fic: Flew Away or Started Sinking (1/2)
Title: Flew Away or Started Sinking.
Rating: NC-17.
Pairings/Characters: Bruce/Jane, Erik Selvig, Tony Stark, Betty Ross.
Summary: Bruce comes back to New York eight months after Tony dropped him off at a ferry terminal, with a nasty cough, no money, and nowhere to stay. Jane answers his shot in the dark phonecall, and suddenly he's helping to build wormholes while S.H.I.E.L.D. are quietly watching his every move.
A/N: This was inspired by a prompt at avengerkink, although it doesn't follow it at all, I'm afraid. I just saw Bruce/Jane and my brain said 'YES'. (Title from Fun's Stars.)
Bruce leaves. Tony takes him to a ferry terminal, presses a fancy watch and a roll of bills that Bruce later discovers are several different currencies - British pounds, Euros, pesos, quetzals, reals - into his hand and wishes him a safe trip. With that and the duffel bag full of food and clothes for every kind of weather that Natasha gave him, he feels almost happy. It's a feeling he hasn't had in a long time. It's the best he's going to get.
Bruce arrives. Eight months and a week later he's freezing and soaked to the bone outside the rebuilt and better than ever Stark Tower, vicious New York rain making mincemeat of his battered and too large sneakers. The rain has straightened out his hair that's already too long, and it hangs in front of his face stubbornly, while his chest rumbles with a nasty cough that he picked up while treating people in the Dominican Republic. Doctor, heal thyself, indeed.
He squelches his way into the lobby of the tower and up to the main desk.
“Name?” the receptionist asks.
“I was just wondering if--” He stops a moment to cough, and the receptionist blinks a little harder. “--Mr Stark was here.”
“Name?” she repeats and locks eyes with him.
He takes a rattling breath. “Bruce Banner.”
She flicks her eyes to her computer and taps away at it. “Sorry,” she says, flicking her eyes back to him, “You don't have an appointment.”
“I know that. I'm a friend. Can't I just... go up and knock on the door?”
She looks at him as if he's some random lunatic off the street. Which is mostly accurate, as it happens. “I'm sorry, sir, only authorised visitors are allowed past the lobby.”
“Fine,” he concedes. He can feel water pooling in his shoes. “Can I use the bathroom?”
“Authorised visitors only,” she repeats blandly.
“I guess I have no chance asking to borrow a phone, do I?” he asks.
“I'm sorry, sir,” she says, tipping her head to one side. Yeah, she sounds sorry.
He turns around and leaves, taking petty satisfaction from the wet trail he leaves behind him. It's short-lived once he's outside, though. He's back where he began. He doesn't have a lot of people he can call, and he imagines that Steve, Clint, and Natasha probably aren't listed in the phone book. Betty briefly flits through his mind, but he dismisses the thought; it's been almost three years since he last saw her. He's changed, and not for the better.
The only person he can think of is Erik. He only got to see him for a few hours after everything was over; Bruce wanted to leave as soon as he could, and Erik was being taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for 'questioning'. Bruce felt bad for his old friend, but he was relieved to not be in the same position.
Most likely, Erik isn't in the city; after what he went through, he should really be on vacation to some tropical island for the foreseeable future. But Bruce has a quarter in his pocket and it's worth a shot.
He pointlessly covers his head with his hands and crosses the street to a sad looking phone booth. He picks up the receiver and pauses; he'll have to call Culver to get Erik's number, but hell if he can remember Culver's number. So he's going to have to call the directory, too, all on one quarter. Well, he's faced more challenging problems.
Directory puts him through to Culver, and after much umming and erring, the physics department at Culver tells him that Erik is on a research sabbatical. Bruce almost bashes his head into the phone booth, but then the guy adds that they seem to have a number for him at a lab in New York.
Bruce repeats to back to himself about ten times before he dials, then crosses his fingers behind his back.
“Hello?” a woman's voice answers.
“Oh, hi.” Bruce's heart sinks - maybe he dialled wrong. “I don't suppose, uh, there's a Dr Selvig where you are, is there?”
“He's actually away visiting family at the moment,” she says.
“Oh,” Bruce sighs, then gets caught in another coughing fit.
“Um, do you want to leave a message?” she asks hesitantly.
“No, it's okay,” he mutters.
“Well... he'll want to know who was calling for him,” she says. “What's your name?”
“I--” Exactly how many people is he going to tell his name to today? He sighs, and rubs his face, trying to get some blood flowing again. “Bruce.”
“Bruce,” she repeats, “okay, I'll... wait. Bruce Banner?”
He almost hangs up right then and there. It's probably fucking S.H.I.E.L.D, what was he thinking?
“One minute remaining,” a bland voice says on the line.
“I, uh, the- the lady's telling me that my money's almost run out, I should--” He's cut off by yet another coughing fit, even more miserable than the last.
“You sound terrible,” the woman says, “and you're calling from a pay phone? Tell me where you are.”
“What?” he asks, taking a rattling breath.
“You're using a pay phone, in the rain, sounding like you're about to die, and no one's seen you in almost a year. You're Erik's friend and I'm going to come pick you up.”
This woman seems to know an awful lot about him, considering how he doesn't even know her name.
“Thirty seconds remaining.”
He grimaces. All paranoia aside, he's pretty sure that if he doesn't get out of the cold soon, his cough is going to turn into full blown pneumonia.
“Vanderbilt and East 45th Street,” he says weakly.
“Okay, stay there, I'm--” The line goes dead, and Bruce replaces the receiver with a deep sigh. This is a terrible, terrible idea. And he still doesn't know her name.
He ducks into a store doorway, and gets unpleasant looks from the security guard standing there. Too bad, he thinks, and the other guy rumbles in his head. Not now, he tells him.
He's not sure how long to wait for his mystery woman, or how long it'll be before the cops come to move him on. He hopes that the former's shorter than the latter.
The former, it seems, is twenty five minutes, just as his feet are starting to go numb. A van that looks about as battered as he feels trundles slowly down the street, coming to a stop near the intersection. The door opens and a girl - woman - jumps out, wrapped in a large, puffy coat. She slams the door closed, and it springs back open immediately, so she shoulder checks it closed and blows hair from her face. It brings a smile to his face.
She squints at the people passing on the sidewalk - he doesn't wave to her because he's not absolutely certain that she's who he thinks she is - until she lights on him. Apparently she knows what he looks like, because she comes straight at him.
“Dr Banner?” she asks, looking him up and down, from his dripping hair to his sodden shoes.
“Hi,” he says.
“I'm Jane,” she says, and takes hold of his arm.
“Okay,” he mumbles as she pulls him back over to the van. She sends him around to get in the passenger side. “I'm going to get your van wet,” he says.
She looks pointedly at the candy wrappers carpeting the well of the van, and he smiles. “Oh,” he says, and climbs in, slamming the door closed behind him.
“Get that top off,” she says, pulling her arms from the sleeves of her coat.
“Um.”
She smiles cheerfully. “I'd say take everything off, but I don't want you to get charged with public indecency. The shoes need to go, though.”
“Uh.”
“You're halfway to pneumonia already,” she says, sliding into disapproval.
“Well,” he says, and then starts coughing. His body is, as always, a traitor. He nods his agreement as he attempts to catch his breath. She waits fairly patiently until he's done, then holds her hands out for his drenched collection of clothes. It takes him a few confused minutes to get them off, they're so wet and stuck to his skin, and he apologetically hands them to Jane, who unceremoniously drops them in the back, where they send things clattering.
“Put this on,” she says, tossing her coat into his lap.
“Oh, no, it's okay,” he replies. He takes a moment to wonder at the bizarreness of the situation at hand: he's shirtless (which isn't much to look at, and can't be any fun for Jane) and ill, sitting in a stranger's car, with said stranger insisting he wear her clothes.
“It's Erik's, put it on,” she says, and starts the van. The heat blasts on and he starts shivering. The coat feels very soft and warm when he squeezes it in his hands. Maybe just for five minutes... He toes his shoes and socks off, and pulls the coat on. Jane smiles smugly.
It doesn't make him feel much better, though. In fact, he starts shivering so hard that his teeth clatter against each other. “Sh-shit,” he stammers.
“Do you want me to turn the heat up?”
“No, it's-- it's okay,” he says. He zips the coat up and tucks his nose into the collar, peering out at the road.
At some point he zones out, because the next thing he knows Jane is nudging his shoulder and when he looks up, he finds that they're in a parking lot. He starts and bangs his side into the door.
“Sorry!” Jane says, holding her hands out, palms up. “I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to scare you.”
She's the one who's scared, he can tell; her eyes are bright with it, and he can't stop his mind from pointing out how small and fragile she is. She could snap in two so easily.
“You didn't, you didn't. Look, thanks for the ride but--”
“Okay. Hey, I just did a grocery store run yesterday, it's like a candy store in the lab right now,” she says, blithely ignoring him. She hops out of the van and comes round to his side, waiting for him to sort himself out. He steps down next to her, grunting at the cold concrete on his bare feet.
“Are you going to be okay without shoes?” she asks.
“I've walked barefoot on worse,” he says. Jane just raises her eyebrows and leads the way to the elevator.
It's awkward. Bruce puts his hands in the pockets of the coat, finds more candy wrappers, some tissues, and at least a couple dollars worth of change. He pulls out a handful and looks at it; Jane smiles uncomfortably. He puts it back.
“So,” he says after a minute. “You run this lab with Erik?”
“Yeah, we're working on getting the Einstein-Rosen Bridge up and running.”
“A wormhole? I didn't realise that was past the theoretical stages. Sorry, my astrophysics is a little rusty.”
She smiles. “It wasn't, until recently.”
“Thor?” he asks, taking the gamble that she knows about him. If she doesn't, he does an excellent impression of a madman.
She drops her gaze to the floor. “Yeah. Oh, this is our stop,” she adds, stepping out.
He follows her down a hallway until she stops at an unmarked door. Not suspicious at all. She swipes a card through the wall mounted reader, and the door clicks open.
It is a lot bigger on the inside. Jane grins when he mutters this to himself.
“There's a shower in the back,” she says, pointing him in the right direction.
He stays in there for close to forty five minutes, all told, long after all the accumulated dirt of his trek back to New York has washed down the drain. Five minutes in, Jane taps on the door and tells him she's left some clothes for him, and he mumbles something vaguely affirmative in response and goes back to enjoying the hot spray. When he finally gets out, he cracks the door ever so slightly, and finds a pile of clothes and towels, with a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste on top. He dries himself off and does his teeth, looking at himself in the mirror. He really is skinny as fuck these days, and looking old to boot.
When he's done he pulls on the sweatpants - only just held up with the drawstrings pulled as tight as they'll go - and fleece hoodie that she's left for him, and wanders out to find her. It's not hard, he just follows the sounds of clattering and finds her in a small kitchen, bent over, poking at a microwave.
