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“That freak is a menace!” “It’s dangerous!” “It should be locked up!”
“Hey now, the Hulk is a hero, and he deserves to be treated just like anyone else.”
The image of the conference from earlier that afternoon paused on Tony Stark, hands lifted in a placating manner over the crowd of angry reporters. “That was the scene earlier today at the press conference called about the topic that has been heatedly debated for the past several weeks, all revolving around the sixth member of the crime-fighting team, The Avengers—” The image of the conference cut away to the newscaster, along with an image of the Avenger in question being displayed in the top left corner. “—the Hulk.” The headline below faded into being: Hulk: Man or Monster? Hero or Heathen?
“I hate biased news stations.”
Five pairs of eyes left the news broadcast on the television screen and went over to Tony, in time to catch the disgusted look on his face. “I can’t believe this is even an issue, that this is still an issue.”
“Agreed,” Thor commented before he turned his glare back to the screen. “Berserkers on Asgard are celebrated; why should the Hulk be held in a different regard?”
“They’re not wrong.”
The gathered Avengers’ eyes all shot to Bruce, who was staring at the television. Images from the incident in Harlem were playing while two people debated on the issue. With each passing image of destruction, the physicist shrunk a little more into the cushions of the sofa.
“You can’t be serious,” Clint said, disbelief in his voice.
Bruce offered a shrug with forced casualness. “I can’t really blame them for feeling so strongly.”
“They’re debating whether or not you are an animal,” Natasha summarized bluntly, her eyes locked harshly on the doctor.
That made Bruce avert his eyes from the screen to stare at the floor. “I’m not exactly human… It’s a fair debate.”
“Do you actually hear the words coming out of your mouth right now?” Tony demanded. “What’s the point of us going out there and arguing for you if you’re on their side?”
“I’m not saying they’re right, Tony,” Bruce stressed. “I’m just saying they’re not wrong.”
==
“Has anyone seen the Hulk?” Captain America asked.
A week had passed, and the Avengers had just defeated another villain just outside of Manhattan. It was a relatively simply battle; there were just a lot of bogeys that had needed to be taken care of. They were reconvening on the ground, awaiting SHIELD to arrive for clean-up. Captain America and Black Widow were already on the rubble-filled road, the unconscious villain at their feet, when Thor and Iron Man landed next to them, Hawkeye in tow.
“I haven’t seen him for the last half-hour or so,” Clint told the rest of the team. “Last I saw him, he was chasing a group of rogues down 31st Street.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard him in a while, either,” Natasha commented. The remark made them all pause; none of them had heard the Hulk’s roars recently. The goliath was always extremely vocal when he was smashing bad guys.
“Something’s not right,” Steve said lowly. He turned to Thor and Tony. “Do a sweep of the city; Thor, take downtown. Tony, uptown.”
The two nodded before they took to the air again, in search of their missing teammate. The silence over the battlefield was beginning to be broken by the sound of sirens, now that the all-clear was given. They would have still been able to hear the Hulk if he roared, but no such luck.
After five minutes of radio silence, growing more and more tense by the second, Thor’s voice came through. “Man of Iron, I require your presence.”
“On my way,” Tony said before he zipped off toward downtown, his sensors searching for the Asgardian.
He found the demigod down on the road, several blocks away from where the majority of the fighting had been. The crater of broken asphalt was a clear signal that the Hulk had been there, but there was no other sign of the big guy. A few nondescript government cars drove by down the road a block over; it looked like SHIELD had finally arrived for the cleanup.
Thor was kneeling next to the crater when Tony landed, a dark look upon his stormy features. Before Tony could ask what he had spotted, his HUD zoomed in on a shred of fabric within the crater. If they hadn’t been sure that the Hulk had been there before, they were positive now: that was fabric from Bruce’s pants. “Well,” Tony began as he surveyed the rest of the crater, “he was definitely here.”
“My concern lies not in the crater,” Thor said.
When Tony turned to look at the demigod properly, Thor gestured toward the ground next to the crater, where lying in the dust—
Tony felt the air in his lungs freeze before he breathed a curse.
Amidst the rubble were four tiny tranquillizer darts, their bodies empty and their tips coated in blood.
As Tony began to pace around the hole in the road to keep himself from shooting repulsors at the nearby buildings in a fit of rage, Thor began to study the nearby area. There was no sign of either the Hulk or Bruce Banner beyond the crater. The surrounding area, aside from the rubble of the fight, held no clue as to their friend’s location.
“Guys, he’s gone,” Tony growled into the communicator on their private line, drawing Thor out of his darkening thoughts. “Someone tranqed him and took him. He’s gone.”
==
After a week of working tirelessly, using every resource they had, they finally had a lead. Their only clue was a small trace amount of the sedative found within one of the tranquillizer darts, enough to run an analysis through JARVIS. When that came back with no results, it seemed like they were back to square one.
How Fury caught wind of what was happening, they’ll never know. All that mattered was that he discretely offered to let Stark and the AI run their findings against the SHIELD database. That in itself had been thoroughly surprising; Fury had only replied that while SHIELD couldn’t officially assist them in finding Dr. Banner, he was more than willing to help under the table.
Clint and Natasha had narrowed their eyes at that comment. Once Fury was gone, the two agents immediately got to work on a hunch while Tony and JARVIS began to run their data through the top-secret files Fury had willingly allowed the billionaire access to.
Within three hours, they had a rough location. In the emergency meeting, Tony said that the sedative used to subdue Bruce had a nearly identical formula make-up to tranquillizers developed by SHIELD technicians, but had properties of nearly all of the sedatives the US Army (namely, General Ross) had developed in the past decade or so.
It was then that Natasha and Clint began to explain the World Security Council. Not many members of SHIELD knew of their existence; Fury did, as did Coulson and Hill, as they were the only ones to have a chance to speak with the Council. More often than not, they spoke directly to Fury. Natasha and Clint knew of them, but had never been called to speak to them. The Council was the next step higher than SHIELD. If Fury couldn’t officially aid them, the Council must have given him orders. At least, that was the hunch.
