Mr. + Mr. Sharpe, Pt. III
FEB 8, 2024 - 11:02PM
*three years ago*
Maxim and Antwan stood locked in a stand off. Antwan’s left hand was full of the cashmere sweater at Maxim’s throat while Maxim’s right arm collided with Antwan’s other hand which held a gleamingly sharp butcher’s knife.
“I’m telling you I know what I’m doing!” Antwan grunted.
“And I’m telling you, you’re gonna end up on a fucking cereal box if you meet this guy! He’s trying to kill you!” Maxim spat back.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course, you don’t.” Maxim growled.
Maxim positioned his leg behind Antwan and pushed him over as he let out a scream. Antwan tumbled over Maxim’s thigh and his knife clattered to the floor. Maxim sprang on him and pinned Antwan’s thick frame to the ground.
“Stop. Fuck, Antwan! Just be still.”
Maxim’s voice was now a furious whisper as Antwan squirmed beneath him.
“Shh!” he hissed.
Maxim aimed his gun at the dingy door of the small kitchen and, seconds later, a man dressed in all black sent the door flying off the hinges with a kick of his boot. The tip of his gun scoured the air as Maxim’s first bullet buried itself deep into the man’s throat. His second bullet lodged itself in the assassin’s heart and his last bullet drilled a hole through the man’s skull before tunnelling its way out the back and into the wall behind him. The assassin’s eyes rolled back in his head as he dropped to the linoleum floor with a thud. The thick layer of glaze covering his eyes turned to tears and they spilled over his lids as his hollowed head hit the floor.
“Good shot.” Antwan groaned.
“Thanks. I call it a Third Eye.” Maxim smiled.
“I can see why.”
“You trust me now?”
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can i get Toby Z (WW) and Bruce Banner (MCU) in a humor scene? i think those two would just have so much to bitch about surrounded by giant...egos lol
Bahahhaha thank you for participating in BLURB WEEK, I had a blast!
Summary: Toby Zeigler's been asked by one superhero to write a speech for a different superhero. Maybe it's gratitude that he's not in the White House and contractually required to make any of this make sense, but once he meets Bruce Banner, Toby appreciates his shy genius.
Length/Warnings: 1,282 | No warnings. Can be read as gen or pre-slash!
A Banner Speech
“Just… wait here, okay?”
Toby shrugs and watches as the man he’s been contracted to write a speech for leaves the room to confer with the building’s owner. Bruce Banner seems a lot more shy in person than in the two magazine profiles he’s read about the guy. It makes sense; people want to picture the Hulk’s scientist persona as more Sagan than Einstein. It’s a quirk of history that one of the latter’s most famous photographs is of a stuck-out tongue. Einstein was sincerely introverted, often struggling in social situations.
Toby can relate.
When Tony Stark contacted him for this, he had mentioned feeling touched that then-governor of NH Josiah Bartlet had issued a statement lamenting the loss of Howard and Maria Stark, back in 1991. He wasn’t working for Bartlet at the time, but this is what people do; they make connections. You worked for this guy, and he’s a decent man. That makes you a decent man.
Ironically, Toby’s fall from political grace has lifted him up practically everywhere else, which is how he finds himself in a skyscraper in New York six months after an alien attack threatened to destroy his old neighborhood.
“You just had to say out loud how glad you were not to be working at the White House this year, didn’t you!” he mutters under his breath as he stares out of one of the floor to ceiling windows. No way in hell would he have wanted to construct a speech thanking superheroes for saving New York City from aliens.
“Do you miss it?” It’s Banner, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched as though that makes the knowledge of who he can sometimes be more palatable.
“Only in my nightmares.”
This prompts a bright smile, strangely enough. “I suppose working at the White House is one of the clearest examples of ‘you can never go back home’ that there is, given how often the whole staff changes over,” Banner muses. “I had one of those, sort of. Only mine was, you know, destroying the whole lab.”
“My downfall was less structural and more personal,” Toby shrugs. He’s made peace with that, even if he hasn’t fully made peace with some of the people involved.
“Saved lives, though.”
“We would have saved them anyway. Just more quietly.”
Banner scratches the side of his face and looks sheepish. “My days of quietly saving people are behind me, I guess.”
Toby turns his head, notes that Stark is actively hovering on the other side of the glass doors which lead to their conference room. He nods over his shoulder and says, “With him around, why bother reaching for the microphone?”
