Chapter 5
The way the Big Guy sloughed off Bruce’s clothes and emerge as his own fully formed creature would never fail to amaze Natasha. She’d seen it countless times, of course, and it didn’t shock her, exactly, but the naked truth of it was unlike anything else. Underneath so many layers of lies and bullshit, humans were monstrous creatures. Bruce Banner was maybe one of the very few on the entire planet who came by that truth honestly. It was admirable in its own strange way. Though nothing he’d ever want to hear, hiding from his truth the way he did.
As he scrambled away from her, he kicked up huge clods of dirt, which rained down on her head. She shielded herself with her arms, but it wasn’t enough. She’d be shaking out bits of rock and debris from her hair for a good while now, she was sure.
“Gee. Thanks,” she said to Hulk’s retreating back. He whipped around and gave her a fairly terrifying grin before leaping off somewhere past the tree line. She raised her eyebrows, because it was pretty clear the bastard did it on purpose.
"Watch your back, Banner," she muttered. The forest still echoed with gun-fire, which meant planning some kind of petty revenge would have to wait until the bad guys were done trying to kill her. Natasha dove for cover behind a felled tree, and returned fire.
Overhead, Stark fired off a volley of own, both in repulsor blasts and obnoxious quips. Natasha, thankfully, was fairly decent at tuning him out by now without overlooking anything vital. It was a skill.
Natasha fired off another round, and as she ducked back down behind her downed tree, the sound of gun-fire came to an abrupt stop.
Somewhere off in the distance, Hulk roared. It sounded more pitiful than she would have expected, and that gave Natasha pause. While Hulk was nigh invulnerable, Bruce definitely was not. Maybe she was imagining Hulk’s distress, but she trusted her instincts. Usually. The thing with Bruce was fucked up and complicated, but she couldn’t be sure the feelings she had for him weren’t getting in the way of her judgment in the field. It was so much distracting bullshit. It was a problem.
In her earpiece, Steve and Falcon spoke at the same time. “I don’t like it,” from Steve and “Is it me, or is it quiet out here, like scary quiet,” from Sam.
"Okay, that's not good," Stark added. He sounded spooked, even over the radio, which made the hairs on the back of Natasha's head stand.
“Stark,” Natasha said. "Steve. Whaddya boys got." She waited a beat, and when no one responded, she pursed her lips. Crouching back into the ground, she placed her hands firmly into the soft dirt and tilted her head to listen.
She nodded to herself, because they were right. It was quiet, eerily so.
With her palms still pressed to the ground, she felt it more than she heard it; a deep-pitched rumble from somewhere deep underground. The sound dropped in pitch, and kept dropping until she thought her eardrums would burst. Then all at once, it stopped, and her ears popped the way they would with a change of air pressure. She inhaled, and worked her jaw. Craning her head upward to locate the others, she saw a blue-white light pulse out, seemingly from every direction. She braced for it, and it crashed over her like an ocean wave of sound. After it passed, she opened her eyes in time to see Stark drop from the sky like some kind of downed human-shaped missile. She watched, helplessly as he crashed down into a large pine tree no more than twenty feet from her position. It managed to catch him in its sturdy arms like a child, only to snap under his weight a moment later. He went down like a sack of potatoes, broken tree limbs and all.
“Stark!” she yelled. “Get up get up get up.” She said it for the both of them, because her limbs had turned to lead, heavy and useless. She wormed her way through the mud, even as her arms screamed at her. “Stark,” she said once she got to him. “Hey."
“Jesus,” he said, “Somebody remind me to put padding in here next time.”
She breathed out. For what little patience she usually had for his mouthiness, she was grateful for it now. “Yeah,” she said, “For your thick head.” Carefully cradling his helmeted head, she searched for some sort of a catch or release.
“Stark,” she said, keeping her voice even. “I need you--”
He grunted when her fingers caught on some kind of metal edge. “Whoa,” he said flatly, “Slow down. Maybe let me buy you a drink first.”
She shot him an unimpressed look. “Your virtue is safe with me, don’t you worry about that,” she said, imitating his flat tone. “Can you move?”
“Nope. Good to know you still think I have any virtue left, by the way.”
“I don’t,” she said, pulling a little at the cold metal underneath her fingers. “Is this a--”
“Don’t,” he said. “Leave it. I just need a--”
“Hey, I’m a patient girl. Take all the time you need.”
“Sometimes, Romanoff, I swear to god.”
She ignored him and pulled her hands completely away. Then she tapped at her earpiece. There wasn’t anything to listen to, not even the static of dead air.