“Hey,” he says quietly.
She looks over her shoulder. “You're looking a little brighter. I don't suppose you know how to work microwaves, do you?”
He holds up his hands. “I'm not that kind of scientist.”
“Mm, I used to have an assistant that did this stuff, but she went off to grad school.” She straightens up and tugs her t-shirt down ('I'm going to the Disneyland Resort!'). “Really inconsiderate. How about some toast? I can work the toaster, most of the time.”
“Toast is great. I mean, you've already been too kind, you don't have to--”
“I found some Robitussin in the cupboard,” she says over him. “It tastes god awful, but it does the job.”
“Thanks,” he murmurs.
He takes a little bit too much of it, he guesses, because twenty minutes later he's sitting on a couch that has no right being as comfortable as it is, struggling to keep his eyes open. Jane dumps a soft blanket on top of him, and that seals it; he lists sideways and is out of the count.
He feels warm the next time he opens his eyes; there's a pillow beneath his head, the blanket is spread out over him, the other guy is less pissed about everything, and he can take a breath without doubling over. It's almost dark in the lab, just a few soft lights illuminating the place, giving everything a blurry quality. It takes him a minute to realise that he's not wearing his glasses any more; he tips his head back and finds that they're folded up on the coffee table by the couch.
Jane is hunched over a desk a little distance from him, scratching away at something with her pen. When he sits up with a huff, she blinks at him owlishly.
“Oh! How are you feeling?”
“Uh, a little stoned,” he says slowly, and smiles. “What time is it?”
“It's, uh...” She checks her watch. “Huh, it's two.”
“In the morning?” he asks.
“Yeah...” she murmurs. She looks up at him and smiles. She seems to be a very smiley person. “I'd better get some sleep, I guess.”
He looks at his makeshift bed, then back at her.
“Don't worry, there's a cot in the back. Unless you'd prefer it, I don't mind.”
“No, no, this is-- I'm fine here. Unless you want the couch instead?”
She shakes her head, laughing a little. “No, it's fine.” She stands up and stretches her arms over her head - there's an audible pop of her shoulder blades that he hears from where he's sitting. “Well, feel free to eat anything edible you find in the kitchen.”
“Okay.” He's bunching the blanket up between his hands, he realises, and forces himself to stop and smooth it out again. “Thank you, you know, for...”
“I'd never have heard the end of it from Erik if I hadn't.”
“Yeah, he can be a bit... grouchy.”
“Yeah,” she agrees and tucks some hair behind her ear. “Well, good night, Dr Banner.”
“Morning,” he says reflexively.
She smiles again and disappears into the back of the lab, switching the lights off as she goes.
He should leave. He could leave a note thanking her for her kindness and slip out; he's very quiet, he's been likened to a mouse more than once. It seems to have stopped raining outside, from what he can see, squinting in the dark at the window. Maybe he could filch some food off her first, she probably wouldn't mind.
He's just so tired, though, and definitely a little stoned. He could stay till morning, he thinks, get up and sneak out before she wakes up, he's an early riser, and then, at least, it'll be light and maybe little warmer. It's a more sensible plan than going out into the cold and dark, especially since he's not even sure where he is right now.
He nods to himself, feeling less anxious having made a decision, and lies back down.
It's just beginning to get light when he wakes up again, probably no later than six. He sits up a little easier this time, though there's a tickle in his throat again and he feels like hell, and grabs his glasses off the table before tiptoeing into the kitchen.
Where Jane is standing in fuzzy pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt.
“Oh,” he says, and she starts a little. At least he still has his mouse-like qualities intact.
“Good morning, Dr Banner,” she says. He almost expects her to add, 'the earth says hello', but she's probably too young to remember that, he guesses.
“Hi. What time is it?”
“About... six thirtyish?”
He fidgets with the baggy sweatpants he's wearing. “I thought you'd still be asleep.”
She shrugs. “I don't need a lot of sleep.”
“I used to be like that. Then I got old.”
She laughs and turns to open a cupboard door. “Do you want some coffee? Tea?” She picks up a bottle of something vaguely grey in colour. “Whatever this is?”
“Um, coffee? If it's not too much trouble.”
She shakes her head, and waves to a rickety looking table. “Sit down,” she says, grabs a spatula from the rack and points it at him. “I'm going to make eggs. Do you like eggs?”
“Yeah.”
The coffee's kind of awful, but the eggs are good. The tickle in his throat is getting stronger, but he manages to swallow it away. They sit across from each other, and chew in uncomfortable silence for a couple of minutes, before Jane clears her throat determinedly.
“So, where were you coming from?” she asks.
“From?” he repeats.
“Before you were standing in the rain like a bedraggled cat,” she clarifies.
“Oh, that. I was in the Dominican Republic.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Well...” He lays his knife and fork down on the empty plate, exactly parallel to each other. “It is, it's a beautiful place, but uh. Nicer when you know where you're going to be sleeping every night, I guess.”
“Is that why you're back in New York?”
“Well, yeah, ran out of money, and... got lonely...” He stops to cough, but of course what he hopes will be a polite clearing of the throat turns into a chest-rattling hack. “And ill,” he adds ruefully, once he's regained the power of speech.
“That sounds terrible. You should really see a doctor about that,” she says.
“I am a doctor.”
“Not that kind.”
“People don't tend to get the difference.”
She rolls her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
“You're a doctor?”
“Of astrophysics, for the last three years.” She pushes back from the table and picks up the plates.
“Let me--” he starts, but she waves him off. “So, that's how you know Erik?”
“Yeah, he and my dad were best friends, so I asked him to be my doctoral advisor.”
Bruce raises his eyebrows. “He must like you, he hated doing those things when I knew him.”
“I'm pretty sure he hated every minute of it.” She drops the plates and cutlery into the sink with a thunk, and runs the water. “So, you were pretty close to Stark Tower yesterday, were you looking for him?”
“Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, a guy can't just swan in there without a full cavity search.” He finishes with a cough, and smiles. “What a treat I was for the receptionist.”
“I can try to get hold of him, if you want.”
“You know Tony?”
“Not personally, but I'm sure S.H.I.E.L.D. can find it in themselves to call him for us.”
Despite the warm clothes and the central heating, he feels himself go cold at the mention of S.H.I.E.L.D. He'd thought it, hadn't he, that she might be S.H.I.E.L.D., and now he's finding himself at a distinct disadvantage: no clothes, sick, and tired.
Jane notices his long silence and wrinkles up her nose. “We're S.H.I.E.L.D. 'sponsored', I'm sorry, I should have let you know.”
“No, uh, it's fine, I should just get going, thank you for the food. And the couch.” He pushes his chair back from the table and gets two steps away from it before a wave of dizziness hits him so hard that he backs up and sits down again before he collapses. “Um.”
“Look, I'll tell them I want to consult with him or something,” she says, “I won't mention you.”
She leaves the room in search of her phone before he can point out that they already know he's there. He thinks about getting up for a second, but the kitchen is starting to blur a little, and the best option seems to be putting his arms on the table and resting his head in them. When he opens his eyes again it's to the soft whirring of the coffee maker, and he knows immediately that he's lost time. He rolls his head to one side and looks at Jane, blinking away sleep.
“Dr Banner, you're awake again,” she says, smiling softly.
“Bruce,” he mumbles, and she smiles wider.
“I called S.H.I.E.L.D.; apparently Stark is abroad for the next month.”
“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, then lifts his head and pulls a face. “Sorry... What time is it?”
“Just after ten,” she says, taking her cup of coffee from the machine. “Why don't you come sit on the couch? That doesn't look comfortable.”
He pushes himself up against the protest of his back and nods. “Sure.”
The main area of the lab has exploded into flurry of paper, stacks of them everywhere, and equations drawn all over the whiteboard mounted on one wall. They almost make sense to him, but his brain is just too foggy to work it out.
“I had a breakthrough,” she says.
“I see that...” He sits down heavily on the couch and can't stop himself from leaning back into the soft cushion and sighing.
“Why don't you take some more Robitussin and get some more sleep?” she asks gently.
That sounds like a really, really good idea right about now. About the best idea in the world, actually. But he shouldn't, he shouldn't, it's not safe to stay in a place like this, with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents around all the corners.
“I shouldn't, I should...” He rubs his palms over his face and sighs. “I don't know what I should do,” he mumbles.
“Take some medicine and sleep,” Jane says, tossing the bottle to him. He doesn't even try to catch it; it bounces off his chest and falls into his lap. “Sorry.”
He smiles and scratches the back of his head. “Okay, yeah.”
-
He wakes up being nudged in the shoulder. He startles a little, uncurling from his foetal position. Jane is standing a couple of feet from the couch, looking nervous and determined.
He levers himself up on his elbow. “I'm not gonna...”
“No, I know.” She chews on a nail for a second before smiling awkwardly. “I need to go home and do some stuff.”
“Oh, I-- I'll--”
“I have a futon,” she says quickly, while shrugging. “You could stay on it.”
“In your apartment?”
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “You've been really kind, but...”
“It's snowing.”
“It is?” He leans to one side and squints out the window. It is. “You really want a strange man sleeping on your futon?”
“You're not strange.”
He cocks an eyebrow and snorts. “What kind of people do you know?”
Jane shrugs. “Look, I'd be a really shitty person to let you go out in this weather with no money and no proper clothes and, well, we have met before, you know.”
“We have?”
She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against a drafting table. “Yeah. The faculty had a mixer for the grad students. You were talking to Erik and I sort of stood awkwardly adjacent to the two of you.”
He frowns, trying to sift through memories of the many mixers he went to in his illustrious career at Culver. “I... don't remember that.”
“You were pretty wrapped up in Dr Ross, I think. And I wasn't very memorable.”
Betty. Bruce's heart slides into his feet, it feels like. He twists his fingers in the bottom of his hoodie and takes an unsteady breath.
Jane clears her throat. “Anyway, I'm not taking 'no' for an answer.”
He runs his fingers up and down the zipper, nails catching on the teeth. “Well... I guess I don't have a choice then.”
-
She gives him fresh sheets, a squashy cushion, and her old boyfriend's clothes that make him look like a kid dressing up in his father's clothes.
“You dated a giant?” he asks, fiddling with the bottom of the shirt he's wearing - it hits mid-thigh and hangs baggy from his shoulders.
“I have a type,” she says, with a slight drawl that suggests a joke that Bruce isn't getting.
The kitchen here is a little better equipped, though not by a wide margin, and there's what looks like a curbside TV in the corner of the living room with a stack of books on top.
“Feel free to watch stuff on it,” she says. “The picture's not very good, though.”
“Do they still make The Wire? I liked that show.”
“I think it got cancelled or something,” she says, handing him a pair of socks.
He looks at them sceptically; he could probably wear one of them as a hat. “Oh.”
He means to leave the next day. He means to get up in the middle of the night, fold up the blankets and sheets, leave a thank you note, and slip out into that good night.
