Archive of Our Own ^beta

Bruce Banner lets himself stay three months in Manhattan. He stays long enough to get too comfortable in the little family-of-choice that Tony Stark gathers around himself without noticing, long enough to see the streets return to something like the way they should be, long enough to tour Tony's newly rebuilt private laboratory and workshop in what is soon going to be the Avengers Tower, long enough to get used to clean bedsheets and hot showers and dependable access to electricity. Long enough for Tony's constant flirtations to seem less like teasing and more like the prelude to an inevitability.

He spends endless hours in Tony's labs, working with access to resources beyond his wildest dreams and a research partner who understands his ideas almost as well as Betty did. He spends far less of that time than he should looking for an antidote to his condition, and more time than he should going through SI's archive of materials patents trying to design a pair of pants.

(He does eventually find something in some old notes from the seventies, a polymer which will stretch ten times and return to its original shape, all while mimicking the drape of cotton duck; but it won't take a dye and its natural color is an electric purple that not even the seventies could make fashionable. He's learned to appreciate a nice plum or burgundy; according to JARVIS it complements his complexion; but that particular shade goes a bit too far.)

He starts adding to his time-without-incident by weeks at a time instead of days. He stops counting the occasional save-the-world outing, when the other guy always manages to go where the team points him with a minimum of collateral damage. He's mostly letting himself coast on denial until the day Tony talks him into letting out the other guy under controlled conditions, for science, because Tony doesn't understand the concept of boundaries and, for some unfathomable reason, trusts them both.

It's when he wakes up the morning after that experiment that he admits he doesn't dare stay any longer, and should probably have left months ago. He's sore and shaky in that too-familiar way and blinking away half-dreamed flashbacks of the other guy, but he's tucked carefully into his familiar king-sized bed in a pair of silk pajamas, and JARVIS offers him a cheerful good morning and a weather report. And the flashbacks involve nothing less innocuous than stacking large, plush building blocks into a careful tower over and over again.

He wakes in a bad mood, and JARVIS's unflappable politeness makes him angry. The unnecessary, wasteful luxury of his suite makes him angry, the way it always does. The fact that he has to leave even though he loves it here makes him very, very angry.

He holds on to the anger. He's going to need it to do what he has to do, because there is no way in hell Tony will understand why he's going.

***

Tony does not, in fact, understand why he's going.

Bruce had known better than to try to leave without saying goodbye-- SHIELD might have been content to silently track him, but Tony won't be, not if Bruce leaves without explanation-- so as he re-packs his go bag, he asks JARVIS to let Tony know he's heading out.

He hadn't expected Tony to barge into his room and say "What the hell, Banner?"

"Morning, Tony," Bruce answers, rolling an insulated shirt into a small bundle. He's been collecting traveling supplies the whole time he's been here, knowing even while he delayed that this was inevitable.

"Is this about yesterday? Because nothing happened yesterday, the other guy was a sweetheart as always, you can check the recordings if you want, we got some excellent data--"

"Building blocks, Tony?" Bruce asks acidly. His travel supplies are much better-quality than he'd had before, right down to the small packet of false papers sewn into the lining of his backpack, but are sturdy and practical enough that they shouldn't stand out too much. (No purple this time. He bids a sad goodbye to his closet of designer menswear, courtesy of Stark Enterprises.)

"You're a scientist, you build things, I figured it would go over well. And it did! Even when I kept knocking his creations down, and wow, honestly I didn't think it would be possible to do full arches with those things, but the guy has good instincts-- Seriously, nothing happened, what's gotten into you?"

"It wasn't anything that happened yesterday, Tony. I should have left months ago, and I've just realized that I have to leave now, or I'll keep putting it off until it's beyond too late." He tucks one last thing into his pack-- the novel from his bedside table, there's enough room at the top-- and starts zipping it up.

"You aren't coming over all weird about living off my largesse, are you? Because I keep telling you, I'm more than willing to take it out in trade." He leers, but it's half-hearted; a good sign, it means he isn't confident that he's going to talk Bruce out of it.

"No, Tony, I've long ago lost any pride over living off the kindness of others." Bruce sighs as he swings the pack onto his shoulders. "But the Hulk can't live in Manhattan."

"Oh come on, you've been here how long and nothing's happened? Seriously, I'm more likely to destroy the place than you are. You've got the transformation totally under control, and besides the other guy's really a cuddle bunny once you get to know him. "

"Yep. I'm pretty confident in my control. And that's exactly why I can't stay," Bruce tells him.

Tony gives him a blank look. "What?"

Bruce shakes his head as he heads for the door. "You have no idea, do you?"

Tony spreads his hands. "Give me something to work with here. All I've got is that you think you have to leave the city because the other guy isn't going to go apeshit and smash stuff, which makes no sense whatsoever. You can't leave after three goddamn months."

"You're smart, I have faith in your ability to reproduce my reasoning," Bruce says, and then, because they both know he can out-asshole even Tony Stark when he sets his mind to it, and he's still fucking angry, he reaches out, a hand on each shoulder, and gives Tony a chaste goodbye peck on the lips, the first time he's openly acknowledged whatever this is between them. "Call me when you figure it out," he murmurs to Tony's stunned silence, and then heads for the elevator. "I'll have my phone."

***

His phone is the special Avengers team Starkphone, which is stuffed with technology at least three years from public release, is almost indestructible, gets tolerable reception everywhere on the planet and under as much as a kilometer of water or sea ice and up to 30,000 km altitude, holds a charge for about ten years of moderate use, and has unbreakable encryption and a completely untraceable signal, which was the only way to convince Natasha to take one. The fact that he's confident he can keep hold of it should be evidence enough that he's not worried about the other guy getting out unexpectedly.

Only five other people have his number, and one of them isn't currently on-planet.

The phone emits a few bars of Jonathan Coulton singing about his robot bride less than three hours after Bruce leaves the tower. Tony must at least have taken time to drink his breakfast and talk at his robots before he called, so it can't be too urgent. But Bruce has some waiting to do right now, and it's a good enough diversion, so he answers anyway.

Tony doesn't bother with a greeting. "Okay, so, you only stayed at the Tower because you needed a safe and predictable space to get confident in your control, but you think you've gone as far as you can here, and you want to test yourself under harsher conditions."

"Interesting for a first try," Bruce tells him. "Completely wrong, but it says some fascinating things about you. Too bad it doesn't even begin make sense if you, say, apply logic: to start with, a 'safe and predictable space' does not include anything within a hundred yards of your influence."

"See, that was going to be my next point, that if you need less serenity I can totally ramp up the unexpected explosions. No, huh?"

"Nope. I was pretty confident in my control before I met you, Stark, or I wouldn't have risked it, and short of a helicarrier falling on me, I would have been fine then, too."

Tony lets that hang for a moment, then says, "You know, Pepper's favorite relationship counselor tells me that clear communication is essential to a healthy partnership, and playing games with expecting the person you're dating to read your mind is always a bad idea."

"Does Pepper know you and I are dating? Because I didn't know we were dating." Sure, he kissed Tony first, but he's willing to hold out that ironic goodbye kisses don't count.

"Obviously I told Pepper before I told you, what kind of a partner would I be if I tried to hide something like that from her? Actually I won't lie, she was the one who told me we were. She thinks you're adorable, by the way, and that you need a lot of hugs, not that that's going to be very achievable when you're halfway around the world in some shantytown trying to cure AIDS with nothing but the power of your guilt complex."

"You managed world peace, in a cave, with nothing but yours," Bruce says, coldly, "Why can't I go for AIDS in a hut?"

"Low blow," Tony says after a minute.

"Yes, what you said certainly was," he agrees. "I don't know what you think you're poking this time, Tony, but you're not going to get anywhere with it. And Pepper knows you better than I do, I'm pretty sure she'd agree that there are some things you just won't listen to unless we make you work them out for yourself."

Tony starts a reply, but Bruce hears someone calling the name that's on his MMC, and says, "Sorry, Tony, it's been fun, but I gotta go. Talk to you later. Once you've actually put in some thought on the question."

***

When he calls back, Bruce is already well into crossing an ocean, and he's technically on watch.

"You aren't worried about losing control and hurting people, or you wouldn't have risked Manhattan in the first place," Tony says. "You wouldn't have even risked Calcutta."

"Right. If innocent bystanders were my real concern, I wouldn't have risked Rio." It had been an interesting thing to learn about himself, that he could coldly calculate that the probability of a few hundred innocent deaths was worth it for the greater good, but at the time, cold calculation had been something reassuring to cling to.

"So there's something about Manhattan that doesn't apply to Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro that means you aren't willing to live there."

"Congratulations, you're capable of passing freshman logic."

"And it's not population density, or you--"

"Tony, do you have an actual theory, or are you just fishing for hints? Because I do have other things to do right now."

"Obviously I have a theory, I was just showing you the pathways of my brilliant logic--"

Bruce rolls his eyes. "Don't call me again until you've figured it out," he says, and hangs up before the officer of the watch notices him slacking off.

***

"The difference between Manhattan and a favela in Brazil," Tony says on his next try, as Bruce is stretching out on an aged mattress in a cheap hostel, a few days later, "The difference is that people who have real power actually give a shit if someone destroys Midtown Manhattan."

"Very good!"

"So you don't dare risk Manhattan, because you're afraid that if you lose control there, the military will start actively hunting you again."

