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Human Connection [Avengers -- Sprouts & Virginia]

Theresa had made vague references to a violent past and he'd seen the scars, he knew enough to know they had been carved out with a knife as well, that it wasn't her first time experiencing physical assault, but he found himself on the fence about if he should ask. It wasn't just a case of not wanting to intrude - though that was a factor - it was also because he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know. He gave a damn about others, but he had long ago decided to make boundaries about precisely how much of a damn he could give to any given person - he had never been someone who got close to others, and asking personal questions was a one-way street to close.

Not that he thought there was any chance he and his neighbour were going to connect. The more likely scenario would be that she would go home, heal up, they would encounter each other outside the building or on the stairs some time in a few weeks, it would be awkward, and they would move on. At most he would glimpse her in the distance and likely try to find ways to avoid needing to talk to her.

He thought about asking about the worst place she'd been.

He decided against it. It wasn't his business, it was too much for him to know.

"I don't really use it much." Bruce said, a dismissal of her apology; he sat at the kitchen table for his tea, the floor for meditation, he slept in the other room - the couch had already been in the apartment when he'd moved in, too bulky and heavy for the previous owners to take with them easily.

"It's more than contempt." Bruce agreed, "That's just the most easily recognizable - uh, if you've heard of Paul Ekman? He - he sort of heralded the emotional atlas. He gets called the human lie detector. Um. Surprise and fear can get mixed up, so can anger and disgust, and happiness can be faked, but uh, contempt - it's so automatic and it's so distinct that -" he gestured, "It's the clearest."
 
The ones on her back were from glass, but that didn't exactly... detract from the physical assault angle. She was a mess of things that made her look like a woman who'd been through some personal hell and that wasn't entirely wrong. It wasn't from what she was saying and hinting it was, at least in that there hadn't been a boyfriend for the years of abuse, but she supposed that in the end it didn't really detract from everything she'd been through. But right now she felt like it was best to be a more recent victim, not someone who'd handled it years ago. There was more sympathy that way, more desire to protect and comfort, more investment. Being the person someone revealed abuse to could be an emotionally connecting moment.

He'd do his best to avoid that.

She wanted to optimize the awkwardness. Make sure that when he saw her Bruce tried to go in the opposite direction like he hadn't seen her. Not that he would, she was goddamn good at following. Apparently not as great at winning fights, but she could get better at that.

"Doesn't mean I don't feel a little bit bad anyway. You stitched me up and uh... the rest of it," she feigned discomfort at the idea that he'd had to pack her stab wound because that was sorta weird, "and I'm repaying that by taking up your couch space. But also I don't think I'm going to try and be super polite and move, this might be an okay time to be a little selfish. I'm practicing." Or pretending she was someone who was working on figuring out where healthy boundaries were supposed to go.

Yes she had heard of him, but Theresa shook her head no. There wasn't really any need to fake interest at least, she was decently engaged in the conversation and not just from an observational standpoint. He probably knew all sorts of things she didn't, and she liked to learn. Had been a pretty invested, optimistic college student once upon a time. And he had the sort of voice she figured could probably help calm down normal people. Maybe it was yet another sign of how unfixably broken something in her was that she could think that while knowing full well that if he snapped they would be lucky if only a few blocks got destroyed. All the emotions he mentioned could be faked, all of them could be suppressed, it just took time. The flinching had been the hardest thing for her to get control of. ”It makes sense, the others seem like they... go together. But contempt is sort of on its own. ” Mostly she’d seen anger. Lots and lots of it. But some contempt too.

"I like-- um, it seems like you know a lot of interesting things. Beyond just patching people up, I mean. Makes me wish I'd stayed in school, maybe I wouldn't need you to explain it all." It hadn't been an option. She was careful not to use a tone that made it sound like it was annoying that he had to explain, more that she was apologetic about not knowing things.
 