Turned out they were right.
While Tony had been going through their database for chemical formulas, Natasha and Clint had been surveying security files, files normally so classified that even Stark couldn’t break into them. It was there that they found their information:
The Council had been in contact with General Ross.
The two groups of information painted a grim picture. In light of the recent debates, it appeared that the Council sided with Ross and the media: the Hulk was a menace and should be locked away forever. When it looked like the general public’s favor was beginning to side with the notion of him being a hero, they took matters into their own hands.
“So,” Thor began in a low voice, the thunder in the background echoing the rage in his voice, “we now know who has taken him. Do we know where he was taken?”
“We have JARVIS running a search right now,” Clint answered.
“I have three possible locations at the moment,” the AI piped in. “The search is approximately 87% complete.”
“Lay it on us, J,” Tony all but growled. “Get us visuals of each location. Break into satellite feeds if you have to.”
A screen instantly appeared on a nearby wall, and the five quickly gathered around it, watching Tony easily manipulate the information. Hardly a minute later, Tony stepped back to survey the map. “All of the locations are out west. JARVIS we can narrow it down on the way.”
“Everyone suit up,” Steve commanded, his hard eyes locked on the screen. “We’re leaving in five.”
As they began to depart, rushing off to gather their weapons and armor, Thor called Mjölnir and his armor to him. “It is time to bring Bruce home.”
==
As soon as they had a location, somewhere in the air over Indiana, both Thor and Tony elected to fly the rest of the way themselves. It had already been a week, roughly one hundred and seventy hours too long for Bruce to be gone, to be in the hands of the likes of General Ross and the Council. They were both faster than the jet, and the sooner they could reach Bruce, the better.
The team raced across the country, the two flyers miles ahead of the jet, and within an hour, Thor and Tony arrived at the facility hidden deep in the desert in Nevada. “Made it,” Tony said to the rest of the team via the communicator in his helmet.
“Send us visuals,” Steve’s voice returned. “Hang back until we get there.”
Thor shot a look over at the suited man next to him. “You surely cannot expect us to stand idle,” he boomed to the captain, thunder rumbling overhead to echo the demigod’s sentiment. “He has been held for far too long already.”
“We are ten minutes out, Thor,” Clint’s voice broke in. “Just hang tight until then—”
“Yeah, not happening,” Tony said as he watched Thor take off at the compound, sending the visuals over to the jet. “If Fabio’s going in, so am I. Meet you inside.”
Thor didn’t even bother slowing down when he reached the building, Mjölnir held before him. The hammer met the roof of the building with explosive force; the momentum carried him through the roof as the surrounding brick turned to pebbles. A great ringing noise filled the air, followed by the sound of a heavy impact where the demigod landed inside.
Alarms immediately began to wail.
Without shaking off the dust or stray pebbles raining down on him, Thor stood and quickly took in his surroundings. The room was windowless, but three of the four walls were covered with screens. A uniformed man in a swivel chair quickly spun around, drawing his gun from his belt. As the weapon was pointed at the intruder, Thor grabbed the man and flung him against the wall without screens. The impact knocked the man out cold.
“Well, they know we’re here,” Tony commented casually as he flew in through the hole Thor had created and landed. He glanced around. “Thor, buddy, you picked an awesome room to crash into.”
Thor watched as the suited man strode forward to the screens lining one of the walls. Even if he couldn’t see the engineer’s eyes, he knew they were scanning each of the screens in turn. Tony pushed aside the chair, letting it roll into the unconscious man on the floor, before he honed in on one of the screens. “J, pull up the blueprints for the building and find the camera that goes to feed twenty-four.”
The demigod turned to look at the screen in question and felt his blood boil. His grip on his hammer tightened and a great crash of thunder shook the facility. “What is this?”
“Security footage,” Tony answered in a tight voice.
The image displayed on the screen was a far-shot of a man strapped to a table. A variety of machines surrounded him, as well as a number of armed men in uniforms. Despite the graininess of the video, it was clear that the figure on the table was Bruce.
“Got it,” Tony said, bringing Thor’s eyes away from the screen. Tony stepped away from the walls and gazed over at the demigod. “They’re holding him in the center of the building, two floors underground.”
“Lead the way,” Thor growled.
The two moved to the door, but paused when the sound of thundering footsteps sounded out beyond the door, barely loud enough to be heard over the alarms. “Right, personnel,” Tony grumbled under his breath.
“Hang on.”
Thor and Tony glanced behind them as the sound of the jet engine roared, clearly audible over the roaring alarms. Clint dropped down through the hole in the ceiling. As he stood, he whipped an arrow out of his quiver and stepped sure-footedly toward the door. With deft fingers, he pulled the arrowhead from the stem and knelt next to the door.
Steve landed in the room.
The archer slid the arrowhead under the door, and with a flick of his fingers, it scooted out into the hallway. He remained silent as his index finger settled over one of the buttons on his bow.
When the sound of approaching footsteps became loud enough to easily be heard over the alarms, Clint pushed the button.
There was a sound like shifting sand, followed swiftly by coughing, and ended with the sound of bodies hitting the floor.
“Thor,” Clint said as he stood up and pulled the door open.
“Aye.” Thor filled up the doorway, swinging his hammer and sending a gust of wind away from the room, carrying with it the airborne sedative Clint had fired.
“Natasha not coming?” Tony asked.
Steve turned a look on Tony, and then on Thor. “Someone has to keep the jet ready, since our cover is blown.”
“I do not regret my actions,” Thor declared as his hammer came to a rest.
“I don’t regret them either,” Natasha said over the communicator. “I’ll keep you posted on what’s going on outside the compound and won’t let anyone in or out.”
“Good,” Steve said before he turned back to Tony. “Take the lead. If there aren’t doors, you and Thor make them. Barton and I will handle any rogues in the way and cover you.”
Tony fired up his thrusters and looked over at Thor. “Let’s go.”
The two took off down the hall, Clint and Steve on their tail. The group traveled unhindered for a few minutes.
