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Bruce wrote his first letter to Betty a week after he went into hiding. He didn’t send it to her, it was too much of a safety breach, and he wasn’t entirely sure she would even be happy to hear from him after everything. But it was a comfort to him; just being able to write her name on paper, like a part of them was still connected, like a part of her was still with him.
He wrote her dozens of letters. Each one he would fold into an envelope and then tuck away into the side pocket of his backpack. They became a diary to him, he wrote to her about the highs and lows, when he encountered the fantastic sights you only ever found on the road, and when he was so low it was all he could do just to reach out to someone, whether they were aware of it or not.
He wrote of how he missed her, how he wanted her with him, how he wished she could be with him. He told her about his regrets, that if he could do it all over again he would have told her he loved her more than he did. That if he could, he would kill the Hulk forever and that he’d do it all for her.
On his darker days Bruce would think how with each passing day Betty became more of a concept and less of a person to him. He remembered her dark hair and severe blue eyes, her thin lipped mouth that held secret smiles only for him, but he couldn’t remember the smell of her, or how she felt curled up next to him.
At first, sleeping alone was the hardest thing. When he lay there on a number of lumpy threadbare mattresses with the unfamiliar cacophony of life passing outside his open window. Whether it be the passionate heated shouts and screams of the Mediterranean, or the Jeepneys and traffic of the Philippines, or the night markets of India. He would lie in each country and the emptiness of the bed, the lack of familiar warmth beside him, would eat at him like a void.
But then gradually, he got used to it, being alone. Although sometimes he felt that was worse. At least missing someone reminded him that at one point he had someone.
Over time, he began to stop missing Betty completely. The first few months of running, her name would be on his lips almost constantly. He’d utter it like it was his only constant; it was always there on the tip of his tongue. He’d shout it when he woke from nightmares of seeing her fragile face beaten and bloody, he’d say it in answer to unspoken questions in his mind. Who was he doing this for? Betty. He was alone, no, he had Betty. Betty, please be ok.
There was one point, somewhere in Mexico, when Bruce had been struck down with food poisoning so bad that it damn near killed him. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely keep down water for weeks. All he could do was lie in the dingy little rented room and stare at the ceiling fan, with cold sweat soaking his clothes and freezing his bones, and wonder how long it would take them to find him if he died. Would they find him? The whole time, he spoke her name over and over like a mantra, tasting it like the bile that rumbled in his stomach. Betty Betty, Betty…
Weeks later, when the fever finally broke and Bruce was able to drag himself from the fetid mattress and eat his first pieces of solid food, he scribbled out another letter to Betty. His hands and chin were sticky from fruit juice and he shook so badly the words were no better than chicken scrawl. But he had to write to her, the compulsion to tell her, anyone, that he was ok, he’d survived and he would be fine, was overpowering.
When you use a word too many times, it loses all meaning, and as months turned to years, Betty as a person became abstract. Her face began to unravel until eventually all he had was her name but he held onto it because it was all that he could keep from his old life. She’d likely moved on and left him long behind. Maybe she thought of him on quiet nights when she had nothing to distract her, but otherwise he was nothing to her, an unpleasant part of her past that would have moulded her and changed her, but couldn’t hurt her any more.
Betty’s name was always a part of Bruce’s present; her name was his like she could never be again.
Sometimes it’s not so bad, he’d tell her in his letters. I’m learning languages and seeing so much. To them I’m just a backpacker. It’s nice, I think you’d like it here… Bruce had to stop and think to remind himself where ‘here’ was.
There was one letter Bruce didn’t write to Betty. Just to the left of the middle of nowhere, a few hours outside of Juneau, Alaska, Bruce sat in a shack with a pen held awkwardly in gloved fingers. He was numb even with all the layers. He wrote slowly and methodically, his eyes red raw and his chapped lips blue. This was an open letter to anyone who may find him, if they found him. I’m sorry, he wrote, for everything. You didn’t deserve this. Bruce didn’t have much, never had. What he did have had been seized by the army long ago but in that letter he signed his life away. To whoever may find this. The gun felt heavy under the layers. He kept it close to his skin, so the frost didn’t get to it. The cold metal leeched the warmth from him, leaving a hollow coldness in his side. To whoever may find me, I’m sorry.
But Bruce never died.
He woke up some time later, how long? He’d never know. He woke with a splitting headache and a trail of tacky blood on his chin. He woke up tonguing an ulcer on the roof of his mouth that hadn’t quite healed and the taste of metal still on his lips. He woke up knowing that he’d failed even at that.
