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When the doorbell rings at some unconscionably early hour of the—well, of technically the morning, it’s Tony Stark.
Tony Stark, on his front stoop, his face a combination of light and shadow under the porch light.
Tony Stark, in Angry Birds-patterned pajama pants and a black sleeveless shirt that shows off, uh, arms. And shoulders. And—
“I brought a movie,” he says, and he holds up a battered DVD case.
Bruce exhales, slowly, and nudges his glasses up onto his forehead. He rubs his eyes as though Tony’s some kind of optical illusion, but—no. No, when he drags his hands down his cheeks, over his stubble, Tony’s still there. “It’s . . . ” he starts to say, then he frowns. “What time is it?”
“Two,” Tony reports. He rocks up onto the balls of his feet, then back onto his heels. “Two thirty-five, if you wanna be technical. And you always—”
“Want to be technical,” Bruce finishes with him. He’s in his bathrobe. It’s an impossible hour of the morning, and he’s standing in his threadbare bathrobe while Tony watches him from his stoop. If there’s a god, he’s laughing right now. “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” he repeats.
“I know. That’s why I didn’t bring two movies.”
Bruce rolls his lips together, nods a little, and steps out of the doorway.
He knew it’d be—bad, that’s the word he wants, when Tony texted him. Well, texted him six times, right in a row, because Tony’s learned from experience that the first text never quite wakes Bruce up out of a dead sleep. Anything past about a third text will, and Tony’d banked on that. Just like Tony’s banking on, “You’ve got tea, right? That weird spicy Indian thing you got last time we went to the market? Tell me you’ve got that tea, I need that tea.”
Bruce steps over Tony’s abandoned slippers—he drove in his slippers—and wanders through to the kitchen. There’re already three cabinets hanging open, and Tony’s digging through the fourth. He watches for a few seconds, watches the back of Tony’s shoulder strain while he shoves cans around on a high shelf.
Then, he sighs and steps in after him.
“I haven’t moved anything,” he points out, and he puts a hand on Tony’s hip to steer him out of the way. He . . . likes, somehow, that Tony stills at his touch. But he doesn’t dwell on that, not when he can open the drawer in front of them and pull out a bag of loose chai. “It’s like you need a map.”
“If it’s an illustrated map, I’m in,” Tony replies, raising a finger. He pokes the bridge of Bruce’s glasses lightly, pushing them back up on his nose, and then reaches for the kettle. “Y’know, maybe color-coded. I’ve always liked things color-coded.”
“Where ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’ are brown?”
“Tea should be red. Because you don’t have normal tea, you have spicy Indian magic tea.” He waves a hand as he sets the kettle on the burner. He twists the knob up to the highest setting and leans against the countertop . . . before he pulls his cell phone out of his pocket.
Bruce stops filling teabags to watch him. He activates the display, frowns, drums his fingers against the case, and then swipes to unlock. A few scrolls of the screen later, he locks the phone and shoves it back in his pocket.
He starts, a little, when he catches Bruce watching him. “How bad is she?” Bruce asks quietly.
Tony shrugs. “You know how kids are. Weird bug, lots of puke, freaking out her dads, all of that.” He waves his hand like he’s dismissing something . . . but Bruce can see the little spark of fear in his dark eyes. He watches him swallow thickly. “Steve said he’d call as soon as they got in with the ER doctor, lemme know what’s going on.”
“You didn’t—go with them?”
“Who, me?” Tony snorts a tiny laugh that doesn’t sound amused at all. “Yeah, that’s just what Steve and Buck need right now, freaked out fairy godfather, twitching his way around the ER while their kid pukes into one of those little cardboard—things.”
He makes a shape with his hands and Bruce—smiles. Softly, though, nothing like how Tony usually smiles. “Kidney dish,” he offers as he turns back to the teabags.
“Kidney what?”
“They’re called kidney dishes. The cardboard dishes they give you to . . . you know.”
“Huh.” Out of the corner of his eye, Bruce can see Tony screw up his face in thought. “You’d think they’d save kidney dishes for pee.”
Bruce laughs, a little. “You’d think,” he replies, and finishes with the teabags.
==
“Okay. Okay, that’s it. This is officially the worst movie ever made, and I am including the Star Wars prequels in that assessment.” Tony throws up his hands. “How could you let us watch this?!”
