kore_logs | it's a blacked out blur

"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.

“Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s bad to eat paper?” Tony asks, pretending to chide him. It may be a lame joke, but at least it’s a joke. If he’s feeling well enough to start telling them, it could be that he’s starting to come down from the panic.

Leaning forward to the coffee table, Tony chooses a piece of paper at random, picks up a pen, and starts writing. He knows that his handwriting can be difficult to read if he writes too fast, which in this case would be counterproductive, at least where Bruce is concerned. Making a conscious effort to write legibly, he scrawls the formula onto the paper. He’s worked with it enough in the last year that it’s fast, and when he’s done, a minute and a half later, he leans back on the couch and holds out the paper for Bruce to take and examine.

“Here it is. Secret of the genetic code, broken and primed for the cheat code. It’s a little more complicated than up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.” He winks, recognizing how ridiculous it might be that a billionaire genius might know the Konami Code. “But not by much.”

Of course Tony knows the Konami Code; even billionaire geniuses played video games, and he smiles at Tony before he pulls out his glasses and looks over the formula. Bruce isn't really a geneticist, but he's sort of become one on the side, in the way of casual geniuses. There's a lot he doesn't know, but looking over the formula, it makes sense to him and he does his best to remember it.

"And then you activate all the powerups." He grins, and then he turns the paper over. "And the reversal serum?"

“Like this.”

He leans over, pen at the ready, and writes out the other formula. It’s slightly longer than its counterpart; unlike a computer, it’s not quite as easy as hitting the reset button and restoring it to factory settings. But it can be done, Pepper’s the living example of that.

“And just remember, this is the basic algorithm. Once you’re in there, you can change whatever you want. That part’s longer, obviously. Like any sophisticated program, the more you want to change, the longer the code has to be. But it’s not difficult to do. What I can do with this…” Isn’t something he should be discussing.

Shaking his head, he taps the paper with the pen. “What do you think?”

He hears the possibility behind what Tony tries to play off, and he looks sharply at him. He won't call him out on it now, but he hopes Tony notices that Bruce isn't letting him get away with that. He'll bring it up when he doesn't have to try to memorize this in whatever time they have left; it's likely he'll forget pieces, but this is important enough that he thinks he can commit it to memory.

"I think it's incredible." He sighs, touching the paper. "I think it could change the world. Probably for the worst."

Taking a few more seconds to look over it, he sighs again and picks the paper up, crumpling it up in his hand as he goes over to the camera to uncover it. He stands still for a few seconds, his nails pressing into his palm through the paper, before he turns around again.

"Do..." He loses the thread, has to breathe before he can recover it. "Do you think it could cure me?"

“That’s why I’m not publicizing it,” he agrees, studiously avoiding acknowledgement of the way Bruce has just looked at him. He saw it. He knows what it means. But he’s optimistically, and vainly, hoping that if he doesn’t let on that he knows, Bruce will forget about it. “Or letting anyone other than you know about this. The world’s bad enough. It doesn’t need anything else screwing it up.”

And he knows this is coming too. It twists his stomach into uncomfortable knots of tension, but he can’t, he won’t, lie to him. “Possibly.”

It’s a betrayal of the Hulk that doesn’t sit with Tony at all. Yet the Hulk is Bruce. Bruce is the Hulk. They’re the same person and if this brings them back together, heals Bruce and makes him whole, then Tony can’t refuse to help him.

“We’d need to figure in the gamma radiation. That’s the unknown variable, but once it’s accounted for, yeah. I think it could cure you.”

He knows Tony is attached to the Hulk, but it's not as easy as that; neither one of them has a very good quality of life, given that they split their lives between them. Back home, if Bruce ever gets back there, he's never going to be able to get out from underneath the Hulk's shadow; the relative peace he's found here is unlikely to be repeated with the population at large. He's tired of being a time bomb.

Part of the reason he'd been afraid to ask was because he thought for sure Tony would push against the idea, but he agrees and Bruce feels like he can't stand up anymore. Instead of just falling to the ground, he manages to get back to the couch and he collapses onto it. Somehow. He can't really feel his legs.

