Bruce was a man of simple tastes, at the root of it. He didn't need much in the way of creature comforts. Spartan and basic was best. Things and needs and friends were ties and chains. He didn't much like to be chained.
Out here, in the wide expanses and clean air of the arctic tundra, he should have been at peace. Instead, he found himself as restless as he could remember.
It was solitary, his work. Breaking down and peering into the building blocks of the fields of the earth, out here in the clear where humanity didn't dull the edges. He knew that this assignment was SHIELD's way of giving him an escape, sending him out into the wild before he ran there.
But something had fundamentally altered in him, since that last summer when the sky opened up and the world changed. There were things and needs and friends that didn't feel like ties or chains, but instead felt like anchors and safe harbors. And so a few months in the tundra of quiet and focus and data sets that refused to resolve were beginning to grate. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he missed something. Something that felt a little bit like home.
So he spent his days waiting, the quiet focus and routine of his work no longer consuming him as each day seemed to take him farther and farther away from any real progress. And he spent his nights dreaming, longing for something that he couldn't quite place and was always just somewhere out of reach.
In the natural way of things, his last days felt as long as all the months of solitude combined. He sat out front of the small shelter that housed his equipment, breath fogging in the morning air as he looked out over the river.
It made him feel lighter, this time. The whip of the helicopter and the flurry of action bringing him back from nowhere to the bright lights and fast pace of the city.
He had people there now.
It didn't take away from the fear that had become a part of his life, and the need for iron control. That would always be a part of him, something that shaped and defined him, like a chisel through stone. But somewhere along the line he had learned that under control didn't necessarily mean loneliness and dangerous didn't all the time mean worthless.
It was amazing, when he stopped to think about it, the clean morning air rushing past him as he ran, that after only twenty four hours of civilization, he felt as if he had never left. The subtlety and power of habit and the human mind that could exert an influence over even the monster that he carried within him. His spare and open home waiting for him as if he had never left. Familiar faces in the halls who were genuinely happy to see him. Real work, purposeful and important, ready to be tackled and challenged and overcome.
This. The routine and comfort of his regular running path, of people who needed the man and not the monster, of a life ready and waiting for him to live it, was somehow more centering than all the empty space in the world.
Maybe it was that easy feeling, or the rushing endorphins of pushing himself farther than he had in a while, or the comfort and anticipation of returning to his lab space, where Jane would offer him breakfast pastries (which he would accept) and coffee (which he never did) and his scattered lab space, eccentric organization in piles of scientific flights of fancy, would remain untouched, waiting for him.
It was something though, because Bruce hadn't looked sideways at a woman since Betty had ripped his heart in half and kept the ruined pieces.
But there was a woman on the path, coming towards him, eyes fixed forwards and a million miles away. She was petite, shorter than him at least; but the way her hips curved and the way her waist narrowed, and the graceful line of where her neck met shoulders in a strong arc, somehow hit him like dynamite, throwing his balance somewhere off to the left.
She smiled and raised a hand to him, something normal, habit even. A reflex of polite society that Bruce had lost touch with almost entirely. He managed a halfhearted smile in response, the conscious mind dragging slowly behind the chemical rush, before she breezed past him, long hair bouncing with her stride.
He was too honest with himself not to admit that his eyes followed her, the way her lean and tight muscles bunched and shifted as she ran. Something loose and easy about her style, as if all the tension she ever carried was being sucked into the dirt beneath her feet.
She was beautiful, was the bottom line that worked its way through his distracted thought process.
And so perfectly removed from him.
He had still not regained his equilibrium when he made it into the lab. What he found there did not help him. His lab bench was clean. His beautifully chaotic system, which Jane had tried to express as a fractal pattern at one point with moderate success, was completely cleared away.
"Welcome home Bruce," Jane didn't even look up from her work, and it made Bruce remember why he had been happy to come back here.
"The lab…" he trailed off, running a hand through his hair.
"Darcy," said Jane, pausing. "She's…well she's here. She put things in order."
"Darcy?" the name was familiar to him for some reason.
"My assistant from New Mexico." Jane put down what she was doing and came over to his lab bench, refilling her coffee on the way.
