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He wakes up in a crater, and maybe it says something about the state of his life that he isn’t even disoriented for long, that the feel of pebbles digging into his back and the rough grit coating the inside of his mouth tell him where he is long before he even thinks about opening his eyes. Beside him, Tony is sprawled out on his back, except it isn’t Tony right now, it’s Iron Man-- or maybe they’re the same.
Not everyone is like him. He forgets sometimes.
Tony calls him “Jolly Green” and “King Kong,” but he looks more wary than usual, and when Bruce figures it out he’s mortified. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Tony’s a terrible Ann Darrow, there’s also the little thing where normal people don’t kidnap their friends and drag them into craters in the middle of nowhere.
But he’s never been normal, not really, not even before the accident. He resolves to check Tony for bruises later, because the chances that Tony will take care of them himself or even notice them are fuck-all. He wants to apologize. The words won’t come, but he wants to. He should.
He doesn’t.
(His first thought, when he woke to see a body lying beside him, had been Betty, and jesus christ there is so much about that that he does not want to think about right now.)
---
It’s cold when he wakes, but the lights in the lab are on, which means he doesn’t spend half a minute floundering in panic because he can’t remember where he is. Part of him still expects it to be hot and muggy every time he wakes up; sometimes when it’s cold like this he gets confused, thinks he’s back in his lab at Culver, maybe, and then he spends the rest of the day hanging onto his control by his fingernails.
JARVIS calls him “Master Wayne” (because Tony thinks he’s so fucking clever), but he also discloses the location of Tony’s latest snack-hideaway, and Bruce steals an entire bag of cheesy crackers. It’s not comfort-eating, not really, it’s just that he misses his travels a lot sometimes, and he likes to remind himself that there are good things here, too. State-of-the-art lab technology. Hot showers. Cheesy snack foods.
He doesn’t see the note until he’s already opened the bag; when he reads it he feels almost shamefully stupid. Of course Tony’s not really trying to hide his food; if he wanted a hundred thousand bags of chips he could have them delivered here in a heartbeat. “Dear Snack Thief, i have no idea who you are but please do not touch my cheetos, OK??? WINK WINK. Also have some ideas about the gamma biomarkers project, need your input, come to workshop”
It should make him feel at home, like maybe he belongs here.
It doesn’t.
(He puts the bag back, still full, before he heads upstairs to bed, because it’s not that he enjoyed the idea of stealing, but at least it felt anonymous.)
---
He wakes up one day and Pepper’s back, sitting at the breakfast table with her fruit salad, just like she never left, and Bruce realizes, a little ashamed, that he hadn’t even really noticed she was gone. Next to him, Tony’s sitting up a little too straight, grinning a little too wide; his jokes fall flat and this feels nothing like the breakfast routine they’ve built over however-many-months they’ve been working on this weird, disjointed parody of a family. Clint and Natasha are quiet. Tony’s still trying with the jokes. Pepper shoots him a look that is equal parts amused and gently concerned; Tony’s smile looks like it’s about to crack around the edges, and Bruce thinks, oh.
The next few weeks are like the last few weeks, except Bruce notices things he didn’t notice before: Pepper doesn’t lounge barefoot on the living room couch, Tony’s drinking more. Bruce isn’t sure when Tony started coming to him all drooling and maudlin, but he does, and he puts his head on Bruce’s lap, and Bruce is pretty sure normal people don’t do this, but then he’s never been normal, and Tony won’t remember this tomorrow.
(Tony doesn’t say a word about Pepper, and Bruce doesn’t ask, just lets him drink and runs fingers through his hair until the lost look in his eyes is gone and he’s ready to smash bottles and try to redefine physics again.)
---
He wakes with the bright taste of metal on his tongue, the click of the hammer still echoing in his ears.
Fifteen minutes later he’s in his lab, pulling everything off the shelves, pushing armfuls of delicate equipment to the edges of the benches to make space for bottles and jars of amino acids, surfactants, organic compounds. The buffers go back onto the shelf marked “reagents.” The reagents go into the “solvents” cabinet, and the solvents end up on the floor next to the freezer. The next few days will be hell as he tries to reorient himself in what’s practically a new lab, but that’s sort of the point.