He was poorly clothed after the change and the air was bitterly cold. But the Hulk hadn’t gone far from the shack; Bruce thought maybe that was intentional. The Hulk’s driving force was survival and he believed the Hulk to be smarter than people gave him credit for, than Bruce gave him credit for. Bruce returned to the shack feeling numb inside and out. He wrapped himself in spare clothes, layers of thick fur lined coats that were never quite thick enough to chase the chill away. He sat at the desk and he held his aching head in his hands and he stared at the letter with angry, teary eyes.
The open invite, To whoever may find this, felt like it was mocking him now. He took the letter and shoved it in his bag with all the letters to Betty and tried to forget that he ever wrote it.
He went to Calcutta, India. Tried to make something of himself. He dedicated his time to helping people because no matter how bad it got for him, if he could still help someone, maybe he wasn’t such a lost cause. He was good at it, damn good. Sometimes people turned up at his clinic having travelled for days just to reach him. Farmers without a penny to their name tried to pay him through crops and livestock. Bruce never accepted, he didn’t have much but he made it a point never to take from anyone who had even less.
He worked on grounding himself. He trained in Akido and learned to meditate. He’d spent so long running from the Hulk and it always came to nothing, now it was time to face his counterpart.
I think he’s just frightened. He confided in a letter late one night. Sometimes I can talk to him and it’s like talking to me when I was a child. I think that’s all he’s ever wanted, Betty. Just to be listened to.
For the first time in a long while, Bruce felt like he was beginning to live. It was a broken shadow of a life, but it was something, it was enough. He found a dog, or rather, the dog found him. A stray that wondered the alleyways close to his clinic. He spotted it a few times, its nose pushed deep inside bags of garbage, an oily sheen of grime on its black coat. One day he tossed it a scrap of food. The dog followed him home, licking its chops. It sat outside the clinic door for days, wagging its tail whenever it saw him. They were playing a waiting game, him and the dog. Sooner or later one of them was going to have to cave and in the end it was him.
The dog was friendly, but it wasn’t tame. It spent its days wondering the streets living the life it had always known. But every night it slept at the foot of his bed, its head resting on his shin and its tail beating a gentle staccato on the sheets. Bruce never officially gave it a name but when anyone asked he replied ‘Vira-lata’, a word he’d picked up in Brazil.
And then S.H.I.E.L.D showed up and in hindsight Brue supposed it was inevitable, of course they’d been watching him. He’d been left alone for too long not to have been marked by someone. He supposed he should be grateful that it was them and not Ross and that they’d allowed him the respite that they had.
He left the dog with his neighbour and he went with them to New York, back to a world of traffic and noise, cell phones and computers, a world where people functioned on reserves of stress and coffee. When Bruce first set foot on the tarmac from his plane, he breathed in a lungful of the fresh air and remembered just how much he hated it here. It was bad for him, held bad memories, and already he could feel the warning pressure of The Other Guy rattling at the back of his mind.
Just get in, do the job and get out again. That became his new mantra.
He kept close to Natasha as she showed him the base, introduced him to the faces of S.H.I.E.L.D and the faces of what was supposed to be his team. A trained assassin, a soldier from the yesteryear, and a demi-God, it sounded like the opening of a bad joke.
And then there was him.
Tony Stark, he knew the face behind the name, but until that point he knew nothing of the man behind the ‘face’. Dazzling, egotistical, and brilliant. He was terrible and nothing Bruce was used to dealing with and he loved him for it. Bruce loved the fact that Tony wasn’t scared of him, he didn’t treat him like he was fragile and only a few raised words away from breaking. Tony Stark reinvented himself out of nothing for no other reason than he wanted to change. Bruce only wished he had the same ability.
The day it was over, the day that they won, Bruce sat in the rubble that had once been Third Avenue. His belly was full with shawarma and now he just felt a deep tiredness, the kind that ached behind his eyes. He desperately needed somewhere to hide out for a few days, a hole to crawl into and just sleep.
The jangle of a bell and the screech of a door on bent hinges said that he wasn’t alone anymore.
Footsteps behind him and then a warm body easing itself down to the curb, a huff of air, Bruce didn’t have a turn his head to know that it was Tony.
“Well then,” Tony said. “I think we broke New York.” He toed at a warped Chitauri helmet that lay nearby. Nudging it away so it spun in the dirt and broken glass.
Bruce watched it. He snorted but he didn’t speak, he was too tired to make small talk just then. Dusk was starting to fall which brought with it a chill in the air. The streets were dotted with people who were only just beginning to hesitantly step out into the world, taking in the destruction that was left behind.
