nny | (no subject)

Continued from here.

Bruce flinches awake, unprepared for the space limitations and almost ending up on the floor. He’s lost the day again. There hadn’t been much of it left when Tony had persuaded him onto the couch with popcorn and M&Ms and a documentary with some British scientist with floppy hair, but he’d had plans.

Tattered remnants of sleep are still draped over him, a barrier between him and the world - alongside a blanket that he hadn’t seen before he’d fallen asleep, one that Tony must have gotten specifically, and that settles something inside him in a way that’s unfamiliar. This doesn’t feel like any way he’s used to waking up, calm and quiet and breathing steady, but even before the thought’s fully formed there’s another soft scrape from the kitchen and Bruce sits abruptly upright.

Barnes doesn’t look around, but Bruce doesn’t fool himself for an instant that that means he hadn’t heard. He clears his throat.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, soft enough there’s excuses no one needs for the lack of an answer. But there are two mugs on the counter, steaming faintly in the half-light, and Bruce doesn’t so much coffee but right now he wouldn’t admit that under torture. (He winces at the stray thought, turns around so that he’s looking out of the window, because it’s not fair to look at the lines of Barnes’ back the way that Bruce is looking at him).

There’s quiet for a time. Just drawers, liquid, the faint ring of ceramic against granite. Bruce can hear Barnes as he crosses the room to the doorway, which is a courtesy he hadn’t expected.

“I’m not him,” Barnes says, and Bruce twists without meaning to, looks at the blank lines of his face.

“Him?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” he says. His mouth twists a little when he says it. “Bucky.”

“Okay,” Bruce says. He knows about names, about who gets to choose them, about which ones get given. “So who do you want to be?”

He’s wincing even as he’s saying it, hunches down a little in the couch, but there’s no reaction but thoughtful silence.

“I’ll let you know,” Barnes - the Soldier - the man says, and slips out. The scent of Tony’s expensive coffee fades a little with him and now Bruce can tell it’s undercut with something different, with tea from the caddy that’s derisively labelled ‘foliage’ in Tony’s scrappy script.

The mug is warm against his hands.

-

Natasha calls him Dr Banner, for the most part, and for that she will always have his lasting gratitude and respect. It’s for that reason he hasn’t asked her to call him Bruce - partly for associations. Partly because he’s afraid she won’t.

Coulson, Fury, Hill, likewise. JARVIS, too. Clint mostly shortens it to ‘Doc’. In the little time he’s spent in Thor’s company he’s been Noble Banner, Friend Banner, Good Doctor, and has had an imprint of Thor’s big hand clapped into his shoulder blades, but Thor is an anomaly in every possible situation you could name. Steve sticks with Dr Banner. Bruce wishes he wouldn’t.

And then there’s Tony. To Tony, Bruce is Green. Big Green, Green Machine, sometimes Lean and Mean in there too. He’s been Big Man and Big Guy; Big Boy only lasted long enough for Tony to half kill himself laughing, although sometimes Tony will snort over his work and Bruce can tell he’s thinking it. Tony uses words like weapons, quick-fire and sharp-edged, but he’s come to the conclusion that they’re not aimed at him and he’s not sure how to deal with that. (Somehow it’s hardest when Tony calls him Bruce).

It’s a tower of Babel, is his point. It’s a chaos of half-finished sentences and jokes he doesn’t understand, a shifting landscape of emotions and alliances built on names he doesn’t always know the provenance of. But he’s got kind of used to living on foreign soil, so he sticks with the limited phrasebook of names he knows and picks up what he can.

So line redrawing is a complication but not an impossible one, not until he brushes hesitant fingers against the man’s elbow to get his attention and stillness shivers out from the contact until neither of them are even breathing.

Shit, Bruce says, or thinks he says, or something. Please, please don’t -

After a second the man takes in a breath, a deep one; lets it out. His fingers flex against the counter in ways that Bruce is familiar with, intimately.

“Yeah?” he says, after a second.

“I - coffee?” Clint’s across the kitchen, looking mournfully into the empty pot. Offering to make more is essentially an empty gesture; the pot’s never been empty more than half an hour as long as Bruce’s lived here. Still.

“Sure,” he says, and then, grudging, “thanks.”

Bruce is pretty sure Steve’s drilled it into him. Bruce shrugs and smiles and moves his hand away, sets beans to noisily grinding, the call of the lesser spotted Stark.

“Loxley,” Tony says after a moment, shuffling across the tiled floor - he sounds like he’s been sleeping. “Big Green. Barnes.”

“Tin man,” the man says, a sharp smile hiding in his voice, behind ragged hair.

They call him that - Barnes. It seems safest; Steve’s the only one who calls him Bucky, and no one else wants to look at his expression when there’s no response.

No one else seems to touch him.

-

The Soldier’s eyes snap open and Bruce flinches back, pulls his fingers away from the softly ticking pulse.

Somewhere metal groans, but the structure is currently safe; Bruce was carefully counting heartbeats so it continues that way.

Something explodes in the distance.

“No one on our side’s badly injured,” Bruce says, because he’s learned that sometimes that’s the most reassuring thing you can say. “The other side, there’s some - casualties, but -” a bitter laugh licks out around the edges of his words, “I cannot adequately describe to you how much they deserved it.”

The Soldier tugs at the fabric covering him, balls it up in his hand and looks at it. It’s garish against metal, orange and waffled, for victims and patients and the injured and Bruce knows superheroes so that’s getting steadily less true; people in need, though. Maybe.

“Thanks,” the man says, like someone learning a language. Bruce isn’t sure he speaks it well enough to come up with a reply.

*