He sleeps until eleven.
He really means to leave the day after that, but... Jane buys bagels from a local place and he is suddenly ravenously hungry that morning, between his coughing fits. She pushes a bottle of non-drowsy cough medicine across the table to him.
“I really think you should have a doctor check out that cough. You might need antibiotics.”
He wipes his hand across the back his mouth and shakes his head. “The other guy, he won't let anything... really bad happen to me.”
“'Other guy'?”
“The--” He taps his head, drawing her eyes up.
“Huh, so is he like a separate entity? Do you have two consciousnesses in your head? Is it...” She pauses and smiles. “I'm sorry, those are kind of private questions, aren't they?”
He shrugs. “It's okay. He's like... to get Freudian on you, he's the Id and I'm the Super-ego.”
“So, he's not...?”
“No, he's...” It's been so long now, Bruce has learnt to disassociate himself with the other guy. No one's ever really questioned it before. Unsurprising, since he never interacted with people long enough to give them the chance. “We're the same person.” His stomach twists with the confession.
She nods thoughtfully. “Everyone's calling him-- you, the 'Hulk'.”
“Yeah. It's as good a name as any, I guess. I find it kind of funny, though, 'cause I really couldn't have been called 'hulking' for most of my life.”
She smiles. “You're bigger on the inside.”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Have another bagel,” she says.
He gives up 'meaning to' by day five. Jane drags him out to buy clothes - where it feels like everyone's staring, but probably only because he's a guy who looks homeless with a pretty, young woman - then back to the lab.
“You have a PhD in nuclear physics, right?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
She hauls a box up from the floor and puts it on the table in front of him. “Then you can work out how to create enough power to open a bridge to Asgard.”
He leans over and peers in the box. “Okay?”
“I'm not letting you stay with me out of the goodness of my heart,” she says sniffily, even though they both know that she is.
He lifts the corner of a stack of paper. “Isn't any of this stuff... digitised?”
She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and secures it with a rubber band. “I don't want S.H.I.E.L.D. to be able to monitor my work.”
“Good point.”
Jane flits between the table and the whiteboard, scrawling equations on it then going back to check her stacks of paper, then coming back to the board and starting all over again. It's exhausting just to watch.
The work is soothing, though. Aside from that little alien invasion, he hasn't had a chance to work like this in years, and especially when not under the threat of death and destruction. He can't drum up the levels of excitement for it that Jane has, or that he used to have, but it still feels good to stretch himself.
“Coffee break,” Jane says an indeterminate amount of time later. A cup appears in his line of vision and lands in front of him. He looks up and notices that it's getting dark outside.
“Thanks,” he says and pushes his hair back from his face, not that it accomplishes much. He pulls on a wayward curl and it stubbornly springs back into place. “I need a haircut.”
“Don't look at me,” she says, and leans her hip against the table next to him as she scans his work. “So, what do you think? Do you think it'll work?”
“It could.” He taps a sheet of paper. “You'd need an unheard of level of nuclear fission, which is possible, but radiation is going to be a big problem. Or you need some new power source. The Tesseract would have done it.”
“But Thor took it,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She sighs and hops up onto the table. “It doesn't matter what I build if we can't power it up.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what do I do?”
“Create another power source.”
“Just like that?”
He shrugs. “Why not?”
She shakes her head. “It's a hell of a lot of work.”
“Yeah, but you'll do it.”
“How do you know?”
He lifts his shoulders again. “Just a feeling I have.”
-
He cuts his hair the next day, over Jane's bathroom sink with a pair of paper cutting scissors, and it looks terrible. Jane laughs and flicks an errant curl with the end of her pen.
“It'll grow,” is her pronouncement.
-
They discover that they both did their undergrad at Harvard, and trade stories about the science faculty that make Bruce feel very old. Jane's memories of pulling pranks on MIT and Yale are a lot more vivid then his, in particular one story involving several chickens, some ladies undergarments, and a few cans of paint. Bruce laughs so hard that he starts coughing helplessly. It feels really good to laugh, aside from the unpleasant rattling sound his chest is making.
They're both so wrapped up in the story and Bruce's possible death by asphyxiation that neither of them hear the door until it slams closed.
His body snaps into alert mode; he's on his feet and Jane is close behind him as he retreats to press himself against a wall. There's no good way out of the lab, as far as he can tell, and he's kicking himself for not casing the place properly earlier. Jane worries her lip and looks around.
“Jane, are you here?” a voice calls. Erik. Bruce sags with relief.
He huffs a laugh, and Jane squeezes his shoulder before calling, “You're not supposed be back for another week!”
“There's only so much of my mother's soup and good intentions I can take,” he grumbles, rounding the corner into the room. “Lucky S.H.I.E.L.D. were paying for my flights... Bruce? Bruce?”
Jane's still got her hand on his shoulder, he realises; she lets go and Erik grins, crossing the room with just a couple of his ridiculously long strides, and envelops him in a hug.
“Hi,” Bruce murmurs.
Erik steps back and holds Bruce's shoulders. “You're looking good, Bruce.”
He knows that's a lie.
“Yeah, you too.”
Another lie.
“So, what are you doing here? How long have you been in New York?”
“About... a week and a half?” he says, looking at Jane. She nods.
“Where are you staying? God, if I'd known you were here, I'd've left my mother's sooner.”
“That's okay...” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I've actually... been staying on Jane's futon.”
Erik's eyebrows go high. “Really? I didn't realise that you two knew each other.”
“We didn't.”
“He didn't have anywhere to go, what was I meant to do?” Jane says, tilting her chin up just a little.
“Well, I have a whole spare bedroom,” Erik says, “you can stay with me until you find your feet. Are you going to be staying long term?”
“Um, I don't know, but uh...” He glances at Jane. Obviously it's better to get out of her hair before her goodwill runs dry, he just feels reluctant, for some reason. “I'll take you up on that offer, yeah.”
“Great,” Erik says, “we can pick your stuff up from Jane's later.”
“Oh, uh.” Bruce looks down at himself, and shrugs. “I come as I am.”
Jane claps her hands together before Erik can reply. “Let me show you what me and Bruce have been working on!” she says, and latches onto Erik's arm.
-
Erik has a nice apartment, with an actual bed and a mattress that's large enough for Bruce to stretch his arms and legs out. He sleeps terribly the first night. He's in good company, at least, as he runs into Erik pacing the hall when he slips out of his room to get a glass of water.
“Hey,” he says.
“Bruce,” he grunts, none of his earlier friendliness present.
“Are... you okay?”
Erik stares at him for a long second, before blinking and shaking his head. “I'm fine. Fine. It's late, what are you doing up?”
Bruce scratches the back of his head. “Thirsty.”
“Well, on your way then,” Erik says, waving his hand towards the kitchen.
Bruce shuffles off, guilty about being so glad that Erik lied to him.
He's back to normal the next day, if still a little more cheerful than Bruce knew him to be. Jane is considerably less happy, though, and already in the lab when he and Erik get there.
“Good morning, starshine,” he says. He places a cup of Starbucks coffee they picked up on the way in down in front of her, and nudges her in the shoulder.
“Huh? Oh...” She smiles up at him and picks up the cup. “Thanks.”
“Erik paid for it.”
“But you gave it to me,” she says.
“I did,” he says, taking the seat next to her.
“So, how is it, staying with Erik?”
“It's fine. I think, uh, I don't think he got a lot of sleep last night, though. But then, people don't tend to, when I'm around.”
She rolls her eyes and gives him a light shove. “I'm sure it has nothing to do with you, bighead. Erik wasn't doing so well after... everything. The trip home was meant to help him, but...” She shrugs.
“Yeah... So, how's the work go--”
“Bruce! Jane!” Erik calls, cutting him off. Bruce's looks over his shoulder as Erik comes in, carrying a laptop. “I've got something to show you.”
“Okay?” Bruce says, watching as Erik comes around the table and puts the laptop down in front of them. The screen says '1995' in Comic Sans. Jane wrinkles her nose.
“I started going through my cupboards last night when I couldn't sleep,” he says, and Bruce and Jane share a look. “And I found this. The faculty converted all their VHS to DVD a few years back, and they sent out this compilation disc of our Christmas parties.” Bruce doesn't have time to register his complaint before Erik leans over and hits play.
“Are you filming this?” someone asks as the camera pans around the poorly decorated room. Bruce remembers it well: the heating broke in there every winter, yet that was where they always had their Christmas parties.
“Remember Hank?” Erik asks.
Bruce nods. “Yeah.” Hank does not look pleased to be filmed. “What's he doing these days?”
“His wife was killed a few years ago. He gave up work to devote all his time to 'research'.”
Bruce widens his eyes. “Christ,” he mutters.
The cameraman walks around the room, zooming in on people at random. Bruce recognises a lot of the faces, though he can't put names to half of them. Erik names some of them, pointing out to Jane people who she only knows in their current older forms.
“Erik, get over here!” someone calls, and Jane laughs as he comes into the frame.
“I forgot you wore those huge glasses,” she says, “and you had hair.”
Erik runs a hand over his head. “Thanks.”
“So, how're you enjoying the party?” the cameraman asks.
“Beer's terrible,” he replies.
“But you're still drinking it.”
“It's free.”
Bruce smiles; that's the Erik he remembers.
A guy claps Erik on the shoulder, peering around him at the camera. He's tall, though not as tall as Erik, slim, with dark, thinning hair. Bruce vaguely recognises him. Jane takes a deep breath.
“Dad,” she murmurs.
“That's your dad?” he asks, looking between the screen and Jane, as her father laughs and jokes along with the cameraman. Bruce can see the resemblance now that he's looking for it.
“Yeah,” she says, and smiles weakly. “He was killed in a car crash a couple of months later.”
Jesus, now he remembers; he was the guy who died midway through the semester. Bruce didn't go to the funeral because he had midterms to give. His name was Dan, he thinks. Daniel Foster. “God, I'm sorry.”
Erik squeezes her hand and she shrugs. “It's okay.”
On the video, the younger Erik disappears from the frame for a second, then comes back with someone by the arm. Bruce recognises that hideously patterned shirt and braces for impact.
Jane laughs wetly as Bruce's young, baby-fat round face comes into view. “You had even more hair,” she says.
He smiles and runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, it was a problem.” His younger self is a mish-mash of unruly curls, horrible clothes, and a wide-eyed look of terror. It certainly doesn't help that Erik has a good six or seven inches on him, and makes his younger self look even more like a child. Bruce was fairly terrified of Erik for at least the first couple of years that they knew each other.
“Enjoying the party, kid?” the cameraman asks.
“Um, sure. Beer's good.”
Bruce had never got why they laughed at him for that, he remembers now.
“How did your first semester teaching go?” Dan asks.
“Yeah, it's been okay. I've got over two hundred finals to mark, though...”
“I hated teaching,” Bruce confides to Jane and Erik. “I was absolutely miserable doing it. My students walked all over me.”
