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“The thing with being an Avenger,” Tony says. “Is that you can’t hide any more.”
Bruce would beg to differ. It had been part of his deal, part of the reason he’d ever agreed to leave Calcutta in the first place, that he would be able to go back into hiding after the fight was over.
Except… the fight never seems to be over. One minute he’ll be packing his bags and making preparations to book a ticket to India, and the next he’ll be sat in the cockpit of the Quinjet, waiting to be dropped into the thick of battle with villain-of-the-week’s robotic army or some psychic, ethereal alien being.
He sighs and looks at the blinking box on his screen again, apprehension written in his features.
10 new messages.
“Fan mail,” Tony had called it. “We get tons of it, so I hooked up your computer to alert you to the ones for Hulk.”
Bruce decides to let the breach of his private belongings slide for now, considering Tony did provide it for him. He’s got bigger problems.
Like how he’s going to face a world who thinks he’s a hero when, in reality, he’s just as much a threat to them as any of the other villains. All it’d takes is one bad day, with no Avengers nearby to stop him, for him to destroy a city on one of Hulk’s rampages.
He doesn’t know if he can.
The window minimises and the monitor is turned off. Bruce rubs a hand over his eyes, tired and conflicted in his mind.
The next day he has a stuffed backpack on his bed and an empty wardrobe. He needs some time. He’s not ready to face the world. At least not as himself. Letting Hulk out in public in life-or-death situations is one thing. Going out into the city by himself on a whim is another. Even just reading the fanmail, he fears, will be too much too soon. He needs go away for a while, as far away as he can get.
He stays in India for two weeks, before he skips countries and lands himself in Nepal. Then China. Then Russia. He keeps on moving, even ending up in Australia at one point. Restless, unable to stay in one place for very long - he’d chalk it up to old habits, if not for the fact that he managed well over a year in Kolkata with little fuss before Natasha had found him. Each place he goes to, he ends up staying for less and less time than the previous city. The travelling becomes less about escaping and finding people to help (which he does, when he sees people in need of it, although not everywhere he goes to does), and more about feeding his own impulses to hop on every train or boat as it passes him by.
About two-thirds of a year pass before he realises where he want to go next. Two days later he’s gripping the arm rests of his seat as the plane touches down in New York.
He’s welcomed back with open arms by a few of his fellow Avengers. Apparently, there had been a few struggles with the past couple of fights they’d been called to and Tony was two seconds away from hacking into Bruce’s laptop and calling him back to them. Bruce is glad that he didn’t. He would have answered, of course, but the whole point of his journey had been about only facing the city when he was needed rather than when he wanted.
And right now, he thinks he wants to try.
That evening, he boots up a computer and clicks open the small window that he’s been thinking about for a solid week now.
78 new messages.
Oh boy.
It’s probably not a lot when compared to what some of the others probably get, he thinks. Both Tony and Steve, at least must get hundreds of these a day. Bruce himself is not technically Avenger and Hulk is a point of controversy, even among the fans.
He opens the first one, sent nearly nine months ago now.
Subject: For the Hulk (but all of you are AWESOME and I hope you see this!!)
Bruce is unable to tear his eyes away from the screen as he reads through message after message. There are people praising, or even speaking directly to the Hulk in order to thank him for some specific deed he has done, none of which Bruce (nor Hulk, he imagines) can remember. They say he’d caught a roof that was about to collapse on them, or that he’d torn through a group of aliens that were about to spear somebody’s cousin, or stopped a helicopter crash from landing in the middle of their store... All of them acts of heroism in the eyes of these people. It’s still uncomfortable to thing of Hulk in such a way, but Bruce has already made the decision to try, as he suspects it will in getting him used to playing his role as an Avenger.
About thirty messages into the night, he gets to one that is addressed a little differently to the rest; for the first time since he began reading these messages, there’s one addressed directly to him. As in Bruce Banner. Not Hulk.
It reads:
Dear Dr Banner.
My name is Joan. I thought I recognised you on the news and was wondering if you would have time to meet me? I’m not able to travel right now so I’m sorry if it’s an inconvenience for you to have to leave Avengers Tower. I’m sure you’re very busy. But I thought I’d ask anyway, so that I can say what I need to in person. You may not remember me, but seven years ago you saved me from my father…
By the time Bruce has finished reading the message, which goes on for several more paragraphs, his eyes are a little hot and he has to blink a few times, rubbing under his glasses to clear his vision. The clock in the corner of his screen reads 1am. It’s probably better to read the rest another time.
But the message, the one addressed to him, repeats in his mind throughout the night and by the time morning comes he’s just as tired as when he went to bed. Nevertheless, he has a new mission to undertake.
He makes a call.
…
Bruce has a complicated relationship with hospitals. In his childhood, they were a place of reprieve and safety, although the memories of the events leading up to his many hospitalisations to them are much harder to shake as he steps into the sterile hallway, led by a nurse in bright blue scrubs.
