Fic for jedimasterstar: Make Your Own Luck | Bruce/Natasha
Title: Make Your Own Luck
Author: lena7623
Recipient: jedimasterstar
Rating: PG
Universe: Movie
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Natasha, featuring Bruce, Natasha, Tony, Loki, OFC.
Word Count (if applicable): 2802
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper.
Summary: Bruce is trying to adjust to a lot of things. Being around people, having to deal with Loki’s rehabilitation around Stark Tower, Tony Stark dragging him around like a lost puppy, showing off the awesomeness of New York, and now he has to deal with someone else: Natasha Romanoff, who seems interested in him.
Warnings: Some action, some possible underlying sexual tension. I kept this one clean.
Bruce was amazed that he had actually agreed to go back to Stark Tower with Tony. He had initially been sure that, as soon as Loki was taken care of and the Tesseract was found, he would be in the wind again. He didn't think that he'd go back to India this time. He had initially been thinking about maybe somewhere in South America or maybe China. China was big enough to get lost inside of.
However, what little he could remember of the battle in Manhattan made him want to stay. He rarely remembered more than a few snippets when the Other Guy popped out, although, when he brought him out on purpose, he seemed to remember a little more. One thing that he did remember was that the Other Guy had saved Tony's life. He had snatched Tony up when he was falling out of the sky, then basically screamed at him until he woke up. Bruce could only assume that the Other Guy liked Tony. He wouldn't go out of his way to save anyone that he disliked or saw as the enemy, after all. That gave Bruce a little bit of hope that maybe he could be around others. Maybe the Other Guy could learn to work with a team and realize who to smash and who not to.
Even though parts of Start Tower had been heavily damaged, some of the R&D floors had been left intact. Tony had showed them all off to Bruce, giving him the full grand tour. The place was dizzying with all that could be accomplished within. Tony himself was focusing on creating clean energy for the world, but there were plenty of other labs that Bruce could play in, as Tony put it.
Bruce felt that the best thing to start working on was, at least at first, some kind of either suppressant or maybe even tranquilizer to deal with the days that he lost control of himself. Just because he was learning to bring the Other Guy out on demand didn't mean that there wouldn't be days that he completely lost his stuff completely and needed to be controlled in some way.
There was another reason that Bruce was hiding in the labs. Someone in SHIELD had the bright idea that they should work on rehabilitating Loki. Therefore, they had him in a guarded room in the tower as well. Bruce had his own issues with Loki and what he did, but even the mention of the Asgardian's name made the Other Guy scream inside of his head. He was more than happy to hide down here. Tony had the bright idea of dragging the self-called god around the city, showing him how grand it was, but, when he could, Bruce was more than happy to hide in the lab and not deal with that stuff.
He had been in the lab for several days, only coming out when Pepper dragged him down for a dinner with her and Tony (she had told him that she loved the alter ego for saving Tony and that he was always welcome) or Tony dragging him on coffee visits when he had a surprise visitor. He hadn't even realized that someone else was in the room when he heard a polite cough, turning around and seeing Natasha standing at the door of the lab.
"I thought that you had taken off with Barton," Bruce said to her, looking her over. She was wearing the same camel colored leather jacket that he had last seen her in, but now she had on a black wife beater and jeans.
"He was ready to come back," Natasha explained. "I think he just needed a few days to decompress." She walked further into the lab, soon standing beside Bruce.
"How'd he react to our extra guest in the tower?" Bruce asked. Barton of all of them would likely hate that Loki was around. They would do well if Barton didn't simply find a way to break into the room and steal Loki away long enough to find a way to kill him.
"Not well," Natasha admitted with a sigh. "Still, got him to promise to behave enough as long as Loki doesn't go ballistic again or anything." She glanced around Bruce. "What are you working on?"
"I'm not sure I believe he'll behave, either," Bruce admitted. "Some sort of suppressant for myself, to ah...prevent incidents like on the Helicarrier," he said, looking down at the floor. He was still horrified that he had nearly killed her and nearly destroyed a flying fortress when he last lost control. “Just because I can sometimes be useful doesn’t mean that there won’t be times when I need to be calmed down by force.”
“You sure you want something like that to exist?” Natasha asked him. “If that fell into the wrong hands, a person could basically leave you powerless.”
