fic: Holding onto Stars 1/2
Title: Holding onto Stars.
Fandom: MCU.
Rating: NC-17.
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Jane, Erik, Thor.
Summary: Jane, Bruce, and Erik go to the desert to test out the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which means that, just maybe, she's finally going to see Thor again.
She might be a little less excited about this than she expected to be, three years ago.
Notes: Sequel to Flew Away or Started Sinking, some discussion of past canon abuse
It's been a long time since Jane's woken up with a man in her bed, especially on more than one occasion with the same guy. Don was the first steady, move in together, meet the parents, boyfriend that she ever had. She'd had some one night stands, some blind dates, one intense two and a half month relationship at NASA Academy that was purely intellectual, but Don was the first guy that she thought might go the distance. And it did, like a twelve hour plane ride that you're travel sick for six hours on.
Bruce mumbles something into the pillow, clutching tightly at it, then huffs, his cheek blowing out. He sleeps kind of like a child, she thinks, making funny little sounds, face twitching, curled up in his protective ball. It doesn't help that his hair gets so messed up when he's sleeping, though the grey offsets the image somewhat.
She's not sure that 'like a child' is a positive descriptor for him.
After a month of living together, she knows that his internal alarm is about to go off as the clock ticks towards six thirty. Actual alarms are kind of a problem for him, unsurprisingly, so he relies on the fact that he tends to wake up early. She isn't sure what she's going to do when she needs to set an alarm, but so far it's been okay, since she can get to the lab whenever she wants and she's an early riser too.
Bruce shifts, scratching his nose, and snuffles into the pillow before his eyes slowly flicker open. She watches his face as he wakes; maybe it's bad to find it fascinating, but 'the other guy' is so much closer to the surface when he's half asleep, and it's just really interesting to watch. His eyes are green when he first opens them, not the brilliant green they are when he's woken unexpectedly, but still recognisably green. She's not sure if he knows this, as he pushes himself up and smiles sleepily at her, seemingly unconcerned. Maybe he's not quite fully Bruce yet. She wonders if going through REM cycles has some kind of effect on the barrier between Bruce and the other guy.
It's probably creepy that she's thinking about this.
Bruce's eyes fade back to brown while he scratches the back of his head, fidgeting the blanket with his other hand. “Why're you staring at me?” he asks.
She shrugs, and leans over to give him a kiss. “I can look, can't I?”
“Not much to look at, but okay.”
“Shush,” she murmurs, tipping her head to one side to kiss along his jaw.
-
She brings a couple cups of coffee with her to help broker some peace between her and Erik. Not that she's done anything wrong, but he's been even gloomier than normal since she and Bruce started... dating, or whatever it is that they're doing.
“So how's everything going?” Erik asks, his tone suggesting that he thinks he's being subtle. He's not.
“Everything is fine,” she says, “and how about you?”
He scowls a little. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” she says, and takes her coffee over to her desk.
Erik huffs. “And?”
“I'm just agreeing with you. I don't have anything else to say on the matter.”
“You're as stubborn as your father was,” Erik mutters, shuffling over to his own desk.
“Thank you,” she calls.
In the afternoon, she picks up a couple of cartons of lo mein and takes them over to Bruce's new lab in Stark Tower. She's only been there the once, but she can't help but feel a little jealous: Bruce has this enormous lab with every cutting - and bleeding - edge tech on and off the market, and nothing to do with it, while she and Erik have a couple of rooms in a sad office building in which to create probably the most ground-breaking invention of their time.
She's let up to the lab after a fingerprint and retina scan, and a thorough investigation of the lo mein.
“Bruce?” she calls, looking around the main room. There's a white board on the wall that has written on it: 'Cancer, what's up with that shit?; colds and super-colds (flu); codeine that doesn't make me hork; how come pepper's feet can defy gravity?; create the next super virus???' and underneath all that in block capitals: 'SCIENCE'.
Bruce pops his head out of an adjoining room. “Hey,” he says, and frowns a little. “What're you doing here?”
She holds up the takeout bag. “Lo mein.”
“Oh,” he says, his eyes widening. “Come in then.”
She rolls her eyes and he grins a little. “I'm guessing you didn't write all of this?” she says, nodding to the board.
“Tony came by. He wanted to give me some ideas for stuff I could work on. I think he's slightly unclear about what kind of scientist I primarily am.”
“Who isn't?” she says. “What exactly does he want you to do about cancer?”
Bruce ducks back into the other room for a minute, returning with a fork for her. He just has to be such a show off about being able to chopsticks while she can't. “Cure it, so that he can take the credit.”
“And then he wants you to create a super virus?”
Bruce shrugs and shows her over to a couple of seats. “Well, we have to keep people guessing.”
“Riiight,” she says, digging into her carton. “So, been doing anything interesting today?”
Bruce wrinkles up his nose a little, glasses bobbing up for a moment. “Not really. I helped some sustainable energy researchers this morning, but that's been about it.”
“So what's he paying you for?”
“I have no idea,” he says, smiling ruefully. “How's your morning been?”
“Fine. We're still stalled over the power issue. Erik's still sulking.”
Bruce nods slowly, and leans back in his chair, resting his feet on a bar at the bottom of the table. What an exciting, dynamic couple of people they are. “Is he any happier at all about... everything?”
“Not really.”
Bruce's brow furrows. “I just don't have any luck with fathers, you know.”
She does her best to cover a wince; she's not sure if he just means Dr Ross's father, or if he's referring to his own as well. He tends to stay at such a steady level of mellowness that sometimes it's difficult to gauge his actual mood.
She settles for, “Erik isn't my father.”
“Older male authority figures, then. I just never could make a good impression. Which makes me sound like some kind of cool rebel without a cause, or something.”
“You're tearing me apart, Bruce,” she says, in an awful approximation of James Dean.
-
Since he first told her about Brian, she's resisted the urge to look up information about him, but once she's back in the lab after lunch, Bruce's offhand words just won't get out of her head, and she drags her laptop over and opens up Google. As she types the letters, the suggested searches whittle down until she's got 'Brian Banner Los Alamos'. She hits enter and Los Alamos's official website is at the top of the page. She frowns, toying for a moment with just closing the tab; she gets as far as pressing the control button before she moves the cursor over and clicks.
His biography is a short one, with just his date of birth, university he attended, and period of time that he worked at the lab: 1961-68. She backspaces back to the search hits and skims down the page until she gets to a newspaper archive with a little snippet of an article that reads: 'Dayton resident, Brian Banner, is currently wanted for questioning...'. She bites her lip and clicks on it.
There are several entries on Brian Banner from 1977 and '78. She opens one at random and starts reading:
A warrant has been issued for Brian Banner, 38, wanted for questioning in conjunction with the murder of his wife, Rebecca Banner, 35, on Sunday night. There is also a missing persons report out for Robert Banner, 8. Rebecca Banner was found by her neighbour on Monday afternoon, with injuries in line with a severe blow to the head. Authorities have reason to believe that Brian Banner has abducted his son, and they are advising that anyone who sees either of them should call 911 immediately and not approach.
Her stomach wobbles uncertainly. She presses her fingers to her lips and clicks back, skimming some more article titles until she finds one from late in 1978:
Brian Banner, former researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dayton resident, was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole yesterday for the murder of his wife, Rebecca Banner. His son, Bobby, was meant to give evidence for the prosecution, but, once on the stand, denied that his father had had anything to do with the brutal attack and murder of his mother. When first examined by doctors after his father was located and arrested, marks and fading bruises across his back and the backs of his legs were found, and as well as evidence of multiple healed fractures...
“Jane?” Erik calls.
She jumps an inch in her chair and slams the lid of her laptop closed. “What?” she snaps.
He squints a little. “Never mind,” he mutters.
It's horribly addictive, reading through the archived articles, about the trial and the impersonal details of 'Bobby's' abuse. Brian was also charged with witness tampering, but his lawyers successfully argued that Bobby was psychologically disturbed and that's why his story did a one eighty. And they printed that in the newspaper, right there for everyone to read. God.
She can't concentrate at all on her work, and packs up for the day at five, heading home upset and agitated. It crosses her mind to try to tidy the apartment to take her mind off everything she's read, but the place is entirely too much of a mess for her to even consider starting to clean at six o'clock. Instead she grabs a book that Bruce left on the coffee table, a dog-eared secondhand copy of The Andromeda Strain. The first week he moved in, and got his first ridiculous pay cheque from Stark Industries, he bought a ton of battered old books, mumbling that he lost all of his years ago when he brought the box of them home. Jane cleared out a space on her bookcase, between Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.
Bruce gets home at seven thirty, rattling his key in the door with his normal inability to work the rusty lock. She jumps up and heads over to open it for him.
“Hey,” he says, wrenching the key back out. “You're home early.”
“Yeah,” she says, and fists her hand in his shirt to tug him closer. He puts one hand against the door frame as they kiss, keys clinking together, and tucks his other against her hip, thumb hooking in her belt loop.
“What was that for?” he murmurs when she breaks off.
“Just because,” she says, and tugs him all the way in, closing the door behind him. “I was thinking, do you want to order pizza and watch a movie?”
“Sure,” he says, smiling.
“What's your favourite movie?”
Bruce looks thoughtful for a moment. “Well, my pop culture is pretty out of date, but I like, uh, schlocky horror movies.” He runs his fingers through his hair and ducks his head a little.
She grins and goes over to her sad little TV cabinet, rooting around in there for a moment before emerging triumphant with a DVD boxset: all the best and worst B horror movies of the eighties. “My intern gave this me for my birthday a couple of years ago,” she says, “I've never actually had time to watch them before.”
Bruce grins back. “I'll order the pizza.”
He falls asleep halfway through the third movie, just before the mom realises that Chucky is alive. He has his arms crossed over his chest, his mouth set in a serious line, looking very stern in his repose. She smiles and reaches up to fiddle with his hair, tucking salt and pepper strands behind his ear; he shifts, tipping his head back further and sighs. She wonders how hard it must be to sleep out in the open like this, after years on the run.
She switches the TV off at one am and looks over at Bruce, whose sleep has gone undisturbed by screaming women and children. She's not sure how advisable it is to shake him awake, but she doesn't want to just leave him out here.
“Bruce,” she says softly. He stirs for a moment, then settles again. “Bruce,” she repeats, a little louder, “come on, time to wake up.”
“What?” he mumbles plaintively.
“It's time to get up and go to bed, Bruce.”
He huffs but opens his eyes to slits. “Sleep here,” he mumbles.
“No,” she says, and grabs his arm to pull him up. He shuffles after her into the bedroom, clumsily undressing and falling into bed. His eyes stay green the whole time.
-
She has a breakthrough while watching a weather report, of all things.
“Oh!” she says, waving her hand at the screen, “that's it!”
Erik startles, smudging the equation he was writing on the whiteboard. He looks over his shoulder. “What's it?”
“That!” She waves her hand at the report of lightning storms predicted in the coming weeks in the Grand Canyon area. “Fucking electrical storms, God's own power supply!”
