A/N: Many thanks to everyone who favorited, alerted, and especially to those who reviewed this story! I'll try to respond individually to reviews this week! Many thanks also to VleRoux and pacphys of the Beta Branch for their insightful beta reads, which very much improved this chapter. Enjoy!

Specular Reflection

Chapter 2

Bruce Banner was seriously reconsidering Tony's offer to build him a lab assistant.

He had entered the lab this morning to a cacophony of alarms. The vacuum on the mass spectrometer had failed overnight. His second discovery of the day ended up being that JARVIS was not networked to either the mass spec or the GC (he made a mental note to remedy that stupid oversight as soon as possible). That meant Bruce got to spend two hours on the phone with an engineer trying to determine the source of the failure, and if any of the delicate electronics had been damaged by the sudden breach. At least he'd finally managed to turn the alarms off.

The scientist was now crammed on his back awkwardly under the malfunctioning instrument, trying to extract a defective turbopump. He was sweating from the hot fan exhaust and he'd got grease on his glasses and pump oil all over his trousers. Matters were not improved by the fact that the exact wrench he needed had gone missing (probably pilfered by Tony) so he had to improvise. The other wrench was just a bit too large and not quite the right shape for the manufacturer's proprietary bolts. His knuckles hurt from when he had banged them into the machine's casing when the wrench inevitably slipped.

Bruce took a deep breath and flexed his green-gloved hands (Tony thought it was funny to get him Hulk-green gloves instead of the purple ones he had requested) before picking up the wrench and trying to loosen the last stubborn bolt for the third time. He gritted his teeth and twisted as hard as he could. The wrench suddenly popped loose, sending Banner's sore knuckles careening into the unyielding metal underbelly of the machine. Again.

"Damn it," he swore, shaking his injured hand. He felt the Other Guy stir on the edge of his consciousness, but he easily repressed the sensation. He examined his hand with a sigh. Thankfully the nitrile was undamaged and his skin had been spared. It still hurt, though. "Ow."

The chimes on the lab door tinkled faintly. And that would be Tony. Bruce rolled his eyes. Stark had been trying to enlist the physicist to help him build an accelerator for approximately the last 72 hours. The billionaire inventor had been quite taken with the idea of Bruce doing the initial research on what he fondly referred to as "starkium". The problem was that he hadn't synthesized any "starkium" beyond what was currently powering the arc reactor in his chest.

Tony's solution to this oversight was to build his own accelerator in Stark Tower. Pepper had wanted her living room back, so she'd made him dismantle the one he had already built in Malibu. Tony was now too impatient to wait for the pieces to arrive in New York. Bruce had no interest in the project and his patience with Tony's nagging was wearing thin.

Okay, fine, the physicist had to admit that he had quite a bit of professional interest in building an accelerator from scratch. But Bruce had already survived one horrific lab accident and he didn't care to push his luck. Tony might be willing to stake his life on his math, but Bruce had since learned to be a little more cautious.

Either way, he was tired of Stark's pestering. "For the last time, Tony, I'm not helping you build an accelerator for R and D," Bruce said sourly, raising his voice to be heard over the humming instruments. "No, that's not a challenge. Yes, I believe you can do it. I can go to Brookhaven or Los Alamos. Ask me again and I'll make sure the next time I go green is in your garage."

To his surprise, it wasn't Tony who responded. "That I'd pay to see," Clint's voice replied with the hint of a chuckle.

Bruce smiled. "Oh, hi, Clint," he called. He stuck his head out from under the machine. "I'm down here."

After a moment, the agent's face popped into view above him. He looked down at the disheveled scientist and raised an eyebrow. "Do I want to know?"

Bruce sighed and retreated back under the mass spec. He glowered at the reluctant bolt. "I'm trying to replace a broken turbopump."

"Doesn't Stark have some robot to do that for you?"

"Probably," Bruce replied, his voice echoing weirdly through the machine. "But I like to do it myself, sometimes. Just to prove I still can. I did a lot of this sort of thing in grad school."

"So…can you?"

"If I can ever get this last bolt loose, yeah," Bruce grumbled. He eyed the bolt again and decided to spare his knuckles another attempt. He extracted himself from beneath the mass spec and leaned tiredly against a cabinet. Clint was watching him from a few meters away from his accustomed place on the bench closest to Bruce's desk.

"Got a minute?" Clint asked.

"Sure," Bruce said. There was an unusually pensive quality about Clint's voice that caught his attention. Well, he needed a break anyway. The scientist stripped off his gloves and ran a damp hand through his equally damp hair. A dark bruise was already forming across his knuckles, he noted with irritation. "Shoot."

The sniper hesitated for a moment before taking the plunge. "When you go green," he asked, "do you remember what you did?"

Bruce blinked in surprise. So Clint had finally decided to trust him. Now what? He took off his smudged glasses and inspected them, playing for time to collect his thoughts. He decided that trying to polish them on his shirt would be a losing battle. Bruce got to his feet and fished around on the bench for a wash-bottle of isopropyl alcohol and a dry wipe. He glanced up at the agent while he methodically cleaned the lenses.

Clint's choice of words had not been lost on the scientist. Unlike the rest of the team (Bruce included), the SHIELD agent had not made a distinction between Banner and the Other Guy. Bruce suspected his question was just a roundabout way of asking if it was normal for Clint to not remember what he had done while under Loki's control.

"As a rule, no," Banner replied. He inspected his glasses again before dropping them into his shirt pocket. He thought about what he would have wanted to know before he transformed for the first time. Bruce decided to fall back on simple honesty. He took a seat on edge of his desk and took a deep breath before finishing the thought.

"It's complicated. Usually I wake up and it's just…gone. I'm in a new place. I'm cold and alone and terrified. No matter how much I wrack my brain I can't remember how I got there or anything I did."