It was something that he had definitely thought of. If it got into General Ross’s hands, he truly could hold Bruce hostage. Of course, it would be hard to hold him hostage now that the entire world knew who he was and would likely notice if he disappeared. Of course, Ross wasn’t the only person that he had to worry about controlling him.
“It’s something that I thought about,” he told her, pulling off the goggles that he had been wearing. “Still, I think the benefits outweigh the risks.” If he was really going to be sticking around, and it was starting to look like that would be more and more, then he wanted a way that would allow for him to be brought back down to earth, so to speak.
“Think you can take a break off for coffee?” she asked. Not what he expected at all. As a matter of fact, it caught him so far off guard that he found himself nodding before he had even thought about it. “Come on then. We’ll go to Tony’s favorite place.”
Bruce had to laugh at that. The nearby coffee place was a place that Tony complained that he both loved and hated. The place had the best coffee that Bruce had ever had, but one of the main clerks who were there all the time seemed to get off in making Tony’s life absolutely miserable. Of course, she got away with it because her parents owned the place. So, Tony couldn’t complain about her to get her fired or even buy the place and shut it down. He could either go to the neighborhood Starbucks or put up with her. So far, it seemed like he was going just to put up with her.
Bruce liked the place, though. He was very glad to go there today, even spotting the cranky clerk behind the counter. “Hey, my favorite heroes,” the clerk said as Bruce and Natasha walked inside. The place wasn’t busy at the moment, which was something of a surprise, as it was one of the few buildings near Stark Tower that hadn’t taken too much damage. The coffee shop, like the Shawarma place everyone had gone to after the battle, had been able to open up again on the same day. “What can I get for you guys today?” the clerk asked them.
“Can I order a chai tea?” Bruce asked.
“And can I get a caramel macchiato?” Natasha asked.
“I can do both of those for you guys,” the clerk said, punching them into the cash register and giving them the total. Before Bruce could insist, Natasha paid her off.
“Can I ask you something?” Bruce asked while they waited. “Why do you torment Tony Stark every time that we come in here but you’re nice to me and now Natasha?”
The clerk grinned at him. “Because ever since he started coming here, he’s always tried to skip to the head of the line,” she pointed out. “I’m a communist. Everyone’s just as good as everyone else is. Just because you save the city a few times doesn’t mean that you get to jump to the front of my line.”
Bruce smiled, since she was right. Tony, for all of his good points, seemed to have almost too much self esteem in himself and thought that he should be able to get whatever he wanted. Most of the time, it seemed to work, but it was good for him to occasionally be knocked down a step or two as well. Good for Tony's soul to occasionally be reminded that he was human.
Soon enough, they had their drinks, and were sitting at a table next to one of the windows. "I don't know how this place took almost no damage," Bruce said, looking around. One of the windows was boarded up, but it seemed other than that, it had survived intact.
"Some places were luckier than others, it seems," Natasha said, watching him over her cup as she took a sip. "True to life."
He nodded. It really was true to life. Sometimes people were just lucky, or, in his case, unlucky. Bruce had a magnificently unlucky life. Only lately was he seeing anything that might be considered lucky for him.
"Sometimes you have to be willing to make your own luck," Bruce remarked.
"Is staying in New York your way of making your own luck?" Natasha asked him. Even as she sipped at her drink, she kept watch on him. He wondered if she worried that something around here would make him accidentally change again. That's why he was working on the suppressant. She'd likely be the first that he gave it to after Tony. No one needed a worried spy hanging around.
"Partially," he told her. "I can't really work on controlling myself when I remove myself from all stimuli." It was something that he finally realized. Hiding away wasn't going to make his problem disappear. The only way to fix it was to face it head on. Make his own luck.
"That's true," Natasha said, smiling slightly at him. "You're better off being in the world, Bruce, and the world's better off having you in it."
Before he could respond, there was a scream from behind the counter, and Bruce turned to look, seeing a masked man with a gun. The communist clerk was holding her hands in the air, while another was digging in the cash register for money to put in a bag.
"You know," Bruce said, standing up from the table. "Now's not the time to be turning to petty crime." He started over toward the thief.
The thief held up his gun toward Bruce and Natasha, who had stood up after him. "You...just stop right there, OK? This doesn't concern you."
