☢ FIC ⇝ Oh, boys.
Title: Just Another Saturday Night
Author: fribbled
Word Count: 2756
Rating: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Tony Stark ; Bruce Banner ; mentions of others
Warnings: Some language, Tony being a dick, and a very triggering childhood. :C
Summary/Description: Bruce just wanted to do a couple loads of laundry and be left alone. But Tony's bored and starts asking questions. He might not like what those questions get him.
-❖-❖-❖-
You’d think that between a genius intellect, billions of dollars, dozens of cars, even more dozens of names in a little black book and plenty more walking on the street just waiting to be added, cabinets of fine liquor, and a handful of gold-titanium alloy prosthetic suits to calibrate, a body could keep itself occupied until Judgment Day had come and gone with naught but a janitor to sweep up the place before locking up.
You’d think. And yet here walks Tony Stark through the halls of Avengers’ Mansion at midnight, bored out of his skull and itching to do something. He’d planned on going out tonight, hopefully with Pepper, but she’d pled out - saying something about how companies don’t run themselves, Tony, there’s a thing called responsibility and duty to stockholders and employees and not everyone can just run out for a party whenever they want to. He’s not sure how much of that is true, given that things with him and Potts are… Complicated. Complicated enough that he’d much rather bury himself in a disassembled SAE-certified GM 6.2L LSA engine rather than actually try to talk about just what the hell they were going and doing with each other, if anything at all and he thinks maybe she feels the same way but with high heels and power suits that make her legs go on for miles and miles and...
Damn it, this isn’t helping at all.
He knows he could just ask JARVIS to see if anyone’s around, but poking his head around the various rooms gives him something to do. Three floors later, he’s just about freaking done with it and about to ask the AI to play some kind of brain buster when he hits the jackpot. First sublevel lounge - subject locked on. Smirking, he closes in. There’s practically a thrilling, hard rock rendition of the Jaws theme music in the background.
For his part, Bruce Banner is just trying to fold some laundry. He never sees it coming. The poor schmuck.
“Bruuuuuuuuce,” Tony drawls, flopping down on the couch next to the basket of delightfully fresh-scented laundry and grinning up at his erstwhile teammate. The only signs the good doctor takes any notice of him at all is in the silent gritting of teeth and the singularly dedicated focus he puts toward folding a tee-shirt. There might also be a small vein starting to throb quietly at a temple. Who knows. Tony’s not really paying that much attention.
“You know,” he plows on, only pausing to pull out his wireless keyboard and turn the television on. “Pretty sure you’re unknowingly disappointing who knows how many people who fantasize about what the mighty Avengers do in their downtime. Seriously, thousands of kids sleeping in their Iron Man pajamas are tossing and turning - all because of you. How can you even live with yourself, Banner, knowing you’re responsible for all those children not getting a good night’s rest. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
He barely gets through six channels before Bruce sets down a pair of sweats with an exasperated sigh. “Mr. Stark,” he says, obviously going through whatever new sissy frou-frou meditation crap he’s gone and learned, “is there anything particular I can do to help you to, uh. …Leave? Since I’m kind of trying to do something here, and I’m sure you can go occupy yourself elsewhere.”
It’s uncanny how Bruce can make ‘go occupy yourself’ sound like something much more R-rated.
Tony huffs as he flicks through a sports broadcast, a sitcom, and one of the ‘edgy’ new shows on the CW. “You ever look into your apparent allergy to fun, Brewski?” But whatever - Bruce wants to whittle on that stick up his ass a bit more, he’s more than welcome. “Where is everybody? It’s like a ghost mansion around here.”
Bruce counts to ten (twice, so maybe twenty’s a more appropriate term but that’s not the point here) and exhales quietly. The sooner he answers, the sooner Tony will hopefully go away. “Well, Janet said she and Dr. Pym were going out for dinner, and then she sort of dragged him along. Steve said he wanted to take a walk through his old neighborhood… Miss Romanoff went off with Colonel Fury for something. I didn’t ask. And then Barton and Thor just. ...Left. They didn’t actually say where they were going, but then again. They don’t really talk to me all that much. So.”
