Redshift

Three days ago, the Hulk had been in space, headed back to Earth alongside Thor and Valkyrie.

Two days ago, Bruce had crash-landed in the Sanctum Sanctorum, delivering a grave warning.

Yesterday, half the universe had still been alive.

Today, the world they thought they knew was completely unrecognizable.

Leaving Wakanda had been hard. It felt like they were leaving behind the bodies of their fallen comrades—even though in reality there wasn’t anything of them left, save for Vision.

There was nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.

When the quinjet docked at the compound, Steve was the first one to depart. He walked away briskly, back straight, face hidden so they couldn’t see him crumbling into pieces.

As he watched Natasha hurry after Steve, Bruce realized he didn’t have the energy to pretend he was any better.

Thor and the raccoon—Rocket, he’d introduced himself as—left next, traipsing morosely down the ramp and toward the compound’s west wing, in the opposite direction of Steve and Natasha.

Rhodey met Bruce’s eyes as he unbuckled himself from the pilot’s chair. He opened his mouth, as if to say something...but there were no words that mattered anymore. His jaw locked shut, and he moved past Bruce.

Left alone, Bruce glanced around at the passenger seats. His eyes lingered on one near the back.

“E-everyone, Dr. Banner. I feel everyone.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, then rubbed his eyes and exited the quinjet.

Immediately, he almost wished he hadn’t. Pepper had emerged from the compound, and Rhodey was making a beeline for her. They slammed into each other with palpable relief, embracing tightly and whispering words he couldn’t hear. But he already knew what they were discussing.

What the hell is happening? Have you heard from Tony?

I...I don’t know, Pepper. I’m sorry. 

The thought of Tony made his heart ache. He’d been their first line of defense—intercepting Thanos before he could seize the Time Stone from Strange. But when Thanos had arrived in Wakanda, it was sitting snugly in the thumb socket on the Infinity Gauntlet. Had Thanos killed Tony? Even if he didn’t, had Tony survived all this devastation?

What about the spider guy with him? Peter? Bruce couldn’t even begin to fathom breaking the news about Connor. They were just kids.

Two days after the Snap, Bruce heard the term “decimation” dropped for the first time.

“That’s what the news is calling it,” Rhodey explained tonelessly, peeling himself an orange. The pair of them stood in the kitchen, illuminated by the soft orange light of dawn coming in through the compound's window. "The Decimation. Course, there are other names being thrown around too. The Rapture, the Judgment, but...Decimation is the most popular. What do you want for breakfast?"

That's not right, Bruce wanted to say. A decimation means only a tenth of something was eliminated. So many more people died than just ten percent!

But instead he said, "Oh," and asked if they had oatmeal.

That was also the day Natasha left the compound, unable to wait for the global census to finish tallying who had survived. There were people, like Fury and Clint, whose fates were still unknown. She needed answers.

Before leaving, however, she went around to each person in the compound and asked if there was anyone they wanted her to check up on.

Bruce knew how Natasha worked. She needed to keep herself busy, to keep herself useful, so she didn’t drown in despair. Sure, it was almost certainly an avoidance tactic—they were all coping differently, and not the most healthily—but it was better than spending days cooped up inside. This was just her way of processing what had happened.

In the end, she left the compound with a list of names. Jane Foster, Darcy Lewis, Erik Selvig, Sharon Carter, Maria Hill, Scott Lang, May Parker, and…

“Betty Ross,” Bruce asked, when Natasha approached him.

Her eyebrows rose. “As in...”

“His daughter. She’s...a friend.”

He wasn’t sure what Betty was to him anymore—it had been almost a decade since they’d last seen each other—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t on his mind. He could never forget her.

“Done. Anyone else?”

He shook his head, and Natasha turned away, but then something occurred to him and he grabbed her arm.

“Wait. Connor, the, uh… He came with us to Wakanda.”

She nodded, her expression a stone mask. “I remember.”

“Can you find out if he has—if he had family?”

Once again Bruce found himself struck by how much he didn’t know about the kid. Connor had been living with the Parkers, but before that he’d been homeless. Bruce didn’t know the circumstances which led to that, but if he still had blood relatives out there… He had to at least try to find them.