He’s not running anymore, but he forgets sometimes.
The next morning, Clint calls him “Freckles,” and nearly walks into the newly-moved spectrophotometer. “That wasn’t there before,” he says, but Bruce is too busy looking for the barium nitrate to apologize. “Wouldn’t have these problems if you just, y’know, left stuff where it was.”
“Shut up, dickhole,” says Tony, and hey, when did he get here? “Don’t question genius.”
“Well, Steve wants to know whether genius wants bacon. Does that count?”
He doesn’t find the barium nitrate, but Tony and Clint stick around until he’s tired of looking, bickering good-naturedly. Breakfast is good; by the end of it, he can almost taste the pancakes and maple syrup over the metallic tang still bright on his tongue.
(The barium nitrate never turns up, and that’s sort of frustrating and sort of a comfort; three days later, there’s a box of half a dozen bottles sitting on his desk, and he wonders why he even bothers.)
---
He wakes up in the middle of Central Park.
Everything feels like a dull ache, and he thinks he might be sick. All he can do is stay very still until it passes. Beside him, Tony could be a civilian napping in the shade. No armor-- the briefcase-suit is nestled in the grass beside him-- just jeans and a concert t-shirt from some band or another. He’s not asleep, but he’s pretending, so Bruce gives him a few minutes.
“Did I kidnap you again?” he finally asks.
“I don’t know that I’d call it kidnapping,” Tony replies after a while.
(And really, that’s answer enough.)
---
It’s the crinkling of the cheetos bag that wakes him, and he’s conscious of a vague sort of guilt before he’s actually conscious. Tony doesn’t say anything, just frowns and reaches around behind him to pull the crumpled bag out from underneath his butt. Out of habit, he takes a glance inside, but what kind of person would leave a lone cheesy puff behind?
On the TV, Adam and Jamie are strapping rocket packs onto a dummy’s feet to see if they can make him fly. “That’ll never work,” says Tony, leaning back and loosening his bow tie.
“Works for you,” says Bruce. “How was the gala?”
“Wouldn’t work without the stabilizers.” Tony gives no indication that he heard the second question. “Green bean,” he says, turning toward Bruce as though seeing him for the first time, “were you waiting up for me?”
“Just catching up on my popular science.”
“Uh-huh. Science, sure. His center of gravity’s way off, did these bozos even take high school physics?” He kicks off his shoes, wiggles his toes. “I keep expecting to come back and find out you’ve run away back to India or some shit.”
There’s the guilt again, and he hasn’t even done anything this time.
“Which, I mean, fine. Nobody’s keeping you here. But this is kind of nice. Or whatever. Right?” It’s so unlike Tony, so completely unlike him, that Bruce is suddenly uncomfortable, almost embarrassed. It feels a little like Tony’s just walked into the room naked, except Tony’s done that before; actually, that’s pretty much par for the course where Tony’s involved.
He says, “Sure,” because he can’t think of anything else to say.
(On the screen, the dummy tumbles head-over-ass a few times, looking as panicked as dummy can look, before crashing headfirst into the surface of the water. Bruce thinks he knows the feeling.)
---
His first thought upon waking is, Tony where’s Tony
His second thought is, There, he’s right there, it’s okay
His third thought is, This is becoming a thing.
A thing, like the furtive midnight kitchen runs that feel like stealing, like the intense need to rearrange the laboratory every couple of weeks, like the way he still gets nervous in rooms with too many windows.
Tony calls him “Big G” and doesn’t look as wary about this situation as he has in the past. He helps him brush the rubble out of his hair, cracks a few jokes, but mostly he looks concerned, like maybe he can read Bruce’s thoughts on his face.
(Maybe he can.)
---
He wakes up itching to blow something up, so he pulls on a sweatshirt and heads down to the lab-- not his lab, because he can never find anything and he keeps bruising his shins on the spectrophotometer. More importantly, exploding things with Tony is fun, but doing it by himself is just a little closer to “mad scientist” than he ever really wanted to be. (He’s aware that it might be too late. He tells himself that it’s probably okay as long as he doesn’t start cackling.)
