[MINGLE] One-Man Show

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: Inari Shrine and elsewhere
WHEN: 25 January 2019 through ?
OPEN TO: All opted in characters
WARNINGS: Please warn in the subject line of your comment as needed, and remember to move anything turning adult to a new post.
IMPORTANT NOTES: Final reminders and informational links are here. Please label all top-levels clearly so that there is no confusion who they are open to and what they are for, and DON'T FORGET TO ADD YOUR TAG!
Have fun and ask questions here!

Comments

[constructionzone]

"I told Pepper about it, and you know she'd play along." That's the thing with people who love Tony; they understand that tweaking at him a little is part of that love.

He's silent for a moment. "Tony wished you were there when it happened," he says. "Pretty sure Nat told him that we wouldn't have been on the same side if you had been."

[notsoangry]

Bruce sighs. "I think he knows better now. We had a long talk, he explained everything that happened." Which was to say, yeah, Nat was right. He wouldn't have been. "She said she wishes I was there to help keep the peace if possible, but you can't have me without Hulk, and the Hulk can't be in the same vicinity of Ross without become destructive." That was Bruce's fault, he knows that, it's his lack of control, but he hates the man for very good reason.

"It's not that I disagree with the need for oversight, but I've spent over a decade keeping my body and the Hulk out of the hands of anyone else's control." Bruce shrugs. "If walking away was truly an option for me, I would have taken it and stayed out of the fight entirely. Gone back into hiding somewhere." He hates fighting. He never wants to be in the middle of a fight, especially not between friends. And he knows the Accords gave the option of retirement.

[constructionzone]

"I bet you did." It's one thing he's been avoiding talking about with Bruce - but also Tony. Tony never asked why he'd signed the Accords, and neither had anyone else. Probably made perfect sense to them; he was best friends with Tony for almost as long as a couple of the Avengers had been alive, obviously, they were going to stick together. There'd been some of that for sure, but more it had been...well. Rhodey had been respecting a chain of command almost as long as he'd been friends with Tony, and for all that Steve had been the original super soldier, and as much as Sam was ex-army too, neither of them had been immersed in the military as constantly. It made your mind work in a certain way.

"Would have been easier if S.H.E.I.L.D. hadn't gone fully underground," is what Rhodey says instead of any of that. "There was a long time that they pretended Nick Fury was plenty of oversight, while simultaneously itching that he was running an organization they weren't strictly allowed to call to account."

[notsoangry]

Bruce and Tony's friendship works because they are honest with one another, sometimes brutally so. It's not always comfortable for him, because he backpedals if he's afraid he'll lose him, but in general, they keep the air clean between them. And in this case, there really was no compromise for him, which says a lot since Bruce loves compromising. He actually assumes that Rhodey's reasons were a mixture of thinking oversight was necessary and being military to his core, and he gets that. He wasn't so military to his core that he didn't protect Bruce from Ross when Thanos came down, hiding him from view until the others arrived.

"I'm not sure they would have accepted them after Hydra anyway. Eventually we were going to make people nervous, once they realized how much power was out there following no rules but our own. I don't trust us in the hands of anyone else, but I also do understand how people would feel about that." Bruce smiles wryly. "If I was still an ordinary person, teaching my classes and hiding in my lab, I might have a different opinion too." It's impossible to say, if it made a difference, but he feels like it would have. It's complex. "It's tough. All of you were in an impossible position." He shrugs. "Meanwhile Thor and the Hulk were trying to kill each other in space."

[constructionzone]

He'll always be military to his core but - there's a difference between that and throwing his friends to the wolves. He knows enough to know that Ross feels his failure to capture the Hulk is his worst failure, and he knows enough to know that the Hulk would have probably ripped Ross in two, and cleaning up that much blood was just a pain in the ass.

And he knows that, despite differences in how they reacted or would have reacted, they're friends, and that comes first. "Do you even remember anything about that?" He asks, then his lips twitch. "Because you know if I ask Thor the story's going to come with several tall tales."

[notsoangry]

Bruce chuckles softly. "I don't. Thor said they had a fight and he won easily, which as you can imagine, I don't believe a word of." Held his own, definitely, but the Hulk and Thor had a few fights in the past and it was never that simple. It's not like Bruce was proud of his other self's viciousness though. He didn't want him to win fights against their own friends. "We'll have to ask him when we get back. I'm sure with you there he'll give us an even more ridiculous story we won't believe."

[and wrap here too if that's okay!]