Bruce was no stranger to self-flagellation, and like any true self-deprecating cynic, he had given a good deal of space and time in his head to brooding over his many and varied mistakes that had led him to where he was today. At first it had been going over and over his own notes until they all just became scribbles on the insides of his retinas, trying to piece together where exactly he'd gone so wrong. Which step was the one step that had ultimately turned him into what he was today.
But that only sustained his own brooding sense of justice through self immolation for so long. Then Bruce had started devouring the work of everyone else who'd ever tried to work on a version of the super soldier serum. Those who'd reached for that same holy grail that seemed to be forever out of reach. There was some kind of commiserating in it too, seeing that almost everyone who tampered with human biology in the same way met some disastrous fate.
At least until he ran across the research of Dr. Bobbi Morse. It wasn't perfect, the journal articles and notes he'd been able to dig up, but it was close. And that was surprisingly painful to come across, how damn close she'd been, and the fact that she wasn't exactly suffering the same kind of consequences he and some of the other poor fools that had tried were battling. In a way, it made him angry, seeing where he'd fumbled, and where he could have thought harder, better... And there was definitely ego at play there too, wondering why he couldn't have and why she'd been able to...
But it all came down to the self flagellation in the end, and after a an odd decade of it, Bruce had done his best to give up on it. At least in the sense that he spent the majority of his days alone and angry, trying to channel himself into yoga or eastern medicine, all the while it ate away at the back of his brain.
He'd been a little to focused on his own battles with allowing the Other Guy to be apart of the Avengers team at all to have anything but a cursory awareness that Bobbi Morse was also involved, and honestly the urge to pick her brain about the whole thing seemed to just play into his old tenancies that he was slowly and painfully trying to rewire.
Now felt a lot like several lifetimes later, but the fact that he knew Dr. Morse was just down the hall in the lab made all of those old thoughts spring up again. Not that he really needed to revisit it now, there were better things to think about and worry about, there really were... But still Bruce found himself closing up the notes he was working on, brushing a hand through his hair and smearing the small collecting of gathered ink on his hands over his forehead before leaving the small office he'd claimed for his own and venturing out.
He watched her for a moment, bent over some project or another, fighting past a few scattered biases that he knew were ridiculous and just bred of years working around old academics and nothing more. "Dr. Morse?" he greeted as he approached, his usual self-deprecating smile in place. "Got a moment to spare for a lesser mind? It's probably far past time for a proper introduction."