“Damn,” Stark said. She looked at him. “Not just me then,” he clarified.
“Looks like. All right,” she said to Stark. “When you’ve decided you’re all done napping, come help me find the others.”
“Yup,” he said with a groan, “Will do.”
There was a deep roar from somewhere distant, and she sucked in a breath. She didn't want to admit how relieved she was to hear that sound. Stark, too, if his "Oh thank god," was anything go by. "I thought," he started to say, but Natasha interrupted him.
"Yeah, me too," she said.
She patted his metallic shoulder, letting him know that she was getting up to leave. She grabbed at a fistful of stiff fabric from her own pant leg and pulled up hard. The movement sent a cascade of pins and needles through her body, and she had to bite her lip to stifle the pain. As much as it hurt, the fact that sensation was returning was a good sign. It meant she could get up and moving again.
She pushed herself up and tried to stand. She took a few steps, which were as graceful as a newborn foal, but at least she was walking.
Several hundred feet ahead of her, she spotted Steve and Sam limping along together, leaning hard against one another like one single ambling and kind of dorky entity.
"Hey," she shouted at them. "Hey!"
Both men immediately dropped their arms from each other’s waists. Sam lost his footing at the loss of support from Steve, and stumbled a little as he turned toward the direction of her voice. Steve moved to catch him, but Sam batted him away. Natasha raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips a little, because she wasn’t about to laugh at their bravado and posturing now that they were aware she was watching them. She raised her arms up above her head to get their attention, and immediately regretted it.
"Goddammit," she spat as her every muscle in her arms screamed at her in protest.
"You too, huh," Steve said.
“Lost my wings,” grumbled Sam, “Somewhere back there.”
Steve was looking at him intently. “We’ll get ‘em back, Sam. I promise, but right now--”
“What happened,” Natasha said. She mentally kicked herself for not asking sooner.
Sam whistled and with one finger, gestured in a downward spiral. She remembered the way Stark plummeted out the sky and grimaced.
“I’m fine.”
“He’s fine.”
Natasha tried not to laugh. “All right,” Natasha said. Well, all the boys were accounted for, (save for Bruce) if a bit worse for the wear. Which only left Wanda. They pushed on, forming a tight triangle, with Steve ahead of her and in the lead.
*
Ahead of her, Wanda saw Banner’s figure stumble toward some sort of round domed object embedded in the ground. He was as coordinated as a drunken man and about as belligerent as one as well.
“Hey,” she called, and he whipped his head around and looked at with her with wide, wild and angry eyes.
“You,” he said, voice deep with barely controlled rage. “You did this.” He gestured down toward himself, at his naked torso. Stripped of his power, he felt more naked than even his state of undress suggested. Vulnerable. Wanda was not unsympathetic. He didn’t ask to have his power stripped away. She herself most certainly had not. Surely, that was what had happened. Her head was too quiet, and she couldn’t see or feel any of the infinite probabilities which she could ordinarily unfurl as was her desire. They were gone now, all collapsed down into the single waveform that now existed before her.
“It was not. I swear this to you.”
“Keep away from me,” he said. The hurt and betrayal in his voice was as naked as the rest of him.
She continued approaching him, carefully and deliberately, as if she would an injured creature. He was shaking his head, more and more vigorously as she grew nearer. He stumbled backwards over the metal dome, but recovered well enough to avoid hitting the soft, muddy ground surrounding the structure. Something about it had meaning to him, it seemed, as he then stood up and straightened his spine. Everything that had seemed feral and wild about him just moments before evaporated. All at once he seemed self-conscious of his wild man hair, patting it down ineffectually, dislodging bits of rock and leaves as he did so.
He nodded his head at her and then downward toward the dome. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, sounding… not uncertain, but… confused, maybe.
“What do you think it means?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure,” he mumbled. She was not sure she meant to hear his words. Then: “Help me open this up?” She pursed her lips at his wide-eyed and boyish smile.
“Yes,” she muttered at him. Though nothing good could come from such a thing, she was sure of it.
Together, they turned the giant metal wheel which sat atop the strange domed structure oddly placed in the middle of a forest. As they did, an uncanny roaring sound rumbled from somewhere not so far from where they stood. It was an impossible sound. A Hulk sound. Banner looked unnerved. The wheel beneath their hands hit a stop, and with a tug, the hatch opened up into a deep, dark cavernous maw below.
The air inside smelled stale and dusty, but she knew they would have to climb down into it on the rusty and unstable ladder.
The creature roared again, and they were both scrambling inside toward whatever dark secrets awaited them.
*