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xxx-cat-xxx · 5 years ago

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Vacation

This is my very fluffy @marveltrumpshate fic for @twentyghosts, whose wonderful stories made me fall in love with Science Bros. I hope you like it.

Many thanks to @whumphoarder and @sallyidss for beta reading!

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“This is ridiculous,” Tony moans, letting himself sink down on his backside to slide down a steep passage of the hill, his injured foot carefully stretched out in front of him. “For the record, this is the last time you get to plan our vacation.”

“You know, this is easily my fifth hiking trip in the Himalayas and the first time someone managed to get injured by tripping over their own feet on a perfectly straight road,” counters Bruce.

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in...” Tony mutters, then winces when his ankle bounces on a stone and pain shoots up his leg.

“Hey.” Bruce’s expression sobers. “You sure you don’t want me to call for medevac?”

“I am not calling for medevac because I sprained my ankle on a vacation,” Tony retorts, already picturing the field day Barton would have upon hearing about it. Then seeing as Bruce is about to protest, adds, “And no, Bruce, it’s not broken. I think by now I should know what a broken bone feels like.” He uses a nearby branch to lever himself back upright and grits his teeth when he puts weight on his right foot. “Besides, we’re almost back—I think I can see the village down there.”

That was a bit optimistic. By the time they reach the village where they stayed the previous night, it’s already late evening and the sun has long since set. Tony is glad for his arc technology-powered flashlight that makes it possible for them to find a path in the dark forest covering the mountains.

They slowly make their way back through the village road—Tony’s arm slung around Bruce’s shoulders and his lips pressed tightly together, politely declining any offers of help from the few villagers that are still awake—before finally reaching their rental car.

Tony leans heavily against the driver’s side, glad to take the weight off his foot for a bit. He’s exhausted and feeling kind of shaky, which, he realises after hearing a loud growl from his stomach, might be because the last thing he ate was breakfast at the homestay that morning. It was only supposed to be a short hike up the mountain; they’d planned to leave for the city before dark after eating in the village, but then Tony’s foot had thwarted their plans.

Tony fumbles for the car keys in his pocket, then opens the door and lets himself fall inside with a groan. “Okay, let’s go,” he announces. “I hope the restaurants will still be open by the time we arrive—I’m fucking starving.” Then he realises that Bruce hasn’t made a move to get into the vehicle.

“Brucie?” In the rearview mirror, he sees his partner take their suitcase out of the trunk. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Bruce says in the tone of someone talking to a very stubborn child.

“I’m driving us back.”

Bruce scoffs. “No, not with that foot of yours, you’re not. How are you gonna work the pedals?”

“Fine,” Tony says in the most provocative tone he can muster, “then you drive us back.”

Bruce rolls his eyes. “You know I don’t drive on these mountain roads, Tony. Especially not at night.”

Tony shrugs. “It’s your choice, darling.”

“This is not a choice at all!” Bruce says in frustration. “Don’t be ridiculous. Neither of us can drive tonight. You can barely walk.”

“You’re the one being ridiculous,” Tony declares. “If you’re not driving, then I am. This is nothing compared to what I’ve worked through on missions.”

“But this is not a mission.” Bruce bends down to the window, a softer expression on his face now. “Come on, Tony, there’s no need for you to prove anything to anyone. Let’s just spend another night at the homestay. We’ll ice your ankle and see how it’s looking tomorrow morning. I’d feel terrible making you drive for three hours while being in pain like this.”

Tony’s pride tells him (in Howard’s voice, of course) to just suck it up and drive anyway. But then his eyes meet Bruce’s warm ones and he feels his resistance melt. “Fine, whatever,” he agrees. “But I hope we can get a decent dinner there...”

When they reach the homestay, the lights are already out, and Tony’s hope for dinner extinguishes with them.

“Didn’t you want to go back to the city?” their host’s grown-up daughter, Radhika, asks them when she opens the door. She is dressed in a colourful long nightshirt and a warm shawl, her usually braided black hair falling over her shoulder.

“Yeah, we had a small…incident,” Bruce replies. He gestures to Tony’s foot, which is held awkwardly out in front of him.