As Tony and Thor turned a corner, they found four guards all standing at the ready to fire.
As soon as Steve turned the corner, he hurled his shield toward a wall. The shield bounced off the wall and collided with each of the men’s knees. The team never lost their stride as they continued to run, even as all of the men gave a shout of pain. The shield bounced off the last guy into a wall before bouncing back into the super soldier’s hand. They jumped over the men with newly broken legs and raced on.
Before they were able to tear around the next corner, one of the men managed to fire a shot at the intruders.
Clint glanced over his shoulder when a ping sounded behind them. His eyes immediately locked on the tranquillizer dart sticking out of the wall. “They’re firing tranqs at us.”
“Guess they’re more worried about the Hulk breaking out than us breaking in,” Tony suggested before firing his repulsors at the next wall. Thor swung his hammer against the surface, and the wall instantly caved.
The group raced into the next room, quickly dispatching the personnel inside. “Where next?” Thor asked.
Tony remained quiet for a moment as he stepped further into the room. The alarms continued to blare, and thundering footsteps were approaching again. Tony pointed his hands at the floor and fired two continuous beams of energy. “We’re dropping down a floor now,” he said as he began to turn his body slowly in a circle, bringing the beams with him as they cut through the floor. “There’s an elevator shaft not far from here, and we can fly the rest of the way to the right floor.”
Clint and Steve kept their eyes locked on the giant hole into the room, waiting for the incoming storm of guards to arrive.
As soon as Tony cut a hole through to the room below them, he slipped down into it. “Clear,” he called to the rest of the team. Thor jumped down, followed swiftly by Clint, and then Steve. The archer fired an arrow into the ceiling of the room above them, setting off a smokescreen that would remain in effect for at least a minute.
“This way,” Tony said as they raced from the room. Within seconds, they came upon the elevators. “Thor.”
With a grunt, Thor slammed his hammer into the closed metal doors. They immediately flew off the wall and into the back of the shaft before falling into the darkness with a ruckus.
The four flew down the shaft, Clint and Steve both with Tony while Thor brought up the rear.
The floor where they were keeping Bruce was teeming with guards, all having assembled when the alarms started going off. The team fought their way through the officers, who had switched back to using bullets instead of sedatives meant for the Hulk. Within a few minutes, they had made it to the room where Tony said they were keeping their missing friend. The doors to the room were heavy-duty metal, complete with a set of locks and other security measures in the wall next to it.
They soon had taken out everyone in the surrounding area with minimal damage. They were all breathing a little heavier than normal, but were none the worse off. Steve looked back at the doors leading to the final room. “Thor, can you break through those doors?”
Thor didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he began beating against the door with everything he had. The first flew blows seemed to have no effect, but on the fourth, the metal began to bend ever-so-slightly.
There were shouts down one of the halls, signaling more guards were on the way.
Tony approached the keypad next to the door. “We may actually need the door,” he murmured under his breath as he studied the keypad. He turned to a panel next to the contraption. “Hey Clint, can you get this open?”
Clint turned and scrutinized the panel for all of a second before he whipped out a blade from somewhere on his person. His fingertips ran lightly over the edges of the panel, and then came to a stop. He jammed the blade under a raised lip of the panel and easily pried the metal from the wall, revealing a mess of wires behind it.
The engineer immediately got to work, JARVIS working furiously to distinguish which wires went to what. A piece of armor lifted on his shoulder and a tiny laser shot into the mass of wires, cutting a few and leaving others intact. “Alright, Thor, give it another go.”
Thor obliged, and with a might swing, the hammer slammed against the door.
The door flew open under the force of the blow, but thankfully remained on its hinges. The four quickly ran into the room.
“Thor, shut that door and keep it shut!” Steve called over the alarms as he, Clint, and Tony all began to take out the armed men and scientists in the room.
The demigod forced the massive door shut before he placed Mjölnir against the bottom of the door, serving as a doorstop that only the worthy could move. Thor quickly took stock of the situation with the other three. They looked like they had it under control, so he allowed his eyes to scan the remainder of the room.
His eyes fell upon the mass of equipment across the room, and he instantly recognized the setup from the fuzzy image back in the security room. He took off toward it, completely ignoring everything else.
Once he rounded the equipment, his eyes fell upon the naked body lying on the table and his blood ran cold.
There were wires running everywhere, running between Bruce’s limp body to the various machines surrounding him. Lines of some clear grey-ish colored drugs were attached along at different points of his body: wrists, elbows, neck, thighs. Restraints were placed along his body as well, sometimes interfering with where the chemical was being pumped into his body.
Bruce himself was instantly recognizable, but also completely foreign. He looked like he had lost weight in the past week, weight that he really couldn’t afford to lose. His ribs were more visible than before, even half-hidden under restraints, tubes, and wires. There were bruises all over his body, the worst of them surrounding the needles where the chemical was entering his body.
It physically pained the demigod to look at Bruce’s face. His hair was limp against his glistening forehead, which was beaded with sweat from either the chemicals or a fever. A week’s worth of stubble was spread across his chin, and his lips were chapped and cracked, like he hadn’t seen a sip of water in ages. Worst of all were his eyes. It wasn’t the dark circles under them, dark enough to be bruises, but the fact that his eyes were half-open. Bruce was awake, in whatever semi-conscious state he was in, but he was awake.
Thor breathed a low Asgardian curse under his breath before he carefully leaned forward until he was in Bruce’s line of sight. “Friend Bruce,” he called gently.
Bruce’s eyes sluggishly rolled in Thor’s direction, but there was no sort of focus within his gaze and no other reaction.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Thor lightly ran the backs of his fingers along Bruce’s cheek. “Bruce, we are here to set you free.”
The heavily drugged man offered no sort of response to either the touch or the words. He simply remained lying limply against the table.
Thor got to work on the restraints holding his friend down, tearing through them easily with his anger-fueled strength.
By the time the other three found them, Thor was carefully peeling back the jagged metal of the restraint across Bruce’s neck, revealing the needles pumping drugs into that area. All three of them paused, like Thor had done, to take in the horrible sight.