Erik squints at her.
“To power up the bridge!”
Erik is still squinting. “That sounds extremely dangerous, with a very low chance of success.”
“Oh, whatever,” she says, turning away from him, and pulls her cellphone from her pocket. “I'm calling Bruce.”
He answers on the first ring. “Thank God,” he says by way of greeting, “I am so bored.”
“Electrical storms!” she exclaims.
“Uh... maybe later?”
She grins to herself and launches into a quick, but thorough explanation of her blossoming plan to harness the awesome power of nature for her own ends. She feels a little light-headed at the end of her lecture, and takes a deep breath before adding, “So, do you wanna go storm-chasing with me, Bruce?”
She can hear Bruce laughing softly. “Yes, definitely,” he says.
-
All she has of the bridge are the schematics, and after recovering from the excitement of her revelation, she realises that there's no way she'll be able to build it in time, not with revisions she's going to have to make and with the resources she has available to her. She calls Bruce back and asks for a raincheck on that trip and he's as magnanimous as usual about the whole thing, in stark contrast with Erik's quiet smugness.
When she gets into the lab the next morning, she finds Erik remonstrating with a group of sloppily dressed men and women.
“Um...” she says, squeezing through the group to get to the door. “What's going on?”
“They say they're from Stark Industries,” Erik says, eyeing their apparent leader, a young guy in an Adventure Time t-shirt. “Apparently we require some kind of 'help'.”
“What?” she says.
“Dr. Foster,” the guy says, thrusting his hand at her, “I'm David. Mr Stark sent us over to help build the Einstein-Rosen bridge. We're not gonna steal anything. We're not-” He fixes a stare at Erik. “-the man.”
She shakes his hand briefly, then retrieves her phone from her bag. “Everyone,” she says, as the volume starts to escalate again, and holds up a finger. “Quiet.”
She hangs on for ten rings this time, before Bruce picks up. “Hey, sorry,” he says, “are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, except for all the Stark employees cluttering up the hall outside the lab...”
“The what?”
“So, you didn't have anything to do with this?”
“No...” He trails off and the sound gets a little muffled as she hears him call out, 'Tony? Tony, what did you do? What? Why?', then disappears altogether for a couple of minutes. “Okay,” he says, back on the line, “yesterday I asked Tony if it would be all right to take some time off, and then later told him not to worry because you needed more time, so apparently he decided to lend a hand.”
“He really wanted to go storm-chasing with you!” she hears Tony yell in the background.
“Those guys are gonna help build the machine and, apparently, 'trip it out' with some experimental clean energy to give it a boost - no, Tony, I'm not giving you the phone - and they have a contract for you to sign that promises that they won't steal any of your ideas.”
She drops the phone to her shoulder. “Contract?” she says to David.
“Oh! Yeah, I've got it here somewhere, let me see...” he mutters, digging around in his bag. “Yeah, here it is.”
She takes it from him and flicks through it quickly. She replaces the phone to her ear. “Well, it looks okay.”
“So, are you going to go for it?” Bruce asks, and there's some rustling on the line that sounds suspiciously like he's batting something away.
“Um... yeah, okay, I guess so.”
“She says okay,” he says, to Tony, she assumes.
“Whoo!” she hears him reply.
-
Stark's guys are frighteningly efficient. The majority of them might look like they've stepped directly out of Revenge of the Nerds, but they can get shit done, and by the end of the week, she's got an experimental Einstein-Rosen bridge waiting to get juiced up.
She strokes it lovingly, while Bruce smiles behind his carton of takeout, both of them sitting on the floor of the lab as it gets dark outside. Bruce is polite enough about laughing at her that she isn't even offended.
“Tony's chartered a plane to fly us out there, and he's got us an RV. I had to seriously dissuade him from getting a party bus,” he says, and holds out the bag of prawn crackers.
“Thanks,” she says, and grabs a handful, then frowns. “But... can you fly?”
“I'm not that mutated,” he says. She arches an eyebrow and he smiles again. “I'll be fine.”
-
She doesn't see him all day the day that they're scheduled to take off, through a combination of her every thought being taken up by preparing for the trip, transporting the machine, not letting anyone else touch the machine, etc. etc., and Bruce going to the tower in the morning to 'tie up a few loose ends', and not coming back for hours. She ends up on the tarmac at five o'clock, with the dark cloud that is Erik beside her, starting to fret about why Bruce isn't answering his phone, when the car pulls up and the man himself stumbles out. He swings his duffel bag over his shoulder and waves to the driver as he backs up.
“Why the hell haven't you been answering your phone?” she calls.
“Oh, I, yeah... phone,” he says, patting his jacket for a moment before looking up. “Wow, that's a big plane.”
It's actually a rather small plane, as planes go. Erik casts him a look and shakes his head, before heading towards the airstairs. Bruce ambles up to her and smiles. Jane leans in to study his face and he tips his head back, widening his eyes comically.
“Are you high?”
“Oh,” he says, and twists his fingers together. “Yes.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Sure,” he says, and falls silent for a moment, before his eyebrows jump up. “Oh, um, I guess I kinda am a nervous flyer after all, even without all the... grrr.” He makes claw motions with his fingers, and it's just about the cutest thing she's ever seen. She curls a hand around his shoulder and kisses him, and he just sort of melts into her, hands in her hair, leaning the weight of his thigh against her hip. He hasn't exactly got the build that she normally goes for, though with a little weight on him she discovered that he has rather nicely muscled arms, but he's still a little too heavy.
She pushes him back and smooths her hands over his hair. This close, it's pretty obvious that he's been smoking weed. “So, where'd you get the weed?”
“Tony,” he says, and kisses the corner of her mouth.
“I wish you'd told, I would have joined you.”
“You smoke?”
“I'm a theoretical physicist, Bruce,” she says.
He grins. “Good point. Tony gave me some for later, it's in my bag.”
“Awesome,” she says, and takes his hand. “Come on, we'd better get on before they leave without us.”
Bruce, it turns out, is very fidgety when high, and very, very bored. He looks through all the cupboards, flicks through all his books, and solves a Rubrik's Cube in under a minute.
“Where'd you even get this from?” she asks, leaning over and giving it a poke. It's dark now, but while he was fiddling with it, it was all lit up, each individual cube flashing through a rainbow of colours. The goal, she guesses, is to solve it before the lights change.
“Stole it off Tony's desk on the way out,” he says, planting his feet on the table in front of him and sliding down into the couch until his knees are almost against his chest. “Wow, this couch is really comfy. How much longer do we have?”
She comes over and sits beside him - it is pretty comfortable - and checks her watch. “About four hours.”
“So, we've been flying for an hour? Feels like longer.”
“If you're high, sure.”
“Hey,” he says weakly, glancing over Erik.
Erik lifts his eyes from his book. “You think I don't know you're high? I'm European.”
“Oh,” Bruce murmurs, and turns his attention to his fingernails. “I feel like a teenager again,” he mumbles.
She grins and slides down next to him. He tips his head towards her shoulders and squints at the Kindle in her hand.
“Can you even see anything right now?” she asks, pushing loose curls from his face.
He squints harder. “Mm... No. Not a thing. Where're my glasses?”
“I don't know, you weren't wearing them when you arrived. Maybe they're in your bag?”
“I hope so...” He snuggles against her side and sighs. She amends her list of behaviour that Bruce displays while high to include: affectionate.
-
They spend the first night in the nicest hotel Jane has ever been in, though she doesn't really get the opportunity to appreciate it fully. Bruce is out like a light as soon as he hits the bed, his cheek pillowed against his hand, one leg stretched out, and Erik retreats to his room, saying something about minibars.
She does make use of the jacuzzi, though, trying every setting multiple times and giving herself a sloppy pedicure with some of the supplies that she finds in a drawer. Her feet arguably look worse than before, but they feel nice, at least.
They have an early start the next morning, so she pulls on her fuzzy pyjama bottoms and her Islands of Adventure t-shirt at ten, and gets into bed, squirming under the covers with Bruce on top beside her.
She wakes up with Bruce's knees pressed into her back, his arm snaked around her side and clutching at her shoulder. It's the closest they've got to spooning so far, but it's a little more uncomfortable than what she's used to.
“Bruce,” she murmurs, shifting around. He mutters irritably, and stretches out his legs, flattening himself against her back, the two of them still separated by the blanket. She takes his hand from her shoulder and presses it between her own. She guesses it's still early, she could sleep for another couple of hours.
-
Colorado has uncommonly good weather their first day out. She watches the barometer intently until it starts to get dark outside, before admitting to herself that clear skies and balmy weather means there's not going to be any sudden lightning storms. She pouts at the machine for a while, then grabs a couple of folding chairs and the cooler.
“Wanna go sit on the roof?” she asks Bruce, who's scribbling something in his notebook.
He peers over the top, eyebrows climbing. “Sure.”
The stars are out in full in the cloudless sky, and she can't help but wonder after Thor's star, trillions of parsecs away, outside of observable space. She doesn't even have a star to gaze at and think of him.
“I feel like I should say something profound,” Bruce says in his soft voice. “'I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world', or something.”
“Like in that movie,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“My eighth grade teacher was obsessed with that movie, we wrote a report on it instead of Wuthering Heights. The principal was pissed.”
“Eighth grade?” he repeats.
“Yeah. It came out when I was in third grade though.”
Bruce leans his head back in his chair. “Me and Betty went to see it the day it was released, for our two year anniversary. I was twenty.”
She laughs. “Such an old man.”
He groans a little. “Don't remind me.”
“What, are you having a mid-life crisis?”
“I have so many crises,” he says, “I really don't have the time for one so self-indulgent.”
She rolls her eyes. He's totally having a mid-life crisis. “Beer?”
“Oh, I don't think that's a good idea. Apparently alcohol makes me confess horrible things to you.”
Half of his face is in shadow, and the light she can see by is faint, coming from the hatch in the roof. But still, she thinks she can see that self-deprecating quirk of his mouth. She tries to keep her tone light.
“Yeah? Going to confess your secret double life as an orc, or something?”
Bruce chuckles. “I used to love World of Warcraft. I was a level... forty night elf? That sounds about right.”
“You don't play any more?”
“Well, being on the run sorta impacted my gaming,” he says, and she's glad it's dark, because that way he can't see her blush. Jeez, what a stupid question. “Also,” he adds, “once you become your own alter-ego, it's not really as much fun any more.”
“Yeah...” She leans over and retrieves a beer from the cooler; maybe he doesn't want one, but she sure needs one now. “I'm one of the undead. I haven't played in months though, I've been too busy with the bridge.”
“Makes sense,” he says, nodding. “God, we really are nerds.”
“Geek pride,” she says, waving her bottle a little, spilling some of it. “Shit...”
“What are you two doing up there?” Erik calls, sticking his head out of the hatch a moment later. “Are you making out?”
She laughs. “Grab a chair, grumpy. We're talking about MMORPGs.”
“Kids,” Erik mutters. “I remember when text adventures were cutting edge.”
“Oh my God,” Bruce murmurs, covering his face with his hands. “So do I.”