"I'd prefer you weren't super polite, on that note." Bruce said; her trying to move off the couch would be the worst thing for her, at least for a little while. The most reasonable scenario would be for her to stay where she was for the better part of a day, but he knew neither of them were in the position for that to happen - half a day was the best they would both be able to manage, she wouldn't want to stay there forever and he would have to go back to work by then. Not that it would matter if he left her there alone - if she stole anything from him, she would need to be desperate, given that there was very little to take, certainly nothing worth much. He'd stopped having possessions a long time ago, save for his clothing, which were all care-worn from washing, hand-stitched where they had been snagged or pulled or torn.

He toyed with a loose thread on the sleeve of his sweater, bright blue woven in amongst the dark, fingertip circling it, resisting pulling it. He got the feeling that if he did, he might just keep pulling it and end up unraveling his whole sleeve - it wasn't likely, but the image was in his head. Sometimes he just wanted to destroy things.

"Most of what I know isn't very interesting." he said; Ekman's studies had been a utilitarian thing for him because with all of the reading he had done through his life, he still couldn't read people. Facial expressions tended to escape him, subtleties and hints and micro-expressions were often lost on him - it was a personal failing he had made some effort to correct, but still he found himself unable to often understand what someone else might be feeling. The best he could do, often, was make a broad guess according to the situation, and working with the others in New York had been worst-case scenario, given that everyone he had been surrounded with at the time were people who repressed -

- everything.

His best basis for understanding others came from understanding their goals and intentions, rather than their emotions. Natasha Romanoff, he'd had no chance of understanding what was going through her mind in a personal sense, but he'd known that as a SHIELD agent, she would have an understanding of what he was, what he was capable of, which pointed him to one possible option: fear. It had been there. He'd found it in her. He'd felt some guilt for it, but maybe not as much as he should have when he'd made her pull her gun - he'd guessed she'd do something like that, but he hadn't known. Not so much a lucky guess as much as it was an educated one.

People, he didn't understand. Motivations, he did.

"I just - I just have a lot rattling around in here that isn't -" he gestured, "A lot of it's pretty useless. Tic-tac-toe was played in 100 B.C. Quarters have 112 ridges. Astroturf can repel an Octopus - they uh, they can't climb it." he lifted both hands, a kind of apologetic shrug; it was the hazard of having a photographic memory - the only time he got to forget things was when the Other Guy took over.
 
"Okay, great." She stretched her legs out a tiny bit more on the couch to take up as much space as she possibly could and then retracted when she reached the point where the stretch reached her side and let out a tiny "oops, too much space, too selfish." The joke at least partially covered up the expression of pain that she basically had to force onto her face. She probably would have thought of his apartment as depressing, but hers was just as under decorated and impersonal. She just... didn't have crates. And a few things there to strategically make it look like she cared about her apartment even when it meant nothing to her.

For a while Theresa had assumed that everyone was lying all the time. That was exhausting and impossible, and after a certain point of getting used to what her life was life she'd settled into the more reasonable assumption that most people didn't lie regularly but did avoid talking about the things they didn't want to talk about. Made trips to the grocery store easier. More importantly it made it easier to talk to people, try and forge those one way connections so that they'd like her and she could get what she wanted from them.

"But see, that's the stuff I want to know! I'm great if someone needs housewife-y knowledge, but that's about it. I've got cooking, cleaning, and sewing down like a pro." Plus knifework, sharpshooting, hand to hand combat, and cello. "I wasted a lot of time and I haven't figured out how to recover it yet. Oh, do you know why quarters have ridges?" She didn't know, and she did sort of want to. Theresa had guesses, of course, and she was pretty confident in what the answer was going to be, but it would be better if he had the answer. "And for octopus, is it because it's plastic or because of the texture?" Or just because astroturf was terrible? Because it was terrible.

