Work Text:
When Bruce Banner walks into his office on Monday—two days after Zebediah Killgrave is arrested for the murder of fifteen-year-old Jordan Silva-Ribiero and two minutes after Bruce is accosted by fifteen reporters in the hallway—there is a tiny potted cactus in the middle of his window ledge. He stops in front of his desk, bag in hand, and for a few seconds, he . . . stares.
He thinks, maybe, he’s hallucinating. He puts down his bag to rub his eyes with the butts of his hand. But the cactus is still there.
There, on his window ledge, between a book Clint’d flipped through and left and his favorite fern. It lives, it seems, in an equally-tiny terra-cotta pot, and when Bruce picks it up, he finds a neon-green post-it note hidden underneath.
if Barton can have a pillow, the note reads, then you can have this. The handwriting’s a scribble and nearly illegible, but Bruce— Bruce knows that handwriting. He knows it better than he knows his own, lately.
Or at least, he knows it well enough to lose his temper, stomp out of his office, and abandon the cactus with Clint—and the idiotic purple pillow that clearly started . . . this.
==
“I know you did your PhD in India or whatever, and that things were different there, but I’m pretty sure you’ve been back here in the U.S. of A. long enough to know that regifting’s actually kinda—rude.”
Tony’s fingers dance against one another, steepled in air but not doing anything, and Bruce . . . He sighs, quietly, and closes his eyes. His desk, it’s—covered, really, with notes and statute books. He’s working on a response to a motion that asks the court to return a four-year-old to his mother. Because she really hadn’t meant to leave him alone at the park for at least ten hours.
She’d just gotten busy with other things and, you know. Forgot him.
“I mean, just saying,” Tony presses, and Bruce counts to five before he opens his eyes again. He thinks maybe that pause’ll—enlighten Tony, a little. That if he waits, and takes a breath, Tony’ll realize that today really isn’t the day to . . . Well, to be Tony Stark, for one. That today is a day to smile and offer to come back later. That today is—
When Bruce opens his eyes, Tony’s still there, still standing in front of Bruce’s desk. He’s wearing a light gray suit with this powdery lavender shirt, but you can tell that he’s having an off day of his own. His jacket’s missing, his sleeves are rolled up, and there’re wrinkles all over from where he’s sat, stood, shifted, paced, and, now, settled his hands on his hips. His hair’s sticking up in six directions, too, proof he’s been running his fingers through it.
Bruce inventories all this with a long look before he says, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” He forces himself to return to his statute book.
“It must be uncomfortable, wearing such flaming, fiery, burning pants,” Tony retorts, and Bruce rolls his eyes. He turns another page, scanning the tiny print for—something. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, anymore. He’s aware of Tony still talking, of Tony saying his name, but he doesn’t look up.
Tony says his name again, then twice more, and—
Bruce nearly leaps out of his seat in fright when Tony closes the distance between them and slams his palm down in the middle of the page. The impact shakes the entire desk, and a handful of police reports slide onto the floor. They spread all over the carpet, mingling with old paperwork Bruce needs to shred but hasn’t managed to take down to the shredder, yet.
“You know the whole fucking book by heart,” Tony accuses. When Bruce glances up, he meets these—big, brown, half-wild eyes. He tries to hold them, tries to . . . counteract Tony’s wildness with something calmer, but he can’t. Instead, he turns his attention to the opposite page, the one Tony’s not blocking.
But Tony’s too fast. He grabs the book, pulls it out of Bruce’s grasp, and slams it shut.
“Stop avoiding me and answer the question.”
Bruce desperately, whole-bodily, wants to roll his eyes again. The urge presses at the thready edges of his patience, and he tries to swallow it. When swallowing fails, he bites the inside of his cheek to keep his face neutral.
“I don’t need a cactus,” he says.
“Since when?” Tony demands. He abandons the book and throws his arms out like an eagle showing off his wingspan. Actually, no, he more reminds Bruce of a ringleader at the circus, announcing the next act. “You love plants!” he presses, punctuating the point by spreading out his fingers. “You only have, what, a half-dozen here? There’s that stupid hippie co-op garden you spend every other weekend fawning over. And your yard—which looks great, by the way, and totally professional, but distinctly lacking in special-ordered cactuses from—”
“I don’t need a cactus,” Bruce says again.
“Everybody needs a cactus, Bruce.”
“Then maybe I’m nobody, and therefore not a member of that demographic.”
The words, they—stumble, a little, on the way out of Bruce’s mouth, a sure sign that he probably shouldn’t’ve said them at all. Because they’re dry and cold, no hint of humor, and they sound . . . cruel, somehow. Like a jab to the stomach, and even though Bruce flinches a half-second after he realizes that, it’s too late.