-
Sleeping arrangements are awkward. There are two beds in the RV, one slightly bigger than the other, but they're both tucked away in little alcoves, and they're just all at very close quarters with each other.
“This is awkward,” Bruce mutters, shifting around under the blankets. Jane leans over him and tugs the curtains closed.
“Erik's a heavy sleeper,” she says, “it'll be fine.”
He hums, looking unconvinced.
“He does snore a bit, though.”
“Oh, good,” he murmurs, “I love room mates who snore.”
Jane dreams about Asgard. She dreams about Thor in Don's old clothes, about his drawings in her notebook, about the bright flash of light that took him away and didn't bring him back.
She wakes with Bruce's face pressed against her chest, his fingers twisted in the fabric of her t-shirt, Erik's freight train rumble in the background.
-
They go into the town for breakfast. It reminds her of Puente Antiguo a little, with all its squat little buildings and peeling shop fronts and old stacked signs that make her feel like she's a character in a 1950s movie. Erik elects to stay behind and watch the equipment, so long as they bring him back a box of donuts, which she guiltily feels thankful for.
There are even some cops around the place, chatting with passersby, a couple leaning against their patrol car, drinking cups of coffee. They say good morning as Jane and Bruce pass. Jane smiles and raises her hand in greeting; Bruce mumbles something and looks at the ground.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asks as they make it to the next block.
He shrugs. “Don't really like cops,” he murmurs, glancing back at them.
“Oh, well... that makes sense,” she says. She takes his hand and squeezes it. “How about this place?”
He looks up and around at the diner they're passing. His thumb rubs along the back of her hand. “Sure.”
There are only a couple of other people in the diner, hunched over their coffees and papers. Bruce eyes them for a moment before drifting towards a table against the wall, out of sight of the windows, she notes.
“Is here okay?” he asks.
She smiles as gently as she can; he's not so great at being out in the open, she's found, even in a place as empty as this, apparently. He smiles back awkwardly and slides into the cracked leather booth.
The waitress comes over with the menus and makes small talk as she fills their glasses with water, asks them where they're from and where they're going. Jane makes something up on the fly, about coming over from Portland to see the Grand Canyon, fielding questions with a detached smile.
“Would you like some more time to choose, honey?” the waitress asks.
Jane drums her fingers on the laminated menu. “Are you serving burgers yet?”
“All day lunch,” the waitress says.
“Great, can I get, uh... the cheese burger with everything and fries, and a strawberry milkshake?”
“At nine am?” Bruce says, startling her a little - he hasn't said a word for the entire conversation with the waitress, barely looked up from his menu, even.
“Oh, that's just the tip of the poor nutrition iceberg,” she says.
He grins and glances back down at his menu. “I'll have the same,” he says after a moment, and hands the menu back to the waitress. “Portland?” he adds, once they're alone again.
Jane shrugs. “That's where I was born.”
“I didn't know that.”
“Yeah, we lived there until I was seven and my dad got the position at Culver. My mom moved back a few years ago.”
“Oh, so after that you lived in... Virginia, I guess?”
“Yeah. Mom thought about moving back after Dad died, but I'd started high school a year early, so she didn't want to pull me out. And, I don't know, I guess going to Harvard was always my plan, so she didn't want to be on the other side of the country while I was there. Once I hit twenty seven, she decided I was old enough to be left alone.”
He smiles. “That's nice. I actually... went to high school not so far from here, in New Mexico.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, my aunt and her husband got custody of me, after... you know. I went to a magnet school in Albuquerque.”
“Is your aunt still alive?”
He shakes his head. “She died of breast cancer when I was nineteen. Her husband and their kids are still around, probably still in Albuquerque, but... they didn't like me so much. I was weird.”
“Well, kids are assholes,” she says, smiling faintly.
“No, they were right not to like me, I was really weird. I used wake up shrieking, I used hoard food, and become mute for weeks at a time, lock myself in the bathroom all night. You know, horror movie kid stuff.”
“That's...” She purses her lips. She doesn't want him to withdraw, she wants him to tell her things, because she doesn't think he's probably had much opportunity to say these things to people before, but she has no frame of reference for this kind of thing. She's always been task and research oriented, but she can't do that with this. She has to just let it flow, and that's not something she really knows how to do. “That's not weird,” she finishes quietly.
He shrugs. “I don't mean that they were bad to me or anything, 'cause considering the circumstances, they were pretty good to me. But I just... I mean, she was my paternal aunt. It was awkward.”
She doesn't know what else to do but nod. The waitress comes over a minute later with their food, which saves her from trying to think of what to say next.
Bruce is a messy eater. Jane is too, but Bruce has this uncoordinated grace about it, eating too fast, then too slow, wiping ketchup from his face with a rueful smile, washing everything down with a gulp of milkshake and starting over.
“You're staring again,” he murmurs.
She grins. “Yep.”
He frowns so deeply at her that she giggles and covers her mouth.
A bell jingles across the room, and Bruce lifts his eyes to the door for a moment before looking back down at his plate quickly. Jane glances over her shoulder and sees the broad back of one of the police officers from outside.
“It's okay,” she says quietly.
“I know,” he mumbles, picking at his fries.
The officers stay up at the counter while the waitress gets them their food, and Jane thinks that that'll probably be the end of it; they'll grab their sandwiches and go back to their car, but then the younger one turns around and catches her looking ('and oh, he is very good-looking', her brain informs her) and she has to smile and nod to him, or else look as suspicious as Bruce does right now.
The guy wanders up to them (oh, and he has a swagger, that is very nice), and tips his head in greeting.
“Let me guess,” he says, “tourists?”
“How'd you know?” she says, smiling widely. She can see Bruce squirming in his seat out of the corner of her eye.
“Well, normally when I see a pretty lady in here, she's a tourist. Not that I'm casting aspersions on the women of our fine little town. Don't tell Jean I said that, okay?” he says, nodding towards the waitress.
Jane can feel her cheeks warm up at the compliment, she always does come over a bit shy when men flirt with her. “Your secret's safe with me.”
“Thank you, ma'am,” the officer says, lifting the sunglasses nestled in his hair in thanks. “So, where're you visiting us from?”
“Portland,” she says, easily this time. “We're just here for a few days to see the Grand Canyon.”
“Well, I hope the weather holds for you guys, we were forecast lightning storms earlier in the week.” His partner calls to him, and he waves his acknowledgement. “Anyway, I hope you enjoy your stay. By the way, I'm Leo.”
He holds out his hand to her, and she takes it, quickly searching her mind for a fake name. Not that there's really a need, but she's committed to this hiding-out-from-the-law narrative, now. “Jan...et. This is Brad,” she adds, nodding to Bruce. Bruce raises his eyebrows at her.
Leo smiles (he has a nice smile, too, she notes) and shakes her hand for a moment before stepping back. “Maybe I'll see you guys around again this week,” he says.
“Maybe,” she calls, as he backs up and then turns back to his partner. She pinches the bridge of her nose for a moment before facing back towards Bruce.
He blinks a couple of times, then says, “So, is Erik Rocky or Dr. Frank-N-Furter?”
“Oh my God, it was the only thing I could think of!” she says, laughing.
“Why did you lie at all?”
“I don't know! You got me all freaked out! I got into the whole Portland thing and... I don't know!”
Bruce is full on laughing at her now, and she kicks him under the table, pouting. “Don't laugh at me!”
He waves his hands in surrender, still chuckling a little, and shakes his head. “I guess it's not the worst thing I've ever been called.”
-
She buys a t-shirt at the souvenir shop to go with her collection; it says 'get your kicks on Route 66' on it. She buys a t-shirt for Bruce too, one with a skull and cross bones on it, and the words, 'America's mother road' printed across the top. He tugs it on over his shirt.
“I feel very pirate-y,” he murmurs.
“We'll get you an eye patch,” she says, reaching over and covering his eye with her palm.
“Oh, don't talk to me about eye patches,” he mutters, and wraps his fingers around her wrist lightly, rubbing his thumb against her pulse.
She smiles, embracing the flutter in her stomach - he's not her 'type', he's not Leo the police officer or Thor the space god prince or Don the vain ER doctor, but she likes him all the same - and rocks forward on her toes, kissing him lightly. He runs his tongue over his lips and winds his arm around her waist, tugging her gently against his side, leaving a couple of inches between them, as if she'll want to pull away. She tucks her hand under his elbow and gives him a light shove.
-
They spend another fruitless afternoon and evening watching the equipment, picking their way though boxes of donuts and a family sized bucket of chicken wings.
“I haven't eaten this badly since I was writing my doctoral thesis,” Bruce says, licking his fingers.
Jane stretches out on the couch, propping her feet up on his legs and leaning back against the arm. “Well, stick with me, Banner, you'll see some unhealthy food.”
He laughs and runs his thumb down the centre of her foot, digging into the heel, his index finger brushing against the dry, cracked skin around the edge. Her amateur pedicure really didn't do any good at all.
“Well, I'm going to turn in,” Erik says, wiping his fingers on his pants as he goes. He's trying, she knows that, and he hasn't been doing a bad job so far (even though she happens to think that she and Bruce are hardly all over each other and it shouldn't be a problem at all), but the night's been getting steadily more uncomfortable, and she can't say she's going to miss his company.
Bruce works his knuckles into the arch of her foot as they say their good nights and Erik disappears into his alcove at the back of the RV. She's not sure what to say after that, other than that Bruce gives really good foot massages.
“Sorry about my feet,” she says after a couple of minutes.
“Hm?”
She wriggles her toes a little. “They're kind of gross.”
“No, they're not,” he says, pushing her toes back one by one. “They're feet, they're meant to look like this.”
“Oh,” she says, inexplicably starting to blush. “Well, my feet thank you.”
He smiles vaguely and looks up at her. “Do you wanna go smoke pot on the roof?”
-
He's a deft hand at rolling joints, she finds, even by lamplight sitting on the roof of an RV.
“I was kinda a stoner in college,” he says, lighting the joint. There's something very attractive about how easily his fingers work the zippo lighter - something else he stole from Tony. She's starting to think that he might be a bit of a klepto. “I fell in with a... hippie sort of crowd, I guess.” He hands her the joint and she takes a drag.
And promptly starts coughing. She hands it back as tears prickle at her eyes. “Sorry, I, ahem, haven't smoked in a while.”
He just grins at her and takes his own drag, holding it in his lungs for a couple of seconds, then blowing out smoke rings. After a few more, less embarrassing, drags, she feels herself loosen up. She thinks maybe it's the first time she's loosened up in the last three years. Everything since Thor has led up to being in this RV, with this machine strapped to the back, everything in her life has focused down into this one goal of the Einstein-Rosen bridge powering up and then... and then she doesn't know. She was motivated by seeing Thor again, back then, but now? Now she's not so sure.
Bruce is looking up at the sky when she hands the joint back. “He's up there somewhere,” he murmurs.
“Yeah...” She presses her palms against roof of the RV and sighs.
Bruce looks back at her. “Tell me something about yourself,” he says.
