Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made…
The man, small, salted, and undeniably poached, lies naked on the sand, the waves nibbling at his bruised flesh and memories as he recovers his strength and recites the familiar lines in his head.
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade…
Behind his eyes (the algaed pearls of his eyes) a headache lingers. He does not ignore the pain, rather embraces it - not because he feels that he deserves it, but because, when it comes down to it, his last few weeks have not exactly been an exercise in neutrality, self-imposed or otherwise, and headaches are supremely and cruelly unconcerned on such mundane and subjective things as 'blame'. It makes a refreshing change.
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange…
Bruce Banner opens his eyes, and closes them again. No images from the brief interlude process. The waves wash over him. In the distance, the rattle of a motor sounds. He ignores it. Eventually, it goes away.
Eventually again, he drags himself to a sitting position. A scrap of royal purple cloth, caught under his hip and protected from the tide, catches his eye. He pulls it out from under himself and pushes himself to his knees, wrapping it around his narrow, aching hips and tying it off.
The last of the headache recedes with the next round of waves. Banner looks down at himself and literally watches the last of his bruises fade. Purple to green to yellow toolive. When they are all gone, and the aches in his muscles with them, he rises to his feet and starts to walk in slowly widening circles, keeping an eye on the sand.
It doesn't take him long to find what he's looking for. Less than two hundred feet away lie an even half-dozen small metal cylinders, half-buried by a tide pool and attached by welded metal clips to the sodden, ripped out seatbelt that he'd torn from the QuinJet pilot's seat and strapped to his thigh. It had come off of course, once he'd changed back, and the waves had tossed further up the beach… Banner squats and tugs and digs, unscrewing the top of the first cylinder. Inside, in carefully sealed, airtight packages, are several thick wads of bank notes. Inside the second and third are several more. From the fourth, he pulls out, not just sealed (he presumes) local currency, but a tiny sealed USB stick. He turns it over in his fingers.
Some Enhanced Individuals he reflects, are made… Some are bred. Others… Not many, but a few… Are simply born. Not many of any variety have the ability, or prudence to keep their mouths shut and their talents strictly to themselves for use-of-in-case-of-friends'-personal-emergencies. He puts the USB stick back in the container and opens the fifth cylinder. It contains papers and a plain black phone. The sixth… He turns it over. The bottle of whiskey is sealed, and wrapped in a torn page of a book. He turns the page over and reads the printed words there.
THE LAST BATTLE
C.S. LEWIS
Below, penciled lightly in a familiar scrawl are a few, unsigned, handwritten words.
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprite, the burthen bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark….
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
Nobody's home.
Banner examines the page one last time, and the phone again. There is no power button charger port – no buttons or ports of any kind, and the device is all of a piece. No seam of any kind. It might as well be a lump of plastic.
He stuffs the phone back in the cylinder, straps the belt around his waist, and heads up the beach again. Several miles up, he spots a small house: awkward, wooden and thatched. It appears to be deserted. He glances at the note in his hand again.
Nobody's home.
Nick Fury, he reflects, would piss himself – no, shit himself - if he knew what he has on staff in Fallon Ichloss – and how, exactly and when it comes right down to it, Ichloss defines his role as SHIELD's mild-mannered Head of Accounting.
Why haven't you ever told anyone? he'd asked one night when they'd been kicking back over a shared pitcher.Banner doesn't generally socialize with his co-workers, but the other man has a way about him. Or maybe it was just that Ichloss' lover was broken along with Harlem, and while the Abomination had done the actual dirty work before the Big Guy had ever arrived on the scene, he'd felt more than guilty enough to feel obliged to accept the first invitation.
He hadn't had much choice in accepting the ones that followed either… For some weird reason, the Big Guy had decided that he liked Ichloss. The novelty of actually agreeing on something had kept them both coming back, and, as it turned out, Ichloss was more than skilled enough at small-talk to keep them both entertained. "The ability to see the future…"
"I don't see the future," Ichloss had said patiently. "I see very specific points in time, and even more specific situations, where certain very specific people will need help. Sometimes they're important people. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes you change a moment in a life, sometimes you change the life altogether. I never know which it will be, and in most cases, I'll probably never know… But if I can help … I do. My way of squaring things, in this gaping round cornhole of a world."
"Do you think you've ever changed the world with anything you've done?"
"No idea."
"Liar." That had come straight from the Big Guy.
Fallon Ichloss had lowered his bottle and examined him. Them. He is a big man, bigger than Steve, raw-boned, grey-haired and pale, with slightly protuberant eyes that bulge, perhaps, with the bit of extra that he claims to be able to see.
Everything changes everything, he said. Every day. There's no such thing as an action that doesn't affect anything. I just funnel a bit of karmic spare change to those who need it, when I see – or am shown - the need.
"Have you ever…" Banner stopped in his tracks abruptly, remembering Ichloss' job before he transferred into Accounting. Heads of SHIELD'S Ninjas Anonymous, Natasha told him once, have a fairly predictably short shelf life. Ninjas, after all, only work with their particular client lists. The Heads are the ones who get to do the original and specific research on why the clients should be honored with a place on those lists in the first place… "Oh. Oh."
"Oh," Ichloss had agreed. "Nother beer?"
Banner circles the house one more time, and approaches the front door... Short minutes later, he is clad in a pair of plain shorts and shirt, has appropriated a pair of battered sandals from the porch, and has dropped a bill or three in the empty sugar bowl on the crated table to pay for his 'purchases.' He examines the belt and the cylinders again, retrieves a pillowcase off the line, stuffs everything inside, and feeling only slightly less conspicuous, picks a direction at random, and heads off to find whatever, in Fiji, passes for breakfast.