Chapter Text
Bruce is three squares away from the end of his sudoku when the pen runs out of ink. It was the best pen he ever found, thin point and clickable and everything, and now all it’s good for is making grooves hard enough to tear the newspaper, which was already soggy and hard to read. He has to finish this before the rain comes, which could be any minute now. He might not find another clean one.
“C’mon,” Bruce says. He clicks it eight times in rapid succession, and presses the tip against the back of his hand hard. It makes a little comet of puckered white, like a freckle. “Don’t crud out on me now. I need you.”
It’s dead. It’s mega dead, no room for fancy pen necromancy here. Sometimes, Bruce can fiddle with things a little bit and they go back to the way he needs them to be, but there’s nothing he can do.
“You’re making me angry,” Bruce says to the pen and then, almost hopefully, “I guarantee you won’t like me when I’m angry.”
The Power twists in his brain, hot and itchy. It shoots him a baleful look, then rolls over back toward his cerebral cortex.
“I said,” Bruce repeats, more than a little annoyed now, “you won’t like me when I’m angry.” Pause. “Which I’m about to be. Really soon.”
Actually, he’s just kind of tired and hungry and needs to pee. But he doesn’t like it when the Power hibernates, like it’s zipped up in the too-tight sleeping bag of Bruce’s brain. It’s uncomfortable, and claustrophobic, and Bruce doesn’t like talking to himself.
Bruce drop-kicks the pen. It rolls, anticlimactically, off the side of his shoe.
“Stop ignoring me,” he says. “You’re too much in my head when you ignore me, and that’s one of the compromises we made. Remember? It’s my head, and you promised.”
Bruce always pinky-promised when things were important, like with Mom, but the Power doesn’t have pinkies. Probably, the Power doesn’t even know what a pinky promise is, or why it’s more real than a normal promise, because the Power doesn't really know much. Bruce could tell it, but then they would have to talk about Mom.
Bruce’s brain shifts. Rustles, slow as a tectonic plate. The Power cracks open one blazing eye, and Bruce’s own vision blurs and splits, cleaves and then cracks back together.
Go back to picture, it says.
The Power doesn’t have a voice, in Bruce’s head. It should. The Power has a body that isn’t Bruce’s body, that came from somewhere not Bruce, and it has a voice too, according to the Guardian and CNN and the TV in the corner of the falafel place. But when it’s just the two of them, when it’s Bruce’s body and Bruce’s voice and the Power is just a seismic thing inextricable from him, they communicate by branding their conversation on the inside of Bruce’s eyelids. It doesn’t sound like anything the same way particles of light don’t sound like anything.
“Give it a rest,” Bruce says, shaking out the paper like there’s any way of saving the sudoku now. “I don’t want to read that stupid article again, you’ve already made me read it four times. It’s not even well-written.”
Picture, the Power says, more insistent.
Bruce hates that dumb picture.
Sighing, he flips the paper until the headline shows. There’s rain and coffee and a little sidewalk gunk on the headline, so it’s hard to make out, but the picture is clear in all its grainy glory. It was taken from some kid’s Starkphone 4 in the middle of Manhattan.
Bruce has never been to Manhattan. The Power says he wouldn’t like it. Too bunched together.
There’s five real people in the picture, Iron Man and Hawkeye and Black Widow and Captain America (real live Captain America ) and Thor. Thor’s not really a real person according to his Wikipedia page, which Bruce has read dozens of times. But he’s definitely like a real person, especially when compared to the thing standing next to him.
Smash, the Power says, almost reverently.
Bruce can’t look at it. It makes Bruce physically sick to look at it, but he can’t look away, either.
The thing standing beside Thor in the picture is taller than the streetlamp and some of the buildings, and takes up a really, truly insane amount of space. Bruce doesn’t get scared over stupid things anymore because he’s not a little kid, but looking at how the thing as is big as a dump truck and has the width to match, all he can think about is what do you do if you’re not small enough to hide anymore.
Bruce isn’t four feet tall yet. He’s gonna be, really soon, probably (hopefully) by his birthday in December.
Hulk, the Power says. Hulk. Smash.
“I’m not calling you that!” Bruce says. He drops the paper, wedges it with his foot until the page kind of folds over. “That’s a dumb name.”