She laughs. “What? Is that some kind of pick up line?”
“If I was an enzyme, I'd be a helicase so I could unzip your genes,” he says, straight-faced for a moment before they both dissolve into laughter. He hiccups a couple of times, and then screws up his face and shakes his head. “Seriously, though, you know lots of things about me, and I don't really know that much about you. Which is strange, 'cause I don't tell people things, as a rule.”
“Well, okay... I'm from Portland, like I said earlier.”
“What does your mom do?”
“She's a nurse. I thought about studying medicine for a while, too, but I'm just not that caring of a person.”
“You're caring,” he murmurs.
She shrugs. “Not really. I get too wrapped up in my own head.”
“Who says?”
“I don't know, boyfriends? Don said I wasn't supportive enough.”
“This guy sounds like an asshole,” Bruce says, and takes another drag, blowing the smoke out through his nose.
She takes the joint back and smirks a little. “Yeah, I'd say that's probably accurate. But still, I'm not great company a lot of the time.”
“Trust me, you are, and you're talking to the guy who never is.”
She blows smoke out of the corner of her mouth and frowns. “That's not true.”
“So we're even. Tell me something else. Do you have any siblings?”
“Nope, just me.”
“Childhood pets?”
“A dog named Rex. I was a very creative child.”
“Favourite colour?”
“Green.”
He raises his eyebrows, as if to say 'bullshit', and she giggles. “Really! I dressed up as a green dinosaur for Halloween every year until I grew out of the costume.”
“Dinosaurs are cool,” he says.
“Dinosaurs are the best!” she cries, then covers her mouth with her hand, surprised at how loud that came out. Bruce laughs, tipping his head back so she can see his Adam's apple bob up and down. She thinks about leaning forward and licking it, but she isn't quite that high yet. “I thought about being a palaeontologist, too, when I was kid,” she says quietly from between her fingers.
“What changed your mind?”
She drops her hand from her face and shifts around. It's starting to get cold out, even with a sweater on. “Well, there was this comet in 1994 that collided with Jupiter--”
“Shoe something?” Bruce interrupts. “I remember the news coverage.”
“Shoemaker-Levy 9,” she says, and grins. “Like you said, there was all this coverage, we followed it in school, and I followed it at home, and I was just fascinated by it. My parents took me to the Hayden Planetarium for my thirteenth birthday a couple of months later, and I just... fell in love, I guess. It was so... endless and full of possibility...” She shakes her head and laughs. “Ignore me, I'm high.”
A moment later she has a lapful of Bruce. Well, not quite, but that's what it feels like for a second as he pushes into her space and kisses her softly. “Sorry,” he murmurs, brushing his lips against her chin. “I just really wanted to kiss you.”
“Don't apologise,” she says, running her fingers through his hair, and he smiles, rolling over to lie down beside her. She scoots down as well, staring up at the clear sky, stars twinkling like pieces of glitter, before taking his hand and threading their fingers together. He squeezes it a little and tips his head towards her.
“I want to ask you, like, a hundred questions about the-- the other guy,” she says suddenly, turning her head to him so that their noses almost touch.
“So ask.”
“I don't want to upset you.”
He blinks slowly. “You'll know if I'm upset.”
“That's what I'm afraid of,” she mutters, then widens her eyes. “Not that I'm... I-I'm not afraid of you...”
He smiles easily. “I know. It's a figure of speech.”
“Okay...”
“Ask me something.”
She bites her lip. “Does it hurt, when you change?”
“Depends on the circumstances. It's not so bad if I'm controlling it, but if it comes out of nowhere... it's agony.”
“Are you aware of what's going on when you're... when you've changed? Do you remember stuff afterwards?”
He lifts one shoulder. “Sometimes. It's like a, a fever dream. I think sometimes I only remember what I want to remember, the other guy shields me from stuff... or I shield myself, I should say.”
She nods, pulling their joined hands to her chest to study Bruce's square fingernails and hairy knuckles. Bruce watches her patiently. “So, you change when you're angry?”
“Anger and fear,” he says. “Mostly fear, really.”
“What're you scared of?”
“Myself.” He laughs. “It's such a cliché.”
“Why?”
He lets out a long breath. “Because I'm my father's son.”
“Bruce...” she murmurs.
He rolls over onto his side and smiles. “It's okay. The fear's sublimated most of the time. Just occasionally it wells up, like when you got to see the other guy for yourself.”
She frowns; she doesn't know what to say, she doesn't know how to fix things like this. Instead she rolls over too, and kisses him, soft at first, until he opens his mouth and presses his tongue past her teeth. He's kind of shockingly good at all this sex stuff - it's not like she's an inexperienced virgin, but she certainly hasn't had a hugely wide range of experiences. She hasn't been touched softly and lingered over to any real degree by any of her boyfriends. It wasn't always their fault: sometimes she just couldn't be bothered with intimacy; she had exams to study for and PhDs to get and research to complete, and when she dated guys in her program they ended up competing against each other and if she dated someone outside of it, they couldn't understand why she couldn't quit studying this one night to go out clubbing.
She hooks her leg over his hip, rolling them so that she's sitting up over him, and shakes her head against sudden light-headedness before leaning down and kissing him again. He explores the backs of her legs gently, tapping his fingers against the seams of her jeans, and hums into her mouth.
“Do you want to go inside? It's cold out here,” she asks.
“Sure,” he says, “we'll have to be really quiet, though.”
“I can do that if you can.”
“I'm like a mouse, remember?” he murmurs.
“Sure you are,” she says, taking his hand and leading him back down the hatch and into the RV.
They stand on the little bit of floor space in front of their bed, ineptly undressing each other to the tune of Erik's snoring. Jane gets Bruce tangled up in his button down/t-shirt combo, so that his head has disappeared into the neck and his arms are flailing around uselessly. When she finally frees him, his laughter is coming in silent, helpless gasps, until she pulls him into her arms and swallows his laughter, kissing him breathless. He sways slightly on the spot, and when she pulls away, he looks drugged, eyes half-lidded. Well, she thinks, he is; they both are, and she hasn't said sex while high since she was a freshman.
He smiles that easy smile of his, and pushes her t-shirt up, flattening his hands over her stomach and caressing her skin lightly for several long moments. It makes her feel a little exposed, honestly, how content he is to just touch her and look at her; she can only take the gentle scrutiny for so long before she starts pushing him towards the bed. He goes without argument, only momentarily getting caught in the curtain on his way down. She pulls her t-shirt off, then her sports bra, and pulls down her jeans that Bruce already got unzipped, taking her underwear with them.
Bruce grins at her crappy striptease, tugging at his pants, a bulge clearly visible. She leans over and helps him out of them, and the boxers too. “Get under the covers,” she says quietly, and he scrambles to do just that as she drags her bag out to retrieve a packet of condoms. She's used more condoms in the last few weeks than she has in the last few years, which is not exactly difficult, but still strikes her as kind of funny.
She climbs onto the bed and pulls the curtains tight, then turns her attention to Bruce's dick. He sucks his stomach in slightly as she looks down at him, and she rolls her eyes. He's definitely put weight on since that first time she saw him shirtless - the only thing that stopped her from being able to see the outline of his ribs was his chest hair - and the extra weight has mostly settled around his stomach, his waist thicker than it was, but he's still pretty skinny. Maybe she's given him a bit of a complex, with the kind of guys she's previously dated.
She leans down and kisses him quickly, then rolls the condom on and grinds against him, enjoying the little frissons of pleasure that shoot down her legs. Bruce squirms underneath her, throwing an arm over his mouth to muffle his panting. She grins - the show hasn't even begun yet - and presses her fingers inside herself for a moment, much to Bruce's obvious delight, before sinking down on him, pulling his arm away from his face and giving him another kiss.
He wraps one hand gently around her hip and mostly keeps pace with her, rocking against her clumsily. She can tell by the strained look on his face that this is not going to last very long, the way his lip catches between his teeth and his eyelashes flutter. She snaps her hips forward, once, twice, grinning at the way his whole face just crumples.
“Shiii--” he groans. She can feel his legs shuddering against her thighs, as he squeezes his eyes shut and tenses his shoulders. He presses a hand to his face and groans into it for a couple of long seconds before opening his fingers and looking at her. “Sorry,” he mumbles behind his hand, “'m old.”
She laughs. “It's okay.”
“Mm. You didn't come.”
She shrugs. “That's okay.”
He makes a squinty face that seems inordinately funny to her. “Switch?” he asks.
“What?”
“Cunnilingus,” he says, and presses his hand to his mouth again to stifle his laughter. “Sorry, it's a funny word. Cunnilingus, cunning linguist...” He shakes his head. “Anyway, I'm gonna do it on you. Y'know, if you want me to?”
“Oh, well...” She scratches at the back of her head. “Okay, I guess.”
“I won't do it if you don't want me to...” he says, looking at her with big eyes. Really big eyes. She doesn't think they used to be that big...
“No, I just...” She lowers her voice. “I've never... done that with someone.”
“Oh, well, I'm told I'm really good at it?”
“Okay,” she says, and ungracefully gets off him, lying down back on the bed, feeling exposed and excited in pretty much equal measure. Bruce pulls the condom off, fumbling around and mumbling to himself before turning back to her. He shifts around, settling between her legs, and presses his palms to her inner thighs.
And she hasn't shaved in a while, she remembers, as he rubs his thumbs against the hair.
“You're sure?” he asks, with a tone and a gaze more serious than she would think he'd be able to maintain having smoked as much weed as he has.
“Sure,” she says.
“Prepare to have your mind blown,” he says with a mischievous smile, and ducks down between her legs.
It's... odd, at first. His mouth is warm and wet and kind of alien, but not unpleasant. Not unpleasant at all, she thinks, as he finds her clit with his tongue. “Oh,” she squeaks, and flails for something to hold onto. He lifts his hand and pushes his fingers through hers, and how did he get so goddamn good at this? He's just as nerdy as she is, maybe even more, he does have twelve years on her, so how come he's already bringing her this close to climax?
She gasps quietly, tightening her legs around his shoulders, and he grips her hip with his free hand, flicking his tongue. She comes harder than she ever has, sinking one hand into his hair, biting the inside of her mouth to muffle herself. Bruce rides it out with her; quite literally, as she rocks her hips erratically against his mouth.
When he pulls back, it takes her a second to remember to let go of his hair and his hand. He pushes his hair back from his face with a self-conscious smile, his cheeks pink, his chin... damp.
“Was that any good?” he asks, wiping his chin on the back of his arm.
“Um, yes,” she says, smiling back a little nervously. She feels kind of warm inside, and not just because of the orgasm, as she looks at him. She'd put it down to the pot, except she's been feeling like this all day, really. She takes a deep breath. “We should probably get some sleep.”
“Okay,” he says, and moves up the bed to lie down beside her. He shifts around for a couple minutes to get comfortable on his side, then loosely rests his arm around her waist. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine.” She blows out a scornful laugh and kisses him quickly. “I'm good.”
He smiles, eyelids drooping. “Good,” he murmurs, “me too.”
