Work Text:
Bruce steps out of the shower, his wet hair dripping down his neck, towel slouching low around his hips. He is restless in a way that he was all too familiar with; an itching in his fingers, under his skin. The other guy wanted out, wanted to run, wanted to break, wanted to hurt.
He smoothes a hand over his hair and dismisses those feelings back into the void of his overall rage that bubbles just underneath the service. The other guy always wants those things, and he is used to ignoring him.
He fishes a yogurt from his fridge—his favourite kind, JARVIS had made a study of his eating habits, and pops open the door to his balcony to eat outside.
The view from the Tower is beautiful, the kind of New York City that people were always writing songs and poetry about, and Bruce itches in his skin to examine just how tightly rooted the buildings are to the ground.
He rips the tab off his yogurt savagely, balls it up, and throws it into his room with a quick, violent motion. He feels a small stab of vicious delight at the way it streaks in and bounces off a counter, though not as much as if he had thrown something bigger, something heavier.
He quashes that desire also, with practiced efficiency. Bruce Banner is no stranger to want, and if he were so inclined, he would list them out professionally, in twelve point Times New Roman font, with citations. Thusly:
-he wants some Indian food. Proper food, like the kind he got in Calcutta. The nurses would cook after his patients were asleep, moaning fitfully, and the flavour of it was so intense it always took his mind off of dwindling medical supplies, dwindling beds, dwindling time. The food was so spicy it was bracing, and so good it was a revelation; nothing at all like the bland crap that they served in Manhattan. Even the best Indian food here was missing something, something that was washed away, like desperation, or by using too clean ingredients.
-he wants the Hulk to be gone, out of his life. This is barely even wrapped in his concerns to have a normal life anymore, but he hates it, hates the way people look at him, with a mixture of pity and fear as he walks down the halls, hates the way their avoid his touch, his gaze, waking up in a mess of rubble with only the tired thought of how bad was it this time to tie him to the here and now, hates, hates hates. His rage simmers like a pot on the heat, always about to overflow, and of course—
-he wants to be able to lose his temper.
-he wants to get back to work. Chitauri tech was an intriguing blend of technological and biological, though it operated on a system he knew not of. It was all networked together in a way that he was finding hard pressed to replicate in lab, though ground reports from the Battle of New York said that all of the Chitauri and their machines had fallen lifeless to the ground the second the bomb had imploded. He was close to a breakthrough, he knew it, though now he was limited by their life cycle. In twelve hours his tissue cultures would mature and he would have answers.
-he wants Tony to turn the goddamned music down in the labs, or at the very least quit piping it through the entire floor. Days that Tony Stark spends in New York are stressful for a myriad of reasons, not the least among which is the fact that every time he brings up minor grievances, however emphatically or mildly, Tony Stark always shrugs them off and says that he is merely testing the limits.
-he wants not to know what it feels like to hold a body in his hands and break it thusly, as simply as if he were snapping open take out chopsticks; wants not to be able to hear the wet squelch of it in his dreams.
-he wants the next Avengers meeting to be productive, which likely means that two thirds of the group would likely have to be unconscious. The number of threats to the city, and to the world in general are rising, and more and more of them are coming from unexpected quarters, as if their very presence is encouraging ...unorthodox methods. This bothers him.
-he wants a drink. The last time he had had alcohol he had been in Cambodia and some woman at a bar had brought him something that she had sworn was non alcoholic. He should have known better; she had bedroom eyes. He had woken up in a forest clearing—well. He had woken up in the forest, in a clearing that he had made, trees bent and broken like matchsticks in a twenty yard radius around him. Alcohol made him lose the iron tight grip he had on his rage, made it slip from something manageable to something ugly, and large. He still didn’t know what, if anything, happened to the bar. Or the woman.
-he wants a guarantee that he won’t end up like his father.
-he wants to press Agent Sitwell’s latest assistant to the nearest serviceable surface and fuck her. Slide his hands in Darcy Lewis’s blouse and rip it open savagely. Wrap his hands around her breasts, her thighs, lift them up and around him, dig his nails into her flesh, score red lines down her sides. Press his teeth to her cunt, her clit, feel her heat on his tongue, her cloying, obnoxious, heat. Hear her moan, and gasp, her voice a stutter as she digs her fingers in his hair and tugs, pulls, as he makes her scream his name when he licks into her—
A knock sounds at his door, and he grins savagely, flinging the now empty yogurt cup the same way as the tab. He will get to at least one of these things in the course of the evening.