“I really wish we had run into Ross on our way here,” Tony snarled at last.
Steve struggled to swallow the lump in his throat. “We’ll worry about him later. We need to get Bruce out of here.” He glanced behind him at the gigantic door. “Tony, we need you to seal that door. Weld it shut, if you can. Thor, we need a direct route to the sky. Clint and I will get these wires and stuff out of him. Natasha,” he said into the radio, “we found Bruce. Be ready for takeoff.”
“On standby,” her voice came through.
Tony didn’t say a word as he blasted off and returned to the door, immediately getting to work. Thor took a step back and allowed his eyes to linger on Bruce, hardly noticing his other two teammates pulling the needles from his skin. The man didn’t even react when some of the puncture wounds began to bleed. He hardly heard Clint mutter a curse and step back, and he then only vaguely remembered Bruce’s toxic blood. “Steve…” the demigod heard himself say.
“I’ve got gloves, Thor,” Steve said as he looked frantically around for some sort of bandage to use.
Thor ripped his cape from his shoulders and offered it to the soldier. Steve nodded his thanks and tore a few strips off, tying them around the bleeding wounds on his arms. “We’ll take proper care of this on the jet; this’ll have to do for now.”
“Thor!”
The Asgardian turned to Tony, who had welded one full side of the door shut; it would have to be enough to hold the group of guards on the other side out.
Thor strode away from his teammates to a safe distance and called Mjölnir to him. His enraged eyes and hammer shot to the ceiling. Sparks began to dance along the runes before the bolt of lightning sliced through the building to find the hammer. As soon as the bolt disappeared, leaving a supercharged Mjölnir in its wake, Thor fired the bolt of lightning back through the hole he had just created, back out of the facility and into the night.
“Alright, let’s go,” Steve called to his team. “Natasha.”
“Ready,” she responded.
Tony and Thor returned to where Bruce was lying. “Thor,” Steve began, “take Bruce. Tony.”
“Right,” the engineer said as the demigod gingerly wrapped Bruce in the remains of his cape and lifted him into his arms. Despite the deadweight, Bruce weighed practically nothing to Thor.
The group raced to the hole leading to the outside, but not before Tony snagged a medical bag of the grey drugs that had been pumping into the physicist. Thor tightened his grip on Bruce, who hung limply in his arms, and began to swing Mjölnir. Tony took his grip on Steve and Clint.
As soon as Thor flew off with Bruce, he heard the repulsors of Tony’s suit fire up. He didn’t bother glancing down at them, nor at Bruce. Instead, he kept his focus on the path before them as they rushed past floor after floor, and then finally, out into the open night air.
Bullets whizzed by them from personnel, but their shots were wild. Thor and Tony flew toward where Natasha had the jet in hover, back already open and waiting for them.
As they landed on the ramp, bullets began to ping against the metal overhead. They rushed into the body of the jet, Steve’s shout of “Go!” sounding over the jet engines.
Natasha lifted the ramp and immediately took off. Had they not been prepared, the force of the acceleration would have knocked them off their feet.
As Clint rushed to the front of the jet for the first-aid kit, Thor gently laid Bruce down across one of the benches that lined the sides of the jet. His eyes were closed now, and he was just as unresponsive as he was back in the facility; at least he was unconscious now.
“Cap,” Clint said and tossed the kit to the soldier before taking his seat next to Natasha in the pilot’s seat.
Thor took a step back to let Steve patch Bruce up and nearly bumped into Tony, who was pacing. The engineer hadn’t lifted his faceplate on his helmet yet, nor did he seem like he would anytime soon.
“Tony,” Steve said without looking up from where he was wrapping gauze around Bruce’s wrist, “can you keep track of Bruce’s vitals?”
The armored man had stopped pacing at the sound of his name and turned to look at the limp man lying across the bench. He remained silent for a moment longer. “It looks like they pumped him pretty full of sedatives,” he offered tersely. “His heartbeat is really low, as are all of his other vitals. But they’re steady.”
“Keep an eye on him,” Steve said as he stood. He stripped off his gloves and tossed them in a bag under one of the seats, along with the cotton balls and gauze used to clean up Bruce’s bloody wounds. “Clint, Natasha, are there any SHIELD doctors you trust nearby?”
“No,” Natasha answered. “They’re all on the helicarrier.”
“Forget SHIELD,” Tony growled. “We should take him to the nearest hospital.”
“Radioactive blood, Tony,” Clint said without looking away from the sky beyond the jet. “SHIELD doctors are the only ones who have the means to handle that.”
Tony growled again, but didn’t offer a counterargument.
“We can get to New York in three hours,” Clint continued, softer than before. “We’ll call half an hour out and let them know what’s going on.”
As they were discussing hospitals and doctors, Thor took a seat on the bench next to Bruce’s head. The man showed no signs of stirring, no sign of waking up. The demigod carefully brushed the limp hair that had fallen over Bruce’s eyes away from his forehead; there was no sign he even felt it.
==
Forty-five minutes later, the hull of the jet was silent and somber. No one had said a word once they had all agreed to keep a rotation on watching over Bruce while he was in SHIELD medical.
Steve and Tony had sat down across from Thor and Bruce. The engineer still hadn’t taken off his suit, as he was keeping track of Bruce’s vitals, but Thor could watch Steve’s eyes. They would focus in on Bruce, and then lose their focus as he got lost in some thought.
Thor could hardly blame him, though. He felt like he was doing the exact same thing.
Forty-five minutes, there was nothing but their thoughts.
A minute later, the silence was shattered.
Tony perked up a little in his seat, making both Steve and Thor’s eyes shoot immediately to him. “His heartbeat is picking up,” he said. The raw fear in his voice told them that this was most definitely not a good thing.
Before any of them could say something, tremors began to shoot through Bruce’s body. A pained whimper escaped from his throat as his brow furrowed and his body curled in on itself.
Thor placed his hands on Bruce’s shoulders to keep the man from shaking off of the bench. “Bruce?!” he called.
