Author's Note: This is actually my favorite chapter out of the whole thing. The prompt here began as a question I asked myself while watching "The Incredible Hulk"—namely, if he was so afraid of being spotted, why the hell didn't Bruce ever try to make himself look different? Me being me, the answer turned into fluff.

Disclaimer: Bruce Banner, Darcy Lewis, and all associated characters and concepts are property of Marvel Comics Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.


The Fourth Surprise: Bruce Banner can't do disguises.

Five weeks in, and nobody's died. There hasn't even been an Avengers Assemble, which surprises Darcy; normally the team gets called out once a week or so, either to deal with some massive crisis somewhere (hostage situation in Cleveland, stray nukes in Somalia) or simply to be seen by the press and the people of the world. Sort of a "we're still here, and everything's gonna be okay" kind of situation. She wonders idly why the public appearances have fallen off, but though she entertains a few theories, she knows she'll never be able to figure it out without getting more info from SHIELD. And Darcy Lewis likes her job too much to risk it by poking and prodding at the scary secret agent men.

With everything going so smoothly, Darcy finds herself able to request—and be granted—a half-day off. She frets a little about it, sure that either Jane or Bruce will have an emergency and she'll come back on duty eighteen hours later to find one of them unconscious in a pile of science, but she's been pulling long hours to look after her two scientists and she could really use a break from all the genius talk. So she gets her half-day, bribes Thor into babysitting Jane ("I'll help you pick out her birthday present. Seriously, she loves you, but what's she gonna do with a bilchsteim?"), and promises Tony she'll wear a low-cut top for a week if he makes sure Bruce gets fed and walked.

Tony seems a little too eager to agree to the deal, which is weird. After all, Pepper Potts is right there, but she doesn't seem to mind at all. If anything, she gets a laugh out of it, and says something to Tony about "that'll get him moving." Whoever 'he' is.

Pepper Potts. Spooky, spooky woman.

So she clocks out at noon, checks on her scientists one last time, and then heads back to her little midtown apartment (SHIELD cost-of-living supplementary income, how Darcy loves thee) for some well-deserved downtime. She kicks back on the couch, catches up on a couple of her soaps, makes a batch of cupcakes and plans to meet an old college buddy for a movie that evening.

She's right in the middle of washing her hair when her official SHIELD-issued StarkTech phone rings.

"You're shitting me," she mutters, stumbling out of the bathroom with a towel haphazardly wrapped around her soapy curls. It's not a number she recognizes, and the phone slips out of her hand twice before she manages to unlock the screen and answer. "This had better be good," she informs the caller darkly, "because if you're a wrong number, I'm going to find you and make you hurt. Do you know how long it's been since I had an uninterrupted shower? Seriously?"

"Uh," the caller begins, and Darcy's stomach clenches. Well, shit. Darcy Lewis, you've just won the Ways Not to Greet Your Sort-of Boss contest. "Um. Never mind-"

"Wait!" she cuts in quickly, before he can hang up. "Shit, I'm sorry. Doc, is that you?"

The phone crackles as he exhales a deep breath. "It depends. Are you going to find me and make me hurt?"

"Well, is this a wrong number?" Darcy shifts the phone and wipes a little water out of her eyes. "Because if so, I'm impressed. What're the odds of accidentally calling someone you know?"

"In New York? About eight million to one. That's not factoring in the out-of-state visitors, and the possibility of shared numbers, of course."

She laughs a little at that. "Aw yeah, talk mathy to me. What's up? Since I'm guessing this isn't a wrong number and you won't be dying, you can tell me. Has Tony been feeding you?"

"Yes, I ate. Listen, I need . . . I need your advice."

He sounds serious, and a little worried, and that gives Darcy pause. She senses something heavy incoming, possibly emotional, and she doesn't know if she's qualified to deal with that quite yet. Avoiding and diverting sensitive stuff is different from weathering it, especially with someone who's been through as much as Robert the Bruce Banner. (Shut up, she can say it inside her head.)

"Enhance your calm, science lord. What's up?"

"Do you know how to die?"

Darcy pauses for a moment, swipes a dangling lock of wet hair back under the towel turban, and shifts the phone to the other ear. "Doc, I'm going to assume that this is one of those hi-larious homonym mixups, because I'm pretty sure that's not a standard Dr. Bruce Banner sort of question. Unless you've been possessed . . . in which case, I'm calling in sick tomorrow. 'Die' as in 'd-y-e,' right?"

"Right. Yeah." He sounds . . . embarrassed? Weird. Shy, yes, but once you've done the whole I-broke-Harlem thing you sort of leave the normal territories of mere chagrin behind.

"And since you don't strike me as the home crafts type, I therefore further deduce that you're talking about hair dye."

"Um."