“I hated it too,” Jane says, “but I was too impatient with them. 'Shrill', some said.”
“Students are always little shits on teaching evaluations,” Erik says.
“Where's he going?” the cameraman asks, following Bruce as he crosses the room.
“Where'd you think?” Dan replies. The cameraman zooms in on Bruce as he meets up with Betty at the door. She fiddles with his shirt, loosening his tie and generally trying to make him look less ridiculous - she despaired throughout their relationship of his fashion 'sense'.
“You really wouldn't know that he's one of those scary geniuses, huh?” one of them says as Betty starts trying to tame his hair by combing her fingers through it.
It feels like his heart is stuttering in his chest as he looks at how happy he used to be with Betty, how he leaned into her touch, how he wasn't afraid of being touched; not by her, at least. It's like a physical pain, thinking about how thoroughly he's ruined his life.
“Have you seen his evaluations? He's doing terribly, his students treat him like shit and he just takes it.”
Bruce takes a deep breath and holds it for a second, then leans over and looks at Erik.
“That wasn't me,” Erik says.
“I don't think anyone else at Culver had a Swedish accent,” Bruce says blandly before settling back to watch the video.
“He's definitely going to take over the world one day, though,” Dan comments on the video as Bruce disappears out the door with Betty.
“My dad must have liked you,” Jane says, “he only said that about people he really liked.” Her eyes are a little red-rimmed, but she's smiling. He knocks his shoulder into hers and settles down to watch the rest of the video.
-
Erik has a lot of pictures from the 'old days', which he pulls out at regularly intervals over the next couple of weeks. Bruce never knew that he was so sentimental.
There aren't very many pictures of Bruce, because at least half of the time he made up some excuse to get out of get-togethers, and he hated having his photograph taken, he always looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Betty used to say that it was cute.
There are a couple, though, mostly with Betty, that Erik gives him. It's difficult not to keep looking at them; he finds himself carrying them with him, pulling them out while he's working, or eating, or doing anything at all, really.
“What're you looking at?” Jane asks, dropping another box on the table and sliding it across to him. He tips it on its side and sighs; she has a lot of handwritten research on possible power sources.
“Just pictures,” he says, handing them to her.
She takes them and smiles. “Aw,” she says, “you're so cute.”
“Thanks.” He takes the pictures back and smooths his thumb over their faces in the top one.
“When was the last time you saw her?” she asks.
He spares another few seconds for the pictures, then replaces them in his pocket. “About three years.”
Jane hums and pats his shoulder. He glances up and smiles.
“Are you going to go see her?”
“I dunno...” He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “So, what's this present you brought me?”
-
They have their first big breakthrough at the end of February. Jane goes out and buys a couple six-packs of beers in celebration.
“Do you drink?” she asks him.
“Whenever I get the chance,” he says, and she tosses him a can. Early on, he'd discovered that alcohol drowned out the noise in his head.
It's late when they work out how to get around the averaged null energy condition, and later still when they start drinking. Erik bows out after one beer, and Jane and Bruce jeer at him a bit as he leaves. He quite pointedly asks Bruce how he's going to get home, but Bruce is pleasantly buzzed enough to just shrug and slouch lower into the couch.
“I don't think he approves,” Bruce mumbles into his can after Erik's left, cutting a look at Jane.
“He's just jealous because we're young and cool,” she says, grinning. She scoots closer to him until their legs are pressed together and clinks their cans.
“Speak for yourself,” he says.
She smacks his arm. “You're not old.”
“I'm almost forty four,” he says, then narrows his eyes. “Wait a minute... what about cool?”
“Well...” she says and bites her lip.
“Oh, I see how it is,” he mutters.
“You make up for it by being so cute, though,” she says, and pinks immediately. She grabs another couple of cans from the coffee table and gives him one.
“You're trying to get me drunk...” he says, and drains his second can, placing it back on the table.
She leans over and cups her hand around his ear. “You're already drunk,” she tells him in a mock-whisper.
“Oh,” he says, tipping his head towards her. “That's what that is.”
Bruce tends to be a miserable drunk, was even before the other guy. Alcohol makes him miserable, and blunt, and even less socially adjusted than usual. He had to make a conscious choice to stop drinking alone, because he hardly needed to add 'sad alcoholic' to his laundry list of problems.
Jane's a happy drunk, though, happy to chat and hum songs under her breath that he doesn't know. She tells him about when she was at Harvard, doing her graduate studies at Culver. She tells him how close Erik and her dad were, that she used to think of him as an uncle when she was a kid, but now he's more of a father to her. Even when she gets onto sad topics, she talks about them happily. It's really quite admirable.
“But you know what moms are like,” she says, finishing a story about prom date disasters that he really is listening to, but he's starting to feel a little vague. He's had six, maybe seven beers, and he always was a lightweight.
When he doesn't respond, her eyes go a little wider. “I'm sorry, are your parents...?”
It takes him a couple of seconds to work out what she's getting at. “Oh. Yeah, my mom died when I was eight.”
She lays a hand on his knee. “I'm so sorry.”
She sounds so open and sincere, and he's feeling so calm and tipsy, the next words just come out of his mouth with no prior examination. “My father killed her.”
Her face goes slack, fingers tightening around his knee. He smiles.
“I shouldn't have told you that. It's okay, you don't have to say anything. I don't tell people because what are you supposed to say to that?” It was at great personal angst and anxiety that he told Betty, all those years ago. It's what most of their fights stemmed from: when the subject of having kids came up, she used to tell him that it wasn't genetic; he said maybe that was true, maybe it was learned behaviour. Maybe he'd learned the behaviour.
“Bruce...”
“He's in the Ohio State Pen, has been since 1978. My mother tried to escape with me, and he came home early and... there was a trial, and...” He's really not sure why he's telling her this; her face has gone ashen, and he should stop, stop it, Bruce. “I've never told anyone except Betty, I just... told people they'd died in a car crash when I was a kid, people know what to do with that. I guess, though, some people probably knew already. Brian, my father, was a respected scientist, and Banner isn't that common a surname, I guess. That's why I stopped using my first name.”
“What's your first name?” she says quietly.
“Robert. All the articles at the time were about how renowned physicist Brian Banner had killed his wife and abused his son, little Bobby Banner. I didn't want to be abused little Bobby Banner any more. I heard my aunt say once that he'd experimented on me, but I don't know if that's true. Maybe that why I didn't die from the Gamma radiation, like I should have, but I don't know.”
He lapses into silence and finishes his beer. “Brian was an alcoholic,” he observes at length.
“Bruce,” Jane says, her voice almost unbearably gentle, “what was your mother's name?”
“Rebecca. Why?”
She reaches up to cup his cheek. “You're crying.”
“I am?” He pats his cheek and his fingers come away wet. “Oh. Oops.”
“Can I...” she starts, dropping her palm to his neck. “Can I hug you?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
She's too small to envelop him, but she does her level best anyway, despite the awkward angle they're at to each other. She squeezes his shoulders and he feels frozen, not completely sure of what's going on, although really he does know: people comfort you when you tell them about the horrible things that have happened to you and then start crying. That's compassion 101.
He places his hand carefully on her waist, flexing his fingers. He's crying even more now, he can feel it on his face, but he's disconnected from it. He knows that he's crying because he's sad, but the thing is, he doesn't feel sad, he feels pretty much the same as always, except a bit drunker.
He wonders if it's the other guy who's sad.
Jane runs her hand over his hair, and he drops his chin to her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I guess I am,” he mumbles.
Her hand drops lower, stroking his back, and he suddenly feels so tired. He presses his forehead to the curve of her neck and sighs. She keeps stroking his back, until his eyelids feel too heavy to keep open any longer. He's not sure, but he thinks that she kisses him on his temple just as he drifts off.
He's horizontal when he wakes up, his knees pulled up to his chest, his cheek pillowed against something, one arm hanging off the edge of the couch. His eyes feel sore and itchy, his mouth is dry and tastes awful, and for a moment he doesn't know what's going on. He rolls over onto his back and looks up, at Jane, sleeping with her head tipped back against the couch.
Oh. He looks at his 'cushion' out of the corner of his eye. He's got his head in her lap, and she's taken his glasses off again, left them folded up on the coffee table. He cried himself to sleep, he thinks, frowning, and it's been decades since that's happened.
He should definitely get up now. Jane must be uncomfortable like that; he should get up and resettle her in a better position, and drink as much coffee as possible to try to wash away the embarrassment and shame of telling her about Brian. God, even the thought of it now makes him want to throw up. Although that might have something to do with his hangover.
But... she's asleep, and maybe he'd wake her if he tried to move her. And maybe he just doesn't want to get up yet. It's still dark, and he's got at least a couple of hours of sleep left in him.
Jane sighs in her sleep, one hand pressing into his arm, and he makes the snap decision to leave his panic attack for tomorrow and go back to sleep.
He wakes for the second time to a door slamming in the lab; or, rather, he finds himself sitting up, hanging on to Jane's hand, blood pumping in his ears, a few seconds before he becomes aware of the noise that woke him.
Jane's fingers flex in his grip. “What's wrong?” she asks, voice rough.
He snaps his head back to her, and she starts, leaning away from him momentarily. The other guy is pressing against him, thrashing to be let out; he blinks hard, forcing him back. “Heard something,” he murmurs.
“What--” she starts, but the lights are switched on before she can finish.
Erik walks in, looks at the two of them, rumpled and holding hands, and sighs. “Morning.”
“Yeah,” Bruce says, dropping Jane's hand, and levers himself off the couch. “I'm gonna put the coffee on.”
Jane joins him a couple of minutes later, shuffling in with a blanket around her shoulders.
“Three sugars,” she says, “if you're offering.”
“Sure,” he says, watching out of the corner of his eye as she opens the cupboard door next to him and digs around in there. “Um. I'm sorry about... about last night.”
“You don't have anything to be sorry for,” she says.
He snorts. “Well, I still shouldn't have laid all of that on you. And... I hope I didn't scare you before, with the...” He waves a hand towards his eyes.
She closes the door and turns to him, leans her hip against the counter. “Oh, you didn't, I was just surprised. Green suits you.”
He watches the coffee maker as it whirs along, catching his fingernails along a groove on the underside of the counter. “I don't know about that.”
“I do. Hey.” She taps him on the arm. “I'm not scared of you.”
“You should be.” He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, then back to the counter. “I am,” he mumbles.
Jane sighs, closing the short distance between them, while he keeps looking down at the counter. She wraps one arm around his waist and squeezes, her other hand resting on his shoulder. He's had more hugs in the last twelve hours than he has in the past three years.
“Thanks,” he says quietly, patting her arm.
“Jane,” Erik calls, “where're your notes on...” His voice fades a little as he steps into the room.
“Hey,” Bruce says. Jane pulls back a little, turning her attention back to foraging for food.