Tony cranes his neck to give Bruce the eye. “…So with quite probably the most-tricked out house ever all to yourself. On a Saturday night. You do laundry.”
A shrug. “It has to get done, doesn’t it.”
Tony raises his eyes to heaven, begging for some kind of divine intervention here because he’s really starting to think only a miracle will get Banner to stop being the dour son of a bitch he’s apparently dead set on being. “You don’t have to stay inside, you know. Got the whole of New York out there waiting for you to take advantage of it.”
“Yeah, let me just grab my jacket and the two dozen S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who’d be ‘escorting’ me,” Bruce replies bitterly before inhaling deeply. When he continues, the bitterness has bled out of his voice, and now he’s just tired. “Thanks, but. No. At least here, I can pretend that there isn’t whoever knows how many people watching me on cameras, finger on the knockout gas just in case I get riled.”
“Would you prefer us having to rebuild the mansion? …Again?”
Banner flushes before shaking his head. “I don’t need you to spout on about how it’s necessary. It wouldn’t be necessary if I wasn’t even h-“ He cuts himself off. This is a line of conversation that’s been drawn enough that Tony could recite it back to him in his sleep. ‘This is a bad idea - it’s not safe - eventually you’ll see exactly why I’m right - it can’t be controlled - blah blah freaking blah’.
“Except you are, so suck it up, quit the Negative Nancy crap, and actually try enjoying yourself for once.” Tony rolls his eyes, still flipping through the channels - though how he can tell what’s going on given how he’s changing it a couple seconds after getting there, who knows. “So you don’t want to go out, fine, whatever. Nothing stopping you from getting a little party up in here. We break open a bottle or four, I call up some entertainment, and boom.”
For a moment, Bruce wants to take the shirt in his hands, wrap it around Tony’s neck, and squeeze. Or maybe just try and shove it down his throat. But he shoves the urge down before he can fully realize what he’s thinking and just. Calm. Calm. Right. “I don’t drink,” he replies tersely, his face closing as he goes back to staring a hole into the laundry basket. He doesn’t comment on what else he doesn’t do re: the ‘entertainment’ because he doesn’t need Tony going and mocking his inability there again.
Tony’s about to shoot back with a beautifully prepared comeback, but something makes him take pause. “…Yeah, why is that?” Because seriously, what was even up with not drinking. In fact, Tony thought with a frown, why doesn’t he have a drink in his hand right now? Huh.
“Why are you even bothering to ask? It’s in my file.” Bruce can’t imagine it not being in there, because between working for the government and running from it, one would think that everything down to the state of his toenails would be included in it. At least he’d assume so.
Cooking show, auto traders, horse racing, something with accents, flip-flip-flip. “I haven’t read it.” It’s a long minute before he notices the silence and turns to see Bruce staring at him in annoyed disbelief. Shrugging defensively, Tony returns his attention to the television. “I mean, I’ve read the green parts, sure, but come on, Brucie. Do I really seem like the kind of guy who’d abuse a clearance code just to go and read up on someone’s extremely personal details?”
A much, much longer minute, and the disbelief on Bruce’s face has evolved from annoyed to ‘are you seriously asking that’.
Tony pouts at the other man in mock disappointment. “Oh, come on, that really hurts, Bruce. Hurts me right here,” he taps at the glowing arc reactor peeking out from the specially tailored window in his shirt. Then he fixes Banner with a stare, and when he speaks this time, he’s completely and totally sincere. “…No, I haven’t read it.”
Bruce stares back, and a small frown of confusion makes his forehead wrinkle. “…Really? You really haven’t looked in there?”
“Scout’s honor.”
An incredulous eyebrow quirks up at that. “Yeah, I’m. Kind of doubting you were ever a scout. Sorry, but no.” Another shirt is placed carefully into the basket before Bruce shakes his head. “And it’s not something I’d like to talk about, so. No to that too.”
