After his "incident", Bruce thought his life was over; he was destined to run and hide for as long as he lived, and he would always be alone. Until he met Tony.

Tony, who treated him like a normal person, who was not afraid of provoking him, who did everything to make him accept The Other Guy, who trusted him when no one else would, who gave him a place to stay, who spoke with him like they were equals ...

It was only natural that he'd fallen in love with him.

To be fair, it wasn't love at first sight. It took at least a week for him to realize that he was completely in love. Or nearly so. There were more than three days, for sure. Or maybe two.

The question was that he known to have fallen in love with someone who was used to bring a stunning new girl to bed every night. That could be a problem.

It took a few days for him to decide to do something. Actually, he believed wasn't worthy of love, at least until Tony looked into his eyes and said: "Stop using the Hulk as an excuse for everything, you deserve to be happy and deserve to love someone. Or at least to have sex, because that self-imposed celibacy is starting to annoy me so much that if it doesn't stop soon, I'll have to solve the problem myself." Tony laughed at the last statement, to demonstrate clearly that he was joking. And Bruce knew he wasn't serious, because he understood enough of neurology and biology to realize when someone was interested in him. But the effect of those words was too strong, strong enough to cause decided to act. He knew he wasn't attractive enough for Tony patterns, but also knew that arouse fascination was more a matter of attitude than appearance.

But he was a little shy, and had not been in any kind of romantic relationship for a long time. He knew that if he was too obvious, Tony would retreat. He was too proud to let himself be seduced. So he needed to be more subtle. He remembered one of his old thesis, from his college days. Years passed since he worked with neurolinguistic programming, but he still remembered well what he had to do. Or at least he hoped so.