Chapter Text
Bruce wakes up, rolls across the sidewalk, and screams into the grass for two minutes straight. Then, he cradles his head in his arms, vibrating with some strange residual adrenaline.
“What did you do? ” he asks Hulk, who seems to be bouncing off the walls in his head. “Did they give you coffee or something?” That would be completely unfair. It’s not like it’s Hulk’s growth that’s going to get stunted.
Hulk’s response is fast and zippy and totally incoherent. The only part Bruce can make out is hungry.
Weird. “I’m hungry, too,” Bruce says as a peace offering, even though he just de-Hulked and so that’s like saying I’m made of atoms or my brain feels like it’s melting into my throat. He paws through his bag for a minute, comes out with a little stapled circus bag of popcorn.
Hulk brings him popcorn a lot. Bruce thinks it’s because he likes the name.
Bruce’s hands are shaking still, from all the energy bubbling up. He doesn’t know what to do, and he’s feeling overwhelmed and like he wants to get out of this alley, but he’s not sure his legs will cooperate. They don’t always, after Hulk. He drags a hand through his hair and ends up scratching at his face a little, even though he used to promise Mom he wouldn’t.
It’s okay! Hulk says. Good thing happened. Big colors, dogs, smash.
Bruce smushes his forehead to his knees. “Okay.”
Good thing, presses Hulk. Bruce can feel his frustration, can feel how it’s about to turn into Bruce’s frustration. Bruce’s problem. Something Bruce will have to deal with in a constructive way, because he doesn’t get to flip cars when he has feelings.
“Don’t worry about it,” says Bruce, a little anxiously. “I’ll look it up. I’m sure it was lots of fun. Did you thank your friends?”
No! Hulk says, and Bruce is about to scold him, but then Bruce can feel him--straining, almost. Like Bruce does when his whole body hurts but he needs to brace himself to move. Can show you!
And then time slows down, warps and pools and fuzzes. Bruce’s mushed-up thoughts solidify into a picture of a girl, long-haired and holding a bow and arrow.
Bruce has to take long, slow breaths because that memory wasn’t there a second ago and does not belong to him. Is it Hulk’s memory?
Hulk’s never showed him anything on purpose.
“Who is that?” he says. “Did you fight her?”
No! Hulk sounds gleeful. Hungry Games.
“Hungry--oh my god!” Bruce yells, forgetting that he’s scared and starving and filled with thoughts that aren’t his. “You watched The Hunger Games without me?”
You were there! protests Hulk. Sleeping. Early bird eats worm.
“Doesn’t count!” Bruce says. “Was it good? No, don’t tell me. No, wait, do tell me. Just tell me if it follows the book or not.”
Went boom! Hulk says happily, which does sound a lot like what happened in the book. Bruce struggles for a minute with whether to ask for more details--on the one hand, spoilers, but on the other, he’s never gonna see it himself unless he gets real lucky with the display TVs in a video store. And—well.
He really liked the book.
“Okay, show it to me.”
There’s more pictures, all in a rush, and confusing clips of sound. Mostly explosions. Bruce can guess what were Hulk’s favorite parts. Some of the dialogue is jumbled and confused, and some of it sounds more like what Hulk would say; Bruce is ninety percent sure that they didn’t change Peeta’s name to Square Face Man in the movie adaptation. The colors are too bright and almost all the plot stuff is skipped.
It’s the most wonderful thing Bruce has ever seen.
He pulls out Boy to play along, runs him up and down the edge of the sidewalk and gives him all the best lines, including the ones Hulk makes up.
“Gonna smash Square Face Man,” says Bruce as Boy as Hulk as Katniss Everdeen. “Gonna smash him in the ground and say thank you for smashing to team.”
Yes, Hulk says. Exactly.
Bruce giggles and then pretends to make Boy-Katniss shoot some arrows, except in his imagination the arrows have lasers so he gets to make the pew-pew sounds.
Like Bird Man! Hulk says and then, unbidden, pulls out a memory of Hawkeye shooting a bunch of explosive arrows into a huge tentacled thing. Bruce stops playing to watch, amazed.