“Oh, I see,” Radhika replies with a frown, then turns to shout over her shoulder, “Mata!”

Moments later, her mother—an elderly woman wearing the same combination of clothes—appears in the doorway and ushers them inside. She, Bruce, and Radhika start a conversation in Hindi, with Bruce evidently explaining their situation.

“She says her older daughter is a doctor in the hospital down in the city—it’s about four or five hours from here if we take a bus that leaves at six in the morning,” Bruce translates to Tony. “We can stay here overnight, but the room we had yesterday is already taken by other guests. They are offering us their spare room.”

“Fantastic...” Tony grumbles, grimacing both at the prospect of having to get up before sunrise and the word “spare room”, but it’s not like they have many other options. “Yeah, go ahead.”

Bruce nods and turns back to their hosts. Tony can’t understand the words, but he definitely makes out some English numbers in between.

“Bruce, are you seriously haggling right now?” he interrupts. “Maybe you’ve forgotten in the last few hours, but I am an actual billionaire.”

“Sorry, sorry, force of habit…” Bruce mutters, rubbing a hand over his brow. A few sentences later they seemed to have agreed on a price and Radhika takes the suitcase from Bruce’s hand to bring it to the spare room.

“Are you hungry?” the elder woman asks in heavily-accented English.

“Starving,” Tony agrees immediately.

“Tony!” Bruce scolds. “They’ve already had their dinner—they were about to go to sleep.”

He says something in Hindi to their host and another discussion ensues, which Bruce apparently loses.

“Great, now she’s staying up later to cook for us.” Bruce sighs, visibly uncomfortable.

Tony knows that Bruce doesn’t like anyone working for him, but Tony’s stomach is so empty that, combined with the pain in his foot, he feels almost nauseous. He’s sure that Bruce must be hungry as well. “We’ll give them a big tip, okay?”

Bruce bites his lip and nods.

Twenty minutes later, Tony is sitting on a plastic chair next to the freshly-lit fire in the middle of the family’s courtyard, His foot is resting on a pillow on a small stool with an ice pack (made from actual ice, thanks to the Himalayas) wrapped around the ankle. Now that the hiking boot has come off, it’s visibly swollen and pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and although Tony hasn’t admitted it to Bruce, he thinks that maybe he’ll have to correct his earlier statement about being sure that it’s not broken. According to Bruce, nothing can be done except for keeping it still and iced until they can get an x-ray done at the hospital tomorrow.

“Isn’t Indian food supposed to be spicy?” Tony mutters under his breath, slashing his spoon around in something that looks suspiciously like algae soup, except that it can’t be algae, because, well, Himalayas. “And tasty?”

Bruce frowns and gestures for him to keep his voice down. “I told you before, different regions have different dishes. India’s more of a continent than a country—things here are different than in Delhi or Mumbai. There is actually no such thing as Indian food, you know.”

“Still, I could have done with spicy now…” Tony grumbles. “This tastes like the stuff Steve makes when he gets nostalgic about the 40s.”

Bruce gestures him to be quiet and this time Tony obeys. He eats a bit more, and, despite the rather bland taste, feels his bad mood receding more the fuller his stomach gets. After dinner, Radhika brings them chai—for which Bruce thanks her profusely—and then settles down next to them, followed soon by her mother.

India, in Tony’s head, has always been a synonym for poverty, which is a bit weird because compared to Tony, almost everyone on the planet is poor. But as Bruce has been slowly showing him since their arrival, there is no one such thing as poverty—its appearance varies from city to village. Poverty can mean anything from not being able to afford a place to stay or sturdy shoes to wear, to living in a large farmhouse but going hungry because the crops were ruined by the last thunderstorm, to having a comfortable life but still being unable to afford a life-saving surgery due to lack of health insurance (which, as Bruce added, is not actually very different from the US).

Tony has seen his fair share of India’s high society—which, to be frank, is not much different from US high society (except for prettier, more colourful clothing and better food). He’s always imagined the rest of the country outside of luxurious hotels and glamourous wedding celebrations to be a mixture of the slums he’s seen from his car window while driving through the city and international aid commercials with dirty children begging for someone to feed them.