"Actually, it kind of does," Natasha said, moving forward.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. Natasha leaped, and the gun went off. However, before the bullet hit her, or anything, it appeared to be snatched out of the air by a black and green blur, which then kicked the thief across the room.
"You people are utterly moronic," the former blur, who appeared to be Loki, said, examining the bullet between his fingers. "No one who can be harmed by them should leap in front of a bullet." He dropped the bullet to the ground.
Bruce was breathing raggedly, trying to keep his pulse down. He had thought that Natasha was about to be shot, which had sent pulses of blinding green rage through his head. "How did you get in here?"
Loki looked towards a window, which was now broken. Before he could say anything, an out of breath Tony dashed into the coffee shop. "Is he in here? I saw him head this way," he said, looking around and spotting Loki. "If you wanted a coffee, you could have just said something. You didn't have to go running off!" It seemed only then that Tony took in the scene. "What the hell just happened here?"
"It appears that your friends are good at finding trouble no matter the setting," Loki explained with a glance around the room.
"More like bringing it," the communist clerk grumbled. It was only now that Bruce noticed her name tag that said her name, Delilah. "My parents are going to be pissed when they see that another window is broken. I appreciate the save, but do they not have doors on your planet?" she asked, turning toward Loki.
"My apologies," Loki said with a deep bow. "The window was closer than the door." He glanced toward Tony. "Do you think you can pay for the window? I do enjoy the coffee drinks that are made here."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Sure, whatever, Rudolph," he said with a wave of his hand. "Let's give the clerks here one less reason to spit in my coffee."
"Oh I've never spit in your coffee!" Delilah insisted, crossing her arms over her chest. "I like that you spend money here. I just hate that you always try to skip in line like you’re some fancy big shot."
"But I am a fancy big shot!" Tony insisted. "If you look up fancy big shot in the dictionary, it has a picture of me next to it! I paid a lot of money to be in that dictionary."
"Communist, Stark. We're all the same here, even if you're a superhero," Delilah explained, smirking at him.
OoOoOoOo
As soon as everyone headed back to Stark Tower (Tony ended up paying for both windows just so that they would be fixed faster), Bruce hid himself away in his lab again. He thought that it would be impossible to feel both powerless and out of control at the same time, but it seemed that he felt this way. He hated that he still could be sent into a pure rage by seemingly nothing (he could likely have taken care of the robber without even changing to the Other Guy), but it was something that he would have to learn to accept. Some people had a bad temper, and he just had an exceptionally bad one. It was just terrible that he could hurt all of those around him with his.
He was briefly thinking of simply running away again when he heard a knock at the lab door. He thought about not answering, but Natasha simply poked her head in just the same. He knew that she likely would have come in even if he’d said to stay away. “What can I do for you, Natasha?”
“Wanted to see how you were doing,” she asked as she moved further forward. “See if you were feeling alright.”
He nodded. “I’m alright enough. Just managed to prove earlier that I really need some sort of depressant if I’m going to stay here for any real length of time.” China was still looking pretty good about right now.
He could swear that the spy was a mind reader by the way she narrowed his eyes at him. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’d better put it out of your mind right now,” she told him.
“I’d think that you of all people would be happy to see me go,” Bruce pointed out to her, leaning back against the lab table that he had been working at. “It seems that I’m pretty good at putting you in some sort of danger.” He had almost made her a black and red smear in the Helicarrier before, and today had almost changed in the middle of a coffee shop.
“Well, the only way that you’re going to get any sort of control of yourself is to be around other people, not hiding a world away,” she said, making steps closer to him. “Don’t you worry about me, though. I can take care of myself pretty well.”
“Can you now?” he asked, a nervous smile crossing his face as she came closer to him. “Guns don’t do much against the Other Guy, you know.” Of course she knew. She had been there for the story that he had told.
She shook her head. “No guns,” she said to him. “I was actually hoping that your other half would eventually grow to like me, put me on that no smash list that Stark seems to have wiggled himself onto.”
He arched an eyebrow at her when she said that. Was she hinting at what he thought she might be hinting at? It had been a long time since he had anything to do with that. He had to be wrong. “That takes...prolonged exposure, from what I can tell,” he managed to stammer to her.
