Re: log: Tony's Super Secret Facility
He didn't know what he wanted to tell Steve. Rogers. Wanting anything was a fresh and strange experience. Did he care what Captain Rogers thought about death? Rogers was a soldier. He should understand that casualties happened in every war, and that the Soldier was absolutely engaged in one.
Having a mission kept him grounded, focused him on a goal, prevented him from drifting into a formless past of splinter sharp memories. His gaze dropped to Banner, wrapping his leg and gesturing to the remaining water packet. He picked it up and tore it open without really looking at it.
He didn't think he was virtuous, but how would he know either way? "I tried to kill him," he said. "He should know better."
It might have been a joke, black as the humor was. He was so consistently deadpan that at was hard to say, but a brief flick of his eyes up to Stark seemed to suggest it. Neurons in those damaged areas of his brain flickered and fizzled like bad Christmas lights. This was not an irreversibly damaged mind, perhaps, not with his brutally enhanced physiology, but it was safe to say that he could drop too deep at almost any moment. Stark was right to be concerned about inconsistency.
He lifted his head a little when the tinny sound of the game crested up and Stark's face reappeared behind his helmet. The change drew his attention. "I can repair it myself," he said. It was only half true. He knew how to perform a patch in the field, enough to prevent the hunk of metal grafted onto his body from becoming nothing more than that. The finer work had always been kept from him, though. The arm's construction and the tweaking of its inner workings was a mystery.
For a reason, of course. It served Hydra to make sure he had as many reasons to report back after a mission as possible, however sure they felt that his programming guaranteed loyalty and homing back to them, every time. He understood that, now, that there had been a careful architecture of ignorance. Another center of his brain lit up, this one more functional - healing faster, or never as damaged. His expression hardly changed, so the emotion was difficult to pinpoint, but he had felt something.
A farmhouse in Spain, hiding in the cellar, crafting a patch for his arm with salvaged metal and blunt screwdrivers in the middle of the night, waiting for the house to go to sleep. A fuzzy line from that distinct memory led somewhere deeper, however, somewhere watery and submerged, where the air smelled like oil, and he lay on his back, looking at car parts, and the crackling voice of a man relayed the a spectacular pitch.
By the time the image had resolved itself, the film of it splitting and burnt at the edges, Stark had stopped talking. Banner had also completed the patch on his leg at last, and he glanced down at him, checking to be sure he was still doing nothing but finish the wrap.
"Am I a prisoner?" he asked, rather than answer any questions. He didn't seem to have an opinion about either answer to that query, but he did seem calmer. Maybe it was because the wound in his leg had been closed, or maybe it was the faint sound of a pair of strangers chanting numbers into microphones, but his neural activity, which had spiked for a few moments there, had steadied considerably.