Part 2
Fandom: MCU.
Rating: NC-17.
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Jane, Erik, Thor.
Summary: Jane, Bruce, and Erik go to the desert to test out the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which means that, just maybe, she's finally going to see Thor again.
She might be a little less excited about this than she expected to be, three years ago.
Notes: Sequel to Flew Away or Started Sinking, some discussion of past canon abuse
It's been a long time since Jane's woken up with a man in her bed, especially on more than one occasion with the same guy. Don was the first steady, move in together, meet the parents, boyfriend that she ever had. She'd had some one night stands, some blind dates, one intense two and a half month relationship at NASA Academy that was purely intellectual, but Don was the first guy that she thought might go the distance. And it did, like a twelve hour plane ride that you're travel sick for six hours on.
Bruce mumbles something into the pillow, clutching tightly at it, then huffs, his cheek blowing out. He sleeps kind of like a child, she thinks, making funny little sounds, face twitching, curled up in his protective ball. It doesn't help that his hair gets so messed up when he's sleeping, though the grey offsets the image somewhat.
She's not sure that 'like a child' is a positive descriptor for him.
After a month of living together, she knows that his internal alarm is about to go off as the clock ticks towards six thirty. Actual alarms are kind of a problem for him, unsurprisingly, so he relies on the fact that he tends to wake up early. She isn't sure what she's going to do when she needs to set an alarm, but so far it's been okay, since she can get to the lab whenever she wants and she's an early riser too.
Bruce shifts, scratching his nose, and snuffles into the pillow before his eyes slowly flicker open. She watches his face as he wakes; maybe it's bad to find it fascinating, but 'the other guy' is so much closer to the surface when he's half asleep, and it's just really interesting to watch. His eyes are green when he first opens them, not the brilliant green they are when he's woken unexpectedly, but still recognisably green. She's not sure if he knows this, as he pushes himself up and smiles sleepily at her, seemingly unconcerned. Maybe he's not quite fully Bruce yet. She wonders if going through REM cycles has some kind of effect on the barrier between Bruce and the other guy.
It's probably creepy that she's thinking about this.
Bruce's eyes fade back to brown while he scratches the back of his head, fidgeting the blanket with his other hand. “Why're you staring at me?” he asks.
She shrugs, and leans over to give him a kiss. “I can look, can't I?”
“Not much to look at, but okay.”
“Shush,” she murmurs, tipping her head to one side to kiss along his jaw.
-
She brings a couple cups of coffee with her to help broker some peace between her and Erik. Not that she's done anything wrong, but he's been even gloomier than normal since she and Bruce started... dating, or whatever it is that they're doing.
“So how's everything going?” Erik asks, his tone suggesting that he thinks he's being subtle. He's not.
“Everything is fine,” she says, “and how about you?”
He scowls a little. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” she says, and takes her coffee over to her desk.
Erik huffs. “And?”
“I'm just agreeing with you. I don't have anything else to say on the matter.”
“You're as stubborn as your father was,” Erik mutters, shuffling over to his own desk.
“Thank you,” she calls.
In the afternoon, she picks up a couple of cartons of lo mein and takes them over to Bruce's new lab in Stark Tower. She's only been there the once, but she can't help but feel a little jealous: Bruce has this enormous lab with every cutting - and bleeding - edge tech on and off the market, and nothing to do with it, while she and Erik have a couple of rooms in a sad office building in which to create probably the most ground-breaking invention of their time.
She's let up to the lab after a fingerprint and retina scan, and a thorough investigation of the lo mein.
“Bruce?” she calls, looking around the main room. There's a white board on the wall that has written on it: 'Cancer, what's up with that shit?; colds and super-colds (flu); codeine that doesn't make me hork; how come pepper's feet can defy gravity?; create the next super virus???' and underneath all that in block capitals: 'SCIENCE'.
Bruce pops his head out of an adjoining room. “Hey,” he says, and frowns a little. “What're you doing here?”
She holds up the takeout bag. “Lo mein.”
“Oh,” he says, his eyes widening. “Come in then.”
She rolls her eyes and he grins a little. “I'm guessing you didn't write all of this?” she says, nodding to the board.
“Tony came by. He wanted to give me some ideas for stuff I could work on. I think he's slightly unclear about what kind of scientist I primarily am.”
“Who isn't?” she says. “What exactly does he want you to do about cancer?”
Bruce ducks back into the other room for a minute, returning with a fork for her. He just has to be such a show off about being able to chopsticks while she can't. “Cure it, so that he can take the credit.”
“And then he wants you to create a super virus?”
Bruce shrugs and shows her over to a couple of seats. “Well, we have to keep people guessing.”
“Riiight,” she says, digging into her carton. “So, been doing anything interesting today?”
Bruce wrinkles up his nose a little, glasses bobbing up for a moment. “Not really. I helped some sustainable energy researchers this morning, but that's been about it.”
“So what's he paying you for?”
“I have no idea,” he says, smiling ruefully. “How's your morning been?”
“Fine. We're still stalled over the power issue. Erik's still sulking.”
Bruce nods slowly, and leans back in his chair, resting his feet on a bar at the bottom of the table. What an exciting, dynamic couple of people they are. “Is he any happier at all about... everything?”
“Not really.”
Bruce's brow furrows. “I just don't have any luck with fathers, you know.”
She does her best to cover a wince; she's not sure if he just means Dr Ross's father, or if he's referring to his own as well. He tends to stay at such a steady level of mellowness that sometimes it's difficult to gauge his actual mood.
She settles for, “Erik isn't my father.”
“Older male authority figures, then. I just never could make a good impression. Which makes me sound like some kind of cool rebel without a cause, or something.”
“You're tearing me apart, Bruce,” she says, in an awful approximation of James Dean.
-
Since he first told her about Brian, she's resisted the urge to look up information about him, but once she's back in the lab after lunch, Bruce's offhand words just won't get out of her head, and she drags her laptop over and opens up Google. As she types the letters, the suggested searches whittle down until she's got 'Brian Banner Los Alamos'. She hits enter and Los Alamos's official website is at the top of the page. She frowns, toying for a moment with just closing the tab; she gets as far as pressing the control button before she moves the cursor over and clicks.
His biography is a short one, with just his date of birth, university he attended, and period of time that he worked at the lab: 1961-68. She backspaces back to the search hits and skims down the page until she gets to a newspaper archive with a little snippet of an article that reads: 'Dayton resident, Brian Banner, is currently wanted for questioning...'. She bites her lip and clicks on it.
There are several entries on Brian Banner from 1977 and '78. She opens one at random and starts reading:
A warrant has been issued for Brian Banner, 38, wanted for questioning in conjunction with the murder of his wife, Rebecca Banner, 35, on Sunday night. There is also a missing persons report out for Robert Banner, 8. Rebecca Banner was found by her neighbour on Monday afternoon, with injuries in line with a severe blow to the head. Authorities have reason to believe that Brian Banner has abducted his son, and they are advising that anyone who sees either of them should call 911 immediately and not approach.
Her stomach wobbles uncertainly. She presses her fingers to her lips and clicks back, skimming some more article titles until she finds one from late in 1978:
Brian Banner, former researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dayton resident, was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole yesterday for the murder of his wife, Rebecca Banner. His son, Bobby, was meant to give evidence for the prosecution, but, once on the stand, denied that his father had had anything to do with the brutal attack and murder of his mother. When first examined by doctors after his father was located and arrested, marks and fading bruises across his back and the backs of his legs were found, and as well as evidence of multiple healed fractures...
“Jane?” Erik calls.
She jumps an inch in her chair and slams the lid of her laptop closed. “What?” she snaps.
He squints a little. “Never mind,” he mutters.
It's horribly addictive, reading through the archived articles, about the trial and the impersonal details of 'Bobby's' abuse. Brian was also charged with witness tampering, but his lawyers successfully argued that Bobby was psychologically disturbed and that's why his story did a one eighty. And they printed that in the newspaper, right there for everyone to read. God.
She can't concentrate at all on her work, and packs up for the day at five, heading home upset and agitated. It crosses her mind to try to tidy the apartment to take her mind off everything she's read, but the place is entirely too much of a mess for her to even consider starting to clean at six o'clock. Instead she grabs a book that Bruce left on the coffee table, a dog-eared secondhand copy of The Andromeda Strain. The first week he moved in, and got his first ridiculous pay cheque from Stark Industries, he bought a ton of battered old books, mumbling that he lost all of his years ago when he brought the box of them home. Jane cleared out a space on her bookcase, between Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.
Bruce gets home at seven thirty, rattling his key in the door with his normal inability to work the rusty lock. She jumps up and heads over to open it for him.
“Hey,” he says, wrenching the key back out. “You're home early.”
“Yeah,” she says, and fists her hand in his shirt to tug him closer. He puts one hand against the door frame as they kiss, keys clinking together, and tucks his other against her hip, thumb hooking in her belt loop.
“What was that for?” he murmurs when she breaks off.
“Just because,” she says, and tugs him all the way in, closing the door behind him. “I was thinking, do you want to order pizza and watch a movie?”
“Sure,” he says, smiling.
“What's your favourite movie?”
Bruce looks thoughtful for a moment. “Well, my pop culture is pretty out of date, but I like, uh, schlocky horror movies.” He runs his fingers through his hair and ducks his head a little.
She grins and goes over to her sad little TV cabinet, rooting around in there for a moment before emerging triumphant with a DVD boxset: all the best and worst B horror movies of the eighties. “My intern gave this me for my birthday a couple of years ago,” she says, “I've never actually had time to watch them before.”
Bruce grins back. “I'll order the pizza.”
He falls asleep halfway through the third movie, just before the mom realises that Chucky is alive. He has his arms crossed over his chest, his mouth set in a serious line, looking very stern in his repose. She smiles and reaches up to fiddle with his hair, tucking salt and pepper strands behind his ear; he shifts, tipping his head back further and sighs. She wonders how hard it must be to sleep out in the open like this, after years on the run.
She switches the TV off at one am and looks over at Bruce, whose sleep has gone undisturbed by screaming women and children. She's not sure how advisable it is to shake him awake, but she doesn't want to just leave him out here.
“Bruce,” she says softly. He stirs for a moment, then settles again. “Bruce,” she repeats, a little louder, “come on, time to wake up.”
“What?” he mumbles plaintively.
“It's time to get up and go to bed, Bruce.”
He huffs but opens his eyes to slits. “Sleep here,” he mumbles.
“No,” she says, and grabs his arm to pull him up. He shuffles after her into the bedroom, clumsily undressing and falling into bed. His eyes stay green the whole time.
-
She has a breakthrough while watching a weather report, of all things.
“Oh!” she says, waving her hand at the screen, “that's it!”
Erik startles, smudging the equation he was writing on the whiteboard. He looks over his shoulder. “What's it?”
“That!” She waves her hand at the report of lightning storms predicted in the coming weeks in the Grand Canyon area. “Fucking electrical storms, God's own power supply!”
Erik squints at her.
“To power up the bridge!”