This was easy. She didn't have to fake caring about some problem she couldn't relate to or didn't just straight up didn't give a shit about. Theresa could learn useless facts that would be interesting in the moment and then discarded later to make room for whatever knowledge she needed in order to complete a different job. Or this one. There was no cited end to this, she was in some ways a bandaid applied to this huge problem because they didn't know what else to do. Couldn't kill the man, couldn't force him to stay somewhere he didn't want to be, and if anyone was going to have figured out how to suppress the Hulk it would have been the doctor himself. So what they had was someone keeping an eye on him. For... who knew how long. Until he went back to Stark or the Avengers needed him again, or until he died of old age or someone figured out how to kill him.

She should probably buy nicer towels, years of the cheapest and lowest quality ones was a punishment that even she didn't deserve.
 
Bruce considered mentioning that domestic labour was undervalued, that she shouldn't sell herself short when cooking and sewing were dying talents, but he didn't want to come across as the guy who mansplained what she would already know. He was better off not aiming to reassure in any sense that wasn't medical and he was frankly terrible at compliments.

"It made counterfeiting harder." Bruce said, more knowledge he didn't particularly want to have, the kind of thing that would never be useful to him - he would go to his grave knowing about the ridges on coins and still know nothing about basketball, "And people used to shave the sides off coins when they were smooth, pile up the gold and silver and sell it - adding ridges makes it obvious when they've been tampered with."

Or maybe it was useful. He was utilizing it right then, even if he didn't specifically need the knowledge for the conversation, it was a pointless distraction, something to keep them away from awkward or personal topics.

"They can't form a seal on it - so I guess it's both. They've got part of their brain in their tentacles, so it has to be especially irritating to come in contact with something they don't like."
 
She let out a tiny and interested "huh" at his explanation. "Seems like it'd take a really long time to get enough silver it would be worth anything, but I don't know much about silver prices. But I guess people who are desperate to get money would probably do it even if it wasn't much. Maybe the equivalent of hiding change than doing something meant to get a lot of money? It adds up eventually, I save all my coins out of my wallet by habit." Theresa had scrounged coins and dollar bills and hidden them on two occasions. She wasn't sure why she'd tried the tactic twice when the first time had ended poorly, but there were a lot of things in her life that she felt like she should have had a better reason for doing. Too much time spent in a state of desperation. Which itself was probably a pretty decent reason for things, but it didn't feel like it to her.

It was one of those things that she would never have to experience again, at least not the same way. Fighting for her life was better than feeling like it was entirely out of her control. She had power now. People could hurt her, but it was all physical. Admittedly SHIELD was a weight that she felt at all times, but the door would open soon. She was a hundred percent sure the whole thing had been rigged to make sure she wouldn't walk through it, but that was because of her own feelings and not because of anything they'd done. Except make her like this, but she'd consented to that every step of the way.

But no thinking about that, only thinking about an octopus's adventure on fake grass. "Wouldn't that be like.... having part of your brain in your hands?" Theresa offered it like she was half convinced that if she phrased it poorly it would annoy Bruce. She lifted the hand that wasn't kept stashed under the blanket in an attempt to keep the injured arm out of sight, and splayed her slender fingers slightly as she inspected it. "If so, astroturft would be terrible. I like having my brain behind a bunch of bone, I don't think I'd be comfortable with it being too close anything. Also it would make hand-stitching anything a terrifying experience. Or would it be more like arm-brain? Because I'd not be great at that either." What with the whole having recently acquired defensive arm wounds.

"I know... how to make flower shaped garnishes out of a few different things. Which isn't that exciting to talk about and would be a waste of food to do for fun. And requires using the injured arm." Well hand, but still. Theresa didn't exactly enjoy cooking, but she'd learned to do a lot of pretty things to try and make someone feel better. Had been entirely useless in the end, but it was something that counted a a potentially interesting skill. "Oh! I think I heard once that clouds are super heavy." She didn't really give him time to answer that, for the same faked reason of concern over how he'd respond if she was wrong or it seemed stupid, "I mean, heavier than it seems like they should be since they're... in the sky. Is that true?" It was a slightly hesitant question.
 