There was also the fluorescent lights and the sharp smell of chemicals that took him down an equally dark, but more recent path of recollection. A small shiver makes its way up his spine, before he shakes his head, dispelling his thoughts so as to focus on the reason he’s here.
The nurse knocks on the door and there’s a soft, “come in,” followed by a gesture for him to enter first.
The room is small and sparse, furnished most noticeably with a bed in the centre and a chair by its side. In the bed is a young girl, who Bruce knows from the message on his computer to be around thirteen years of age. She’s sat up in bed, back braced against a mountain of pillows, head bowed as she reads a book held in one hand, the other hand braced in a cast across her chest.
As the door clicks up behind him, she glances up and her mouth immediately forms a small ‘O’ of surprise.
“You must be Joan.”
“Doctor Banner. You came!”
A wide smile breaks out on her face and Bruce finds he can help smile back.
“May I sit down?” he asks, gesturing to the chair besides her. In answer she nods enthusiastically, putting a mark in her book and placing it aside.
“Do you remember me?” is the first question out of her mouth when Bruce settles. His expression turns gentle. He wouldn’t have know she was the same girl he’d met on the bus several years ago if not for the description of the incident in her message. But he does remember, quite vividly now that the memories have been resurfaced.
It was his first week back in the States since the incident. A risky move, he knew but there was someone he needed to make contact with, someone who claimed to have a potential cure to his ailment and he wouldn’t be able to without getting at least getting back into the country.
He’d stuck to the more rural areas of the south initially, not wanting to bring attention to himself in the weeks before his contact would be available to meet him. Travelling around, much like he had in the past, by bus and train, and occasionally by plane. The former was the transport he had been taking that day, the best place to meet people (which he didn’t necessarily want, but needs must).
There had been several people crossing paths with him that day, but none stood out more to him than a father and his six year old daughter. The father was red faced, most likely more than a little drunk, and had a tight grip on her arm, which was already littered with purpling bruises.
Perhaps those two things had struck Bruce a little too close to home. That’s all he could think to make him take such a great risk as he did. Because one minute he’d been debating whether or not he could get to the father to intervene and the next he was watching him snatch a small baby doll from the child’s hands, tearing its head off and shouting obscenities about hitting him with it when the bus jolted. Half a second later Bruce was on his feet and telling the father to step away. The rest of the bus was tense and quiet. The only person other than the two men to make as sound was the bus driver, shouting at Bruce to sit down and stop causing a problem. That had only served to rile Bruce up more. But the last straw had been the father’s final sneer.
“I can do whatever the fuck I want with my own daughter. How about you --”
He didn’t have time to finish the sentence before Bruce clocked him in the jaw. After that, the fight became far more heated. And Bruce was by no means a large or strong man. By the end of it he found himself on the floor with his arms up in front of his face to protect it from the man’s enraged blows. It was all he could do to keep Hulk at bay; the deep voice in his mind was roaring to get a piece of the man.
Eventually, they’d been pulled apart, the bus had stopped and the police were called. Both Bruce and the father were arrested. It’s only by sheer luck and practice that Bruce had been able to break his way out before he could be identified. He never knew what happened to the father and the young girl.
Until now.
He smiles, gently. “Yes, I remember.”
She nods, quiet for a moment as if taking it in. Then she stretches to her left, to the table where she’d placed her book. Instead of a book she picks up a thin, white envelope.
“Here. The nurses said I should make this for you,” she says, pushing it carefully towards Bruce. “It’s not much. They wouldn’t really let me have anything other than card and glue, but they insisted I do it anyway.” She rolls her eyes heavenwards and Bruce stifles a chuckle. He takes the envelope, tucking it safely into his pocket to open later. One thing at a time, he thinks. That’s the only way he’ll handle this.
“Thank you.”
They talk for awhile and Bruce becomes caught up on most of the major events of her life after their first meeting. Her father’s arrest had been the spark that ignited someone to finally make an investigation against him. Joan herself, emboldened, apparently, by Bruce’s actions had been coaxed into telling her story to the authorities. Five months later her father was arrested again, caught red-handed and Joan was taken out of her home-town to somewhere safer. Or it had been safer, until the day Avengers were called in.
The coma she was put in by one rather devastating battle had lasted for several weeks, and she’d been kept hospitalised for even longer by some added complications to her injuries. With plenty of time to kill, she’d one day looked a little more extensively into the public background of the people that had saved her from the invasion… and found Bruce.
She’s a smart kid, he finds out. And an artist too, apparently, or at least she aspires to be.
Indeed, when he gets back to his room in the tower, he opens the envelope and finds a beautiful, hand-made card with the words ‘THANK YOU’ written in neat handwriting across the front.
It takes a place on his living room mantle, the centre of what sparse decorations he has dotted around the room. And on days where he struggles to go out to the press or respond to the outcries of anger at the Hulk’s place on the team, he looks at the card and he remembers why he keeps trying.