Tony watches as Bruce crumples to the floor, hesitating only a second before sitting opposite him, making sure to leave a fair amount of space. His mind flits through various explanations, and he remembers other incidents where Bruce had a similar, albeit not as severe, reaction to sound or touch. Tony thinks about what he knows: Bruce has a heightened acoustic startle response, and an increased fear-potentiated startle. His brain supplies him several explanations. The one that fits best leaves Tony's stomach in knots: past fear conditioning, likely related to childhood abuse, as shown through symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Tony hopes he is wrong, hopes with all his being, but he also knows that Bruce has never talked about his childhood or his parents. Tony has several bits of information, but that's all they are, bits.

"Is there anything I can do?" Tony doesn't ask if Bruce is okay, because clearly he's not, and Tony isn't in the habit of supplying meaningless platitudes.

"I thought I had gotten over it, I thought I was fine." Tony isn't quite sure what Bruce is talking about, but he figures that the best course of action is to let Bruce lead this conversation, so he sits back and waits.

"There were a lot of...bad things...that happened when I was a kid." Tony senses this is an understatement, but he keeps his suspicions to himself. "They've left their mark, both literally and metaphorically." He hates to think that Bruce has scars from his past, has physical reminders of pain no child should be subjected to. "I guess I still have some stuff to work through." Bruce shrugs sort of sheepishly, and Tony slowly reaches forward to place one of his hands over Bruce's.

"Don't you dare try to apologize. Whatever happened, it wasn't your fault, and no one is going to think badly of you for being affected by it."

Bruce smiles. It's a small smile, tinged with a fair amount of sadness, but it's progress and Tony will take what he can get at this point.

"Come on, you're staying here tonight." He takes Bruce's hand in his and helps him to his feet. "There's a guest room you can use just down the hall."

A week later and Bruce is once again at Stark Tower. He and Tony are in Tony's lab, working on a pet project. Bits of paper, covered with complex equations, are strewn about, mixed in with various types of expensive tools that Bruce never dreamed he would have this sort of access to.

He's nervous, unsure of what he's about to do, but he feels a need to get it out, to tell someone. Bruce takes a deep breath and begins.

"It was my father." Bruce makes sure not to say 'dad', because his father might be one of his parents, but he sure as hell wasn't ever his dad.

"What about him?" Tony asks, frowning in confusion.

"He used to beat me. A lot." Bruce stares at the wall behind Tony's head because there's no way he's going to be able to do this if he looks at Tony. He feels Tony turn his attention to him, putting aside his tools. "It got worse after my mother died. She could sometimes stop him, but without her, he was..." Bruce trails off. He doesn't know how to explain this, how to convey the fear and pain he felt every day for years, how he walked on eggshells and did everything in his power not to set his father off. He usually failed; his father was unpredictable and cruel. He knew it wasn't his fault, logically he knew that. But even after all these years, Bruce still felt a niggling of doubt, that maybe if he'd just tried harder, been a better son, that everything would have been different.

"It was bad." Bruce unconsciously runs a finger over the long, white scar on his forearm. Tony notices and slowly reaches out, taking his arm gently and examining the mark. "Glass shard," Bruce explains. "He threw a bottle at me once." Bruce remembers that night, remembers the paralyzing fear as he watched his father descend into a fury unlike anything he'd seen before. He'd tried to protect his face, deflect the worst of the hits, but was left with several jagged scars on his forearms as a reminder of that night. Tony runs a callused hand over the scars before releasing his arm.

"I thought I had gotten over it, but the move to New York, Hulking out for the first time in so long, the battle, it must have triggered something and it's like it all came loose, and now...I don't know." He looks down at his hands. This is harder than he thought it would be.

"Hey, it's fine if you don't want to say anything else. I think you should talk about it, but it doesn't have to be right now, and it doesn't have to be with me." He looks at Tony for the first time since the conversation started, and is glad to see that whatever Tony is showing, it's not pity. He looks concerned, but Bruce can hardly blame him.

"Thank you," Bruce says, and he really means it. Tony is letting him go about this at his own pace, isn't forcing any answers out of him, isn't pressuring him at all.

"If you want, I can give you the info for a therapist I know. I saw her after the kidnapping stuff, she's really good with PTSD." Bruce nods and Tony asks Jarvis to print out the info.

They return to their project and start a lively debate over the awesomness of various theoretical physicists. Pepper comes in at some point to let them know they've worked through dinner, but neither of them really mind.

Tony is relieved when Bruce agrees to see a therapist. He just wants to cuddle Bruce until all the bad stuff is gone, but not only would that probably not be appreciated, Tony knows it also wouldn't work. Bruce's demons can't be scared away with hugs, as much as Tony wishes they could. He doesn't like feeling helpless, but he knows this is something in which he can only offer support; for all his money and intelligence he can't fix this.

Bruce goes to his first therapy appointment the following week. He makes an appointment for every Thursday of the foreseeable future, but finds himself talking to Tony more and more. It becomes a regular thing between Tony and Bruce. On certain nights they'll retire to the lab, a safe middle ground in which Bruce feels relaxed and unthreatened. They'll tinker with some project and eventually Bruce will start talking. He tells a different story each time. Sometimes it's the story of one of his scars, other times he recounts a happier memory, usually of his mother.

"What about this one? Tony brushes a finger over Bruce's eyebrow, where a small scar is hidden, only visible up close.

"I was twelve, and it was summertime..."

There's a cathartic sort of release in sharing something he had kept to himself for so long, and in a startling moment of revelation, Bruce realizes he's not alone in this. As a child he was isolated from his peers, his intelligence providing a barrier few could cross, and his father effectively preventing any sort of support system from developing. But Bruce is an adult now and his father can't control him anymore. Bruce thinks about the other Avengers, about Thor's stories of Asgard, of Pepper and Clint and Natasha, of Tony and his pancakes and intelligent banter. He smiles as he thinks of his friends, of the family he's created in the time he's spent in New York. He has a real family now, a family that he chose and who chose him back. No, Bruce is not alone, not anymore.