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Bruce Banner was four years old when he first ran up to his mother, seated with his father at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, and tugged on her elbow happily, saying, "Look, Momma, I'm a bear!" He grinned and scrunched his face at her in a child's exaggerated attempt to seem scary, and she smiled indulgently at his high-pitched growl and fondly ruffled his soft brown curls. Then her smile froze and she watched, dumbstruck, as her little boy started growing soft brown fur and sharper teeth and little black claws.
She sat where she was, still in shock, as her husband dragged Bruce into the hallway, and she tried to ignore the sounds of a belt hitting flesh, and a child's shrill cries.
*
As Bruce grew up he learned quickly to control any desire to change forms, no matter how intense the pull was sometimes. His father made it abundantly clear what the consequences would be of letting anyone find out about his child's secret. (Monster. Freak.) No teacher or counselor ever saw the bruises - they always healed in just a few hours. And sometimes that enraged his father all over again. Sometimes his mother tried to stop the worst of it, but then dad would just turn to punishing her for bearing him a monster instead of a son.
*
He had always been smart (it had been another thing for his father to hate, that he was intelligent instead of a dumb beast), and he excelled in college. It was an opportunity to try and forget growing up (mom trying to take him and leave - dad coming home early - mom's blood on the pavement - going to live with Aunt Susan), an opportunity to learn and discover. Bruce set about mastering nuclear physics, and when he wasn't studying the secrets of the atom, he studied himself, too. In careful seclusion he explored the ability that had made his childhood a misery. He was able to transform into a brown bear whenever he wished, and the urge to do so was very strong during a full moon, or when he was exceptionally angry, but the control he'd learned very young never failed him. He couldn't begin to guess the hows or whys, but of course there had to be a scientific explanation. It wasn't exactly something he could write his thesis about, however, so for the time being he focused on physics.
And then he met Betty.
Beautiful, brilliant, kind Betty, who smiled at him despite his tempers and insecurities and who shared his opinion that an evening spent on the couch next to each other reading scientific journals was better than a night spent at the cinema. One night, after a year of dating, apprehensive and half-ashamed and more than half-convinced it was a terrible idea, Bruce shared his secret with her. He shouldn't have worried, of course. Betty was fascinated and delighted, and thought he was special (not a monster), and on some cold winter nights after that, safe in her apartment or his own, he would let himself change and she would curl up, warm against his side, and Bruce felt happier than he'd ever thought he could be.
*
He shouted at his lab assistants to halt the countdown, and ran out of the bunker. Bruce's heart was racing fit to burst as he finally reached the teenager who'd somehow gotten himself onto the gamma bomb's testing grounds. He grabbed the kid, hustling both of them towards a trench as fast as he could, and he had only just shoved the kid to safety when the bomb went off. Heat and pain washed over him and he was convinced that he was dying before the world went black.
He woke amazed, in an infirmary, and couldn't believe his good fortune. But when night fell, he felt the familiar tug of the full moon - only this time he couldn't fight it, and he felt the change being ripped out of him no matter how hard he resisted, and the last thing he remembered before he lost himself again, this time in fear and a roaring green haze, was pushing through the concrete walls of the building as if they were made of wet paper towels.
*
He'd heard in reports later that people had died when the base infirmary collapsed around the hulking behemoth that had trampled it. And that people had died when the base was mobilized against the monster. They had been soldiers, to be sure, people who'd willingly signed up for a life of danger and some of them had probably been trying to kill him too, and maybe he wouldn't have cared before he met Betty and she'd taught him to have a heart again, but it tore at him. And now he watched the news, with ever more fanciful artist's interpretations of "the hunt for the Hulk" (most of them based on rumor and entirely wrong - he didn't have five-foot claws for one thing, they were much shorter than that), in a dingy diner along route 85 and hoped that the single call from a payphone south of Albuquerque wasn't all he would ever have to remember her by. But he suspected it was. His name and an old ID photo were all over the news, and every time the army tracked him down and started shooting, he always changed again into the thing that was no normal bear, but huge and shaggy green and more like a hunched half-man, half-bear, and he didn't always remember what happened after if the fear and rage were too strong, and there could be no going back or getting Betty mixed up in all of this.
Bruce finished his terrible coffee and runny eggs as quickly as he could without seeming unduly suspicious, and moved on.
He hoped that Betty would move on, too.
*
He kept moving, out of the U.S., then from country to country, doing what he could to get by, always making certain he was someplace rural and isolated when the moon rose full and he couldn't stop the change. As long as no one shot at him during those times, he lost only his body to the transformation, not his mind, and he did his best to avoid farmers or herdsmen, but sometimes rumors followed him and he was forced to move on again. Then the spy Romanov found him in Kolkata - "You've been more than a year without an incident in a populated area" - and convinced him to help SHIELD with some crisis.
*
Bruce felt very strange, working with Tony in the lab on the helicarrier. Here he was, with a man who had admitted straight out that he knew Bruce's secret, and was somehow completely comfortable working in the same room as him, talking to him like he was a normal fucking person and not a disaster waiting to happen. He felt safe around Tony. Calmer, more stable. Betty was the last - the first - person who had been so genuinely accepting of Bruce despite knowing everything, and he'd thought he could learn not to miss that. He'd been wrong. Bruce savored the feeling he got from being around Tony, happy enough that when Tony poked him with an electric prod he almost, almost, made a joke about 'poking sleeping bears'. He couldn't quite bring himself to say it, since this was all still too new, but he found himself hoping desperately that this new friendship could last just a little longer before the inevitable moment when he would have to flee again.
