Bruce pulled the overpriced comforter, that could have easily fed an entire village with the amount of money it cost, closer to his body as he let out a small groan. Morning. Oh, how he hated mornings. It wasn’t that he was lazy by any means, it was just that after moving into Stark Towers with Tony, the mornings seemed to come a lot earlier than they ever had before. Bruce rolled over and moved to put his arm around his narcissistic mate, but his arm didn’t fall upon the warm chest of the partially mechanical man, but instead hit the soft mattress with a soft thud. For the first time, Bruce gathered the courage to open his eyes, the morning light already flooding through the windows thanks to JARVIS. For a while, Bruce had been quite impressed with the computer system that Tony had designed and installed himself. There was no doubt that the man was a genius, but did that mean he had to start his day at the crack of dawn?

Bruce had become used to waking up to an empty bed. He knew that Tony had issues sleeping, which meant that he spent a lot of his time while most people were sleeping in his lab, working on whatever seemed interesting enough to keep his mind occupied for the time being. Though he understood Tony’s need to keep busy, Bruce wished that Tony would think about how it felt to wake up alone, something that Banner had done for a majority of his life. When he had agreed to move in with Tony, he had expected to find a friend. He expected to find someone he could talk nuclear physics and gamma radiation with. What he didn’t expect was to become so attached to the eccentric playboy. In fact, he had promised himself that he wouldn’t become this emotionally invested in anyone again. There was no way that this situation could turn out okay, but Tony didn’t seem to care. Tony was different. Tony wasn’t afraid of the other guy. He should have been, but he wasn’t. He seemed more intrigued than anything.

When he had first been asked to stay at Stark Towers, Bruce had been suspicious. Tony had been so infatuated with the Hulk that he thought maybe Stark was just asking him to stay so that he could get more information on the green guy, possibly run some tests, ask questions. That’s how he normally operated, so Bruce couldn’t be blamed for being weary. If it didn’t help Tony, Tony didn’t often want much to do with whatever it was. He had found that the same couldn’t be said for Iron Man, but Bruce wasn’t sleeping with Iron Man, glorified hero and savior of more than a handful of towns, he was sleeping with Tony Stark, well known playboy and egomaniac. But as the days slowly turned into weeks and Bruce found himself falling asleep in the boss’s master suite, he realized that it wasn’t the big guy that Stark was interested in after all. It had been him the entire time.

With a loud, exasperated mixture of an annoyed groan and a sigh, Bruce tossed the bedding off of himself and swung his legs over the side of the bed and let his head rest in his hands for a moment as he sat. “JARVIS, what time is it?” He mumbled through his fingers, the light still blinding in his sleepy state. “5:17 am, Mr. Banner. It’s 72 degrees and sunny, though we’ll be expecting a few light showers in the late afternoon.” The program responded, just like it always did. It seemed to Bruce that everything Tony designed was eventually perfected, which made sense seeing as he spent the majority of his spare time tinkering with his various toys in his lab. Bruce understood the want to learn more and to improve things, but Tony’s work ethic was like nothing Bruce had ever seen. While most people ran away from work when they got stressed and things became to much for them, it seemed that Tony ran to it. And Bruce totally understood Tony’s need to escape into the world of science, because he had done the same thing countless times. But did he have to do it at 5:17 in the morning?

After he felt as though his eyes had adjusted to the light and his legs were working well enough that he wouldn’t fall face first down the flight of stairs he had no doubt he’d have to go down to track down his iron plated hero, the scientist stood up, pulled his arms over his head and stretched for a moment, still trying to get his brain out of sleep mode. He ran a hand through his already messy locks and started the familiar trek out of the master bedroom and down towards the lab in just his boxers and an old t-shirt that Tony had given him one of the first nights he had stayed over, coming with nothing but a toothbrush. The shirt was obviously the other man’s due to the wear and tear his reactor put on the cotton after so many wears. But that wasn’t enough to get Bruce to give the shirt up. It had actually made him more inclined to wear it, as childish as it sounded. The shirt smelled vaguely of Tony, much like motor oil, cigarette smoke, and the slightest scent of liquor. While most people would have thought those smells together to be utterly disgusting, Bruce found them… comforting. Every once in a while as he walked he would get a whiff of the smell and it would remind him that someone cared for him enough to literally give him the shirt off of his back (though it was more like Bruce had drunkenly pulled it off of his back, but with Tony Stark, that was as closest than anyone else had ever come to such a thing so it left the scientist feeling accomplished regardless).

For the first week or so, Bruce had been quite shy around Pepper. Though she and Tony were used to people ending up in the prodigy’s bed without much knowledge of what had happened the night before or where their clothes were, Bruce wasn’t exactly used to waking up naked in another man’s bed.