected with them. Maya guarded her secrets, she didn’t give it to anyone else. She’s dead. Everyone who’d been given the serum is dead and their bodies have been destroyed. The databases are wiped. There’s only one person who knows what it is and how to make it. That’s me. It’s always been me. And I’m sure as hell not going to weaponize it.”

No, it's too late. The serum exists, and someone's going to figure it out, and even if they don't? More Blonskys, more Killians, more Bruces in an attempt to figure it out. And Tony will be at the center.

Bruce realizes belatedly that he's being too panicked, that he is setting himself up for some kind of an attack, and he breathes again, and again, going slowly until he feels like he has himself under some kind of control. Only then does he open his eyes.

"And when they start to come to you? To get it from you however they can?"

“Nobody knows that I have it. There aren’t actually many people that even know that Extremis exists, and most of those are dead.”

He understands where Bruce is coming from, truly he does, but he isn’t concerned. Maya was arrogant, Killian even more so. Tony knows they didn’t broadcast their secrets to every listening ear in the area.

“And those that do know? They know Maya Hansen created it. They know she administered the dosages. They don’t know anything about me, other than that I flew in and destroyed it all. And if anyone wonders why that happened, the answer’s easy. They blew up my house and they hurt my friends. There’s nothing to connect Extremis to me.”

Okay. Okay, that's... something. Breathe. He closes his eyes again and squeezes Tony's hand, waiting for his thoughts to stop racing with the very clear and obvious fact that something's been introduced to the world that's going to change it forever, and Tony's right in the middle of it.

He gives him a small nod and then rubs his hand over his face, his gaze drifting. Tony can make it. This is the kind of thing that should never be made; what if the scientists got it? But they're here, and it's unlikely anyone here is going to steal it from them or become so power hungry they would do anything to get it, right?

"You said you had it with you?"

Well, he’s breathing. That’s a start. Smiling, Tony rubs at his shoulder, curls his fingers in until the rub becomes a light scratch. It’s okay, he tries to will into him through osmosis. It’s okay. It’ll be fine.

“The way to make it, yeah. I memorized it. It’s, you know, when you look at it, it’s easy to see where she went wrong.” Does that sound like bragging? He’s not bragging, he’s just making talking, letting the thoughts filter out through his mouth without much consideration for what he’s actually saying.

“Do you want to see the formula? I’ll write it down for you.”

And there it is, his trust for Bruce as simple and as plain as that. Tony has the means to create an army of superhumans and he doesn't bat an eye at offering Bruce the directions to do it.

Bruce doesn't look any less uneasy, though now for a plethora of reasons related to curing himself or not curing himself, and he's grateful for Tony's steadying touch. He's been down the road of an obsession to cure himself, and he's had some dark days, mixed up with all the rest. He's afraid of going back to that place; he wasn't always so zen in his search for a cure.

If Tony's bragging, Bruce doesn't hear it. A lot of scientists can't see the flaws in their own work. Bruce could've used a few outside opinions, back in the day. Tony clearly trusts him with the information, but is that even wise? Hasn't Bruce proven that he's unstable, unsteady, especially when given the means to alter himself? He won't go making a superhuman army, he's not about to weaponize anything, but Bruce has made plenty of mistakes in his time.

"Okay," he says quickly, like he has to say it fast or else he won't be able to say it at all, "but we have to be careful with whatever notes we take. They can't fall into the wrong hands."

That’s probably the understatement of the century. Tony’s eyes shift away from Bruce to the camera in the room. They’re always being watched here, though how sensitive the monitoring equipment is, he can’t possibly begin to guess. Presumably, they’re being watched and overheard, but can the cameras pick up tiny writing on a piece of paper? He doesn’t know.

“How good are you at visualizing information without seeing it written down?”

It’s not an underestimation of Bruce’s abilities. Just because he’s a genius, which he clearly is, doesn’t mean that he’s capable of doing everything. Tony can’t follow directions, and to anyone who doesn’t understand the nuances of how the brain works, that could seem like lazy contrariness. But it isn’t, and he accepts the possibility that Bruce might have to see something written down.

“If I tell you, minimize the chance for the formula to be seen by anyone else, will that work or no?”

Bruce follows his eyes to the camera and chews his lip.

"Hold on." He gets up and crosses to the camera, pulling over a chair so he can climb up on it, and he covers up the lens. He'd rather write it down in whatever time they have before they come to fix the cameras; a paper they can burn, once Bruce memorizes it, if he can memorize that fast. An audio recording that's not in their hands would be more difficult to dispose of.

"If you hurry, you should be able to write it out before they come to fix that. Then I'll, I don't know. Eat it." It's his first attempt at a joke, and not only is it not very good on its own, it's also pretty weak, but he feels weak as he gets down and comes back over to the couch.

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