"Oh, so close, and yet entirely wrong."

"Wrong?" Tony asks, as if he is unsure this word can apply to him.

"Wrong. I'm not afraid that I'll lose control, Tony. We established that already."

"Damn," Tony says, "Because that was going to be my next point," and hangs up.

***

The next time Bruce's phone rings, it's a number he's never seen before, but it must have come preprogrammed, because the transparent screen identifies the caller as Pepper Potts.

"I just want you to know that you're driving Tony nuts," she says.

Bruce feels a broad smile spreading across his face and pulls himself into sukhasana pose atop the ancient stone wall he's been hiking along. He's pretty sure Pepper is tired of people telling her how genuinely delighted they are to speak to her after dealing with Tony- really, she and Bruce have a lot in common sometimes-- so he only says, "'Nuts' as in 'we can no longer avoid getting him the professional help he needs' or 'nuts' as in he's driving you nuts?"

Pepper sighs, with a little bit of a laugh in it. "The second one. He's not used to not getting what he wants."

"You know him better than I do," Bruce said. "Is this game really a bad idea?"

"Oh, he could use periodic lessons in the fact that he can't always get what he wants," Pepper says. "He's being annoying, but he might actually learn something in the end, and that's usually worth it with Tony."

"Good," Bruce says. These days self-doubt is sometimes more dangerous to him than anything else, but at the same time he knows better than to blindly trust his own judgment on every call-- hard lessons learned.

"And besides, he's working his frustration out with lots of sex, so there are compensations for me. But you know," she adds, "Tony isn't the only person around here who misses you."

Bruce winces. He really can't afford to think about that. Staying angry is still a thing, and so is avoiding temptation, even when the temptation has more to do with hot tea on demand, movie nights and friendly warmth than it does with smashing things. "Are you okay with this?"

"Okay with what? The part where you've run off to the far corners of the world with no warning, the part where you're playing riddle-games with my boyfriend, or the part where my boyfriend is a manchild who has elevated sulking to an art form?"

"Actually I meant the part where your boyfriend thinks he and I are dating, but you could answer those too if you wanted."

There's the sort of pause that Bruce has learned means Pepper is taking her time to reply very carefully, and then she says, "You did know that Tony and I aren't monogamous, didn't you?"

"That time when I had to listen to months of him whining about you and Phil kind of clued me in, yes. But I'm not new at this, Pepper, him learning to live with your lovers on the side doesn't mean you're automatically going to be okay with him letting himself fall head-over-heels for a teammate. And, um, I don't know him as well as you do, but I'm pretty sure that's what he's doing."

"I'm okay with it," Pepper says. "You're a good man, and you're good for him, and that's all I could ask for. Besides, I have video evidence that when he lets himself fall, you'll be there to catch him. And that's a good thing, because you can dissipate a lot more kinetic energy than I can."

Bruce swallows something back, and then takes a swig from his water bottle to wash it down. "Well. Good, then. Thank you. And I suspect you know this or I'd already be in chains twelve stories under a secret Army bunker, but the last thing I want to do is come between the two of you, and if that ever happens, please talk to me about it. I've noticed that Tony's not that great about talking honestly about this stuff, but I somehow suspect we're going to need it. I'm not big on setting rules in relationships, but always talking it out is something of a hard limit." He almost chokes on the hypocrisy there, what with the thing where he hasn't talked to a certain person since before Manhattan, but at least he knows what he should be doing.

"You meant it when you said you're not new at polyamory," Pepper says.

Bruce snorts. Speaking of a certain person. "I know you've read my file. Did you think I was going to make Betty sit alone at home and pine for me? And did you think Betty was going to let me break up with her over a little thing like that? Besides, there's kind of going to be a, um, silent third in all my relationships now. We've worked it out, mostly."

"Huh. Betty Ross has hidden depths," Pepper says.

"I suppose she didn't put most of the details of our poly arrangement into her debriefings with her father, come to think of it," Bruce says thoughtfully.

"Are you and she still together?"

"Yeah. I don't-- I don't think she and I are ever not going to be a couple, to be honest. She and I just fit together, sometimes it happens like that. She's home. But I haven't spoken to her recently, I've been giving her space."

He hasn't spoken to her recently because if she'd known he was living with Tony, she'd have come, and Tony would have asked her to stay, and then the last thing the Tower was missing would be there, and Bruce would never have been able to leave. He hadn't spoken to her before that because he's changed since they've been apart. Maybe too much. He is rock-solid certain that they will always love each other, but deep inside, he's afraid she won't like him when he's angry. He doesn't like him when he's angry. And he's always angry, now. (He's always been angry. He's just learned to stop pretending he's not.)

"Is she going to be okay with you and Tony?"

"Sure. As long as he doesn't try to come between the two of us, in which case he should probably start looking out for the entire might of the US Army." He's kidding, obviously-- for all his star-bright narcissism, Tony is the kind of man who would be less likely to try to break them up than to silently sacrifice his own needs for theirs, and Bruce doesn't really know how to deal with that: another reason not to call Betty.

"Wonderful. That's settled," Pepper says. "Now can we talk about the part where this is all largely irrelevant, because you've run away?"

"I can't come back," Bruce says, before she can start.

"I know," Pepper says, "And I understand why. I think Tony does, too, somewhere underneath all the bluster. It's not that different than some of his reasons."

"Tony's smarter than I am, and even more used to dealing with this kind of shit than me. He knows why, he just doesn't want to admit it, which is part of the reason I'm angry enough at him to keep playing games."

"He wants it to be something he can fix," Pepper says gently.

"Even Tony Stark," Bruce answers, "can't fix everything."

"I am not one to disagree. I ought to warn you, though," she says, "that Tony Stark is going to damn well try."

***

It's another week and two more identity changes-- probably immediately traced by SHIELD, and to be detected six months from now by General Ross and Co.-- before Tony calls again. There is a small but thoroughly decadent summer house, once owned by a petty but impressively corrupt bureaucrat in the pay of the CIA (among others), in ruins several miles behind him, and Tony's lucky Bruce came back for the phone (and his trousers) first thing, or he'd have missed the call.

He's in a pretty good mood when he picks it up, though. Angry, but sometimes it's a satisfied sort of angry.

Tony sounds kind of angry, too. "You won't live in Manhattan because you know you're not going to lose control, and you're afraid that if you live in a visible place, being visibly non-threatening, people will stop being scared of you," he says. "And if the green guy starts seeming controllable, then the Army will decide he's useful, and they'll try to make more."

"Not just the Army, everybody," Bruce agrees. "And they'll probably succeed, more or less. It's not that complicated if you have access to the original serum research and the right equipment, and there are plenty of tissue samples out there courtesy of Blonsky and Sterns. What did you do, ask Pepper?"

"Of course I didn't ask Pepper!" Tony says. "You set me a legitimate challenge, I'm not going to cheat by asking my girlfriend!" He pauses. "I asked Natasha."

"Oh," Bruce says. Yeah, Natasha would get it. She had probably been counting down the days until she would have to provoke an incident, if he was still delaying his departure.

"You realize that reasoning's bullshit, right? So what if General Ross et al are dumbasses? People try to get their hands on an Iron Man suit all the time, and I just smack 'em down."

"Yeah," Bruce says, "But it's different with me."

"How?"

"I'm not Tony Stark."

"...Wow, I don't have an answer for that one. But, Bruce, listen, once a technology is out there, you can't put it back in a box again, Tony Stark should know if anyone does. You hiding away is not going to change that."

"The super-soldier serum's been out there for seventy years, Tony, in one form or another. Do you know why we don't have armies of people who look like Steve yet? And don't give me any nonsense about Vita-rays, I've seen the original machine; if he was anywhere near your level, your father could have reverse-engineered it in a drunken afternoon."

"Dad bowed out of the super-soldier research about a week after Erskine died."

"Well, good for him. Smarter than me, anyway."

"So why don't we have armies of people who look like Steve? I have to say, it would really improve the standards of military gangbang porn--"

"If you really want to know the story on that, ask Director Fury. Or better yet, ask Steve about Fury. And get JARVIS to record his reaction when he finds out the answer. Now if you don't mind, I need to find my trousers."

***

"So I asked about Fury," Tony says.

Bruce is packing antibiotics in ice for transport, holding the phone to his ear with one shoulder like it's an old-fashioned headset and not an over-engineered marvel of semiconductors and transparent aluminum. "Mmm," he says.

"I didn't ask Fury himself because I'm not actively suicidal, and I didn't ask Steve because that might make him sad, and that would make his girlfriend upset, and seriously, she's scarier than Natasha--"

"Steve has a girlfriend?" Bruce asks with interest.

"Old news, Banner, moving on, I asked Clint, and Clint said, and I quote, 'They gave Fury the super-soldier serum, but it didn't do anything, because he was already the pinnacle of human perfection.'"

"Mmm-hmm," Bruce replies.

"That's a direct quote from the 'Facts About Nick Fury' thread on the SHIELD intranet's free chat forums," Tony says. "Which, by the way, is so old meme that I'm embarrassed to even have it in my network logs."

"Oh, sorry, did you think those weren't true?"

"'There is no such thing as global warming. Nick Fury was cold, so he turned the sun up.'"

"Yes?"