While all these realities certainly exist somewhere in India, he hasn’t really ever thought of everyone living in between both of the extremes—people like Radhika and her family, who don’t seem to fit into any of the stereotypes shown on CNN. He knows that one of the reasons Bruce took him on this low-budget holiday was to show him some of those realities, and Tony has to admit that he now has a much better idea about why Bruce sometimes misses the country so much—chai definitely being one of them, he thinks while watching his partner blow into the steam curling up from his cup.

They are sitting quietly, sipping their tea. Tony notices a black cat watching them from the shadow of the other side of the patio. He stretches out his hand and idly wiggles his fingers to make it come closer, but the cat just keeps on sitting, its gaze now slightly judgemental.

“Oh, she doesn’t like to cuddle,” Radhika comments. “But she knows everything that’s going on in the village, I tell you. She’s a spy.”

“Natasha,” Tony states, turning towards Bruce, who snickers into his chai. “We found Natasha’s Indian counterpart.”

“I wonder how the cat’s interrogation techniques compare,” muses Bruce.

“Let’s not find out,” replies Tony. “I’ve already got one injured joint, thank you.”

Radhika giggles at that.

“What’s so funny?” Tony asks, slightly irritated.

“It’s just…” she hesitates, visibly trying to contain a grin. “You are Iron Man. I mean, you defeated aliens and supervillains and all that…and then you sprain your ankle during a hiking trip.”

“Very funny,” Tony huffs. The corners of Bruce’s lips twitch.

“So if we take the bus in the morning, what about the car?” he changes the topic, suddenly realising the flaw in their plan. He gestures at his foot, then at Bruce. “You won’t let me drive, you won’t drive on your own—how are we supposed to get it back to the rental company?”

Radhika looks at her mother and says something. The woman shrugs and then gives one of those sideways head shakes Tony has seen Bruce do when he’s getting interrupted deep in his thoughts and forgets he’s not in Kolkata anymore—it means yes, he’s learned. “I can drive the car,” Radhika offers.

Tony looks at her critically. “No offence, but I was kinda planning to get back to New York in one piece.”

“Most people born in the village know the mountain roads by heart,” she says, “My sister visits us once a month and drives all the way with her tata, and sometimes I drive her back when I go to the city. I’ll drive the route regularly once I start my engineering college next year. With your fancy car it will be even easier.”

“Then we wouldn’t have to get up at five…” Bruce thinks aloud with a side glance at Tony.

“Well, that’s a compelling argument,” Tony agrees with a sigh. “Fine, kid, just try not to kill us.” He gets an angry look from Bruce for this.

Radhika smiles. Her mother collects the now empty cups and disappears towards the kitchen, shaking her head at Bruce’s offer to help her.

Radhika disappears for a few minutes and returns with a deck of cards. “Do you know Court Piece?”

They spend the next hour playing cards with Radhika, her mother, and eventually her father, who joins after being woken up by their laughter. Her mother turns out to be a cunning player, and together with Tony, their team wins the majority of rounds. Eventually, the family turns in, leaving Bruce, Tony, and Natasha-The-Cat at the smoldering campfire.

“The sky is so clear in the mountains,” Bruce states, leaning back in his plastic chair and gazing upwards. “You can see the Milky Way.”

Tony nods, looking straight ahead. Ever since the Battle of New York, stargazing isn’t really on the list of his favourite activities anymore—but then, seeing Bruce’s fascination, he takes a deep breath and holds onto his partner’s jacket a bit to ground himself before turning his head upwards. The Milky Way is clearly visible, and he has to admit, breathtakingly beautiful.

They stay out for a while longer until the fire dies down and the mountain cold starts to seep through their layers of high-quality hiking clothes and into their bones. The toes of Tony’s bad foot have gone from painful to numb and they decide to turn in before they start to fall off. Bruce helps Tony to their spare room, Tony teasingly kissing his neck and earlobe while leaning on him.

Radhika had told them that she put an electric heater in their room, but when they enter, they find it colder than outside, the heater dead on the ground. Bruce’s attempt to switch it on doesn’t yield any results.

