That's What Heroes Do

Bruce

“Good to see you back on your feet,” Korg offered cheerily as he joined us at the (by now very full) dinner table. “This is my new friend, Mantis. She is almost a bug, but she is also almost a human.”

“Truly horrifying,” the large blue man chimed in.

“Hey, Rocky,” Tony interjected, gesturing at Korg in his entirety. “Are you mineral all the way through, or is there flesh and organs in there somewhere?”

With Korg distracted, Mantis hovered over me curiously. “Which one of them are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You are broken in two, yes?” Her wide eyes had not faltered in their stare, and I wondered briefly if she had eyelids, and whether or not she was even capable of blinking.

“I’m the small one,” I fumbled out. “The other guy’s big and angry.”

Without warning, Mantis reached out and touched my hand.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a searing pain shot through my mind, overriding every other sensation and thought. My spoon clattered to the table, utterly forgotten, as a wave of intense, conflicting emotions swept over me. I screamed as the Hulk roared in pain in my ears.
Then just as suddenly, it was gone.

I doubled over, weeping soundlessly and clutching at my ears, and vomited onto the floor.

“Bruce! Bruce, what happened?” Tony snapped out of his conversation with Korg abruptly.

I groaned eloquently in response.

“What have you done to her?” Drax unsheathed both of his knives at once.

Tony held up both of his hand placatingly. “Whoa there, big guy.”

Mantis was clutching at her hand and whimpering. “He is in pain,” she whispered.

“No… shit…” I gasped out. The closest thing I’d ever felt to this was our first encounter with Wanda, but even that didn’t come close. Slowly, I became aware of Nat’s hand rubbing soothing circles on my back. My whole body was trembling.

“You burned her?” Gamora asked skeptically, examining Mantis’ hand. Mantis was weeping and making weird, hiccuping sounds.

“What?” I wasn’t the only person to say it, but I was still sufficiently disoriented not to know who else said it with me.

Tony frowned. “Are you sensitive to gamma radiation? ‘Cause Dr. Banner here practically glows with that stuff.”

At the far end of the table, Loki brushed off the idea. “This is your doing, brother,” he pronounced, rounding on Thor.

Thor looked intrigued. “Try it again.”

“What? No!” I snapped incredulously as Mantis reached for me.

He waved off my concerns. “Not—whatever that was. Make some sparks.”

“You’ve been sparking all day,” Nat mouthed at me, recognizing correctly that I might not be ready to share that information with the entirety of the table.

“You got a blood transfusion from Thor,” Tony caught on. “Guess you got more than we bargained for.”

Val slammed her fifth empty mug of ale down on the table. “Just what we need, another sparker. 'Banner, Lord of Static.'”

“It should wear off,” Loki mused. “Theoretically.”

“Shit,” I said again, and promptly threw up. The salt of tears mixed with the bile aftertaste in my mouth as they dribbled down my face without my bidding. My head still hurt. Dimly, I heard Nat talking to me.

“Bruce…Bruce! Can you hear me?”

I nodded through the nausea, squeezing my eyes shut.

“We should probably get him back to medical.” Tony sounded concerned.

“What did you do to him?” Nat demanded of Mantis.

Mantis’s antennae twitched. “I am sorry. I did not know that would happen.”

“Mantis has empathic powers,” Gamora explained.

Steve frowned. “Empathic?”

I looked up. “You felt what I felt?”

Staring at me with wide eyes, Mantis nodded. “All three of us felt it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mantis bared her teeth in an approximation of a smile. “I will be okay.”

“What about you?” Nat asked.

“I’m almost back to normal.” I rested my head on the table, suddenly tired.

“I think I speak for all of us,” Steve said seriously, “when I say that we want you better than normal.”

“Tony’s right,” I admitted. “I should go back to medical.” I dragged myself to my feet. “After I clean this up.”

“Oh no you don’t,” Steve insisted. “You aren’t well.”

“Don’t want to give anybody radiation poisoning.”

Loki looked up from attempting to bypass the lock on the phone that he had somehow acquired from Thor’s pocket over the course of the meal and sighed. “Amateurs.” At a gesture and a muttered phrase, the puddle of refuse coalesced into different form. It slithered across the stone floor and out of sight.

“Why is it always snakes with you?” Thor asked.

Loki shrugged noncommittally.

“Is that safe?” Tony questioned with a frown.

“You should be fine unless it bites you. Or, of course, you bite it.” Loki appeared unconcerned by the possibility. “Don’t do that.”

Tony

As the guardians bid us goodnight, Korg and I helped Bruce into a wheelchair that the rock-man had retrieved. I knew he must be exhausted by how willingly he sank into the chair’s support. To my surprise, Loki took control of the situation. As they disappeared out the door, I felt a pang of guilt.

“We shouldn’t just send him back to an empty room,” Natasha said.

I agreed. “Also, no offense, Point Break, but should we really—”

“Send him with my brother?” Thor shrugged. “I don’t think Loki is particularly homicidal at the moment, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s erratic but harmless.”

