Howdy everyone :) This is my brand new story!
Ok, I know I still have a lot I need to do on my other stories, but as most of you know, life and lack of motivation makes it hard. But this one I am TOTALLY confident about!
I got into Avengers this past summer when I went to see it with a bunch of friends. At first (when it came out) I had no real desire to see it. But after hearing my good friend swyatt4 talk about it so much, I started having a dsesire to go see it. So we all went...and it was the best 2 hours of my life so far. I was hooked...especially on dear Dr. Bruce Banner :3 He's just so ADORABLE! And really, Mark Ruffalo is sexy.
In the words of Mark Ruffalo and Tom Hiddleston, I have been Ruffalized.
Anyways, so I have been reading a lot of BruceOC fanfictions, and I have to say you people have AMAZING ideas. You have inspired me to create one of my own, but in a way that you guys have NOT thought of yet! *evil laughter* ehh sorry.
NOTE! This first chapter just starts out with Bruce's introduction scene in the movie. My character will be introduced in the next chapter!
Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers. This awesometastic movie belongs to MARVEL.
Enjoy guys!
The Tesseract has awakened.
It is on a little world. A Human world.
They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.
He is ready to lead. And our force, our Chitauri, will follow.
The world will be his, the Universe yours.
And the Humans? What can they do?
But burn.
It was night when the little girl led Dr. Bruce Banner to a house on the outskirts of Calcutta, India. She had come to him while he was tending to patients fallen victim to a sickness. At first, the woman in the household tried to shoo her away as her husband stopped her from entering the house. "There is sickness here!" she had exclaimed in exasperated Hindi. The girl had spotted him right away, and pleaded in her small voice for him to come and help her ailing father.
He had asked her if it was the same sickness that he was treating in that very house. "Like them?" he had pointed to the two bed-ridden children lying miserably in the corner, their bodies wracked with coughing and fever.
"Please." She had whimpered, holding up a few rupees clutched tightly in her little fist. Her sad doe eyes made it impossible for him to say no.
Now here he was, stepping into the threshold of the run down little house, following the little girl as she ran inside. Once indoors, he noticed something was off. And it wasn't about the residents of the house. It was the complete lack thereof.
Nobody was the there.
He looked around in puzzlement and had just enough time to catch sight of the little girl as she slipped out of the glasses window of a tiny bedroom at the back of the house. She had been lying, and had just led him here for no cause. He sighed to himself in disbelief and ran a hand through his messy black curls.
"Should've gotten paid up front, Banner." He reprimanded himself, licking his dry lips.
"You know," a voice sounded from behind, startling him and making him whirl around to find the source. Out from behind a curtain stepped a woman wearing a black shirt, a long and dark turquoise skirt that brushed the floor, a magenta sash tied loosely around her waist, and a red wrap draped around her upper torso. Her thin face was framed by wavy, chin length, fiery red locks, and her guarded gray eyes pierced his own, emphasized by her smoky eye-shadow. A presence in the back of his mind growled at the intruder, becoming a little restless at being surprised. It didn't like being startled. Panic swirled in his heart and he quickly forced the grumbling disturbance to calm down. The woman stopped in front of him with her hands on her hips. "For a man who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle."
Bruce couldn't help but smile wryly as he set his bag down. "Avoiding stress isn't the secret." He said.
Her smirk matched his almost perfectly, her eyes still careful. "Then what is it? Yoga?"
She was trying to be lighthearted with him, he could see, despite that her guard was up. But she was trying gently. She was a smart woman. A smart spy, he should say. There was no doubt in his mind that that was what she was. It just fit her somehow. "You've brought me to the edge of the city. Smart." He paused and squinted out of the small window at the back of the house, straining his hearing for the sounds of guns being cocked and whispered orders. That usually happened to him in a situation like this. They thought they could contain the beast that way. He would hate to have to prove them horribly wrong. "I uh…assume the whole place is surrounded?"
The woman shook her head and removed the red wrap from around her, dropping it to the table standing in the middle of the room. "Just you and me." She told him.
He didn't quite believe her. 'The Other Guy' shouldn't be taken that lightly unless you wanted to be killed. There would almost have to be some kind of precaution in case he was to come out. But he had to keep things light in order to figure out what it was this woman wanted from him. He gestured to the busted out window where the little Indian girl had disappeared. "And your actress buddy, is she a spy too? Do they start that young?"
"I did." Was her reply, coupled with an almost blank expression and a shrug of her shoulders.
"Who are you?" he began his guarded interrogation of the redhead.
"Natasha Romanoff." She answered him automatically in a soft voice. She was giving him straight answers. She was a very smart woman.
"Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff?" he asked her with a hint of bitterness in his voice. It wouldn't be the first time if she was. "Because that's not gonna work out for everyone."
