A/N: Hey guys. *dodges tomato, punches, mustard, and everything else you imaginative people have threatened me with*

I CAN EXPLAIN.

This is, without a doubt, the most stressful school year I've ever had. I'm a sophomore this year, and I stupidly thought, "Hey, I bet I could handle AP classes!" THEY. SUCK. BUTT. I barely have any free time and I'm pretty sure I've had a couple mental breakdowns so far. But I have this weird pride-thing that prevents me from dropping down to Honors... uggghhhhh. And my friends are always needing me to do assignments for them and my work hours have gone up like crazy so I don't even have weekends anymore and UGHHHHHH.

ANYWAY. Thank you all for your kind reviews. I think last chapter hit 200. WHAT. THE. PANCAKES. You are all so lovely!

NEWS-I made fanart for Ink Stains! Link is on my profile. Also, if you like Harry Potter, and if you like Lord of the Rings, go check out my story Visionary.

That is all.

CHAPTER WARNINGS: Mentions of suicidal thoughts.

CHAPTER SONGS: "Take it Away," by Ashes Remain.

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In his dreams, Bruce sees a boy.

A black-haired boy, with stunning green irises. Small and thin, but life seems to vibrate off him.

"Harry," he thinks he says, because his lips are moving, but he can't hear himself. He kneels. The child—his form is blurry and indistinct at best, despite the obvious mop of messy black hair and laughing green eyes—runs towards him. Bruce thinks he smiles.

And then the ground rocks.

The ground is shaking, like an earthquake, and the floor that Bruce is standing on swells, carrying him upward. Bruce pitches forward, hands splayed on the surface—it feels rough, fibrous—paper? Parchment?

He is on a page. The page is flipping, with Bruce on it, and suddenly the world is tilting, and Bruce is sliding sideways, listening to a child's cry of horror. His feet leave the surface, but moments later, he lands on his back, spread-eagled on the opposite page. The sheet that he just fell from is crashing down over him. Bruce sees T.M.R. everywhere he looks. The sharp letters cut him like knives, green blood stains the pages. Bruce sees jaded, monstrous eyes looking back at him out of the growing puddle.

Harry is beside him, dwarfed in the shadow of the diary's slowly approaching page. He shakes Bruce's shoulder, but Bruce can't move, no matter how much he screams internally, he cannot twitch a muscle.

"Bruce! Help me! Bruce! Please!" Harry screams, and the child is melting, melting and liquefying and dripping into black ink. Bruce watches the face sag, the black hair plastering to his undefined forehead and bleeding soulless glittering ink trails down the child's face, tainting every patch of skin that it travels over. He watches the thin arms splatter ever so softly and slowly and silently onto the fibrous parchment, and Harry is gasping for breath now, his lower jaw melting away, his green eyes wide and panicked and horrified—does he even have lungs anymore?—and—and then he is gone, nothing more than a massive ink blot on a page. Bruce's limp fingers dangle in the ink, in the blood, and he watches bleakly, hopelessly, as the page gently enfolds him, crashing over him like a wave.

.

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"So let me get this straight."

Fury leans back in his chair, fingers intertwined, that single glaring eye focused solely on Bruce's bedraggled form.

"You were in possession of a magical artifact that housed the soul of a young boy from another dimension." (Fury enunciates the last three words sharply, somewhat sarcastically). "You became friends with this boy, and over the course of a few months, found yourself feeling drained. Then this boy admitted to sucking your soul dry to gain a physical form, severed ties, and now you can't contact him anymore."

Bruce finds meeting Fury's weighted stare is too difficult, so he looks elsewhere. Humiliation and grief rage fiercely inside him..

And yet, stubborn loyalty incites a slow burn of anger in him. He doesn't like the way Fury phrases it. The way Fury condenses everything that's happened in the past few months into a few simple, cut-and-dry sentences… Its brevity is jarring, and Bruce wants to yell that the situation was so much more complex, and that Harry is a boy, for Pete's sake, not some malevolent vampiric being intent on feasting on Bruce's soul.

("At least," a little voice whispers slyly, "that's what you think. He was feeding off you from the start, maybe you really were nothing but a slaughter animal to him—if he was even a twelve year old child. You idiot, how could you fall for that?"