On TV, the Avengers look like superheroes. Through Hulk’s odd, technicolor vision, they’re as bumbly and bright as children on a playground. Hulk’s memory, new as it is, doesn’t really have any barriers against his imagination, so images twist and turn. Hulk remembers Iron Man as twelve feet tall and loud as a bomb; Captain America has a real star on his shirt, infinitely heavy and hot. Black Widow’s legs bend in ways that would destroy anyone else’s skeleton, and Hawkeye has real wings that propel him off buildings, blocking out the sun.
Bruce thinks that Thor really does fly and shoot lightning, but he doesn’t know. It’s hard to find a clear video of a real Avengers fight, and most of the papers written on Asgardians are in paywalled physics journals.
“How do you imagine yourself?” Bruce asks, curious.
Hulk just Hulk. Not anything else.
Bruce guesses that makes sense. He can’t really picture himself, either. He has the facts: small and skinny, freckles on the backs of his hands, badly in need of a haircut. But they don’t come together to make a boy, just a glob of composite parts.
Bruce pulls out the picture again, smooths it out on his knee. “That’s what you look like,” he says, pointing.
A rumble of displeasure. No. Hulk bigger than that.
“You are not .”
Is! Hulk insists. Hulk bigger than puny buildings.
“That would be impractical,” Bruce says. “You’d be too big to do anything. And you have to look up to see skyscrapers, how would that work if you were taller than them?”
There’s a long, sullen silence, and then: That hurts Hulk’s feelings.
Bruce can’t help but laugh. “Okay, okay. You’re the biggest. Let’s go back to playing.”
They play Hunger Games a lot over the next couple of days, which is good, because everything else is pretty awful. It rains almost nonstop, and someone at the bus shelter asks Bruce where his mom is, so he can’t go there anymore. Bruce picks out the best library hours, where no one will look twice at him even when he wanders away from the kids’ corner, and he wrings all the warmth and dryness he can out of them.
It’s gross and cold and a ton of walking every day. Bruce has had weeks like this before, and he knows he just has to get through it, that it won’t look nearly as scary from the other side. Still, it’s hard.
The rain incites Hulk’s temper, too; the popcorn runs out after two days, and he wants to know why Bruce won’t let him out to go get more.
“Because we agreed you only come out when it’s important for the good of the world,” Bruce tells him, time and time again. “The good of us does not equal the good of the world. That would be selfish, and also bad manners.”
Manners are sacrosanct with Hulk, so sometimes that’s the end of that. Sometimes, though, Hulk pushes it.
But if Hulk STARVES TO DEATH then Hulk can’t fight aliens! Hulk and Bruce need food. Growing boys.
“You’re so dramatic,” Bruce says. “And you’re plenty big anyway, and I’m gonna be tiny forever, so it doesn’t matter.”
Hulk and Bruce are unstoppable force and immovable object. They’ll always be this way, crashing into each other again and again, wearing down everything that they own. Sometimes it feels like none of this--their body, their sidewalk, their bag of supplies--none of it can survive Bruce and Hulk. Not really. Not the way they’ll grow to be.
Bruce is hungry too, and he’s angry, and his socks are wet. Bruce tries so hard not to let his socks get wet but sometimes there’s a day like this one where everything in the world is colluding to make it happen.
But Bruce doesn’t get to flip cars, and he doesn’t get to jump on buildings or catch metal men or save the world. So he punches his lumpy pillow, unzips his sleeping bag with too much force, and crawls in to find some quiet place inside his head.
Bruce dreams, most nights, of the corner room. One wall was eleven steps long, the other only nine. The teddy tucked in the top drawer of the dresser, who always looked angry with his stitched-up eye. The under-the-bed, with the dust leaving long fingerprints up his arms. Hulk howling like an ambulance into the little hours.
Bruce wakes up with Hulk’s voice in his mouth and Hulk’s eyes underneath his eyes. He scrubs at his skin until it feels like his again. The rain has stopped. The sun is squirming up against the sides of the buildings.
Bruce sits up and runs a hand through his hair. It’s got a yucky texture to it. Maybe if he could find a place to take a bath, the world would look better.
In his head, Hulk offers a picture of the Hudson River. A peace offering.
“I’m not gonna bathe in that river, Hulk. That’s gross.”
