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Betty's desperate, thundering roar is what calls them from sleep, pulling Bruce inside out and sending Hulk running. Betty runs with him, casting orange and red over the walls of the mansion and the slow trickle of water in the stream. They stop what feels like thousands of miles away, Hulk's pained growls echoing over tree-tops and deep into the cluster of neurons where Bruce rests, panting at the strain.
Betty tucks his head into her neck, forehead pressed to the slope where muscle bulges into shoulder. She hums like their mothers used to and the steady jump of her pulse against his nose melts him down until Bruce is bruised and broken in her arms, breaths coming wet and thin. She cradles him, wrapping him in a warmth he hasn't felt since before the crack of his mother's skull on the granite counter-top.
Loki gives a questioning growl, cheetah spots rippling into the thick black fur of his prefered wolf form. He settles on the ground as Bruce hums softly, touching his fingertips to the vibration of Betty's throat as she starts to speak with a voice that's hers but also Hulk's, infrasonic and beautiful and slowly seeping away until she's just as pink and just as naked as Bruce.
Elizabeth Ross, the cellular to Bruce’s atomic, the master manipulator at the master level of all living things.
Bruce wonders if she could alter him like he can’t alter himself, fill the gape of his chest cavity where Tony used to be where he should be where Bruce wants to clench his fingers and tug sever his spine or maybe weave it into a filling like feathers in a pillow with new cells, ones that don’t ache with every breath.