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Fire, fire everywhere and all at once. Smoke. Ash. They were always screaming, before and after he came. But they weren’t screaming anymore.
He counted. One, two, three, four. Where was the smallest one? The one who moved like a shadow in broad daylight. The one he’d almost killed. Even so, she’d lived. He was glad.
A straggler made his way through the falling snow, and he roared. The straggler fell where he stood, a long black arrow at the base of his skull. He roared still, because there was no reason to stop. They were always screaming, even when they weren’t.
“Hey, big guy.” He pivoted where he stood and fell silent. She was walking towards him and he was waiting to see what she would do because he did not want to give her a reason to be afraid. But she was not afraid of him. Her shadow stretched before her in the noonday sun and cleared a path through the smoke and ash, lesser shadows fleeing in her wake.
“You’re okay,” she said. She was so close that he could touch her, but he never did. He had touched her once when he was angry and he did not want her to think he was angry still. He was never angry when she was near. “You can rest now.” He crouched down so that their faces were level, so that she knew he was listening. “We’re okay,” she said, and held her palm out to him, fingers outstretched. She was reaching for him so he reached back, slowly. She was so small. She should be afraid. But she wasn’t afraid of anything. Her hand was cold and he could feel his insides collapsing in on themselves, so he left. They could not see him in pain. He could not let Banner shame him.
“What’s it like, when it happens?” It had been only a few hours since the quinjet had touched down on Avengers Tower and Bruce had refused to rest, throwing himself into his work instead so as to distance himself from all that had happened at Von Strucker’s base in the Sokovian mountains. Failing to convince him to get some sleep, Natasha had followed him into the lab and silently watched him work for a time, but he knew that eventually she’d probe him for information as to his mental status. He just hadn’t expected her to ask him about something so personal.
Bruce shifted awkwardly in his swivel chair, scratching the nape of his neck as he turned to face her.
“I just want to understand.”
He knew he could refuse to answer - these questions of hers were never meant to be an interrogation, no matter how much they felt like one. But in the months since she’d become his bodyguard, he’d never once kept anything from her. It was only fair, of course - she was risking her life for him. It made sense for her to ask what a Code Green entailed, but he knew that the technical details didn’t interest her. She was trying to understand how it affected him emotionally, because she cared about him. Because she believed if she probed deeply enough, she could understand not only him, but the Other Guy as well. He would have to disabuse her of that notion. He turned to face her where she sat cross-legged in an adjacent swivel chair, uncomfortably close to his own.
“When it’s involuntary, there’s a lot of pain. It radiates outward from a point somewhere in my core and I’ve never once been able to reverse it once it starts, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying.” He shot her a significant look, remembering that time on the helicarrier, but her impassive gaze didn’t change. “I salivate as my vocal cords expand - that’s a reflex, you know, to expectorate more whenever there’s an irritant in your body. That’s why our mouths fill with spit before vomiting. My bone and muscle mass grow at a rapid rate to accommodate the girth of my torso. At this point, my consciousness is slipping, and being replaced with his. There’s usually not much I can control from that point onward, particularly if the transformation is involuntary. I do remember some things, though...bits and pieces, distorted by the Other Guy’s warped perception of the world. When it’s all over, it’s like surfacing from a bad trip, and sometimes I remember nothing at all. But lately I’ve found I remember more and more. If I transform on purpose, it’s painful but quick. Although my control is still very limited, before I go under, he sometimes listens to me. And sometimes, if he’s confused by something, he’ll sort of ask me about it, I think. I’m able to assume more control, briefly, to solve a problem or assess a situation. He’s jealous of his time in control, however, and seldom looks to me for help.” It was surprisingly cathartic, putting it all into words.
“Can you blame him?” He looked at her, askance, but her face remained expressionless and still. She was testing him somehow, he knew. But it was always best to be honest with her, so he gave an uncalculated reply.
“No more than I can blame myself, I suppose. We are the same person, after all, as much as it pains me to admit it. He’s a part of me that I’d managed to suppress for most of my life. An apotheosis of the rage I’d so long denied its day in the sun. But in the end, he is the only thing that kept me alive when I should have died. It defies explanation, really.”
She considered this, chin resting on her hand. “He’s changed since I met him. The Other Guy, I mean. At first he was all sulky and indifferent until Steve gave him orders or one of us asked him for help. It was easy to think of him as the Other Guy, then. But it wasn’t long before I couldn’t do that anymore. At first it was just little things I noticed - the way he scrunches up his face when he’s frustrated; the way he scratches the nape of his neck when he’s feeling out of place - he did that once, when I complimented him for making mincemeat of some HYDRA operatives. You do that all the time, especially around me.”
Bruce lifted a brow in consternation. “Natasha, I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you that it’s dangerous to anthropomorphize the Hulk.”
Her lips curled in an ingratiating smile. “But that’s not what I’m doing.” She got out of her chair and made her way around his until she was standing behind him. He tilted his head to look back at her and felt her hand lightly touch the small of his back. “He only ever touches me there, just as you do.”
“That’s...” He was at a loss for words and could feel a hot flush creeping up his neck, though there was really nothing to be embarrassed about. “When have I done that?”
“You and I are the shortest so we always end up standing next to each other in group photos. Everyone engages in the obligatory arms over shoulders pose but you always touch me in the place you obviously think is the least threatening. It’s cute.”
He had nothing to say to this that his thoroughly red face could not say for him, but she was facing away from him now, looking out over the city through the lab’s wall of windows.
“I think I understand him, Bruce. As well as, if not more than I understand you.”
“No, I don’t think you do. You can’t imagine what it’s like, all the light and heat and noise. It’s a heightened reality that dulls your intellect and cranks every neural input up to eleven. It makes you want to annihilate whatever’s in front of you because you’re drowning in a sensory flood and are too dull-witted to do anything different.”
Natasha ignored him, and her grip on the steel support beam in front of her slackened as the blank expression reflected in the window softened. “Do you know what he did at Von Strucker’s?”
“Besides murder everyone in sight?” She ignored this too, and turned to him with a steely glint in her eyes shining in the dim fluorescent lighting of the lab.
“He took my hand. I called out to him when it was all over and told him it was okay, we were okay, it was alright to rest now. And he listened.”
Bruce’s complexion was ashen, even in the pale yellow cast of the display screen glowing quietly behind him. She turned and took his hand again, placing hers over his where it lay limp on the lab bench and he remembered how she’d risen like a phoenix just to walk towards him, the smoke and ash parting around her.
She stood right at the edge, where the windows met the steel floor with nothing but glass separating her from the city below. Bruce was never able to stand that close without feeling queasy and he had a sudden, peculiar urge to pull her back from certain death in more ways than one.