Because when he glances up, Tony’s face, it’s . . . Broken, a little. As open and transparently raw as if Bruce had reached up and slapped him. Bruce breathes in, then presses his lips together. “Tony,” he starts to say, quietly, but Tony—
Tony snorts. “Nice,” he replies, but it’s a—sneer, this curled-lip thing that makes Bruce’s stomach sink into his shoes. He drops his eyes to stare at the edge of his desk, because he’s not sure he’ll survive Tony’s face, right now. “Glad we’re to the point now that, when I do take some time out of my morning to do something nice for someone I care about, when I try to be a decent human being and everything, what I get is some—some passive-aggressive high school bullshit. I mean, when exactly did, ‘Fuck you very much, Stark, but I don’t give a shit’ go out of style? Did I miss that newsletter? ‘Cause if I did, I—”
“What about you missing that a kid just died, Tony?!” Bruce demands, and his whole body—snaps. He rockets out of his chair like he’s on a tension spring, and he doesn’t realize that he’s slapped his desk until the entire thing shakes under his palms. Everything jumps and then trembles—his coffee cup, his statute books, the loose papers that slide off and join the police reports on the floor—but he’s too . . . angry, too fed up with this day and its bullshit to—
“Did you watch the news this morning, after your little speech? Did you hear how many people—important people, people we need to respect this office, people who endorse our boss and keep us in this office—are defending Killgrave?” He throws up his hands, but it’s not—visceral enough, not grounding enough, so he slaps his palms against the desktop again. “Did you hear how many people were saying that Jordan—” And he’s just a victim, a . . . last name without a face to everyone else, but Bruce’d given stickers to Jordan Ribiero at his court hearings, years ago. “—was a bad kid from a bad family and probably murdered by someone just as bad?”
He feels his fingers curl into fists against his desk, and presses his knuckles into the wood. It aches, makes it feel like his bones might pop, but Bruce—kind of likes it.
He likes it until his chest feels like it’s going to burst. He swallows around the feeling. “Because I listened to it, Tony,” he says, and something in the back of the words shakes. “I listened to all of it.”
“You think I didn’t?” Tony retorts. His voice carries, fills the whole office when he spreads out his arms again, and Bruce shakes his head. He shakes it, then pinches his nose between two fingers, but—
“Do you even know how much of what we give a shit about, what we worked for, is burning down around our ankles right now?” Tony insists, dropping his arms to the side. “You’re on the Ascent board, I know you got the e-mails. You know Obie is thinking about dumping the program for the rest of the summer, pulling back on the funding, and all because some—crazy idiot who might be Killgrave or might still be out there killed a kid. And that,” he adds, jabbing the empty space between them with a finger, “is just the shit Obie’s saying aloud, to me, when I talk to him. Which I’m mostly not doing, because answering his thirty-seven calls just means talking thirty-seven more times about how we lost one of our kids.”
The words, they—settle, kind of, but in the way the world settles between thunderclaps during a storm. They’re soft enough, deflated enough, that Bruce . . . Actually, Bruce isn’t sure what does it, whether it’s the quiet edges to Tony’s voice or the way he says our kids, but— He looks up. He looks up, at Tony, and Tony immediately catches his eyes. He’s not wild, anymore, but . . . sad, instead, and the sadness lingers. Bruce feels Tony search him, and he thinks maybe he’s searching Tony, too.
He wonders, sometimes, if they’re searching for the same thing.
After long enough, Tony wets his lips and swallows, his whole throat moving.
“When I put you on the board,” he says, but it’s—soft, almost a whisper, “they became your kids, too.”
The only thing Bruce can manage to say, the only—sound that comes out of his throat, is a murmured, “Tony.”
“So yeah,” Tony continues, nodding to himself as though Bruce hasn’t said anything at all. “Yeah, you know what? I bought you a cactus. I gave you a stupid cactus because I thought maybe you, or me, or both of us, we could use a little win today.”
Bruce frowns, a little. It’s a twitch of his lips, but—careful, too. He knows Tony, knows the roller-coaster of emotions he rides, every day. This mood, the overwhelmed, frantic one, this is one where . . . Well, where fighting fire with fire only ends up burning the whole world down.
He watches Tony for a few seconds before he asks, “How is a cactus a . . . win, exactly?”
Tony’s shoulders move under his shirt, slouching. “It was supposed to make you smile.”
“And that’s a win?”
“Today, yeah. Yeah, it’s a win.”
Bruce opens his mouth, wanting to—say something, to fill the space between them with real sound, but then Tony shrugs. He shrugs, says, “Whatever,” in a half-empty voice, and leaves the office. It’s abrupt, too abrupt for Bruce to really do anything except watch him go. He leaves Bruce alone, then, alone to—sink into his desk chair, to stare at the mess on his desk and the notes for his motion response. When he swivels on his chair, toward the window, he can see the place on the window ledge where Tony’d brushed the dust away. The spot has a weird sort of . . . pride of place, right between Bruce’s favorite fern and the book he needs to put away. Right where Bruce would see it, as soon as he walked in—and smile.
It’s a cactus, he tells himself, staring at the void in the dust. It’s a tiny, potted cactus.
But it’s—also something else.
==
An hour after lunch, Tony leans into Bruce’s office, opens his mouth to say something . . . and then, very quietly, shuts it again.
Bruce doesn’t look away from his computer monitor. He types a few words of his response, frowns, and deletes them, all while Tony’s watching.
When he starts typing again, he says, “You owe me the twenty dollars I just paid Darcy to get your stupid cactus back.”
Even without looking, he can . . . tell, somehow, that Tony’s smiling. He can feel the brightness in the room—or at least, in the softest part of stomach.
“Your cactus,” Tony retorts.
“Mmm,” Bruce replies—and smiles.