Just saying, Hulk mutters.
“Yeah.” Bruce scratches at his arms again. His nails are uncut and leave long red lines, and Bruce sometimes pretends they’re superhero markings. “Thank you. Um, I think now we’ve slept we can have a more productive conversation. With I-feel statements.”
Everything Bruce knows about conflict resolution comes from one parenting website that someone left open on a library computer once. Reading it had felt like a glimpse into an alien world, all this focus on kids’ feelings and kids’ motivations. But Bruce is trying to do good, for Hulk, so he does what the online moms say.
Hulk feels hungry, Hulk says, surly.
“I feel hungry, too,” Bruce says. “See? We have something in common. But I also feel frustrated when you don’t listen to me about things. Because I feel like it’s really hard to live like we do, and we have to stick together.”
Hulk hates the rain.
“You feel like you hate the rain,” Bruce says patiently, although he also thinks that rain should be banned. “And it makes you feel worse when it’s really rainy. But it’s not raining anymore! We can go somewhere.”
Hulk wants to go away!
Bruce worries at the hem of his shirt. It’s getting a huge stain right at the bottom, ugly and greenish. “You’re too noticeable. And nowhere else is going to be any better.”
NO NO NO NO HULK WANTS TO GO AWAY!
“Stop it!” Bruce shouts, loud enough to shock a nearby pigeon into flight. “Stop yelling! I hate it when you yell!”
The silence that comes over his mind is thick, angry. Bruce jams his head between his knees and counts, and counts, and counts.
He makes it to two hundred twelve before Hulk starts poking at the soft part of his brain. Hulk sorry.
Bruce takes a deep, long breath, and gets to two hundred twenty. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t get mad.”
Hulk mad, too.
“That’s too much madness for a little body like ours,” Bruce says. He uncurls, presses his palms flat against the pee-stained sidewalk, and then has an idea. “We have to forgive each other so we can work together. Today especially. ”
Hulk shifts in Bruce’s head. What’s today?
“I have a mission for us.”
“Target spotted,” Bruce whispers into his wrist, tucked against the outer wall of the drugstore. “Proceed with caution.”
Over, Hulk rumbles.
Bruce crawls out of the alley and starts to sidle along the wall, keeping low to the ground. He wishes he had a baseball hat or something to cover his face. Maybe then he’d just look like a short adult, maybe he’d be left alone.
At the end of this street, there’s a house. Two stories, black shutters. A fenced-in yard with a trampoline.
“I’m going in,” Bruce says, practically crawling now.
Over.
“You can’t just say over, you know,” Bruce says. “You have to say something else first. Like, I’m approaching the target. Over.”
A long, thoughtful pause, and then: Over.
Well. Hulk will probably never be asked to do a lot of reconnaissance work, anyway. Hulk can be the superhero, and Bruce can be the spy.
The fence is chain-link, rusted by years of rain. The yard is pretty and green, spotted with dandelions. Sometimes Bruce sees kids out here, but they’ll be in school right now, and their parents will be at work.
There’s nothing else to it. Bruce has to move now.
“I’m going in,” he whispers, mouth almost touching the pale of his inner wrist.
Over, Hulk says, a grim echo.
Bruce almost trips over the curb, and then he’s on the thin line of grass before the fence. He crouches down, briefly distracted by the flutter of a blue-tinged butterfly by his knee.
No, he reminds himself. He doesn’t have time for this. He’s on a mission.
Bruce threads his fingers around the links of the fence. Fences are strange to look at, like school parking lots and restaurant doors, all the lines that keep him out of this part of the world. Hulk could tear it apart like a sheet of paper, but Bruce is Bruce, and he has to stay at the edges.
Moving his mouth as close to the fence as he can get without kissing it, he purses his lips and manages a shaky whistle.
There’s the clatter of a dog door, and then Bruce’s hands are full of puppy.
Bruce loves all dogs, but he loves this one especially. It has the softest ears and the brightest eyes, and it’s black and brown and white and has huge paws. Bruce never owned a dog, but he read somewhere that big paws means that its going to be a big dog. Hulk likes that thought, probably because he imagines a Hulk-sized dog every time Bruce mentions it.
