science_of_control | (no subject)

Who: Bruce Banner & Pepper Potts
Where: Stark Tower
Summary: Bruce has frustrated Tony to no end and he finally gets a restful nap... unfortunately he's too skittish for it to stay restful.
Warnings: None?

He'd been in Turkey when he got the call from Tony. Of course Tony didn't care about time differences so his post-lunch call had come at 2 in the morning for Bruce. But he'd gathered his things, left medicines and instructions for the people he'd been treating, and been on a train by dawn. One train followed by another and another. Layovers were frequent but it was better than flying. Days of hard travel and he'd barely slept, worried about what a nightmare might do when he was on a train with so many other people. It wasn't safe. So it had been nothing but catnaps all the way to Lisbon.

The flight from Lisbon to New York had been 8 hours of high stress on top of all of it. He was haggard and exhausted by the time he got there. But he'd gone straight to the tower, straight to Tony as requested. The strange friendship between them and the driving curiosity for the other man's science the only thing keeping him going. Only to be shoved into a chair while Tony regaled him with "no this is a really great story, you'll love it".

Apparently when the tale began a second time Bruce had started snoring at some point. The fact that he was comfortable enough with the man to let himself sleep next to him should have said something, been flattering in some way. It implied a level of trust that Bruce had not shown to another person in more years than he cared to count. Tony, unsurprisingly, didn't see that. He was annoyed and childish when he felt ignored or neglected which this was certainly a case of. So he left Bruce to nap in that chair, a nap that would undoubtedly leave him with a kink in his neck and a number of aches in his body. That he would also wake with gold glittery nail polish (stolen from Happy's office who had confiscated it from one of the secretaries on account of the fumes) well... that wasn't terribly surprising either.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Pepper chuffed a laugh at that, edged and dark, and gave him a shake of her head in confirmation. "No, no... although I think you sell yourself short, for the record."

She fell silent again, worrying at the cuticle until she caught herself and folded her hands on her lap. "You, as you told the others, are always angry. That that's your secret. You're not always nine feet tall and green, though. Aldrich..." She parted with a sigh and looked up to the middle distance, her tone kept neutral and measured. "I didn't just kill him with some push of a button. I punched straight through the chest piece of one of Tony's suits that was attacking me, then detonated Aldrich by throwing one of its missiles at him and blowing it up. And all I could think to say after was a comment on how violent it was. And I... well, it felt good. Amazing, actually. The anger, and channelling it like that."

Edited (Edit due to re-watching and realizing I had a detail wrong!) 2013-08-16 22:31 (UTC)

Hearing it recounted from Pepper was far more informative than hearing it from Tony. Or maybe that was the indeterminate amount of sleep he'd gotten between one telling and the next. She was right. It was violent. But that wasn't really all that surprising. From the sounds of it violence was what was needed to combat the unstoppable force that was Aldrich Killian.

Bruce can't quite look at her for a moment though. Of course she knows everything that Tony does about him, he expects that, but it's hard to hear it relayed back like that. And somehow even harder to hear it from Pepper who is now, suddenly, possibly the only person that truly understands exactly what it is he deals with every day. To have that destructive potential and all of that anger and be unable to let it out... which only fed the anger even more.

"That's the hardest part..." He finally says quietly, leaning forward, elbows braced on his knees, gaze directed down at his hands. Not at his nails or the residual gold shimmer at the edges but at his palms, his fingers as he flexed them slightly as though he expected to see bloodstains where there were none. "There's something... satisfying about the destruction, however horrific it is." He swallows hard and looks up at her briefly, dark eyes haunted. Surely she understands that. Even if the only person she'd directed that super powered fury at had been one man deserving of it while the one person that deserved to be punished for his condition never could be. Because he was... indestructible.

"Catharsis," Pepper suggests, tone and expression somewhat detached as she looks out the windows rather than over at Bruce, taking refuge in the mild remove of talking past his left ear rather than directly to him. "In the Classical rather than the Freudian model. The violent purge of emotion before the quiet clarity in its wake."

Sitting no longer suits her, so she rises to her feet with an elegant whisper of shifted cloth and paces her way out and over to the windows rather than staring at them across the open space. "I told Tony that I understood Iron Man," she muses. "But I think that Iron Man doesn't understand Extremis, entirely. Tony understands having a little list of things you want to see burned, that would make the world a better place if you just cleaned them up into sidewalk smears. But Tony... he built that very first suit. It's a part of him, certainly, but it's a part he ultimately chose. Custom-crafted, even. His purgation in destruction has always been tempered by very keen advance intent."