Hulk, the Power says, hard and stiff, filling up Bruce’s head with that one word. Smash. And then, like Bruce doesn’t freakin’ know, Star Man said.
Bruce takes a deep breath. Tries to center himself, arms wrapped around his skinny lightning-rod chest, except Bruce’s body is maybe only three-fifths the body he thinks it is and two-fifths something else entirely. Tries to remember being little and weird, how much he would have wanted to make friends. How much he would have loved a picture, anything that proved he wasn’t as cataclysmically alone as he suspected he would always be.
“I’m glad you had a good time with Star Man,” Bruce says carefully. “And I guess if you like it, you can use it. But hulk means--like, hulking means big. You know that, right? It means big and kind of mean.”
Good, the Power says. Hulk strongest.
Bruce bites the inside of his cheek until, there, the familiar sprig of blood. “You’re the strongest,” he agrees. “But I think the newspapers are making fun of you when they call you that. I can come up with a name for you, if you want a name.”
Name can be Hulk, the Power says.
“The Power could be a name,” Bruce says. “It sounds like a superhero, don’t you think?” Except now there’s this seed of guilt in the corners of his chest, because before Bruce was Bruce he was Robert so he should understand. Even though the only person to call him that was Dad, who hated him, and Bruce can’t hate the Power. The Power is like a little kid, and Bruce isn’t the kind of person who has it in him to hate little kids.
(Don’t think about Dad.)
HULK the Power says, practically branding it against Bruce’s eyeballs.
“Okay!” Bruce says because if the Power--if Hulk keeps that up, Bruce’ll get a migraine. “Okay, yes. You’re Hulk now, fine. Do you want your own merch? Do you want to hold a press conference? I’ll call Ann Curry for you.”
Be nice, Hulk says, because he definitely didn’t get the joke but he lives in Bruce’s brain and knows when he’s being sarcastic. And then, hopeful: Picture?
Bruce sighs. He picks up the newspaper, smooths out the edges. If Hulk is really going to become attached, he guesses he can find a place for it in his bag. Inside a book or something, to keep it flat and nice.
Bruce crosses his eyes and lets the outlines blur until everything on the page is just muted green, no threat, no worry. He and Hulk look at the picture until it gets dark, at which point it finally does start to rain.
After New York, Bruce had woken up to snow. He was dizzy. It was April, and he was very far both from home and from the place he last remembered being. His brain felt heavy and hot, like a collapsing star. It took about an hour for him to realize that he was shivering, and that the constant dull pressure in the back of his head had relented suddenly. It was a nauseating, empty feeling.
What happened? he asked, when he’d gathered together the blank wool of his thoughts enough to make something coherent. What happened to us, and then, because he couldn’t remember ever knowing less than he did right then, did we die?
They hadn’t died. Not that time. The thing in his head, in fact, had never felt alive like this before. The thing inside Bruce’s head had, briefly, borrowed some giant’s body and jumped through the sky like a character in a nursery rhyme, and was trying to articulate the magnitude of what had happened to him, none of which Bruce remembered or had even thought to be possible.
Bruce had eventually picked his way to a local library, where he’d sat in front of the computer for a long time without knowing what to look up. Eventually, hesitantly, guided only by the flipbook of colors and sounds in his head, he had typed in man falling from sky, and that was how Bruce found out about Manhattan.
“You came out,” he said aloud. The library’s heating system was humming loudly with the strain of keeping up with the weather. The horror of what he had just done, what he had just allowed without even knowing it, hadn’t caught up to him yet. All he could think about was the glint of metal against the sun, bright red like campfire sparks. “You came out, you--you hurt people.”
Saved Metal Man, the Power said, almost sullenly.
“I don’t care!” Bruce whispered. He didn’t want people to hear him talking to himself, didn’t want to draw attention to himself. “We have to stay in this body, okay, if we want to hurt people we have to stay so we can’t. ”
Didn’t want to hurt, the Power said, which was a lie. There was some little part of Bruce that always wanted to hurt everyone, and it was from there that the Power had been born. Wanted to help.
According to the New York Times, the apocalypse had happened a day and a half ago. Bruce thought that he had been sleeping behind a convenience store in Queens at the time, but he couldn’t really be sure. His memories were stretched, warped and illegible. The grainy photos of alien ships taken from the windows of skyscrapers hadn’t evoked any feelings of recognition, so it was possible that the Power had already risen up out of him by that point, like an animal waking up, and had gone towards the noises.