"'Odin Allfather isn't blind in one eye. He only wears an eyepatch because he wants to be as cool as Nick Fury.'"

"Hmmm."

"Nick Fury has never killed anyone. He simply asks them to stop living, as a personal favor to him."

"Again, sorry, am I supposed to be not believing these?"

"Well, the last one was originally about Steve's girlfriend, not Fury. But anyway, the point is, I went and had JARVIS dig a little bit deeper into certain classified files--"

"-- which you aren't supposed to have access to--"

"I don't know, how am I expected to keep track of that kind of thing? If they want me to know the difference they should put better security on it. So he found some stuff, and it appears that the Army was doing clandestine, non-consensual super-soldier-related experiments on wounded Black combat veterans after the War, which just fills me with love for my country, let me tell you, and huge amounts of the information about the experiments is gone completely, including if they were successful and how many survivors there were, but weirdly, Fury seems to appear out of nowhere and start kicking ass and taking names just about when it was ending. And then does not visibly age for decades."

"Interesting coincidence, that."

"And after that, there's a stretch of almost forty years where nothing gets done with the research at all. They just let it sit there."

"That sounds about right, Ross's project started in the late nineties sometime, and they hid the connections to the old work on the serum until after my accident, pretty much."

"The lesson I am choosing to take from this," Tony says, "is that Fury was such a badass that he managed to shut them down and keep them shut down, and therefore there is absolutely no reason why we can't do the same thing with the gamma treatment, and therefore there's no reason you can't come home."

"You're going to have to face reality sometime, Tony."

"You first."

"Very adult."

"I'm too busy clapping my hands in glee that you didn't object to me calling this your home."

"Well, if anywhere could be..." Bruce sighs, fastens the last latch on the insulated packing container, and says, "Betty looked into it. She found some paper records that had been missed. And some friends of her father's who still remembered. Fury didn't stop Project Rebirth. They stopped it themselves, because they were afraid they might make another Nick Fury."

"...that sounds like something else from the list of Nick Fury Facts."

"I told you they were all true. Look, they stopped the supersoldier research because it didn't work."

"Steve Rogers seems like pretty compelling evidence to the contrary."

Bruce laughs a little, shakes his head. "The point of the project was to make soldiers. The problem was that it didn't just act on the body. Can you imagine people like General Ross trying to command a battalion of Steves? Or, for that matter, even one?"

"Steve would punch him. In the face. In fact, Steve told me to tell you that any generals you need punched, he's up for it."

"Exactly. How does that famous quote from Dr. Erskine go, the one that's in all the biographies? 'The procedure makes you more of what you already are.' Use it on ordinary people, you get nothing useful: death, or no change, or monstrosities like me. Use it on extraordinary people, and you get charismatic leaders like Steve and Fury who don't take orders, they make their own rules. Either way, it's not much use to a military command. Add the gamma treatment, though, and-- well, you said it yourself. The other guy is a sweetheart when he's not completely out of his mind, he'll do whatever he thinks his friends want him to. And when he is out of control-- or take someone like Blonsky-- drop him in the middle of enemy territory and it doesn't matter if the human side agrees with your politics, he'll smash whatever is there to smash and then make a beeline for home. It's too thoroughly useful for them to leave it alone. You don't need an extraordinary person if all you want is an indestructible engine of destruction, and what do you know, hooray, I stumbled on a way to make one, even out of a nondescript, damaged and deeply flawed biophysics researcher."

"So, what, you've decided that the only way to keep them from making an army of Hulks is to make sure that everybody in the whole world hates you too much for them to get away with it in terms of PR?"

"Pretty much. It's not really a weapon you can use clandestinely, so as long as all the countries that have the resources to try it are afraid of public backlash--"

"'Make them all hate you' doesn't work very well as a long-term strategy, Bruce, believe me, if anybody would know that, again--"

"It's not like I want to do this! Come up with a cure that can be administered remotely in the field, come up with any better way, and I will be back in New York as fast as I can find a plane, I didn't leave your beautiful, beautiful synchrotron behind because I was bored of her, but between me and Betty we have been trying for years, okay, Tony, there are no other options."

There's a few seconds' pause on the other end of the phone, and then Tony says, "Call you back later, I just thought of something."

Bruce sighs and tucks the phone back in his pocket. Telling Tony Stark that something is impossible is like telling Steve Rogers that people are fundamentally selfish: it feels like stomping a baby bunny, and it's about as effective as kicking the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, but sometimes it has to be done regardless.

***

The next time the phone rings, the number isn't familiar and the phone doesn't have any pre-programmed suggestions, either. He answers it anyway, because JARVIS is the only computer on Earth who can handle the encryption, so either it's somebody approved or they're so screwed already that it doesn't matter.

"Hello, Doctor Banner," the person on the other end says, and he almost drops the phone, which would be bad, as it would then go over an approximately four-hundred-foot drop at the side of the road where he's hitching.

"Betty," he barely manages to choke out.

"Bruce," she says. "It's good to hear your voice."

"Yeah. Likewise. How did you get access to this number?"

"Oh, it was in the phone Tony Stark gave me," she says flippantly. "He said I might as well have one, just in case."

Bruce closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. If he destroys this roadcut, he will take out the only paved highway connection for a hundred kilometers, which would be a very bad thing in terms of local infrastructure development. "Betty, I was trying to keep you out of my mess. You have a career. A life. You can't make your life all about what happened to me; I don't have any choice but to live with this albatross around my neck, but letting it ruin your life too would be a tremendous waste of what you can do."

"I know, that was exactly my thought."

"What?"

"Well, when Stark came up to me at a conference and said he was starting a new research project and looking to hire gamma-radiation experts who had familiarity with Project Rebirth and a history of kicking the US military establishment in the goolies, my first thought was obviously for my career. I mean, Stark Industries and unlimited budget! That kind of opportunity doesn't come twice."

"Betty--"

"And I even thought, hey, maybe that Bruce Banner will be there! He's a legend in the field, and there were rumors he was working with Stark. If I can work with him, why, my career is made. Unfortunately, it turned out Banner had flown the coop, so that was a bust."

"He didn't really just come up to you and say that, did he?"

"Well, no, obviously. It's Tony Stark. The first thing he did was hit on me."

"Yeah, me too."

"I kind of figured. The next thing he said was that his girlfriend had told him that my boyfriend had told her that we were in an open relationship, so it was totally okay if I went up to his hotel room with him. Then he gave me the job offer."

"After you went up to his hotel room with him?" Bruce asks, morbidly fascinated.

"No, silly, after I turned him down on the hotel room, I had another engagement. But by that point I was pretty sure that he really was your friend and wanted to help you, so it only made sense to take the job."

"Betty, don't uproot your whole life again just because you feel guilty about me--"

"I'm not doing it because I feel guilty, I'm doing it because I want to help you. If he's allowed to, why can't I?"

"Nobody lets Tony do anything," Bruce mutters. "How does he think he's 'helping', or should I even ask?"

"He's looking for a cure for your condition. Apparently somebody told him that the only way you'd come home to him is if there was a cure."

"Betty," Bruce says, stops walking, closes his eyes. "You know I can't come home."

"You can't come home unless there's a way to effectively defuse the other guy's value as a weapon, I know."

"If I couldn't do it, and you couldn't do it--"

"I couldn't do it before. Have you seen the lab facilities he has here?"

"Yeah, actually, I helped with the decorating--"

"See, he said you had, but I didn't believe it, because if you had been in here, how on Earth could you leave? He'd better not be secretly evil, because I don't think I can ever go back to normal labs that have budgets and spending limits, Bruce. It's a good thing he already has the butler programmed with meal and sleep alarms, or I probably wouldn't have left the submolecular biology lab yet."

"Betty," Bruce says, "I love you so much."

"I love you, too," she says, and he doesn't need to be there or see her, he knows the exact shine that is in her eyes right now. "Although, listen," she says, "I'm not all that attracted to Stark, so that's not an issue, you can have him, but do you mind if I have sex with the high-speed SPECT scanner? Because it is the sexiest thing I've seen since the last time I watched you go, seriously, Bruce."

"Oh, I see. It's not about helping me, it's about you wanting to make time with the lab equipment."

"Now you understand."

"Hey, has Tony shown you his robots yet?"

"Well, I've met JARVIS, of course. Are there more robots?"

"They're shop assistants. No speech, but full AI, object recognition, and I swear he has them trained to read and on-the-fly mimic human body language. He treats them like pets, and they follow him around like puppies."

"Bruce. We have to figure out a way to let you come back here, because I am never leaving."

***

He has a minor territorial skirmish with an MSF group shortly after that, which is odd. Admittedly he doesn't have any medical credentials that match his current ID; he doesn't have any credentials at all that match his current ID, in fact, but they're usually willing to leave alone anyone who keeps to himself and isn't actively doing harm, and he'd been getting along with them fine before. This group is suddenly really cranky, though.

He has virtuously decided not to let the other guy out to go stomp their clinic when he hears through the local grapevine that the town they're working from was just attacked by some kind of giant monsters from the sky, which does sort of explain the change of heart. He heads down to investigate quietly, and sure enough, most of the central square and the shops lining it have been pretty much destroyed, a perimeter around them evacuated, and dark-suited men with black cars and shiny sunglasses are swarming around. There are some very interesting gamma-radiation readings, too, and something about them makes the other guy itch in the back of his head.