Natasha shook her head again. "No. No, of course not." She said calmly as if he had asked her some completely trivial and ludicrous question. She took a few steps towards him. "I'm here on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D."
Bruce could not believe what he was hearing, and he felt a small feeling of anger well up in the pit of his stomach. S.H.I.E.L.D. knew where he was? How was this possible? He thought he had escaped them God knows how long ago, escaped the ruins after his previous…incident with 'The Other Guy'. But now here was Natasha Romanoff, now realized to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent (why would she be here on their behalf if she wasn't?), sitting in front of him and talking to him like she did this sort of thing every day.
"S.H.I.E.L.D…." he trailed off in a soft growl, words temporarily failing to come out of his mouth for the reason that he was so shocked and annoyed. He quickly recuperated, however, and calmed himself. "How did they find me?"
"We never lost you, doctor." Natasha answered offhandedly, her hands fidgeting and clasping together in front of her. She kept her watchful gaze straight on him, and he could swear that she hadn't blinked once with how intense her stare was. "We've kept our distance, even helped keep some other interested parties off your scent."
Well that was very generous of them, he thought cynically. He should be at least a little grateful, he knew, that they had done that for him. But for what? He was still taken aback that he been on their radar the entire time. Why did they continuously keep tabs on him? To use him for their own purposes? To keep an eye on the beast that was 'The Other Guy' even though it seemed he had him under semi-stable control?
"Why?" was all he could say.
"Nick Fury seems to trust you." She shrugged, the ghost of a smile playing on her lips. "But now I need you to come in."
Bruce frowned. "What if I said no?"
"I'll persuade you." She countered with an almost uneasy looking smirk. He licked his chapped lips again.
"And what if the…'Other Guy' says no?"
"You've been more than a year without an incident." Natasha affirmed, tilting her head to the side. Damn, they had been keeping tabs on him. Was it really over a year? He didn't care to count. He just wanted to forget everything that happened in that incident. Wanted to forget about Harlem and General Ross.
Wanted to forget about Betty…
"I don't think you wanna break that streak." She said.
Bruce smiled sardonically for a brief moment. It immediately dropped as he nudged an old, paint-spattered infant's cradle, a pang of painful sadness crawling into his heart. The sadness of not being able to have what he was currently playing with was used for. "I don't always get what I want." He mumbled, his throat tight.
Natasha sighed to herself, twiddling her thumbs and wiggling her entwined fingers, oblivious to the gloomy cloud that had befallen the good doctor in front of her. This was getting nowhere. She needed Banner on board as soon as possible, especially without unleashing his…problem. This banter was just making him frustrated, she was sure.
She walked to the bag she had discarded when she first arrived at this dingy little hut, rummaging in one of the pockets until she found her cell phone. She quickly entered her picture folder and selected the most recent shot. "Doctor, we are facing a potential global catastrophe."
Bruce's scornful reappeared as he turned his attention away from the cradle, forcing the pain from his heart. He chuckled bitterly. "Oh, those I actively try to avoid." He responded.
Natasha set her phone onto the worn-looking table and slid it across the wooden surface towards him. "This is the Tesserect." She explained, watching as he pulled out a pair of glasses from his blazer pocket and slid them onto his face. "It has the potential energy to wipe out the entire planet."
Bruce stared at the picture. It was of a blue and white cube that glowed brightly and looked to be pulsing with energy. It was safe for him to say that it was not of this world. And it was very powerful. "What does Fury want me to do?" He asked cuttingly. "Swallow it?"
Natasha was starting to get antsy. He wasn't trying to hide his growing annoyance and contempt for S.H.I.E.L.D., and that was making the situation increasingly dangerous. She needed to be extra careful from now on if her mission was going to succeed. The last thing she needed was for him to get angry and subsequently lose control. "He wants you to find it." She elucidated calmly. She lowered herself into one of the rickety, old chairs that stood near the table. Her eyes once more remained cautiously on him. "It's been taken. It emits a gamma signature that's too weak for us to trace. There's no one that knows gamma radiation like you do. If there was, that's where I'd be."
Bruce still looked contemptuously suspicious as he gave her the cell phone back. A small portion of his mind felt a tiny bit flattered, but an even bigger portion didn't quite believe her words. It was too much of a coincidence that he was the best gamma ray expert they could find who just happened to have a giant, pissed-off green guy for an alter ego. "So Fury isn't after the monster?" he questioned as he pulled his glasses off and slid them back into his pocket.
"Not that he's told me." She answered honestly.
"And he tells you everything?"
"Talk to Fury," she told him, leaning forward in her chair. "He needs you on this."