"What's she doing here?" asked Bruce, mildly irritated, "and what did she do to my lab bench?"
"You know," Jane sipped her coffee pensively, "that is almost exactly what I said the first week she was working for me." Bruce was fairly attuned to Jane's moods after working with her for over a year now, and she seemed…sad somehow.
"And now?" he prompted, starting to sort through the neatly labeled folders in a filing cabinet that had somehow appeared.
"She's…" Jane's voice seemed heavy, weighed down as she paused. "Darcy was always this incredibly strong link to the outside world. It can get…lonely, and strange; the world of research I mean."
Bruce nodded with a wry grin, he knew the feeling.
"She's incredibly smart," Jane continued, "even though she'd never let you know if she could help it. She's practical, she thinks quickly and sees the big picture and if you tell her why she's doing it, will do the most detailed, repetitive work for as long as you need it. And," Jane broke off, swallowing what sounded like a sob.
"Jane." Bruce looked over at her in concern, taking a step towards her. This wasn't exactly his forte, especially since he had no idea what had prompted this. He thought about calling Thor, and then reminded himself about what Tony had said. Something about never knowing if he could handle situations if he kept walking away from them.
Tony may not have been as eloquent, but somewhere along the line Bruce had come to trust his advice, to an extent at least.
"What's wrong?"
"This is all my fault," Jane looked miserable and embarrassed as she swiped at her eyes. "Darcy being here, getting dragged back into this, what she went through. I ruined everything for her."
"What happened?" Bruce asked carefully, gingerly wading into Someone Else's Problems like a skittish colt.
"There's a new big bad," said Jane, perching on his (now clean) lab bench. "He took her. He took her for something she knew about the bi-frost. Because of me. Bruce…" she paused, looking sick and pale, "they tortured her. Had her for three days."
"Jane," he reached out to her, in a way that he never really did. But he knew something about guilt; intimate and dark and terrible, the things that you couldn't wish away. "I know this doesn't help, but you can't hold all the evil in the world in yourself. Some of it has to belong to others."
She paused for a moment, parsing this out. It was one of the reasons they worked so well together, him and Jane Foster. She would wait and process and consider the variables when she needed to. Tony was challenging and motivating, and occasionally very irritating, and a friend. Jane foster was a partner. And if she needed him for support, even if it wasn't scientific, he would help her parse the variables and move through.
"I know." She let out a breath, "and Darcy…she's so much stronger than I ever gave her credit for. I was scared for a while, we all were. But she is okay. I know she's okay. It's just…this is selfish. But she was this one little piece of normal in my whole world. We argued about who ate the last of the cereal and who's taste in music was worse. And now she's being hunted by a madman and has just accepted a job with SHIELD." Jane sighed, a damp sad little sound.
"I know what you mean," said Bruce, thinking of the girl on the trail, and how easy and free she looked. And how normal it was to just smile, friendly and open, to a stranger on the path. How normal it was to see a beautiful girl and notice.
Jane smiled a little grateful smile at him, hopping to her feet. "I'm being maudlin, and part of me is happy to have her around again. It just hits me at odd times you know, the craziness and horror, really, of the life we lead."
And Bruce could only smile. It had been so long since he was part of any kind of 'we'.
Slowly, as the day wore on, he began to recapture his sense of peace and homecoming. It turned out, as he sorted through, that Jane's Darcy might be slightly more efficient at organizing a lab than he was. It was an odd feeling. This girl, who he knew almost nothing about, clearly knew something about him.
She was smart, that much was readily apparent. Anyone who could so effectively collate and categorize his projects had to be. When Jane indicated that she studied political science, his initial assessment of her rose. A political scientist who could look at a hastily scribbled series of equations on a napkin and correctly identify not only what they meant but which project they were related to was quite a feat.
More than that, there were labels like "The stuff about string theory that you like to write about either really late at night or when you're drinking" and "The project you're not supposed to know about but are working on anyways." It was almost frightening, really. The way she could piece him together from words written on scraps of paper and articles stained with tea and failed titrations.
