Work Text
1981
Dayton, Ohio
The carpet is soft against his skinned knees. He sinks into the floor of the landing on top of the stairs, back pressed against the wall. At the bottom of the stairs, his mother is on the ground, shrinking from his father’s advancing figure. He flinches and squeezes his eyes shut as he hears his father curse and the sound of fists meeting bodies. He hears his mother scream, and then–
Bruce wakes up gasping for air. The clock on his bedside table reads 3:43 AM. Pale moonlight shines from his window onto his bed, and he takes deep breaths, trying to calm down. He’s covered in sweat and his heart is still racing. It’s a dream, he thinks. Just a dream.
He can still hear his mother dying.
Quietly, shakily, he listens for any sounds from his father’s bedroom before slipping out of bed and walking to the window.
The moon is full and bright, and the empty street outside is bathed in a bluish tint. Bruce tries to push the nightmare aside and concentrate on reality. It has been eight years since his mother’s death. Eight years since Bruce was left alone.
He still misses her. Like the ache of a magnet that’s pulling towards something it’ll never reach. Like the hole in his heart is in a constant vacuum, and it’s sucking the life out of him. He stares up at the moon and bites his lip to keep from crying.
He knows it’s stupid. She's dead. Has been for a while. But
some shred of hope inside him
wishes she’s looking up at the moon and thinking of him, too.
He runs a thumb along the latest set of bruises on his arm. Blue moonlight illuminates the wet sheen of tears running down his cheeks.
2003
US Government Research Facility
Shadows loom down the hallway. He’s shuddering under his father’s blows, cringing as his mother tries to intervene and is thrown away with a sickly thud. “You monster,” his father spits, punctuating each word with a blow. He covers his head with his arms, waiting for the next blow to fall, and then–
Nothing happens. He looks up and jerks as he sees himself staring back down at him. They’re both older now, and outside. The cold night air bites at his face. He doesn’t need to turn around to know that the gravestone pressing against his back reads ‘Rebecca Banner.’
The other him stares at him with such a burning hatred in his expression that he flinches away. He’s grabbed by the shirt collar and hauled to his feet with a snarl. There’s no time to react before he’s tumbling backwards, hitting his mother’s gravestone with a crack and–
“Bruce? Bruce?” He feels a cool hand on his back and flinches away instinctively. He hears a voice say, “Hey, you’re okay. It was just a dream.”
He opens his eyes. The lamp on the nightstand casts a warm glow in his bedroom. Betty is gazing at him with knitted eyebrows and a worried mouth. She says, “You were–”
Bruce nods quickly. Too quickly. He looks away. “I’m fine.” He doesn’t want to hear the details, knows too much about the details. The thrashes and groans and half-gibberish, half-screams that come out his mouth. He doesn’t want to see the pity on her face when she looks at him.
Betty gives him her no-nonsense stare that he can feel even when he’s not looking at her.
“Bruce.”
He gives in, gazes at her, takes in the curves of her face and the honey brown of her eyes in the dim lamplight. He has never been more in love with her than that moment.
“I’m fine,” he repeats.
She reaches out to touch his hand, but he slides it away to flick the light off. He still feels like his skin is about to split open at the slightest touch. The sudden darkness unsettles him, but as his eyes adjust to the dark, he feels himself start to relax.
Betty’s soft, sleep-ridden voice floats through the darkness. “Love you.”
He pauses and whispers, “Me too.”
2004
Somewhere in the Rockies
The stairs in his childhood home. The floor stained with his mother’s blood. Trembling hands, coursing with adrenaline and covered in blood. The sick swoop in his stomach when he realized something was going wrong with the experiment. Breaking Ross’ arm, smashing the windows, snapping apart the priceless equipment like they were a child’s Lego creation. Writhing, horrendous energy coursing through him before his self-control was ripped away. And through it all, a throbbing pulse of rage, rage, rage.
Every time Bruce closes his eyes, a highlight reel of his worst moments starts to play. He hasn’t eaten a hot meal (or anything, really) in weeks. The last time he showered was more than a month ago. He’s tired down to his bones, but he can’t sleep. He won’t sleep. Because every time he tries, the nightmares come back.
He’s had nightmares before, about his father, usually. Always. They came almost every night, and they left him gasping for air in sweat-soaked sheets. These dreams are different. These dreams shake him to his core. Every scene is vivid in his memory, from the old furious face of his father about to snap to the new images of utter devastation caused by the Hulk.
By him.
His body’s not his own anymore. It’s Bruce and this new monster fighting for control inside his brain every moment of every day. He thinks about giving up sometimes. About letting the other guy win and drifting down into the comforting darkness.
The only thing that stops him is the flashes of destruction that show up in his dreams. He doesn’t know how many people he’s killed. He’s too afraid to find out.
The only sleep he’s gotten is when he can’t take it anymore and drifts off for mere minutes at a time. It’s called microsleep, he remembers, and it only happens when someone’s terrifyingly exhausted. He took a class on it in college, he thinks. He doesn’t remember.
Every memory from the past is blurry, like he’s looking through a foggy glass. The only thing that’s painfully clear are his nightmares.
