bannersciencebro:
He stalled in his retreat, forcing himself to straighten at the come hither gesture. An order, a command; Bruce loathed anyone that tried to assert any form of control over him. Too many people had done that to him in the past; his father, General Ross to name the most…
The neutral calm didn’t completely fade from Banner’s expression, though he did swallow a tad hard when he was forcefully invited to attend some sort of meeting. God knows what that was all about, but the scientist wasn’t dense enough to expect anything short of it being illegal and down-right heinous in nature. He did look towards Natasha then, hoping she would be able to sway Olev’s outlook and allow him to be cut free without any more compromise to her mission. It wasn’t like he could say he didn’t drink- that was most likely a cardinal sin here and would only make this guy want his head up on a pike somewhere. All Banner could do was stand there, watch and wait for Olev make his departure.
Closing his eyes and dropping his head only after the other male was far from sight, the researcher heaved a pent sigh. Damnit, he just had to go and stick his nose into more trouble, didn’t he? Lifting his head a moment later, he ran the back of a hand over a brow, a forced huff of amusement passing through his nose at the agents dry tone. “I seem to have that affect on most people…must be my radiating personality,” He all but muttered back in a similarly flat tone, though the edge of obvious self-loathing was evident. Folding his arms loosely over his chest, Bruce cast Natasha an apologetic expression after easily catching the hint that she was justifiably pissed at him. How could he blame her?
“I wouldn’t have approached you if I knew you weren’t working on my case again…” He tried to explain as his head lowered and a hand lifted, kneading the space between his temples with a thumb and index finger. Not just in an attempt to soothe away a strengthening headache, but it was also a nervous tic. He had to do something with his hands- fuss with his clothes, wring them together, tap something. Bruce had too much energy to deal with and not nearly enough outlets to release it into that wouldn’t level a few city blocks in the process. “What I get for assuming things. I was sure you were called in since I ditched-“ He paused, glancing around them. Who knows, maybe the entire café was bugged. “-Fell off the grid,” He quickly corrected instead of saying SHIELD out loud. “Guess I just ended up jumping back onto it…”
Bruce knew he screwed up, big time. This was unacceptable on every level, and if Fury wasn’t having an aneurism from losing track of Banner before, finding out that the fugitive gamma specialist had just compromised the best spy under his command and put an entire town at risk of becoming a new collateral damage report, that was certainly going to cause the Director’s blood pressure to skyrocket. “Is there…somewhere we can walk to, or a place we can go in order to talk this out? Devise a game plan before we get sized up for our personalized concrete shoes?” Despite the dark joke and jab at what he was assuming to be some sort of Russian mafia, he was truly reproachful about the whole situation. And not just the fact that, one way or another, there was going to be an attempt to end both of their lives later tonight. But there was already a deeply seeded concern over their relationship- if it could even be called that. It was already on thin ice to begin with given their short yet grim past history. Now he only added more cracks to it.
“Look, I’m sorry- I know I screwed up. And I’ll clean up the mess I’ve created, reset your dominoes so you can topple them in order again, but I’ve got to have all the variables in order to do that.” Bruce could be assertive when he wanted to be- when he had to be. Right now felt like one of those times. “I can’t leave you alone with that slimeball and his no doubt to be equally unpleasant smelling goons on good conscience just because you’re going to tell me that you can handle it.”
