labcoatgirl | Reunion with brokeharlem

Reunion with brokeharlem

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It was a long trip, almost six hours before she was in New York. Betty hadn't driven much in big city like this so she was grateful for the turn by turn directions of her GPS. Stark tower loomed in the center of town, the glowing sign lighting up the dark. It was still a wreck here, she had to avoid multiple construction sites, passing huge holes in the road and businesses smashed to pieces.

She parked in a lot a short distance away from the tower, who's sign was reduced to just a single A glowing overhead. Betty got out of the car and started walking, thumbing her phone as she posted on twitter, to make sure Bruce knew she was there.

@drbanner I'm here, walking towards the tower.

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"That was you though." She's almost insistent. The media always painted the Hulk as a mindless killing machine but this proved differently. "Like with the helicopter you..." Betty stops herself, realizing he might not remember that part either. That was right before he left the last time.

"Like with the helicopter ... ?"

Judging by his tone, no, he doesn't remember. There's a vague impression of emotion attached to that particular gap in his memories -- anger, unusual if only because it's stronger, brighter than anything he remembers having felt before, and something like worry -- but nothing beyond that. Nothing solid. Just an animal sense of wanting to defend what was his. Between that and her comment about the helicopter, he imagines that Blonsky caught up with them at some point while he was trying to stop his rampage.

She's already started the sentence, she might as well finish it. "...when it caught on fire. After you jumped out to fight the other one, we crashed and it was going to explode..."

Betty can remember it as if it was yesterday. She lets go of his arm so she can use her hands to demonstrate. "I don't know how he knew what to do but he created a vacuum," Betty puts her hands together with a clap sound. "And it put out the fire before it could ignite the gas tank." Only a scientist would know to do that.

Only Bruce would have done that.

Bruce has the same thought -- only a scientist would have thought to try that -- and really, it only confirms what he's been slowly realizing the last few years. No matter how much he hates the idea, no matter how much distance he tries to put between himself and his other half by talking about him like a seperate entity or coming up with clever terminology to avoid calling him by name, he and the Hulk are one in the same. He's still not sure he likes the idea any more than he has the few other times he's entertained it.

"Tony ... is probably the only person besides you who's looked at me like anything other than a monster." That's an admission somehow, a note of agreement.

The Hulk knew how to put out the fire because he did; the Hulk had saved Tony because he'd done something no one else had bothered to in six years. He was fearless around him. He'd given him the time of day. And yeah, sure, he'd poked and prodded at him, hoping to evoke a response, but that had felt more like a game, like harmless ribbing, rather than the billionaire proving he thought of him like everyone else did, as just another experiment.

Edited 2012-06-04 03:13 (UTC)

The admission is enough. Her smile returns, just as fond as it always is of him. She could watch a zillion videos of the Hulk and still think him the same Bruce she fell in love with.

"I hope I'll get a chance to meet him." With Bruce always mentioning Tony Stark, she was wanting to see this supposed genius billionaire for herself.

Betty turns to get her things and bring them closer to the couch. "Have you eaten yet?" She was starving, not having eaten anything but a powerbar during the whole trip. Maybe there was a pizza place near here she could call.

"Like I said, you probably will."

He shrugs, trying for a smile in return, and manages only once she asks if he's eaten, albeit sheepishly. "I've sort of been hanging out on what's left of the grounds since you said you were headed this way, so ... not really?"

"Pizza?" She offers, unpacking a few things for the night and finding a spare blanket for the couch. "Maybe Jarvis knows where to get some."

"Indeed, I do, Dr. Ross." And a list of nearby delivery pizza places pop up.

"He's very polite," Betty whispers to Bruce, as if Jarvis won't hear her if she does.

"To you, maybe," Bruce whispers back, the amusement still apparent in his voice somehow in spite of that. Recently, and now that JARVIS is getting just as comfortable around him as he has with the AI, the computer has started taking verbal shots at him. Nothing low, nothing serious, just the same level of snark he maintains around Tony. It's kind of refreshing.