“Then let me rephrase that,” Tony says slowly as to make sure Bruce understands. “I haven’t abused my clearance code yet.” Even if he doesn’t have the pull to check it out, there isn’t a system JARVIS can’t crack if he asks it to.
If Tony wasn’t already sure about Bruce’s severe dislike of him, he would think he just burned a bridge here. Because he can see that whatever small fraction the doctor went and relaxed around him being compensated for with brand-spanking-new resentment. There’s a long while that passes before Bruce shuts his eyes, takes a breath, and then like ripping off an old band-aid, “My father drank.” The ‘are you happy now’ is obvious enough that Banner should have just rented out a neon sign.
Blinking, Tony waits for more, for the rest of it, and when it doesn’t come - he snorts in derision. “What, seriously? That’s it? Hell, my father drank.”
Bruce has run out of clothes to focus on, so he just. Very pointedly plants the basket on the coffee table (and Tony props his feet up right next to it a second later), and then he sits down on the opposite end of the couch and lets his head flop back against the cushion. “Oh. Really. Well, uh. I don’t think yours ever tried to kill you. …So.”
The channels stop flipping, forgotten, landing on some guys in a warehouse talking about whether or not you could really be sucked out of a puncture in an airplane fuselage. Tony’s too busy gaping blankly at Banner to care about it. “You’re shitting me.”
“Yeah, Stark, I thought it would be funny,” is the exhaustedly neutral reply. “’Cause, you know. You know me, always with the funny.” Bruce scrubs at his eyes because he’s just waiting for this conversation to be over and done with as soon as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, a topic doesn’t usually die after dropping a bombshell like that without any details. Tony drops his feet to the floor and sits up straight to get a better vantage for all the staring he’s doing up in here. “When?”
He sighs, and opens his eyes to stare at the ceiling. “I was eight,” he answers quietly, trying to keep his voice detached, disinterested - like he’s talking about someone else, someone he doesn’t know or even wants to know. The success is only middling, but it’s not like he’s any great stranger to failure, is he. He doesn’t even have to look at Tony to know the other man’s about to ask for the salient details. There’s another deep breath, and he cuts it off at the pass. “He wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, not with the way he’d been drinking the night before. So we weren’t paying attention, and he just was there right after we’d gotten in the car. Then…”
The television’s been turned off somewhere in all of this (Tony makes a vague mental note to thank JARVIS for the decorum later), so the silence stretches out for a few seconds as he processes all of this.
“You said ‘we’. Your mom?”
“…He got to her first.” His voice tightens at that before he regains control. “Some neighbor called the police, and they showed up before he could really do more than knock me around a few times. They took him away, and I went to live with my aunt.” Bruce slides down in his seat - he can’t really sink into the floor so this will just have to do. “So… Yeah.”
Tony’s not really sure what he can say, or if he should say anything at all. Even he knows sorry here won’t mean a damn thing, and he doubts there’s a Hallmark card for something like this. “Did he-You ever figure out the why? It’s not as if people just wake up and lose their marbles like that.”
Bruce chokes out a small bitter laugh. “Well, uh. That wasn’t ever really a big mystery. See, he’d always made his opinion of me pretty obvious.” There’s a sheepish, ironic half-smile on his face when he looks at Tony. “He, ah, thought I was a mutant. Said I was a freak. …A monster.” The smile fades slowly as he watches his hands in his lap. “’Course, now… It’s almost kind of funny.” A beat. “Okay, maybe not in the traditional rubber chicken kind of funny, more like the. ‘Look at how things turned out’ kind.” Rubbing the back of his neck, he shrugs. “And, uh. Now you know.”
It’s quite impossible to imagine a more awkward silence than the one going on right this moment. Both men end up looking rather intently at neighboring spots on the wall just above the television screen. Finally it gets bad enough that Tony refuses to let it go on any longer, goddamn it, this is just getting ridiculous.
“You done with your laundry, Kermit?”
Bruce blinks a few times at Tony before his face settles back into the usual exasperated annoyance it likes whenever talking with Stark. Rolling his eyes, he waves a hand at the basket before dropping it back in his lap. “Yeah. Well, I mean for now at least.”