“Sure,” Natasha replied without hesitation, and Bruce’s attention refocused on her. “Last name?”

“Um...” He’d only heard it once, when Connor had been yelling at Friday to let him in Tony’s lab. “Tan...Tanyard? That’s it. It’s Tanyard.”

She promised that if anyone was out there, she would find them. Bruce was just grateful for the attempt.

They all were.

Five days after the Snap—he refused to call it the Decimation—Bruce found Rocket outside on the compound’s lawn, disassembling their microwave while Thor watched indifferently.

“What is...going on here?” he asked, fiddling with his hands as the raccoon tossed a bit of scrap over his shoulder and muttered out a string of curses. Beside him was a small, pyramid-shaped structure, built out of what looked like even more scrap.

“He’s attempting to contact his ship,” Thor rumbled, without looking away from the scene.

“You know, this planet’s technology sucks ass,” Rocket complained loudly. “How hard is it for some humie to discover intergalactic communication? The science already exists, do I gotta write you guys a manual too?”

“Uh...I’m sorry?”

“Not your fault your entire species is inept.” Rocket reached inside the microwave’s guts and pulled out a clump of wires. “Probably should have expected it. After all, Quill’s one of you. Well, halfway one of you.”

Bruce didn’t know who Quill was, so he had no idea how to respond to that. He leaned in closer, examining the raccoon’s contraption. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Nah, I got it. Just need to scrounge up a few more parts.”

“Well…maybe I can help you find them, so you don’t take apart all our—”

“Banner,” Thor warned lowly. At the same time Rocket’s ears went back, and he shot Bruce a glare over his shoulder. 

“Are you deaf? I said I got it. Go find your own project to work on!”

Bruce stepped back, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. Thor reached out and gently tugged his arm, leading him away from the scene.

“Come. He has his task, let us make our own.”

Still holding onto him, Thor led him into the compound and toward the common area. Instantly he made a beeline for a free-standing bar near the back of the room.

“Our task is alcohol?” Bruce asked dubiously, as Thor leaned Stormbreaker against the bar’s side and stepped behind it, inspecting the various drinks and beverage ingredients. “I’m not even sure I can get drunk.”

“All the more reason for us to find out,” Thor replied simply. He pulled out two beers, cracked the caps off them effortlessly, and handed one over.

Bruce wasn’t very big on drinking, even before the Hulk became a part of his life. Alcohol reminded him too much of his father. Then, after the gamma accident, he’d stayed far away from anything which could lower his inhibition.

But the Hulk didn’t appear to be coming out any time soon, and if there was ever going to be an appropriate reason to drink…

What the hell, he thought, and took a sip. 

As it turned out, alcohol did affect Bruce, though it took a significant amount. When it became clear that beer wasn’t going to cut it, they broke open several bottles of liquor. At first, Bruce attempted to moderate himself by mixing rum with soda, while Thor appeared to have no reservations. He drank straight from the bottle, which Bruce found mildly concerning, but eventually dismissed it as necessary due to his non-human physiology.

Soon, the more he imbibed, the less he began to care about moderation. Mixed drinks tasted better but they took time, and he clearly wasn’t going to have to worry about having a low tolerance. When Thor handed him a second bottle, Bruce disposed of his cup and drank the alcohol undiluted.

He went through this one much quicker than the first.

Hours later he found himself lying down the common area’s couch, pleasantly intoxicated. There was a mostly empty bottle of Bacardi 151 resting on his chest, and he was lazily watching Thor through the distorted glass.

“Aha!” the Asgardian crowed, emerging from behind the bar with a dark, amber-colored bottle. “Knew that...that wasn’t the last bourbon!”

“You’re not really s’posed to mix differen’ kinds of alcohol,” Bruce said thickly, raising one eyebrow at him.

“Maybe for humans,” Thor slurred back. “But I am mighty, Banner!”

Stormbreaker slipped from its leaning position against the bar and fell to the floor with a clatter, making them both jump. Then they laughed.