Bruce rolls his eyes. “It’s your movie!”
“Except I have terrible taste. You know I have terrible taste. Nope. Nope, blame rests solely on you.”
Tony jabs his finger into the softest part of Bruce’s side when he says it, and Bruce jerks hard enough that he almost knocks the popcorn bowl off the edge of the coffee table. It teeters, and for a second, he thinks Tony might catch it. Except Tony doesn’t even look at it. No, while Bruce scrambles save his carpet from a full bag of triple-butter movie style, Tony’s checking his phone.
Again.
For the eighth time in probably as many minutes.
On the TV, there’s a high-pitched horror-movie shriek as some pretty blonde woman is abducted by the body-snatchers. At least, Bruce thinks that’s the plot. He’s—not entirely sure. Tony’s talked over most of it.
Like he’s doing now, his phone balanced precariously on a knee while he leans in to grab another handful of popcorn. “You know better than to trust me,” he chides, shaking his head. “Remember Night of the Living Dead? I thought you’d skewer me for Night of the Living Dead.”
“I liked that one,” Bruce reminds him, rolling his eyes. There’s more screaming on screen. He’s starting to suspect that the script calls for nothing more than a sequence of eardrum-shattering screams. “It was—” He frowns. “The shiny gold hotpants.”
Tony attempts to toss a kernel into his mouth, misses, and batters himself in the eye. He frowns. “You offering?”
“No!” Bruce exclaims. “I mean the movie. The one with the shiny gold—”
“Rocky Horror?”
“Was that it?”
“No, it can’t be Rocky Horror.” Tony shakes his head hard enough that his hair flops. It’s messy, all the product worked out of it. Bruce’s watched him run his fingers through it, watched him take and hold onto handfuls. It looks—soft, now. Like something you’d want to touch. “You asked to go see it live with me on Halloween.”
“Oh no,” Bruce drawls, holding up his hands. “No, you dragged me to see it live. And I am still working on finding a therapist who’ll address the post-traumatic—”
“I swear you loved it!” Tony argues. He jabs Bruce again, and Bruce jerks hard enough that their shoulders bump together. It encourages Tony to sort of . . . lean into him. They both sway on the couch. “I swear you—”
Tony’s phone chimes, suddenly, and he jumps away. Bruce presses his lips together and watches as he fumbles to unlock the display. The movie’s quieter now, the screen all panoramic shots of somewhere that’s probably important to the plot, but he’s not really concerned about the movie.
He’s concerned about the soft features of Tony’s face, and the way the light from the TV is reflected in his eyes.
“News?” he asks.
Tony shakes his head. “Today’s Groupon.” When he flops back against the overstuffed couch cushions, Bruce thinks he’s maybe a little closer than previously. Like maybe he wants their shoulders to brush again.
Bruce leans back, too. There’s only a few inches between their arms. “He’ll call,” he replies.
“I know.”
On the screen, a scientist’s gesturing so wildly, Bruce wonders whether he’ll achieve liftoff.
“Next time,” he decides, glancing at Tony, “we get the Mystery Science Theater version.”
Tony tips his head in Bruce’s direction . . . and smiles.
==
“You know, I get that it can clean any kind of stain imaginable,” Tony says, biting off the end of a chocolate bar, “but I don’t think that’s enough.”
“Hmm,” Bruce murmurs, his chin in his hand.
“What we need is a cleaner that, like, dissolves human tissue. Dissolves wood. Dissolves metal. You know? Something strong enough that you could fill a pool with it, drive your car in—well, maybe not you drive your car in, because then you’d die, too—and it’d just be gone.”
“I think that’s called lye,” he replies, and Tony nudges him with his elbow before he grabs another mini Hershey bar off the coffee table.
It’s almost five a.m.—almost dawn, Bruce thinks to himself, and then groans inwardly—and the only thing on TV besides the extra-early morning show is an infomercial. Specifically, it’s an infomercial for OxyClean’s less-impressive second-cousin, a cinematic marvel featuring badly-timed jump cuts, unfortunate dubbing, and a wide array 1980s haircuts. The empty bowl of popcorn is under the coffee table now, leaving plenty of room for their half-full cups of tea . . . and a dozen wrappers from mini-sized Hershey bars.
Bruce had—wanted to save those Hershey bars.
But he’s also fairly sure they’re the only thing keeping Tony awake at this point.