“We can’t wake them up again,” Bruce says with a look at Tony, visibly steeling himself for an argument. “It’s the middle of the night and they already stayed up so long to cook for us.”

“What are you saying, Bruce? You’re travelling with your own personal on-call mechanic.” Tony grunts, already lowering himself down to the ground. “Let me take care of this baby.”

The device, however, proves to be as stubborn as the engineer trying to fix it. Fifteen minutes later, Tony is literally shaking and by now it’s not just his toes he can’t feel anymore, but also his fingers.

“I would need a soldering iron for this,” he complains. “The fuse is blown and it’s impossible to reconnect the wires without it.”

“Shh...” Bruce lays a warm palm over his lips and hugs Tony from behind. His body heat is wonderful—Tony feels himself melting into his partner. “Come to bed,” Bruce admonishes.

“Well, that’s a sentence I love to hear,” Tony replies with a lascivious grin. Stretching his arm behind himself and letting his fingers run down Bruce’s neck, Tony finds himself suddenly not having any issue leaving the device alone.

However, having sex turns out to be harder than it reasonably should.

The blanket is warm, but it seems to be filled with living geese instead of feathers since it weighs approximately 20 pounds. After wiggling his head free to stop the threatening feeling of suffocation, Tony manages to actually enjoy Bruce’s teasing and reciprocate appropriately. They have worked their way out of their shirts and Bruce is in the process of removing their pants when he jostles Tony’s foot and the engineer can’t suppress a yelp of pain.

“I’m sorry!” Bruce exclaims, “I’m so sorry, Tony, are you okay?”

“Yes,” Tony grunts, angry at himself for letting it slip. “Just, get on with it.”

Bruce frees himself from his half-lying position on Tony and almost topples down from the bed. Tony pulls him back in, biting his lip when his injured foot acts up again, but then concentrates on the arguably very distracting other things he’s got to do. After another five intense minutes of making out, Bruce pauses in the middle of a kiss.

“What?” Tony moans, his teeth impatiently reaching for his partner’s lower lip.

“Just remembered that the condoms are at the bottom of the suitcase,” Bruce mumbles.

“For god’s sake,” Tony curses. “It’s fine, I’ll go get them.”

“No, stay there, you’re not supposed to put weight on your foot…” Bruce extricates himself from both his partner’s embrace and the blanket before Tony can stop him.

Tony watches his boyfriend tiptoe over the ice-cold floor towards the suitcases, goosebumps forming all over his body, and start rummaging around. Then he notices the cursed cat has been sitting right next to their bags since god-knows-when, watching their mostly-naked forms with slitted eyes and definitely judging them now.

“I am s-so sure that I packed them back in after w-we used them in that hotel in D-Delhi…” Bruce sighs, rummaging through their belongings.

“God, Bruce, get back in here—I can hear your teeth chattering…” Tony sighs.

Bruce looks up with a guilty expression and definitely blue lips. “I don’t even know if I can do anything with the cat watching us,” he admits.

Tony opens the blankets half an inch in what is supposed to be an inviting gesture and his partner crawls back in, pressing himself against Tony as his whole body shakes.

“I can still try to do so-something nice for you with my h-hands,” Bruce whispers, “just l-let me warm up a little.”

“Sure, Bruciebear…” Tony teases, his voice the kind of sugarcoated that he’d never thought he’d use in any way except sarcasm. He feels a little saccharine though as he lies there, holding tightly onto Bruce’s soft body somewhere in the middle of the cold mountains.

Bruce’s shivering stops after a bit and a few minutes later, his breaths even out. Tony knows he won’t be able to sleep—the pounding in his injured foot is harder to ignore now that there is no distraction, and he’s not sleepy at all. It’s not that Tony doesn’t get tired; it’s just that the times he is and the times he is lying in an actual bed rarely ever coincide.

As he lies in the darkness listening to Bruce’s quiet snores, it occurs to him that he hasn’t checked his emails once since they left Delhi. Bruce would probably count this as a win in his plan to take Tony on a different kind of holiday and get his mind off SI-related projects and Iron Man. Tony briefly considers taking out his tablet and catching up with work, but then decides against it. It’s mostly because the thought of getting out of the blanket is not at all appealing, but also because he realises it’s been a while since Bruce slept like that in his arms and holding him feels... well, not bad.