He contemplates a world in which the other guy can't stomp a neighborhood because alien monsters have been there first. Then he waits until after the last of the cover-up crews are gone, long enough that even the local drug dealers have come back out from under their favorite rocks, and he ducks under the caution tape and lets the other guy out anyway.

It's not like he can do much more damage to the place.

***

"That was brilliant," Tony crows at him the next day, while he's hopping a ride on a cargo plane to somewhere as far away as he can get. Luckily the phone has built-in filters to handle background noise. "Do you realize you missed the UNIT clean-up crew by less than twelve hours? You made the BBC World Service and Fury can't decide whether to be angry that you let the other guy out or smug that he knew you were there all along."

"Did he know I was there all along?" Bruce asks. Idle curiosity. He's pretty sure SHIELD-- Tony aside-- doesn't want him captured and tamed any more than he does, but he's been picking up new tricks as he goes, and it'd be nice to know if any of them work on Fury's best men.

"Who knows?" Tony asks. "There's stuff in that man's head even I don't want to get too close to. And in a clever segue, Bruce, I was thinking about the last time we talked, and what you said about Project Rebirth."

"Oh?"

"Right, you were saying that the problem is that the procedure works on personality, so anybody who's successfully transformed isn't going to be the sort of person who's fond of bowing to blind authority, which makes them useless as tools. And thank fate and Dr. Erskine, Steve Rogers was a fundamentally, nauseatingly good man, so even though he can't be controlled by anything less steely than his own conscience, his powers aren't a threat."

"More or less, yes."

"Thing is, it's not just the supersoldiers that applies to. Thor's powers are linked to his hammer, which can explicitly only be held by 'those who are worthy'. And Rhodey's suit is locked to his biometrics-- I'm sure they had a ton of fun trying to get other people to pilot it, but I let him take it because I didn't trust anyone else to use it right, and nobody else is going to. And you asked about my suit-- okay, so not even SHIELD knows this, but I'm not Iron Man."

"What? Tony, you announced to the whole world on live television that you were Iron Man. You argued in front of Congress that the suit was you."

"Yes, and I'd have to be an idiot to say that if it were true, wouldn't I? I mean obviously I'm the guy in the suit, and some of it's me-- that Tony Stark style and panache is inimitable-- but, look, I tell people that the reason nobody else has a working suit yet is the power source, but that's bullshit, at least for the sort of in-and-out raids that most of these people will be thinking of, if you look at the published trial data, it's clear that the problem is guidance and control, human reaction times and multitasking just aren't up to it-- I mean, I'm good, but I'm not that good, the only reason I'm not constantly crashing into things is that JARVIS handles most of the details. Plus he has full override power at all times, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't trust me in the suit, and you can't manufacture an AI like JARVIS, you have to bring them up and teach them like kids, and then trust them enough to put your life in their hands, and that's not something that's going to proliferate."

"So your thesis, if I'm following this, is that Steve's not a threat because he's a good man, Thor's not a threat because he's a good man, War Machine's not a threat because Colonel Rhodes is a good man, and Iron Man's not a threat because you gave override power to the AI you built in your basement."

"Exactly. And, of course, the other guy's not a threat because you're--"

"Oh, Tony. You don't even see the discontinuity there, do you?"

"What discontinuity? I'm trying to make a point here--"

"Does Rhodes' suit have an AI, too?" Bruce asks out of morbid curiosity.

"Not nearly as powerful as mine-- there was a limit to what I could do with a fully self-contained unit, which is why I can totally beat him up if I have to-- but yeah, there's a little baby JARVIS in there, which is why Rhodey doesn't constantly crash into things. If Rhodey treats him right, one day he's going to wake up and start calling him 'Daddy', and seriously, regardless of any plans I may have had at the time, I really want to be there when that happens."

"God, so do I," Bruce says, imagining it.

"But you're getting me off topic, the topic being that you can absolutely come home, because me and Betty have been looking at some of the new data coming from the other guy, the other other guy, I mean, and Blonsky doesn't have nearly the control you do, they're barely keeping him contained with heavy sedatives, and he's getting worse rather than better. The reason you could live in Manhattan is you, Bruce, irradiate an average guy and you end up with Blonsky, but you're not just some rumpled academic, you do know that, right? I was assuming it was false modesty, which is far more adorable on you than it has any right to be, by the way. You're extraordinary, you're almost as intelligent as I am, and way better at being a human being, not to mention capable of staying out of General Ross's hands for years through nothing but willpower and sheer ingenuity, and convincing a woman like Betty to fall in love with you-- the chance that they'd luck out again if they tried duplicating the procedure is hundreds of millions to one, probably, and even if they did, it's like the original supersoldier treatment: they'd just end up with someone else who isn't interested in following their agenda."

"Or, rather than the shining light of my extraordinary inner virtue saving the day, it could be that Blonsky's getting worse because he's spent years being held in a cage being drugged and tortured," Bruce says dryly.

"Oh," Tony says, and pauses. "Um, should I be doing something about that? Because I got the impression he was kind of a dick even before all that, and Pepper's in Astana, she usually handles the bleeding-heart questions. Betty and Fury have some formal protests in that would cover him too, but ol' Thunderbolt is still a stubborn ass in every conceivable way. I could just get the team together and bust him out, though, no problem."

"What the hell do I care?" Bruce asks. "He was totally a dick. And he was a volunteer, he knew the risks, and I've decided that my own mistakes are enough for me to flagellate myself with."

"Right. Get Bruce home, then worry about trying to salvage the mindless abomination Blonsky turned into, got it."

"Tony--"

"What?"

"It doesn't matter if your theory's right, because even the way he was last I saw him, Blonsky is a force for massive destruction. Why do you think Ross is bothering to hang onto him so hard? If they can crank out a couple hundred guys like Blonsky, they'll have their weapon, whether they're all mad with rage, or they're all special shining snowflakes, like me, apparently."

"Nothing I say on this theme is going to convince you, is it?"

"Nope. We're too much alike, Tony, and I've lost this argument with myself too many times already. I'm curious, has it ever worked when you've tried it on yourself?"

Tony doesn't answer. "Okay, so here's my next idea: we bring you back to Manhattan, and we get the other guy a whole basket of kittens. He'll be happy, some poor starving kittens get a home and a loving family, we can get some photographers in, they'll love it, seriously, and then nobody will be scared of him, anybody tries to turn it into a military project they'll be laughed out of the Pentagon."

"Tony. No."

There's silence on the other end, and just when Bruce is about to break it, Tony says, very calmly, "It's not fucking fair."

That's an argument Bruce suspects Tony's already had with himself too often, too. "I know," he says, and ends the call.

He's pretty sure Tony's seen Star Wars as many times as he has.

***

He sends Tony a postcard he picked up somewhere; it has a photo of a serene city park, and the caption "Echt Grün, Echt Stark." It's some kind of local political slogan, but he can't resist.

On the back he writes, "Having the time of my life. Glad you're not here. All my love to you and the missus, Bruce." Because he is after all an asshole, and he knows it's not one of Tony's languages, he writes it in bad German.

He feels like he should write to Betty, after that, so he tries. It takes up half a pad of hotel stationery, and it's far too drippy, self-pitying, and downright embarrassing to ever reproduce in full.

(Tony thinks I'm a good man, and he's going to try to convince me of it, just like you always did. I suppose there's a certain facility for selective blindness built into the human emotional repertoire; if there weren't, we would never reproduce, and that's what gives me that black hope that you and I will still be all right. But, Betty, if it's true-- if there's something about the treatment that locks into personality, if the treatment only makes you more of what you are,-- what does that make me? What does it make me, that if you amplify me, you get-- that? And if it's my willpower, my will not to do harm, that keeps him in check, that makes mine so different from Blonsky's, what does it say about me that it took me so many years to realize keeping it in check was an option, to think, hey, maybe all I have to do to stop this is to learn to be angry and yet want to stay myself--

'The first time it happened it was an accident. The second time, I meant to not come back at all.'

I like it, Betty. Some part of me likes it. It's easy. If I'm better at it than Blonsky, I don't think it's because I'm a better man.

'Like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I've a call. / It's easy enough to do it in a cell. / It's easy enough to do it and stay put. / It's the theatrical / Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute--')

If she was sitting there beside him, he could maybe tell her some of it, and she could stop him, or point out where he's going wrong, or shame him into being Betty's Bruce instead of the Bruce who's sitting here alone in the half-dark, or walk out on him and give him a more concrete reason to be angry at himself, but he has at least learned on his own that no writing which includes quotations from Sylvia Plath ever ends in anything good.

He burns it in a campfire, watching the paper crisp and turn brown as some small children roast marshmallows over it. Their parents, who have kindly let him tag along in their caravan for a few days, offer him a share of their marijuana. He tells them that he'd love to, but he has to stay angry, or he'll forget why he bothers with any of this. They nod sagely. They know what he means.

He sends Betty a postcard with an aerial map of the Large Hadron Collider instead, and writes, "I bet Tony's isn't this big," on the back (in English.)

He doesn't leave forwarding addresses, but a week or so later his phone makes a new noise at him, and he discovers that Betty has sent him a text message with an image attached. Tony says it's not the size that matters, it's the oscillation of your quantum states, it reads. The picture is a complex bubble chamber photograph of gamma decay, one of the most beautiful he's ever seen, and there's something going on in the trace that he's never seen before, that he suspects has something to do with the ring of strange metal around Tony's heart.

