Never Say Never
Summary: "He knew what you meant to me." He finished, a non-volatile frustration in his words. "So, he eliminated you from the equation."
"The most threatening variable of them all," She added with a sardonically sad smile, hidden behind layers and layers of person.
Two years and she'd slipped so far into herself; that might have been the worst crime of them all.
Rating: T
Pairing: Brutasha [Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff]
AN: I started this months ago, not long after I saw Ragnarok, and it was one of those stories that I wanted to get out quickly because I had so many epiphanies when it came down to why The Hulk really forced Bruce to leave for all of that time and forced himself into the driver's seat, so to speak, and I just wanted to roll with it.
I've always been a huge Clintasha fan and I always will be, but I've always wanted to explore her individual dynamic with everyone else, as well, and that's where this came from. It wasn't until after Ragnarok and even shortly before, once I heard about how they were going to implement Natasha in it, that I truly started to appreciate them in a way that I've never tried to.
At the same time, I acknowledge that this ship is extremely flawed [and I have my preferences for others all the same], but it's canon and it's beautiful in its own way, because alongside all of the flaws there are still really really good pieces that I enjoy working with. I just needed to weed through the bits that make it a good ship and emphasize those, rather than just demolishing Natasha's character. I've played her too long to write her any way other than as accurate as I possibly can.
That's where this came from. I really hope you all enjoy it and I hope I did a decent job of portraying the two. I had to remain intentionally vague about certain things because I don't know when or where this would be appropriate, I just wanted this conversation to take place.
There might be a different version of this later. I like working with them seeing each other again.
Thanks for reading!
[OoOoOoO]
"You have a gash on your forehead."
It was the first set of words that were spoken to her in the past thirty minutes and it felt like an internal vacuum. The last thing she'd been concerned about was the gash on her forehead; she'd had other things on her mind.
Unfortunately, he was one of them.
Natasha did spare him a look, however, finally lifting her gaze from the floor that had seen better days, his face suddenly a bit more attention-grabbing than the fractures in the tile. She wasn't much for hanging out in a bathroom, but it'd been time to give herself to think.
With how the past few days had been, she needed time to think. From Wakanda, to here, to there, to back, it was a lot to process when she'd been lying low. Now she was in the middle of yet another lethal shit storm, except this one was worthy of the end of free human reign and free human choice. This was a danger to the entire galaxy, every planet, life as it itself.
What they were able to do and what they'd be unable to do would influence the rest of life itself.
It was a lot.
To make matters worse, she was in the midst of a conversation with. . . what could she call him, really? What had they ever had the chance to be before he'd left? What had they ever had the chance to be while he was here? What would they ever have the chance to be again?
Now wasn't the time to mull it over.
A familiar ache gathered in the pit of her stomach from just looking at him before her eyes dropped again, a reprieve from what she couldn't handle right now.
"I know."
Silence ensued, she could even hear his awkward shuffling as he struggled to determine whether he should stay or go. That hadn't changed. In two years, his lacking prowess for just about anything subtle or casual remained consistent.
She wasn't even angry with him – couldn't be. She understood why he left and she thought that if she had been in position, that maybe she'd have done the same. She was a runner, a fighter, but a runner. She ran off with Clint when he needed to get his head back together, she ran after SHIELD fell, she ran after the Accords decimated their team, – she'd been running her entire life.
Of course, she'd understand why he, of all people, would do the same – even if it had hurt her, she understood it. He hadn't been ready, he hadn't wanted to continue the fight, he'd needed something else – and away from her, too. She couldn't blame any man for that.
Miraculously, she managed to scrape herself off the floor and stand, dusting at her uniform and flicking strands of blonde from her face, gaze skirting away from him.
"I suppose I should go join the others," She opted for as her excuse to pass him, nearly doing so without a reaction on his part until his hand shot out and grasped her wrist, steeling her in place. Bruce Banner may have looked like a fairly weak man, but the Hulk was in him. Nobody should have ever underestimated the strength that laid beneath the surface.
"Natasha. . ." And it was that tone of voice that could have killed her, because it nearly had earlier.
It'd been well over two years since she'd attempted a lullaby for the Hulk; he'd been gone for too many years to need it. The amount of time that had passed almost led her to believe that he wouldn't even react to her, anymore. She didn't know why she'd taken the long-shot that this would work. Her confidence was waning in this department, but she knew she had to settle him.