"Egads, Watson! Are you worried about your looks? Because seriously, I don't think you need to be. So you've got a little silver, big deal! You're rocking the Distinguished Hot Older Man thing, which incidentally is extremely hard to get right. Reed Richards tries it, but he comes off looking more like he should be waiting in a white van outside a middle school. You, on the other hand, are smokin'."

"Darcy, I'm not-" He coughs a little. "Darcy, there was a lab accident. Green may be the Other Guy's color, but it's not mine. A little advice? Please?"

She almost drops the phone again. "Seriously? I mean, seriously? What kind of lab accident-?"

"Tony."

"Tony. That's a hell of a lab accident, all right." She discards the towel and pads into her bedroom, naked. "Look, I'm gonna go get dressed, and then I'll come help you. Emergency dye jobs should not be attempted alone, especially if you're a makeover virgin." Why is her mouth still moving? She probably should have stopped when she got to the "Distinguished Hot Older Man" part, but give her a break, she wasn't expecting this on her half-day off. "Where are you? Lab?"

"Uh, no. I'm in my apartment at the Tower. Listen, you don't need to, I just need some advice-"

"The hell I don't. It'll be hard for you to maintain your Zen if you accidentally fry all your hair off, and since my job is to take care of you, I need to be in on this." She gropes around in her closet, trying to find some fresh underwear. "Where are . . . aha! Thought you could hide from me, huh?"

"What?"

"Sorry, I was talking to my bra. Avengers Tower, right? Be there in thirty. Don't do anything without me, doc, and I mean it. There are worse colors than green."


It shouldn't take her long to get to the Tower, but she makes a quick stop first. After yanking some clothes on and calling her buddy to cancel their movie date, she heads for the nearest Walgreens and buys up what feels like half the hair-care aisle. After all, Darcy Lewis has her own dye job horror stories, but hair that's been attacked by Tony's brand of mad science is a new one on her. A good lab slave has to be prepared for anything.

After a moment's hesitation at the cash register, she pays with her personal Visa rather than the SHIELD card. Technically this is a work-related purchase, but the accounting department watches her expenses like a hawk, and she doesn't want to have to explain Bruce's little accident to the glassy-eyed paper pushers in Finance. Seriously, at least the Hulk just breaks stuff. Accountants break souls.

Thirty-three minutes later she arrives at the Tower, breathless and carrying three plastic shopping bags, her still-damp hair pulled back into a messy braid. The guard behind the front desk raises an eyebrow at her in a very Brucelike fashion, but she just flashes her ID and walks right on past him. Fuck the haters, she's got places to be and scientists to save.

She's never been to the residential floors of the Tower before. She knows Thor lives there, along with Stark and some of the other Avengers, but Thor is over at Jane's place so often that she's honestly never seen where the God of Thunder sleeps. Getting to Bruce's floor requires an access code that she doesn't have, but she asks JARVIS to let her in, and the AI seems to know she's on a mission of mercy. Good man, JARVIS. Good computer, anyway, but it's hard not to think of him as a guy. It's the snark.

Bruce has a whole floor to himself. The elevator lets her out in a wide foyer-slash-living room, with a couple of sleek dark couches and a flat-screen TV set right into the wall itself. Another wall is floor-to-ceiling glass . . . probably easy to repair if there's a little incident and Hulk wants to make a quick exit without compromising the integrity of the whole tower. Aside from that, most of the decoration comes from bookcases, because apparently Bruce Banner has never read a book or scientific journal he doesn't want to keep. There's a few knickknacks—a Rama token, an empty bottle from some kind of South American soda, a cereal bowl half-filled with foreign coins—but for the most part, the place doesn't feel very lived-in. It reminds Darcy of a dorm at the beginning of the semester, when everyone's moved in but the room isn't really homey yet.

There's a creaking sound, and she turns. Bruce is lurking in the doorway, looking as furtive and rumpled as Darcy has ever seen him. Instead of a labcoat, he's wearing a worn CalTech t-shirt and sweatpants, and his hair is tucked under a Yankees cap.

Most of it, anyway. The few curls that escape under the brim of the cap are a violent yellow-green, bleached within an inch of their lives and almost white in some places. As he edges a little further into the room, she realizes that his eyebrows have suffered the same fate, and probably his eyelashes too. Darcy might laugh, but she also sees the angry red blotches of chemical burns on his skin and chooses not to. Clearly this was not a happy night in science land.

He can't seem to meet her eyes, clearly embarrassed by the whole situation, and Darcy shakes her head. "This is why I'm never taking a vacation ever again," she says, setting down the plastic bags. "Jeez, Bruce, what the heck did Stark do? Am I gonna have to tase a bitch?"