Tony’s got his lab goggles perched on his nose and he’s welding to the blaring tune of guitars. “Shouldn’t you be all tucked into bed, Doctor?” he calls out, as the guitarist goes into a wailing solo.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he says, but he’s not sure Tony can hear him. “JARVIS? Could you--”
The song quiets, and Tony pushes his goggles back onto his forehead with the back of one sweaty wrist. “What’s wrong, big guy? Don’t like the music?” he asks, and Bruce thinks maybe he should have brought coffee.
But he’s here now. “Thought we could throw some chemicals on top of some other chemicals and see what happens.”
“Would you prefer some bhangra, maybe?” Okay, so maybe he shouldn’t have come. “Sitar? We could get some of that weird zen yoga shit. JARVIS, we have any of that weird zen yoga shit?”
“Something happen at the board meeting?” he asks slowly, rocking up onto his toes, fingers working nervously. He feels like the dumb kid called on in class-- except maybe he doesn’t, he’s not sure. He was never that kid until now.
“Maybe some Bollywood. You can do that goofy dancing, right? Sure you can. What do you want?”
Tony’s talking so fast that it takes Bruce a second to catch on to the fact that he’s supposed to answer this one. “I, uh. Thought we could. You know. Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”
The only response is a noncommittal grunt. Which is fine. This is how Tony communicates down here, most of the time. It should feel normal.
It doesn’t.
(He leaves under the pretense of going for coffee, except neither of them expects him to come back tonight.)
---
He wakes up in the wreckage of a warehouse. He wakes up in the splintered remains of a cabin. He wakes up in a roadside ditch.
He wakes up, he wakes, he--
He wakes up, and Tony isn’t there.
(If asked, he would have said it wasn’t possible to Hulk out again with such a short recovery period, but then, nobody can be right all the time.)
---
He wakes up thinking that this has to stop.
It takes him a minute to notice Natasha. He’s beginning to get used to the idea that he’ll never notice her until she wants to be noticed. It’s a skill he’s incredibly envious of-- but he’s not running anymore. He forgets sometimes.
She takes a seat next to his bed (standard white medical-center sheets, he’s woken up here often enough to know them by feel) and stares at him expectantly.
“What?” He’d like to give her whatever it is she’s waiting for, if it means she’ll go away and leave him alone. This bedside-sitting isn’t like her, and it’s making him nervous-- and nervous isn’t a good thing to pile onto the heap of things he’s already feeling right now.
She stares at him for another few seconds before she relents. “Stark is fine, in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t,” he says, and wonders whether she’ll call him out on the lie.
“Oh. Well. There was a malfunction with the suit or something, Cap pulled him out a few minutes into the fight.” She pauses, like maybe he's supposed to say something. "He was worried about you. Said you weren't used to waking up without your teddy bear."
“That’s nice.”
She shrugs. "His words."
Bruce huddles under the covers, thinking of the hot tropical sun.
“Here’s the thing about this house,” says Natasha, after a while. “When you do a google search for plane tickets to India, Tony knows about it.”
“I know that,” he says, more than a little defensive. He’d thought about finding an internet cafe, someplace he wouldn’t have to use his own Starkphone. In the end, it had felt too much like keeping secrets, like maybe he was actually planning on stealing away to a third-world country in the dead of night. “I was just curious.”
Natasha says, “Oh.”
She says, “Well, then.”
She says, “But I hear India’s nice this time of year.”
It should feel like a dismissal, like she’s telling him to leave.
It doesn’t.
(It feels like permission.)
---
He wakes up in village huts some days, in towns on others. Occasionally he wakes up in big cities like Mumbai, where he can watch the news reports on the clunky televisions sitting in shop windows. The Avengers are still doing their thing-- there’s speculation that the Hulk has been lost, or injured, or maybe he died, but mostly nobody seems to care all that much.