“Don’t worry about me, Bruce,” she said, looking up at him with a smile. “I think I can handle prolonged exposure.”
Author: lena7623
Recipient: jedimasterstar
Rating: PG
Universe: Movie
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Natasha, featuring Bruce, Natasha, Tony, Loki, OFC.
Word Count (if applicable): 2802
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper.
Summary: Bruce is trying to adjust to a lot of things. Being around people, having to deal with Loki’s rehabilitation around Stark Tower, Tony Stark dragging him around like a lost puppy, showing off the awesomeness of New York, and now he has to deal with someone else: Natasha Romanoff, who seems interested in him.
Warnings: Some action, some possible underlying sexual tension. I kept this one clean.
Bruce was amazed that he had actually agreed to go back to Stark Tower with Tony. He had initially been sure that, as soon as Loki was taken care of and the Tesseract was found, he would be in the wind again. He didn't think that he'd go back to India this time. He had initially been thinking about maybe somewhere in South America or maybe China. China was big enough to get lost inside of.
However, what little he could remember of the battle in Manhattan made him want to stay. He rarely remembered more than a few snippets when the Other Guy popped out, although, when he brought him out on purpose, he seemed to remember a little more. One thing that he did remember was that the Other Guy had saved Tony's life. He had snatched Tony up when he was falling out of the sky, then basically screamed at him until he woke up. Bruce could only assume that the Other Guy liked Tony. He wouldn't go out of his way to save anyone that he disliked or saw as the enemy, after all. That gave Bruce a little bit of hope that maybe he could be around others. Maybe the Other Guy could learn to work with a team and realize who to smash and who not to.
Even though parts of Start Tower had been heavily damaged, some of the R&D floors had been left intact. Tony had showed them all off to Bruce, giving him the full grand tour. The place was dizzying with all that could be accomplished within. Tony himself was focusing on creating clean energy for the world, but there were plenty of other labs that Bruce could play in, as Tony put it.
Bruce felt that the best thing to start working on was, at least at first, some kind of either suppressant or maybe even tranquilizer to deal with the days that he lost control of himself. Just because he was learning to bring the Other Guy out on demand didn't mean that there wouldn't be days that he completely lost his stuff completely and needed to be controlled in some way.
There was another reason that Bruce was hiding in the labs. Someone in SHIELD had the bright idea that they should work on rehabilitating Loki. Therefore, they had him in a guarded room in the tower as well. Bruce had his own issues with Loki and what he did, but even the mention of the Asgardian's name made the Other Guy scream inside of his head. He was more than happy to hide down here. Tony had the bright idea of dragging the self-called god around the city, showing him how grand it was, but, when he could, Bruce was more than happy to hide in the lab and not deal with that stuff.
He had been in the lab for several days, only coming out when Pepper dragged him down for a dinner with her and Tony (she had told him that she loved the alter ego for saving Tony and that he was always welcome) or Tony dragging him on coffee visits when he had a surprise visitor. He hadn't even realized that someone else was in the room when he heard a polite cough, turning around and seeing Natasha standing at the door of the lab.
"I thought that you had taken off with Barton," Bruce said to her, looking her over. She was wearing the same camel colored leather jacket that he had last seen her in, but now she had on a black wife beater and jeans.
"He was ready to come back," Natasha explained. "I think he just needed a few days to decompress." She walked further into the lab, soon standing beside Bruce.
"How'd he react to our extra guest in the tower?" Bruce asked. Barton of all of them would likely hate that Loki was around. They would do well if Barton didn't simply find a way to break into the room and steal Loki away long enough to find a way to kill him.
"Not well," Natasha admitted with a sigh. "Still, got him to promise to behave enough as long as Loki doesn't go ballistic again or anything." She glanced around Bruce. "What are you working on?"
"I'm not sure I believe he'll behave, either," Bruce admitted. "Some sort of suppressant for myself, to ah...prevent incidents like on the Helicarrier," he said, looking down at the floor. He was still horrified that he had nearly killed her and nearly destroyed a flying fortress when he last lost control. “Just because I can sometimes be useful doesn’t mean that there won’t be times when I need to be calmed down by force.”
“You sure you want something like that to exist?” Natasha asked him. “If that fell into the wrong hands, a person could basically leave you powerless.”