Her fingers pulled at her glove, tucking it in a vest pocket and exhaling, channeling old breathing tactics to make her less nervous about something that probably wouldn't work. She couldn't help the lingering, sub-conscious fear of what he'd done to her on the Helicarrier.
But she could imagine with the circumstances they had in front of them, it wouldn't be the worst way to go. Blind devotion and utter demolition was a fair amount worse.
Seconds before she was ready to slip into his line of sight, she felt a bulky presence behind her back and she nearly stunned the man responsible for it, but fortunately, he caught her reaction, a sheepish look briefly overcoming his healing face.
"Natasha." Thor acknowledged, a smile brief on his lips, before he turned all business and nodded towards the Hulk. "I must warn you that the Hulk may not release Bruce from this all. On Sakaar, he spoke of how difficult it was – to drive a car in this state? I do not know for sure, but the Hulk may not release him."
An uneasy feeling gathered in the pit of her stomach and she looked to the smashing individual, eager for the fight. There was a method to his madness, she could tell. He was different than how he'd been before. There was a change in mannerism enough to be – individual. It was mystifying and now somewhat worrying that she might not even be able to drag him from it. If anything, she was going to be able to solely work off the Hulk's old affection for her, if it was even the same.
Yet the Asgardian dropped a hand on her shoulder, receiving her curious stare in return. "But I know that if anyone is capable of drawing the man from the Hulk, it is you." And though he did not explicitly tell her, because he didn't think he needed to, but the image present in his mind as he told her was solely resting on the way Hulk lost all control when he and Bruce heard her on the Quinjet.
He'd seen the fight in the man's eyes, the way he tore through the beast in order to regain control of himself, all because of his love for the woman in front of him, however far away she was and however long it had been. It had been quite beautiful, actually, but a memory that should have been told by Bruce, if at all. It was not his story to tell.
"Besides, if this does not work, I could take him down just as I did on Sakaar. I won a fight against him, you see. . ."
But she shook her head and dropped a brief hand to his shoulder. "Tell me later, Thor." And she strode forward, glancing once over her shoulder. "Thank you." And though her hesitation was only somewhat sated by his words, when she'd reached his line of sight, she wasn't met with a roar, not even with resistance.
Instead, Hulk stopped in his tracks and stared at her, an uncertainty in his eyes. His stare was cryptic, analytic, and she'd seen the evolution of just how much Hulk had grown in their time apart. Not physically, just – mentally.
Finally, he spoke, able to discriminate between what she'd looked like and what she looked like now.
"Tasha?" Came his mumbled grunt of her name, recognition in eyes that were ever-fading from the green that overtook them in this state.
The smile came without her even needing to call for it, as did the ache in her heart. "Hey, Big Guy."
The blonde managed to squarely look up at him, a knit to her brows that she couldn't help. She made no move to remove his hand from her wrist. She made no move to leave. She just met his warm, brown, familiar stare and pretended that the effect it had on her was less than it was, because her feelings hadn't disappeared. They'd been stowed away, for self-preservation, because staring into walls and mourning the loss of something that had barely had the chance to be was not who she was.
She wasn't even someone who let someone get to her like that, yet she had – and still was.
Uneasily, but not in the ways she assumed, Bruce swallowed, choosing his words carefully. "Thor," He paused, tentative. "he told me that I left two years ago. . . that the Hulk left and didn't come back." And the most heart-wrenching part of the way he told it to her was the clear unknowing, the fact that he had never known that he'd left them all, that he'd left her. It had never been his choice. It had been the Hulk.
Bruce would never have been able to leave her.
The way the Hulk reacted to her was out of familiarity, the massive man smiling and stepping forward before there was a familiar knit to his eyebrows, a growl rumbling in his throat. "No." He outright stated, stomping a foot back. "No." He repeated, harsher this time, his words not directed towards her but rather at his head. "NO!" He roared and shook his head, backing up several steps in a near drunk man's walk.
Natasha didn't dare move from where he stood, but she did reach her bared hand towards him, voice firm in the way she told him, "The sun's getting real low. . ."
And the deadly look he shot her wasn't personal, at the words, but she could read between the lines. He stumbled forward then, clutching his head and letting out several sorrowful growls. What she was watching was an internal fight at its finest and she knew that alone from watching the switch of the color in his irises: fluorescent green, to brown, to fluorescent green, to brown – repeated.
"Hulk stay. . ." He muttered, nearly sounding defeated as he dropped to knees before her, a huff to the pace of his breath. The green had restored, but the exhaustion was weighing on his face. He could only stumble and fight it for so long. "His life, now. . ." But it was as if he was trying to convince himself.