Because it wanted to help. Oh God.
There had been articles linked about the other people who had been seen on the battleground, but there wasn’t much information at the time. Bruce had clicked a hyperlink to Tony Stark’s Wikipedia page, and then he had watched a couple YouTube interviews and the famous press conference. I am Iron Man.
The Power made a pleased-sounding rumble in Bruce’s head. Metal Man.
“Iron,” Bruce said. “Not just any metal, come on. You know this, we talk about chemistry all the time.”
Bruce knew who Tony Stark was, because he followed engineering news a little, but he had only been four when Iron Man became a thing, so he’d had other stuff on his mind. The other four were harder to make out--there were two people in black, one with a bow and arrow like in Lord of the Rings. There was a guy in a Captain America costume and a guy holding a massive hammer. The Internet didn’t seem to know what to make of any of them, which was a little surprising.
You talk about chemistry, the Power grumbled. Always chemistry.
Bruce read a few more articles before he started to get overwhelmed. He climbed down off the chair and crawled under the desk, pressing his back to the wall and knocking his knees against each other, trying to count slowly in his head like Mom taught him.
(Don’t think about Mom.)
Bruce wasn’t a hero. The Power couldn’t be a hero either, because the Power and Bruce were sort of fundamentally the same thing, and all Bruce was was a scared little kid and a bad son and a freak who became more freakish every day, it seemed, and if only Dad could see him now.
(Don’t think about Dad. Just think about counting. Try to make it to two hundred.)
“You fought with them,” Bruce said. “The superheroes. You fought with them against the aliens and you caught Iron Man.”
Yes, the Power said. Yes! Fought with Team.
Team. That was a new feeling. “Were they nice to you?”
Smash, the Power said proudly, as if that said it all.
Okay. “And were you nice to them?”
A long, guilty pause. Nice how?
“I don’t know. If they’re your friends, and they were nice to you and you had a good time, you should thank them or something. It’s good manners.”
Bruce had been teaching the Power about manners for a while now. The Power was younger than Bruce, only a toddler really, and didn’t know everything Bruce knew about the world. That was all right. Everything had to grow, and everything had to learn.
Good manners to say thank you to team, the Power repeated dutifully. When team say smash, say thank you.
“Right,” Bruce said. “But it’s okay, I mean--you probably won’t see them again. I don’t think the end of the world happens that often.”
There was quiet in Bruce’s head for thirty seconds, and then there was a crushing shiver of emotion. Grief, Bruce realized, but not his. He was familiar with the feeling, but oddly detached.
“It’s good that you made some friends,” Bruce said. “Maybe we can--I don’t know, write a card and find Tony Stark’s PO box. Would that make you feel better?”
Tony Stark? the Power said, confused.
“Iron Man.”
No. Metal Man just Metal Man.
“That’s his superhero name. His real name is Tony Stark.”
No! Metal Man!
“People can have two names,” Bruce said, a little despairingly. “Come on, let’s ask the nice lady at the desk for colored pencils and you can tell me what you want me to write.”
Okay, the Power said after a long moment. It liked to color, liked the feel of crayons especially. Bruce had tried to draw with the Power before, so that his dreams would make more sense. It was fun, in a really weird way.
It would be okay. The end of the world had come and gone, and Bruce was still here. His body had been not his body for a little while, but now it was familiar again and people had been saved. There was a part of him, even if it was the not-him part of him, that had done something special, and he had to admit that it felt pretty good.
The month after that, there were some bombers in Central Park, and the Avengers had stepped in, and the fight had gotten kind of messy for a while. Bruce was watching the news through the windows of the upscale burger joint, hands smushed against the glass and squinting to read the heartbeat-quick scroll of text at the bottom of the screen.
When Tony Stark came on, still half-covered in burnt red armor, Hulk had howled in his head like a wounded animal, and Bruce had pressed his way into the angular, air-conditioned dining room. He curled at the corner of the waiting bench, trying not to look so painfully out of place, while Hulk watched Tony Stark talk too fast for the automatic captioning to keep up.