“You know,” Thor began, leaning back against the bar. He opened his bottle and took a long swig. “We haven’t really...talked, since last time.”

“Las’ time?”

“On Asgard.”

Oh. Right. The last time Bruce had been Bruce in front of Thor was when he and Valkyrie had dropped him off at the palace so he could fight Hela. 

“You didn’t want to fight.” It was a statement, but Thor’s booming voice echoed across the room like an accusation.

Asgard seemed like a lifetime ago. Why was he bringing this up now? Blinking blearily up at the god, he fumbled to respond. “Yeah, but...there was a wolf. A big wolf. ‘Twas gonna...eat people.”

Thor let out a small, petulant grunt in response. “So?”

Bruce sat up, much too quickly, and grabbed the couch for support as the room swam around him. “So?” he echoed incredulously.

“You still didn’t have to do it.” The Asgardian took another long drink, smacking his lips. “Wasn’t your fight.”

Was he serious? Should Bruce have stood by and watched innocents get slaughtered? “You asked for my help!”

Abruptly, Thor’s fist slammed into the bartop, punching a crater in the wood. “And you—” He interrupted himself with a massive belch, then started over. “And you said it was a family matter! So...so what happened, Banner? Didn’t think I could handle it on my own, is that it? Thought you needed to step in before I made things worse?”

His mismatched eyes burned ferociously, and most people would have backed down from their heat, but Bruce didn't even flinch.

He understood true rage—how it felt and what it looked like. But even more than that, he could recognize when someone was trying to save face by lashing out. Push people away, and they could never see just how hurt you really were.

Well, screw that.

“Maybe I decided that you’re my family, Thor.”

The silence that followed was downright deafening, as Thor digested those words. His jaw worked silently a few times, and then his stormy expression became somber.

“You should find a different one, if you know what’s good for you. Anyone in my family seems to end up dead.”

There was only a little bit of alcohol left in the bottle Bruce held. He downed it in one gulp. Then, with as much conviction as he could muster, he said, “Well, tough.”

There was nothing he could say that would change things—he doubted any words could offer comfort—but that didn’t mean Thor was right. Bruce had always been too stubborn for his own good, even before the Hulk, and that wasn’t about to change now.

On the seventh day after the Snap, Natasha returned to the compound.

Nick Fury, Erik Selvig, Sharon Carter, Maria Hill, Scott Lang, May Parker, and Betty Ross all appeared to have been disintegrated. Jane Foster and Darcy Lewis were alive, and though Thor looked slightly relieved to hear that, Bruce knew that his thoughts were firmly fixated on the dead.

The Barton family appeared not to have survived either. Natasha described, with a haunted look in her eyes, how she’d arrived at the farm to find a pile of ashes, too large to belong to just one person.

She did not, however, return empty-handed. At the site of Fury’s last-known location, she’d discovered a small device. It looked a little like a pager, the kind not seen since the days before cell phones. But it had been retrofitted with very advanced, very alien technology. Rocket dismissively confirmed it to be of Kree origin.

It only took Friday a moment’s analysis to report that it was broadcasting an incredibly powerful long-range transmission. The nature of the message, however, was lost on her.

“There are no words, human or otherwise, contained in the broadcast,” she’d explained as Bruce fiddled with the pager, connecting wires to its inner circuitry. Then he placed it in a large glass case, which slid shut. “Its purpose is to signal something, not necessarily to communicate.”

Bruce did not trust mysterious alien technology, even if it had been used by Fury. Especially if it had been used by Fury. He wanted to destroy the thing, but had been outvoted by everyone else. Hope was in short supply, and they were all desperate for some. 

It wasn’t until the excitement of the pager died down that Natasha pressed a piece of paper into his hand. There was an address scribbled on it.

“Here,” she’d said. “I found them. Some of Connor’s family.”

“Not all of them?”

“Melissa Tanyard and her daughter Holly. The father didn’t make it. Doesn’t look like Connor’s been with them for a while, either.”

“He hasn’t,” Bruce replied, remembering the brief history lesson he’d been given by the boy. “But they deserve to know.”