“Awesome.” Tony grabs the basket off the table and tosses it on the floor - not knocking it over (somehow) but most likely mussing up Banner’s fastidious folding technique, and most definitely not caring. “Now get off your bony ass, since I’m about to kick it on the Wii.” JARVIS takes the hint and powers up the game console while he jogs over to grab the remotes.
More blinking. “Wa- Just wait a minute. What’s a Wii?”
“…Seriously?” It’s really easy to forget that Bruce is still catching up on the years he’s missed hiding in the various assholes of nowhere he hung around in before joining up with the spandex squad. “It’s Nintendo, Banner - you know? Video games? I can understand you not really being familiar with the concept, as it’s intricately linked to the concept of fun and everyone knows you and that simply do not mix, but hey. Let’s take a chance, see what happens.”
“I know what a video game is, okay,” he answers peevishly before frowning in confusion. “…Are y- Is this you trying to be nice?”
“Don’t go trying to turn this into some heartwarming, touchy-feely, buddy-cop type of thing, Broccoli Boy.” Tony tosses the second controller at Bruce over his shoulder as he fiddles with settings. “Just pick out your guy so we can get this show on the road. Don’t want to hold up the entirely epic schooling you’re about to experience.”
Bruce stares at Tony’s back a moment longer, trying to compute just what the heck all of this is before ducking his head to hide the beginnings of a miniscule smile and slipping the loop around his wrist. Busying himself with the remote, the smile fades back into a frown as he tries pressing a few buttons with no effect.
“How does this thing even work?”
“You’ll figure it out as you go,” Tony replies as he flops back onto the couch with a sadistic smirk. Maybe he had a slightly unfair advantage in that he was one of the first people in the world to have even heard about the Wii, never mind actually being the first to own one. Maybe. But that didn’t mean beating Banner’s butt was going to be any less satisfying.
Maybe this Saturday night wasn’t a complete bust after all.
-❖-❖-❖-
Yeah, this is what I think of while at work.
Author: fribbled
Word Count: 2756
Rating: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Tony Stark ; Bruce Banner ; mentions of others
Warnings: Some language, Tony being a dick, and a very triggering childhood. :C
Summary/Description: Bruce just wanted to do a couple loads of laundry and be left alone. But Tony's bored and starts asking questions. He might not like what those questions get him.
-❖-❖-❖-
You’d think that between a genius intellect, billions of dollars, dozens of cars, even more dozens of names in a little black book and plenty more walking on the street just waiting to be added, cabinets of fine liquor, and a handful of gold-titanium alloy prosthetic suits to calibrate, a body could keep itself occupied until Judgment Day had come and gone with naught but a janitor to sweep up the place before locking up.
You’d think. And yet here walks Tony Stark through the halls of Avengers’ Mansion at midnight, bored out of his skull and itching to do something. He’d planned on going out tonight, hopefully with Pepper, but she’d pled out - saying something about how companies don’t run themselves, Tony, there’s a thing called responsibility and duty to stockholders and employees and not everyone can just run out for a party whenever they want to. He’s not sure how much of that is true, given that things with him and Potts are… Complicated. Complicated enough that he’d much rather bury himself in a disassembled SAE-certified GM 6.2L LSA engine rather than actually try to talk about just what the hell they were going and doing with each other, if anything at all and he thinks maybe she feels the same way but with high heels and power suits that make her legs go on for miles and miles and...
Damn it, this isn’t helping at all.
He knows he could just ask JARVIS to see if anyone’s around, but poking his head around the various rooms gives him something to do. Three floors later, he’s just about freaking done with it and about to ask the AI to play some kind of brain buster when he hits the jackpot. First sublevel lounge - subject locked on. Smirking, he closes in. There’s practically a thrilling, hard rock rendition of the Jaws theme music in the background.
For his part, Bruce Banner is just trying to fold some laundry. He never sees it coming. The poor schmuck.
