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"This is the automatic quarantine warning from Thule Station. You are strongly advised to maintain your distance from this location. Anything that emerges from this station is to be considered highly dangerous - avoid or destroy with overwhelming force. Message repeats. This is the automatic…"
"The gamma signature is unmistakable." Jane glanced up nervously from the display. "Are you sure you want to do this? There's no guarantee that there's anything left of Bruce in there to rescue."
"I do not abandon my companions in peril," declared Thor. "Your fellow scientist is strong of mind and body. I am endowed with the power of cleansing lightning. There is nobody better suited for this rescue operation."
"Well, this is as close as I'm getting," replied Jane. "You're on your own from here."
With a respectful nod, Thor raised his hammer and hurled himself out of the quinjet's rear hatch.
"This is the automatic quarantine warning from Thule Station. You are strongly advised to…" the message which had been ringing out across the icy plains cut out suddenly. "Raargh! What you doing, stupid puny god! Go! Run! Aarrrgh…"
The voice that replaced it was booming and rough - the Hulk - and cut off by a terrible sound of struggle, breaking machinery and muscles straining against themselves, then just static.
As Thor soared through the skies towards his destination, the automatic warning resumed.
---
The first thing he spotted were the remains - some of the original inhabitants of the station, he assumed, but they had been thoroughly beaten to a red pulp on the snow where they had tried to escape.
The second thing he spotted was Bruce Banner, not at all correctly dressed for the cold, beckoning him from a wedged-open doorway.
"You are not in your right mind," Thor surmised, sheathing himself in lightning in preparation for battle with the insidious threat he had been warned about.
"Aren't you cold out there?" asked Bruce - or at least, something that was using his voice and shape. "It's much nicer in here, out of the wind."
"Relinquish your hold on my companion at once," Thor ordered, to no effect. Bruce leaned nonchalantly against the doorway, clearly intending to let him take his time.
Raising his hammer, Thor sent a mighty bolt of lighting into the form of his companion. He knew that Banner would have no trouble turning into the Hulk and surviving the onslaught, but as he had anticipated, 'Bruce' scattered into a thousand hungry fragments and battle was joined.
From the depths of the base, a disconsolate howling was faintly audible above the thunder.
---
"No. No. No!"
The Hulk was not especially happy to see Thor triumphantly striding into the heart of the building - the trashed communications room from where he'd tried to warn him off.
"Sssh now. It's okay. The creature cannot pierce my defences," asserted Thor boldly.
"No. No…"
There followed a horrible flexing and bending, a roar of defiance and a dreadful tearing, and a brief lashing out which Thor ably dodged, followed by the Hulk curling up into a ball and sobbing dejectedly.
"What is the matter, my brave companion?" questioned Thor.
"Can't go," sniffled the Hulk. "It… gets out. All die."
Thor retrieved the remains of a chair from the wreckage, dusted it off and pointedly sat down calmly near the Hulk.
"Do you remember," he said, "the greatest battle we fought together?"
"Spiky aliens?" guessed the Hulk. "Ugly chin guy?"
"No, Bruce," replied Thor, "that battle with yourself."
---
With Thor's general lack of understanding that some matters were rather more private to Midgardians, it had not taken very long for him to hear about Bruce's heart rate predicament.
"So you do not allow yourself… any relief?" he asked, with uncommon levels of tact and diplomacy.
"It's not all that bad," replied Banner. "I get a lot of science done."
Nevertheless, Thor insisted on turning the problem into a Project. At first they considered a Hulk-proof room, but watching Banner transform, and the Hulk's subsequent pitiful confusion, moved his heart.
"Someone has to be in there with him," Thor declared. "And not in some kind of metal suit."
He asked Jane's permission, and of course Darcy interrupted and asked if she could watch the camera footage afterwards, and maybe keep it for her 'private collection'.
Then he asked Bruce.
"Aww, Thor," said Bruce, "I didn't know you cared."
"Of course I cared," replied Thor, in confusion, "I made everyone build you a special room and everything."
"No, no," Banner waved his protestations off, almost laughing, "that you wanted to… you know. With me."
"Oh!" Thor exclaimed in realisation. "This is some kind of taboo amongst your people? I assure you, brothers in battle often share such…"
"Is that it?" asked Bruce. "Some kind of… manly bonding exercise?"
Thor stopped for a moment, looking puzzled, then strangely awkward.
"I owe considerable loyalty to Lady Jane," he resumed, "but… she has given me permission. And I would like… I would like to explore that… not being 'it'?"
The first few… the first several times were rather… awkward. The stash of healing unguents that Thor had brought were distinctly required on several occasions. But, slowly but surely, Banner's control improved - and the Hulk was at first mollified, and then, to Thor's great delight, became not only curious but rather enthusiastic.
The memory of that first experiment with the lonely Hulk left confused in the chamber resonated sadly with the sad, hunched Hulk trying to work out the relevance of his question in the icy station.
---
"Is different."
"How so?"
"Is not me. Is in everything."
"Then," replied Thor decisively, "at least you will not be alone."
Coaxing the scientist out of his protective shell was the work of many patient weeks, but once Banner was returned to his right mind, between Thor's protective lightning and Banner's ultimate failsafe, they studied the creature and discovered its weaknesses.
And studied each other, too, after too long apart.
And one day, the automated warning was finally silenced, the station cleansed with lightning, and the Hulk strode into the icy plains, with his lover riding one great shoulder.