p • r • e • s • s • u • r • e

pansies

He pondered a moment. Really, it should have been longer. 

"I'm gonna jack myself off with a stuffed cat."

"Even you aren't that weird, Tony."

He shrugged and giggled a little. They put him on all the good drugs. Bruce was sitting cross-legged on the beg beside him with a book in his lap. He was watching him over the rim of his dorky glasses, and it struck Tony how decent-looking the guy was. He shouldn't still be single. 

Tony sat up and groaned.

"Fuck..."

"Indeed. Care to explain what exactly I walked in on?"

He ignored him, stuffed a pillow between his back and the headboard and glanced over at the clock on his bedside table.

"Huh...it's five."

"You napped for awhile."

He made a face.

"What."

"Well you don't have to call it that...Morgan takes naps."

"Okay, fine. Your very manly siesta."

"Better."

Bruce ran his tongue over his upper lip in thought. 

"Seriously, you owe me an explanation."

"I was bored."

"Uh-huh."

"Seriously. I just...drifted off. Got caught up in all the...the head things."

Thoughts, his brain supplied. 

"So you thought yes, let me stab myself, that'll make me feel better?"

"No, I didn't, it was an accident."

"How could it have been an accident??"

Tony sighed. 

"I made recall knives for Natasha, they're magnetised, but one of 'em locked on to my gauntlet and-y'know. Fwoosh."

"That really shouldn't-"

"Yep. Working on it."

"What about everything else?"

Tony cocked an eyebrow. He hadn't realised he was on the back foot and wasn't about to accept it. 

"What else."

He pulled a list he'd written on a scrap of paper in preparation for this conversation. 

"Fractured clavicle, very badly fractured scapula-they said you nearly had a floating shoulder but it was dislocated, two broken ribs, broken ulna, and your liver got shish-kebabbed but they fixed it with the tissue regenerator. Also it's been twenty-eight hours, not four. You woke up after the surgery but they said you wouldn't remember."

"Huh. All right then."

"No, it really isn't."

"Yeah."

"So? What about everything else?"

"Sparring with sixty-"

"Mark 60?"

"Mhmm."

"I've never seen it."

"I never finished it. Which is why JARVIS can't run it. Which is why when I got knocked on my ass, he couldn't tell it to shut down."

"But you could."

"Mm?"

"Well if he wasn't controlling it that leaves you and you could have turned it off."