"I don't think so," he says, and finally gets up the gumption to walk right over to her. Yep, his eyelashes are bleached. It's odd: between his bright hazel eyes and his usual weary look, the color makes him old-young, like a Tolkien Elf. Granted, a Tolkien Elf that had something blow up in his face, but the image is still strange enough to give Darcy pause. "Thanks for coming over. You didn't need to."

She pshaws that and plucks the ball cap off his head. He must have been facing the blast, or fumes, or whatever it was when it happened, because the bleaching is definitely the worst at the front. "I have to make myself useful, right? I mean, I can't kick the crap out of gods, but at least I can make sure you look your best when you do." He half-smiles at that, and she grins back. "Besides, it's a crime to let such excellent hair remain in this condition. I mean, seriously, I would kill for this kind of natural volume."

"Darcy Lewis, stylist to Avengers," he says, definitely amused despite his brand-new platinum-green locks. "That would look good on your resume."

"Yeah, if I was allowed to ever tell anyone about what I do here. At least with this part, they wouldn't believe me." She grabs a straight-backed chair from the kitchen and pushes him down into it, running her fingers through his hair. Wow, that is fluffy . . . Why hasn't she done this earlier? For a scientist, he's awfully pettable. "Okay," she adds, trying to keep her mind on the task at hand, "I'm seeing straightforward bleaching here. You've got some split ends, incidentally, so between that and the chemical damage you could probably do with a trim. But it looks like you just washed it, so we should be able to put a couple layers of ash brown on here and get you back to your science lord self in no time. Unless you used some kind of super-duper classified chemical in the explosion, in which case I can't guarantee that your scalp won't fall off."

"Nothing classified," he says, "although some of it might have been stronger than necessary. Tony was impatient."

"That's because Tony is an epic troll." She whisks an old towel around his shoulders and opens up one of the boxes of dye. He squirms a little, protesting that she doesn't have to help, but she pokes him in the shoulder and orders him to sit still.

It's a strange experience, quiet and close. She smooths the dye into his hair, running her hands through the damp waves, and he leans back into her touch just a little and makes a noise under his breath like a contented cat. Darcy feels her cheeks warm and covers up the confusion of the sensation by babbling, talking about everything and nothing that springs to mind. The weather, her plans for the evening, her own hair-care horror stories . . . quite a few of those, too, since she went through a regrettable mallgoth phase in high school.

"Black with red streaks," she confides as she takes another palmful of dye gel. "Bad scene, man. I called myself Bathorie for eight months. Mom had to ban me from answering the phone because every time I did, people thought they'd accidentally called a plumbing supply store."

"Bathory?" he says, half-turning in his seat to look at her. She tsks and motions for him to put his eyes forward again, and he does, but his incredulity still comes through in his voice. "As in Elizabeth Bathory? Bathing in the blood of a hundred virgins?"

"Well, yeah, except I spelled it with an i-e." He snorts, and she pokes him again. "Hey! I was fifteen. You can't tell me you never did anything crazy when you were that age."

"I never dyed my hair," he points out. "Although," he adds, "when I was fourteen, I did decide to make a neutron gun in my grandma's garage."

Darcy half-stifles a laugh and tilts his head back to get at the worst of the bleaching. His eyes meet hers, and his expression is oddly abashed. He's telling her the truth? What kind of kid plays with nuclear science at that age? Didn't he have friends?

She decides not to betray his trust, and swallows the half-dozen bits of snark that come to mind. "That doesn't count," she says as she gently works the dye into his hairline. "That's still genius, even if it might've been a little weird. And I refuse to believe you've never dyed your hair before. It's a rite of passage, like your first hangover—the Bad Collegiate Dye Job."

He starts to shake his head, but Darcy tsks again, and he desists. "Nope," he says instead. "First time."

"Not even while you were on the run?" her mouth says before she can clamp it shut. Darcy freezes, her hands stilling in Bruce's damp curls, and winces. "Oh my God, shit, I'm sorry. That's none of my business, right? It's none of my business. My bad. Ignore that."

"It's okay," he says. She chances another look into his eyes, and he doesn't seem angry. A little sad, maybe, but . . . well, Darcy can't exactly fault him for that. "And no, I never did. I was never any good at disguising myself . . . and a lot of the time, I never knew if I was going to be staying in one place or running out again. Maintaining a different look is hard under those circumstances. Most of the time it was just a hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap. And I didn't want to, well, make it easier for people to be comfortable around me."

Darcy's hands pause in the motion of running through his damp hair. He looks back at her, seemingly asking a question with those hazel eyes, and for a moment she's not sure what she can say to that.

"Maybe that's a good thing," she responds finally. "Can you imagine a blond Hulk? I can't."

He smiles, but no laugh. Not yet.

The fourth time Bruce Banner surprises Darcy Lewis, she learns that despite everything, he's not very good at pretending to be anything he's not. And she wonders how she would live if she couldn't be anything other than the woman with the monster inside.