The dog trembles with joy, bouncing up against the fence and trying its hardest to lick Bruce’s face through the gaps. Bruce doesn’t know its name. He doesn’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl, and it would be impolite to check. But it doesn’t see anything strange in Bruce, doesn’t see a lost little boy or the shadow of the Hulk. It just sees a friend.
Bruce could use a few more of those.
“Good dog,” Bruce murmurs, scratching behind its ears. It always goes ballistic when Bruce does that, stomping its paw and jumping up hard. “Good doggy.”
Scratch under the chin, Hulk says, finally giving some input.
Bruce grins and does as he’s told. “I bet you’re going to get a big walk today, right? When your people come home, they’re gonna walk you all around. I might see you then, if I don’t go to the library.”
Bruce knows this dog’s walking route by heart, because it’s the best dog in town and impossible not to notice. When he thinks he can, he hides by the Dumpsters around when it’ll pass by, and then sprints to the benches in the park so he can see it again.
Pet the back, Hulk insists, so Bruce worms his hand between the gaps of the fence, glad for once that his arms are so skinny. The dog’s fur is shiny and soft, perfect for petting.
“It’s been kind of a hard week for us,” Bruce informs it. “It’s getting better, though. The rain stopped just this morning, you probably noticed. Do you like the rain? We don’t, but you can go inside when you want, and you probably like stepping in puddles. I used to like stepping in puddles, but now I have to keep my socks dry because I don’t have very many pairs.”
Stick! Hulk gasps, like it’s the best idea in the world. Do the stick!
Bruce roots around in the dirt until he finds a little stubby stick. He throws it over the fence, and the dog goes galloping after it. Watching it run off pulls at Bruce’s chest a little, but then the dog comes running back and drops the spit-stained twig at Bruce’s knees.
“We’re still hungry, though,” he tells the dog, low like it’s a secret. “But we’ll find something. Maybe--maybe aliens will attack again, and we’ll get some food from the Avengers.”
Bruce scratches at his arms, suddenly overwhelmed with a sick shame. How could he possibly want the world to be in danger? That’s really bad of him, really selfish. He has to do better than that, has to draw lines and not cross them.
The dog yips and buries its face into Bruce’s palm. Bruce rubs at the soft skin of its cheeks, wishing that he and Hulk could stop time instead of just becoming something huge and endless within it. He presses a thumb to the divot in the dog’s forehead while it tries in vain to lick his wrist.
Could go now, Hulk says, but it’s gentler than his other reminders, almost a nudge. Could go without aliens. Superhero slumber party.
Bruce doesn’t respond, just smashes his face further into the fence until he knows he’ll be patterned with red angles when he pulls away. That’s a comforting thought, that parts of his skin might always remember this moment, the bite of steel and the just-rained smell of sidewalk. He stays there, wiggling his fingers at the ecstatic dog, until he hears the crunch of tires in the driveway, and then he runs away, and away, and away.
“I don’t want to live there,” Bruce whispers later, over The Very Hungry Caterpillar . It’s not his first choice of book, but the woman in the kids’ corner of the library was looking at him like she didn’t know where he belonged, so he’s trying it out. “Real life isn’t like that, Hulk, we’re going to get hurt there.”
No, Hulk says. Smash. Hulk smash before that happen.
“That’s even worse ,” Bruce says.
His head hurts like it used to sometimes at home. It’s like all the thunderclouds and loose nails and wasps on the windowpane have come inside him and they’re building a house in his head, a little house where bad things live, and all Bruce can hear is the noise of it.
Bruce can’t be the thing that kills the Avengers. Hulk doesn’t understand that, maybe doesn’t even understand that when someone dies, they don’t come back. He’ll look for a book that will explain it someday, when all the well-meaning people leave the kids’ corner and it’s just Bruce and Hulk and the bad house in their head.
Hulk presents Bruce with the same image he always does: Bruce and Hulk, magically separate people, playing foosball in an enormous room in the tallest tower in New York. Light coming in from the windows, beaming superheroes sitting like dolls on the curved sofas.
“That’s your imagination,” Bruce says. “It’s not--they don’t know me, Hulk, they probably wouldn’t even want me there.”