Erik nods. “Mm. Coffee ready yet?”
Part 2
Rating: NC-17.
Pairings/Characters: Bruce/Jane, Erik Selvig, Tony Stark, Betty Ross.
Summary: Bruce comes back to New York eight months after Tony dropped him off at a ferry terminal, with a nasty cough, no money, and nowhere to stay. Jane answers his shot in the dark phonecall, and suddenly he's helping to build wormholes while S.H.I.E.L.D. are quietly watching his every move.
A/N: This was inspired by a prompt at avengerkink, although it doesn't follow it at all, I'm afraid. I just saw Bruce/Jane and my brain said 'YES'. (Title from Fun's Stars.)
Bruce leaves. Tony takes him to a ferry terminal, presses a fancy watch and a roll of bills that Bruce later discovers are several different currencies - British pounds, Euros, pesos, quetzals, reals - into his hand and wishes him a safe trip. With that and the duffel bag full of food and clothes for every kind of weather that Natasha gave him, he feels almost happy. It's a feeling he hasn't had in a long time. It's the best he's going to get.
Bruce arrives. Eight months and a week later he's freezing and soaked to the bone outside the rebuilt and better than ever Stark Tower, vicious New York rain making mincemeat of his battered and too large sneakers. The rain has straightened out his hair that's already too long, and it hangs in front of his face stubbornly, while his chest rumbles with a nasty cough that he picked up while treating people in the Dominican Republic. Doctor, heal thyself, indeed.
He squelches his way into the lobby of the tower and up to the main desk.
“Name?” the receptionist asks.
“I was just wondering if--” He stops a moment to cough, and the receptionist blinks a little harder. “--Mr Stark was here.”
“Name?” she repeats and locks eyes with him.
He takes a rattling breath. “Bruce Banner.”
She flicks her eyes to her computer and taps away at it. “Sorry,” she says, flicking her eyes back to him, “You don't have an appointment.”
“I know that. I'm a friend. Can't I just... go up and knock on the door?”
She looks at him as if he's some random lunatic off the street. Which is mostly accurate, as it happens. “I'm sorry, sir, only authorised visitors are allowed past the lobby.”
“Fine,” he concedes. He can feel water pooling in his shoes. “Can I use the bathroom?”
“Authorised visitors only,” she repeats blandly.
“I guess I have no chance asking to borrow a phone, do I?” he asks.
“I'm sorry, sir,” she says, tipping her head to one side. Yeah, she sounds sorry.
He turns around and leaves, taking petty satisfaction from the wet trail he leaves behind him. It's short-lived once he's outside, though. He's back where he began. He doesn't have a lot of people he can call, and he imagines that Steve, Clint, and Natasha probably aren't listed in the phone book. Betty briefly flits through his mind, but he dismisses the thought; it's been almost three years since he last saw her. He's changed, and not for the better.
The only person he can think of is Erik. He only got to see him for a few hours after everything was over; Bruce wanted to leave as soon as he could, and Erik was being taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for 'questioning'. Bruce felt bad for his old friend, but he was relieved to not be in the same position.
Most likely, Erik isn't in the city; after what he went through, he should really be on vacation to some tropical island for the foreseeable future. But Bruce has a quarter in his pocket and it's worth a shot.
He pointlessly covers his head with his hands and crosses the street to a sad looking phone booth. He picks up the receiver and pauses; he'll have to call Culver to get Erik's number, but hell if he can remember Culver's number. So he's going to have to call the directory, too, all on one quarter. Well, he's faced more challenging problems.
Directory puts him through to Culver, and after much umming and erring, the physics department at Culver tells him that Erik is on a research sabbatical. Bruce almost bashes his head into the phone booth, but then the guy adds that they seem to have a number for him at a lab in New York.
Bruce repeats to back to himself about ten times before he dials, then crosses his fingers behind his back.
“Hello?” a woman's voice answers.
“Oh, hi.” Bruce's heart sinks - maybe he dialled wrong. “I don't suppose, uh, there's a Dr Selvig where you are, is there?”
“He's actually away visiting family at the moment,” she says.
“Oh,” Bruce sighs, then gets caught in another coughing fit.
“Um, do you want to leave a message?” she asks hesitantly.
“No, it's okay,” he mutters.
“Well... he'll want to know who was calling for him,” she says. “What's your name?”
“I--” Exactly how many people is he going to tell his name to today? He sighs, and rubs his face, trying to get some blood flowing again. “Bruce.”
“Bruce,” she repeats, “okay, I'll... wait. Bruce Banner?”
He almost hangs up right then and there. It's probably fucking S.H.I.E.L.D, what was he thinking?
“One minute remaining,” a bland voice says on the line.
“I, uh, the- the lady's telling me that my money's almost run out, I should--” He's cut off by yet another coughing fit, even more miserable than the last.
“You sound terrible,” the woman says, “and you're calling from a pay phone? Tell me where you are.”
“What?” he asks, taking a rattling breath.
“You're using a pay phone, in the rain, sounding like you're about to die, and no one's seen you in almost a year. You're Erik's friend and I'm going to come pick you up.”
This woman seems to know an awful lot about him, considering how he doesn't even know her name.
“Thirty seconds remaining.”
He grimaces. All paranoia aside, he's pretty sure that if he doesn't get out of the cold soon, his cough is going to turn into full blown pneumonia.
“Vanderbilt and East 45th Street,” he says weakly.
“Okay, stay there, I'm--” The line goes dead, and Bruce replaces the receiver with a deep sigh. This is a terrible, terrible idea. And he still doesn't know her name.
He ducks into a store doorway, and gets unpleasant looks from the security guard standing there. Too bad, he thinks, and the other guy rumbles in his head. Not now, he tells him.
He's not sure how long to wait for his mystery woman, or how long it'll be before the cops come to move him on. He hopes that the former's shorter than the latter.
The former, it seems, is twenty five minutes, just as his feet are starting to go numb. A van that looks about as battered as he feels trundles slowly down the street, coming to a stop near the intersection. The door opens and a girl - woman - jumps out, wrapped in a large, puffy coat. She slams the door closed, and it springs back open immediately, so she shoulder checks it closed and blows hair from her face. It brings a smile to his face.
She squints at the people passing on the sidewalk - he doesn't wave to her because he's not absolutely certain that she's who he thinks she is - until she lights on him. Apparently she knows what he looks like, because she comes straight at him.
“Dr Banner?” she asks, looking him up and down, from his dripping hair to his sodden shoes.
“Hi,” he says.
“I'm Jane,” she says, and takes hold of his arm.
“Okay,” he mumbles as she pulls him back over to the van. She sends him around to get in the passenger side. “I'm going to get your van wet,” he says.
She looks pointedly at the candy wrappers carpeting the well of the van, and he smiles. “Oh,” he says, and climbs in, slamming the door closed behind him.
“Get that top off,” she says, pulling her arms from the sleeves of her coat.
“Um.”
She smiles cheerfully. “I'd say take everything off, but I don't want you to get charged with public indecency. The shoes need to go, though.”
“Uh.”
“You're halfway to pneumonia already,” she says, sliding into disapproval.
“Well,” he says, and then starts coughing. His body is, as always, a traitor. He nods his agreement as he attempts to catch his breath. She waits fairly patiently until he's done, then holds her hands out for his drenched collection of clothes. It takes him a few confused minutes to get them off, they're so wet and stuck to his skin, and he apologetically hands them to Jane, who unceremoniously drops them in the back, where they send things clattering.
“Put this on,” she says, tossing her coat into his lap.
“Oh, no, it's okay,” he replies. He takes a moment to wonder at the bizarreness of the situation at hand: he's shirtless (which isn't much to look at, and can't be any fun for Jane) and ill, sitting in a stranger's car, with said stranger insisting he wear her clothes.
“It's Erik's, put it on,” she says, and starts the van. The heat blasts on and he starts shivering. The coat feels very soft and warm when he squeezes it in his hands. Maybe just for five minutes... He toes his shoes and socks off, and pulls the coat on. Jane smiles smugly.
It doesn't make him feel much better, though. In fact, he starts shivering so hard that his teeth clatter against each other. “Sh-shit,” he stammers.
“Do you want me to turn the heat up?”
“No, it's-- it's okay,” he says. He zips the coat up and tucks his nose into the collar, peering out at the road.
At some point he zones out, because the next thing he knows Jane is nudging his shoulder and when he looks up, he finds that they're in a parking lot. He starts and bangs his side into the door.
“Sorry!” Jane says, holding her hands out, palms up. “I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to scare you.”
She's the one who's scared, he can tell; her eyes are bright with it, and he can't stop his mind from pointing out how small and fragile she is. She could snap in two so easily.
“You didn't, you didn't. Look, thanks for the ride but--”
“Okay. Hey, I just did a grocery store run yesterday, it's like a candy store in the lab right now,” she says, blithely ignoring him. She hops out of the van and comes round to his side, waiting for him to sort himself out. He steps down next to her, grunting at the cold concrete on his bare feet.
“Are you going to be okay without shoes?” she asks.
“I've walked barefoot on worse,” he says. Jane just raises her eyebrows and leads the way to the elevator.
It's awkward. Bruce puts his hands in the pockets of the coat, finds more candy wrappers, some tissues, and at least a couple dollars worth of change. He pulls out a handful and looks at it; Jane smiles uncomfortably. He puts it back.
“So,” he says after a minute. “You run this lab with Erik?”
“Yeah, we're working on getting the Einstein-Rosen Bridge up and running.”
“A wormhole? I didn't realise that was past the theoretical stages. Sorry, my astrophysics is a little rusty.”
She smiles. “It wasn't, until recently.”
“Thor?” he asks, taking the gamble that she knows about him. If she doesn't, he does an excellent impression of a madman.
She drops her gaze to the floor. “Yeah. Oh, this is our stop,” she adds, stepping out.
He follows her down a hallway until she stops at an unmarked door. Not suspicious at all. She swipes a card through the wall mounted reader, and the door clicks open.
It is a lot bigger on the inside. Jane grins when he mutters this to himself.
“There's a shower in the back,” she says, pointing him in the right direction.
He stays in there for close to forty five minutes, all told, long after all the accumulated dirt of his trek back to New York has washed down the drain. Five minutes in, Jane taps on the door and tells him she's left some clothes for him, and he mumbles something vaguely affirmative in response and goes back to enjoying the hot spray. When he finally gets out, he cracks the door ever so slightly, and finds a pile of clothes and towels, with a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste on top. He dries himself off and does his teeth, looking at himself in the mirror. He really is skinny as fuck these days, and looking old to boot.
When he's done he pulls on the sweatpants - only just held up with the drawstrings pulled as tight as they'll go - and fleece hoodie that she's left for him, and wanders out to find her. It's not hard, he just follows the sounds of clattering and finds her in a small kitchen, bent over, poking at a microwave.
“Hey,” he says quietly.
