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petroniaMy favourite scene in The Avengers was the Steve/Tony/Bruce three-hander, which I never got to in my truncated analysis. The sort of character evolution via cross-cutting dialogue you imagine it's a pleasure to write for good actors, and that actors surely prefer to endless vistas of green screen, even if they did sign up for a megabuck superhero flick.
In other news, EPISTEMOLOGICAL HULK SMASH haha okay no I'll stop.
Steve's eidetic memory gives out halfway through the shawarma. They go, all of them, less out of bravado than a sudden shared sense of euphoric possibility, now that Manhattan's secure and no one else is about to become dead in the immediate foreseeable future; and because Tony's rambling reminds them that they're all very hungry. Steve is sure he ate enormously, but he can't remember tasting it. He barely remembers the restaurant at all. When his memory picks up again he's opening his eyes to a expanse of rumpled ivory bedsheet, the three cracked ribs he was powering through may as well have been a dream, and -- just to ensure he doesn't think he wakes up back in the forties -- an invisible butler with Peggy's accent is telling him he's needed in the kitchen.
In the kitchen?
It turns out he's in Stark Tower, which as epicentre of the invasion is ironically one of the less damaged buildings in Midtown. The kitchen is three floors up by elevator, and by the time he gets there the crisis is over.
"Loki made a break for it," Tony says, "but he's not moving too fast and Thor roped him back in. Stuck him in a different bunker with Natasha staring him down while Thor and Bruce rig up some kind of damper to prevent him from casting magic spells -- which I don't believe in, by the way."
Loki's been meek as a lamb throughout, even mannerly, as if the Hulk's bashed the fight out of him -- or the sense in. "It couldn't last," Steve says.
"Yeah, well, hope springs eternal." Tony is wearing a different black undershirt, and his hair is damp from showering, but his face and arms are still taped up with slapdash gauze compresses. Evidently he hasn't sat still long enough for someone to bandage him properly. He's perched on a barstool at the spotless counter, huddled over a Stark Industries mug and one of those omnipresent glass tablet devices.
"How long was I out for?"
"Six hours. Give or take." Tony shrugs. "I was out, Bruce was out, Archer Boy was out. Natasha, I dunno, maybe she hung from the ceiling for a while. It was an adorable slumber party in here. You wanna peel off those tights, Cap? I figure we've still got a three-, four-hour window of abject gratitude before the jurisdiction fight gets ugly and Fury starts slathering on the plausible deniability. Give SHIELD a call before they stop taking our calls, have them send a flunky over with an ironed button-down and a pair of jeans. Levis were a thing in the nineteen-forties, right?"
Steve ignores the leer, which is too tired to be anything but perfunctory. He's starting to get a handle on the younger Mr. Stark: the key is to focus on the modicum of real information being conveyed, rather than the actual words it's dressed up in, or the tone of voice, or the body language besides the eyes (the sunglasses tend to put paid to that), or... he focusses on the real information being conveyed.
"You think there's going to be a jurisdiction fight over the aliens," he says. "Over Loki." Of course, Loki's crimes weren’t all been committed on U.S. soil, and SHIELD's authority-- that nuclear missile--
He knows what it was, but the significance hasn’t fully registered before now. It settles now, hard, in the pit of his stomach.
"You're giving the bozos too much credit for critical thinking, Cap," says Tony. "There's going to be a jurisdiction fight over us. Gimme one sec, this ought to be Bruce." He slides the tablet, which has started to make chiming noises, toward the middle of the counter, and swipes at something with a finger. A column of blue light rises from the centre of the screen and expands into a rectangular shape, hanging in the air. “Bruce. Banner. Big guy. Talk to me. How’s it going with the quote, magic spell, unquote? Isolated any fairy dust yet?”
Steve stares through the hole at Bruce Banner, life-size and rumpled, framed by what looks like a fluorescent-lit laboratory. He can’t tell if the blue light is a -- hologram? -- or an actual window from here to there, and he knows better than to ask Tony. If today hasn’t shorted out his capacity for disbelief, he thinks, he must be doomed for the rest of his life.
"Confirmation holism," Bruce says. (At least, those seem to Steve to be the right words; he's not sure what they signify in combination.) "You have two Ph.D's, don't pretend you don't get Kuhn. A theory can't be tested in isolation, you have to work from a context, and in practical terms the only paradigm--"
"No no no, you know what was the only paradigm? Lamarckism was the only paradigm. That doesn't mean it wasn't the wrong freaking--"
"Guys," Steve says, and it's flattering that they actually stop and glance at him. "Dr. Banner, is Loki secured?"
"For the time being, yes." Bruce takes his glasses off and fiddles with the ends, gaze sliding sideways. He's unhappy with how it went, Steve thinks, suddenly; however it is they managed to restrain Loki, he doesn't like... He opens his mouth to ask, but Bruce is already speaking.
"It won't last forever," he says. "We don't really have the means here. Thor wants to bring him back to Asgard."
[tbc]
In other news, EPISTEMOLOGICAL HULK SMASH haha okay no I'll stop.