The worst of the shaking suddenly stopped, but the physicist remained curled painfully tight. He inhaled a tiny gasp of air, but when another didn’t follow, they realized he couldn’t breathe.
Tony let out a quiet string of curses before he practically shouted at JARVIS to find the nearest hospital to their current location. Two seconds later, Tony was yelling for Clint and Natasha to head southeast. He turned to Thor. “You need to fly to that hospital and let them know we’re coming. JARVIS will give you directions. Tell them he has a blood condition.”
Bruce was able to pull in two tiny gasps of air.
“Now, Thor!”
Thor broke away from the physicist and called Mjölnir to him. Natasha had already let the ramp down, and with a rapid cycle of swings, he was out in the night air once more. He followed the instructions JARVIS gave him, and within ten minutes, he was landing in the parking lot of the hospital, next to the emergency room.
In a rapid sprint, the demigod made his way into the ER and up to the desk, ignoring the awed stares of the people in the open-aired waiting room to his left. “Please, I require your assistance,” Thor said hastily to the young woman behind the desk. “My friend was forcefully taken a week ago and has been heavily drugged with an unknown substance for the past seven days. He and the rest of the team are on their way here, and he desperately needs a healer. He has a blood condition, so please be cautious. His— He cannot breathe, and he’s shaking, and…”
He trailed off when the woman didn’t react beyond simply staring at him. He exhaled in frustration and leaned heavily forward on the desk. “Listen!” he boomed, the command punctuated by a rumble of thunder.
That seemed to snap the woman from her awe-induced daze. She jumped, along with the entirety of the people in the waiting room, and quickly apologized. Thor rapidly recounted everything he had just said, and the woman informed the doctors and nurses of what was about to happen.
Not five minutes later, the sound of the jet engines rumbled into being, and Thor ran ahead of the series of nurses out to see the jet landing in an empty part of the parking lot. The group rushed over as the back opened to reveal Iron Man with Bruce’s body in his arms. The man was still trying to curl in on himself, shaking and struggling to breathe.
Tony put the physicist down on the stretcher the nurses had brought with them, and the hospital workers rushed him back into the hospital with the remaining Avengers in tow. They left the rest of the team in the waiting room with the gaping other people. All they could do now was wait.
==
Sunlight began to peek in through the hospital room window, causing Thor to momentarily look away from the prone man on the bed out to the parking lot below. The jet was still down there, where he knew Natasha, Clint, Steve, and Tony were all having a teleconference with Director Fury on the situation.
It had taken roughly three hours before one of the doctors had come out to the waiting room with an update on Bruce. It had taken that long to get Bruce stable enough to get him moved to an actual room. The doctor had explained along the way that they had done about all they could do. The case was completely bizarre, as they were working with drugs that should have killed a human being a hundred times over, if Tony’s crude makeshift-lab analysis of the grey drugs were accurate. There wasn’t much the doctors could do without risking the health of everyone else in the hospital, and they didn’t have the tools to safely handle Bruce’s irradiated blood.
When the doctor had opened the door to their stricken teammate’s room, Thor had immediately bristled at what he saw. There were a number of machines surrounding Bruce’s body, much like the setup from the facility they had just rescued him from. His eyes were drawn to the horrid-looking tubing going into Bruce’s mouth.
Before he could demand what they had done, Natasha calmly explained what the ventilator was doing, and how it was breathing for Bruce when he couldn’t do it on his own. The doctor explained everything else they had done for the unconscious man on the bed for Thor’s sake before he excused himself.
It had been three hours since they had been allowed to see Bruce. Thor had promised to stay with Bruce while the others worked out the transportation to SHIELD with Fury, Coulson, and the medical team aboard the helicarrier.
Thor looked away from the jet and back to his friend lying limply on the bed. His eyes focused on the machine breathing for Bruce and listened to one of the other machines beep along with Bruce’s steady heartbeat; the repetitive cadence was reassuring in its own respect, but it still deeply pained him to look upon his friend.
In the bright fluorescent lights, Bruce’s pallor was even paler, making all of the bruises that lined his skin stand out like white against black. He could now clearly see every little mar against his previously sun-kissed skin, from where the needles punctured his body to the bruises that looked suspiciously like fingertips that had grasped deeply into his skin. He wasn’t sure if the man’s hair was greyer now than it was the last time he saw him, healthy and whole, or if it was just his imagination. The lines of tubing now running into his arms carried pain killers and fluids that the man desperately needed, as the doctor had told them that he had been devastatingly dehydrated. The pain killers would keep him drowsy, which was probably for the best.
At least the nurses had rinsed the week’s worth of sweat and grime from his naked body before putting him in a hospital gown.
In the time the Avengers had been admitted into the room, Bruce hadn’t so much as stirred. Only the machine helping Bruce breathe had any sort of responsibility for the man’s lifting and falling chest.
Thor broke off from his thoughts when he heard the machine monitoring Bruce’s heartbeat pick up pace ever-so-slightly. He looked to find Bruce’s eyes fluttering open. They were glazed with exhaustion and drugs, lacking energy and focus, but they were open. Well, half-open, but that was still something to be rejoiced.
Thor moved to stand, and as the sound of shifting fabric became audible between the beeps, Bruce froze. He moved his head as if to glance over, but immediately paused his efforts with a wince. A terribly shaky hand lifted from the mattress to go to the contraption at his mouth, the motion pulling at the IV line.
The demigod carefully grabbed Bruce’s arm before he could tear out the needle and start bleeding, trying desperately to ignore how thin the appendage felt in his grasp. The action made Bruce violently flinch, which garnered another wince that was accompanied with a muffled whimper of pain.
“Bruce, you are safe,” Thor hastily reassured his friend over the frantic beeping of the machines. The words didn’t register to the man on the bed, as he continued to struggle against the Asgardian’s grip, sluggishly turning his head despite the obvious pain he was in as he moved the tubing at his throat with the motions.