'Shut up,' Bruce mumbles to himself, and is surprised when he feels the Hulk drowsily stir, growling agreement. He and the Hulk never coincide on things, and the fact that is over the matter of Harry seems somewhat ironic.

"Yeah," Bruce says aloud, and then makes an effort to inject some life into his voice. "That's about it."

"Hmm." Fury says shortly, and then spins in his swivel chair, launching himself upright. "Well, Mr. Banner, the journal has been taken into custody, and I've got a team of bright scientists examining it—"

(No no no no—)

"—in efforts to shed some light on the matter. I hope that in the future, you can approach me directly upon coming into contact with such an artifact."

(Shut up, just shut up.)

"In the meantime, I hope you recover quickly. The world sure ain't gonna wait around for you to get up on your feet again, and we need you on the cube."

Bruce fists his hands in the hospital bed's white linen sheets, face burning, and says nothing as Fury closes the door behind him, cutting off the sound of his molded shoe soles hitting the floor. The room seems achingly empty.

Beep…beep…beep…

Bruce closes his eyes, feeling sick, wanting to be anywhere but the infirmary. He hates hospitals, hates needles, hates white linoleum floors and painful fluorescent lights and IV bags. He hates the little plastic pouch of orange juice with a cheerful animated cartoon orange (it seems so fake, so out of place in this cold, cruel world) meant to raise his blood sugar, hates the Velcro cuff around his wrist measuring his pulse.

He just hates.

And Bruce is lying there, staring up into the loathsome fluorescent lights, hating the world and hating himself, when Stark steps through the door minutes later.

"Hey," the billionaire offers lamely, moving to claim the swivel chair Fury had left behind. Bruce says nothing, too afraid that if he opens his mouth, he might scream.

Beep… beep… beep…

"I just wanted to apologize… for… well, you know. I'm sorry about Harry."

'Stark is way out of his element,' Bruce thinks with detached amusement. 'Comforting is not his forte.'

"You were listening in, weren't you?" Bruce deadpans. His fingers convulse briefly before he shoves his black, bitter hatred aside and tries to be emotionless.

'I'm always angry.'

(It doesn't work.)

"You were listening to our entire conversation, and now you think you know everything, don't you? You think you know Harry?" He carries on, every softly-spoken word more bitter than the last, no matter how hard he tries to keep a loose, disinterested tone. He seems to fail at everything these days. "Well, let me break it to you, he's twelve. Twelve, and he was ripped from his own world and crammed into his own horrific hell—" his voice breaks briefly "—he's described it to me, Tony, it's hell. I would rather kill myself than go there."

Vaguely, he realizes that he's referred to Stark by his first name.

Tony is quiet, a rarity, and Bruce takes the time to slow his heartbeat and calm himself. (So fragile. So pathetic.)

"I believe you, you know," the genius finally admits. "I mean, we've got Thor and Loki over here, and they've already proved the existence of other dimensions. Natasha's a trained lethal assassin. Barton—codename Hawkeye, you don't know him, but I hacked SHIELD's mainframe—"

—'Wait, what?'—

"—and he was one of their top agents before Loki mind-wiped him. Dude could hit a fly from a hundred feet away. And we've got me, a genius who builds advanced weaponry in my free time, and you, who… ah…"

"Who turns into a big green rage monster when I get mad," Bruce finishes. He smiles his self-condescending smile like he always does when he's stuck in an uncomfortable conversation.

Tony bobs his head, as if to say, 'Point.'

"Well anyway, back to Harry."

Hearing the name, so taboo now, fall easily from Tony's lips makes Bruce wince.

"I was thinking, Banner… maybe we could, you know, investigate?"

"…What?"

"Oh, come on! You're a scientific genius. I'm a scientific and mechanic genius. We've got Thor, who lives on freaking Asgard with his golden faires and pixies and whatever and magic. They've got magic, Bruce, I asked him and he said so!"

Bruce remembers, with a painful flash, the hulking blonde man he'd met hours ago, who'd introduced himself as 'Thor Odinson' and nearly attempted to crush the bones of Bruce's hands together with his handshake. Brother to…

His breath catches in his throat, and pale green eyes, cutting and icy and sinister, dart across his vision. Magical scepter. Magic. Magic.

MAGIC.

"Loki."