He didn't even know Tony had a bubble chamber. It's awfully low-tech for him, and he's not the sort to own one just for the aesthetic possibilities. He hopes he didn't build one while drunk, and, say, fill it with Thor's uncanny Asgardian beer in tribute to Don Glaser, but unfortunately that's exactly the sort of thing Tony would do.

Actually, he hopes Betty didn't do that either.

(Two of the more prominent particle traces happen to come together to make a shape resembling a cardioid with an acute vertex opposite the cusp. He's pretty sure that was just a coincidence.)

He's tempted to reply with another quantum physics pickup line-- possibly something involving bottomomium, which he's been quietly giggling about ever since CERN announced they had some-- but he learned way back in undergrad that once you start with the scientific double entendres, it never, ever ends. He's even more tempted to try some serious analysis on the image, but it's Betty and Tony who have the equipment and the time, and that's not his job any more. He tucks the picture away in a folder and moves on.

***

It's not Betty or Tony who calls him next, though. It's Doctor Jane Foster, a name he knows from a great many published papers that touch on his field of study-- and a name that kept turning up in the SHIELD files on Asgardian technology. He corresponded with her by e-mail a few times, long ago, and even anonymously peer-reviewed one of her papers, but he's never spoken to her by voice before.

"Doctor Foster," he says cautiously, pulling his tarp closer over his head. It's pissing down rain out there, hard enough to even pound through the dense forest cover.

"Oh, no, don't even," she says, "It's Jane. You don't mind if I call you Bruce, do you? Because I'm afraid I'm going to anyway, it seems like Tony and Betty between them say that name every five minutes."

"They're siccing you on me now, are they?"

"Siccing me?"

"Telling you to convince me to come home."

"Oh. I don't know about that. Actually I was calling you because I've hit a roadblock in the research, and Betty said you'd worked more closely with Erskine's original notes than she had and you might be able to help."

Ah. They've sent someone who only wants him for his scientific expertise. Tony must be getting desperate if he's borrowing Fury's strategy.

But then, it had worked for Fury.

"I didn't know they were Erskine's at the time, and they were still heavily censored, but yes," Bruce answers. "I didn't know you were working on that topic; weren't you doing something with exotic matter?"

"I didn't know I was either," Jane says. "But we've noted that the radiation signatures related to gamma transformations have major commonalities with the Bifrost echoes that I discovered, and it seems possible that there's an equivalent causality for the two, so we've been pooling resources. But we keep running up against the original Vita-Ray discovery-- that's what you based your gamma treatment on, wasn't it?"

"Not exactly," Bruce says. There's something moving out there, crackling through the leaf cover despite the rain. He considers for a moment deciding to be afraid of it, just for nostalgia's sake. "Ross came to me because his people thought that my work with gamma might have some bearing on their attempts to reproduce the Vita-Ray. Erskine seems to have kept that part of his work very close to his chest, and any notes he had on the basic energies he was working with were lost entirely, maybe deliberately. But I did adapt my work based on what we could reconstruct from his, yes."

"Well, it's known that the scientific working group that Erskine was conscripted into in Germany was working with Asgardian technology as early as 1942, and given the similarities we're now seeing, it occurred to me to ask if you could remember anything that might hint that Erskine had access to similar data or artifacts in the early stages of his work."

By 'scientific working group' she of course means the Nazi precursor to the terrorist group HYDRA. It occurs to Bruce that Jane has yet to learn the lesson, which Bruce, Tony, Betty, and Erskine were each taught all too well, that when you pay attention only to the science and not to its results, you end up killing people.

When Jane meddled in affairs beyond human ken, she didn't get a guilt complex, she got a heroic, unbelievably handsome alien prince (with a large hammer) who fell madly in love with her.

It occurs to Bruce that it's possible that Jane, unlike the rest of them, is just a genuinely good person, and he should probably tell her to run even faster and farther than he did. Innocence seems rarer than vibranium lately.

"I don't know," he says instead. "I noted the similarities in the energy signatures when I was working on the Tesseract, of course, but I assumed there was independent derivation. I never thought to test-- is Captain America radioactive like I am?"

Is Captain America radioactive? What has become of the world that he's even asking that question?

"No, he reads as normal human in every way; Betty looked into that almost as soon as she gained access to the relevant experiments. Of course that's almost as bizarre as the rest of it."

"His transformation was a one-time event; mine is more an... ongoing affair. It makes sense that the gamma energies wouldn't necessarily have lingered the same way, assuming that's what it was."

"We're currently working under that assumption, but I still maintain that a normal human couldn't have his capacity for healing, even at the peak of physical development. But Betty and Tony have been the ones concentrating on Steve; I've been paying more attention to Thor's hammer."

Bruce absolutely doesn't choke back a snort of laughter at that, and even if he did, there's no way she could have picked it up over the connection. Of course, there's also no way he could have heard her rolling her eyes, and yet it comes over loud and clear. "Yes, go ahead and make the jokes," she says. "Believe me, between the rest of them, I'm pretty much inured."

"I don't know what you could possibly mean, Miss Foster. Are you implying I have a sense of humor as juvenile as theirs?"

"Betty has that postcard taped above Tony's particle accelerator, you know, with your message facing out."

"That's because Betty is the best girlfriend in the world," Bruce explains. "The hammer-- does that mean Thor's back in town?"

"Oh, yes, at least for now, didn't I mention? Betty and Tony tell me you just missed us when we picked him up, in fact. Thank you for helping obscure the remaining energy traces! The last thing we need is someone else trying to build a Bifrost."

"Glad to be of service," Bruce says, not so much dryly as damply, as the tarp decides to dump a stream of rainwater right on his forehead. That would have to have been the last time he let the other guy out to play, then, which made the gamma traces he'd detected there even more interesting.

"Anyway," Jane says, "Mjolnir gives off the same energies as the Tesseract and the gamma transformations, though at a much lower level, even when it's actively in use. The most interesting thing, though, is that the total signature is most similar to the Tesseract's, and yours, when someone is in the act of attempting to lift it. We've had several test subjects try it under controlled conditions, and the small gamma burst does seem to be directly related to some sort of individual analysis, it's distinct and reproducible for each person."

"You aren't suggesting that the other guy try to lift it, are you?" Bruce asks morbidly.

"Um. No. But Thor tells us that the Tesseract is designed to be controlled with pure intent-- that the various mechanical means that we and his people developed to harness it are simply ways to channel that intent more safely. And also that there is a story, which he is unclear on, which somehow connects the Tesseract to the original emergence of consciousness in the universe. Given the apparent emotional link to the gamma transformations, and Erskine's comments about his process amplifying the subject's personality as well as physicality, our current working theory is that the restrictions on Mjolnir are not, in fact, an additional protective enchantment, but a fundamental aspect of its power source."

Oh... boy. Tony is apparently still pushing the "power comes to those who deserve it" angle, and he's roped Jane into it through the sweet, sweet seduction of science. "I'm afraid if you're studying the interaction of mind, ethics, and physics, you might be better off talking to a psychologist. Or a philosopher. Or maybe Roger Penrose. Or General Ross, he was really into New Age crap when Betty was little. My mystical phase was more about looking for an antidote to science than reconciling with it." He thinks about this, and adds, "Or you could ask JARVIS what he thinks about the ideas of quantum mysticism, since to my recollection they don't entirely account for him. Have you had him try to lift the hammer yet?"

"No. I haven't. How would that even... work? Does he have... limbs?"

"I have no idea," Bruce says happily. "You'll have to ask him and Tony."

"Yeah, that's, that's a good idea. Thanks, Bruce, I'm glad we had this talk."

"Hey, no problem. Don't really have a lot of demands on my time right now." He doesn't say 'call back anytime,' though. He's always avoided the more navel-gazing schools of physics for a reason, a reason that usually ends with him back at Sylvia Plath.

"Oh, wait," Jane says, and he just barely catches a sound like paper crumpling. "I have a list of instructions here, I'm supposed to remember to say this stuff. Um, 'How are you doing, Bruce? We all miss you here.'"

Bruce does laugh out loud at that. "I'm doing fine, Jane, thank you very much for asking. Hey, do you happen to know where Tony got his hands on a bubble chamber? He didn't build it himself, did he?"

"Oh, no, that was Erik's idea, mostly. You know Erik Selvig?"

"Uh. Mostly by reputation." Selvig had disappeared almost immediately after the battle with the Chitauri; Bruce had kept an eye out long enough to note that he'd been embraced back into the bosom of SHIELD and was talking on the intranet enough to prove he was alive and more or less free, and then let it drop off his radar. If the guy wanted to hole up for awhile, let him hole up.

"Well, him and Thor. He was trying to explain to Thor about Earth particle physics and somehow ended up telling Glaser's beer anecdote, and then Betty said someone ought to try it, and Tony said why not us?"

"I can fill in the rest of that story for myself, can't I?"

"Well. Probably."

****

"Hey, Bruce," Betty asks.

"Yeah?" he replies. He's lying belly-down over the edge of a stream, trying to catch trout with his bare hands, and not succeeding very well. Betty had called a while ago, but they'd run out of things to talk about fairly quickly. The things they aren't talking about are starting to crowd them out. But it turns out that they can still breathe into each other's silence and be comforted by it, so he's been holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he listens.