Thor released his arm to gently hold Bruce’s face and stop his head from moving. Bruce’s eyes opened again, his focus fighting against all of the drugs in his system. “Bruce,” Thor said quietly, looking straight into Bruce’s completely brown eyes and looking past the wetness that had collected in their corners, “my friend, you are safe.”
Whether the words actually registered or if he had recognized Thor was up for debate, but Bruce stopped struggling. His eyes tried so hard to focus in on the Asgardian’s face.
Thor used the opportunity to keep speaking. “You are no longer there, dear friend.” His thumbs began to move on their own along Bruce’s cheekbones. “You will never be taken there again, nor will we let you be taken again. On my honor, I shall never let this happen to you again.”
The calm of the moment was broken when the doctors and nurses rushed into the room. “How on earth can he have woken up already?” the demigod heard one of them wonder aloud.
“It matters not,” Thor answered without moving. “He is awake, and he is in pain.” He was still staring down into Bruce’s eyes, his thumbs still running patterns against his face and keeping his friend calm.
Thor carefully pulled away and reluctantly stepped back to let the doctors in, but he remained at the head of the bed. Bruce blinked sluggishly before his eyes began to search the room; when they found Thor, they remained there.
The demigod offered a small smile and placed a massive hand on Bruce’s shoulder. A wave of some strong emotion went through Thor as Bruce’s eyes closed at the grounding touch.
The tension in Bruce’s shoulders loosened when the doctors gave him another dose of pain killers, and Bruce promptly went back to sleep.
The nurses and doctors filed out of the room once the man in the bed was safely slumbering again, leaving the head doctor behind with Thor. “Thank you for calming him down,” he said as he took notes on Bruce’s vitals. “It looked like he had tugged at one of the IV lines.”
“It is nothing,” Thor replied as he took his seat once more. “He is not fond of hospital settings at present.”
There was a light rapping at the door, making the doctor and the demigod glance away from each other to the entrance to the room. Steve stood in the doorway, still in his Captain America uniform, but with the cowl pulled back.
The super soldier forced himself to tear his eyes away from Bruce to look at Thor. “Transport ought to be here within the hour,” he said, and then glanced over at the doctor. “Is there anything else that needs to be done before then?”
The doctor put Bruce’s charts back down on the nearby counter and gazed at his patient. “We can get him set up on a different ventilator; he is breathing on his own again, but he should be kept on oxygen.” He turned and looked between Thor and Steve. “We can get that taken care of. I can speak with the medics picking him up, too, if that’ll help.”
The hospital worker then excused himself and exited the room, leaving Steve and Thor alone with their unconscious comrade.
Steve looked back over at Bruce, eyes taking in everything that Thor had memorized in the past three hours. “You had to calm him down? He woke up?”
With a long exhale, Thor sat back in the chair. “He did wake up, aye, but he panicked. I believe he recognized me, but he was not able to focus his eyes. It is hard to say.”
The soldier nodded to himself, and then stepped out of the way when a group of nurses returned with the doctor and a new machine. “We’re taking the tube out of his throat now,” the doctor explained.
The two Avengers simply stood aside to let the medics work.
==
It didn’t take long before they decided they wanted Bruce in the Tower and not on the helicarrier. The transport from the hospital to the SHIELD aircraft had been seamless. Coulson himself came with the jet to overlook everything. Steve had ridden along with Bruce and the agent while the rest of the team rode back on the jet they had flown in on.
They hadn’t been on the helicarrier for more than five minutes before they knew they were taking Bruce home with them. As soon as they had landed, the medics had started to move Bruce not toward the medical wing, but somewhere else.
“Oh, hell no,” Tony immediately snarled as he stepped in the way of any progress down the hall. “He is not going to wake up in Fury’s damn cage.”
Coulson had reappeared then, with a different SHIELD doctor in tow, and quickly diffused the situation. Still, negotiations were rapidly made: Bruce would just get a check-up in the medical wing, and then he, the team, and a doctor of Natasha’s and Clint’s choosing would all go straight to the tower and set Bruce up there in his room.
Throughout the heated discussion, Bruce never stirred.
The entire team stayed in the room during the examination, never once leaving their unconscious friend’s side. Before long, they were all packing back into the jet and within the hour, they were landing atop the tower.
The team and the doctor quickly got Bruce set up in his room with the medical equipment surrounding his bed, keeping the fluids and the painkillers going. The heart monitor was set up and the oxygen mask remained firmly in its place over Bruce’s nose and mouth.
Once the unconscious man was settled, Tony took the remaining drugs from the bag he had grabbed for a more complete analysis in his labs. The others set up a rotation to stay with Bruce, and while Natasha took a seat in the desk chair she had dragged over to the side of the bed, the others scattered.
They were all running on very little sleep, but despite how the exhaustion weighed down on his shoulders, sleep eluded Thor.
==
Close to twenty hours passed in nervous anticipation. Natasha’s, Steve’s, and Thor’s shifts sitting at Bruce’s bedside had gone silently by with no sign of activity. The doctor moved back and forth between his patient’s room and Tony in the lab as the engineer’s analysis of the drugs began to come through.
The earlier examination of the grey drug had been accurate; the stuff was so potent that it could easily kill a person one hundred times over and still deliver a nasty punch to person 101. The difficulty in the analysis was how Bruce’s irradiated body was reacting to the drugs and how quickly his body was fighting to get it out of his system. Bruce’s physiology was already a thing of science fiction; there was no telling how his body was fighting the chemicals in his bloodstream.
One thing was for certain, however, and it was that the Hulk’s influence in the entire situation was minimal. Bruises that would have normally disappeared within half an hour were still as livid as ever.
Had the Hulk been conscious, the marks would have been gone by now, and Bruce would probably have been on his way to a quick recovery.
So, after twenty hours of nothing but a steady heartbeat and steady breathing, it was clear that the Hulk was just as affected by the drugs as Bruce was, if not more so.
It almost came as a relief, then, during that twentieth hour when JARVIS’s voice interrupted the tension. Almost being the operative word, of course.
“Dr. Banner has awoken.”