Erik is still squinting. “That sounds extremely dangerous, with a very low chance of success.”
“Oh, whatever,” she says, turning away from him, and pulls her cellphone from her pocket. “I'm calling Bruce.”
He answers on the first ring. “Thank God,” he says by way of greeting, “I am so bored.”
“Electrical storms!” she exclaims.
“Uh... maybe later?”
She grins to herself and launches into a quick, but thorough explanation of her blossoming plan to harness the awesome power of nature for her own ends. She feels a little light-headed at the end of her lecture, and takes a deep breath before adding, “So, do you wanna go storm-chasing with me, Bruce?”
She can hear Bruce laughing softly. “Yes, definitely,” he says.
-
All she has of the bridge are the schematics, and after recovering from the excitement of her revelation, she realises that there's no way she'll be able to build it in time, not with revisions she's going to have to make and with the resources she has available to her. She calls Bruce back and asks for a raincheck on that trip and he's as magnanimous as usual about the whole thing, in stark contrast with Erik's quiet smugness.
When she gets into the lab the next morning, she finds Erik remonstrating with a group of sloppily dressed men and women.
“Um...” she says, squeezing through the group to get to the door. “What's going on?”
“They say they're from Stark Industries,” Erik says, eyeing their apparent leader, a young guy in an Adventure Time t-shirt. “Apparently we require some kind of 'help'.”
“What?” she says.
“Dr. Foster,” the guy says, thrusting his hand at her, “I'm David. Mr Stark sent us over to help build the Einstein-Rosen bridge. We're not gonna steal anything. We're not-” He fixes a stare at Erik. “-the man.”
She shakes his hand briefly, then retrieves her phone from her bag. “Everyone,” she says, as the volume starts to escalate again, and holds up a finger. “Quiet.”
She hangs on for ten rings this time, before Bruce picks up. “Hey, sorry,” he says, “are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, except for all the Stark employees cluttering up the hall outside the lab...”
“The what?”
“So, you didn't have anything to do with this?”
“No...” He trails off and the sound gets a little muffled as she hears him call out, 'Tony? Tony, what did you do? What? Why?', then disappears altogether for a couple of minutes. “Okay,” he says, back on the line, “yesterday I asked Tony if it would be all right to take some time off, and then later told him not to worry because you needed more time, so apparently he decided to lend a hand.”
“He really wanted to go storm-chasing with you!” she hears Tony yell in the background.
“Those guys are gonna help build the machine and, apparently, 'trip it out' with some experimental clean energy to give it a boost - no, Tony, I'm not giving you the phone - and they have a contract for you to sign that promises that they won't steal any of your ideas.”
She drops the phone to her shoulder. “Contract?” she says to David.
“Oh! Yeah, I've got it here somewhere, let me see...” he mutters, digging around in his bag. “Yeah, here it is.”
She takes it from him and flicks through it quickly. She replaces the phone to her ear. “Well, it looks okay.”
“So, are you going to go for it?” Bruce asks, and there's some rustling on the line that sounds suspiciously like he's batting something away.
“Um... yeah, okay, I guess so.”
“She says okay,” he says, to Tony, she assumes.
“Whoo!” she hears him reply.
-
Stark's guys are frighteningly efficient. The majority of them might look like they've stepped directly out of Revenge of the Nerds, but they can get shit done, and by the end of the week, she's got an experimental Einstein-Rosen bridge waiting to get juiced up.
She strokes it lovingly, while Bruce smiles behind his carton of takeout, both of them sitting on the floor of the lab as it gets dark outside. Bruce is polite enough about laughing at her that she isn't even offended.
“Tony's chartered a plane to fly us out there, and he's got us an RV. I had to seriously dissuade him from getting a party bus,” he says, and holds out the bag of prawn crackers.
“Thanks,” she says, and grabs a handful, then frowns. “But... can you fly?”
“I'm not that mutated,” he says. She arches an eyebrow and he smiles again. “I'll be fine.”
-
She doesn't see him all day the day that they're scheduled to take off, through a combination of her every thought being taken up by preparing for the trip, transporting the machine, not letting anyone else touch the machine, etc. etc., and Bruce going to the tower in the morning to 'tie up a few loose ends', and not coming back for hours. She ends up on the tarmac at five o'clock, with the dark cloud that is Erik beside her, starting to fret about why Bruce isn't answering his phone, when the car pulls up and the man himself stumbles out. He swings his duffel bag over his shoulder and waves to the driver as he backs up.
“Why the hell haven't you been answering your phone?” she calls.
“Oh, I, yeah... phone,” he says, patting his jacket for a moment before looking up. “Wow, that's a big plane.”
It's actually a rather small plane, as planes go. Erik casts him a look and shakes his head, before heading towards the airstairs. Bruce ambles up to her and smiles. Jane leans in to study his face and he tips his head back, widening his eyes comically.
“Are you high?”
“Oh,” he says, and twists his fingers together. “Yes.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Sure,” he says, and falls silent for a moment, before his eyebrows jump up. “Oh, um, I guess I kinda am a nervous flyer after all, even without all the... grrr.” He makes claw motions with his fingers, and it's just about the cutest thing she's ever seen. She curls a hand around his shoulder and kisses him, and he just sort of melts into her, hands in her hair, leaning the weight of his thigh against her hip. He hasn't exactly got the build that she normally goes for, though with a little weight on him she discovered that he has rather nicely muscled arms, but he's still a little too heavy.
She pushes him back and smooths her hands over his hair. This close, it's pretty obvious that he's been smoking weed. “So, where'd you get the weed?”
“Tony,” he says, and kisses the corner of her mouth.
“I wish you'd told, I would have joined you.”
“You smoke?”
“I'm a theoretical physicist, Bruce,” she says.
He grins. “Good point. Tony gave me some for later, it's in my bag.”
“Awesome,” she says, and takes his hand. “Come on, we'd better get on before they leave without us.”
Bruce, it turns out, is very fidgety when high, and very, very bored. He looks through all the cupboards, flicks through all his books, and solves a Rubrik's Cube in under a minute.
“Where'd you even get this from?” she asks, leaning over and giving it a poke. It's dark now, but while he was fiddling with it, it was all lit up, each individual cube flashing through a rainbow of colours. The goal, she guesses, is to solve it before the lights change.
“Stole it off Tony's desk on the way out,” he says, planting his feet on the table in front of him and sliding down into the couch until his knees are almost against his chest. “Wow, this couch is really comfy. How much longer do we have?”
She comes over and sits beside him - it is pretty comfortable - and checks her watch. “About four hours.”
“So, we've been flying for an hour? Feels like longer.”
“If you're high, sure.”
“Hey,” he says weakly, glancing over Erik.
Erik lifts his eyes from his book. “You think I don't know you're high? I'm European.”
“Oh,” Bruce murmurs, and turns his attention to his fingernails. “I feel like a teenager again,” he mumbles.
She grins and slides down next to him. He tips his head towards her shoulders and squints at the Kindle in her hand.
“Can you even see anything right now?” she asks, pushing loose curls from his face.
He squints harder. “Mm... No. Not a thing. Where're my glasses?”
“I don't know, you weren't wearing them when you arrived. Maybe they're in your bag?”
“I hope so...” He snuggles against her side and sighs. She amends her list of behaviour that Bruce displays while high to include: affectionate.
-
They spend the first night in the nicest hotel Jane has ever been in, though she doesn't really get the opportunity to appreciate it fully. Bruce is out like a light as soon as he hits the bed, his cheek pillowed against his hand, one leg stretched out, and Erik retreats to his room, saying something about minibars.
She does make use of the jacuzzi, though, trying every setting multiple times and giving herself a sloppy pedicure with some of the supplies that she finds in a drawer. Her feet arguably look worse than before, but they feel nice, at least.
They have an early start the next morning, so she pulls on her fuzzy pyjama bottoms and her Islands of Adventure t-shirt at ten, and gets into bed, squirming under the covers with Bruce on top beside her.
She wakes up with Bruce's knees pressed into her back, his arm snaked around her side and clutching at her shoulder. It's the closest they've got to spooning so far, but it's a little more uncomfortable than what she's used to.
“Bruce,” she murmurs, shifting around. He mutters irritably, and stretches out his legs, flattening himself against her back, the two of them still separated by the blanket. She takes his hand from her shoulder and presses it between her own. She guesses it's still early, she could sleep for another couple of hours.
-
Colorado has uncommonly good weather their first day out. She watches the barometer intently until it starts to get dark outside, before admitting to herself that clear skies and balmy weather means there's not going to be any sudden lightning storms. She pouts at the machine for a while, then grabs a couple of folding chairs and the cooler.
“Wanna go sit on the roof?” she asks Bruce, who's scribbling something in his notebook.
He peers over the top, eyebrows climbing. “Sure.”
The stars are out in full in the cloudless sky, and she can't help but wonder after Thor's star, trillions of parsecs away, outside of observable space. She doesn't even have a star to gaze at and think of him.
“I feel like I should say something profound,” Bruce says in his soft voice. “'I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world', or something.”
“Like in that movie,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“My eighth grade teacher was obsessed with that movie, we wrote a report on it instead of Wuthering Heights. The principal was pissed.”
“Eighth grade?” he repeats.
“Yeah. It came out when I was in third grade though.”
Bruce leans his head back in his chair. “Me and Betty went to see it the day it was released, for our two year anniversary. I was twenty.”
She laughs. “Such an old man.”
He groans a little. “Don't remind me.”
“What, are you having a mid-life crisis?”
“I have so many crises,” he says, “I really don't have the time for one so self-indulgent.”
She rolls her eyes. He's totally having a mid-life crisis. “Beer?”
“Oh, I don't think that's a good idea. Apparently alcohol makes me confess horrible things to you.”
Half of his face is in shadow, and the light she can see by is faint, coming from the hatch in the roof. But still, she thinks she can see that self-deprecating quirk of his mouth. She tries to keep her tone light.
“Yeah? Going to confess your secret double life as an orc, or something?”
Bruce chuckles. “I used to love World of Warcraft. I was a level... forty night elf? That sounds about right.”
“You don't play any more?”
“Well, being on the run sorta impacted my gaming,” he says, and she's glad it's dark, because that way he can't see her blush. Jeez, what a stupid question. “Also,” he adds, “once you become your own alter-ego, it's not really as much fun any more.”
“Yeah...” She leans over and retrieves a beer from the cooler; maybe he doesn't want one, but she sure needs one now. “I'm one of the undead. I haven't played in months though, I've been too busy with the bridge.”
“Makes sense,” he says, nodding. “God, we really are nerds.”
“Geek pride,” she says, waving her bottle a little, spilling some of it. “Shit...”
“What are you two doing up there?” Erik calls, sticking his head out of the hatch a moment later. “Are you making out?”
She laughs. “Grab a chair, grumpy. We're talking about MMORPGs.”
“Kids,” Erik mutters. “I remember when text adventures were cutting edge.”
“Oh my God,” Bruce murmurs, covering his face with his hands. “So do I.”