"So feel free to ignore this question if there's an answer you'd rather not share, but why don't you ever use the video option when we talk?" Betty asks.

Bruce considers this. "My phone has a video option?" he answers, finally.

"Bruce!" Betty protests. "And you're supposed to be a certified genius!"

"I do biophysics," he grumbles, "not consumer design engineering."

If he'd thought about it he'd probably have assumed the phone had video. Tony designed it as a personal toy-- it probably has a spectrograph, an fMRI, and can make toast to order. He hasn't really been exploring its capabilities, though. It would be too easy to get dependent on the technology, which he can't afford; the last time he was in a hotel room with Betty, she'd even forgotten how to play Solitaire without a computer to help her. The phone lets him talk to people he cares about, that's all he needs to know. He can't really afford to be dependent on that, either, but it's almost certainly too late to prevent that one.

"Bruce," Betty says. "Really?"

"Oh, fine, give me a second," he grumbles. It takes only a little bit longer than that for him to fumble his way through the menus to turn on the video option and then send Betty's phone an invite to the video call.

She appears on the screen almost immediately, smiling, beautiful. It looks too much like the photo he carried for a year, after the last time he left her, and he almost chickens out and ends the call, but then she scrunches up her face and says, "Bruce, you look like crap."

He runs a hand self-consciously across his head, and comes out with a handful of twigs. "Don't like the new hairdo?"

"Are you living wild out in the woods like Tarzan?"

"Me Tarzan, you Jane?" he said. "No, wait, that would get confusing, don't want to upset Thor."

"I'll have you know that Doctor Foster and I are getting along like gangbusters," Betty tells him haughtily with a toss of her hair.

"Is that 'with an axe' or 'in bed'?" Bruce asks.

"It's only with an axe when Tony is too insistent about his offers to join us in bed," she says. "Jane's adorable, Tony. I think she loves her science even more than you do, and being around her makes everything seem simple, because to her, it is. It's easy to see why Thor fell for her so hard."

"I am happy to hear you're happy," Bruce says, and he is. That had been unexpected; when they'd started this arrangement he'd thought of it as necessity, making the best of a bad set of choices, but the first time he'd managed to speak to her and she'd been bubbling over to tell him about how she'd started dating a psychiatrist they both knew a little bit, and he was such a romantic that it just made her laugh-- he'd been astonished to find that her happiness had spilled right into him. She was happy and she loved him and she wanted him to be happy, too, and he was. He'd known since he was little that pain was transitive, but it was only then that he'd realized happiness was, too.

He can see that happiness in her eyes, now, and he realizes that her protests, those weeks ago, had been true. She didn't go with Tony because she felt an obligation to help him. She went with Tony because she wanted to. And it was a good choice for her. He's glad-- fiercely, selfishly, unselfishly glad-- that if he can't be there, being happy, being with people he loves, that at least she can.

"But seriously, Bruce, losing yourself in the uncharted taiga? Even Director Fury is starting to get worried. It was always cities before. What's changed?"

"I'm doing primal therapy," Bruce says. "Getting in touch with my caveman spirit, in search of inner balance. Isn't that what your Doc Leo always said?"

"That's what Leo always said was bullshit," she answers, rolling her eyes.

"Anyway, I suspect Director Fury is only worried because it's impossible to track me here."

"Is that why you're doing it?"

It's not so much Fury as your father, he could say. Or It was always cities before because I was hoping to find a cure, and I've stopped bothering to hope. Or these days, having people around me just reminds me of who I'm not with.

"I just wanted to see how lost I could get," he says lightly, instead. Betty doesn't believe him, but she lets him change the subject anyway.

He's gone too long without destroying anything. If he picks his next place right, the various watchers will assume he's been madly smashing up pine trees for the past few weeks. The problem is, he's not sure he wants to be the Other Guy. Not fear of the damage he'll do, not fear of losing control, not because he hates the transformation-- but he wakes up and sees the cold summer light starting to slant through the trees, and one day he might forget to hate being Bruce.

He definitely needs to move on.

*****

When Tony finally calls again, he starts with, "Hi, Bruce! What are you wearing?"

"Nothing, in point of fact," Bruce says. He doesn't activate the video option. Let Tony do that if he wants.

"I thought so! That's why I called. Hey, I saw you on TV."

"That was... fast. What, do you have a Google alert set for me?"

"I am deeply insulted that you think I would resort to anything so crude. You're getting really good at finding ways to get publicity, by the way. They're already running the footage on CNN, with hysterical commentary about how you could be anywhere, ready to mindlessly destroy. Project: Make Everyone Hate You is working as planned."

"Good to know," Bruce says. He's sitting, rather gingerly, on a bit of the little remaining forested slope near a partially-reclaimed strip mine. Partially, and poorly. Strip mines in this part of the world get very little oversight (as if they do anywhere), but the violations at this one had been egregious, and blatant, enough that it had attracted a very determined group of nomadic environmentalist protesters. He'd heard about it from his new-age friends with the caravan, muttering down the grapevine about the serious sabotage that had been going on and private armed guards that had eventually driven the protesters away. Apparently the heightened security had stayed after they left, though. He'd cased the place just long enough to notice that, a, no human guards or workers were there in person after dark, and, b, the night vision security cameras trained on the equipment park were still constantly monitored.

Right now the place is kind of a mess, and crawling with activity, though he gives it a few more hours before the international press shows up in force. The other guy had really, really enjoyed demolishing all that heavy earth-moving equipment, and Bruce is finding it hard to disagree even though he knows that the cost of replacement is, in the end, going to be put on people who can't afford it, instead of touching the pockets of whatever peer of Tony's has been gobbling up the profits.

Also, he's kind of angry that the other guy decided to run off into the woods on the wrong mountain afterward. His carefully cached pack, including his clothing, is currently several dozen miles, a rather steep and treeless valley, the main access road to the mine, and a lot of possible attention he can't afford away from where he's sitting.

"Why are you still naked, by the way? Isn't it getting cold where you are?"

He can't tell Tony this, because then Tony would immediately wonder why he still has his phone, and he'd be forced to admit that he's taken to wearing it on a steel-cable lanyard around his neck when there's a risk that he will be violently separated from his pants pockets. It's not that he's planning to call anyone, it's just nice to know it's there if he needs it, and he didn't think the night-vision camera would pick it up well enough to be identified.

"Well, I was hoping you'd call as soon as you got my message," he says instead, "And I thought it might make you happy. Why, what are you wearing?"

"Glory," Tony says. "I am clothed in glory and triumph."

"Oh, we're not having phone sex, then?"

"Was phone sex on the table?"

"Well, not now," Bruce says. "I'm too curious about the 'glory' thing. Have you been playing with your particle accelerator again?"

"Ooh, baby, talk particle accelerators to me some more," Tony says. "And here I thought we weren't having phone sex."

"I should have known you get off on talking science."

"I get off on you talking science," Tony says. "No, seriously, talk to me about particle accelerators. The glory and triumph was just saving the world from another alien invasion, I need something to distract me from the adrenaline comedown. Give me a second to get my pants off, have to keep things fair."

"Tony--" Bruce starts.

"Did Betty tell you about the latest results she and Jane got from their waveform analyses? The significant values were great--"

Bruce lets it wash over him, throwing in a half-formed suggestion once in a while when he can. He's pretty sure Tony wasn't serious about getting off on this, but then again, you can never quite tell with Tony, and he could use the distraction, too, especially since his toes are starting to get very chilly. It sounds like they're still working on the idea that there's some kind of mystical element to the shared properties of the Asgardian and Chitauri technology. Bruce is largely convinced it's a dead end-- not that they're wrong, but that engineering might be the wrong way to approach that part of the equation. It's good to hear, though, to almost feel like he's in the middle of the research again, until Tony starts talking about how much more help he could be if he was working in the lab with them.

"That's great, Tony," he interrupts, "But I'm going to have to hang up, I need to steal a pair of pants." Some of the security at the mine is starting to fan out toward Bruce's location, but they're using absolutely terrible search tactics; he's pretty sure he can get one of them alone and ambush him for clothing. With shoes and trousers, he should be able to circle around the long way, find his cache, and move on.

****

He's sitting on the train the next time his phone goes off. It's a video call, from another unknown number. He shrugs to himself and answers it.

The screen lights up to an image of what is probably one of the labs in the Tower. Foreground are a young woman with dark hair and impressive assets, a tall blond giant he recognizes on a second glance as Thor, and beside him, an even more statuesque woman in Asgardian-style armor.

As soon as they see him on-screen, they start singing. Thor has a surprisingly good voice, and the smaller woman's is sweet. It's a tune Bruce recognizes.

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Hide it under a bushel-- No! I'm gonna let it shine.

They're even doing the hand motions, Bruce realizes in horror. It takes him far too long to react, but when he does, he growls, "STOP THAT" across the line at them.

He might have put in a little more of the other guy than he meant to, because Thor stops immediately, looking stricken, and then silences the other two with prods in the shoulder. "My apologies, Friend Bruce, if this serenade was unwanted, but I was assured that it was a traditional song of encouragement and warm hearts among your people."

"It's not your fault, Thor," he sighs. "Someone thinks he's being funny, that's all."