He went to visit Tony later that day. Not that Tony was going to restore his sense of balance. It was more that Tony made him feel like being off balance was okay, and even better sometimes.
"Hey big man!" Tony looked up enthusiastically and immediately when Bruce found him in his garage in the basement of Stark tower, rolling out from under a car with lines more beautiful than most women.
Not, Bruce thought against his will, anything in comparison to the girl from the trails.
Tony immediately and without reservation strode up to Bruce and tossed his arms around the other man, slapping him on the back in a fierce embrace. "Missed ya buddy, Pep doesn't let me have as much fun when you're not around."
Bruce grinned and adjusted his glasses as Tony stepped back. "Maybe I should visit the tundra more often then. It would probably lead to fewer explosions."
"We do have a habit of that don't we," said Tony in a fond and nostalgic tone. "So how was your first day back?" Tony asked as he tossed Bruce a beer from the ubiquitous beer fridge before pulling one out for himself. "Missing the wide open spaces?"
And Bruce liked the way Tony had never asked him if he was okay to have a drink, or if it would be too hard for his control. Because Tony knew that if Bruce was on edge, he would refuse. And Bruce knew that if he was firm, Tony would relent. And because their friendship was such a well known quantity now, Bruce enjoyed a beer in the garage with his buddy like the rest of men.
"I'm not really," he said frankly, "Nothing ever explodes up there. It got monotonous."
Tony grinned widely at him. "Finally admitting that we're worth keeping around, are ya?'
"I suppose I am," said Bruce, without reservation.
"So, psychological breakthrough in the desolate wilderness? You found yourself? Or is this about a girl?" Tony prodded him with the neck of his bottle.
"Those are my only two options?" he queried lightly. Because he had missed this. Normalcy, or the Tony Stark version thereof.
Tony just raised an eyebrow at him.
'Well, the former I suppose," he raised his glass to Tony in a salute both teasing and sincere, "I missed home."
The look Tony gave him as they toasted was as close to sincere as anyone beyond Pepper ever saw, Bruce thought. And because he was enamored with this idea of normalcy, he said.
"Although I did see a really beautiful girl out running this morning."
"Bruce!" Tony exclaimed, "Noticing the opposite sex? Are you possessed? A shape shifting Alien? Or did the arctic wilderness just make you really lonely?"
"Maybe," said Bruce with a comfortable smile, "she was just really beautiful."
He was almost disappointed, the next morning, not to see her. No, if he was being honest, there was no almost about it. There was something so simple and easy about a girl on the track. So uncomplicated.
So when she was there, after he had finished, breathing hard and wiping sweat from his face after his run, his focus was drawn immediately.
He saw her fall, and it was like gravity pulling him into her. It wasn't an issue, not really. She wasn't hurt. And yet he couldn't stop himself. He helped her up, he made an ass of himself, he reached out to touch her.
And when she invited him to meet her the next day, it never occurred to him that he wouldn't go.
It was awkward, he admitted to himself.
He had never, ever, had a male friend who he would even consider going to for advice about women. And the last time he had needed advice about a girl, he hadn't had problems greater than any other unfashionable and awkward physicist, which were enough in and of themselves.
But every morning for a week she had been drilling her way into his subconscious.
It wasn't just that she was beautiful, even though that was certainly part of it. And he would admit, although never out loud, that the way her skin moved under the lycra of her shorts when she stretched didn't exactly detract from her appeal.
It was about how she reached out to swat him on the arm without a second thought, how she teased him in a way that made Bruce think that maybe she was flirting. How when she mentioned a movie, mostly Bruce knew it and liked it. How she would drop her earbuds around her shoulders and crank the volume so he could hear her favorite song as they ran in step up the hill. This thing they were doing together, this friendship thing, where he was just a man and she was just a woman, it was something he had never done before. It was someone he had never been before.
It was something that would vanish if she knew who he really was.
It was starting to tear him apart.
Although, looking at the positive end of the spectrum, when he called Tony, asking him if he could spare some time, Tony had dropped whatever it was he was doing (potentially literally from the sound over the connection) and said he would meet him in 20 minutes. It was good to say the word friend about him and know that it really meant something.