-
Sleeping arrangements are awkward. There are two beds in the RV, one slightly bigger than the other, but they're both tucked away in little alcoves, and they're just all at very close quarters with each other.
“This is awkward,” Bruce mutters, shifting around under the blankets. Jane leans over him and tugs the curtains closed.
“Erik's a heavy sleeper,” she says, “it'll be fine.”
He hums, looking unconvinced.
“He does snore a bit, though.”
“Oh, good,” he murmurs, “I love room mates who snore.”
Jane dreams about Asgard. She dreams about Thor in Don's old clothes, about his drawings in her notebook, about the bright flash of light that took him away and didn't bring him back.
She wakes with Bruce's face pressed against her chest, his fingers twisted in the fabric of her t-shirt, Erik's freight train rumble in the background.
-
They go into the town for breakfast. It reminds her of Puente Antiguo a little, with all its squat little buildings and peeling shop fronts and old stacked signs that make her feel like she's a character in a 1950s movie. Erik elects to stay behind and watch the equipment, so long as they bring him back a box of donuts, which she guiltily feels thankful for.
There are even some cops around the place, chatting with passersby, a couple leaning against their patrol car, drinking cups of coffee. They say good morning as Jane and Bruce pass. Jane smiles and raises her hand in greeting; Bruce mumbles something and looks at the ground.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asks as they make it to the next block.
He shrugs. “Don't really like cops,” he murmurs, glancing back at them.
“Oh, well... that makes sense,” she says. She takes his hand and squeezes it. “How about this place?”
He looks up and around at the diner they're passing. His thumb rubs along the back of her hand. “Sure.”
There are only a couple of other people in the diner, hunched over their coffees and papers. Bruce eyes them for a moment before drifting towards a table against the wall, out of sight of the windows, she notes.
“Is here okay?” he asks.
She smiles as gently as she can; he's not so great at being out in the open, she's found, even in a place as empty as this, apparently. He smiles back awkwardly and slides into the cracked leather booth.
The waitress comes over with the menus and makes small talk as she fills their glasses with water, asks them where they're from and where they're going. Jane makes something up on the fly, about coming over from Portland to see the Grand Canyon, fielding questions with a detached smile.
“Would you like some more time to choose, honey?” the waitress asks.
Jane drums her fingers on the laminated menu. “Are you serving burgers yet?”
“All day lunch,” the waitress says.
“Great, can I get, uh... the cheese burger with everything and fries, and a strawberry milkshake?”
“At nine am?” Bruce says, startling her a little - he hasn't said a word for the entire conversation with the waitress, barely looked up from his menu, even.
“Oh, that's just the tip of the poor nutrition iceberg,” she says.
He grins and glances back down at his menu. “I'll have the same,” he says after a moment, and hands the menu back to the waitress. “Portland?” he adds, once they're alone again.
Jane shrugs. “That's where I was born.”
“I didn't know that.”
“Yeah, we lived there until I was seven and my dad got the position at Culver. My mom moved back a few years ago.”
“Oh, so after that you lived in... Virginia, I guess?”
“Yeah. Mom thought about moving back after Dad died, but I'd started high school a year early, so she didn't want to pull me out. And, I don't know, I guess going to Harvard was always my plan, so she didn't want to be on the other side of the country while I was there. Once I hit twenty seven, she decided I was old enough to be left alone.”
He smiles. “That's nice. I actually... went to high school not so far from here, in New Mexico.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, my aunt and her husband got custody of me, after... you know. I went to a magnet school in Albuquerque.”
“Is your aunt still alive?”
He shakes his head. “She died of breast cancer when I was nineteen. Her husband and their kids are still around, probably still in Albuquerque, but... they didn't like me so much. I was weird.”
“Well, kids are assholes,” she says, smiling faintly.
“No, they were right not to like me, I was really weird. I used wake up shrieking, I used hoard food, and become mute for weeks at a time, lock myself in the bathroom all night. You know, horror movie kid stuff.”
“That's...” She purses her lips. She doesn't want him to withdraw, she wants him to tell her things, because she doesn't think he's probably had much opportunity to say these things to people before, but she has no frame of reference for this kind of thing. She's always been task and research oriented, but she can't do that with this. She has to just let it flow, and that's not something she really knows how to do. “That's not weird,” she finishes quietly.
He shrugs. “I don't mean that they were bad to me or anything, 'cause considering the circumstances, they were pretty good to me. But I just... I mean, she was my paternal aunt. It was awkward.”
She doesn't know what else to do but nod. The waitress comes over a minute later with their food, which saves her from trying to think of what to say next.
Bruce is a messy eater. Jane is too, but Bruce has this uncoordinated grace about it, eating too fast, then too slow, wiping ketchup from his face with a rueful smile, washing everything down with a gulp of milkshake and starting over.
“You're staring again,” he murmurs.
She grins. “Yep.”
He frowns so deeply at her that she giggles and covers her mouth.
A bell jingles across the room, and Bruce lifts his eyes to the door for a moment before looking back down at his plate quickly. Jane glances over her shoulder and sees the broad back of one of the police officers from outside.
“It's okay,” she says quietly.
“I know,” he mumbles, picking at his fries.
The officers stay up at the counter while the waitress gets them their food, and Jane thinks that that'll probably be the end of it; they'll grab their sandwiches and go back to their car, but then the younger one turns around and catches her looking ('and oh, he is very good-looking', her brain informs her) and she has to smile and nod to him, or else look as suspicious as Bruce does right now.
The guy wanders up to them (oh, and he has a swagger, that is very nice), and tips his head in greeting.
“Let me guess,” he says, “tourists?”
“How'd you know?” she says, smiling widely. She can see Bruce squirming in his seat out of the corner of her eye.
“Well, normally when I see a pretty lady in here, she's a tourist. Not that I'm casting aspersions on the women of our fine little town. Don't tell Jean I said that, okay?” he says, nodding towards the waitress.
Jane can feel her cheeks warm up at the compliment, she always does come over a bit shy when men flirt with her. “Your secret's safe with me.”
“Thank you, ma'am,” the officer says, lifting the sunglasses nestled in his hair in thanks. “So, where're you visiting us from?”
“Portland,” she says, easily this time. “We're just here for a few days to see the Grand Canyon.”
“Well, I hope the weather holds for you guys, we were forecast lightning storms earlier in the week.” His partner calls to him, and he waves his acknowledgement. “Anyway, I hope you enjoy your stay. By the way, I'm Leo.”
He holds out his hand to her, and she takes it, quickly searching her mind for a fake name. Not that there's really a need, but she's committed to this hiding-out-from-the-law narrative, now. “Jan...et. This is Brad,” she adds, nodding to Bruce. Bruce raises his eyebrows at her.
Leo smiles (he has a nice smile, too, she notes) and shakes her hand for a moment before stepping back. “Maybe I'll see you guys around again this week,” he says.
“Maybe,” she calls, as he backs up and then turns back to his partner. She pinches the bridge of her nose for a moment before facing back towards Bruce.
He blinks a couple of times, then says, “So, is Erik Rocky or Dr. Frank-N-Furter?”
“Oh my God, it was the only thing I could think of!” she says, laughing.
“Why did you lie at all?”
“I don't know! You got me all freaked out! I got into the whole Portland thing and... I don't know!”
Bruce is full on laughing at her now, and she kicks him under the table, pouting. “Don't laugh at me!”
He waves his hands in surrender, still chuckling a little, and shakes his head. “I guess it's not the worst thing I've ever been called.”
-
She buys a t-shirt at the souvenir shop to go with her collection; it says 'get your kicks on Route 66' on it. She buys a t-shirt for Bruce too, one with a skull and cross bones on it, and the words, 'America's mother road' printed across the top. He tugs it on over his shirt.
“I feel very pirate-y,” he murmurs.
“We'll get you an eye patch,” she says, reaching over and covering his eye with her palm.
“Oh, don't talk to me about eye patches,” he mutters, and wraps his fingers around her wrist lightly, rubbing his thumb against her pulse.
She smiles, embracing the flutter in her stomach - he's not her 'type', he's not Leo the police officer or Thor the space god prince or Don the vain ER doctor, but she likes him all the same - and rocks forward on her toes, kissing him lightly. He runs his tongue over his lips and winds his arm around her waist, tugging her gently against his side, leaving a couple of inches between them, as if she'll want to pull away. She tucks her hand under his elbow and gives him a light shove.
-
They spend another fruitless afternoon and evening watching the equipment, picking their way though boxes of donuts and a family sized bucket of chicken wings.
“I haven't eaten this badly since I was writing my doctoral thesis,” Bruce says, licking his fingers.
Jane stretches out on the couch, propping her feet up on his legs and leaning back against the arm. “Well, stick with me, Banner, you'll see some unhealthy food.”
He laughs and runs his thumb down the centre of her foot, digging into the heel, his index finger brushing against the dry, cracked skin around the edge. Her amateur pedicure really didn't do any good at all.
“Well, I'm going to turn in,” Erik says, wiping his fingers on his pants as he goes. He's trying, she knows that, and he hasn't been doing a bad job so far (even though she happens to think that she and Bruce are hardly all over each other and it shouldn't be a problem at all), but the night's been getting steadily more uncomfortable, and she can't say she's going to miss his company.
Bruce works his knuckles into the arch of her foot as they say their good nights and Erik disappears into his alcove at the back of the RV. She's not sure what to say after that, other than that Bruce gives really good foot massages.
“Sorry about my feet,” she says after a couple of minutes.
“Hm?”
She wriggles her toes a little. “They're kind of gross.”
“No, they're not,” he says, pushing her toes back one by one. “They're feet, they're meant to look like this.”
“Oh,” she says, inexplicably starting to blush. “Well, my feet thank you.”
He smiles vaguely and looks up at her. “Do you wanna go smoke pot on the roof?”
-
He's a deft hand at rolling joints, she finds, even by lamplight sitting on the roof of an RV.
“I was kinda a stoner in college,” he says, lighting the joint. There's something very attractive about how easily his fingers work the zippo lighter - something else he stole from Tony. She's starting to think that he might be a bit of a klepto. “I fell in with a... hippie sort of crowd, I guess.” He hands her the joint and she takes a drag.
And promptly starts coughing. She hands it back as tears prickle at her eyes. “Sorry, I, ahem, haven't smoked in a while.”
He just grins at her and takes his own drag, holding it in his lungs for a couple of seconds, then blowing out smoke rings. After a few more, less embarrassing, drags, she feels herself loosen up. She thinks maybe it's the first time she's loosened up in the last three years. Everything since Thor has led up to being in this RV, with this machine strapped to the back, everything in her life has focused down into this one goal of the Einstein-Rosen bridge powering up and then... and then she doesn't know. She was motivated by seeing Thor again, back then, but now? Now she's not so sure.
Bruce is looking up at the sky when she hands the joint back. “He's up there somewhere,” he murmurs.
“Yeah...” She presses her palms against roof of the RV and sighs.
Bruce looks back at her. “Tell me something about yourself,” he says.
She laughs. “What? Is that some kind of pick up line?”