“Bruuuuuuuuce,” Tony drawls, flopping down on the couch next to the basket of delightfully fresh-scented laundry and grinning up at his erstwhile teammate. The only signs the good doctor takes any notice of him at all is in the silent gritting of teeth and the singularly dedicated focus he puts toward folding a tee-shirt. There might also be a small vein starting to throb quietly at a temple. Who knows. Tony’s not really paying that much attention.
“You know,” he plows on, only pausing to pull out his wireless keyboard and turn the television on. “Pretty sure you’re unknowingly disappointing who knows how many people who fantasize about what the mighty Avengers do in their downtime. Seriously, thousands of kids sleeping in their Iron Man pajamas are tossing and turning - all because of you. How can you even live with yourself, Banner, knowing you’re responsible for all those children not getting a good night’s rest. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
He barely gets through six channels before Bruce sets down a pair of sweats with an exasperated sigh. “Mr. Stark,” he says, obviously going through whatever new sissy frou-frou meditation crap he’s gone and learned, “is there anything particular I can do to help you to, uh. …Leave? Since I’m kind of trying to do something here, and I’m sure you can go occupy yourself elsewhere.”
It’s uncanny how Bruce can make ‘go occupy yourself’ sound like something much more R-rated.
Tony huffs as he flicks through a sports broadcast, a sitcom, and one of the ‘edgy’ new shows on the CW. “You ever look into your apparent allergy to fun, Brewski?” But whatever - Bruce wants to whittle on that stick up his ass a bit more, he’s more than welcome. “Where is everybody? It’s like a ghost mansion around here.”
Bruce counts to ten (twice, so maybe twenty’s a more appropriate term but that’s not the point here) and exhales quietly. The sooner he answers, the sooner Tony will hopefully go away. “Well, Janet said she and Dr. Pym were going out for dinner, and then she sort of dragged him along. Steve said he wanted to take a walk through his old neighborhood… Miss Romanoff went off with Colonel Fury for something. I didn’t ask. And then Barton and Thor just. ...Left. They didn’t actually say where they were going, but then again. They don’t really talk to me all that much. So.”
Tony cranes his neck to give Bruce the eye. “…So with quite probably the most-tricked out house ever all to yourself. On a Saturday night. You do laundry.”
A shrug. “It has to get done, doesn’t it.”
Tony raises his eyes to heaven, begging for some kind of divine intervention here because he’s really starting to think only a miracle will get Banner to stop being the dour son of a bitch he’s apparently dead set on being. “You don’t have to stay inside, you know. Got the whole of New York out there waiting for you to take advantage of it.”
“Yeah, let me just grab my jacket and the two dozen S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who’d be ‘escorting’ me,” Bruce replies bitterly before inhaling deeply. When he continues, the bitterness has bled out of his voice, and now he’s just tired. “Thanks, but. No. At least here, I can pretend that there isn’t whoever knows how many people watching me on cameras, finger on the knockout gas just in case I get riled.”
“Would you prefer us having to rebuild the mansion? …Again?”
Banner flushes before shaking his head. “I don’t need you to spout on about how it’s necessary. It wouldn’t be necessary if I wasn’t even h-“ He cuts himself off. This is a line of conversation that’s been drawn enough that Tony could recite it back to him in his sleep. ‘This is a bad idea - it’s not safe - eventually you’ll see exactly why I’m right - it can’t be controlled - blah blah freaking blah’.
“Except you are, so suck it up, quit the Negative Nancy crap, and actually try enjoying yourself for once.” Tony rolls his eyes, still flipping through the channels - though how he can tell what’s going on given how he’s changing it a couple seconds after getting there, who knows. “So you don’t want to go out, fine, whatever. Nothing stopping you from getting a little party up in here. We break open a bottle or four, I call up some entertainment, and boom.”
For a moment, Bruce wants to take the shirt in his hands, wrap it around Tony’s neck, and squeeze. Or maybe just try and shove it down his throat. But he shoves the urge down before he can fully realize what he’s thinking and just. Calm. Calm. Right. “I don’t drink,” he replies tersely, his face closing as he goes back to staring a hole into the laundry basket. He doesn’t comment on what else he doesn’t do re: the ‘entertainment’ because he doesn’t need Tony going and mocking his inability there again.