"Well, yeah, he lived on Asgard too, but—"

Bruce sits up, yanks off the cuff. The machine wails but he, with years of lab training, disables it quickly. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. The linoleum floor is shockingly cold on his bare feet. He realizes for the first time, that his hospital outfit is composed of loose white shorts and a white T-shirt. Tony rises, grabs his arm. Bruce shakes him off and staggers to the doorway.

Hope—something previously dead and painful—is waking up his stone heart, and he is almost afraid to let it blossom, too afraid that he might watch it die again.

But if this could be Harry's way out… if he could convince Loki…

"Where is Loki?" He grabs Tony's shoulders, shaking him slightly in his urgency. Tony catches on in a millisecond.

"You're not thinking—of course you're thinking that. Bruce, he's a bad, messed up dude—he'll play with your head and use you!"

"I don't care!" Bruce nearly yells. (He doesn't, not really. What does he have to live for?) "I don't care," he repeats again, brokenly, and maybe Tony sees the fractures in his eyes, because he nods a second later, sighs, scratches his goatee, and then gives a to-heck-with-it smirk.

"You owe me," Tony says, hooking a finger in his chest. "And only if you ask nicely," he adds, and bats his eyelids dramatically.

"When have you ever needed incentive for breaking the rules?" Bruce snorts, experiencing a fleeting shadow of humor. It feels… well, it feels refreshingly alive. Bruce hasn't really felt much of anything outside of hatred since he woke up in the infirmary after passing out in the lab. Tony waggles his eyebrows expectantly.

"Please." (And there may or may not have been an impatient, monstrous undertone eerily mirroring his voice, because Tony immediately sets to work putting the security cameras for Loki's cell on a data loop.)

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Harry

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As timeless as this plane is, it seems to only take minutes for Harry's strength to dissipate.

The shadowy outline of a body crumbles like dust in wind, the sliced ends of the ropes seamlessly attached to his phantom-fingers unraveling, the blessed legs falling apart.

Harry is dead again.

He is gratefully numb for a while. He doesn't feel regret, or sadness, or bitterness or loneliness. He doesn't even miss Bruce. He just exists, and tries to avoid remembering or feeling.

He thinks to himself that he is finally insane, because he occasionally finds himself experiencing brief hallucination fits. Sometimes he catches glimpses of that beautiful meadow again, but the doppelganger is gone. Harry feels strangely betrayed.

Eventually, he finds himself mechanically tearing down the horrible, horrible words painted across the colorless sky, like a contractor tearing down a 'for sale' sign. How long has it been? Bruce must have certainly read the letter by now.

Have decades passed? Is Bruce dead now? Harry's heart, firmly protected by a layer of ice and locked away, gives a funny twinge.

'It's better this way,' he tries to convince himself, 'Bruce is living a good life now. Probably feeling much better health-wise.'

(He thinks of Bruce as living because imagining him dead is much too painful, and Harry really doesn't want to feel anything right now.)

He is vaguely aware that he has been moved around. Sometimes liquid drips onto his surface, liquid that is not grape juice or lemon juice or milk or water or ink, and these liquids smoke and taint his atmosphere, like burning chemicals. Sometimes, when he snaps himself out of his daze, he feels lab-glove covered hands probing his pages. Did Bruce hand him off, then? Is he being experimented on, like the freak that he is?

'Don't think.'

Harry casts his emotions into the steel, icy box and locks it tightly. No emotion. Emotions are bad. Emotions lead to hope and hope, as Harry has learned, is a bad thing.

(He tries not to remember, but he can't help but recall helplessly watching Bruce's panicked inquiries as they carved themselves across his pages, or how he heartbreakingly refused to draw in the ink, or the faint feel of Bruce' calloused hands frantically, hysterically attempting to shove the ink in—)

(—Silly Bruce, the world doesn't work like that—)

'Can I kill myself?' He disinterestedly considers at some point. A crack appears in the steel box.

'Am I alive enough to even kill myself?' Crack, dangerously wide, near the padlock holding the lid shut. The box rattles, the trapped thoughts and emotions desperate to burst free.

Harry quickly goes back to thinking about not-thinking.

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A/N: Don't think this is a cliffhanger, or at least, not as bad as some of mine (I mean, you know what's going to happen.) I've got an extended weekend, however, so if I'm not swamped with projects and homework, Ill try to update ASAP.

Peace, love, and happiness! If anyone has a prompt idea they'd like me to write for Ink Splatters, go ahead and tell me in a review.