They sat over scotch that was so expensive that Bruce didn't even want to consider it, in a very discrete corner of a very discrete club. Bruce was sure they would not have let him in if not for Tony.
"So," said Tony, taking a healthy sip of his drink, "You're getting melancholy over something, you might as well just come out with it and get it over with. Who knows how long my sympathy will last."
"Well," said Bruce slowly, "There's this girl."
The delight on Tony's face floated his mood up a few meters.
"You are coming to me for girl advice?" he asks, incredulous.
"Yes." He spoke directly to his glass.
"I feel like I should send out a press release, or at least text pepper." Tony was gleeful.
"I would prefer," said Bruce dryly, "If we could keep this private. I hear that is the code."
"The Bro code? Did Bruce Banner just bro code me? Dear diary…"
"Tony," he couldn't decide whether to be amused or exasperated, but that was par for the course, he supposed.
"Right, there's a girl. Is it the first girl I have ever heard you call beautiful who you saw on the trails?"
"Yes," glad he didn't need to spin a story. "We've been running together."
"And you need my advice because?"
"She doesn't know who I am."
"Well she must have at least noticed that you run behind her. Bruce, are you stalking her?"
"What? No! Of course not. We just, we haven't exchanged names. She doesn't know about…"
"The other guy?" it was a surprisingly sensitively made point for Tony.
"Yeah."
"Well," said Tony, stoking his beard in a way that Bruce was sure the other man though was sage, "Who says you need to tell her right away?"
Bruce sent him a savage glare, "I'm not going to lie to her Tony."
"Hey, that's not what I'm suggesting" he raised his hands defensively. "I'm not saying the other guy doesn't complicate things. I'm just saying, don't you think it's worth letting the girl know who she'd be taking on those complications for? And, in point of fact, there is no rule saying you need to make a play for her. Why would she ever need to know about Mr. Hyde if all you want is some friendly motivation for that morning run?"
Bruce rolled this idea over slowly in his head. He supposed that there was no reason that he needed to get to know her better, to try to make her anything more than a woman who he ran with. A woman who was beautiful in a way that made his heart stutter in his chest and was so easy in her manner that he sometimes forgot to be careful. Something about that didn't sit well with him.
But he also wasn't ready to say he was interested in a real way. Not even to Tony. Not even to himself.
It turned out, despite Tony's support, that the issue was moot. On Monday morning, Bruce's distractingly beautiful running partner walked into his lab, and the world changed again.
After she stormed out, there was a long silence.
She. Her.
Bruce's head was spinning in an endless loop.
"So," said Jane cautiously, "anything you wanted to tell me Bruce?" Her arms were crossed and her expression stern. He remembered that the first thing they had spoken of after he had been away for six months was Her. He remembered that little break in her voice when she had told him about what had happened to her. To Her. He remembered what had happened.
"I," he paused. At a bit of a loss, regret and guilt sitting low in his gut hovering somewhere near the edges of his control. "No," he said finally. "I don't think there is."
It didn't surprise him that Jane had nothing to say to him either for the rest of the day.
It wasn't hard, when you knew Tony Stark (or more accurately his AI) to get files he shouldn't be able to get. He didn't often abuse the privileges that came with being a member of the Avengers, but there was no way he could stop himself.
He wished he had.
When the computerized file on "Lewis, Darcy" lay projected in front of him against the windows of his office at home, the blue light shining out into the woods, he didn't know whether to run for containment or the bathroom.
Her medical file showed close and detailed photos of exactly what had been done to her. Cold, clinical notes and chart readings hitting him like a slap in the face.
He swiftly swiped at the file, closing it. He shouldn't have looked. She wouldn't have wanted him to see. He remembered that first time, when he had reached out and laid a hand against her scars, not knowing what they were at the time. She thought they made her weak, an object of pity. But he could see how strong she was.
He didn't so much regret knowing what had happened to her. But it was harder to pretend she was just a beautiful girl, just a slice of normal, when he could feel his heart pulling out of his chest for her.