“Funny you should say that,” Banner coughs. “Tony’s banned from attending this thing. Lifetime prohibition after too many cocktails and no procedure for dragging a billionaire off the stage.”
“I’d have liked to witness that.” The surprised look Banner shoots over at him is encouraging. Toby’s… not all that good with people, but he does have practice juggling big egos, and like recognizes like. “So you’re the next best thing? The Kent to Stark’s Luthor?”
Bruce Banner’s eyes bug out of his head and he turns his back on the window to give Toby a look. Then, his shocked expression turns shrewd. “You said that to see if he’s eavesdropping, didn’t you?”
Toby just smiles.
“They want a scientist superhero. I doubt much thought went into whether I have anything interesting to say.”
“Well, at least they’ll be afraid to play you off stage,” Toby says mildly. Before his implication hits too hard, he adds, “You should use that. Got anything you’ve been wanting to share with the world?”
“I--” Banner blinks at him for a little while, then nods, slowly. “Actually, yes.”
“I told you you’re a genius, right?” Banner asks, fiddling with his bow tie again.
“No…?”
“I mean, yes, for the speech, which is brilliant, even if everyone’s going to know I didn’t write it, but also for getting the Chief of Staff to show up. He’s taking the heat off.” Bruce leans his head over to look out from backstage at the gathered crowd.
Toby moves to stand behind him so he can see, too. As expected, Joshua Lyman is standing beside his table in a crowd of people. The huge grin on his face is tempered only by the way he keeps looking toward the stage like he expects something important to happen at any minute, probably involving him.
It usually does.
“It’s a good thing your guy isn’t allowed to come to this thing,” Toby says in a low, amused voice. “The attention-gravity distortion between the two of them would probably mess with the laws of physics.”
“Fun to watch, though,” Bruce observes. “Did you, uh…”
“Promise him access? No, but I did promise--”
“Toby? There you are! They told me to come back here, but--” Donna Moss breaks off as she comes over to give him a half hug.
“--her access. Bruce Banner, this is Donna Moss. She is also a Chief of Staff, to the First Lady of the United States.”
“Aww!” Donna frowns at him.
“What did I do?”
“I told Josh I was going to try to get the Hulk to say ‘FLotUS!”
“Unless that’s an arcane synonym for ‘smash,’ I don’t think you had a chance of that, I’m afraid,” Bruce says with a slight smile.
“I was mostly teasing, I promise,” Donna grins. “It’s just that Josh goes heart-eyed at superheroes. I think it’s because he sees himself as a political version of Tony Stark, but with social capital instead of money.”
“He spends it just as quickly,” Toby says, picking up Donna’s wrist to look at her watch. As intended, the action is a gentle reminder that they’re out of chatting time, but to smooth the way, he adds, “I’ll send someone to fetch you and Josh later?”
“Perfect, thanks,” Donna says, her wide smile growing wider as she leans over to catch Bruce’s anxious gaze. He’s back to warily regarding the filling room. “If you get nervous during the speech, just look at Josh. He’ll probably be so enraptured you’ll feel like JFK in Berlin.”
“Ich bin die wurst at public speaking, so I doubt it,” Bruce tells her, before she heads off with a chuckle.
“You know what you just said, right?”
“I told a beautiful woman that I’m a sausage. I feel like a sausage,” Bruce says, tugging at his neckline. “In five minutes, I’ll be roasted on a spit.”
“In five minutes, you’re going to tell the White House Chief of Staff and a room full of people with money to burn that there’s a child hunger problem just begging for their help. They’re your captive audience, and not one of them will risk your wrath to interrupt, especially not when you tell them the problem’s not just in some far-flung nation halfway across the globe,” Toby reminds him.
“It’s also here. In our own country.” Bruce clenches his jaw. “There isn’t enough science in this speech. They’re going to be angry.”
“Well, you’re the expert on that,” Toby shrugs. He’s not looking at Bruce, but he can feel the other man’s amused glare. “Look, you sounded jealous about Stark being banned. I just took the hint and wrote a speech that’s the nerd equivalent of too much tequila. If they didn’t want a hero to try to save something, they shouldn’t have invited you.”
“You’re a good man, Toby Ziegler,” Bruce says. His voice is thick, like he’s forcing the words out past a few layers of emotion.
“It takes one to know one, Bruce Banner.”
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