"It's my fault, really," the girl in front said. "Tony told me he'd give me a new Starkphone if the first thing I did was call you and sing that. I thought I ought to encourage the tendency to ask for things other than sexual favors." She paused. "That doesn't count as asking for sexual favors, does it? You and Tony have a thing, don't you? Does that song have some sort of hidden meaning? Oh, god, ew, I feel slimy."

"The only hidden meaning that song has to Tony is that he's obnoxious," Bruce reassures her.

"Oh good," she says, looking relieved. "I'm Darcy Lewis, by the way. I'm Jane Foster's PA. It's nice to meet you at last, Dr. Banner."

"Nice to meet you, too," he says, "Please tell Tony to stop handing out this number," and hangs up.

That was unnecessarily rude, but sometimes there's really no other option.

****

He wanders into a forgotten Soviet-era industrial town a day's travel north-east of anywhere, the sort of place where all the locals only want to find a way to get as far away from their hometown as they can, and all the non-locals have already succeeded. His command of the local language is shaky, but one more foreigner speaking Russian will probably blend in better than a native accent anyway, so he decides to treat himself to the rent of a cheap room with a real bed and a hot shower, and a cup of tea at the internet cafe across the street, and then somehow he keeps deciding not to move on.

He tells Tony it's because he lost his military tails a little too well, and he needs to give them a chance to catch up. He tells Betty, who knows him too well to buy that, that it's because he likes the way they make their tea: green, strong, and incredibly bitter.

She tells him she's going to get that printed on a mug.

The real answer is that he's just plain tired. He's tired of moving, he's reached the end of himself, and he knows that if he doesn't stop, somewhere, and let himself rest, he's going to keep going until he ends up back home.

The proprietor of the cafe hears him speaking English into his phone one day, and before long he's got a steady stream of acquaintances who will buy him dinner in exchange for language practice. The Czech physician who runs the clinic down the block will let him have lab time in exchange for doing all the x-rays, because he's convinced the machine will give him cancer if he goes in the same room. The clinic equipment is crude in comparison to the equipment he'd become used to with Tony, but it's steps up from what he had in Kolkata, and it's enough to play at replicating some of the things Betty has been telling him about.

He gets comfortable way too quickly. He can't afford to stay there much longer than he could in Manhattan; the only real difference is that the publicity is less, but he pushed things too far with his Siberian sojourn already. He's going to have to find something to smash, soon, and it's going to have to be more dramatic than the last one, too.

He doesn't wanna.

He gets up every morning and has tea and pastries at the cafe, he messes around in the lab and sets kids' broken wrists and watches the weather move across the sky and chats with people, who call him the American Doctor and have started to treat him a lot like a neighbor. Tony or Betty call him a couple of times a week and talk about nothing, or science, or what's going on in their lives. Tony has stopped trying to get him to come back to New York, except by telling him stories of all the grand adventures the rest of the team are having without him.

Bruce is pretty sure he's happy about that. He's happy that Tony has accepted the truth and stopped trying to do the impossible. The only reason it worries him a little is the possibility that Tony's stopped talking about it because he's planning something; Tony planning something never ends well.

Sometimes he tells his new acquaintances stories about his life before, but he always leaves out any identifying details. He starts to get a reputation anyway. Some of the kids he x-rays start to ask if he's a real mad scientist. (He always says yes, of course. When someone asks if you're a mad scientist, you say yes.)

He's sitting in the cafe one afternoon when a stranger comes up to him and asks him in thickly accented Russian if he's the one they call the American Doctor.

"Yes," Bruce says, cautiously, in the same language. "But I'm not really a medical doctor-- I have a medical degree, but I'm mostly a biophysicist. A research scientist," he clarifies.

The man nods along. He's maybe in his early thirties or late twenties, with dark hair, a medium complexion and features that trace his ancestry to somewhere in the area where Asia and Europe come together. "They tell me you know about radiation," he says.

Bruce raises his eyebrows. "A little."

"We need your help," the man says.

Bruce buys him some tea. There is almost certainly very little he can do to help, but listening to the man is something, and it's not as if he has another appointment. The story he has to tell is terrible, terrible in the oldest sense: he comes from a town south of here, in the mountains, a town that did not weather the fall of the USSR with any tranquility. Five years ago there was a weapons depot there, of some sort-- the man isn't clear; maybe he doesn't know. Noone knew what was in it, and it exploded, or it was destroyed. Ever since then, children and old people have been dying, adults have been getting sick. Noone will come there to help, he says. The NGO aid workers say it is too dangerous. The government agencies, the people in the capital and the Americans and the WHO and the UN, say that they are making up the story, that nothing could possibly have happened there, that the people are only sick because they are poor.

"They are poor," he says, "but they have always been poor, and they have not always been dying. Not like this. I have asked everyone, and noone can help, but then I started hearing people mention you, the radiation doctor. So: will you come?"

Bruce says that he is very sorry and what has happened to his village is terrible, but there is nothing he can do. He knows radiation in the laboratory, he studies it, but he knows nothing that can help a town. He hopes the man finds help somewhere. He will tell the story, when he can.

It's the answer that was expected. The man nods, solemnly, and bids him goodbye, and leaves. He doesn't show any anger at being turned away, yet again. Bruce knows all about not showing your anger.

He spends that night staring at his phone. Nobody calls-- he wasn't expecting them to, he'd talked to Tony only the night before-- and yet.

The next day he packs up and starts hitchhiking south.

Fixing radiation poisoning is what he did. Or, at least, it's what he'd originally set out to do. If that is really what has happened in the village, he can teach them the basics of how to protect themselves, how to alleviate the symptoms. He can collect some data that he can pass on to — someone, somewhere. It will probably be hidden and forgotten about again — but at least it will be something.

It's probably not radiation, though. The people in this part of the world still remember the Soviet nuclear tests, the Chernobyl disaster, and it's still magical and sinister to them, while the Americans and Indians and Western Europeans have moved on to being afraid of genetic engineering instead. Any run of bad luck could be blamed on Soviet radiation tests. He goes to the village expecting to find a bad harvest and maybe a small epidemic.

He finds a disaster site.

Something blew up here five years ago, but it was more than a weapons depot-- it looks like there was a running firefight through the town, maybe more than one. And it wasn't the first time that had happened. And on top of it all, there's an abandoned Soviet chemical weapons factory just outside the inhabited area, which is being lived in by a dozen families whose homes are still not rebuilt. This area has been trampled by war for generations now, but what's happened to this village was special.

It's not radiation, some simple tests confirms that, but it's pretty much everything else. Name a toxic substance or carcinogen that modern civilization had learned how to concentrate and poison itself with, and there's some here.

They don't need a doctor. They don't need a radiation expert. They definitely don't need a superhero. They need about a hundred million dollars' worth of toxic waste cleanup, just as a start.

Bruce can't help them with that. He can't throw around millions of dollars and organize huge international projects.

He knows someone who can, though.

He sits that night in the guest room of the house where he's been offered a place to stay, and turns his phone over and over in his hands. He can't help everyone. Tony can't help everyone. This, though, he probably could. Even if he thought it was a bad idea, and it probably is, if Bruce asked, he'd throw in all of his resources, because Bruce has never asked him for anything.

Bruce has never even asked him to answer the phone.

He runs his finger down the 'recent calls' list and clicks Tony's name before he can change his mind.

Tony answers before the first ring, which would be gratifying if Bruce didn't know that Tony had practically wired his brain into the system.

"Bruce!" he says. "Calling to tell me you're on your way home?"

"I'm calling to ask for a favor, actually," he says. "Not for me, but these people need help of the 'multinational corporation' kind. I thought you might need a tax break."

"That's the Bruce I know and love," says Tony, and then there's a short pause. "Where are you? You've moved again," he adds accusingly.

"I thought these phones were untrackable," Bruce says dryly. "I'm in a little place you've probably never heard of. It's called Gulmira."

"Fuck," Tony says.

"Oh, you have heard of it then," Bruce replies. "Someone's scattered chemical weapon byproducts, heavy metals, unexploded bombs, and various other lovely things all over their village. I've never seen anywhere in more need of a toxic waste clean-up. I don't suppose any of them are yours?"

"Bruce, where are you? Exactly?"

"I'm in somebody's spare room, they've set out bedding for me. They were very grateful that the American radiation doctor believed them enough to visit their village. Why?"

"Stay right where you are," Tony says. "Don't leave the room. I can be there in--" he pauses, "--six hours, maybe sooner."

"...They are yours, aren't they?" Bruce asks, but Tony's hung up. Tony's never hung up on him before.

Bruce had been idly aware that he'd wandered near the part of the world where Tony Stark's famous kidnapping and escape had happened, but "Central Asia," is a very, very big place. It's hard to conceive how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is, even for Bruce, and he's walked across half of it.

And Tony had never talked about that time, much. Bruce probably could have looked up the details in a file somewhere, but he'd wanted to respect Tony's silence-- he'd been busy curating all of his own silences-- and besides, Fury's overtures of friendship aside, he was pretty sure he hadn't been granted the same unspoken amnesty to go rummaging through classified documents that Tony has.

But now, he goes walking out in the village in the last of the evening light, and once he's started looking, it's obvious that Tony had been here, once. It's like reading a loved one's handwriting in a letter; that collapsed building, that shrapnel pattern, that burn mark, that teenager sitting on a crumbling concrete wall, texting on his Starkphone; it all says, "This is a place where Tony Stark once fucked shit up."