They had been shooed out after twenty minutes of drawing red streaks on a kids’ menu that doubled as an activities page. It had gotten dark. They were running out of bottled water. The night promised to be bad, washed through by a blot of streetlights that seemed almost resigned to their own cruelty. Bruce slept like a vampire, hands clutching at opposite shoulders, and dreamed of waking up to a street so filled with the bodies of falling men that he couldn’t wade through them. Dreamed of a howling sky filled with huge gray birds. Dreamed of a stone on a stick that pulled everything else away, made his mind simple and lovely and catatonic with a kind of smooth agony. He dreamed that all of New York was a threadbare pattern on the back of a corduroy couch, smoldering with the meteoric impact of a cigarette butt, too small to even understand what it was constantly bearing witness to.
When he woke up, his arms were twisted with green. Somewhere, distantly, a car alarm started up.
Next time, the Hulk had said, with Bruce too tired to do anything but scratch at the fading green, catch them. Pause. And say thank you. Good manners.
It’s five months after Manhattan, since the Power became Hulk and definitely, undeniably a thing different from Bruce. Twice since, Bruce had seen something or other on the news and said will you be nice and polite and help pick up once you’re done, and Hulk, wriggling with excitement had said yes yes yes yes and then Bruce had let him out. Hulk is way good at geography, and can find his way to the action well enough, so that he can help people while Bruce stops being anything at all.
There’s a something-or-other with giant millipedes in Brooklyn, and after that Bruce wakes up with a pager in his bag. Bruce’s bag is the single most important thing he owns, so he checks it religiously every time he comes back to himself.
He does inventory fast: sweatshirt socks two books three T-shirts sleeping bag empty water bottle and a little stale popcorn. Then his hand closes around the pager, and he flings it halfway across the sidewalk on pure instinct. It breaks on impact, and Bruce stares at it.
Hey, Hulk objects sleepily. Present from one-eye.
Bruce is used to vague, cryptic comments from Hulk about stuff that is extremely relevant to Brcue’s continued health and safety. Usually, he pieces together what actually happened later, with help from a computer. Now, the frustration bubbles over.
“Who the hell is One-Eye?”
Manners, Hulk says. It’s not smug enough to be anything but genuine parroting of something Bruce tells him a lot, which makes Bruce proud enough to cool down a little.
“Sorry.” Bruce creeps over to the broken device. It’s not too badly broken. Bruce could put the battery pack back in and maybe tweak the circuits. “I need more details than that, Hulk.”
Hulk huffs, exasperated. One-Eye. Boss.
Bruce freezes, fingers dancing over the back of the pager. “We have a boss now?”
No, Hulk says. Yes. Don’t know.
Great. That’s just fantastic. Bruce clicks the battery back in and fiddles with the little parts inside the pager until the screen turns on. It’s cracked in the corner, and Bruce is momentarily filled with a deep sense of self-loathing. He broke it. He got mad and he wasn’t thinking and he broke it, and it could have been important.
He has to be smarter than this. He can’t just replace things when they break like he used to. He has to be very careful so this doesn’t happen again, so that his huge bodiless anger doesn’t ruin everything. So he doesn’t break the life he’s made.
Gingerly, Bruce thumbs at the controls. The pager seems responsive, but he doesn’t know how it works; there’s no contacts in it or anything. Vaguely, Bruce wonders if there’s a tracking chip in there somewhere, if people are going to come find him and lock him up and experiment on him. He might be able to avoid anyone who came, though, because Bruce has read all the articles and even the skeevy conspiracy message boards and it hasn’t occurred to anyone that Hulk might not look like Hulk all the time. Bruce looks about as far from Hulk as he can get, so he knows that’ll offer him some protection, someday. The question is if it’ll be enough.
After a moment of indecision, Bruce turns the pager off and places it back in his bag.
He spends the rest of the day reading a beat-up copy of The Martian that he got from a curbside library, explaining the physics to Hulk as they go along. Hulk reads as fast as Bruce does, maybe because they kind of have the same eyes, but he’s not so good at the comprehension part. It’s been a time-honored part of their life since Bruce still lived with his parents--Mom would finish reading The Hobbit or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and tuck him in, and then Bruce would wait until she was all the way down the hall to start telling Hulk what had happened, and how it connected to the last chapter, and which parts Bruce liked the best.
While they read, Bruce sends covert glances over at his bag. He’s trying not to think about the pager. Trying not to think about One-Eye. Boss.