Steve, Natasha, and Thor had been gathered in the living room, each trying to distract themselves with very little success. At JARVIS’s interruption, they all jumped to their feet and moved quickly through the corridors toward Bruce’s room.
They weren’t expecting the scene that greeted them.
The chair that had been placed at Bruce’s bedside had been abandoned. Clint was seated on the bed with Bruce, who was half-leaning against the archer and half-curled over, retching into the kidney basin that the SHIELD doctor had brought into the room, just in case something like this were to happen. It looked like Bruce hardly had the strength to keep himself upright as his body was wracked with the urge to vomit. Clint held the basin steady in one hand and kept Bruce upright with the other, holding him against his torso.
The doctor was also there, holding the fluid bags in his hands so there was some slack in the lines that attached to Bruce’s arms. There seemed to be no sign of blood anywhere. The oxygen mask had been hastily pulled off and was now resting on the sheets, forgotten.
“You done?” Clint asked quietly once the man in his arms collapsed against his body.
Bruce didn’t reply. He just remained where he was pressed against Clint, shaking and trying to catch his breath. It looked like he had drifted back into unconsciousness. The archer carefully put the basin aside and gingerly maneuvered Bruce until he was lying back on the bed again. Only then did the doctor put the fluid bags back on the pole next to the bed and strap the oxygen mask onto Bruce’s face once more.
Once the mask was in place again, Bruce’s breathing began to even out.
Clint slipped off of the bed to let the doctor check over his patient and approached the three others in the doorway. “Well, he was awake for a moment there.”
“Did he just wake up to vomit?” Natasha asked softly, her eyes still locked on the man in the bed.
“He had his eyes open for maybe half a minute before he actually started puking,” Clint explained. He turned his eyes back to the basin lying on the floor at the bedside. “We should probably get a sample of that to Tony, see if he can find something that’ll help.”
“That might help,” the SHIELD doctor cut into the conversation, “but more than likely, he’s just going to have to ride this out. It’s harder to say what side effects he’s going to feel from whatever they had pumping into him. Right now, I’d say we can expect to see more nausea and intense fatigue, with a possibility for tremors and fever. He should be fine once he can keep food and fluids down.” The doctor paused to grab the used basin to replace it with one that was empty. “He should be alright to be taken off the ventilator in a few hours; his oxygen levels are almost back to normal.”
The doctor then excused himself to take the basin toward the labs.
The four Avengers watched him leave for a moment before they turned their attention back to the unconscious man on the bed. Steve tore his gaze away from Bruce to look at Clint. “Did he do anything before he got sick?”
The archer shrugged. “I don’t think he heard anything I said to him. He kind of just stared at the ceiling, and then stared at me, and then he hurled.”
“Did he panic?” Thor asked, breaking from his silence. His mind went back to the scene in the hospital room across the country.
“No,” Clint answered. “He might have recognized the ceiling, or maybe he recognized me. I don’t know, but he didn’t freak out.” He paused to glance back at Bruce again. “So…that’s a good thing, right?”
“Aye,” Thor replied as the other two nodded in agreement. “I believe it means that he thinks he is safe.”
==
Thor watched the doctor change out the fluid bag for a new one in silence. It had been several hours since Bruce had woken up, and he hadn’t stirred once. The doctor had started to give him a pain killer with a fever reducer mixed in once the physicist’s temperature had started to spike. His temperature currently sat at 106.5ºF, which was near-fatal for a normal human being, but was a mild fever for Bruce, who always ran hot thanks to the gamma radiation in his body.
The doctor jotted down some notes in the file he was keeping before he left the room, promising to return within the hour or if Bruce woke up again.
Once the door was pulled nearly shut behind the doctor, Thor turned his attention back to Bruce. The physicist’s skin was less pale than it had previously been, but there was a small quirk in the man’s eyebrows that told the demigod that Bruce was still feeling the full effects of whatever drugs his kidnappers had filled him with.
It felt like a blink when the doctor returned to check on his patient. A full hour had passed, and there was no sign of the physicist waking up again.
Time continued to pass in a similar fashion: the doctor would leave, Thor would stare at the various pieces of medical equipment surrounding his friend, get lost in his thoughts, and the doctor would return to mark that another full hour had passed.
It was getting close to the point where either Steve or Tony would relieve him from his post when JARVIS suddenly spoke. “Shall I alert the others, sir?”
Before he could even ask what the AI was alerting the others of, Thor’s gaze snapped to Bruce. He was startled and immensely relieved to see Bruce staring back at him, albeit with half-lidded eyes that seemed to have trouble focusing. There was a look of dazed confusion on his face.
“Please do,” Thor answered the AI absentmindedly and leaned forward in his seat. “How are you feeling, friend Bruce?”
Bruce’s eyes narrowed slightly and his brow furrowed as he continued to stare at the God of Thunder. He broke his stare to glance around the room, swallowing with no small amount of difficulty. He went a shade paler and closed his eyes for a moment.
Thor quickly fetched the kidney basin and removed the oxygen mask from Bruce’s face moments before the man started to vomit again. There was nothing in the man’s stomach to expel, so Thor had no idea just what was being retched, but he held Bruce steady regardless.
Bruce spat the rest of the bile from his mouth and collapsed against Thor, his glistening forehead pressed into Thor’s neck.
The demigod kept the basin within reach and held the physicist against him, stroking a hand down the man’s back in a soothing motion. “Bruce…” he began, not at all sure what he was about to say.
He paused when he heard Bruce draw a breath to speak. “…how?” The word was terribly raspy and so soft it was nearly lost in the silence of the room. Bruce struggled to swallow again and forced his glazed eyes open. “H-How…?”
“We freed you, Bruce,” Thor explained quietly.
The door across the room opened to reveal the rest of the team and the doctor. Both Thor and Bruce glanced in their direction; when Bruce unconsciously tensed, Thor held him closer. “We found you, the rest of the team and I, and we freed you.”