“If I was an enzyme, I'd be a helicase so I could unzip your genes,” he says, straight-faced for a moment before they both dissolve into laughter. He hiccups a couple of times, and then screws up his face and shakes his head. “Seriously, though, you know lots of things about me, and I don't really know that much about you. Which is strange, 'cause I don't tell people things, as a rule.”
“Well, okay... I'm from Portland, like I said earlier.”
“What does your mom do?”
“She's a nurse. I thought about studying medicine for a while, too, but I'm just not that caring of a person.”
“You're caring,” he murmurs.
She shrugs. “Not really. I get too wrapped up in my own head.”
“Who says?”
“I don't know, boyfriends? Don said I wasn't supportive enough.”
“This guy sounds like an asshole,” Bruce says, and takes another drag, blowing the smoke out through his nose.
She takes the joint back and smirks a little. “Yeah, I'd say that's probably accurate. But still, I'm not great company a lot of the time.”
“Trust me, you are, and you're talking to the guy who never is.”
She blows smoke out of the corner of her mouth and frowns. “That's not true.”
“So we're even. Tell me something else. Do you have any siblings?”
“Nope, just me.”
“Childhood pets?”
“A dog named Rex. I was a very creative child.”
“Favourite colour?”
“Green.”
He raises his eyebrows, as if to say 'bullshit', and she giggles. “Really! I dressed up as a green dinosaur for Halloween every year until I grew out of the costume.”
“Dinosaurs are cool,” he says.
“Dinosaurs are the best!” she cries, then covers her mouth with her hand, surprised at how loud that came out. Bruce laughs, tipping his head back so she can see his Adam's apple bob up and down. She thinks about leaning forward and licking it, but she isn't quite that high yet. “I thought about being a palaeontologist, too, when I was kid,” she says quietly from between her fingers.
“What changed your mind?”
She drops her hand from her face and shifts around. It's starting to get cold out, even with a sweater on. “Well, there was this comet in 1994 that collided with Jupiter--”
“Shoe something?” Bruce interrupts. “I remember the news coverage.”
“Shoemaker-Levy 9,” she says, and grins. “Like you said, there was all this coverage, we followed it in school, and I followed it at home, and I was just fascinated by it. My parents took me to the Hayden Planetarium for my thirteenth birthday a couple of months later, and I just... fell in love, I guess. It was so... endless and full of possibility...” She shakes her head and laughs. “Ignore me, I'm high.”
A moment later she has a lapful of Bruce. Well, not quite, but that's what it feels like for a second as he pushes into her space and kisses her softly. “Sorry,” he murmurs, brushing his lips against her chin. “I just really wanted to kiss you.”
“Don't apologise,” she says, running her fingers through his hair, and he smiles, rolling over to lie down beside her. She scoots down as well, staring up at the clear sky, stars twinkling like pieces of glitter, before taking his hand and threading their fingers together. He squeezes it a little and tips his head towards her.
“I want to ask you, like, a hundred questions about the-- the other guy,” she says suddenly, turning her head to him so that their noses almost touch.
“So ask.”
“I don't want to upset you.”
He blinks slowly. “You'll know if I'm upset.”
“That's what I'm afraid of,” she mutters, then widens her eyes. “Not that I'm... I-I'm not afraid of you...”
He smiles easily. “I know. It's a figure of speech.”
“Okay...”
“Ask me something.”
She bites her lip. “Does it hurt, when you change?”
“Depends on the circumstances. It's not so bad if I'm controlling it, but if it comes out of nowhere... it's agony.”
“Are you aware of what's going on when you're... when you've changed? Do you remember stuff afterwards?”
He lifts one shoulder. “Sometimes. It's like a, a fever dream. I think sometimes I only remember what I want to remember, the other guy shields me from stuff... or I shield myself, I should say.”
She nods, pulling their joined hands to her chest to study Bruce's square fingernails and hairy knuckles. Bruce watches her patiently. “So, you change when you're angry?”
“Anger and fear,” he says. “Mostly fear, really.”
“What're you scared of?”
“Myself.” He laughs. “It's such a cliché.”
“Why?”
He lets out a long breath. “Because I'm my father's son.”
“Bruce...” she murmurs.
He rolls over onto his side and smiles. “It's okay. The fear's sublimated most of the time. Just occasionally it wells up, like when you got to see the other guy for yourself.”
She frowns; she doesn't know what to say, she doesn't know how to fix things like this. Instead she rolls over too, and kisses him, soft at first, until he opens his mouth and presses his tongue past her teeth. He's kind of shockingly good at all this sex stuff - it's not like she's an inexperienced virgin, but she certainly hasn't had a hugely wide range of experiences. She hasn't been touched softly and lingered over to any real degree by any of her boyfriends. It wasn't always their fault: sometimes she just couldn't be bothered with intimacy; she had exams to study for and PhDs to get and research to complete, and when she dated guys in her program they ended up competing against each other and if she dated someone outside of it, they couldn't understand why she couldn't quit studying this one night to go out clubbing.
She hooks her leg over his hip, rolling them so that she's sitting up over him, and shakes her head against sudden light-headedness before leaning down and kissing him again. He explores the backs of her legs gently, tapping his fingers against the seams of her jeans, and hums into her mouth.
“Do you want to go inside? It's cold out here,” she asks.
“Sure,” he says, “we'll have to be really quiet, though.”
“I can do that if you can.”
“I'm like a mouse, remember?” he murmurs.
“Sure you are,” she says, taking his hand and leading him back down the hatch and into the RV.
They stand on the little bit of floor space in front of their bed, ineptly undressing each other to the tune of Erik's snoring. Jane gets Bruce tangled up in his button down/t-shirt combo, so that his head has disappeared into the neck and his arms are flailing around uselessly. When she finally frees him, his laughter is coming in silent, helpless gasps, until she pulls him into her arms and swallows his laughter, kissing him breathless. He sways slightly on the spot, and when she pulls away, he looks drugged, eyes half-lidded. Well, she thinks, he is; they both are, and she hasn't said sex while high since she was a freshman.
He smiles that easy smile of his, and pushes her t-shirt up, flattening his hands over her stomach and caressing her skin lightly for several long moments. It makes her feel a little exposed, honestly, how content he is to just touch her and look at her; she can only take the gentle scrutiny for so long before she starts pushing him towards the bed. He goes without argument, only momentarily getting caught in the curtain on his way down. She pulls her t-shirt off, then her sports bra, and pulls down her jeans that Bruce already got unzipped, taking her underwear with them.
Bruce grins at her crappy striptease, tugging at his pants, a bulge clearly visible. She leans over and helps him out of them, and the boxers too. “Get under the covers,” she says quietly, and he scrambles to do just that as she drags her bag out to retrieve a packet of condoms. She's used more condoms in the last few weeks than she has in the last few years, which is not exactly difficult, but still strikes her as kind of funny.
She climbs onto the bed and pulls the curtains tight, then turns her attention to Bruce's dick. He sucks his stomach in slightly as she looks down at him, and she rolls her eyes. He's definitely put weight on since that first time she saw him shirtless - the only thing that stopped her from being able to see the outline of his ribs was his chest hair - and the extra weight has mostly settled around his stomach, his waist thicker than it was, but he's still pretty skinny. Maybe she's given him a bit of a complex, with the kind of guys she's previously dated.
She leans down and kisses him quickly, then rolls the condom on and grinds against him, enjoying the little frissons of pleasure that shoot down her legs. Bruce squirms underneath her, throwing an arm over his mouth to muffle his panting. She grins - the show hasn't even begun yet - and presses her fingers inside herself for a moment, much to Bruce's obvious delight, before sinking down on him, pulling his arm away from his face and giving him another kiss.
He wraps one hand gently around her hip and mostly keeps pace with her, rocking against her clumsily. She can tell by the strained look on his face that this is not going to last very long, the way his lip catches between his teeth and his eyelashes flutter. She snaps her hips forward, once, twice, grinning at the way his whole face just crumples.
“Shiii--” he groans. She can feel his legs shuddering against her thighs, as he squeezes his eyes shut and tenses his shoulders. He presses a hand to his face and groans into it for a couple of long seconds before opening his fingers and looking at her. “Sorry,” he mumbles behind his hand, “'m old.”
She laughs. “It's okay.”
“Mm. You didn't come.”
She shrugs. “That's okay.”
He makes a squinty face that seems inordinately funny to her. “Switch?” he asks.
“What?”
“Cunnilingus,” he says, and presses his hand to his mouth again to stifle his laughter. “Sorry, it's a funny word. Cunnilingus, cunning linguist...” He shakes his head. “Anyway, I'm gonna do it on you. Y'know, if you want me to?”
“Oh, well...” She scratches at the back of her head. “Okay, I guess.”
“I won't do it if you don't want me to...” he says, looking at her with big eyes. Really big eyes. She doesn't think they used to be that big...
“No, I just...” She lowers her voice. “I've never... done that with someone.”
“Oh, well, I'm told I'm really good at it?”
“Okay,” she says, and ungracefully gets off him, lying down back on the bed, feeling exposed and excited in pretty much equal measure. Bruce pulls the condom off, fumbling around and mumbling to himself before turning back to her. He shifts around, settling between her legs, and presses his palms to her inner thighs.
And she hasn't shaved in a while, she remembers, as he rubs his thumbs against the hair.
“You're sure?” he asks, with a tone and a gaze more serious than she would think he'd be able to maintain having smoked as much weed as he has.
“Sure,” she says.
“Prepare to have your mind blown,” he says with a mischievous smile, and ducks down between her legs.
It's... odd, at first. His mouth is warm and wet and kind of alien, but not unpleasant. Not unpleasant at all, she thinks, as he finds her clit with his tongue. “Oh,” she squeaks, and flails for something to hold onto. He lifts his hand and pushes his fingers through hers, and how did he get so goddamn good at this? He's just as nerdy as she is, maybe even more, he does have twelve years on her, so how come he's already bringing her this close to climax?
She gasps quietly, tightening her legs around his shoulders, and he grips her hip with his free hand, flicking his tongue. She comes harder than she ever has, sinking one hand into his hair, biting the inside of her mouth to muffle herself. Bruce rides it out with her; quite literally, as she rocks her hips erratically against his mouth.
When he pulls back, it takes her a second to remember to let go of his hair and his hand. He pushes his hair back from his face with a self-conscious smile, his cheeks pink, his chin... damp.
“Was that any good?” he asks, wiping his chin on the back of his arm.
“Um, yes,” she says, smiling back a little nervously. She feels kind of warm inside, and not just because of the orgasm, as she looks at him. She'd put it down to the pot, except she's been feeling like this all day, really. She takes a deep breath. “We should probably get some sleep.”
“Okay,” he says, and moves up the bed to lie down beside her. He shifts around for a couple minutes to get comfortable on his side, then loosely rests his arm around her waist. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine.” She blows out a scornful laugh and kisses him quickly. “I'm good.”
He smiles, eyelids drooping. “Good,” he murmurs, “me too.”
Part 2