Propped neatly back against the headboard, his legs stretched out before him, peering down his nose at the book held somewhere lap-level in one hand, Bruce in his mind's eye was in the bathroom - half here, half there, the sharp meniscus curve of the upper rims of his glasses striking a front between the glowy blur of the lights over the sink, Tony's indistinct form (half here; half in the mirror), and the sharp black and yellow-brown of the book he was not quite attending to. The beginning of this thing was entirely ridiculous - a bunch of purple-voiced young turks talking in hushed tones in the middle of the night about things no one would care about if they did happen to overhear - and the story floating in from the other room populated that late-night smoke-filled coffee shop scene with Rogers - Tony - Natasha - Barnes - all of them. Discoursing. Arguing. With the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.
And then Tony came in, resolving everything into one plane, and Bruce could look up and see him clearly, and - the dry observation that ran first through his mind was, he knew, less than helpful, and tantamount to a shrug. Always tell your friends you know who killed their parents as soon as possible, or they'll definitely nose it out at the least convenient moment you can imagine.
"It's funny," he said, his thumb still lodged firmly between pages. "He's not usually a coward."
It was a word that in his mouth sounded no different than driver, or blonde. People generally had good reason to fear the things they feared - that, or they just came that way. But it was peculiar; out of character. Like seeing your friend for the first time after they'd really cut their hair.
"I would say I'm sorry I wasn't there." But he was, of course, not sorry to have missed it, not really - nor was he particularly convinced his presence would have made a difference. Someone with a specialty in removing his emotions from the equation might have made things shake out a little differently, that was true enough; but there were some things that provoked uncontainable responses, and no amount of reason, no height of stakes, no epiphany of empathy could cure the flaw. (General Ross, for instance. Bruce instinctively shifted to lift his cup of tea from the nightstand - but he had not, in fact, brought one in with him.) "But it would only have been worse. Probably." He flipped a page. "He's not usually a coward, but he's never liked being called a fucking idiot."