Thread: Human Connection [Avengers -- Sprouts & Virginia]

Happy ending, right? He knew how he was supposed to feel about the whole - thing. He'd spent so many years on the run - Alberta, Idaho, Greenland, Rio de Janeiro, Chiapas and Virginia and New York - that he should have been jumping at the offer to hold still for a while, to just stay put . The thing was that he had been holding still, back in Kolkata - at least in terms of habitation he'd been holding still, but he'd spent every day moving. He'd spent every day doing something, really doing something and maybe it was small, maybe it was one person at a time and maybe there were seven billion people out there, but it had mattered. He had felt like it had mattered. Doing things that mattered made it so he didn't have to think about anything else, particularly about himself, and while he didn't generally consider himself given to fits of narcissism, anxiety had a way of making someone self-cannibalize. If he wasn't moving, he was sitting there eating his own brain, just breaking it down, pulling himself to pieces until something shook him hard enough to come out of it and spit himself back out. He'd weighed the pros and cons of the outcome and had arrived at a point where he just barely avoided regretting going back to New York, he'd squeaked by, but only by a couple of hairs. On one hand, sure, he'd been part of a team that had ultimately saved the world, that was always a nice thing. He'd also seen a wormhole in the sky and a giant terrifying floating space lizard, both of which most people probably would have considered on the con side of things but he kept those thoughts private. People had to cop to it being at least a little cool, right? On the other hand, he'd pretty much destroyed New York. That was a con. Big con. Bruce couldn't precisely remember what he had done - things always got pretty foggy - but he'd tortured himself with enough news reports and cell phone recordings that he was able to piece it all together. He'd even made a map, printed a satellite photo of the city and circled all the spots that he'd had a hand in destroying and when he'd leaned back it had been a globular star cluster that made his stomach sink. When that wasn't enough to feed his ever-present but-still-growing self-hatred, he'd done the math - he'd destroyed 592 square km or 7.7 percent of New York City, the equivalent of all of Manhattan. He didn't need to know those things, there was no use in knowing those things, but he knew them now and he couldn't forget, just like he couldn't forget what he'd done to Harlem, or what he'd done to Culver University, or what he'd almost done to Natasha Romanoff. That was what burned him most about it. Some guys had alcohol and others had cocaine and some had sex and others had gambling, his problem was his tendency to level boroughs. He'd been clean for a year, no incidents, no smash. He'd had it under control. He hadn't hurt anyone, he'd never wanted to be that person but he had a problem and he'd gotten a saddle on it. A lot of things were gone from that day, but he could still remember the fear in Romanoff's expression, of all the memories that could have stuck with him it was that one, the open terror in the face of a woman who had already seen all the horrors the world had to offer. He saw that look in his nightmares, it was the same look his mother had given his father during those times she was crumpled on the floor, not knowing if he was done yet, not knowing how many more hits it would take before his anger subsided. Bruce didn't talk about that. He thought about it plenty. He knew what they would tell him, that he 'couldn't control it', but that was verbatim what people said when they hit their wife or their husband or their kid. That was what everyone said to justify their rage. He wasn't going to justify his rage even if he couldn't stop it - going easy on himself seemed like the equivalent of permitting it. Constant vigilance was the only way, the self-flagellation was just habit. So there he was in New York and the building-sized giant space aliens still hadn't completely cooled, but the general population had emerged and resumed the pace of their lives, because that was New York, those were New Yorkers, they were used to having to keep going in spite of smoke and rubble and grief and chaos. And there he was in Stark tower on one of the floors at the top and he could feel Tony staring at the back of his head, knew that his eyes were narrowed like he was trying to see into his skull. He wondered sometimes if that frustrated him, if Stark got annoyed that it was the one thing he couldn't manage if he just read enough about it mind-reading. He took educated guesses based on personality but a good portion of the time, Tony was astoundingly wrong about the way others functioned. He let him stare for a while and then turned to look at him and Tony didn't look away because he was shameless, and his eyes were narrowed and his head was cocked