The verbal clue seemed to help Bruce place the faces on the other side of the room, for he relaxed in Thor’s arms and let out a tiny sigh, practically going limp against the demigod. The physicist’s eyes slipped shut again as he slipped back into unconsciousness.
The tension in the room deflated as the rest of the team exhaled together in relief. Thor carefully returned his weakened friend onto his back in the bed. Their friend was improving, albeit slowly, but any improvement was cause for relief.
==
The next couple of days passed in a similar fashion. The five Avengers continued their around-the-clock vigil over their stricken teammate. The doctor was in and out of the room and back and forth between the tower and SHIELD. He brought news from the helicarrier that the facility that had been holding Bruce for the past week had exploded, and only the charred husk of the building remained. Turned out that the lightning bolt that Thor had called into the building had started several fires in very inappropriate places, and the place had gone up in smoke less than an hour after they had rescued Bruce.
None of them could deny the deep sense of satisfaction the news brought them.
As for Bruce, he continued to mostly sleep off the sedative. He’d wake up from time to time to vomit or, as his recovery progressed, to succumb to a fit of tremors. His fever came and went, but each time it appeared, it was closer to his normal temperature than before.
He didn’t have the strength to do much more than open his eyes and turn his head before he started retching, and no matter how the machines said he was improving, each time he woke up he seemed weaker than before. He’d manage to stay awake a little longer each time after his bout with nausea had passed. Unfortunately, he was still losing weight, and would continue to lose weight until he was able to keep solid food down.
A day later, the man managed to stay awake for about an hour without vomiting. The doctor managed to get him to sit up a little before Bruce’s head began to spin and he nearly succumbed to his rebelling stomach. He was taken off the oxygen, but the fluids remained. True, he was lethargic and drowsy the entire time he was awake, but it was better than the few minutes of sickness they had been encountering for the past several days.
After that, his strength began to return in increments. He was able to stay awake longer and, with the help of one of the Avengers, was able to start slowly walking again. It had been roughly two weeks since he had used his legs, and with the sedative still in his system, he was terribly shaky on his feet.
Once he could keep down small sips of water and watered-down juice, the doctor took him off of the fluids.
He still couldn’t eat solid food without throwing it back up, though.
Thor had brought some of Steve’s homemade chicken soup up with him when he came to sit with Bruce. The physicist was able to eat a little of it before the nausea returned with a vengeance. Surprisingly, and to Thor’s relief, he managed to keep it down.
After that wave of nausea passed, Thor helped Bruce slowly cross the room and settle on the couch in the living room. What should have been a ten second walk took roughly five minutes, but Thor remained patient and Bruce remained determined to make the walk.
Bruce collapsed onto the sofa once the pair finally made it. “This is ridiculous,” he said as he tried to catch his breath, exhausted by the brief trip.
“It is fine,” Thor replied calmly, “you are improving every day.” When he noticed the slight shiver go through his friend, he frowned. “I will return momentarily,” he said before he went back to Bruce’s room.
When he returned, he had the kidney basin in one hand, a glass of water in the other, and a fuzzy fleece blanket thrown over his arm. He set down both items and then carefully wrapped Bruce in the blanket. “How do you feel?”
Bruce weakly pulled the fleece more tightly around himself, and the worst of his shivering subsided. “I’m just tired,” he answered in a drowsy mumble.
“As you should be,” Thor agreed as he sat down next to Bruce on the couch, watching him closely. “You had those drugs pumping into you for nearly seven days straight. You are recovering remarkably well, considering the circumstances.”
Bruce snorted lightly. “The only reason I’m recovering at all is the same reason they kept me under so heavily,” he returned softly.
Thor stared hard down at the man next to him. The scientist’s voice was quiet, but his tone was worth volumes. “You cannot be serious,” the demigod said in a low voice, anger beginning to burn in his belly. When Bruce didn’t answer, didn’t even look up, that anger began to consume him. “They abducted you and forced an unknown substance into your body! They held you captive without remorse or compassion! How can you not be furious?!”
“I’ll be furious when the Other Guy wakes up,” Bruce replied bitterly without looking up. “Believe me, you’ll know I’m furious then.”
“You cannot honestly believe that what they did to you was right,” Thor shot back, still fuming.
Bruce finally looked up and over to the demigod. “Thor, I can’t blame them for what they did to me. Even if I don’t think it’s right, I can’t on good conscience say they were wrong. They just want to protect the public.”
“You already protect the public,” Thor rejoined firmly.
“I’m dangerous, Thor,” Bruce protested. “The Other Guy…we’ve done so much damage, hurt so many people. They have every right to want to lock me up.”
“And what of the rest of us? Clint, Natasha, Tony, Steve, and I?” Thor inquired heatedly. As Bruce ducked his head, the God of Thunder continued. “Do you honestly take us for innocents? Widow and the Hawk are assassins, the Man of Iron was once the king of weapons development, and the Captain and I have fought in wars, he in one, myself in several. None of us can claim to have clean hands, but that does not give anyone the right to treat us as you have been treated. You do not use your abilities to purposely hurt others, friend Bruce. You are a good man. If the public cannot see that, then they are blind. You, my friend, are a good man.”
That final declaration was answered with silence. The two sat in the heavy quiet for a long time, Bruce refusing to look up and Thor refusing to look away.
Finally, Bruce’s shoulders slumped and he let out a soft sigh of resignation. “…You make some very good points,” he allowed. “I’m not sure if I agree, per say, but you make a very good argument.”
Thor grinned; it wasn’t a complete victory, but he’d take it. “I am very glad to hear it,” he replied pleasantly. He was about to go on when he saw Bruce go a shade paler and swallow. “Are you alright?” he asked, even as he reached for the kidney basin nearby.
“Yes,” Bruce answered softly, and then quickly corrected himself. “No.”
The demigod passed him the basin and sighed as Bruce threw up the soup he had eaten earlier. “Well, you managed to keep it down for a little bit.”
“Some victory,” Bruce managed to get out before he started vomiting again.
Thor ran a consoling hand along Bruce’s back in a soothing motion. “It is progress, my friend. It is progress.”