"I think it was one of those cases where patience was a virtue." Bruce agreed; that, and desperate enough times could make people do just about anything to dig themselves out of a hole. It was another of those things he'd seen enough evidence of that someone shaving down coins for hours a day just for slivers of metal didn't strike him as especially unlikely.

"When I was a kid I used to hide money under the carpet." he said, "There was this spot in the corner where it pulled up, I had a paper route, I'd put half of it under there." He'd heard his mother talk enough times about how they didn't have the money to leave whenever he brought it up, how it would get better.

"And your mouth." Bruce said, gesturing his hands out, making a tensing motion with his fingers in some imitation of the suckers on the octopus arms, "They have taste sensors in their tentacles. Sometimes they get angry at their trainers if they ate something they don't like and can taste it on their skin." he gave another of those half-smiles at the mention of her talent, then offered: "I can make toast pretty well."

He could do more than that, but his cooking skills were utilitarian at best - he'd spent most of his adult life moving from place to place, food was something that he occasionally had to deal with and that was all he did. He'd largely stuck to a vegetarian diet, partly because it was cheaper, but mostly because it didn't come with the same risk as food from areas with fewer stringent sanitation policies. He wasn't even sure he could get salmonella. Maybe. He wasn't looking to find out.

"Cumulus clouds can be around a billion cubic metres." he said, finding himself easing a little; science was a place where he was comfortable, "About five hundred thousand kilograms."
 
Theresa didn't ask, but she gave him a look of understanding. Only so many reasons someone hid their money like that. "I kept mine in an empty laundry bleach container in the back of the cupboard. I was the one who washed the clothes, so it worked well." Until it hadn't, but this was the fictional end to abuse because it was happening with a fictional person instead of the reality. “Grocery change and tips from work and coins that I found in pockets while doing the laundry. Allowance, money people she suspected knew but didn't want to make waves would give her for simple tasks, it all got stashed. "Now I keep it in a jar, which is much easier.” She actually did that, at least. There was one in her SHIELD provided apartment back in the States, too. It was a weird comfort, having money on hand at all time. The jar back in the States had a lot more bills in it, enough that she could buy a plane ticket if she wanted to disappear. She wouldn't, but she liked to feel that she had the option.

"Oh I would hate that too. Shaking hands would get super weird. She looked at him and then frowned a tiny bit and added "being a doctor would probably be an... experience." Disgusting. Like, even by her standards that would be super gross. She knew the taste of blood pretty well from the times she'd gotten hit in the mouth, and it wasn't fantastic. Knowing she was tasting someone else's insides was a firm 'no thanks, ever'. "I don't mean to imply that you're not probably already a good person because not everyone would treat people without insisting on payment, but I think if you had to hand-taste every patient, doctors would probably be the most selfless people in the world." One of the things she didn't entirely know about was how often he used gloves. She wasn't climbing trees to peer into every house he ever went into (just some, occasionally), usually she just figured out where he was and then waited, watched, and listened.

Her smile in response to his toast comment was a little bit tired. "Toast is an important staple and good for every meal. It's halfway to a grilled cheese. Or more, depending on ingredients." It was a cheerful reassurance from someone who realized full well that reassurance wasn't necessary but was being kind anyway. "If you' let yourself be on call all the time, cooking anything too time consuming could be an issue." Taking something out of the oven half cooked and coming back to it wouldn't work great. She would have had 'office hours', but Theresa had an entirely different set of skills and probably shouldn't be trying to use it to try and help people. At least not the way she thought about it, because instead of interpreting her skills as prime for saving or protecting if she was going to sell them, Theresa immediately assumed she'd hurt people for money. Probably kill them, objectively she knew that was something that made bank.

"Yep, super heavy for something that seems like it should be fluffy and solid instead of made up of a bunch of super tiny bits. And imaginative kids books and movies lied to me about how clouds." Books for kids had a lot of lies. Clouds are fluffy adventures that castles can be built on, you can do whatever you want with your life, things will always turn out okay... she considered those three equally ridiculous.
 