Yes they would, Hulk says, and that makes Bruce go quiet.
He likes the Avengers. He really does; they saved the world, and they’re very nice to Hulk, and Hulk’s feelings bleed over anyway so it’s not like Bruce could not like them.
But surrounding yourself with strong adults only protects you until it doesn’t.
They said, Hulk insists. They promised. Bruce can come too.
Bruce scrunches himself up into the corner, not wanting to think about promises or Avengers or what Hulk might have told them about him. “On Thursday, he ate through four strawberries, but he was still hungry,” he reads.
Hulk sighs, and the feeling of it settles around Bruce’s temples. It’s frustrated, but a truce for now. And then what happened?
The next morning, Bruce wakes up with a chest like a deflated balloon. He coughs for two minutes straight, Hulk hovering worriedly at his periphery, and then hauls himself up. He has to lean against the wall. This is not good.
“It’s okay,” Bruce manages, around the spit flooding his mouth. “It’s okay-- down, Hulk,” like Hulk is a disobedient dog and not the second scared-er self rising up below Bruce’s skin. “I’m fine, it’s just a cold.”
It really might just be a cold. Bruce hasn’t gotten sick in a while, he wouldn’t know. He has a few taste-memories, cough syrup and tea on the corduroy couch, but nothing that seems helpful.
No, Hulk mutters, dramatic as ever. Dying.
“We’re not,” Bruce says firmly. “We’re okay. It’s probably all the rain. But the rain went away, and this will too.”
Hate the rain.
“Me, too.” Bruce gingerly tries standing again, and is relieved to find himself upright. Movement causes some supernova event deep in his chest, but he can ignore it for now. “Let’s get warm and decide what we’re going to do about this.”
Bruce already kind of knows that he’s not going to do anything about it. Pain is nothing without a body to belong to, and his body doesn’t even have him in it some days. A little chest cold can’t stand up to that.
Walking out onto the street makes Bruce stop and cough for another minute, and Hulk rears up immediately, so close to Bruce’s skin that he can feel the heat of him. Bruce crouches down, pressing at his temple with both hands and whispering Hulk, Hulk, it’s okay Hulk, it’s okay until the huge green shadow slopes off to the back of his mind again.
Bruce has to bide for time before he can get up again, trying to reconcile the soreness of his body and the way it’s splitting at the seams with Hulk’s worry. Once he thinks he’s got it managed, he digs through his bag until his hand closes around Boy.
Don’t want to play stupid Hungry Games! shouts Hulk. Want to go to a doctor!
Bruce flinches, rubs reflexively at his forehead again. “I know, but this’ll help distract us until--” he breaks off, smacking his head a little harder. “It’ll make me feel better. Please Hulk, can we play?”
There’s a taut, furious silence. Then, projecting reluctance into every pore of Bruce’s body, Hulk sinks back down into the eves.
“Thanks,” Bruce says. “Um, where were we? Did Katniss get back from the moon yet?”
He’s certain that Hulk’s giving him the silent treatment until, almost a snap: Compromise.
“. . . Oh.” Bruce presses a finger to the skid-mark scars of Boy’s stomach, thinking it over. It’s probably good that Hulk’s asking, right? That’s the kind of behavior he should encourage. “Okay. Let’s go to the library and we’ll look up what to do. But we’ll play Hunger Games on the way over, deal?”
Deal, Hulk says. Not back from moon.
“Okay, we can still be on the moon. And we can fight the aliens with the horns, would you like that?”
Yes, Hulk admits begrudgingly.
Bruce starts walking. The ache isn’t so bad right now. Maybe he just needed some time to wake up. He starts bouncing Boy along in the air, like taking him through an invisible trampoline park. “But before we fight the aliens, we have to take our moon soil samples for today, because science requires consistency . ”
Nooooo, Hulk groans, but he already mentioned compromises, so he has to go along with it. And he likes the pretend microscope noises Bruce does, even though they're not very accurate.
In the library, Bruce scoots over to the big computer desk and hauls himself into the chair. There’s not a lot of people here, and it’s definitely school time, so he should try to be quick and quiet before anyone gets curious.