Case in point: "It may be interesting to note that I can, in fact, hear you, sir."

She looks up as the ceiling reminds them their whispering has not gone unnoticed and can't help a small chuckle. "Probably silly to whisper, I guess."

Jarvis even helps with ordering it and soon, a few minutes later, pizza is being delivered to the Stark Tower. At that point, Betty has been able to figure out the bathroom shower and gotten herself cleaned up after her long car ride, putting herself in some clean clothes, a sweatshirt and pants for the night.

She's toweling her hair when the delivery boy comes and she takes the pizza off his hands, bringing to Bruce. Wherever he was at on this floor.

Bruce has changed, too, wearing a pair of slightly over-sized black-grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt now, where he was in a button-down and a pair of khakis before. He's sitting in a chair, the only furniture so far in what will probably be his living room, when Stark gets around to finishing the remodel, the book Betty brought back to him settled in his lap. He hasn't bothered to retrieve his glasses or liberated one of the pairs she'd packed along with the book, so he's resorted to squinting down at it, but he looks up when she comes in. He manages a small smile that borders on embarrassed.

"I'd tell you to set that down on the table ... " But there's not one. Not yet.

She does her best not to smile at that, but doesn't succeed. It was a little bare in here as far as furniture was concerned. "It's alright, the couch is big enough to double as a table."

Betty sits down on the white sofa, mentally telling herself that they really need to be careful with the pizza sauce so the sofa doesn't end up stained by the end of this.

He gets up, hesitating rather than moving to join her immediately, then turns to grab a six pack of Coke he managed to track down while she was in the shower. Soda in hand, he moves to join her finally, settling himself and their drinks down on the couch carefully, as if he's afraid of ruining the couch, too.

"They should still be cold." He hadn't thought to bring ice up. Or cups.

Betty's already biting into a large slice hungrily and accepts a Coke from Bruce, cracking it open away from the couch. "We probably should have picked a red couch," she says with a smile.

Now that they were in the same room once again, she wasn't sure what to ask. She had a million questions on her mind on the way here but right now, she was content to sit with him and just eat pizza. Too bad they don't have a television for watching movies...

Bruce snags a piece of pizza for himself, looking at it as if he's half-convinced it's going to attack him for a moment before taking a bite.

"Next time," he says, after he's swallowed. Not that he expects them to have to drag another couch up here any time soon, but still. He even offers her a tiny smile to go with that statement, though it's short-lived, fading slowly as the silence falls between them. He lets it sit for awhile, comfortable, only deciding to break it once they've both gotten through a slice of pizza.

"You mentioned research?" She's heard his story. He's curious to know in more detail what she's been doing the last couple of years.

"Oh yes...." she sets her plate on the floor, licking a spot of sauce off her lip and opening the other box in her collection of things she brought.

Inside are a few official folders and a few unofficial ones. They are sectioned into different categories, the top ones being neuro-depressants and neuro-toxins.

"I've had a little success with lab mice but I couldn't irradiate them nearly as much as I would have liked."

Brushing his hands off on his pants -- he really should have thought to bring napkins, too -- he reaches for one of the folders and flips it open. After a moment of squinting at it, he sets it aside again, long enough to retrieve one of his old pairs of glasses, and then he's back at her side, with the folder in his lap. It doesn't take him long to at least get the gist of what she was trying to do.

"You were trying to ... " Fix him. Fix the mess he'd made of himself.

She smiles fondly as he goes for his glasses, glad that she brought the old ones.

Betty lifts her shoulders slightly in an apologetic shrug. "I couldn't just sit and do nothing." And it had helped her too, slightly therapeutic to be thinking she might be able to help him while he was out there. "It's probably not the solution you were going for..."

"It doesn't help that the trigger's not what we thought it was," he says sympathetically. He knows that's not quite what she means, but it's still true. "It's a start, though."

He's suddenly glad Tony hasn't stuck his nose in yet. He'd probably try to burn Betty's notes or something equally ridiculous.

