Not a Cure || Bruce and Tony
From what Tony could tell between the calendar on Pepper’s wall and the one on his phone, the “start of the week” was rather up in the air: was it Sunday? Was it Monday? Did anyone give a flying rat’s ass when the week started as long as it ended? By the time Tony slumped into the workshop on Monday night, pushing a cup of de-caffeinated tea in Bruce’s direction, he was sure of only one thing: that if this was the kick off of the week, then he couldn’t remember the last one ending, and he’d gotten gypped somewhere in between. He gave an over exaggerated groan as he collapsed into his worn chair--the fabric of the arms burned off from the last chemical spill, Dum-E’s claw marks etched into the back from where he’d lost his balance and gone sliding across the workshop floor, enough coffee stains to fill a Starbucks.
“They’re lucky they don’t sue,” Tony said, tugging at his tie until it got caught around his neck--tighter than he’d meant for it as his tugging brought the knot in instead of out. He coughed, finally untangling the fabric and throwing it unceremoniously to the ground; it fell into a bit of engine oil, and Tony frowned, scanning the room for Dum-E. “Did you do this?” he asked, pointing at the spill then at the bot. “Did you leak on my floor? Jay, why’s he leaking again?” As the JARVIS interrogated the bot--interpreting his squeaks and rolls as “a refusal to change his coding, Sir; superficial repairs are the best we can hope for; he is at least ten years out of date”--Tony rolled his chair somewhere between his own computer and Bruce’s, close enough to speak while he shuffled through the emails, flashing alerts, and the demonstrations he’d been running through the afternoon.
“Can you sue a company you don’t work for? It’s inhumane, we’re talking--” He paused, plucking a bag of dried fruit from his desk drawer and popping a few pieces into his mouth. “Basic protocol--a man doesn’t just fall into a vat of jellyfish by accident, and who keeps poisonous spiders on hand?” He paused to eat, typing a few bits of code into the nearest computer which pulled up the holographic screens that filled his half of the room, glowing lights in every direction. “I mean, Peter’s great. Don’t get me wrong. But no one should be walking into a room of spiders.” He snagged one of the nearest holograms, flipped its dominant image to that of their previous “flu tracking” and turned it so the charts were facing Bruce. “Vaccine’s out, Bruce. AIM kidnaps the president one year, and saves the city the next? Really?” He leaned back in his chair, lifting the front legs of the floor as he popped another berry into his mouth and glanced at Bruce, his first moment of silence since he’d entered the workshop.
And this was how it went: long days at Oscorp, long days at SI, and Tony running at a hundred miles an hour, one idea flipping to the next without pause, without context, and every day it seemed a work of God--or Odin, or Zeus, The Maker, take your pick--that Bruce was there, a human body in the workshop. Steve’s art supplies sat in the corner, notebooks and pencils, lovingly sorted by Dum-E (and half broken because of it); Natasha’s jacket slung over one of the chairs; a nerf bullet on the floor left over from Clint’s gun: a team here where there had once been nothing but metal. “Virus isn’t a cure,” Tony said, thinking of Steve, quarantined in their room upstairs, of Natasha curled into his bed with a box of tissues. Two sick super soldiers went through a hell of a lot of tissues; at this rate, he might have to buy out Kleenex.