A small medical kit and a backpack with some clothes are all he carries with him now. It’s a relief to get back to a simpler life. Things are liabilities. He tried to explain that to Tony once, and Tony predictably didn’t get it. “Things are awesome,” he’d replied simply, like something couldn’t be awesome and a liability at the same time.
He’s been robbed a couple of times now, but the things in his medical kit are unlabeled specifically for this reason, and nobody really knows what to do with them. So mostly they just take his clothes, his hat, his glasses. Just things. Just objects.
He’s missed this whole zen feeling.
He hasn’t had an episode, not even a near-miss since he got here.
Probably it’s the fresh air full of fennel and garam masala. Or the way he can disappear into a crowd so easily here, despite his skin and his fluffy hair, because everyone ends up covered in the same dusting of grime after a while-- it’s the way nobody chases him down calling him green bean, batman, big G. Nobody wakes him in the middle of the night because their hands are shaking from too much caffeine and they need someone to thread a wire through a space the size of a needle’s eye-- no, just that, you can go back to sleep now, thanks.
India is great.
India is the best.
India is where he needs to be, for the rest of his life, forever.
(“Tony--”
”Shut up. This is how it works. You have a year of time off. Call it a sabbatical. Twelve months, Banner. And then you fucking come home, okay?”)
---
He wakes up surrounded by people.
The whole house is bustling about-- boiling water, fetching medicinal herbs-- and the tension is wound so tight it’s dizzying. The girl on the single mattress is raving, probably hallucinating by this point.
She was always going to die. He knew that when he agreed to treat her, but he’d thought maybe, maybe he could pull a miracle out of his little medical kit.
Now he’s tired and the little girl’s brother is shaking him awake because the fever spiked in the middle of the night. He doesn’t have the tools for this. He doesn’t have the meds. They’re miles away from anything resembling a city, and there isn’t time.
She’s not the first patient he’s lost. She’s not even the first child, but it never seems to get any easier, and Bruce begins to remember just how hard it can be.
There are other towns, other villages that need healers. He eats dosas with potato palya and sleeps on the sides of roads, and nobody wakes him or tells him to move. He meets a young woman in Nagpur who teaches him to make chapatis after he sets her husband’s broken leg. A man called Baldev in a village north of Hyderabad saves him from being run down by a bicyclist and invites him home for dinner, where he feasts on lentils and spiced cauliflower. Baldev’s teenaged daughter sits beside him, and when he notices the excited gleam in Baldev’s eye, he begins to make up stories about his wife back at home. And his three children. And his dog.
Outside Bangalore he finds a village beaten down by a plague. He settles in for the long haul. This is what he’s been looking for-- a place where he can really do some good. A place where he can stay a while... maybe forever.
They call him Videsi, a word he doesn’t recognize. There are children who run circles around him until he lifts them in his arms, where they tug at his hair with skinny fingers. There’s an old man who talks to him in the evenings as the sun is setting-- he has no formal training, but he’s got steady hands and sharp eyes. He’s helped Bruce save lives.
This is what he came here for.
(When he falls asleep, it’s beneath a canopy of stars, thinking that Tony would like it here if he could ever stop complaining long enough to just look at it.)
---
He wakes to the sound of honest-to-god roosters most mornings, and he thinks Tony would laugh and laugh if he knew.
Mostly, though, he tries not to think about Tony or New York or anything else of his old life. Thinking about them makes him feel guilty, like maybe this is some weird little vacation instead of the do-or-die situation it was the last time he was here. Can they tell? he wonders, watching the villagers as they pull water from their wells. Do they know?
One evening, when the sky is painted a brilliant orange-red and the smell of cumin lingers in the air, he asks the old man what Videsi means.
The man smiles at him, all crinkly-eyed, and says, “Foreigner.”
(He wakes each day surrounded by people, but really, he’s alone.)
---
One morning he wakes up thinking, twelve months.
It hasn’t been twelve months. It’s barely been eight. If he can wait just a little longer, then he’s going back under protest. Just a little longer, and then he can always leave again.
This should feel like a good thing.
It doesn’t.
(In his dreams, sometimes, he thinks he can hear a voice telling him to come home, Bruce. Come home now.)