Steve's eidetic memory gives out halfway through the shawarma. They go, all of them, less out of bravado than a sudden shared sense of euphoric possibility, now that Manhattan's secure and no one else is about to become dead in the immediate foreseeable future; and because Tony's rambling reminds them that they're all very hungry. Steve is sure he ate enormously, but he can't remember tasting it. He barely remembers the restaurant at all. When his memory picks up again he's opening his eyes to a expanse of rumpled ivory bedsheet, the three cracked ribs he was powering through may as well have been a dream, and -- just to ensure he doesn't think he wakes up back in the forties -- an invisible butler with Peggy's accent is telling him he's needed in the kitchen.
In the kitchen?
It turns out he's in Stark Tower, which as epicentre of the invasion is ironically one of the less damaged buildings in Midtown. The kitchen is three floors up by elevator, and by the time he gets there the crisis is over.
"Loki made a break for it," Tony says, "but he's not moving too fast and Thor roped him back in. Stuck him in a different bunker with Natasha staring him down while Thor and Bruce rig up some kind of damper to prevent him from casting magic spells -- which I don't believe in, by the way."
Loki's been meek as a lamb throughout, even mannerly, as if the Hulk's bashed the fight out of him -- or the sense in. "It couldn't last," Steve says.
"Yeah, well, hope springs eternal." Tony is wearing a different black undershirt, and his hair is damp from showering, but his face and arms are still taped up with slapdash gauze compresses. Evidently he hasn't sat still long enough for someone to bandage him properly. He's perched on a barstool at the spotless counter, huddled over a Stark Industries mug and one of those omnipresent glass tablet devices.
"How long was I out for?"
"Six hours. Give or take." Tony shrugs. "I was out, Bruce was out, Archer Boy was out. Natasha, I dunno, maybe she hung from the ceiling for a while. It was an adorable slumber party in here. You wanna peel off those tights, Cap? I figure we've still got a three-, four-hour window of abject gratitude before the jurisdiction fight gets ugly and Fury starts slathering on the plausible deniability. Give SHIELD a call before they stop taking our calls, have them send a flunky over with an ironed button-down and a pair of jeans. Levis were a thing in the nineteen-forties, right?"
Steve ignores the leer, which is too tired to be anything but perfunctory. He's starting to get a handle on the younger Mr. Stark: the key is to focus on the modicum of real information being conveyed, rather than the actual words it's dressed up in, or the tone of voice, or the body language besides the eyes (the sunglasses tend to put paid to that), or... he focusses on the real information being conveyed.
"You think there's going to be a jurisdiction fight over the aliens," he says. "Over Loki." Of course, Loki's crimes weren’t all been committed on U.S. soil, and SHIELD's authority-- that nuclear missile--
He knows what it was, but the significance hasn’t fully registered before now. It settles now, hard, in the pit of his stomach.
"You're giving the bozos too much credit for critical thinking, Cap," says Tony. "There's going to be a jurisdiction fight over us. Gimme one sec, this ought to be Bruce." He slides the tablet, which has started to make chiming noises, toward the middle of the counter, and swipes at something with a finger. A column of blue light rises from the centre of the screen and expands into a rectangular shape, hanging in the air. “Bruce. Banner. Big guy. Talk to me. How’s it going with the quote, magic spell, unquote? Isolated any fairy dust yet?”
Steve stares through the hole at Bruce Banner, life-size and rumpled, framed by what looks like a fluorescent-lit laboratory. He can’t tell if the blue light is a -- hologram? -- or an actual window from here to there, and he knows better than to ask Tony. If today hasn’t shorted out his capacity for disbelief, he thinks, he must be doomed for the rest of his life.
"Confirmation holism," Bruce says. (At least, those seem to Steve to be the right words; he's not sure what they signify in combination.) "You have two Ph.D's, don't pretend you don't get Kuhn. A theory can't be tested in isolation, you have to work from a context, and in practical terms the only paradigm--"
"No no no, you know what was the only paradigm? Lamarckism was the only paradigm. That doesn't mean it wasn't the wrong freaking--"
"Guys," Steve says, and it's flattering that they actually stop and glance at him. "Dr. Banner, is Loki secured?"
"For the time being, yes." Bruce takes his glasses off and fiddles with the ends, gaze sliding sideways. He's unhappy with how it went, Steve thinks, suddenly; however it is they managed to restrain Loki, he doesn't like... He opens his mouth to ask, but Bruce is already speaking.
"It won't last forever," he says. "We don't really have the means here. Thor wants to bring him back to Asgard."
[tbc]
no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 11:56 pm (UTC)The one line in this story that really throws me is:
"It couldn't last," Steve says.
And then Tony's reply. What couldn't last? Loki's rampage? But then Tony's reply doesn't make sense (unless he thinks Steve is talking about something else)? Would Steve Rogers say something that was difficult for the listener to interpret?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 12:13 am (UTC)I'm not sure how much of this conversation is relevant to the fic I'm writing, or why I'm writing it. I complained at Aya a lot today re: how much I don't know where this ought to go in comparison to when I was 4-5K words into eg. Senza Fine. I have a sinking suspicion it really ought to be more than one fic. Also, we theorized that Tony seems to take over these things because he's almost like a Dunnett character: the words and the content of the words and the body language and what's happening in his head are all doing different stuff, so to get a clear picture you have to write four times more paragraphs about him than about anyone else.