back and to the side. I'm just trying to figure out how we can adjust your wardrobe to better suit your ennui, I don't think that shade of blue is sufficient. Tony said, spinning a wire stripper point-first against his index finger he was always moving because he had to be, because he would probably shake all of his skin off if he had to stay in one place, like a dog right out of the bath, just vibrating himself down to the bone, Why so melancholic, Hippocrates? I could be phlegmatic. That's not phlegmatic I'm seeing, phlegmatic doesn't get the - Tony gestured brow-ward, - financial worry lines. Bruce reached up and rubbed between his eyebrows. Notable that you don't have them. Bruce said. I'd need to have financial worries for that. Tony agreed, stepping forward and Bruce had to resist stepping back, he always had to resist it, but he could never hold off the flinch that happened, his hands twiddling. It had only been a couple of days since the incident but Tony had absorbed his tics by now, he didn't stop walking or slow down when he saw the twitch, he didn't take it as a deterrant or a warning sign, he just kept coming. Bruce wasn't used to Tony and he wasn't sure he ever would be - he wasn't used to talking much anymore, but he especially wasn't used to being touched. And Tony touched people. A lot. He stood with his hands on either side of Bruce, resting on his shoulders, I have a proposition. I'm not going to sleep with you. Bruce said, a wary joke. Not yet, anyways. Tony agreed, managing to keep a straight face, I propose we go and get stewed. Just thoroughly blottoed, off-our-faces sloppy drunk. Wasted, trashed, shit-faced - Curado. Bruce contributed. Yes. Tony said, giving him a little shake, You and me. I don't really drink. Okay, but what if you did? Not the most compelling argument. It might loosen you up. It might loosen me up too much. So you're saying you will sleep with me, then. Tony said, squinting at him, and Bruce smiled at the floor, so Tony amended, looked down as well, then they both looked up at the same time, I know what you're saying. Of course he did. As much as Tony seemed to get a kick out of being the one person in the world who wasn't worried about the Other Guy while in a room with the guy that contained him, he was also aware . He drank with Tony that night, the first drink he'd had in years by then, a finger of scotch while Tony had two hands worth, and he sat slouched deep into a chair more comfortable than any bed he'd ever slept on and he listened to Tony Stark speak. It was almost lulling, the sentence that had run-on for hours, the explosion of stories and non-sequiturs and insights, the way he got more enthusiastic and soft-eyed as the night went on. He knew, given time, that Tony Stark was very likely to become a dear friend. He knew, given time, that they would create amazing things together. And he knew, given time, that Tony would understand it when he woke up in the morning and couldn't find him anywhere. That he would ask and Jarvis would tell him that Dr. Banner had packed his things and left at four in the morning, that he'd used one of the laboratory computers to look at the train schedule, that by then he was at least seven hours away from New York and Stark Tower and him and everyone. He'd had the plan before he'd even left Kolkata. The only way to stay off the radar was to always know the next three moves, but even in India he hadn't gone unnoticed - he didn't know how long SHIELD had been watching him. At least a year, if Romanoff hadn't just been implying. He'd heard about chikungunya, henipavirus, the leptospirosis and the rubeola. The flood in the Philippines had been unkind and the ratio of doctors was one for every thirty-three thousand residents. Even volunteers wouldn't go, the risk of acquiring meningitis was too high even for the most hardened philanthropists. He had the good fortune of being impervious to all of it. He hitchhiked from New York to North Carolina with one trucker and got as far as Alabama with another, then caught an Amtrak from Tuscaloosa to Dallas. He got a last minute cheap seat from there to Mexico City, twenty-one hours in transit with eight stops along the way and he worked on an orange orchard until he'd made the money for a one-way ticket to Manila. He used the remainders to put down the first month's rent on a bachelor apartment in Payatas and when he looked out the window he could see the steaming expanse of Smokey Mountain II, a landfill where the poorest in the city had built their homes, where they waded through a dump site that could swallow them whole, thousands of people in thirteen hectares. Two years ago, almost a thousand people had gone missing on the site after a landslide. A few weeks into his work there, while setting the ankle of a woman who had gotten her leg stuck in twisted metal, he watched a bus pull through with iron bars on the windows and white faces staring out at the residents, some of them lifting their cameras, bright