---
The cab driver wakes him when they get to the Tower. The reunion is stilted, a little awkward. Of course he didn’t call ahead (not because he was afraid they’d tell him not to come, okay? That wasn’t it at all), and now half of them aren’t even home. They’re out seeing some horror film Bruce has never heard of starring some kid Bruce has never seen, and he feels old.
Steve calls him “Doctor” and makes an abortive move as if to hug him. Normal people don’t tense up like this when faced with physical contact, but Bruce has never really been normal. Steve, at least, seems to understand, and settles instead for a hand on his shoulder and a warm, “Welcome home.”
(It’s not that he’s disappointed, but it’s not Steve’s voice that he’s been dreaming those words in for months.)
---
He wakes and can’t remember where he is.
The next minute or so is one of the worst that he can remember, as he shivers violently, scrabbles his hands along the wall, tries to find a way out. He is genuinely surprised when he tries the door and finds that it’s unlocked, and then he’s standing in the hallway in his underwear in the middle of the night.
The best thing he can think to do is to throw on a pair of pants and take a bag of cheetos down to the lab-- Tony’s lab. His own has probably been dismantled by now, and even if it hasn’t, he can never find anything there anyway.
Tony calls him Shahrukh Banner and says, sounding unconcerned, “JARVIS says you’ve been freakin’ out.”
Bruce shrugs and holds out the open bag of cheetos like a peace offering, except they’re not at war. “Snack?” he says-- and they’re not blueberries but they’re something.
But he remembers half a second before Tony says, “I don’t like being handed things,” and now he’s standing shirtless in a lab holding a bag of cheesy corn puffs to a man who isn’t going to take them, and he thinks maybe this whole thing was one big mistake.
(Do normal people feel this way, like strangers in their own skin?)
---
Weeks later, Bruce wakes up in the middle of a crater, aching down to his bones.
It’s a distantly familiar feeling.
Above him, birds are flying. A dropping splatters close enough to his head that he can hear the wet slapping noise it makes when it hits the ground.
Beside him, Tony says, “Gross.”
And it’s started again. Jesus, he just got back and now he’s gonna have to run-- somewhere else, this time. Not India. Maybe Brazil. He had some good times in Brazil. Brazil could be home.
“Shut up,” says Tony.
“I didn’t--”
“I could hear you guilting.”
“Guilting?”
“Yes,” says Tony. “You were guilting like a professional guilter.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re a rotten liar, big guy.” He crosses his legs at the ankle, puts his hands behind his head-- he could be sunbathing on a beach.
There’s a long silence while Bruce considers the possibility that he’s going crazy.
Then Tony says, “You didn’t kidnap me. I followed you here,” and Bruce is sure of it.
“Why?”
Tony shrugs. “You passed out, you know, like you do. So I lay down to make it look like we’re just two bros chillin’.”
Bruce doesn’t know what to say. It’s the middle of the afternoon and he’s lying naked in a crater shaped like a giant and this is not normal.
“Just two bros chillin’,” Tony continues, “which we totally are.”
(Bruce draws the line at Tony removing his pants in solidarity, but by the time he’s able to stand they’re both laughing like idiots, and Bruce feels like a real person for the first time that he can remember.)
---
He wakes up in a field, in his bed, in his lab. Sometimes he wakes up cold and confused; sometimes he wakes up too warm and thinks, has it been twelve months yet? before he remembers.
The next few weeks are like the last few weeks, except Tony comes to see him in his lab and brings spicy dried peas, mango strips, corn chips in some weird curry flavor that they both decide are pretty gross. One day he brings a whole samosa, freshly fried, and hovers over Bruce’s shoulder until he gets an invitation to try a bite.
Bruce is pretty sure normal people don't do this, but he feels more normal in these moments than he's ever felt in his life. So one day he asks, over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, “This is nice, or whatever, right?” and maybe what he means is, am I forgiven now, or even, am I the only one who’s--
His heart is beating so fast it feels like running, but he’s not running anymore.
Tony calls him “Bruce.”
(And maybe that’s answer enough.)