The rest of their team still sat in the restaurant behind them. With food in them and the knowledge that they’d won, their adrenaline had turned to exhaustion and giddiness. Thor’s laughter drifted out to them, a real belly laugh, as deep and booming as they’d expected it to be.
“What’s next?” Tony asked.
“Sleep,” Bruce responded. He picked up a slither of glass from the tarmac, turning it over and over in his calloused hands. “And lots of it.”
“And after that?”
Bruce knew what Tony was angling for, he wanted him to stay, and honestly, he was tempted. Sometimes he even caught himself thinking Why Not? Why not just stay? But then for every moment that he found optimism, another part of his mind, the darker part that reminded him daily of just how alone he was, would remind him of every reason why he shouldn’t. Let me count thine ways.
“I’ve got to see a man about a dog.”
Tony looked at him; he sucked on his teeth and shook his head. “You’re extremely weird. You know that, right?”
Bruce laughed, he tossed the slither of glass at the helmet, it landed two inches shy of going in.
“There’s a few things I need to tie up in Calcutta. A few things I need to set straight with S.H.I.E.L.D too.”
Tony tossed a pebble at the helmet. It hit at an angle and skittered out and he threw two more. “About Ross?”
Bruce, who had been angling his next shot, froze; he glanced at Tony. “You know Ross?”
Tony hummed. His third pebble hit its mark and he mimed the cheering of a crowd. “I dealt with him in my less scrupulous days. Some of the missiles that went your way back in the day, the really good shit not that crappy Hammer Tech, those may have been Stark Tech, sorry about that.”
Bruce blinked at the helmet, palming a pebble. Eventually, he shrugged, what was a few missiles amongst friends, really. He threw the pebble and it went in with a satisfying thunk. One all to both sides.
“I spoke to him,” Tony confessed. “Just before…” he waved a hand around, encompassing everything. “…all of this. Some half-baked scheme by Coulson. It’s a long story involving me somehow buying a bar, but the important thing is we’ve got you on the team and not Blonski.”
“Wait, they wanted Blonski?”
Tony shrugged. “They didn’t want me either initially, don’t take it personally.” He tossed a pebble into the helmet, 2 – 1 to Tony. “Listen I wanted to thank you for saving me back there.”
“It wasn’t me, it was the Other Guy.” Bruce paused. “But thanks I guess for believing in me. In both of us.”
“Never doubted you for a second.” Tony dusted his hands off on his undershirt; he rocked back, dropping his hand on his knees. “I’m just going to throw this out here. But maybe, once you’ve finished whatever it is you need to finish in Calcutta, if you’ve got nowhere else to be, maybe you could come back.”
And there was that optimism again, why not?
“Maybe,” Bruce said finally. “If there’s nothing else.”
That seemed enough for Tony. He slapped Bruce on the shoulder, squeezing once, and then he climbed to his feet, helping Bruce up with him. Together, they stepped back inside, joining their team.
When Bruce returned to Calcutta, he wasn’t certain what he felt.
The muggy air greeted him with warm familiarity and along with it came the familiar smells he had grown so used to. But it felt different this time. Even as he set up shop back in his one-room clinic above the laundrette. Even after he spent his first few nights in his old bed with Vira-Lata sprawled over his feet, something felt wrong. He felt like there was something missing.
Finally it came to him, after the second week, he realised he missed it all. He missed the people he’d met in New York, the friendships he’d formed in those few weeks saving the city together. Most of all, he missed the brilliant walking contradiction that was Tony Stark.
Loss had become a familiar part of his life and until then, he thought he’d become pretty adept at handling it. But this time around, he was struggling. It felt senseless and unnecessary and he longed to return. But truthfully, what was waiting for him back there?
Once the severity of the threat on the world was gone, how welcome would he even be? He would be the same square peg he had always been, he’d found a life that suited him here, all he needed was to get back to it. Focus on helping people who needed it, focus on what he was good at.
And if there was anyone who was a gifted pretender, it was Bruce, and so he almost convinced himself that he was fine and he was still where he belonged.
Until one day, a few months after his return, when he was tending to a young girl with a rash and a raging fever. A young man in a suit climbed the clinic steps, knocking awkwardly on the side of the wall to announce his presence.
Bruce recognised the outfit immediately as S.H.I.E.L.D and he greeted the agent with a curt nod, neither rude nor welcoming, just wary.
“Doctor. Banner, I am Agent Lea.”
“To what do I owe the honour?” Bruce asked somewhat wryly.
“A letter addressed to you arrived at S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters. Director Fury insisted I bring it to you personally. He wanted to make certain you received it.”
