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They learn to read his hands.
He’s still nervous, almost twitchy, but how he uses his hands says a lot about how he’s feeling. It makes him very easy to read but that doesn’t mean he’s easy to understand.
He’ll wring his hands if he feels uncomfortable. He fiddles with his glasses when he’s irritated and trying to work out a problem.
If his hair is more tousled than usual it means he’s been running his hands through it and he’s worried or anxious about something.
Tony gets him a stress ball as a joke but they know when they see him squeezing it that he’s on the edge and desperately trying to regain control.
Despite his displays he’s surprisingly reserved about what he’s feeling and talks about it even less than Tony.
He has a pattern he taps out with his fingers and the speed at which he runs through it dictates his emotional level.
Fast means he’s nervous or trying to work through a hard problem. He never uses it when he’s angry because he’ll stumble through the taps and get angrier when it doesn’t work.
An easy pace shows that he might be bored, or trying to keep from laughing at something that one of them has done.
It’s not so surprising that his hands are steadiest in the most stressful of times.
His work as a doctor translates well to their ragtag group and he picks up field medicine quickly, moving from teammate to teammate, bandaging wounds, splinting bones, and checking head injuries. All the while with steady hands.
They can see the shock when they tell him that the Other Guy has steady hands too.
At one time or another the big guy has caught each of them and kept them tucked safely to his chest before placing them down gently and well out of the way of any danger.
His fingers tap out the pattern quickly while he tries to think over the implications of that, but they all see it, and they hold his hand and give it a squeeze to pass on their strength for those times when he lent his to them.
