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1.
The first time Bruce gets drunk with the Avengers, it’s in a two bit shawarma joint with plaster on the floor and the owners look with wild eyes at the man in red armour who strides in talking six words to the dozen and announcing that he’ll take their entire stock. But they serve the crew anyway, and hover around them sweeping up the plaster dust while the Avengers eat, and it’s all Bruce can do to shovel food into his mouth. He’s had better in Syria, but when did that ever matter? One of the owners puts an opened bottle of light beer in his hand, and he takes a swig, and that’s all it takes – he’s out.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s been moved to somewhere with dim lights and beeping monitors. He rolls his head to the side and squints at the intravenous baggie, and fumbles for the glasses on the table near him and blinks and blinks again until the blur is mostly gone: it’s saline and nutrients so far as he can tell, if there are any little extras in there there’s no way for him to know. Across the aisle from him is the agent, the one that his friends were talking about at dinner, and the guy… Coulson, looks as bad as he feels, ghastly pale skin and tubes out of every orifice that will take them. He shares a moment of sympathy for the agent, and as nurses arrive and start rolling the man away, he blinks and blinks again and then he sleeps.
2.
It’s a good party.
Bruce can’t even remember what they’re celebrating, but he’s awash in a haze of appletinis, the good brandy and vodka shots. He lounges on the couch smiling genially at the chatter in the room, his eyes half lidded.
“Hey,” someone says, “Bruce is falling asleep.”
“I’m not asleep,” he says, and bats at the cellphone that has appeared in his face. And there is laughing, and dancing, and party tricks.
“I’m not asleep,” he says clearly, and he isn’t. The room is stark and quiet, thin early morning light, the dregs of the party - half empty glasses, cigarette stubs, discarded clothes, a half used lipstick - lying around him. It’s sordid as hell, and he looks cautiously around for the kinds of pranks he could reasonably expect from falling asleep in company during his college dorm days. His hand is not in a bowl of water, his clothes are unmolested; instead, there’s a warm red blanket pulled over him, and when he stands a small toy mouse with Stark Solutions! blazoned across its chest falls from the crook of his elbow.
He eases his way into the bathroom to check for vivid marker drawings on his face. And stops, washes his face in cold clear water, and wonders: when did I get so old?
3.
The job is over, done, complete, and their handler has headed off somewhere in the city to Deal With Paperwork. Barton’s climbed out onto the windowsill, and Tony’s just given up on the next unlikely cocktail and has crawled out to join him.
Bruce doesn’t care. He’s sitting on the floor with a bottle of whisky – the good whisky, trying to drink enough, fast enough, that he’ll be unconscious before the Other Guy remembers that he used to know some of those kids.
4.
In Papua New Guinea, Natasha turns up, a bolt from the blue, in a bright skirt and a flower in her hair. She won’t say what went down in New York after he left.
He gets her to help him in the surgery – puts her field first aid training to work as a nurse and watches her be… really not good with people. He wonders, because she’s supposed to be the Super Spy, what there is beneath the play acting and seduction and hot lethal death. Who is she supposed to be when she’s not clearing the red off her ledger?
And he realises over the next couple of days that he’s somehow now a Grand Old Man. He’s being asked for advice, not just by the newbies that he’s here for, but also the older more experienced hands. One evening, the director of the shelter he’s based at breaks out the good schnapps and they spend the night drinking and talking about different problems the shelter’s been having. She’s spent thirty years doing this job, and now she’s asking Bruce who only ever made it up as he went along.
Somewhere in this comedy, he thinks, he’s been cast as a holy begger, a fool in rags and patches rousted out every so often to speak wisdom to the King. He has the rags down pat, too many times he’s been left with the clothes he’s been standing in, or less. As for the other… well, the joke’s on them.
Natasha asks him about toilets, so they hook up with some Oxfam workers and go on a tour of highland villages to help make poo maps. And then they’re drafted to set up some new toilets, and put concrete aprons around the wells and drip points, and it’s good hard physical work in the sun, and he feels the heat bake the soreness out of him. Natasha works alongside him, in a singlet and shorts, and he realises that she doesn’t shave her armpits and legs, or at least not unless she has to. When she raises a mallet over her head, there’s a soft red down and the glow of sweat on her pale skin.
In a village near Mount Hagen, he fucks her. Or rather, she fucks him. They stay up late with the Oxfam guys, and Pidi the headman and his family, and get drunk on the local homebrew. Late that night, they’re twisting together in the little hut they’re sharing, and it’s all heat and fire and bodies, and afterwards she lies by his side and lets him stroke her back with his hands. She tells him what happened in the school in Maryland, or some of it, and he’s never seen her so relaxed and unwound; but the homebrew takes him and he’s asleep.
In the morning, Nat’s a coiled spring again and they’re back to being ‘buddies,’ good humanitarian aid worker bros, and nothing ever happened.
He leaves PNG early.
5.
The fifth time, he doesn’t even know why, because everyone is happy and out celebrating the pregnancy of a co-worker, and he’s happy for her, he is, but he’s also realising that he’s technically old enough to be a grandfather now, and where the fuck did his life go?
It’s late, and he’s standing in the hallway tapping on a door frame, staring at the door with the intensity of a cat who wants it to both open and stay closed at the same time. He dangles a bottle and some glasses from his hand, the good brandy, and he almost winces when the door opens and the occupant peers sleepily out.
“Hey,” he says, his voice light, unsupported. “I’m… feeling kinda low.”
Steve nods, and opens the door to let him in.