Now, he can’t worry about anything much except keeping himself together. One day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time.
Breath in, breath out.
Calm your heart rate.
Steady your hands.
Take one step, then another.
And whatever you do, don’t close your eyes.
2012
Kolkata, India
“Monster,” his father spits, kicking him in the stomach as he’s curled up on the floor, and he’s smashing his skull against his mother’s gravestone and his hands are stained with blood and he’s strapped into a chair with nowhere to go and his body explodes with pain and fury and his mind is ripped out of himself and he’s turning buildings into dust, killing dozens with a sweep of his hand, and he’s running and running and running and running–
He wakes up gasping, flailing an arm out to the other side of the bed to reach for the ghost of a woman long gone. There’s nobody there. There hasn’t been for almost a decade. He can’t remember the last time he touched anybody. He can’t remember the last time he was touched.
This is familiar now.
Bruce is a scientist. He’s looked for patterns everywhere from day one. And even this new life has a routine to it.
Hulk out. Destroy cities, kill people. Wake up naked in a field somewhere. Run. Find a new place to stay. And begin the cycle all over again.
It’s gotten to the point where he can tell if he’s about to turn. His skin starts tingling. His vision goes green. He feels a swell of something begging to break free of his tiny, fragile,
human
body. Most of the time, he can calm himself down. Sometimes, he can’t. He’s getting better, though, he has gotten better, and it’s been over a year since the Other Guy last appeared.
Yet the nightmares still haunt him, like they have for his entire life. The usual scenes of early childhood trauma are nothing new. Occasionally, though, he’ll have flashes of awful devastation. Buildings crumbling, corpses strewn about the street, bullets pinging off his skin. Those are worse. Those remind Bruce that his father was right. He’s not inhabited by a monster. He is a monster.
He was a killer before he was a Hulk. The rage is always there, simmering under the surface. Primed to explode with vivid green and swelling muscle. There’s a reason why the superserum didn’t work on him, he thinks bitterly. You can’t make a hero out of just anyone.
Bruce was never meant to be a hero.
2015
Avengers Tower, New York City, New York
His father is crouched in the snow, back pressed against a gravestone. He’s bruised and bleeding from his lip, like Bruce, but the awful part is that he’s smiling. “Go on,” he taunts, “Prove me right. You know what’s been in you all along.” He doesn’t need to say the word both of them have in their minds. He gets to his feet, pushes himself into Bruce’s face. “You’re just. Like. Me,” he breathes softly, a grin twisting his features into something unrecognizable.
Bruce flinches despite himself, tries to turn away, but he’s thrown by the collar face first into the snow. That touch is all it takes to spark something in him that’s been buried deep, deep down since he was born. He sees green, heaves himself up from the ground and throws himself at his father with a cry filled with utter rage. A moment of fighting, a good punch to the sternum, and an ear-splitting crack–
Bruce jolts awake with a throbbing pain in his head. His covers are thrown to the floor, soaked with sweat. His skin is tingling with a terrible, familiar feeling. He throws himself back onto the too-soft bed for a moment before deciding sleep is a no-go. To the lab it is, then.
The halls are empty, as they should be at two in the morning. So when Bruce exits the elevator and walks down the hall to Tony’s lab (it’s technically shared between them, but he can never really think of it as
his
, really), he’s intrigued at the bright light that floods the hallway through the small window in the door.
He can hear the thumping bass of Tony’s usual playlist (classic rock, lots of Queen) as he approaches the door. With a swipe of his keycard, he slides it open, blinking at the sudden brightness. Tony’s in the middle of something, fiddling with another half-finished robot. Bruce has to wave his hand in front of Tony’s face to get him to notice anything.
“What are you doing awake?” he says once Freddie Mercury’s voice fades away. His father’s taunts echo through his head and he presses his nails into his palms.
Prove me right.
Tony lifts an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same question,” he says shortly. He turns back to the robot, the mini-screwdriver he’s holding ridiculously small compared to the size of his fingers. The dark circles under his eyes are noticeably prominent, and Bruce realizes with a start that Tony’s hands are shaking.
“Are you okay?” Bruce asks, a note of hesitation lingering in his voice. He flinches despite himself when Tony suddenly utters an exasperated cry and heaves the screwdriver at the wall, letting his palms fall with a heavy thud onto the workbench.
The lab is silent for a heavy moment. Tony squeezes his eyes shut. Bruce looks at the floor.
You’re just. Like. Me.
“I’m fine,” Tony replies after a minute. Even though he’s obviously lying, Bruce doesn’t push.
“Want to go blow something up?” he asks instead.
“Please.”
They explode everything they can get their hands on until they’re too tired to continue, the loud booms ringing in their ears until they can’t think. Bruce leaves to eat something and Tony leaves to shower. When Bruce sees him next, he’s back to his usual genius-billionaire-playboy-bullshit exterior, pretending that nothing happened.
You know what’s been in you all along.