Her heart clenched for a different reason.
But yet the massive green hand reached out towards her, palm against hers, and then he collapsed all together, the growls and snuffling growing quieter and quieter as she watched him shrink, the fastest she'd ever seen a transformation.
She couldn't take her eyes off of it, even if there were no clothes in sight for him. It wasn't a view of his ass that had her entranced. It was what all of this meant.
When Bruce surfaced properly, fingers grasping at the filthy ground beneath him, he was blinking through a wave of surprise. He hadn't expected to be able to fight back like he had, but he'd had an incentive – an incentive he couldn't pinpoint. It was always hard to clear his head, but now that Hulk had taken such a solid stance in reigning control. He hadn't had a lot of choice in the matter.
He tipped his head forward, catching his breath. He felt the weight of a gaze on his back, hard enough to prickle his skin, yet when he turned his head and looked, it was gone and the feeling had vanished.
"I'm so sorry. . ." But the weight of the apology was lost on the transition of confusion to realization in her eyes. Piecing together all of what she had seen wasn't hard. In fact, it made sense. Too much sense, and this revelation had no place being found out now. They had bigger, better things to worry about than sifting through the failed love life of Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner, but here they were.
"He was protecting himself." She decided, noting the crinkle of Bruce's eyebrows, then. The blonde nodded once, exhaling sharply. "He'd protected you for too long. He didn't want to play that role for you anymore." Not when he'd been so intent on protecting her, on refusing to acknowledge him. "And he knew you were gaining more control and he didn't like it. He felt used, he felt – unneeded." Now her own eyes were cryptic as she met his.
The next part she didn't say, but the unspoken realization hit her heavily nonetheless.
The Hulk had taken off because he'd known that the one thing in the way of his own domineering reign over Bruce's body was her, because she was his compelling reason to remain in control, his single reason to run away and slip into a life of dormancy and normalcy, and not anything the Hulk would ever need to arise from again.
He didn't want to be shut away, so he'd forced him to leave them, forced him to leave her.
Bruce was good at putting together pieces, especially as she fed them to him, but the last piece he added was made when he stepped forward, knowing what she meant. "He knew what you meant to me." He finished, a non-volatile frustration in his words. "So, he eliminated you from the equation."
"The most threatening variable of them all," She added with a sardonically sad smile, hidden behind layers and layers of person.
Two years and she'd slipped so far into herself; that might have been the worst crime of them all.
The anger he felt for the Hulk was immense, knowing what he had done to his life and knowing, worst of all, what he'd done to Natasha. That was the final knife in the coffin and his teeth clenched, a ripple of rage purely sifting through him, one entirely his own. It was fierce enough to not even prod at the beast and the hand on her wrist clenched.
Her brow furrowed and she misread it, insisting, "Bruce. . ."
But he shook his head, teeth clenching and unclenching before his cool slid back into place, for her, and raised his eyes to look back at her. "I'm okay." He put forward, but amended it quickly. "Sort of."
And then she said something that surprised the both of them.
"Don't hate him for it." And the immediate argument that grew in his eyes told her to keep talking. "Self-preservation isn't a bad thing. It's fair. Safe." She did it all of the time, had done it for the past two years, was doing it now. When she'd fallen for him, initially, she'd wanted to deny it and push it away. She'd had battle after battle with herself, trying to persuade herself that this was a terrible idea, that she should never get anyone involved in the picture, let alone someone like Bruce Banner.
She tried not to dissolve into the touch when his hand reached for her cheek, cupping and stroking a thumb over her cheekbone. It was tender in ways that she'd only initiated and it made her want to run away and stay at the same time. It was an emotional torrent and she knew he could see the fight in her eyes.
There was a lot that he wanted to say, a lot he wanted to voice, but they weren't like that. He couldn't just spew how much he hated him for taking her from him, for taking the one damn thing that could have given him a bit of happiness since Betty and stepping all over it, crushing it, and crushing the both of them for two years.
Instead, they still played cat and mouse, speaking through heavily-guarded metaphors and shoving through enough hesitance to make both of their lives much more difficult because of each other. They were a mess.
Sometimes he didn't even know how they came to be, whether or not referring to them as something plural was even something he could do anymore. Two years of silence because his other half had played keep away wasn't the most positive reinforcement in a relationship.
"I really messed things up, didn't I?" And it was yet another aggravating example of how he was holding accountability for what Hulk did, when he always acknowledged him as a separate self otherwise.