Bruce's distrust in the woman was not going to go down without a fight. He decided that, since she was an actress herself, he would show her just how good his own acting was. He wanted to see her reaction if she thought he would allow 'The Other Guy' to run free.
"He needs me in a cage?" he bit back acerbically.
"No one's gonna put you in a-"
"STOP LYING TO ME!" Bruce lashed out in that instant, getting in Natasha's face and slamming his hands down on the table in anger.
She moved swiftly, quicker than he had ever seen anybody move in a long while. Before he so much as blinked, the redhead was on her feet and had an armed M1911 pistol aimed at his chest, her face stony and unreadable but her eyes and the twitching muscles in her throat betraying her fear.
He slowly straightened himself, so he didn't provoke her to shoot, and an apologetically sheepish smile graced his lips. "I'm sorry…that was mean." He said softly, ducking his head.
Natasha didn't move, and she didn't put down her gun. Her finger was still locked on the trigger. "I just wanted to see what you'd do." He admitted, his smile becoming gentle. He wasn't an ass like that all of the time, honest. Just when 'The Other Guy' was concerned.
She still didn't budge. Bruce could worry that she might have been frightened to death and was just frozen like that, but he saw her throat continue to twitch. Now look what you did, Banner, he scolded himself again. In hindsight, maybe showing off his apparently remarkable acting skills wasn't a very good idea.
"Why don't we do this the easy way," he spoke to her kindly, slowly, hoping to get her to loosen up. He began feeling anxious and uneasy as the presence in the back of his mind roared angrily at the sight of the gun. It wanted out, and Bruce was starting to get worried for Natasha Romanoff's safety. "Where you don't use that, and 'The Other Guy' doesn't make a mess? Okay?"
He wondered if she had seen Medusa and turned to stone by this time, as she still didn't move. "Natasha…?" he whispered. His heart rate began to pick up, causing panic to well up in his gut again.
Then, finally, she moved. Her right hand let go of the gun and flew to her ear, where it rested on an earpiece that he hadn't noticed before. Mainly it was because it was hidden under her fiery locks. "Stand down. We're good here." She said into it.
And that was when he heard it: the sound of guns being lowered and gruff, male voices shouting orders to one another. Ah, there it is, he thought with a wry smirk.
"Just you and me?" he chuckled, raising an eyebrow. She shrugged again, which seemed to him as a trademark move for her. She stepped back into the room behind the curtain from where she had first emerged, and returned with a black coat with the S.H.I.E.L.D. emblem emblazoned on the shoulders.
"So," she said finally, shakily, as she slipped the coat on. "Are you going to come with me?"
Bruce sighed, feeling conflicted as he rubbed at the scruffiness of his jaw in thought. He had tried his hardest to avoid being detected by S.H.I.E.L.D., but now that he knew they had always known he was here in Calcutta, what else was there to do? They needed him to find this Tesseract, and soon by the sound of it.
Why not, he asked himself, ignoring the growls of protest from 'The Other Guy', who was blatantly making it known that he did not like Natasha or this idea of walking straight and willingly into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s clutches. Whose to say they would keep him in their grasp if he agreed and he found this energy cube. Then again, he reasoned with the other guy, the sooner he found the Tesseract, the sooner he could be back here and the sooner he could be left alone. He wanted to be trusted, and therefore, he had to trust them even if he didn't want to. And the people here had gotten along okay without him before, and the plaguing illness was faltering slightly, so they should be okay while he was gone.
Finally, he nodded tiredly. "Yes," he sighed again, once more ignoring the snarling objection from Big, Green, and Angry. "I'll help you find the Tesseract."
"Good." She said, nodding briskly. She moved to pick up her discarded bag and turned her attention back to him. "We'll swing by your place so you can pack. Then we need to be gone."
Bruce picked up his own bag, nodding as he ran a hand through his hair again. Natasha had turned and walked out of the entrance to the house, leaving him alone to his thoughts for a few minutes.
"What did you just agree to, Banner?" he mumbled to himself tiredly before walking out the door.
And that be a wrap!
I don't remember where I read it, but someone said the part where Bruce nudged the cradle and said "I don't always get what I want" indicated that he wanted kids and was scared to have them because of the Other Guy (and with the possiblilty of every woman running away from him once they found out about the Other Guy). I could totally see that as the reason behind it, so I applied it into my story. Oh, don't worry, guys, he'll be happy at the end! :D
Reviews would be wonderful and would make my day! Constructive criticism would be kool (but just be nice about it!) and if you can't find something nice to say flamers, then don't say anything at all. Don't like, don't read. Simple as that!
I'm starting on chapter 2 now, guys! I have a small portion already typed up, so hopefully I will get it in by the end of this week.
See ya next time!