It was something that he had definitely thought of. If it got into General Ross’s hands, he truly could hold Bruce hostage. Of course, it would be hard to hold him hostage now that the entire world knew who he was and would likely notice if he disappeared. Of course, Ross wasn’t the only person that he had to worry about controlling him.
“It’s something that I thought about,” he told her, pulling off the goggles that he had been wearing. “Still, I think the benefits outweigh the risks.” If he was really going to be sticking around, and it was starting to look like that would be more and more, then he wanted a way that would allow for him to be brought back down to earth, so to speak.
“Think you can take a break off for coffee?” she asked. Not what he expected at all. As a matter of fact, it caught him so far off guard that he found himself nodding before he had even thought about it. “Come on then. We’ll go to Tony’s favorite place.”
Bruce had to laugh at that. The nearby coffee place was a place that Tony complained that he both loved and hated. The place had the best coffee that Bruce had ever had, but one of the main clerks who were there all the time seemed to get off in making Tony’s life absolutely miserable. Of course, she got away with it because her parents owned the place. So, Tony couldn’t complain about her to get her fired or even buy the place and shut it down. He could either go to the neighborhood Starbucks or put up with her. So far, it seemed like he was going just to put up with her.
Bruce liked the place, though. He was very glad to go there today, even spotting the cranky clerk behind the counter. “Hey, my favorite heroes,” the clerk said as Bruce and Natasha walked inside. The place wasn’t busy at the moment, which was something of a surprise, as it was one of the few buildings near Stark Tower that hadn’t taken too much damage. The coffee shop, like the Shawarma place everyone had gone to after the battle, had been able to open up again on the same day. “What can I get for you guys today?” the clerk asked them.
“Can I order a chai tea?” Bruce asked.
“And can I get a caramel macchiato?” Natasha asked.
“I can do both of those for you guys,” the clerk said, punching them into the cash register and giving them the total. Before Bruce could insist, Natasha paid her off.
“Can I ask you something?” Bruce asked while they waited. “Why do you torment Tony Stark every time that we come in here but you’re nice to me and now Natasha?”
The clerk grinned at him. “Because ever since he started coming here, he’s always tried to skip to the head of the line,” she pointed out. “I’m a communist. Everyone’s just as good as everyone else is. Just because you save the city a few times doesn’t mean that you get to jump to the front of my line.”
Bruce smiled, since she was right. Tony, for all of his good points, seemed to have almost too much self esteem in himself and thought that he should be able to get whatever he wanted. Most of the time, it seemed to work, but it was good for him to occasionally be knocked down a step or two as well. Good for Tony's soul to occasionally be reminded that he was human.
Soon enough, they had their drinks, and were sitting at a table next to one of the windows. "I don't know how this place took almost no damage," Bruce said, looking around. One of the windows was boarded up, but it seemed other than that, it had survived intact.
"Some places were luckier than others, it seems," Natasha said, watching him over her cup as she took a sip. "True to life."
He nodded. It really was true to life. Sometimes people were just lucky, or, in his case, unlucky. Bruce had a magnificently unlucky life. Only lately was he seeing anything that might be considered lucky for him.
"Sometimes you have to be willing to make your own luck," Bruce remarked.
"Is staying in New York your way of making your own luck?" Natasha asked him. Even as she sipped at her drink, she kept watch on him. He wondered if she worried that something around here would make him accidentally change again. That's why he was working on the suppressant. She'd likely be the first that he gave it to after Tony. No one needed a worried spy hanging around.
"Partially," he told her. "I can't really work on controlling myself when I remove myself from all stimuli." It was something that he finally realized. Hiding away wasn't going to make his problem disappear. The only way to fix it was to face it head on. Make his own luck.
"That's true," Natasha said, smiling slightly at him. "You're better off being in the world, Bruce, and the world's better off having you in it."
Before he could respond, there was a scream from behind the counter, and Bruce turned to look, seeing a masked man with a gun. The communist clerk was holding her hands in the air, while another was digging in the cash register for money to put in a bag.
"You know," Bruce said, standing up from the table. "Now's not the time to be turning to petty crime." He started over toward the thief.
The thief held up his gun toward Bruce and Natasha, who had stood up after him. "You...just stop right there, OK? This doesn't concern you."