But it wasn't time to pick out the discrepancy in his behavior. It was the time to cop to what was and fully her responsibility. It was something she'd thought about over and over, argued back and forth in her head, playing devil's advocate and her own worst enemy.
The blonde gave the barest of head shakes. "If I hadn't pushed you. . ."
"Then the world would have been a lot harder to save. I would have regretted it. We would have regretted it." Because there was nothing more he would have liked to do on that day than bail and run out with her, chase a future that was somehow possible for them; he'd spent too much time already sacrificing himself for the good of helping people, that he deserved time for himself – time for his happiness, right?
He would have regretted it as much as he'd regretted Harlem. Every additional body would have been yet another drop of blood on his hands and he wouldn't have been able to take it because he would have convinced himself that he could have done something, but instead he'd run off with Natasha to chase some fairy tale, idealistic life that would never have been in his future to begin with.
She'd been right to push him, because he'd needed to be pushed. He didn't resent her for that.
Instead, he loved her just a little more.
"You made the right call." She'd heard that statement so many times and never once had it ever made her feel better, because it'd always meant there was a sacrifice of some kind and she'd picked the lesser of two evils. It was a statement that still left her drowning in regret.
But hearing it from him now, having him stand here and tell her that he was grateful that she'd made the choice he had? It made all the difference.
His gaze dropped with a wry laugh. "The world needs the Hulk and I never really understood why until now. Sokovia needed him that day, Asgard needed him, too. He even had a place on Sakaar." His eyes lingered on her again, and there was an acceptance that she hadn't seen before. He was accepting the monster in him, just like she'd long accepted the monster in her. "I can't fight him." His eyes searched with an insistence. "I have to run with it. I need to run with it now."
The déjà vu was like taking a bullet and warmth swarmed in the pit of her stomach, and whether he was specifically trying to parallel things or not, it held an unusual charm that had her just as – adoring as she'd once been. She knew it had never really faded.
"Then don't fight him." The line between what he could possibly mean was blurred, but she still couldn't help but be apprehensive in touching anything else. They had a world in peril, they had a world to fight, and now wasn't the time to hash out details of what could be. They could talk about that after the dust had settled. "Work with him." She insisted. "It might be a hell of a lot more successful."
The look she received in return would have been laughable under any other circumstances. "Yeah, reassert the dominance I've never had? I'm sure that'll roll over well." But he grew pensive, focusing on her. She would have called the stare undressing had she known any better; it was like he was peeling back the layers of who she was, who she'd constructed herself to be in the past two years. "I'll focus on you." His fingertips extended to run gently across a few strands of blonde, smoothing them from her face. "That usually works. It was the first thing that brought me out of the two-year chance, you know?" He breathed. "Hearing you. . . seeing you."
Her brow furrowed slightly, confusion knitting. "That was the first time? Thor mentioned that you," He shook his head and she fell silent.
"No, uh, on the Quinjet. There was a recording, and it played, and I heard you and I thought you were there, so I just – ripped through him, in a way." The heart grew fonder over time, but it didn't take a scientist with seven PhD's to put that one together. He'd missed her. "Didn't know until I was lucid that it wasn't really you, after all, unfortunately. It was just Thor being really weird?" His face twisted in a confused way that made her laugh, oh god, it made her laugh.
She couldn't even remember the last time she'd genuinely laughed.
"Could I make a request and ask if we could just skip the whole 'sun's going down' part of the routine?" And she would have sworn that he was just trying to make her laugh harder if not for just how stricken he looked about the alternative. "Thor beat that to hell."
"Great, he took my job and my words. Wonderful." But the words fell flat when he boldly leaned forward, hand warm as it slid to the back of her neck, mindful as he touched his forehead to hers of the gash that had started this entire conversation. The time for levity was over and she reached for him, too, trailing fingertips along his jaw, against the side of his head, through the hairs on the nape of his neck. Achingly familiar and not all the same.
She'd never had enough time to properly explore; neither of them had.
"I missed you," He muttered in a low, resigned tone, a familiar strain in his voice. She knew she mirrored him in every way regarding that. "I'm never going to leave again."
She smiled with wry uncertainty, realism seeping into a situation that wouldn't be completely remedied until Thanos and all of his goons were gone, every last one of them, and the world was safe.
Her lips brushed his, an exhausted sigh weighing. "Never say never."
[OoOoOoO]
AN: I really really hope you liked it and I could definitely use some feedback given it's the first time I've attempted the two together.
Reviews are my life; don't kill me!