Clint didn't say anything. Bruce paused to collect his thoughts and continued. "Sometimes, it comes back later. In flashes. Images mostly, sort of out of order. Sometimes there's a really strong sense of emotion. The Other Guy isn't too articulate. Anything that does come back is always sort of…."

"Fractured," Clint said suddenly. Bruce looked up at him with surprise. It was the exact word he had been fumbling for. The sniper did not return his look. His eyes were focused on an invisible spot on the floor.

"Yeah, exactly. Fractured," Bruce said. He hesitated, struggling to articulate his thoughts. "It's disconcerting when I do remember. But I don't really remember, because it wasn't me…it was someone else. They aren't my memories. But they're there in my head, so they have to be mine. They just feel wrong somehow. Alien."

"It's kinda like watching a movie. You see yourself doing things…" Clint started, but his nerve failed before he finished the thought. A pair of angry red spots burned on his cheeks. His hands clenched into fists.

To Bruce's knowledge, the sniper had never spoken directly about being controlled by Loki with anyone except Natasha. They both knew why he was here. It was stupid to beat around the bush any longer.

"How much do you remember?" Bruce asked, deciding on a direct approach. He didn't mention Loki's name. Clint knew all too well what he was talking about.

"Not much," the agent admitted. His eyes flicked to Banner before falling back to the floor. "Flashes, like you said."

"I'm sorry," Bruce said quietly. "Sometimes it's better not to remember anything. Then you can sort of…pretend it never happened."

"It's more what I don't that gets to me, you know?" Clint said. His voice was tight; rigidly controlled. He ran a hand uncomfortably through his sandy hair. Bruce sensed it cost him a lot to make the admission.

"Yeah," Bruce said fervently. "I do."

They sat in silence for a few moments, neither looking at the other. Clint kicked his boots back and forth a little. Bruce thought it was weird seeing the usually ice-blooded agent fidget.

The silence finally became too much for Clint to stand. "A lot of it's from my fight with Nat," he added suddenly.

"If I'm emotionally connected to something, it can affect the Other Guy enough that I remember. Like when Tony fell through the portal," Bruce told him, relieved he had broken the awkward pause. "Or finding my girlfriend in the wreckage after I…had the accident. Maybe that happened to you."

The scientist frowned. Why did he keep using that word, accident? What had happened to him was no accident. Injecting himself with his own experimental formula, sitting under a gamma source, and expecting the universe to just play along had been nothing but pure, unadulterated hubris. The familiar nauseating sense of self-hatred rose in his chest and he felt the Other Guy stir again. Bruce took a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing himself to relax. He would pay penance for that arrogance for the rest of his life.

The spark of humor in Clint's reply dragged him out of his useless self-pity. The corner of the sniper's mouth was quirked into one of his not-quite smiles. "What're you implying, Banner?"

Bruce looked up and smiled sheepishly. They all had their own theories about the nature of the ambiguous relationship between Clint and Natasha, which ranged from more-or-less platonic (Steve) to very much the opposite (Tony). Bruce himself fell somewhere in the middle, but he was willing to bet none of them were even close to correct. Not that the SHIELD agents themselves would ever admit to anything.

Clint's smirk slowly faded and the brief moment of levity was gone. "So can I get it back?" he asked, his pale eyes settling onto the scientist. There was a plaintive note in his voice that dragged Bruce back to hellish nights steeped in guilt and pierced by brittle fragments of memory. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly.

"No," Bruce told him. Clint seemed to slump slightly with what he assumed was disappointment. "Believe me, I've tried. It either comes back piecemeal or not at all. It gets worse if you try to force it. If you sort of let it go, sometimes things will start to come back. That's one of the reasons I meditate."

"Meditate?" Clint said incredulously, making a face. "You want me to meditate?"

"It works for me," Bruce replied with a slight smile. "Like when you've lost something. Sometimes you only find it after you stop looking."

He was surprised to find that felt good in a cathartic sort of way to talk about his transformations. He had tried to describe them to others before with little success. Betty tried to be supportive, but they had so little time and she had been more focused on analyzing what happened than really listening. Tony had asked once after a night of heavy drinking and had probably forgotten about the conversation entirely.

Clint still looked thoughtful, but he said nothing further on the subject of memories. Instead he rubbed his hands together and said: "You want me to take a look at that pump?"

Bruce blinked. Really, it was amazing how quickly the agent could switch gears. Clint was full of surprises today. "Uh, sure."

Armed with a pair of green nitrile gloves and the wrench, Clint wormed under the mass spec and had the bolt out in less than thirty seconds. He set the broken pump carefully on the floor (Bruce cringed inwardly because the floor was dirty and dirty was synonymous with bad) and glanced up at the physicist. "You got the new one?"

Bruce handed him the new pump and crouched down beside the mass spec. He bobbed up and down nervously as the agent rotated the pump in his hands and inspected it, itching to get it in his own hands. "Yeah, it goes there, like-"

Clint raised his eyebrows. "Relax, man," he said wryly. "I work on quinjets. I think I can handle this…thing."

Bruce laughed and left him to it. He put on his glasses and dropped into the chair in front of the computer that controlled the mass spec. Clint emerged a few moments later, peeling off his gloves. Bruce clicked a few controls and they heard the new pump hum to life. Clint clapped him on the shoulder and turned to leave. The scientist waved at him absently while he pulled up the vacuum readouts for the entire instrument and studied them for any other anomalies. At these rates, it would take several hours for the mass spec to evacuate-

"Hey, Banner?"

Bruce looked up from his screen. Clint was hovering inside the lab doorway. "Yeah?"

"Thanks."

The scientist smiled. "Anytime."

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