Tony’s about to shoot back with a beautifully prepared comeback, but something makes him take pause. “…Yeah, why is that?” Because seriously, what was even up with not drinking. In fact, Tony thought with a frown, why doesn’t he have a drink in his hand right now? Huh.
“Why are you even bothering to ask? It’s in my file.” Bruce can’t imagine it not being in there, because between working for the government and running from it, one would think that everything down to the state of his toenails would be included in it. At least he’d assume so.
Cooking show, auto traders, horse racing, something with accents, flip-flip-flip. “I haven’t read it.” It’s a long minute before he notices the silence and turns to see Bruce staring at him in annoyed disbelief. Shrugging defensively, Tony returns his attention to the television. “I mean, I’ve read the green parts, sure, but come on, Brucie. Do I really seem like the kind of guy who’d abuse a clearance code just to go and read up on someone’s extremely personal details?”
A much, much longer minute, and the disbelief on Bruce’s face has evolved from annoyed to ‘are you seriously asking that’.
Tony pouts at the other man in mock disappointment. “Oh, come on, that really hurts, Bruce. Hurts me right here,” he taps at the glowing arc reactor peeking out from the specially tailored window in his shirt. Then he fixes Banner with a stare, and when he speaks this time, he’s completely and totally sincere. “…No, I haven’t read it.”
Bruce stares back, and a small frown of confusion makes his forehead wrinkle. “…Really? You really haven’t looked in there?”
“Scout’s honor.”
An incredulous eyebrow quirks up at that. “Yeah, I’m. Kind of doubting you were ever a scout. Sorry, but no.” Another shirt is placed carefully into the basket before Bruce shakes his head. “And it’s not something I’d like to talk about, so. No to that too.”
“Then let me rephrase that,” Tony says slowly as to make sure Bruce understands. “I haven’t abused my clearance code yet.” Even if he doesn’t have the pull to check it out, there isn’t a system JARVIS can’t crack if he asks it to.
If Tony wasn’t already sure about Bruce’s severe dislike of him, he would think he just burned a bridge here. Because he can see that whatever small fraction the doctor went and relaxed around him being compensated for with brand-spanking-new resentment. There’s a long while that passes before Bruce shuts his eyes, takes a breath, and then like ripping off an old band-aid, “My father drank.” The ‘are you happy now’ is obvious enough that Banner should have just rented out a neon sign.
Blinking, Tony waits for more, for the rest of it, and when it doesn’t come - he snorts in derision. “What, seriously? That’s it? Hell, my father drank.”
Bruce has run out of clothes to focus on, so he just. Very pointedly plants the basket on the coffee table (and Tony props his feet up right next to it a second later), and then he sits down on the opposite end of the couch and lets his head flop back against the cushion. “Oh. Really. Well, uh. I don’t think yours ever tried to kill you. …So.”
The channels stop flipping, forgotten, landing on some guys in a warehouse talking about whether or not you could really be sucked out of a puncture in an airplane fuselage. Tony’s too busy gaping blankly at Banner to care about it. “You’re shitting me.”
“Yeah, Stark, I thought it would be funny,” is the exhaustedly neutral reply. “’Cause, you know. You know me, always with the funny.” Bruce scrubs at his eyes because he’s just waiting for this conversation to be over and done with as soon as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, a topic doesn’t usually die after dropping a bombshell like that without any details. Tony drops his feet to the floor and sits up straight to get a better vantage for all the staring he’s doing up in here. “When?”
He sighs, and opens his eyes to stare at the ceiling. “I was eight,” he answers quietly, trying to keep his voice detached, disinterested - like he’s talking about someone else, someone he doesn’t know or even wants to know. The success is only middling, but it’s not like he’s any great stranger to failure, is he. He doesn’t even have to look at Tony to know the other man’s about to ask for the salient details. There’s another deep breath, and he cuts it off at the pass. “He wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, not with the way he’d been drinking the night before. So we weren’t paying attention, and he just was there right after we’d gotten in the car. Then…”
The television’s been turned off somewhere in all of this (Tony makes a vague mental note to thank JARVIS for the decorum later), so the silence stretches out for a few seconds as he processes all of this.