“He made a radioactive vomit snake,” I pointed out.

“Mostly harmless.”

“You should stay with him,” the Valkyrie interjected unexpectedly.

Natasha hesitated. “I don’t want him to feel trapped, like we’re guarding him.”

Steve shook his head. “She’s right. He shouldn’t be alone. I’m sorry, ma’am, I missed your name.”

A ghost of a smile flitted across the Valkyrie’s lips. “I have many names, Captain. Scrapper 142, Brunnhilde, hey you… Banner calls me Val. Take your pick.” She emptied another mug. “Romanoff, let me fix you up with some pajamas and toiletries. Cho’s facilities may be state of the art, but med bay issued supplies are crap everywhere.”

Steve

As the room emptied out around us, I felt the events of the day starting to catch up to me. Tony slid down to sit across from me at the table.

“It’s been a long day,” he said, echoing my thoughts.

“Yeah.”

Tony seemed as if he were about to say something, but changed his mind. He shook his head and fiddled with a napkin.

“When did you find him?”

“Last night. Couple hours before I called you.” Tony’s eyes avoided mine.

Even though I had already guessed enough of it, acknowledging the story with Tony still felt like a punch to the gut. “I’m sorry.” Seeing the tended wounds had been jarring enough; I didn’t want to think about what finding him and not knowing if he would survive must have been like for Tony and Natasha.

“We almost lost him. I almost lost him.”

“Tony—”

“I don’t know what to say to him. I keep going between anger and grief and feeling like I’ve failed. Losing people I care about…I’m good at that. How do you tell someone how much you’d miss them? How do you apologize for years of mistakes, for driving them away through your own stupid, stubborn actions? For not listening to everything they were trying to tell me? For having my head so far up my own ass that I couldn’t see my teammates’ needs and pains? How—”

“Tony.” I interrupted firmly. “Look at me. You did not fail. You kept him alive and got him to help. Talk to Bruce. He’s having a tough time with the aftermath, too, especially now that we all know. He’s ashamed, and scared, and lost.” I hesitated, but the subtext of the outpouring of emotions from Tony was too poignant to ignore. “As for the rest of us… we know, Tony. We know. We’ve all asked that. Ever since… well… I’ve been turning over and over in my mind the countless ways I could have made things go differently, kept the team from fracturing, kept you and Rhodey from being hurt, even prevented the U.N. bombing. The past is there, and we have to live with it. All of us.”

Sam reentered the dining hall with his arm around Rhodey, a relaxed grin on his face. “Good to see you two working things out.”

“You worked at the VA as a counselor for PTSD and stuff like that, right?” Tony asked, looking over at Sam thoughtfully.

“Yeah, went back and got trained after my tours were over. Why?”

I saw where Tony was going with this. “Sam… Bruce isn’t in a good place right now. He tried to end his life yesterday.”

Sam sank into a chair. “Bruce?” he echoed.

Tony nodded shakily. “After… when he got back from space with Thor, he ran off again, got caught by some of Ross’s goons. They tortured him and dumped him on the streets in Queens. My… intern… found him, brought him back to the compound. He was in pretty bad shape, but I didn’t realize quite how bad—” he choked up again.

“Tony and Nat found him last night and brought him here. Physically, he’s going to be fine, but…” I shook my head. “I talked to him earlier, and he’s hurting. Maybe you could talk to him?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Sam got up. “Where’s he at?”

Natasha

Followed closely by a nurse, I paused outside of the room as I spotted Sam inside. He was sitting facing Bruce, engaged in deep conversation.

“They’ll be wrapping up soon,” the nurse said.

I nodded. “I’m glad he could talk to him.” The cozy fuzziness of the pajamas Brunnhilde had lent me felt out of place in the austere medical space, especially after all we’d been through, and with all that promised to lie ahead.

A long, dark room. Cold metal around my wrist. Always, always on guard. Always wary. "Trust no one." Blood, dripping onto the concrete floor. "I don't want to die." Round after round, emptying with precision into the center of the target as I tried to forget. I shivered as I snapped out of the rush of memories.

Sam opened the door. “Come on in.”

Bruce gave me a worn smile. His eyes, lined with the weight of everything he’d been through, were still damp with tears from whatever he and Sam had talked about. To my relief, I noted that they’d let him keep his Asgardian robes instead of making him change back to the papery hospital garments he’d had earlier.

“Thought I’d camp out here tonight, if that’s alright by you,” I offered, pulling in the extra cot.

“Okay.” Bruce looked me up and down, slightly perplexed, and gave a short chuckle. “Hulk pajamas?”

“Brunnhilde again. Can’t keep these ones, though, she wants them back.”

Bruce shook his head in amusement. “I made some tweaks to the monitor, by the way,” he offered, fiddling with the band around his wrist. “Swapped out the cord for a battery pack. Shouldn’t look as much like… well, you know.”

“Thanks.” I was surprised at the weight I hadn’t even noticed I’d been carrying that lifted off me in relief. “Do you need anything?”

Bruce shook his head. “I’m just tired now.”