If he’d known what was about to happen next, he would have left for the Tanyard residence then and there. Or maybe he wouldn’t have gone at all.

The pager’s battery died the very next morning. Bruce spent most of that day bypassing its battery to extend its life indefinitely. He succeeded, but was now reluctant to leave. If something happened while he was away, he’d never forgive himself.

Two days later, it died again, and this time he was unable to bring it back. But, as it turned out, that was entirely unnecessary.

Ten days had passed since the Snap when Carol Danvers arrived on their doorstep.

Well, not technically their doorstep—she’d waltzed straight into the compound as if she owned the place, demanding to know where Fury was. 

Her story, if she was to be believed, was an odd one. Apparently, she’d known Fury “back when he had two eyes” and the pair of them had thwarted a Kree invasion of Earth. Among other things.

Bruce wasn’t surprised in the slightest that Fury had been hiding Danvers’ existence from the Avengers—it was exactly the kind of underhanded tactic he expected from the former S.H.I.E.L.D. director. 

If it hadn’t been for Thanos, he would have demanded to know why Fury had never called her for the Chitauri invasion, or the Ultron crisis. But now he knew. She was Fury’s final gambit—the one he called when the Avengers lost.

Bruce failed to see how she could salvage anything from this disaster. When Danvers departed less than an hour after her arrival, rocketing into the atmosphere like a comet, he assumed she had a similar opinion. Earth wasn’t the only planet affected by the Snap. There was an entire universe out there grieving as well.

He left the next day. With the mystery of the pager solved, there was nothing keeping Bruce at the compound—and he’d put off Connor’s family for long enough.

Eleven days after the Snap, he arrived at the Baltimore address Natasha had given him.

The drive down had been haunting. He’d passed hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars littering the highways. When he stopped to siphon gas (he still didn’t have any money to pay for it, even if there was an operating station), he peered inside a few of the vehicles. Many of them were filled with dust on their driver and passenger seats. Impromptu tombs for all the people that hadn’t been saved.

One of the cars had an infant’s car seat inside, and Bruce had to swallow down bile as he passed it by.

The Tanyard residence was unremarkable on the outside—one half of a duplex in the middle of a mostly empty street. No one was outside, and Bruce wasn’t sure how many of the houses still had residents. It wasn’t just this street—the whole of Baltimore seemed like a ghost town.

As he approached the front door and knocked, Bruce hoped the Tanyards hadn’t packed up and moved somewhere in the aftermath, though it was certainly a possibility. He wasn’t even sure what he would be walking into—Connor had told him that he’d been homeless in New York before running into Tony’s protege. 

The door opened slightly after a few moments, and a woman peered out at him through the crack. She had Connor’s skin tone, hair, and his eyes—but their green seemed a little duller as she scrutinized him warily.

“Who are you?”

“I’m—” Bruce faltered for a moment, then continued, “My name is Bruce. Bruce Banner. You’re Melissa Tanyard?”

Her eyes widened, and he didn’t miss the way the door shut a tiny bit further. It used to be that people didn’t know him by his birth name. Back when the Hulk was more feared than celebrated. “Yes? What do you want?”

“I...” Bruce swallowed, his throat dry. He’d repeated what he was going to say a thousand times over in his head, like an inner mantra, but now that he was standing before Connor’s mother, all the words had escaped him. “I don’t want anything. I’m here about your son.”

She tensed. Emotion flowed across her expression, but not in a way Bruce could clearly recognize. 

Then she slammed the door in his face.

Bruce blinked, startled. Almost on instinct, he knocked again.

“Mrs. Tanyard?”

For a long moment, there was no reply. Bruce was about to knock a third time when her voice issued from the other side.

“I don’t have a son.”

There was a twitch in his subconscious, a flicker of green streaking across his vision. Unbidden, a pair of long-dead voices surfaced in his mind.

“Bruce, go to your room while I talk with your father—oh!”

“Now I’ve told you this before, Rebecca, and you know I don’t like repeating myself. That ain’t my son. You hear that, Bruce? You got no father, no mother either! Not anymore. Remember that.”