She looks over her shoulder. “You're looking a little brighter. I don't suppose you know how to work microwaves, do you?”
He holds up his hands. “I'm not that kind of scientist.”
“Mm, I used to have an assistant that did this stuff, but she went off to grad school.” She straightens up and tugs her t-shirt down ('I'm going to the Disneyland Resort!'). “Really inconsiderate. How about some toast? I can work the toaster, most of the time.”
“Toast is great. I mean, you've already been too kind, you don't have to--”
“I found some Robitussin in the cupboard,” she says over him. “It tastes god awful, but it does the job.”
“Thanks,” he murmurs.
He takes a little bit too much of it, he guesses, because twenty minutes later he's sitting on a couch that has no right being as comfortable as it is, struggling to keep his eyes open. Jane dumps a soft blanket on top of him, and that seals it; he lists sideways and is out of the count.
He feels warm the next time he opens his eyes; there's a pillow beneath his head, the blanket is spread out over him, the other guy is less pissed about everything, and he can take a breath without doubling over. It's almost dark in the lab, just a few soft lights illuminating the place, giving everything a blurry quality. It takes him a minute to realise that he's not wearing his glasses any more; he tips his head back and finds that they're folded up on the coffee table by the couch.
Jane is hunched over a desk a little distance from him, scratching away at something with her pen. When he sits up with a huff, she blinks at him owlishly.
“Oh! How are you feeling?”
“Uh, a little stoned,” he says slowly, and smiles. “What time is it?”
“It's, uh...” She checks her watch. “Huh, it's two.”
“In the morning?” he asks.
“Yeah...” she murmurs. She looks up at him and smiles. She seems to be a very smiley person. “I'd better get some sleep, I guess.”
He looks at his makeshift bed, then back at her.
“Don't worry, there's a cot in the back. Unless you'd prefer it, I don't mind.”
“No, no, this is-- I'm fine here. Unless you want the couch instead?”
She shakes her head, laughing a little. “No, it's fine.” She stands up and stretches her arms over her head - there's an audible pop of her shoulder blades that he hears from where he's sitting. “Well, feel free to eat anything edible you find in the kitchen.”
“Okay.” He's bunching the blanket up between his hands, he realises, and forces himself to stop and smooth it out again. “Thank you, you know, for...”
“I'd never have heard the end of it from Erik if I hadn't.”
“Yeah, he can be a bit... grouchy.”
“Yeah,” she agrees and tucks some hair behind her ear. “Well, good night, Dr Banner.”
“Morning,” he says reflexively.
She smiles again and disappears into the back of the lab, switching the lights off as she goes.
He should leave. He could leave a note thanking her for her kindness and slip out; he's very quiet, he's been likened to a mouse more than once. It seems to have stopped raining outside, from what he can see, squinting in the dark at the window. Maybe he could filch some food off her first, she probably wouldn't mind.
He's just so tired, though, and definitely a little stoned. He could stay till morning, he thinks, get up and sneak out before she wakes up, he's an early riser, and then, at least, it'll be light and maybe little warmer. It's a more sensible plan than going out into the cold and dark, especially since he's not even sure where he is right now.
He nods to himself, feeling less anxious having made a decision, and lies back down.
It's just beginning to get light when he wakes up again, probably no later than six. He sits up a little easier this time, though there's a tickle in his throat again and he feels like hell, and grabs his glasses off the table before tiptoeing into the kitchen.
Where Jane is standing in fuzzy pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt.
“Oh,” he says, and she starts a little. At least he still has his mouse-like qualities intact.
“Good morning, Dr Banner,” she says. He almost expects her to add, 'the earth says hello', but she's probably too young to remember that, he guesses.
“Hi. What time is it?”
“About... six thirtyish?”
He fidgets with the baggy sweatpants he's wearing. “I thought you'd still be asleep.”
She shrugs. “I don't need a lot of sleep.”
“I used to be like that. Then I got old.”
She laughs and turns to open a cupboard door. “Do you want some coffee? Tea?” She picks up a bottle of something vaguely grey in colour. “Whatever this is?”
“Um, coffee? If it's not too much trouble.”
She shakes her head, and waves to a rickety looking table. “Sit down,” she says, grabs a spatula from the rack and points it at him. “I'm going to make eggs. Do you like eggs?”
“Yeah.”
The coffee's kind of awful, but the eggs are good. The tickle in his throat is getting stronger, but he manages to swallow it away. They sit across from each other, and chew in uncomfortable silence for a couple of minutes, before Jane clears her throat determinedly.
“So, where were you coming from?” she asks.
“From?” he repeats.
“Before you were standing in the rain like a bedraggled cat,” she clarifies.
“Oh, that. I was in the Dominican Republic.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Well...” He lays his knife and fork down on the empty plate, exactly parallel to each other. “It is, it's a beautiful place, but uh. Nicer when you know where you're going to be sleeping every night, I guess.”
“Is that why you're back in New York?”
“Well, yeah, ran out of money, and... got lonely...” He stops to cough, but of course what he hopes will be a polite clearing of the throat turns into a chest-rattling hack. “And ill,” he adds ruefully, once he's regained the power of speech.
“That sounds terrible. You should really see a doctor about that,” she says.
“I am a doctor.”
“Not that kind.”
“People don't tend to get the difference.”
She rolls her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
“You're a doctor?”
“Of astrophysics, for the last three years.” She pushes back from the table and picks up the plates.
“Let me--” he starts, but she waves him off. “So, that's how you know Erik?”
“Yeah, he and my dad were best friends, so I asked him to be my doctoral advisor.”
Bruce raises his eyebrows. “He must like you, he hated doing those things when I knew him.”
“I'm pretty sure he hated every minute of it.” She drops the plates and cutlery into the sink with a thunk, and runs the water. “So, you were pretty close to Stark Tower yesterday, were you looking for him?”
“Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, a guy can't just swan in there without a full cavity search.” He finishes with a cough, and smiles. “What a treat I was for the receptionist.”
“I can try to get hold of him, if you want.”
“You know Tony?”
“Not personally, but I'm sure S.H.I.E.L.D. can find it in themselves to call him for us.”
Despite the warm clothes and the central heating, he feels himself go cold at the mention of S.H.I.E.L.D. He'd thought it, hadn't he, that she might be S.H.I.E.L.D., and now he's finding himself at a distinct disadvantage: no clothes, sick, and tired.
Jane notices his long silence and wrinkles up her nose. “We're S.H.I.E.L.D. 'sponsored', I'm sorry, I should have let you know.”
“No, uh, it's fine, I should just get going, thank you for the food. And the couch.” He pushes his chair back from the table and gets two steps away from it before a wave of dizziness hits him so hard that he backs up and sits down again before he collapses. “Um.”
“Look, I'll tell them I want to consult with him or something,” she says, “I won't mention you.”
She leaves the room in search of her phone before he can point out that they already know he's there. He thinks about getting up for a second, but the kitchen is starting to blur a little, and the best option seems to be putting his arms on the table and resting his head in them. When he opens his eyes again it's to the soft whirring of the coffee maker, and he knows immediately that he's lost time. He rolls his head to one side and looks at Jane, blinking away sleep.
“Dr Banner, you're awake again,” she says, smiling softly.
“Bruce,” he mumbles, and she smiles wider.
“I called S.H.I.E.L.D.; apparently Stark is abroad for the next month.”
“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, then lifts his head and pulls a face. “Sorry... What time is it?”
“Just after ten,” she says, taking her cup of coffee from the machine. “Why don't you come sit on the couch? That doesn't look comfortable.”
He pushes himself up against the protest of his back and nods. “Sure.”
The main area of the lab has exploded into flurry of paper, stacks of them everywhere, and equations drawn all over the whiteboard mounted on one wall. They almost make sense to him, but his brain is just too foggy to work it out.
“I had a breakthrough,” she says.
“I see that...” He sits down heavily on the couch and can't stop himself from leaning back into the soft cushion and sighing.
“Why don't you take some more Robitussin and get some more sleep?” she asks gently.
That sounds like a really, really good idea right about now. About the best idea in the world, actually. But he shouldn't, he shouldn't, it's not safe to stay in a place like this, with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents around all the corners.
“I shouldn't, I should...” He rubs his palms over his face and sighs. “I don't know what I should do,” he mumbles.
“Take some medicine and sleep,” Jane says, tossing the bottle to him. He doesn't even try to catch it; it bounces off his chest and falls into his lap. “Sorry.”
He smiles and scratches the back of his head. “Okay, yeah.”
-
He wakes up being nudged in the shoulder. He startles a little, uncurling from his foetal position. Jane is standing a couple of feet from the couch, looking nervous and determined.
He levers himself up on his elbow. “I'm not gonna...”
“No, I know.” She chews on a nail for a second before smiling awkwardly. “I need to go home and do some stuff.”
“Oh, I-- I'll--”
“I have a futon,” she says quickly, while shrugging. “You could stay on it.”
“In your apartment?”
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “You've been really kind, but...”
“It's snowing.”
“It is?” He leans to one side and squints out the window. It is. “You really want a strange man sleeping on your futon?”
“You're not strange.”
He cocks an eyebrow and snorts. “What kind of people do you know?”
Jane shrugs. “Look, I'd be a really shitty person to let you go out in this weather with no money and no proper clothes and, well, we have met before, you know.”
“We have?”
She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against a drafting table. “Yeah. The faculty had a mixer for the grad students. You were talking to Erik and I sort of stood awkwardly adjacent to the two of you.”
He frowns, trying to sift through memories of the many mixers he went to in his illustrious career at Culver. “I... don't remember that.”
“You were pretty wrapped up in Dr Ross, I think. And I wasn't very memorable.”
Betty. Bruce's heart slides into his feet, it feels like. He twists his fingers in the bottom of his hoodie and takes an unsteady breath.
Jane clears her throat. “Anyway, I'm not taking 'no' for an answer.”
He runs his fingers up and down the zipper, nails catching on the teeth. “Well... I guess I don't have a choice then.”
-
She gives him fresh sheets, a squashy cushion, and her old boyfriend's clothes that make him look like a kid dressing up in his father's clothes.
“You dated a giant?” he asks, fiddling with the bottom of the shirt he's wearing - it hits mid-thigh and hangs baggy from his shoulders.
“I have a type,” she says, with a slight drawl that suggests a joke that Bruce isn't getting.
The kitchen here is a little better equipped, though not by a wide margin, and there's what looks like a curbside TV in the corner of the living room with a stack of books on top.
“Feel free to watch stuff on it,” she says. “The picture's not very good, though.”
“Do they still make The Wire? I liked that show.”
“I think it got cancelled or something,” she says, handing him a pair of socks.
He looks at them sceptically; he could probably wear one of them as a hat. “Oh.”
He means to leave the next day. He means to get up in the middle of the night, fold up the blankets and sheets, leave a thank you note, and slip out into that good night.
He sleeps until eleven.
