Night Changes
Tony
Loki hung back as the others departed for their quarters. “Stark, if I could have a word.”
“I don’t suppose I can stop you.” I ran a hand through my hair wearily. “Civilized company knocks, you know.”
“If we can put the past behind us for a moment?” Loki took a step closer and lowered his tone. “Romanoff and I have reason to believe that Theodore Ross was connected with Banner’s disappearance. We didn’t feel that it would be helpful for Banner to know in his current condition.”
I frowned. “Ross hasn’t been interested in Banner for years. Why now? Especially in light of the Sokovia Accords…” This wasn’t good. If Ross was meddling behind my back and I didn’t know it, that threatened the stability of all I’d been trying to achieve. Not to mention, the safety of my teammates was once more on the line. This is what I'd been trying to avoid with the Sokovia Accords, dammit.
Loki shrugged noncommittally. “Hard to say. You would know the man better than I do.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Enough not to trust him.”
“Fair enough.” I scratched my head. “Was there any contact between Ross and Banner before he disappeared?”
“Briefly. Banner helped with our initial resettlement conferences, where Ross made his presence felt rather strongly. They seemed cordial enough at the time.”
“Anything that might have rekindled his interest in Banner? Any idea why he was taken in the first place?”
“All the records deleted themselves when Romanoff and I breached the computer system,” Loki admitted. “We saw only a short sample of video footage before losing access entirely. But based on the room he was held in…” he shook his head, appearing disgusted. “If that was all for science, your people are more primitive than I thought.”
“You have a different theory?” I was surprised and a bit uncomfortable to note that Loki seemed genuinely concerned about Bruce.
“I think they wanted the Hulk. Not to recreate him. As a weapon, a means to an end.”
“Why?”
Loki chuckled. “Really Stark—what would a man like Ross stand to gain from forcing the Hulk into gladiator mode in a city of 8.6 million?”
I winced. “Consolidation of his power, grounds for tightening the leash on the Avengers or possibly bringing us under his control entirely, plus the bonus of saving the city from the threat. Yeah, I see where he might stand to gain. And I can also see why you wouldn’t want Banner to know. He’s carrying enough guilt around already.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Did they get him? The Hulk, that is?”
Loki’s face twitched. “I don’t believe so. The lab did not reflect that level of damage. But I find it hard to believe that the Hulk would keep quiet through what they did to him.”
“That bad, huh?” My heart twisted at the thought. I wished again that Bruce wouldn’t be so stubborn about letting us help. A thought occurred to me. “Here’s the even stranger thing… if the Hulk remained dormant, why did they let him go? That just doesn’t make sense.” I shook my head. “He must have Hulked out at some point and escaped with minimal collateral damage.”
Natasha
As I returned to my own room to sleep at Bruce’s urging, I reflected back to the days when we were first trying to work out the lullaby.
“What causes the change for you?” I asked. “Back from the other guy.”
Bruce shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Coming back is always so… disorienting. Like I’ve woken up from an intense dream that I can’t remember, while simultaneously being crushed by a mountain. I’m suddenly aware of everything really strongly to the point that I can’t process any of it. As far as aiming him…I’ve been told that he can sometimes be redirected by people that I have a strong emotional connection with.”
“Waking up,” I mused. “We might be able to work with that.” And we did.
~
As the van drove us out to the remote spot Tony had acquired a few weeks later, Bruce was understandably fidgety in the seat beside me.
I finally broke the silence. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he mumbled.
“After fighting alongside you—him—I don’t think Hulk will try to hurt me. And Tony has that prototype you’ve been working on together on standby just in case.”
“Okay. Yeah, I know.” Bruce ran his hands through his tousled dark hair for the umpteenth time.
“You’re okay with this, though?”
He was silent for a moment. “Better to go through this and have a plan in place than to continue futilely hoping to keep him in forever. But if you aren’t comfortable with this…”
“No, it’s not that,” I said quickly. “I just—I don’t want you to feel that you are being used, or programmed, or forced to become a weapon…”
Bruce looked up at me for the first time since leaving the city. “I know you wouldn’t do that to me, Natasha,” he offered gently. “That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?”
Despite being dressed warmly for our destination in northern Vermont, I felt suddenly naked, my emotional pretenses stripped away. “Yes,” I admitted finally. “I was chosen as a young girl for a special school. I dreamed of being a dancer. That’s what they told me I would learn, ballet, to make Russia proud. Instead I became their perfect weapon. Trained to kill, callously, without mercy. Does that bother you, working alongside a killer?”
I stared fiercely ahead, not daring make eye contact, but I could see in my peripheral vision that Bruce was shaking his head.
“No.” A long, uncomfortable silence stretched through the car. The only sound for a while was the rumbling of tires as the pavement traded out for wash-boarded gravel, only recently scraped clean by a snowplow. Then— “Do you ever still dance?”
I laughed bitterly. “Killers don’t dance.”
“You may have been trained as a killer, but that’s not who you are.”
“Then you don’t know me.”
“Maybe not. But the Natasha who I’ve been working with these past few months is more than a fighter. She’s forgiving, when a freak-out on my part almost crushed her and nearly took down the helicarrier. She cares enough to put herself in danger to find me and make sure I get back to the team after every code green. She stands between danger and innocent people with nothing but her training and a desire to protect lives. Steve has his serum, Tony has his suits, but you? A killer doesn’t save lives at risk of her own.”
I shook my head. “You’re too trusting, Doctor.”
Bruce raised his eyebrows. “Am I? I have to trust you if this is going to work.”
As our transport wound down increasingly remote dirt roads, I had to admit that he was right.
~
The first attempt took over an hour to talk the Hulk down. By the fourth time, we had discovered that touch, gentle touch, the opposite of what the Hulk was accustomed to, helped pull Bruce back out. By the sixth, Bruce looked positively ill.
“I need a minute before we try again,” he gasped out, turning away to vomit into a snowbank. He wiped his mouth, chest still heaving. “That time was different.”
“In what way?”
Bruce hesitated. A shiver traveled across his sweat-soaked body, and I thought that it was a good thing Tony had put together a mostly-Hulk-proof get-up of giant, stretchy sweatpants and a sweatshirt that hung cartoonishly about Bruce’s frame to shield him from the cold. As it was, he was curled up and hugging himself, rocking back and forth.
“I saw my mother. I couldn’t sleep—my father had been so angry that evening, storming about, breaking things—I was scared to close my eyes even after he had slammed the door and driven off. She sat beside me, and stroked my hand, and described the world falling asleep around us, beginning with the sunset. The sun’s getting real low.” With the compounding exhaustion of transforming in and out of the Hulk, any chance of holding back the flood of tears was gone, and Bruce dropped his head into his hands and wept. He hadn’t included many details, but the story told me enough.
“Let’s find the cabin,” I decided, helping Bruce to his feet and half-carrying him as he stumbled weakly along. “I don’t think your body is up for another transformation. I really should have made you stop several times ago. You need sleep, and calories.”
That night, I lay beside a snoring Banner and wondered about the monsters in each of us, and how perhaps they weren’t always what one might expect. And most of all, that perhaps these monsters had some good to offer the world. Maybe I understood the Hulk better than Bruce thought I did.
Back in my own room at the compound, I dropped onto the bed wearily and sent a quick text message to Loki. Banner unwilling to accept medical help. Next move?
I flopped my head back on the pillow, tracing the familiar lines of the ceiling with my eyes in the semi-darkness. Once, this had been home. These people had been home. But everything had changed since then. The Hulk had fled, the team had fought. The assassin had gone back on the run.
For the first time in many years, I let tears fall for the things that had been, and the things that might have been.