There were only so many reasons why a kid with still-living parents ended up on the streets. Bruce had suspected it, but he’d still hoped against hope that Connor was an exception.

He needed to start getting used to disappointment.

The agitation running around in his psyche was the most activity the Hulk had demonstrated since his return to Earth, but Bruce would rather let sleeping dragons lie. So he stepped away from the house, from whatever demons lay on the other side of that door, and walked away.

If no one else would mourn Connor, then he would.

Three weeks after the Snap, construction of the first memorials began.

There did not exist a method for dealing with the sheer number of simultaneous deaths anywhere around the world. Some people considered it a small mercy that there were no bodies to bury, while others thought it to be the worst part of the tragedy. As the names were tallied and the global census neared its completion, more and more people looked for a way to mourn. The decision to build tributes to the people lost, dubbed the Vanished, was perhaps the fastest consensus ever reached between nations.

In the United States, one of the chosen memorial sites was just outside San Francisco. It would be a long time before the marble slabs would be erected and names were carved into their surface, but it gave people something to focus on.

Most people.

Bruce was walking past the command center when he heard Rhodey say, “You can’t be serious.”

The next voice made him freeze in his tracks.

“Deadly, Colonel. You of all people ought to know that in times like these, it’s important that we show strength and unity.” Ross’ voice held an electronic tinge to it, which meant he wasn’t physically present in the compound.

“And your idea of strength and unity is throwing us into a prison?”

“The Avengers violated the Accords. Had you succeeded in Wakanda, perhaps there would be more leniency—”

“Leniency?” The door was ajar, but it slammed wide open as Bruce burst into the command center. Rhodey and Ross both jumped at his intrusion, but the latter’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared.

The last time he’d been face-to-face (so to speak) with Ross, it had been 2010. Bruce had jumped out of an airplane over Harlem. In the eight years since then, Ross’ face had gained a few more lines, he’d gained a little weight, and he’d traded in army fatigues for a suit. Still, when Bruce looked at him, long-buried resentment burrowed up from the recesses of his mind.

“Banner.”

“General,” Bruce replied evenly, knowing full well that was no longer his title.

“Steve Rogers and his friends damned themselves when they refused to sign the Accords,” Ross replied, turning his back on Bruce so he could address Rhodey once more. “There is a slew of charges against unregistered enhanced going back at least two years. You and the rest of the team subjected yourself to those charges when you gave them shelter and refused to detain them.”

“And we’d do that again,” Rhodey shot back.

“Your blatant disregard for the law and the safety of innocent civilians—”

“I think you, of all people, should know what that looks like.”

Silence fell. Slowly, Ross turned back around to stare at Bruce.

“How long did it take to cover up what you did?” Bruce asked. “A year? Two years? That’s the only way you could have become Secretary of State. Does anyone else on the Accords committee know about Blonsky? How you injected him—a foreign soldier, no less—with the U.S. Army’s experimental super soldier serum? About all the people who died because of his rampage?”

Rhodey’s eyes widened a little, but otherwise he said nothing. Bruce stepped closer, jabbing a finger in Ross’ face.

“The second anyone on that committee finds out that an overseer of the Accords committed the kind of atrocity that he preaches against, how long do you think your position is going to last? How long until they pull on all your buried threads, and you’re exposed?”

“I think that hardly compares to what the Avengers have—”

“People died!” Bruce shouted. Even though he wasn’t physically present, Ross still stepped away from him. The alarmed expression hadn’t vanished from Rhodey’s face, but he’d yet to intervene. “They would be alive today, if it weren’t for you!”

He was pulling up old ghosts, but if Ross was going to try to bury the Avengers, Bruce would make damn well sure he’d go down with them.

Whatever the Secretary had been about to say in response, however, was cut off when the door burst open. Natasha rushed in, quickly slowing to a halt when she saw the three pairs of eyes on her.

“You two should come outside,” she said, ignoring their guest.

Rhodey didn’t even hesitate—he severed the connection with Ross, ending the call. “What’s wrong?”

She had always been good at concealing her emotions, but Bruce knew her well enough to recognize a spark of hope in her eyes. “Danvers is back.”