flashes going off. Poverty porn, they called it. Slum tours. Bruce had needed to sit down after that, resting his hand over his heart and telling the Other Guy not to do it. Some days were harder than others, but that was how it went. He was in no place to complain about his work because he had the good fortune of just being the one who treated people, not being the one who needed to be treated, not the one living on an actual pile of garbage. He sutured lacerations and drained abcesses, he corrected broken noses and casted broken wrist after broken wrist, he gave antibiotics when he could get them and he pleaded his case with humanitarian efforts until they gave him innoculation kits to take with him, but he always ran out before he could vaccinate all of the kids. There were too many. There were always too many to help. When he got home it was when the sun was just about to rise and he almost never got more than four hours before there was a knock at his door, a small face that had been sent in his direction, frantically telling him about an injury, an illness, a need. He went. Of course he did, what else could he do? How could he - ? Sometimes he would go back and try to sleep again but he almost never succeeded. From time to time he would just lay down in a softer area of garbage to catch fifteen minutes before someone shook him awake tulungan . Help. When December rolled around, Smokey Mountain II was lit up by the surrounding celebrations, all of Manila glowing with lights, parties with abundance every night. One of the children from the site got his hands on a mortar-and-shell firework in the hopes of having a party as well and it had gone off while he was holding it, taking four of his fingers off. Tulungan, doctor. Di ko kaya. Bruce said all he could do was prevent infection. Sometimes his best wasn't enough. He dragged himself home that morning but every time he nodded off, a firework went off and he woke up with the image of a small, bleeding hand flashing in front of his eyes. He wandered the apartment - there wasn't far to go - rubbing his palms into his face and he stopped moving entirely when he felt the overwhelming urge to hit something, to drive his hand into the wall or through the mirror or into someone's face. He sat on the floor on his knees and he tried to meditate but he fell asleep instead, fifteen minutes then snap-bang , another spray of lights in the sunrise sky. Bruce looked blearily out at the city, out at Smokey Mountain. He just needed a little sleep, and he would be fine. A knock came at the door. The very quiet voice of self-preservation told him not to answer, but he ignored it as he often did, he opened the door and he found a neighbour on the other side, Rodrigo, a man who religiously brought him meals in exchange for the care he gave his aging mother. That morning, he held a woman in his arms. I found her in the hallway. Rodrigo said, I think she's been stabbed. Bruce ran to wash his hands while Rodrigo deposited her on the couch. He applied pressure, he checked for other injuries but the one his hand was on was the worst of it - her forearm could wait - deep enough to go into muscle but it missed the abdominal aorta, as lucky a shot as stomach wounds got. He had no sedatives or painkillers on hand so he used her unconscious state to his best advantage, working fast to seal off the bleeding, to sterilize and pack it, a procedure that would have had someone screaming any other time. He didn't suture it, deep knife wounds were too filthy - it would have to remain open until it had seeped out all of the grime from the weapon and close on its own once the gauze was out. He did suture her forearm. The wounds - defensive - were shallow enough to clean properly, most of the bleeding had stopped by the time he got to them and he closed them the old-fashioned way, with the finicky stitching of the very precise. They would have to be cut out in a few days. After that, he waited. He left her on his couch and paced his apartment. He boiled water and made chamomile tea and when the sun hit the dump site in mid-day, he did what he always did and set a bowl of eucalyptus oil by the window, the heat of the day causing the entire apartment to smell of it. He waited, paced, checked her pulse from time to time until he was sure she was out of the woods. He heard her when he was in the kitchen, a soft groan and he almost took himself out on the tiles in his effort to get out quickly enough. He watched her crank herself up a couple of inches and he came up beside her, put a hand on her shoulder, just allowing his fingertips to make contact before withdrawing like he thought maybe he shouldn't, then doing it again, just in case she hadn't caught the feather-light touch the first time, just in case she was post-trauma frantic or deaf and couldn't hear him when he said Itigil. he paused, corrected himself, Don't - don't sit up right now, okay? Just lay back down. You're hurt. You're safe, but you're hurt.