The Calm Before the Storm
Bruce
I woke up to a faint beeping and something in my arm. I tried to sit up, but there was something stiff wrapped around my torso like a vise. I was trapped again—or was it still? Panic rose in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I yanked out the IV from my arm, setting off a series of alarms.
“Breathe, Banner, breathe.” Strong hands pinned me back down. “The sun’s going down, the sun’s getting real low, the sun’s going down—”
“What the hell, Thor?” I demanded weakly, struggling against the restraint as the nascent panic attack subsided and turned to anger.
“Disembodied voice, tell Stark that Banner is awake!” the god boomed out.
“As you wish,” FRIDAY responded, seemingly unfazed by the nonstandard form of address.
“If I let go, will you hold still?”
I wanted to make some kind of biting retort, but words failed me. “Fine.” I spat out.
Thor backed off carefully, and sat down at the bedside. I took stock of my surroundings. The soft blue ceiling above told me I was back in my own bed at the compound, not in the bleached white lab space I had anticipated.
“I expect you are rightfully angry with me for knocking you out without your consent,” he noted. “I apologize for the trickery, but as you would not let anyone address your injuries we deemed it necessary to intervene.”
Hot tears burned at the corners of my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. “Why can’t you all just leave me alone?” I tore at my chest, trying to find a release for whatever was wrapped around me, heedless of my fingers scraping futilely at the rough plaster until they bled. “Let me out!” Didn't they understand that getting knocked out and waking up with tubes in me was the stuff that haunted me in nightmares? Was I safe, or was this some kind of twisted hallucination? Was this just another experiment? What was going on? I needed to find a way out.
The panic was rising again as Thor stilled my hands. “Banner, listen to me. You have to stop fighting. You’re going to hurt yourself. Try to stay calm.”
“Try to stay calm?” The platitude enraged me. “My friends drugged me and chained me up and I’m supposed to stay calm?”
“Once you are recovered I would be more than happy to smite things together,” Thor promised, probably attempting to be reassuring, “but for now your health demands rest.”
I wrested my hands from his grip. “Let go of me!”
“Can I come in or are you going to go green and make all of our work pointless?” Tony asked from the doorway. “Because to be fair, Hulking out would probably leave you in much better shape.”
“I’m not going to ‘go green’,” I muttered. “Hulk and I had a falling out.” Thor and Tony exchanged concerned glances, but decided not to press further, which was a relief. The story behind my most recent transformation was not one I was ready to share. I doubted I’d ever be ready.
“Okay, so that is a pretty interesting piece of information that might have been good to know, but we’ll save that particular lecture for another day. Also, I should probably clear up that you are not chained to the bed, as much as that may have been a good idea,” Tony added. “You are wearing a cast because you had four broken ribs and a bruised kidney.”
“Oh.”
“That’s right, oh.” Tony gestured angrily at the makeshift medical set-up around my bed. “Not to mention internal bleeding, bruising, burns, lacerations in various stages of healing—badly, may I add—and stress fractures in your feet, and, and, and. You can get a full list from Vision later if you want. I used to think I was the king of disregarding my own health around here, but you had to go and prove me wrong. At least I’ve got Pepper and Rhodey, hell, even Vision, looking out for me. If Pete hadn’t found you and stupidly taken you home, where would you be? You could have died!”
“Can’t,” I interrupted. Believe me, I’ve tried, I thought, but the words didn’t make it past my lips. “This was never in my plan, Tony! I just wanted to disappear. I’m sorry that it didn’t work, okay? I’m sorry.” I sagged back against the pillow, deflated.
“All we mean to say is that your health and safety are important to us,” Thor said gently. “And indeed, to all of Asgard. We would not wish one of our own to suffer needlessly. You granted us your aid on our world, a world that was foreign to you; should we not be allowed to do the same for you?”
“Well, I for one am not under Asgardian rule—”
Thor’s mutter under his breath cut Tony off for a moment. “Well, technically, Midgard is one of the Nine Realms, so you kind of are.”
“I am not under Asgardian rule,” Tony continued pointedly, “but I agree with the sentiment otherwise. You have a massive accepting-help-from-other-people problem. And I’m not really one to talk, but right now you’re the one who needs help, so either you accept that, or I let Antler Head knock you out until your body heals.”
I didn’t have the energy to keep fighting. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll cooperate. Just don’t call Loki Antler Head to his face, or I won’t be responsible for his behavior.” The automatic ability to joke was still there, a shield, a coping mechanism, but I felt so hollow. I closed my eyes as a nurse was called in to fix the IV.
Finally left alone, the weight of everything pressed down upon me. I felt that if I tried to move, I would teeter out of control and dip into the future and all that I could feel lying there in wait was a hungry void that sought to swallow me in its emptiness. A thousand guilt-ridden questions haunted me. Why had I disrupted my friends’ lives? Why hadn’t I refused Peter’s help out on the streets? Why had Loki and Nat followed me? Why hadn’t I been clearer with my intentions before disappearing so that they would let me go? Why were they all so keen on not letting me go? Couldn’t they see how desperately I wanted to be gone? Couldn’t they see that making me stay was only causing them all more problems? Out of the two of us, I was the failure, not the Hulk. He had been successful, even if it was on a distant planet; I, despite everything, was still the catastrophically foolish man who had created him. Hulk was right to hate me. I just wanted out.
~
Over the next week, the deep bruising went from purple to green to yellow, and the gashes and welts slowly began to fill with scar tissue, but the hollowness that had replaced all other emotions within me remained. I went about my days methodically, eating tasteless food when I was told, letting Vision check my wounds without a word, speaking only when absolutely necessary. Peter had gone home the previous Sunday evening. Thor and Loki had both returned to New Asgard at my urging, and Nat had disappeared without a word not long after Peter.
The facilities were almost painfully quiet. Tony stopped by to try to engage me in conversation on a regular basis, but when his attempts to get me to join him in research fell through and it became too difficult to engage with my monosyllabic dialogue, he would vanish into the labs for hours on end. Rhodes was in and out, often shouting at Tony in the hall over his own poor habits. He would drop by my rooms to check on me, but I couldn’t bear the man’s compassion and often pretended to be too tired for company. It wasn’t hard. My body ached with the work of healing, and often I lay on the bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. Just me, and the thoughts, and the void.
Even the Hulk never stirred restlessly within me as he had been wont to do in the past, instead going completely silent.
In the vacuum left by everything else in my life, I started playing the piano in my room, recalling old melodies to my fingertips. But the notes drew a grief to the surface from deep within me, far more painful than the physical wounds my body was trying to heal. Sometimes I soaked in it, needing to feel something even if it was painful; other times it was terrible and overwhelming and I would sink to the ground, curling in a ball and trying to blot everything out. I wondered, not for the first time, why I had ever tried to be an Avenger.