Edited 2012-06-06 01:04 (UTC)

She sips at her coke and smiles to herself. "What was that quote....science is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration?" Even if it was a dead end, it was another thing they knew wouldn't work.

"It was an idea. I was thinking of a plasma bath of a certain neuro depressant in a large tank...or something similar." He had been trying for something internal when he had first come to her for help. She was trying to think outside the box and go for external factors that could be influenced.

He wets his lips with his tongue, eyes flicking up to her for an instant before they return to her notes. "Are we planning long term? A -- a permanent fix? Or something more like what Sterns came up with? For when I ... "

He raises and lowers his eyebrows in quick succession, figuring the gesture will be enough to fill in the blank. Regardless, though, he still adds, " ... you know ... " rather lamely.

Sterns had been too zealous for the Hulk's invulnerability. He had thought himself playing God with science. Betty would be glad never to see him again.

"I was hoping for long term, it's not exactly a cure you could drag around with you." Was he really considering it? After he had been able to use the Hulk to help others? She quickly amends her statement, "You don't have to use it. It's not even complete."

It might not be something he can carry around with him like this, but he imagines they might be able to think up something more portable based on it, and that might not be too bad, even if he's on the fence about leaving the Other Guy behind entirely. If they had had something that could keep him from transforming on the helicarrier, he could have used it to keep from playing right into Loki's hands. Coulson would still be alive. Natasha wouldn't have been traumatized. The Chitauri might not have even showed up, if they'd managed to focus on finding Selvig before he'd completed the setup that had been used to bring them there, rather than trying desperately to mourn their dead and regroup.

On the other hand, though -- and this, too, occurs to him after a moment -- while something like that has the potential to help, it also has the potential to be a weapon. If it had existed before he came aboard the helicarrier, what if Loki had gotten his hands on it? Would the Hulk have been there to save Stark's life? Would he have been able to fight, to help at all? And now that he has, now that he knows the Hulk is capable of more than just mindless destruction, if they were to put something together and it was used against him, would he be able to forgive himself if something happened because of it? Because his friends suddenly needed to protect Bruce Banner when they should be fighting with the Hulk?

Would he be able to forgive himself if he and Betty manage to permanently strip him of his alter ego and someone -- Thor, Steve, Tony, Betty, some civilian somewhere -- ends up hurt or dead because he wasn't there? Or would he devote the rest of his life to trying to chase down the other half of him that he purposefully cut out?

Frowning, he flips the file closed, slowly and deliberately. "I'm not going to stop you, if you want to keep working on something, but ... I think I remember why I stopped."

He wants to help. It's all he's ever wanted. If the Hulk can lend a hand there, and God, he's shown he can and on more than one occasion, than maybe he should stick with it. He doubts it'll be easy, but maybe Tony had had a point when he'd been ranting about terrible privilege.

It's almost a surprise for her to see him put away the cure idea. He had been so determined last time to get rid of IT. Never a him, always an it for the Hulk. Like it wasn't part of him.

Betty is quietly proud of him again, hoping he is able to reconcile these two sides of himself. "Ok." She will probably store the files away and not look at them till they're needed, if ever.

She picks up another piece of pizza, starting in on it with a secret smile, not saying anything else.

Bruce catches that look, much as she tries to hide it behind her pizza and arches an eyebrow. "I get the feeling you were hoping I'd say that."

Not that he's surprised, he supposes. From what she's told him, the Hulk has never hurt her. That doesn't surprise him, either. Not anymore.

She still smiles at her pizza. "Maybe...a little." Betty knows how hard it's been on him since the incident but if he was finally looking for a future instead of trying to fix the past, that was the best she could hope for him.

She slides over a bit closer next to him. "...I almost feel like we should have a movie with this." It did rather seem like a sleepover at this point.

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brokeharlem.livejournal.com - 2012-06-06 02:08 (UTC) - Expand

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Reunion with brokeharlem

that part about picketing is all headcanon for the mun, for lulz :3

Missing accomplished! XD

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Sorry for the pause in tags. Mini-family crisis last night. x.x

don't apologize, it's all good

Thanks.

y/w

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