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Because despite everything, despite the shrapnel and radiation -- despite every half-assed attempt to end it with their bare hands and with guns and alcohol and parties. Despite every Icarus complex, every bullet and every time someone throws a sideways glance their way --
they're alive.
And that might be the most amazing thing of all.
Tony's read Bruce's file. He knows it back-to-front, just like he knows everyone else's. And he knows he's wading into a sea of crazy every time he goes to another team meeting or they fight alongside one another one more time. He's seen their head and he's seen the best of them at the worst times and Tony knows that, in the end, it doesn't matter where they come from or what happened or how they got where they are now. What matters is that they're here and they really are right next to him, it isn't a dream.
He flies into the sun because he can't.
He does a lot of things because he can't.
But he kisses Bruce Banner over a half-finished coffee and a hologram because he can and because it feel good.
Sometimes, Tony does things, just because he can.
"I think we should lay it on the table," Tony says.
"I will not have sex with you on this table."
"Wow, uh, not what I said, but I'm flattered that your mind went their first."
"Only because I care." Bruce looks up over his glasses and he's sexy, yeah, definitely, but he takes up so little space and Tony's pretty sure they need to work on that, just a little bit.
"Well, it's a sweet gesture, but I was referring to something a little more...invisible. I suppose." Bruce takes off his glasses and sits up straighter on his stool, watching Tony, who looks everywhere but at Bruce. "I was talking about our similar...similar backgrounds? Like--"
"Like the time I went to MIT when I was fifteen and got arrested for public indecency on my eighteenth birthday and almost got expelled for screwing my biochem professor--"
"Uncalled for, Banner. No. I was talking about--"
"Yeah. Yeah I know." He pulls his glass out of his pocket and pushes them up the bridge of his nose. "I read your file."
"I read yours."
"I guess we leave it at that, then."
"It's fine with me."
"Good. Because I wasn't going to bring it up again." Tony fidgets with one of Bruce's graphs.
"Stop touching things."
"Spoil sport."
Bruce likes the way Tony's eyes droop when he's trying to stay up after they've fucked. Because they're always tired and it's the best way to get him to sleep, which he might be allergic to, but Bruce needs to keep observing. This is what he tells himself, every time he makes Tony come or Tony's mouth wraps around his dick or they grip each other so hard there are bruises on Bruce's arms and thighs in the morning. He likes to pretend Tony is an experiment and he likes to pretend he can be distanced from it all.
But he falls asleep watching Tony fall asleep and he wakes up with a hand tangled in his hair and his lips at Tony's collar bone and he knows that he is so screwed.
The thing is that Steve knew Howard and Steve liked Howard and Steve wants to like Tony the same way, but he's starting to get the feeling that he and Tony are remembering two different men. And it's like trying to fill a Grand Canyon gap between them with sand and Steve isn't sure he even wants to go there. But does, because it's hard, and Steve doesn't back away from something just because it seems impossible.
"Maybe you can tell me what you remember," Steve says. "And I'll tell you what I remember."
"Don't you have, like, a cultural anthropology class to take or something? I'm busy, Rogers. It's not 'Bring Your Dad To Work' day. Bruce, tell him we're busy." Bruce lifts up a hand and that could mean anything, really. Tony scowls at him. "Betrayal of the highest degree."
"Behave, Stark."
Steve admires their friendship from afar and pretends he doesn't notice anything else.
"What was he like? As a father."
"Look, I..." Tony looks at Steve and whatever he was saying dies on his lips. He looks tired, Steve realizes. Exhausted and bitter and not as lonely as he used to, but hollowed out. Like a shell. Tony's mouth moves around words he's trying to say and Steve thinks maybe he shouldn't have. He really shouldn't have.
"I'm sorry, I'll--"
"He was a genius, I guess. Not so smart about being a dad."
"I always thought he would have made a good one."
"Well he didn't." Tony finally looks Steve right in the eye. And Steve understand what he isn't saying and he knows where to fill in the gaps and with what so he stops because that isn't really how he wants to remember his friend.
"I'm sorry."