2018
Birnin Zana, Wakanda
He’s on the deck of the Grandmaster’s golden spaceship, turning towards Valkyrie with a bittersweet smile on his lips. “You want to know who I really am?” he says, and he’s falling falling falling and his hands are around his father’s throat in the slushy snow and his fists are leveling skyscrapers and he’s strapped to a chair with electrodes attached to his body and his body isn’t his own has
never been his own and his mother hits the ground with a dull thump and his hands are covered in warm, dripping blood and his father roars “You’re just like me!” and he watches helpless as everyone around him crumbles into dust–
“Banner. Banner. Wake up.”
Bruce jerks awake, flinching from the sight of Thor leaning over his face.
“Don’t-” he pants, backing up as fast as he can from Thor’s hand hovering over his shoulder.
Bruce thinks he might rip himself apart if somebody touches him right now. That was the most vivid nightmare he’s had in months. He can still feel the icy snow on his knees. If he looked at his hands, they’d be dripping red.
“Banner?” Thor sounds hoarse, and his voice is full of genuine concern. Bruce is
thisclose
to breaking down, but he takes a deep breath instead and rubs his hands over his face.
“How did you get into my room?” Bruce asks, and he means for it to be gentle but it comes out harsh enough to make both of them wince. But really. Bruce thought Shuri, the genius, would have come up with good enough security to stop the god of thunder from waltzing into his bedroom.
“The door was open,” Thor says lamely. He averts his gaze from Bruce’s face and steps back.
Bruce may be exhausted, but he’s not dumb. “How’d you get into my room?” he asks again, slightly softer this time.
Thor sighs. “Shuri-” He stumbles over her name. She’s gone. Or missing. Nobody knows, and Bruce hasn’t let himself think about what Thanos did yet. “Shuri had a protocol in place for you...if you…”
“Hulk out,” Bruce finishes flatly. “But I was fine. I can’t even turn right now. And I never turn when-when those happen.” This time, it is his turn to avert his gaze from Thor’s worried face.
“I guess the protocol sensed your heart rate increasing and that there was more motion in the room, so it alerted me,” Thor says. “Well–not me specifically, but whoever was in the living room at the time. Or whoever was awake, I suppose. Hey, do you want tea?”
It takes a minute for Bruce to process what Thor means. He chooses not to comment on the earlier part of Thor’s reply and focus on tea instead. Does he want tea? He certainly won’t be able to sleep after this, and it seems that Thor won’t, either.
“Why not?” he mutters. He slides out of bed and strides out the door, keenly aware of Thor’s concerned gaze.
The lodgings Okoye and M’Baku provide the surviving Avengers with are comfortable and modern. They’re staying in rooms with a central living space for the time being while the Thanos thing gets sorted out. Every piece of furniture has technology that is leaps and bounds ahead of anything Bruce has seen. There are holographic projectors in the sofa, for God’s sake.
One wall of the living area is made out of one-way glass. It is almost dawn, and the sky is glowing blue over the mountains. Bruce can see the faint glimmer of lights from the city as the scattered stars above fade away. The moon is bright. All at once, his heart aches with a rush of unidentifiable emotion.
Thor hands him a mug of steaming tea, holding one for himself, and half-sits, half-collapses into the couch. Bruce follows him, careful not to spill his drink all over himself.
Both of them sip their tea for a while in silence. It’s sweet but not too sweet, with a distinctly earthy taste. Not bad. Bruce burns his tongue on the hot drink but the pain doesn’t really register. Thor stares out the window aimlessly. He’s not any different physically, but as Bruce looks at him, he seems like he’s aged all fifteen hundred years of his lifetime in one day.
Bruce doesn’t want to think about what must have happened on that ship after he was beamed down to Earth by Heimdall. Doesn’t want to think about the way Loki died, Thanos crushing his airway with easy strength. Doesn’t want to think about how Thor watched, helpless, from the sidelines.
He was never really a fan of Loki, but nobody deserves to watch someone they love die.
As they stare out the window, the sun slowly but surely begins to rise. The mountains turn to black silhouettes as the sky brightens. Stray clouds glow red, pink, and orange. Brilliant rays of light pierce the horizon and paint the landscape with muted colors. Below them, the city begins to wake up.
Tears fall briefly from Thor’s eyes before he wipes them away.
Bruce drains the last dregs of tea from his mug and takes a deep breath.
“We’re going to be okay,” he says softly. He’s not certain who he’s trying to reassure: himself or Thor.
Thor gets up, sighs with the grief of a thousand lifetimes. “Will we?” he says. His voice is close to breaking.
Bruce pauses.
He doesn’t know how they’re going to defeat Thanos. He doesn’t know how to get the Hulk to come back. He doesn’t know where Tony, Peter, Shuri, Sam, Bucky, or any of the other missing went. He doesn’t know if his nightmares will ever disappear. He doesn’t know how long it’ll take them to
heal.
But he does know there’s moonlight painting the world shades of blue. There’s love reaching for you when you need it the most. There’s someone blasting Queen in a laboratory, fiddling with a robot, waiting for you to arrive. There’s sweet, earthy tea you burn your tongue on. There’s sunrise. There’s always sunrise.
“Yes. We will.”