It's noticeably different from the way a place looks after Bruce destroys it. It shouldn't make him feel oddly fond.

Tony finds him there, just after dawn, sitting cross-legged on the outskirts of the village, staring at the ropy, tenacious weeds that, just like the people, are still insisting on living and growing in this poisoned ground.

"Right," Tony says, jetting to a stop in front of him with a quick burst of repulsor light. "Here's the plan--"

He doesn't even bother to comment on the way Bruce has obviously disobeyed his order to stay put. "You have a plan, do you, Tony? And I'm just supposed to go with this plan? What if I have a plan? What about my plan?"

"You have been talking to Pepper too much," Tony says, flipping up his faceplate. "I knew I should have blocked her number. Do you have a plan? What is this plan?"

"Well, I was thinking you could have some of your people talk to the people here, and then negotiate permissions with the governments involved, and set up a fund to help the locals bring in clean-up--"

"Mmm, nice thought," Tony says, "but too risky. It draws too much attention to my connections to this place, the last thing they need is another round of terrorists targeting them. We're going to have to make it look like it's not all about me."

"Tony Stark, not wanting it to be all about him?"

"I am starting to learn subtlety," Tony says, making a face at him. "No, we're going to need the other guy."

"...That's your idea of subtlety?"

"There are shades of subtlety," Tony replies. "So what we're going to do is you're going to rampage through the weapons factory, and then I will heroically swoop in and--"

"What if they don't want their factory destroyed?" Bruce asks mildly. "There are people living there, you know."

"What?" Tony looks at him. "Seriously?"

Bruce shrugs. "Somebody burned down their houses with a shoulder-mounted flamethrower. It might be killing them with poison but it at least has a roof."

Tony drummed his fingers on his thigh, metal ringing against metal. "Fine. You'll come rampaging out of the hills, and I'll swoop in and heroically stop you right before you destroy the factory. Then, out of the goodness of my heart, I will offer Stark Foundation money and support to repair the damage the Other Guy almost caused, and my PR people will spin it so it's all about how scary the Hulk is, randomly attacking a completely random town for no particular reason whatsoever, and nobody will need to go looking up ancient history. And then you'll come home, and you'll hold me through the nightmares for the next six months, because I should have fucking known better than to think I could just come back here."

Bruce considers this. "Good plan," he says. "I like the way you make it be not all about you by making it all about me. It doesn't change the reason I had to leave in the first place, though, Tony. A public fight with you will help, but not indefinitely, and frankly, I'm not sure I can get the other guy to fight you at all."

"That's because I haven't shown you how I'm going to win," Tony says triumphantly, and produces something from a compartment in the armor.

It's a pendant, hanging from a reinforced cable like the one he has for his phone-- large enough to be mostly hidden when he's Bruce, but small enough to fit snugly around the other guy's neck. There's some kind of circuitry in it, and it glows with a light almost the same shade as Tony's arc reactor. He reaches a hand out involuntarily, and then pulls it back. "What is it?"

"It's something Betty and I have been working on," Tony says. "It's a Hulk tamer. As long as you keep it close to your central nervous system, the Other Guy is guaranteed to stay in control and follow my lead. And with a portable, easily-deployable control mechanism, the design of which is controlled solely by myself, gamma giants lose most of their weapons potential. Ta da, you get to come home."

Betty has been keeping Bruce up-to-date on their work; more-or-less, anyway, but he'd had no idea they were anywhere near success. And even if the most recent prototype had worked out, this is not the result he'd expected. "How does it work?" he asks.

Tony holds it up, contemplating it. "It contains a set of indrium-gallium-nitride semiconductor quantum wells that emit gauge bosons at energy levels carefully tuned to match those experimentally shown to induce calming in human subjects. Betty's concept, mostly."

It takes Bruce longer than it should to parse this. Then he buries his face in his hands. "What you're saying is, it has blue LEDs in it."

"Sure, but they're blue LEDs that are powered by a microminiature arc reactor. The thing has almost no power generation capability, but it'll throw off enough anomalous gammaesque energy signals to confuse anyone trying to figure out what it does," Tony says. "And you know and I know that the other guy isn't going to get out of control either way."

Bruce takes it out of his hand and looks at it. "This isn't going to work for very long."

"What you're doing isn't going to keep working forever, either, is it?"

He folds his hand over it. The blue light shines a little through the gaps between his fingers, mostly blocked by the red of his blood. It looks the way the light over Tony's heart would look, if someone covered it with a hand.

Tony just looks at him, holding himself still, the way Tony only does when he's being very careful. "I won't try to tell you we need you," he says. "Just-- this will buy us time to find another way. Without depending on fear as the primary deterrent."

Bruce opens his hand. Gives the device back to Tony. "So," he says. "When were you thinking of doing this?"

"No time like the present," he says, tucking the amulet back away, and then calls across the street, where the teenager is still sitting with his smartphone, pretending he's too cool to be staring at them. "Hey, kid, can that thing record video?" Tony asks in strongly accented Russian.

The kid looks up. "Of course it does," he says, sauntering in their direction. "And I speak English, you know."

Bruce grimaces. "You didn't, uh, you didn't hear any of what we just said, did you?"

He raises his eyebrows. "Were you saying something I should have heard?"

"No," Tony says. "Listen, how would you like to be internet famous? My friend here--" he gestures at Bruce, "iIs going to turn into a giant green rage monster and fuck up some shit, and then I am going to heroically and courageously stop him. We need a random bystander to completely coincidentally capture it all on video which can then be sold to the American news channels. You know anyone who can do that?"

The kid considers this carefully. "Does it have to be only one person, or can I get my friends too?"

Tony shrugs. "Hey, you want to reduce your bargaining power by diluting the market, that's on you. You've only got until until I can drag this guy about three km thataway, though," he says, and points off vaguely in the direction of the old factory.

It doesn't take him long to make up his mind.

"I love capitalism," Tony says, watching him run off, presumably to find more kids with newish mobiles. "It's so excellent at inspiring a spirit of civic cooperation."

This plan has about three dozen points of failure.

Nearly all of them still end with him going home, though.

***

It's still strange, to stand there and let the other guy out while someone is watching. While Tony is watching, wearing the armor and fidgeting himself about a foot off the ground.

He closes his eyes, and thinks about destroying things, thinks about Gulmira and that teenager with the high-tech mobile phone and no real hope for a future, thinks about Tony's high-handed certainty that he can solve everyone's problems but his own. The anger is easy. Letting the anger be him is harder. Is too easy. It washes up over him like a flood, and just as he's going under, the flood asks him a question, as always, asks, "Why?"

Sometimes he wonders what would happen if he ever found a good answer to that question. For now, he just replies, "Smash." And lets out the breath he's been holding.

***

Afterward, it turns out that the hard part is physically getting back to New York. Iron Man goes where he wants, through a combination of hubris, invulnerability, and Pepper and Rhodey doing a lot of hard negotiating, but Bruce can't just ride along, not at that distance. Since he didn't exactly enter the country legally, and since sneaking out the way he got in isn't going to happen this time, it takes some doing, and even though Bruce is unconscious for most of it, he still has to sit through several conference calls with Pepper, Fury, and some slightly hysterical ambassadors before it's fully arranged that he'll get a ride four hours to the nearest airport, where one of the smaller Stark jets is waiting for him.

The plane seems unreal. He sleeps most of the way to New York. It's not even that he's tired: he just feels blank, like a magnetic tape that's been too close to an electromagnet. The blue light is barely visible through two worn layers of shirts. He doesn't dream. Maybe the other guy does.

There's one car waiting for him at the airport at the other end. Tony and Pepper are standing by it, looking smug, and-- "Betty," he says, before he can stop himself.

She's-- Betty. She's still Betty, and she's in his arms, chest to chest with him, her head fitting just right against his shoulder, alive and real and fierce and happy. "God," he says, and then stops to take a breath before he cracks entirely, "God, I've missed you."

"Yeah." She pulls back a little, so she can look him in the eyes. "And we're going to have a long talk about that, and why you thought that was a good idea, but not... not right now." She reaches up and cups his face in one hand, and smiles. He smiles back, entirely helpless, and they stay like that for one endless moment before she steps away.

He can still feel the warmth of her against him, and the cold where she isn't touching him anymore. He'd forgotten, that quickly, how much simple human touch means: while he was on the road it was too easy to put up a keep-away field, too easy to simply not get that close. Betty's hand, where she's still holding onto his, is almost overwhelming.

Her grip tightens for a moment, a quick reassuring squeeze, and then she turns to the others. "Tony," she says, expectantly.

"Hi, Bruce," Tony says with a wag of his fingers, from where he's standing next to Pepper, leaning against the car.

"Hi," Bruce says.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Tony," Pepper says, and shoves him until he stumbles a few steps forward.

Bruce rolls his eyes. And then drops Betty's hand, and crosses the six strides left between them, and hugs Tony. Hard.

The arc reactor digs into his chest, unyielding, pressing the hard lump of the amulet into him, right where it had pressed against Betty's softness. They're going to bruise. He doesn't care.

"Stay," Tony says, half-muffled against him. Just that, "stay."

Bruce doesn't know what he can say to that. But he keeps holding on.