He really means to leave the day after that, but... Jane buys bagels from a local place and he is suddenly ravenously hungry that morning, between his coughing fits. She pushes a bottle of non-drowsy cough medicine across the table to him.
“I really think you should have a doctor check out that cough. You might need antibiotics.”
He wipes his hand across the back his mouth and shakes his head. “The other guy, he won't let anything... really bad happen to me.”
“'Other guy'?”
“The--” He taps his head, drawing her eyes up.
“Huh, so is he like a separate entity? Do you have two consciousnesses in your head? Is it...” She pauses and smiles. “I'm sorry, those are kind of private questions, aren't they?”
He shrugs. “It's okay. He's like... to get Freudian on you, he's the Id and I'm the Super-ego.”
“So, he's not...?”
“No, he's...” It's been so long now, Bruce has learnt to disassociate himself with the other guy. No one's ever really questioned it before. Unsurprising, since he never interacted with people long enough to give them the chance. “We're the same person.” His stomach twists with the confession.
She nods thoughtfully. “Everyone's calling him-- you, the 'Hulk'.”
“Yeah. It's as good a name as any, I guess. I find it kind of funny, though, 'cause I really couldn't have been called 'hulking' for most of my life.”
She smiles. “You're bigger on the inside.”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Have another bagel,” she says.
He gives up 'meaning to' by day five. Jane drags him out to buy clothes - where it feels like everyone's staring, but probably only because he's a guy who looks homeless with a pretty, young woman - then back to the lab.
“You have a PhD in nuclear physics, right?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
She hauls a box up from the floor and puts it on the table in front of him. “Then you can work out how to create enough power to open a bridge to Asgard.”
He leans over and peers in the box. “Okay?”
“I'm not letting you stay with me out of the goodness of my heart,” she says sniffily, even though they both know that she is.
He lifts the corner of a stack of paper. “Isn't any of this stuff... digitised?”
She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and secures it with a rubber band. “I don't want S.H.I.E.L.D. to be able to monitor my work.”
“Good point.”
Jane flits between the table and the whiteboard, scrawling equations on it then going back to check her stacks of paper, then coming back to the board and starting all over again. It's exhausting just to watch.
The work is soothing, though. Aside from that little alien invasion, he hasn't had a chance to work like this in years, and especially when not under the threat of death and destruction. He can't drum up the levels of excitement for it that Jane has, or that he used to have, but it still feels good to stretch himself.
“Coffee break,” Jane says an indeterminate amount of time later. A cup appears in his line of vision and lands in front of him. He looks up and notices that it's getting dark outside.
“Thanks,” he says and pushes his hair back from his face, not that it accomplishes much. He pulls on a wayward curl and it stubbornly springs back into place. “I need a haircut.”
“Don't look at me,” she says, and leans her hip against the table next to him as she scans his work. “So, what do you think? Do you think it'll work?”
“It could.” He taps a sheet of paper. “You'd need an unheard of level of nuclear fission, which is possible, but radiation is going to be a big problem. Or you need some new power source. The Tesseract would have done it.”
“But Thor took it,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She sighs and hops up onto the table. “It doesn't matter what I build if we can't power it up.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what do I do?”
“Create another power source.”
“Just like that?”
He shrugs. “Why not?”
She shakes her head. “It's a hell of a lot of work.”
“Yeah, but you'll do it.”
“How do you know?”
He lifts his shoulders again. “Just a feeling I have.”
-
He cuts his hair the next day, over Jane's bathroom sink with a pair of paper cutting scissors, and it looks terrible. Jane laughs and flicks an errant curl with the end of her pen.
“It'll grow,” is her pronouncement.
-
They discover that they both did their undergrad at Harvard, and trade stories about the science faculty that make Bruce feel very old. Jane's memories of pulling pranks on MIT and Yale are a lot more vivid then his, in particular one story involving several chickens, some ladies undergarments, and a few cans of paint. Bruce laughs so hard that he starts coughing helplessly. It feels really good to laugh, aside from the unpleasant rattling sound his chest is making.
They're both so wrapped up in the story and Bruce's possible death by asphyxiation that neither of them hear the door until it slams closed.
His body snaps into alert mode; he's on his feet and Jane is close behind him as he retreats to press himself against a wall. There's no good way out of the lab, as far as he can tell, and he's kicking himself for not casing the place properly earlier. Jane worries her lip and looks around.
“Jane, are you here?” a voice calls. Erik. Bruce sags with relief.
He huffs a laugh, and Jane squeezes his shoulder before calling, “You're not supposed be back for another week!”
“There's only so much of my mother's soup and good intentions I can take,” he grumbles, rounding the corner into the room. “Lucky S.H.I.E.L.D. were paying for my flights... Bruce? Bruce?”
Jane's still got her hand on his shoulder, he realises; she lets go and Erik grins, crossing the room with just a couple of his ridiculously long strides, and envelops him in a hug.
“Hi,” Bruce murmurs.
Erik steps back and holds Bruce's shoulders. “You're looking good, Bruce.”
He knows that's a lie.
“Yeah, you too.”
Another lie.
“So, what are you doing here? How long have you been in New York?”
“About... a week and a half?” he says, looking at Jane. She nods.
“Where are you staying? God, if I'd known you were here, I'd've left my mother's sooner.”
“That's okay...” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I've actually... been staying on Jane's futon.”
Erik's eyebrows go high. “Really? I didn't realise that you two knew each other.”
“We didn't.”
“He didn't have anywhere to go, what was I meant to do?” Jane says, tilting her chin up just a little.
“Well, I have a whole spare bedroom,” Erik says, “you can stay with me until you find your feet. Are you going to be staying long term?”
“Um, I don't know, but uh...” He glances at Jane. Obviously it's better to get out of her hair before her goodwill runs dry, he just feels reluctant, for some reason. “I'll take you up on that offer, yeah.”
“Great,” Erik says, “we can pick your stuff up from Jane's later.”
“Oh, uh.” Bruce looks down at himself, and shrugs. “I come as I am.”
Jane claps her hands together before Erik can reply. “Let me show you what me and Bruce have been working on!” she says, and latches onto Erik's arm.
-
Erik has a nice apartment, with an actual bed and a mattress that's large enough for Bruce to stretch his arms and legs out. He sleeps terribly the first night. He's in good company, at least, as he runs into Erik pacing the hall when he slips out of his room to get a glass of water.
“Hey,” he says.
“Bruce,” he grunts, none of his earlier friendliness present.
“Are... you okay?”
Erik stares at him for a long second, before blinking and shaking his head. “I'm fine. Fine. It's late, what are you doing up?”
Bruce scratches the back of his head. “Thirsty.”
“Well, on your way then,” Erik says, waving his hand towards the kitchen.
Bruce shuffles off, guilty about being so glad that Erik lied to him.
He's back to normal the next day, if still a little more cheerful than Bruce knew him to be. Jane is considerably less happy, though, and already in the lab when he and Erik get there.
“Good morning, starshine,” he says. He places a cup of Starbucks coffee they picked up on the way in down in front of her, and nudges her in the shoulder.
“Huh? Oh...” She smiles up at him and picks up the cup. “Thanks.”
“Erik paid for it.”
“But you gave it to me,” she says.
“I did,” he says, taking the seat next to her.
“So, how is it, staying with Erik?”
“It's fine. I think, uh, I don't think he got a lot of sleep last night, though. But then, people don't tend to, when I'm around.”
She rolls her eyes and gives him a light shove. “I'm sure it has nothing to do with you, bighead. Erik wasn't doing so well after... everything. The trip home was meant to help him, but...” She shrugs.
“Yeah... So, how's the work go--”
“Bruce! Jane!” Erik calls, cutting him off. Bruce's looks over his shoulder as Erik comes in, carrying a laptop. “I've got something to show you.”
“Okay?” Bruce says, watching as Erik comes around the table and puts the laptop down in front of them. The screen says '1995' in Comic Sans. Jane wrinkles her nose.
“I started going through my cupboards last night when I couldn't sleep,” he says, and Bruce and Jane share a look. “And I found this. The faculty converted all their VHS to DVD a few years back, and they sent out this compilation disc of our Christmas parties.” Bruce doesn't have time to register his complaint before Erik leans over and hits play.
“Are you filming this?” someone asks as the camera pans around the poorly decorated room. Bruce remembers it well: the heating broke in there every winter, yet that was where they always had their Christmas parties.
“Remember Hank?” Erik asks.
Bruce nods. “Yeah.” Hank does not look pleased to be filmed. “What's he doing these days?”
“His wife was killed a few years ago. He gave up work to devote all his time to 'research'.”
Bruce widens his eyes. “Christ,” he mutters.
The cameraman walks around the room, zooming in on people at random. Bruce recognises a lot of the faces, though he can't put names to half of them. Erik names some of them, pointing out to Jane people who she only knows in their current older forms.
“Erik, get over here!” someone calls, and Jane laughs as he comes into the frame.
“I forgot you wore those huge glasses,” she says, “and you had hair.”
Erik runs a hand over his head. “Thanks.”
“So, how're you enjoying the party?” the cameraman asks.
“Beer's terrible,” he replies.
“But you're still drinking it.”
“It's free.”
Bruce smiles; that's the Erik he remembers.
A guy claps Erik on the shoulder, peering around him at the camera. He's tall, though not as tall as Erik, slim, with dark, thinning hair. Bruce vaguely recognises him. Jane takes a deep breath.
“Dad,” she murmurs.
“That's your dad?” he asks, looking between the screen and Jane, as her father laughs and jokes along with the cameraman. Bruce can see the resemblance now that he's looking for it.
“Yeah,” she says, and smiles weakly. “He was killed in a car crash a couple of months later.”
Jesus, now he remembers; he was the guy who died midway through the semester. Bruce didn't go to the funeral because he had midterms to give. His name was Dan, he thinks. Daniel Foster. “God, I'm sorry.”
Erik squeezes her hand and she shrugs. “It's okay.”
On the video, the younger Erik disappears from the frame for a second, then comes back with someone by the arm. Bruce recognises that hideously patterned shirt and braces for impact.
Jane laughs wetly as Bruce's young, baby-fat round face comes into view. “You had even more hair,” she says.
He smiles and runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, it was a problem.” His younger self is a mish-mash of unruly curls, horrible clothes, and a wide-eyed look of terror. It certainly doesn't help that Erik has a good six or seven inches on him, and makes his younger self look even more like a child. Bruce was fairly terrified of Erik for at least the first couple of years that they knew each other.
“Enjoying the party, kid?” the cameraman asks.
“Um, sure. Beer's good.”
Bruce had never got why they laughed at him for that, he remembers now.
“How did your first semester teaching go?” Dan asks.
“Yeah, it's been okay. I've got over two hundred finals to mark, though...”
“I hated teaching,” Bruce confides to Jane and Erik. “I was absolutely miserable doing it. My students walked all over me.”