“You said ‘we’. Your mom?”
“…He got to her first.” His voice tightens at that before he regains control. “Some neighbor called the police, and they showed up before he could really do more than knock me around a few times. They took him away, and I went to live with my aunt.” Bruce slides down in his seat - he can’t really sink into the floor so this will just have to do. “So… Yeah.”
Tony’s not really sure what he can say, or if he should say anything at all. Even he knows sorry here won’t mean a damn thing, and he doubts there’s a Hallmark card for something like this. “Did he-You ever figure out the why? It’s not as if people just wake up and lose their marbles like that.”
Bruce chokes out a small bitter laugh. “Well, uh. That wasn’t ever really a big mystery. See, he’d always made his opinion of me pretty obvious.” There’s a sheepish, ironic half-smile on his face when he looks at Tony. “He, ah, thought I was a mutant. Said I was a freak. …A monster.” The smile fades slowly as he watches his hands in his lap. “’Course, now… It’s almost kind of funny.” A beat. “Okay, maybe not in the traditional rubber chicken kind of funny, more like the. ‘Look at how things turned out’ kind.” Rubbing the back of his neck, he shrugs. “And, uh. Now you know.”
It’s quite impossible to imagine a more awkward silence than the one going on right this moment. Both men end up looking rather intently at neighboring spots on the wall just above the television screen. Finally it gets bad enough that Tony refuses to let it go on any longer, goddamn it, this is just getting ridiculous.
“You done with your laundry, Kermit?”
Bruce blinks a few times at Tony before his face settles back into the usual exasperated annoyance it likes whenever talking with Stark. Rolling his eyes, he waves a hand at the basket before dropping it back in his lap. “Yeah. Well, I mean for now at least.”
“Awesome.” Tony grabs the basket off the table and tosses it on the floor - not knocking it over (somehow) but most likely mussing up Banner’s fastidious folding technique, and most definitely not caring. “Now get off your bony ass, since I’m about to kick it on the Wii.” JARVIS takes the hint and powers up the game console while he jogs over to grab the remotes.
More blinking. “Wa- Just wait a minute. What’s a Wii?”
“…Seriously?” It’s really easy to forget that Bruce is still catching up on the years he’s missed hiding in the various assholes of nowhere he hung around in before joining up with the spandex squad. “It’s Nintendo, Banner - you know? Video games? I can understand you not really being familiar with the concept, as it’s intricately linked to the concept of fun and everyone knows you and that simply do not mix, but hey. Let’s take a chance, see what happens.”
“I know what a video game is, okay,” he answers peevishly before frowning in confusion. “…Are y- Is this you trying to be nice?”
“Don’t go trying to turn this into some heartwarming, touchy-feely, buddy-cop type of thing, Broccoli Boy.” Tony tosses the second controller at Bruce over his shoulder as he fiddles with settings. “Just pick out your guy so we can get this show on the road. Don’t want to hold up the entirely epic schooling you’re about to experience.”
Bruce stares at Tony’s back a moment longer, trying to compute just what the heck all of this is before ducking his head to hide the beginnings of a miniscule smile and slipping the loop around his wrist. Busying himself with the remote, the smile fades back into a frown as he tries pressing a few buttons with no effect.
“How does this thing even work?”
“You’ll figure it out as you go,” Tony replies as he flops back onto the couch with a sadistic smirk. Maybe he had a slightly unfair advantage in that he was one of the first people in the world to have even heard about the Wii, never mind actually being the first to own one. Maybe. But that didn’t mean beating Banner’s butt was going to be any less satisfying.
Maybe this Saturday night wasn’t a complete bust after all.
-❖-❖-❖-
Yeah, this is what I think of while at work.