Chapter Text
Tony sat at his desk at home, his feet propped upon it in order to aid his willful neglect of quarterly projections from Pepper by blocking the computer screen. He twirled a socket wrench around his fingers as he spoke with Bruce via satellite communication. Owning 60% of the metal orbiting the planet was a huge assistance in keeping contact with vagabond friends.
“So how, exactly, does one keep up with American medical technology journals when they’re knee-deep in third-world sicknesses?”
“The internet, of course. It does exist out here, too, you know,” Bruce preempted, as if he could sense Tony’s rising skeptical eyebrow.
“Fair enough. But why those in particular?”
Bruce sighed wistfully. “I keep an eye on mobile diagnostic tools. It’s a long way from what it was ten years ago, but the technology’s just not there, yet, for what I do. Though, to be honest and cynical about it, most of the medical profession isn’t particularly interested in facilitating what I do,” he finished.
“Probably, but I think the hand-held portable MRI is a bit of a tall order for the foreseeable future,” Tony countered, earning him a rare, genuine chuckle on the other end of the line.
“Unsurprisingly, your wish is vastly more ambitious than mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I’m treating someone who legitimately needs an MRI, they’re probably beyond any help I can give in the field. They’d need a brick-and-mortar hospital. What I’m hoping for is just to expedite how quickly I can diagnose an illness. Doctors, at least when it comes to general communicable diseases, don’t need equipment priced in the tens of thousands of dollars to diagnose and treat it – it just lets you do it quicker, to help a greater volume of people. The biggest problem, considering the places I go, is power efficiency. Some days I’d give up my left arm for an ultrasound that doesn’t need a wall current, or at least has decent battery life. Or that I had an on-the-spot bacterial staining method. I can’t really afford to be restricted by devices if, convenient as they are medically, require me to be in city centers at predictable times…for a number of reasons I think you can appreciate.”
“Yeah,” Tony replied passively, distracted by a hasty acquisition of a pen and scribbling down specs onto the back of some internal company memo. Mechanical and power requirements were one thing, but for a good outward design, he’d need to know more about Bruce’s day-to-day, travel methods…
“Am I keeping you from something?” Tony jumped at the interruption, giving the letter he was writing a sudden, angling tail off the page. How long had he gone without saying anything?
“Probably,” Tony answered with a snicker, “but believe me, I’d find ways to do it myself if we weren’t talking. So how does that work, traipsing amongst leper colonies and the like?”
Bruce huffed, obviously a little taken aback at the interest. “Well…”
---Months Later ---
“Babe, you wanna hand me the three-eighths’ inch?”
Tony’s hand shot out from under the wrecked chassis of a ’70 Chevelle he’d seen in the paper and decided to bring home to give some well-deserved TLC. Pepper obliged, turning her attention away from her book just long enough to remove the correct tool from a workbench next to her chair. He tickled the back of her hand before letting go and taking the wrench with it, smiling at her quiet giggle in response. It was a rare Saturday to themselves, both of them in town and away from the office. In past incarnations of this free time, Pepper had placed a Sabbath-like moratorium on fiddling with prototypes and research, but quickly she had learned that Tony’s seeming ADD just didn’t allow for him to not tinker with something mechanical in one way or another, at least for a little while. So, she’d let it go. Besides, the beneficial part of said ADD meant he would sooner or later get bored, and he’d either bound off to the next suggested activity, or turn his restless hands’ attention onto her. Win-win, either way.
“Phone call for you, sir,” JARVIS came over the intercom. Tony grumbled.
“Did you clear your memory cache? I specifically told you no-“
“It’s Doctor Banner, sir.”
“Oh.” He rolled back out from under the car, jogged across to his desk and snatched his headset off the surface.
“Hey, man, what’s up?”
“I received a very mysterious package today. Care to explain yourself?” Bruce asked, voice torn between amusement and real confusion.
Tony paused a moment in consideration. “You see,” he began, “I was working the other day, and I really needed a new neodymium boring laser, so I left a piece of silicon under my pillow for the technology fairy. But when I woke up the next morning, I found this miniature ultrasound sensor powered by nano-magnetic batteries under there instead of my laser, which gave me the worst kink in my neck, by the way, and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I asked myself, ‘Now Tony, whoever on Earth-',”
“I get it, I get it.”
Tony rummaged around his desk for a previously-abandoned bag of chips, “It work?”
“I…haven’t tried yet. Why wouldn’t it work?”
“Well, I mean,” Tony prefaced churlishly, “it did when I gave it to the SHIELD courier last Tuesday.” He counted off days on his hand. “Four days ago. Plenty of time to break it. What the hell took him so long?”
“Might have something to do with the fact I’m in a mountainside village in the northeastern corner of Bangladesh.”
“Ah. Perfect place to do some test runs, then.”
“Test runs? But you said-“
“Yeah, I used it on Rhodey a couple times to make sure it didn’t start on fire or anything. It’s not gonna hurt anybody, but it’s not like it has an instruction manual, so if you have trouble with it, call me. Though you could probably figure it out if you stared at it long enough.”
“Call…? Tony, did you make this?”
“Uh, yeah,” Stark replied sarcastically, “You said yourself you couldn’t find something that worked for you.”
The line fell silent for some time, and Tony was content enough with his starchy snack to let Bruce take the time to absorb the revelation.
“I…th-thank you.”
“No problem. Let me know if it doesn’t work, or kills somebody.”
He hung up just as Bruce began another, stuttered protest.