“I hated it too,” Jane says, “but I was too impatient with them. 'Shrill', some said.”
“Students are always little shits on teaching evaluations,” Erik says.
“Where's he going?” the cameraman asks, following Bruce as he crosses the room.
“Where'd you think?” Dan replies. The cameraman zooms in on Bruce as he meets up with Betty at the door. She fiddles with his shirt, loosening his tie and generally trying to make him look less ridiculous - she despaired throughout their relationship of his fashion 'sense'.
“You really wouldn't know that he's one of those scary geniuses, huh?” one of them says as Betty starts trying to tame his hair by combing her fingers through it.
It feels like his heart is stuttering in his chest as he looks at how happy he used to be with Betty, how he leaned into her touch, how he wasn't afraid of being touched; not by her, at least. It's like a physical pain, thinking about how thoroughly he's ruined his life.
“Have you seen his evaluations? He's doing terribly, his students treat him like shit and he just takes it.”
Bruce takes a deep breath and holds it for a second, then leans over and looks at Erik.
“That wasn't me,” Erik says.
“I don't think anyone else at Culver had a Swedish accent,” Bruce says blandly before settling back to watch the video.
“He's definitely going to take over the world one day, though,” Dan comments on the video as Bruce disappears out the door with Betty.
“My dad must have liked you,” Jane says, “he only said that about people he really liked.” Her eyes are a little red-rimmed, but she's smiling. He knocks his shoulder into hers and settles down to watch the rest of the video.
-
Erik has a lot of pictures from the 'old days', which he pulls out at regularly intervals over the next couple of weeks. Bruce never knew that he was so sentimental.
There aren't very many pictures of Bruce, because at least half of the time he made up some excuse to get out of get-togethers, and he hated having his photograph taken, he always looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Betty used to say that it was cute.
There are a couple, though, mostly with Betty, that Erik gives him. It's difficult not to keep looking at them; he finds himself carrying them with him, pulling them out while he's working, or eating, or doing anything at all, really.
“What're you looking at?” Jane asks, dropping another box on the table and sliding it across to him. He tips it on its side and sighs; she has a lot of handwritten research on possible power sources.
“Just pictures,” he says, handing them to her.
She takes them and smiles. “Aw,” she says, “you're so cute.”
“Thanks.” He takes the pictures back and smooths his thumb over their faces in the top one.
“When was the last time you saw her?” she asks.
He spares another few seconds for the pictures, then replaces them in his pocket. “About three years.”
Jane hums and pats his shoulder. He glances up and smiles.
“Are you going to go see her?”
“I dunno...” He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “So, what's this present you brought me?”
-
They have their first big breakthrough at the end of February. Jane goes out and buys a couple six-packs of beers in celebration.
“Do you drink?” she asks him.
“Whenever I get the chance,” he says, and she tosses him a can. Early on, he'd discovered that alcohol drowned out the noise in his head.
It's late when they work out how to get around the averaged null energy condition, and later still when they start drinking. Erik bows out after one beer, and Jane and Bruce jeer at him a bit as he leaves. He quite pointedly asks Bruce how he's going to get home, but Bruce is pleasantly buzzed enough to just shrug and slouch lower into the couch.
“I don't think he approves,” Bruce mumbles into his can after Erik's left, cutting a look at Jane.
“He's just jealous because we're young and cool,” she says, grinning. She scoots closer to him until their legs are pressed together and clinks their cans.
“Speak for yourself,” he says.
She smacks his arm. “You're not old.”
“I'm almost forty four,” he says, then narrows his eyes. “Wait a minute... what about cool?”
“Well...” she says and bites her lip.
“Oh, I see how it is,” he mutters.
“You make up for it by being so cute, though,” she says, and pinks immediately. She grabs another couple of cans from the coffee table and gives him one.
“You're trying to get me drunk...” he says, and drains his second can, placing it back on the table.
She leans over and cups her hand around his ear. “You're already drunk,” she tells him in a mock-whisper.
“Oh,” he says, tipping his head towards her. “That's what that is.”
Bruce tends to be a miserable drunk, was even before the other guy. Alcohol makes him miserable, and blunt, and even less socially adjusted than usual. He had to make a conscious choice to stop drinking alone, because he hardly needed to add 'sad alcoholic' to his laundry list of problems.
Jane's a happy drunk, though, happy to chat and hum songs under her breath that he doesn't know. She tells him about when she was at Harvard, doing her graduate studies at Culver. She tells him how close Erik and her dad were, that she used to think of him as an uncle when she was a kid, but now he's more of a father to her. Even when she gets onto sad topics, she talks about them happily. It's really quite admirable.
“But you know what moms are like,” she says, finishing a story about prom date disasters that he really is listening to, but he's starting to feel a little vague. He's had six, maybe seven beers, and he always was a lightweight.
When he doesn't respond, her eyes go a little wider. “I'm sorry, are your parents...?”
It takes him a couple of seconds to work out what she's getting at. “Oh. Yeah, my mom died when I was eight.”
She lays a hand on his knee. “I'm so sorry.”
She sounds so open and sincere, and he's feeling so calm and tipsy, the next words just come out of his mouth with no prior examination. “My father killed her.”
Her face goes slack, fingers tightening around his knee. He smiles.
“I shouldn't have told you that. It's okay, you don't have to say anything. I don't tell people because what are you supposed to say to that?” It was at great personal angst and anxiety that he told Betty, all those years ago. It's what most of their fights stemmed from: when the subject of having kids came up, she used to tell him that it wasn't genetic; he said maybe that was true, maybe it was learned behaviour. Maybe he'd learned the behaviour.
“Bruce...”
“He's in the Ohio State Pen, has been since 1978. My mother tried to escape with me, and he came home early and... there was a trial, and...” He's really not sure why he's telling her this; her face has gone ashen, and he should stop, stop it, Bruce. “I've never told anyone except Betty, I just... told people they'd died in a car crash when I was a kid, people know what to do with that. I guess, though, some people probably knew already. Brian, my father, was a respected scientist, and Banner isn't that common a surname, I guess. That's why I stopped using my first name.”
“What's your first name?” she says quietly.
“Robert. All the articles at the time were about how renowned physicist Brian Banner had killed his wife and abused his son, little Bobby Banner. I didn't want to be abused little Bobby Banner any more. I heard my aunt say once that he'd experimented on me, but I don't know if that's true. Maybe that why I didn't die from the Gamma radiation, like I should have, but I don't know.”
He lapses into silence and finishes his beer. “Brian was an alcoholic,” he observes at length.
“Bruce,” Jane says, her voice almost unbearably gentle, “what was your mother's name?”
“Rebecca. Why?”
She reaches up to cup his cheek. “You're crying.”
“I am?” He pats his cheek and his fingers come away wet. “Oh. Oops.”
“Can I...” she starts, dropping her palm to his neck. “Can I hug you?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
She's too small to envelop him, but she does her level best anyway, despite the awkward angle they're at to each other. She squeezes his shoulders and he feels frozen, not completely sure of what's going on, although really he does know: people comfort you when you tell them about the horrible things that have happened to you and then start crying. That's compassion 101.
He places his hand carefully on her waist, flexing his fingers. He's crying even more now, he can feel it on his face, but he's disconnected from it. He knows that he's crying because he's sad, but the thing is, he doesn't feel sad, he feels pretty much the same as always, except a bit drunker.
He wonders if it's the other guy who's sad.
Jane runs her hand over his hair, and he drops his chin to her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I guess I am,” he mumbles.
Her hand drops lower, stroking his back, and he suddenly feels so tired. He presses his forehead to the curve of her neck and sighs. She keeps stroking his back, until his eyelids feel too heavy to keep open any longer. He's not sure, but he thinks that she kisses him on his temple just as he drifts off.
He's horizontal when he wakes up, his knees pulled up to his chest, his cheek pillowed against something, one arm hanging off the edge of the couch. His eyes feel sore and itchy, his mouth is dry and tastes awful, and for a moment he doesn't know what's going on. He rolls over onto his back and looks up, at Jane, sleeping with her head tipped back against the couch.
Oh. He looks at his 'cushion' out of the corner of his eye. He's got his head in her lap, and she's taken his glasses off again, left them folded up on the coffee table. He cried himself to sleep, he thinks, frowning, and it's been decades since that's happened.
He should definitely get up now. Jane must be uncomfortable like that; he should get up and resettle her in a better position, and drink as much coffee as possible to try to wash away the embarrassment and shame of telling her about Brian. God, even the thought of it now makes him want to throw up. Although that might have something to do with his hangover.
But... she's asleep, and maybe he'd wake her if he tried to move her. And maybe he just doesn't want to get up yet. It's still dark, and he's got at least a couple of hours of sleep left in him.
Jane sighs in her sleep, one hand pressing into his arm, and he makes the snap decision to leave his panic attack for tomorrow and go back to sleep.
He wakes for the second time to a door slamming in the lab; or, rather, he finds himself sitting up, hanging on to Jane's hand, blood pumping in his ears, a few seconds before he becomes aware of the noise that woke him.
Jane's fingers flex in his grip. “What's wrong?” she asks, voice rough.
He snaps his head back to her, and she starts, leaning away from him momentarily. The other guy is pressing against him, thrashing to be let out; he blinks hard, forcing him back. “Heard something,” he murmurs.
“What--” she starts, but the lights are switched on before she can finish.
Erik walks in, looks at the two of them, rumpled and holding hands, and sighs. “Morning.”
“Yeah,” Bruce says, dropping Jane's hand, and levers himself off the couch. “I'm gonna put the coffee on.”
Jane joins him a couple of minutes later, shuffling in with a blanket around her shoulders.
“Three sugars,” she says, “if you're offering.”
“Sure,” he says, watching out of the corner of his eye as she opens the cupboard door next to him and digs around in there. “Um. I'm sorry about... about last night.”
“You don't have anything to be sorry for,” she says.
He snorts. “Well, I still shouldn't have laid all of that on you. And... I hope I didn't scare you before, with the...” He waves a hand towards his eyes.
She closes the door and turns to him, leans her hip against the counter. “Oh, you didn't, I was just surprised. Green suits you.”
He watches the coffee maker as it whirs along, catching his fingernails along a groove on the underside of the counter. “I don't know about that.”
“I do. Hey.” She taps him on the arm. “I'm not scared of you.”
“You should be.” He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, then back to the counter. “I am,” he mumbles.
Jane sighs, closing the short distance between them, while he keeps looking down at the counter. She wraps one arm around his waist and squeezes, her other hand resting on his shoulder. He's had more hugs in the last twelve hours than he has in the past three years.
“Thanks,” he says quietly, patting her arm.
“Jane,” Erik calls, “where're your notes on...” His voice fades a little as he steps into the room.
“Hey,” Bruce says. Jane pulls back a little, turning her attention back to foraging for food.
Erik nods. “Mm. Coffee ready yet?”
Part 2