From his spot tucked in the corner of the couch, eyes half-open and body splayed out enough that his one leg is almost behind Tony instead of beside him, he can watch Tony . . . vibrate. His knee’s jumping so hard that the phone’s now balanced on the edge of the coffee table, and he’s caught in this sort of—holding pattern, his attention moving from phone to TV to chocolate to Bruce and then back to the phone. Every few minutes, he unlocks it, checks the home screen, and then relocks it; every half hour or so, he turns it onto and then off of airplane mode, just to reset the network.
It’s on about the fifth unlock-relock pattern since the end of the movie that Bruce asks, “You really love her, don’t you?”
It’s—not something he meant to say aloud, exactly, but the warm tide of exhaustion is lapping at his brain and tongue, and he can’t really help himself. The words fall out into the space between them, and Tony—
Tony grins. “‘Course I do!” he replies. “I mean, she’s Dot! And, of course, she’s my goddaughter, and I figure if I’m the fairy godfather than I might as well—”
Bruce shakes his head. “That’s . . . not what I meant.”
“So then . . . ?”
“I mean that you . . . ” And it’s suddenly harder, somehow, for Bruce to find the words he wants. He rubs a hand over his face, aware that Tony’s watching him. It’s too late—or early, maybe—for a conversation like this, but— “She’s not just Dot. Right?”
There’s this funny moment when he asks it where Tony doesn’t really . . . move. It’s not hesitation as much as it is a—still-frame of their conversation, a two-second suspension of time. But then his eyes dip, and there’s something soft that takes over his entire face. It’s slow, like a—flower opening or the sun rising, but bit by bit, it’s—there.
And then, he shrugs. “Steve’s the first of my friends with a kid,” he answers, but it’s—quiet. Caught, even. “And, I mean, it’ll be a while before any of my other friends have kids. And I figure, if I’m not gonna have any, then—”
“You could have kids.” It surprises Bruce how . . . quickly he says it. How, instead of listening, he interrupts. Tony’s head jerks up, and he blinks. Bruce shifts, a little, but he ends up in his own half-hearted shrug. “I mean, nothing’s stopping you, right?”
Tony snorts. “Maybe someday. Like, you know, in the far-distant and purely speculative future, and not—now. Not now, and not on my own.” Their eyes meet for a half-second, and then he dips his head again. When he shakes it, his hair moves. “Definitely not on my own.”
“No?” Bruce’s voice, it’s—softer than he means it to be.
“No. I— I mean, sure, some people do it, but I think I’d need somebody else. After everything, I don’t think—”
Bruce knows there’s more. He can feel it, like the pressure in the air before a thunderstorm, feel that Tony— He wants to say something else. He’s sitting up more, their eyes are meeting, and his hands are starting to move. Gesturing a little like the scientist in the movie, he thinks, but the difference is, Tony’s here. He’s here, and they’re talking about something that matters, something beyond . . . body-snatched pod people.
But Tony’s cell phone ringtone is moving from a drumroll to the full-on opening chords of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the moment . . . breaks.
Tony grabs the phone and swipes Steve’s face away to accept the call. Bruce is still in the process of muting the TV when he hears Tony’s urgent, “How is she?” He watches Tony nod, head jerking like someone shaking a marionette’s strings . . . and then watches him flop against the back of the couch. Deflates, Bruce thinks, but he doesn’t say that.
Instead, he watches the nodding slow, and listens as the urgency drop to replies like, “Good,” “We were really worried,” and “Yeah, no kidding.”
When he hangs up, Bruce finds himself focused on every micro-expression that slips into the space between them: the softness around Tony’s eyes, the way his lips part in a sigh, the twitch of his thumb against the phone, and shifting of muscles when he leans forward.
He tosses the phone into the middle of the coffee table. “Apparently,” he says, drawing out the word, “Dot’s caught some really nasty flu that’s been hopping around from preschool to preschool. The nurses said she’s about the tenth kid they’ve seen this week. They pumped her full of fluids, hooked her up with some heavy-duty flu meds, and she’s heading home in an hour or two.”
Bruce nods, his own—stupid marionette head-bob, and smiles a little when Tony glances over at him. “Good,” he says.
“No kidding,” Tony replies, and unmutes the TV.
