p • r • e • s • s • u • r • e

what did you do?

"Why don't you get it removed?"

"My age would probably catch up to me. I'm fifty-four Bruce. I'm old now."

"Yeah me too, but I don't...feel the need to torture myself."

Tony flinched imperceptibly.

"You guys forget that I'm the only one on the team without powers. Even Natasha and Barton are genetically enhanced, to an extent. Not to mention twenty years younger."

"Oh. I never..."

"It's fine."

"Is that really why you keep it? 'Cause..."

Bruce traced his finger softly around its metal rim, and the swollen red skin that bordered it. A war between man and machine.

"I think this pain is ageing you faster, Tones."

He could see the gears spinning in Bruce's head, how his eyes lit up just a little.

Oh god, he's going to try and fix me, isn't he. Motherfucker.

"I can figure something out, you know I can. The team needs you, Tony. More importantly, we want you healthy."

Tony sniffed. 

"You smell that?"

"What."

"Smells like...like-"

Bruce rolled his eyes preemptively. 

"I think it smells like-"

"Tony come on-"

"-like bullshit."

"You know they care."

"Oh really. Do they. Do they."

If wasn't as if it bothered him. Really, it didn't. They were colleagues. That was all. He didn't need them to give a shit about him, and wasn't as if it 'hurt his feelings' when they didn't. Rather it was the way their smiles went dull every time they remembered who he used to be, what he used to sell. It was easier this way. A dying man who is dying still, bereft of conscience and shallow in personality. It was easier to imagine him as all that they held against him than to accept that he was all that, but human as well, and not a very strong one, nor a particularly bad one. 

"It's okay, I'll write you guys into my will and you'll be set."

"Will you cut it out? You know very well that you're more than that, this is ridiculous."

"Am I?" Tony shifted his shoulders to face him. He wanted to hear this. 

"Jesus, the self-pity-" Bruce started, but then he saw Tony and the look on his face. 

My god, he thought. He really-he really doesn't know. How can he not know?

He wore a wry grin like always, but it wasn't happy and it couldn't be further from a smile. Bruce wondered if he even knew how anymore. He wondered when that grin became a permanent fixture of his face, and how he hadn't noticed when it did. He didn't even consider the scarier prospect-that it had been there so long, he couldn't have. 

Bruce racked his brain for all the times he'd seen him happy. And in every memory, he was either drunk, caught off guard by something funny or in the company of someone who genuinely cared for him, and he for them. Pepper, Peter, Morgan, Rhodey-and he realised, with just a bit of horror, that he'd never smiled at him. When they were alone, when he was sober, when they were just talking he never smiled like he meant it, and God knows he cared about Tony.