(no subject)

[nny]

Continued from here


“Everyone okay?” Bruce asks later, casual as he can make it, focusing on his coffee so there’s no need to meet anyone’s eyes.

“I’m good, doc,” Clint says. “Ego’s bruised a little, maybe, but -”

“But it could use it,” Natasha finishes for him, and by the curl at the edges of her words Bruce would guess she’s smiling.

Bruce clears his throat, gives the sugar far more attention than it deserves.

“And Sergeant Barnes?”

“Sergeant Barnes’s fine,” a flat voice says from behind him, and Bruce lets the spark of startled attention wash through him, stomach to shoulders to fingertips and out, watching as his knuckles flush gently pink again.

“Good,” is all he says, but Clint is laughing.

“Sergeant Barnes?” he says. “What is this, Jane Austen? Harlequin?”

Bruce stirs his coffee, lays his spoon on the counter with a soft clink, walks out of the door while they’re still laughing.

Laughing is good.

-

They weren’t ever precisely introduced. Mostly the others leave him alone, aside from Tony, who wanders in every now and again to ask questions about radiation and medication and occasionally the greatest hits of Kylie Minogue - Bruce still has no idea what that one was about. Mostly he hears about things second or third-hand, is the point, unless he remembers to ask Jarvis directly for an update, and he hasn’t got accustomed enough to the voice from the ceiling to be comfortable doing that just yet. Jarvis has apparently intuited this - Tony’s intelligence is both incredible and terrifying - and generally announces a desire to communicate with a low beep from the wall, the mechanical equivalent of a politely cleared throat.

It’s how he’d learned that Steve was back, how he knew that there was another room occupied in the tower. But they were never actually introduced, and it was only by inference that he’d recognised the man with the dragging sweatpants, the overlong sleeves that still didn’t quite hide silver fingertips.

He’d had files, gently steaming coffee, but he’d managed to juggle things enough that he could hold out a hand anyway.

“Hi,” he’d said, “Sergeant Barnes? I’m -” he’d stumbled over it for a second, trying to work out which name they’d used. “I’m Dr Banner. Bruce.”

Buchanan had looked at him for a second, expressionless, before his lip had curled a little and he’d walked away.

Right, Bruce thought. That one.