Everything she had told him about her life made a shape he didn't like, it was less nebulous, forming into something he had a painful understanding of - the scars, the scraped-together money, the hiding places. Even if he didn't know the finer details, he felt as though he knew some aspect, a piece of a puzzle that he felt most people didn't tell others about - that he certainly hadn't told anyone about - but the situation had made the subject prominent. She had survived something painful and traumatic, it was the kind of thing that naturally brought up other painful and traumatic experiences.

"In the theoretical where I'm a mollusc," he began, which was a much better subject than the discussion of childhood trauma - it wasn't that he actively avoided meaningful conversation, it was just -

- alright, yes he did. He actively avoided meaningful conversation, he found it awkward, he found it uncomfortable and he never knew what to say, how to respond when someone told him a secret or something horrible that had happened to them because he had learned yikes wasn't the appropriate response. He still hadn't figured out what was. Tony had still smiled when he'd said it but he was an outlier who enjoyed levity, even if it wasn't Bruce's intention at the time - it had been the only reply he could come up with.

"In the theoretical where I'm a mollusc," he repeated, then added, "And a doctor. A mollusc-doctor, if I had to taste everyone I helped, I think I'd have to find a way to deaden those nerves. I would find that unacceptable."

He gave a little lift of his shoulders.

"The upside is I think science is becoming cool now, so there will probably be kids who know how heavy clouds are in the future, maybe write a book about it, 'Jane Learns Clouds Are Fucking Heavy'." he said.
 
She had done all sorts of things, gotten into dozens of weird situations, and yet her childhood was still the most raw thing. It was the easiest thing to manipulate though, and everything in her life was a tool to be used to get the results that she wanted. So Theresa took the little bit of pain and even though it wasn't like everything else where every time the pain was easier to deal with, and she used the information to get people to pity her.

Years of SHIELD had made her very good at having conversations that felt meaningful to the other person but took nothing from her except for time. She'd been making things up since before becoming an agent, and though it had been for different reasons she had still come in with the skill. And pain intolerance. The things that were meaningful to her now were the things that would probably make people uncomfortable and concerned for their safety around her. Probably for decent reason. Not as decent reason as they'd have to be feeling those things around Bruce, but after all this time watching him she'd settled firmly on a few facts about the man, and was confident that at this moment with things the way they were, there was pretty much no danger to her. From him, anyway. The dude who'd stabbed her could be anywhere.

He'd probably be taking this whole thing personally and come back either to try and get at Bruce again or just to kill her.

"When you repeat the scenario back you make it sound at least twice as ridiculous as when I came up with the idea," It was the way he repeated the line and the sound of his voice that did it. "So was not doctoring an unacceptable option too?" Theresa was interested in why he was running around helping people basically nothing. He could have set up shop somewhere better by now if he'd been charging more, but he was helping everyone for basically nothing. It wasn't like he didn't have other skills that could have made him a ton of money either. Her top options were currently that he did what he did because of the Hulk - either out of guilt or because he thought it might tip the scales back to even if he helped enough people - or because he was an incredibly altruistic person. The first was something that she understood, the latter... not so much. Everyone around her had an agenda all the time, and it wasn't to do the most good for the most amount of people.

She looked a little bit surprised briefly by his swearing, but smiled in a 'I might have laughed at that if I didn't know it would make me regret everything' sort of way. "That couldn't be in a classroom. Though I guess swearing keeps getting more socially acceptable, maybe by the time third graders are old enough to teach it will be everyday language." Theresa's lips turned down into a frown like she hoped that wasn't how it would end up, though she couldn't have actually given less of a fuck. Words and their meanings were powerful to other people, but it was basically all the same to her personally. Oh it mattered how certain people said certain things because she knew what they meant by them, but there wasn't really anything floating around in any language she knew that she really got offended by simply on account of it being a word that existed. "Science should be considered cool. It was always cool. Just... also hard." She'd done fine as a kid and teen. Though that was less because she'd been legitimately interested in science and more because getting a bad grade was totally unacceptable at home.
 
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