Nightmares - Bruce Banner

7.9K 108 4
                                    

"Y/N, come up here and clean your room." Bruce stood in the doorway of his room, rubbing his forehead. Y/N set the Death Star Lego down, and jogged up the steps to his room. The only things that were out of place were a few shirts and a bookshelf that was knocked over.

"Why does my room need to be clean? No one ever comes down to our floor." He picked up the bookshelf and sat it upright, then threw the dirty shirts into the basket. Bruce glared at his son then shook his head.

"That doesn't matter. Your room still needs to be cleaned, just in case. Tony may come down today, and I don't want him to think you're a mess." Y/N sat down on the bed and shrugged.

"But we both know I am. I can't even sleep without waking up from the nightmares. Everytime I try to go to sleep, I think of what happened to Mom." He looked down to his hands and rubbed them together. Y/N felt the bed dip down next to him and looked up to his father. Bruce put his arm around Y/N and pulled him into his side. The two sat there on the bed until the elder sighed.

"Tony may be able to help you with the nightmares. That's why he doesn't sleep at night. He has nightmares anytime he tries." Y/N stayed silent until he heard Tony speak from the door.

"He's right. I go days without sleeping, until I finally crash from exhaustion. I've learned some things that have helped, but they'll never completely go away." Y/N looked up to him in surprise and he nodded. He motioned for the boy to follow him and he looked to his dad for permission. He nodded and they followed Tony to the lab on the floor above theirs.

"Most of the time, I stay in here and stay to myself. Your dad makes sure I get enough sleep, and I'm stable. I don't know where I would be without him." Y/N looked up to his father to see him look down and blush. He smiled then looked back to Tony.

"So how do you keep the nightmares away?" Tony walked to the other side of the lab, grabbed a small black box and tossed it to Y/N. He caught it and flipped it around in his hands. It was a plain box that had no buttons or switches on it.

"What is this?" Tony walked back over to him and had another box that looked identical to the first one.

"These, Y/N, are called neurological disruptors. You set it to your brain waves by the interface down here in the lab, then keep it on you at all times. When you sleep, if you start to have nightmares, it senses the waves and disrupts the signals from being sent." Y/N nodded then flipped it around in his hand a few more times. Tony walked to one of the screens and pulled a smaller screen from the bottom left corner. Y/N walked to the other side next to him and looked at the program. It was the program for his neurological disruptor. You could see the graphs that showed his stress levels and his mental health. He pulled up a new template for the program and stepped to the side.

Y/N stepped up to the screen and looked through it at his father. He smiled and nodded, so the boy focused on the program in front of him. Tony walked him through the steps of making it, then sat him down to run a mental and stress graph. When those were finished, Y/N stood up and threw his arms around Tony.

"Thank you so much, Tony." Tony held his arms up and next to his head, confused at first, and looked over to Bruce, who just smiled and shrugged. He slowly lowered his arms and hugged Y/N back. Bruce walked behind him, pat his back, and he let go of Tony. Y/N smiled and hugged his dad.

"All right, bud. Let's go upstairs and leave Tony alone for a while." Bruce started to walk Y/N out of the lab but Tony stopped them.

"Hey, wait. I'm sure Y/N wouldn't mind staying up here a little while longer. We can show him what we've been working on or something." Y/N looked up to his dad and did his best attempt at puppy dog eyes as well as Tony. He laughed and agreed. They spent the entire evening in the lab.

At night when Y/N went to sleep, he kept the box in his pocket and didn't have any nightmares. He only had dreams about before his mom had died and how happy they were together as a family.

Little did Y/N know, it wasn't an automatic thing. Tony stayed up all night watching the programming. When he saw the stress levels go up, he would insert some old memories into Y/N's mind and keep the nightmares away. He smiled the whole night and didn't sleep once, wanting to make sure the kid was able to get a good night's rest, even if he wasn't.

Marvel One-Shots (Male reader)Where stories live. Discover now