"Actually, it kind of does," Natasha said, moving forward.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. Natasha leaped, and the gun went off. However, before the bullet hit her, or anything, it appeared to be snatched out of the air by a black and green blur, which then kicked the thief across the room.
"You people are utterly moronic," the former blur, who appeared to be Loki, said, examining the bullet between his fingers. "No one who can be harmed by them should leap in front of a bullet." He dropped the bullet to the ground.
Bruce was breathing raggedly, trying to keep his pulse down. He had thought that Natasha was about to be shot, which had sent pulses of blinding green rage through his head. "How did you get in here?"
Loki looked towards a window, which was now broken. Before he could say anything, an out of breath Tony dashed into the coffee shop. "Is he in here? I saw him head this way," he said, looking around and spotting Loki. "If you wanted a coffee, you could have just said something. You didn't have to go running off!" It seemed only then that Tony took in the scene. "What the hell just happened here?"
"It appears that your friends are good at finding trouble no matter the setting," Loki explained with a glance around the room.
"More like bringing it," the communist clerk grumbled. It was only now that Bruce noticed her name tag that said her name, Delilah. "My parents are going to be pissed when they see that another window is broken. I appreciate the save, but do they not have doors on your planet?" she asked, turning toward Loki.
"My apologies," Loki said with a deep bow. "The window was closer than the door." He glanced toward Tony. "Do you think you can pay for the window? I do enjoy the coffee drinks that are made here."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Sure, whatever, Rudolph," he said with a wave of his hand. "Let's give the clerks here one less reason to spit in my coffee."
"Oh I've never spit in your coffee!" Delilah insisted, crossing her arms over her chest. "I like that you spend money here. I just hate that you always try to skip in line like you’re some fancy big shot."
"But I am a fancy big shot!" Tony insisted. "If you look up fancy big shot in the dictionary, it has a picture of me next to it! I paid a lot of money to be in that dictionary."
"Communist, Stark. We're all the same here, even if you're a superhero," Delilah explained, smirking at him.
OoOoOoOo
As soon as everyone headed back to Stark Tower (Tony ended up paying for both windows just so that they would be fixed faster), Bruce hid himself away in his lab again. He thought that it would be impossible to feel both powerless and out of control at the same time, but it seemed that he felt this way. He hated that he still could be sent into a pure rage by seemingly nothing (he could likely have taken care of the robber without even changing to the Other Guy), but it was something that he would have to learn to accept. Some people had a bad temper, and he just had an exceptionally bad one. It was just terrible that he could hurt all of those around him with his.
He was briefly thinking of simply running away again when he heard a knock at the lab door. He thought about not answering, but Natasha simply poked her head in just the same. He knew that she likely would have come in even if he’d said to stay away. “What can I do for you, Natasha?”
“Wanted to see how you were doing,” she asked as she moved further forward. “See if you were feeling alright.”
He nodded. “I’m alright enough. Just managed to prove earlier that I really need some sort of depressant if I’m going to stay here for any real length of time.” China was still looking pretty good about right now.
He could swear that the spy was a mind reader by the way she narrowed his eyes at him. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’d better put it out of your mind right now,” she told him.
“I’d think that you of all people would be happy to see me go,” Bruce pointed out to her, leaning back against the lab table that he had been working at. “It seems that I’m pretty good at putting you in some sort of danger.” He had almost made her a black and red smear in the Helicarrier before, and today had almost changed in the middle of a coffee shop.
“Well, the only way that you’re going to get any sort of control of yourself is to be around other people, not hiding a world away,” she said, making steps closer to him. “Don’t you worry about me, though. I can take care of myself pretty well.”
“Can you now?” he asked, a nervous smile crossing his face as she came closer to him. “Guns don’t do much against the Other Guy, you know.” Of course she knew. She had been there for the story that he had told.
She shook her head. “No guns,” she said to him. “I was actually hoping that your other half would eventually grow to like me, put me on that no smash list that Stark seems to have wiggled himself onto.”
He arched an eyebrow at her when she said that. Was she hinting at what he thought she might be hinting at? It had been a long time since he had anything to do with that. He had to be wrong. “That takes...prolonged exposure, from what I can tell,” he managed to stammer to her.
“Don’t worry about me, Bruce,” she said, looking up at him with a smile. “I think I can handle prolonged exposure.”