He looks over at Tony, his eyes going from wide and uncertain to evaluating.

"What do you want to do with this?"

As far as Tony can tell, there are two potential meanings for Bruce’s question: what does he want to do with the paper he’s written the formula down on and what does he want to do with Extremis? The first question is far easier to answer, and much less controversial. Of course, if they cure Bruce’s radiation problem, if the Hulk disappears, then Tony won’t need to take the serum.

There won’t be a promise left to keep.

“I don’t know,” he says, looking back as guilelessly as possible and shrugging. Maybe he’s a coward just looking for the easy way out, but since it’s an option, he’s deliberately misunderstanding the question. “Burn it, I guess. There are some matches in the kitchen. We put it in a bowl, light it on fire, no one’ll be able to reconstruct the paper from ash. It’s the safest bet. And you won’t have to eat it.”

Seriously? Nice attempt at a dodge, but Bruce is a professional. That was actually a little pathetic. Then again, this whole thing must be pretty difficult for Tony to deal with, from the reality of being back here and fryouom Bruce freaking him out and from Bruce wanting to wipe out the Hulk. He could keep pressing on this, but he presses his lips together instead, and then he wraps an arm around Tony's shoulders, pulling him against his side, and leans over to kiss his temple. That's when he remembers how long they've been apart to Tony, and he freezes.

"Is this okay? Is this still okay? Are we still -- " He draws back, trying to keep his breathing steady even when he feels like he's been punched.

"You've been away so long; if you stopped..." Loving him. Wanting him. If Tony moved on, if he got back with Pepper, if he got with someone else. Bruce was going to say he'd respect that, and he honestly would, but he can't make himself form the words yet.

And there it is. The million dollar question Tony’s been avoiding since waking up with a head full of memories he hadn’t had prior to his arrival. He should have been thinking about it, he knew he was going to have to deal with it, but he hasn’t wanted to. There’s so little of actual value that he has in his life, especially now, that choosing to keep one and lose the other isn’t something he wants to do.

But do it he has to, and right now, because the question’s out there and it needs an answer. When he thought he could have only one of the people he loved, it was so much easier. But both? Both is hard, and Tony hates making decisions. If he thinks about it, though, he knows that he already has. He made it when the Hulk asked about Extremis, and Tony decided to throw away his mortality for him.

“If I stopped what? Loving you?” Bluntness, he decides, is the way to go here. “Don’t be stupid.” He leans over, reaching out to touch his face. This might be difficult to hear, and he’d like to just gloss over it, but Bruce deserves to know. “We didn’t remember this place. I’m not sure why. I didn’t start remembering until I woke up here again. So when I was there, you were, I don’t know, busy with your work and your whole I turn into the Hulk, no one must ever love me thing. And I was too busy having… problems—” He doesn’t know how else to explain the anxiety attacks without actually naming them. “—and then not getting blown up like the rest of my life to do anything about it. But I never stopped. I’m not going to stop. Is this okay?”

It’s his turn to move to kiss him, but he doesn’t quite make contact. Not yet. Not when he’s filled with the irrational fear that Bruce is going to hear that he had a year off without him and take it as an opportunity to get away from him now. “Jesus, I hope so. Because I just spent a year watching you, not being able to have you, and I’d really like to put that behind me.”

He's not entirely surprised to hear that they didn't remember being here, and he doesn't know what to think about them not getting together; there it would be harder for Bruce to connect, that makes sense. Here he didn't have much choice; he can't go hide in India and ignore his feelings for Tony. Hell, he'd even tried to separate them here.

But they aren't separated. God, what a relief. He's been through something like this before with Betty but not only did he have years to adjust to the idea, but he and Betty kind of really didn't do a good job. If Tony had told Bruce no, that they couldn't have this, then he wouldn't have had a very dignified response. Tony stops just shy of kissing him, and Bruce's heart feels like it gets stuck in his throat. He starts to say yes, but then he leans forward and catches his mouth, kissing him slowly as he slides his fingers into his hair.

"Yes, it's okay," he says, breathless against his lips. "I love you too; you have me."

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