Bruce knows he should let it go, dismiss this as another almost-conversation that they’ve almost-had, but he . . . can’t really look away from Tony. He watches him settle back against the couch cushions, close enough that Bruce can feel his heat against his one still-outstretched leg. The light of the TV makes his eyelashes look longer and the circles under his eyes darker, but there’s still something almost—beautiful, in that.
“I. Uh,” he says, and Tony rolls his head against the back of the couch to—look at him.
He realizes that his mouth feels dry, but wetting his lips, it doesn’t really help. Instead, he’s stuck swallowing while Tony watches him. His head’s tipped back against the couch cushion, his neck and jaw on display.
Bruce spends a few minutes just looking at him, like that, before he forces himself to pull in a breath. “I just wanted to say, I . . . I think you’d make a good father.” The words, they’re—soft. As much as he means them, they’re almost a whisper. “Your kids, they’d—never wonder whether they were loved. They’d grow up certain that their dad loves them unconditionally. And I think that’s . . . Well. It’s more than a lot of kids have.”
He’s not really looking at Tony when he says it—he watches his throat, jaw, neck, and shoulder, not any place that matters—but when he’s done and he’s wet his lips again, their eyes meet. They meet, and Bruce has this . . . moment, this half-second, where the only things in the world are Tony’s eyes. Tony’s dark, steady eyes, eyes that watch him more carefully than anyone’s ever done. He feels tiny, sometimes, when Tony looks at him like that.
And sometimes, he feels like the center of the universe.
“Yeah?” Tony asks, quietly.
Bruce nods. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Like Dot knows.”
When Tony smiles at him, it’s—blinding. Blistering, the surface of the sun in a single smile, and it finds every one of the deep-pressed laugh-lines on Tony’s face. It ignites his whole expression, a lick of flame that, in seconds, becomes a bonfire. And that, Bruce decides, that is beautiful, no “almost” about it.
“We are buying her the world’s biggest ‘get well soon bear,’” he declares, clasping a hand to Bruce’s leg. Bruce grins and rolls his eyes. “You know that, right? Steve and Bucky’ll have to move into a new place, it’ll be so big.”
“Okay,” Bruce agrees, and Tony squeezes his leg before he lets go.
==
“—and if you’re dead, you need to at least have Stark call me so I can figure out whether I’ve gotta replace two attorneys instead of just the one!”
Bruce is pretty sure he’s had nightmares about Nick Fury screaming at him before, but never with the mechanical beep of the answering machine following after it. In fact, it takes him a couple seconds to realize the beep he heard in the background was the answering machine, not just part of some strange Fury-related fever-dream.
The house is quiet and warm, this morning. Quiet, warm, and filled with sunlight. Too much sunlight for the bedroom, he groggily thinks, groaning a little. So much, in fact, that he’s sure he fell asleep on the couch.
And if he’s asleep on the couch, then—
He tries to shift and stretch in a feeble attempt to find his bearings, but he can’t. He’s pinned by something warm and breathing that’s stretched across his body.
Something that, when he shifts again, groans and presses into his shoulder.
Bruce groans, too, and rubs his sleep-bleary eyes before opening them. Not that it matters. No, even before he looks, Bruce kind of knows what he’s going to see.
Because flopped bodily across him, face pressed into his shoulder and arm stretched across his middle, is Tony Stark. Tony Stark, whose pajama pants are low enough on his hips that it’s almost indecent. Tony Stark, who—at a point after Bruce himself nodded off against the arm of the couch—decided using him as a human pillow would be . . . okay.
He’s warm, though. He’s warm, and his breath tickles the bare skin where Bruce’s robe has slipped away from his shoulder.
He smiles, a little, and shakes his head.
“Don’t,” Tony grumbles against Bruce’s shoulder. It’s sleep-thick and clumsy, like a mouth full of marbles. “You move, and it’s morning. I don’t want it to be morning.”
He chuckles. “So no moving?”
“No,” Tony retorts, and pushes his face against Bruce’s bare skin.
They lie that way for a long time, longer than Bruce maybe intends them to, warm breath against his skin and silence wrapped around them. They lie there, too, as Bruce curls a hand against Tony’s back. It’s not . . . holding on, exactly, but it’s not forcing him away. It’s just—
It’s there.
“Tony?” he asks, quietly.
“Mmm?”
“I—think I liked how the movie ended.”
“Hmm,” Tony replies, and Bruce smiles as he closes his eyes.