Bruce gets most of his information about the world from Google. It’s how he learns current events and chemistry and what his body does when it’s not his body. The Internet is amazing . They didn’t have a computer at home, and Bruce never would’ve imagined that all the world could be compressed into such a tight little space, accessible even to people who have nothing else.
There’s also a ton of dog videos. If the library computers weren’t on thirty-minute time cards, Bruce would spend all day watching puppies eat watermelon.
“Look,” Bruce says. His voice is as quiet as he can make it, barely scraping his throat, and his knees are tucked up to his chest. “It’s just a cold, nothing bad is gonna happen.”
Citrus, Hulk reads from WebMD, except he pronounces it like “kit-russ.” Rest.
Bruce nicely refrains from saying I told you so, mainly to distract Hulk from the fact that there’s no way he’s getting any of those things. “And time. Which we have plenty of.”
If symp-toms progress, see a doctor, Hulk continues.
Well, they’re definitely not doing that. “It’ll get better before then.”
Could be in-fec-tion, Hulk says, falling for the worldwide trap of people convincing themselves they’re dying from WebMD. Need anibobbits.
“Antibiotics,” Bruce corrects. “And no, we don’t.”
Yes, Hulk insists.
Ugh, he’s so annoying sometimes. “Just leave it alone, okay?”
Bruce doesn’t realize his voice has gotten louder until a shadow falls over his screen. Instinctively, he balls himself up even tighter.
The Thursday library minder is a man with stubble and glasses, and his eyes are kind even as he opens his mouth for the dreaded question. “Everything okay over here?”
“Fine,” Bruce says into the tops of his knees.
“Do you need help finding something?” the guy asks, and Bruce isn’t looking but he can feel the guy’s gaze flit over to Bruce’s computer screen, which probably has all kinds of terrifying and wrong medical information on it.
Great. Now Hulk and the library minder think Bruce is dying of cancer.
“Hey, buddy, I see you here a lot,” the guy says. His voice sounds different now, like he’s changing it to make it sound really gentle. Bruce hates it when grown-ups talk to him like that. “But you know what, I never got your name. I’m Dylan. Who are you?”
Bruce aggressively clicks out of the WebMD tab and doesn’t answer.
“Okay.” Dylan’s voice isn’t changing, still soft as anything, but Bruce isn’t fooled. “Are your parents around here somewhere? Do you go to school?”
“I’m homeschooled, ” Bruce says, hot and angry, and he knows he sounds like someone with bad manners-- don’t think about Mom-- but he can’t help himself. Hulk has slipped into the background, still anxiously threading through Bruce’s thoughts.
“Okay,” Dylan says again. He doesn’t sound angry. Bruce wants him to get angry, wants him to yell, wants him to-- don’t think about Dad. “But do you live somewhere around here, or . . . ?”
Bruce twists around in his seat until he’s facing Dylan the Library Minder head-on, but when he sees the worried furrow of the guy’s brow, his thoughts blur into a panicky static. He can’t do this, can’t talk to adults.
This is why he’d be a bad superhero.
“I live in the house on the corner,” Bruce blurts. “And I’m homeschooled there, but my parents let me come to the library by myself to, um, facilitate independence in the youth. And--and I have a yard, and a trampoline, and a puppy who comes when you whistle and loves fetching sticks. That’s where I live.”
Bruce’s brain is whited out in fear, and he can’t even start counting because Dylan is still watching him, and Hulk isn’t saying anything but is just rising closer and closer to the surface, burning hot like a fever.
“I know the one,” Dylan says slowly. “Okay. Well, let us know if you need help finding anything. Is there something you’re looking for?”
Bruce shakes his head, hard, and bites down on his lip even harder, and then Dylan is saying okay again in his patient voice that makes Bruce’s head melt and Dylan is walking back to the circulation desk.
And Bruce grips the corner of the computer table as hard as he can, and he counts to five hundred, and then he jumps out of the chair and runs out the door and keeps running, all the way down the street and across the bridge and through the little corner park. He doesn’t stop running until he starts coughing, and he has to sit down on the sidewalk, watching his chest heave in and out like it’s about to birth an alien.
“It’s okay, I’m okay,” he mumbles to Hulk, both hands fisted around his hair, but for once Hulk doesn’t say anything back.