The agent, obviously still green, brandished the letter in both hands like he was holding the Holy Grail. Bruce glanced at the handwriting and there was a familiarity to it that made his heart clench. He took the letter, careful to control the shake in his hands and thanked Agent Lea. He pocketed it, not daring to read it just then.
Agent Lea hesitated, not certain if his job was over. When Bruce nodded, he all but saluted, then turned and pounded his way down the steps and out of the clinic. Bruce watched him leave in a moment of stillness. Gradually, he turned back to the young girl waiting patiently on the exam table, her thin legs swinging back and forth.
Bruce smiled at her, throwing himself back into his work, even as he was acutely aware of the stiff card of the envelope in his pocket.
He didn’t open the letter until that evening. And when he did, he did so in dim candlelight during a city wide blackout. His fingers felt hot where they touched the paper as he unfolded the letter.
Dear Bruce,
I’ve been sitting on this letter for weeks now. I wasn’t sure if I should post it, I’m still not sure. If you don’t want to hear from me then I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I just had to write to you.
I saw you on the news, well I saw him. He’s everywhere now Bruce, I just have to look outside and I see him in the newspaper or on a poster on a wall. Do you know there’s graffiti of him by the bus shelter I wait at on my way to work? It’s a pretty good likeness, I have to say, though they haven’t gotten his eyes right – your eyes. You’re a hero now, Bruce. Both of you are.
So long has passed that I’m not even sure what to say to you, how do you even begin a conversation like that? You just can’t. But I’m happy, Bruce. I guess I should start there. I hope you don’t take that the wrong way, I’m not saying it to try and upset you. But I know that all I’ve wanted in all this time is for you to be happy, so I assume that perhaps you’ve been wanting the same for me. So to answer your question, I am happy. I’ve got a good life now and a lot I’m thankful for.
I still think about you a lot. At first it was too painful. Everything that happened, especially that last day, for a long time I shut it all out. I shut you out and I’m sorry Bruce. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. A part of me will always be ashamed of that. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.
These days I can think about you and be happy. I tell everyone about you. I don’t tell them about the Hulk of course, but I tell them all about a smart, kind, brilliant man I used to know. I think Jeff is probably sick of the amount of times I mention you. That’s another thing I meant to tell you. Bruce, I’m married now. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, but he’s a good man and we’re happy together.
There’s so much I want to ask you, I don’t think ‘how are you’ will cover it, but still, how are you? Are you happy in your life now? Where are you? What will you do now?
I hope you’re ok, Bruce, I really do.
Love Betty. X
P.S: I wasn’t sure where to find you so I just addressed this letter to S.H.I.E.L.D in hopes that it would reach you.
Bruce sat alone in the candlelight for a long time reading the letter over and over. Even after the electricity returned and the shadeless bulb flickered back to life he sat there, frozen. A range of emotions coursed through him, happiness, fear, sadness, but most of all, relief. He didn’t realise just how heavily reliant he’d been on Betty’s wellbeing. To read about her happiness, written in her own distinctively elegant cursive... He felt like a weight he’d forgotten he’d been carrying had suddenly been lifted and the buoyancy was somewhat overwhelming.
Finally, after hours of sitting there, once he had all but committed her words to memory, he pulled out a pad of lined paper and a pen and he began his reply.
Dear Betty,
It was a shock to hear from you, but a good one. I’m glad you’re happy, I really am, it’s been the only thing I’ve ever wanted for you.
To answer your questions. I am fine. Truthfully. It took a while to get there and for a while, obviously, I wasn’t. But I am now. I’m in India, the same place I’ve been for a while before S.H.I.E.L.D found me. I’ve been helping a lot of people over here and generally trying to make myself useful, it seems to work most of the time.
Congratulations on getting married. It’s hard to convey emotion on the page but rest assured that is said with nothing but earnestness. What we had was a long time ago now and it’s good that you’ve been able to move on. Although I will say one thing. Jeff? Really? You really married someone called Jeff? Well it’s a step up from a name like Bruce, I guess.
In all seriousness though, I’m happy for you, Betty. You deserve it. Don’t feel bad for anything that has happened, it wasn’t your fault and I have never blamed you.
As for what I’m going to do now…
Bruce hesitated. With pen poised in hand, he stared down at the page and frowned. Just what was he going to do?
In truth, the decision had already been made, it had been made the second he set foot back in Calcutta and realised that everything felt different. But making the decision and admitting the decision were two very different things indeed.
And now he was going to admit it to Betty.
That’s a very good question. I’m not too sure myself, but I have a friend back in New York I thought I might pay a visit. You might know of him. His name is Tony Stark.
Take care of yourself, Betty. My best regards to you and Jeff.
Love Bruce.
P.S: Jeff though. Seriously?