It was a physical pain, shivering and tugging somewhere just behind his temples, that he fought as she approached him the next morning. Darcy, he corrected himself. She was no longer her, she was Darcy. Darcy who went from being someone with whom he could pretend to be average to someone who knew. Someone who would fear, someone who had every right to be afraid, and more than most.
But avoidance, a long tested strategy for him, wouldn't work here. She was present in his circle, invading his calm, firmly installed in this place he called home. A thought both beautiful and terrible at the same time.
And he couldn't help but let that little flicker of home and hope sit low in him. Maybe she. Maybe her.
Which is why it hit so hard when she was like all the rest, coming at him with accusation and fear. He could feel a well of anger pushing up inside of him as she advanced on him, hurling at him the accusations he had been throwing at himself before.
He shouldn't have pushed back, he knew that. But he was angry.
Even though he felt guilty, knew that the other guy was something to be feared, something to be careful of, he wanted so much more out of her. He wanted the extraordinary. So even worse than the low pull of anger, well in hand, was a sharp stab of disappointment.
She was afraid, and her fear cut at him like a knife. She had had enough of it in her life, he now knew. And he wanted to understand her reaction, wanted to accept it with peace. But, as she had so viscerally reminded him, sometimes he was just a man. A far from perfect one. And even as he stepped back and pulled his mask of control together, a burning ember of resentment and disappointment and sadness, more than he should feel after knowing her a week, refused to be extinguished.
But he still felt that he owed something to her, the other her. The her before she was Darcy. So he explained to what remained of the closest approximation to an uncomplicated woman that he had ever know, what it had meant to him. Because maybe it had meant that to the uncomplicated part of her. But she didn't stop him when he walked away. And that little ember burned a little brighter.
He could tell, the moment he walked into the lab, that Jane knew exactly what was going on, and probably more about it than him. He froze at the look on her face as she stood up from her bench.
A Valkyrie, he thought. Sometimes it made so much sense to him how this tiny scientist commanded the heart of a god.
"Jane," he said, hands out in supplication, "I swear, I never meant for any of this."
"I know," she said. It didn't sound much like understanding, only acknowledgement. "But it did."
He sighed, bit by bit this concept of home starting to fall away. Like everything always did.
"I'll go." He said finally, "I'll find another space." He headed at once to his bench, decision made, following through.
"You don't like working with me?" It was a challenge, the question lying below the surface. He wondered how many people saw this side of her.
"Of course I like working with you," he said immediately. "It's just that," he considered his words carefully, "certain events this morning have convinced me that things will be…smoother if I am not around."
Jane cocked her head, looking at him for a long moment. "Don't go anywhere yet," she said firmly. "I'll be back." She swiped the last scone out of the tray near the door on her way.
It was no more than a half hour later that she returned. She walked up to the pile of papers Bruce had placed in a box on his bench, removed them, and placed them firmly on his work surface.
"Stay," she said with an expression that Bruce could have sworn was somewhat amused. "Work."
So he stayed, and he worked, until somewhere in the early afternoon, his muscles tensing before he had even properly seen her come in, Darcy walked into the lab.
It was endearing, he thought, the way she had clearly practiced. The fact that she thought he was worth apologizing to and the fact that she still wanted to be around him going a long way to stamp out that little ember of disappointment. Many women, many people, had feared him. No one, yet, had apologized for it. At least not so quickly, so clearly, and so honestly.
There was something so different about her. She thought, it seemed to him, that she was average. But what he now knew she had gone through, and the way people reached out and attached themselves to her, and the way she opened up her life and took them in without even realizing that this was something rare and beautiful and incredible. ..
She was so far from average.
"You know," he said later as they were companionably sorting papers, "Jane can really be a bit of a terror about you."
Darcy smiled at him, a little nervously, and that little ember flared at him, and said "She's a tiger, for sure. But you know I got the other end of the same stick, right?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"She came down pretty hard on me, in her own way, for being an idiot at you." It was a blunt admission, but delivered shyly, the fear and hurt feelings still lingering around them.
But Bruce cocked his head to the side with a little smile. "Huh," was all he said out loud. It didn't feel so bad to have a Valkyrie on his side some of the time.