*
It was two days after the battle over Manhattan, and Tony couldn't wait to show Bruce around the labs in Stark Tower. Bruce had slept in a guest room in the tower nearly the entire intervening period, and Tony had had to restrain himself from popping in every twenty minutes to check on the man. He'd tried to content himself with having JARVIS monitor Bruce, pestering his AI for updates on Bruce's condition until even JARVIS seemed to think Tony's anxiety could stand to be reined in, and pointedly informed him so. Tony had grumped about it until the physicist-slash-rage-monster had finally awoken and emerged to eat everything he could find in the kitchen, where he accepted Tony's jokes about "coming out of hibernation" and being "hungry as a bear" with decent humor. At one point, however, Tony reached out to snag a piece of toast from the plate Bruce had collected for himself, and Bruce surprised him by slapping a hand down in front of the food and growling at him. Tony's immediate reaction was a delighted grin, but Bruce looked completely abashed and covered his eyes with one hand, and Tony had to tease and prod him out of embarrassment.
Tony's patience was rewarded, once he got Bruce down to the intact R&D levels, with Bruce's wide-eyed appreciation of his equipment (Tony certainly made the obvious jokes), and by something else. Whenever Bruce was particularly interested in a piece of tech, or a cutting edge analytical device, he walked over to it and stood up on his tiptoes and craned his neck to stare down at it. Tony was convinced that Bruce didn't realize he was doing it, and Tony found it absolutely charming.
*
It was Clint who later mentioned to Tony that that was something bears often did when they were curious about something, though Tony had no idea what made Clint an expert on bear behavior, and said as much. Clint just grinned at him and suggested Tony put a couple of small pillars up in the tower's common areas and see what happened. Tony stared at him with some suspicion before leaving, muttering to JARVIS about possibly remodeling. And in fact, shortly after, Tony did remodel the living areas. He'd been planning to anyway, he announced to no one in particular, to make room for the whole team if they liked, and if there were suddenly things like slim decorative pillars and potted plants around, and if the halls and doorways were wider and the decor just happened to be in soothing earth tones, well, it was just because he liked to let the spies and super-soldier feel like they had cover and wide lines of sight, and neutrals were fashionable this year. The spies and super-soldier nodded solemnly at this, and Bruce seemed quietly pleased at all the plant life. And Tony was once again rewarded a few days later with the sight of Bruce stepping off the elevator from his guest floor and absentmindedly walking over to one of the pillars, and honest-to-god tree-rubbing his back against it like something straight off of the Discovery Channel. Tony thought to himself that it was pretty much the cutest goddamn thing he'd ever seen.
*
Steve and Clint were swapping stories in the common area's kitchen, Steve leaning against the counter and Clint perched on top of the refrigerator, one leg dangling while he gestured with his hands to embellish his story. Clint was recounting a time he and Natasha had been under heavy fire in Mexico City, and he glanced across the room as Bruce meandered in, nose buried in a Stark tablet and muttering something about neutrinos. Bruce was clearly not entirely awake, bleary and unshaven, glasses somewhere unknown, and with one side of his hair in hilarious disarray from his pillow. He hadn't noticed either of the other people in the room and was shuffling towards them - well, Clint figured, probably actually towards the coffee pot - with single-minded obliviousness. Clint didn't pause his story, but watched Bruce's progress without seeming to, amused. If the groggy physicist didn't alter his trajectory, then... yep. Bruce blundered right into Steve's broad back and Clint couldn't hold back a laugh at the expression of complete astonishment on Bruce's face. Steve turned to try and offer his apologies while Bruce fumbled and dropped the tablet and backed away in confusion, straight out the door he'd come in through. Steve picked up Bruce's tablet and looked between Clint and the open doorway, clearly trying to figure out what had just happened, while the archer held his sides and laughed.
Bruce came back in a little later, looking very sheepish, with one hand covering his eyes, while he tried to apologize to Steve without actually facing him. Steve simply handed Bruce the tablet and patted him comfortingly on the shoulder.
*
Truthfully, it hadn't taken a lot of talking on Tony's part to convince Bruce to stay in the tower. Bruce had expected to be set on escaping back into obscurity, but he was lonely, he realized, and here he had a chance to possibly build a new life for himself with people who had seen the monster and were willing to be in the same room as him. Even Natasha, who looked at him with her chin raised slightly in challenge, and informed him that since she didn't blame Clint for Loki's influence she certainly wouldn't blame Bruce for the same thing. And besides which, she added with the barest hint of a smile, there were meaner bears in Russia. The army wouldn't be coming into Stark Tower to hunt him down, Tony assured him, and also showed him plans for a reinforced room if he ever wanted to relax for a bit as "Smokey the Hulk," or "spend the full moon somewhere that isn't crawling with mosquitoes." And Thor, before he had left, had clasped him into a one-armed embrace and begged the favor of a sparring match when next he returned to Midgard, and Bruce couldn't bring himself to say no to that beaming golden face.
Bruce realized that he was willing to try being part of this team of people who all departed from 'normal' in their own ways. And maybe their confidence in him would inspire confidence in himself. And if it meant that eventually he felt comfortable enough to let Tony coax him into letting "Grizzly Green" spend the nights of the full moon in the entertainment room with the team instead of down in his reinforced den, well, everyone seemed happy to have him around, and it was safe enough.
And if it meant that, every so often, Tony got JARVIS to drop the tower living areas' temperature uncomfortably low enough that Tony could insist, "The heating's broke, Bruce there's only one way to save us!" Bruce could roll his eyes but smile a little, and could let himself change and Tony could curl up, warm against his side, and Bruce could feel happier than he'd ever thought he could be again.