Tony’s frequent nightmares always make themselves known—he will squirm and shift in his sleep, sometimes mumble or even moan when they get really bad—and if Bruce is around, he always wakes him up before it comes to that point. Bruce, on the other hand, dreams absolutely silently. It’s only when he takes in a short, sharp breath and stiffens in Tony’s embrace that he realises his partner is awake.

“You okay, Big Green?” Tony asks softly.

“Hmm,” Bruce mumbles, not very convincingly. He takes a few moments to ground himself, shift around and calm his now quick and shallow breaths, before his eyes settle on Tony. “You know, I always say I liked my time in Kolkata,” he says. “And I did. But I was still on the run, and it was never… never safe, you know? I always felt like I might have to leave any day. Sometimes it’s just hard to shake that feeling.”

"Well, this time you get to stay right here," Tony says, reaching for his partner’s hand under the blanket and squeezing it tight. "And thank god for that because we're not fleeing anywhere fast on this ankle," he adds with a huff of humour.

"Is it bad?" Bruce sounds concerned again—the exact opposite of what Tony was going for. "Do you need some more ice?"

"Nah," Tony dismisses with a flap of his hand. "I'll just stick it out of the blanket and let that famous Indian-Arctic air take care of it."

Bruce finally gives a short laugh at that and starts to settle down again before stopping suddenly. "We've got company," he observes.

“What?” Tony’s eyes dart to the door.

Bruce motions his head to the foot of the bed, where that damn Natasha-Cat has curled into a ball, a foot’s distance from Tony’s toes. “I guess that’s a compliment?” Bruce ventures. “She’s watching over us.”

“Or maybe she’s making sure that we don’t go anywhere else before she and her feline associates can kill us in the morning,” Tony retorts. “Cats are unpredictable.”

“I think you’re thinking of Nats, not cats,” Bruce says, curling back up under the blanket and shifting closer to Tony.

“Telling her you said that,” Tony mutters.

“Just go to sleep, Tony…”

The morning comes with rays of sunlight creeping through the gap under the door and the dusty window. Tony did get bored in the night after all and, after a couple of fruitless attempts to train Natasha to bring over his bag, he crept out of the bed himself to gather his StarkPad. Now the cat is sitting on the window pane above the bed, intently watching the light reflections on his screen.

Bruce wakes up when Radhika knocks on the door to bring them two cups of steaming chai and biscuits.

“Did you sleep at all after my nightmare?” he asks after thanking her and setting the tray on the bed.

“I was watching over you,” Tony replies cheesily. “Well, that and saving our Nigerian subsidiary from a diplomatic crisis.” Tony takes the cup of tea and carefully sits fully up against the headboard.

“How’s your foot?”

Tony grimaces. “Trying to win the competition for the world's largest eggplant.”

The ankle is swollen even more than the previous day and now a mottled green and blue colour. Bruce prods a few places and then decides that driving is not an option and getting to the hospital is the priority.

After having breakfast and packing (under Natasha’s watchful gaze), Tony thanks the family for their hospitality and leaves a generous tip before getting into the car.

Bruce sits on the passenger seat next to Radhika and Tony positions himself sideways on the backseat, the injured ankle stretched out. It quickly becomes evident that Radhika wasn’t exaggerating about her driving skills. She makes her way down the steep mountain safely, and admittedly, takes the sudden sharp turns much smoother than Tony did on their way up.

Radhika and Bruce start talking about Arundhati Roy’s newest book and then get into an argument about whether one should give money to beggars, only half of which is led in English. Tony feels himself zone out, tiredness finally taking over. He lets his head rest back against the window and watches the mountains slowly give way to hills as they get closer to the city.

Half asleep already, he thinks that despite everything, maybe he will let Bruce choose their next vacation after all.

____________

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#science bros #hurt tony #vacation #fanfic #tony stark #bruce banner #india #fuck caa #fuck ncr #which has nothing to do with the fic #but needs to be said

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