"He spent a lot of time talking about you. And he talked about what it meant to be a real man. And I spent my whole life trying to be that, until he died. I was trying to be you and you know something, you--"
"Tony." A hand curls over his shoulder. Bruce takes off his glass and turns Tony toward him. "That's enough." And Tony just nods and turns away, goes to work on something else. Bruce walks Steve out of the lab. "Don't ask him about it again. It isn't fair." Steve nods, because he understands. Bruce turns on his heel and heads back to the lab, but he pauses before he keys himself back in and says, "Sometimes we bury things because we have to, Steve. Because if we can see them, it hurts."
"Is that what you do?" Steve asks without thinking. "Is that how you stay angry?" Bruce fixes him with a stare that might have made a smaller man shit his pants. Because it's like an animal, zeroing in on something threatening, defending its territory, hackles raised, teeth bared, blood on its jaw like war paint.
"Goodnight, Steve."
To be fair, Tony shares first.
He shares after Bruce fucks him so hard his legs are shaking when he comes and his lungs are burning from begging. Bruce is still trying to gather his wits on the bed next to him, groaning as he turns over, fingers threading through Tony's without thinking. He closes his eyes, but he isn't asleep. Tony knows.
"There was this time," he says, so quietly. Bruce touches his nose to Tony's shoulder. "When I was a kid you know, and I started messing around with gears and stuff in the lab. I used to hide under the tables all the time and he knew I was there, he just didn't want me to be in the way, you know? And I remember he'd leave things out, like...like just in the way, so I could find them. And I would tinker with stupid things and build something and he'd take me out for ice cream. We wouldn't even talk. It's weird, now. In retrospect. We spent hours not talking."
By now Bruce's mouth is at Tony's throat, like he might swallow anything else Tony has to say. And maybe he does. Tony doesn't say anything else and he doesn't ask Bruce to share, doesn't push him for anything.
But it feels unbalanced now and Bruce wants Tony to know that where he is, he can say these things. They can get them out in the air and slaughter them together, harvest the remains and pack them away. Thoughtless killers of their own memories. Sometime in the morning, Tony is away and puttering around the room, jeans hanging low enough on his hips to remind Bruce of why he likes to stay in Tony's room til he wakes up.
Around nine, Tony announces he's tired and Bruce isn't allowed to leave, so they stay in bed until noon and JARVIS doesn't bother them.
"We didn't talk much either." Tony's fingers tighten in his hair and he knows where this is going. "If he was drunk, he'd say something. And it was always the saddest thing. You couldn't find anything worse. Not anywhere. He was the most miserable man. I felt sorry for him, a long time ago."
"You still do."
"Yeah. I guess I do."
But Bruce isn't a therapist and Tony was never really very good at show and tell, so they don't share so much. They already know how deep their emotional ineptitude runs. They already know the other one better than they know themselves. Bruce can see what he is in other people. There are ways of knowing and Tony is a live, screaming specimen and Bruce is itching to reach in and scoop what he can, swallow it maybe, become it, consume what is left and curl himself into a hollow space and dry out in the sun.
He fucks Tony until he's clawing up his back to hold onto something, because Tony reacts and Tony blooms like a mushroom cloud and settles like nuclear dust and he burns to touch, but Bruce does it anyway and he does it because he wants it and because he howls and comes alive.
Because there is something of himself in Tony that sparks when they touch and it lit a fire under their feet when they met on that bridge and it's been burning ever since.
"I wish I didn't know what you've been through," he says, voice damp and harsh in Tony's ears. "I wish it wasn't like this."
"Like hell you don't."
Tony lets the scotch settle on his tongue before he swallows it. He's learned every molecule of it, and it's probably a bad thing, but he couldn't give two fucks. He passes the bottle to Bruce who takes a healthy swallow and lets it dangle between his fingers.
"I think, you and I, should just agree to never speak about the past." Bruce looks at him. "I mean, it's probably like, what, they call it a trigger? It's triggering and honestly I'm up to my eyeballs in gun metaphors already, so if we could just do away with this last one and shove it all in some figurative sack of full of kittens and let it drown, I'd be happy." Bruce hands him the bottle.
"Sack of kittens?"
"You know. Cat has a litter, litter's too big, kittens get the axe. Or the river. They die."
"There's a Disney movie about that."
"Uh, there isn't? That's like not the main point of The Aristocats at all."
"Mmhm." Bruce takes the bottle away again and takes a heavier drink.
"We square?" Tony asks. Bruce passes the bottle back. Their fingers curl together around the neck.
"Yeah," he says, turning toward Tony with a smile. "We're square."