Bruce doesn’t want to be weird about the fact that Hulk knows people Bruce has never met, but the truth is that Bruce has had one friend across the sum total of his life, and that friend lives in his head. Bruce knows that there’s more to the Hulk than either of them are really aware, but it’s still a little like if his imaginary friend started making other, more interesting friends and became a beloved public figure somewhere along the way.
They finish the chapter. Bruce tucks the newspaper clipping back in to mark their place, and slides the book carefully into the bag. Everything else Bruce owns is okay to get beat up a little, or torn, but not the book.
Not the picture either.
Bruce is tired in the same hard-edged, all-encompassing way he gets after he comes back to his body, but it’s still light out. He’s got the kind of hunger that goes past what he can ignore, which also always happens after Hulk comes out. He’s seen the pictures, he knows that he breaks the Law of Conservation of Mass. Defying physics probably burns a zillion calories.
He’s looking at the stupid bag again. He tells himself that it’s because he doesn’t want his stuff to get stolen, but that’s not it. He’s trying to assess whether or not he needs to throw the pager away before someone shows up for him. If it comes down to the wire and he has to leave the bag behind and run somewhere, it’s going to be a really bad year.
Bruce has never lost the bag, not in eighteen months. Hulk lost it once, but then he and Bruce scoured the area for hours and found it in a tree. Now, Hulk straps it onto his finger, like a plastic ring from the grocery store bubbles, and keeps hold of it even while he’s jumping and smashing and lifting whole cars. And then when Bruce wakes up, it’s right in his lap and he can get dressed quickly and figure out where to go next. If Bruce has the bag, then Bruce has a Plan. If Bruce has a Plan, he can survive anything.
Bruce has a couple different sets of clothes, some for winter and some for summer. He has two extra pairs of socks, but only one pair of shoes, so small that it hurts to walk anywhere. He has a sweatshirt that’s huge on him and that he loves. He doesn’t remember where he got it but it smells like coffee and dirt. And the books-- The Martian now, which he’ll leave wherever he picks up the next one, and he always carries a copy of Your Body’s Changes that he got from the twenty-five-cent bin when he was trying to figure out why his body was changing into a giant green muscle man. He’s keeping it for when he’s twelve and his pituitary gland kicks in.
His biggest treasure, though, is his action figure. It was Captain America a long, long time ago, but it got kind of chewed up by a dog and it doesn’t have a head so Bruce just calls it Boy.
(To Dad, Bruce was boy. To Mom, Bruce was sweet boy or baby boy or any number of other things that just left Bruce confused and wanting, like she didn’t know that he wasn’t any of those things, that he was a monstrous plural in the body of her son.
The toy is twisted and bent and stretched and ugly. The toy is Boy, but when Bruce is feeling generous it can be Small Boy. That, at least, they both know to be true.)
Bruce didn’t play with toys much when he was little. He originally grabbed it because he thought Hulk might like it, but Hulk didn’t like it and it turned out that Bruce kind of did. So it’s like the only thing Bruce has that’s just his, not Hulk’s. When he and Boy are playing, Hulk curls up and takes a nap and Bruce gets his thoughts to himself for a little while.
He can’t do that tonight, though, because it would mean getting the bag and sifting through it for Boy, and inevitably finding the pager again and having to make another decision about whether he’s safe here, whether he’s ever going to be safe anywhere, whether he can trust Hulk to get him out of bad situations without killing anyone. And it might be foolish, and it might get him hurt, but Bruce doesn’t want to think about those things on an empty stomach.
So he sits down and leans his head against the wall, and tries not to get cigarette ash on his pants. He breathes big and deep and even, one two three times.
“Tell me about where Thor comes from again,” he says, and Hulk complies with glee. It’s a fantastic story, even badly-told; Hulk pronounces everything just a few syllables to the left, and never remembers the names of the things Bruce is most curious about. And Bruce hadn’t known it until Hulk started going out and doing things without him, but Hulk’s feelings bleed into Bruce’s so completely that it’s almost like the swooping-stomach feeling at the bottom of a swing, or a memory of when he was a baby and everything was light and sound and the clean trim of Mom’s fingernails. He would never get to feel this uncomplicated joy if it wasn’t Hulk’s first, so Bruce closes his eyes and whispers thank you, thank you through his wild and unrestrained laughter.