Note: Have had this Sleepless In Seattle-style romance floating around in my head and decided to start writing it along with the other stuff I have going on. Chapters are uncharacteristically short, for this one, not sure why!
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
.
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Sonnet XVII, Pablo Neruda
Chapter One: First Impression
just after the Battle of New York
Bruce regained consciousness in the middle of a city street. He vaguely remembered making it back to the tower with Tony and Steve as the Other Guy, but that brief flash of memory faded as soon as he was forced to take the stairs down from the penthouse. He guessed it was a good thing so much was wrecked around him anyway, because there was zero chance that his alter ego didn't take out his frustration on the smashed cars.
He hoped Hulk hadn't broken anything in the stairwell of the tower.
He stood up, dusted himself off, watching the concrete powder and glass particles hit the pavement in a distinguishable arc around him. Bruce reached for his waistband, squeezing the communicator Tony had sewn into his special expandable shorts.
"Awake, on my way in."
"Glad to hear it, Brucey Bear," Tony said. Bruce rolled his eyes, leaning over to dust more crap from his hair. "We'll get you patched up and then it's off to the Shawarma place."
"You sure you didn't hit your head on the way down?" he asked, his fingers squeezing the transmission button.
"If I did, it's on you, Banner. You're the one who caught me."
Bruce stopped at the corner across from the tower on hearing that. He remembered seeing Tony falling, but only in a flash, as usual for his time as the Other Guy. The next flash was Tony on the ground, along with a sense of relief. Did neither of them remember the moments that took Stark from unconscious freefall to safe landing?
Once inside the tower, Bruce headed straight for the medical floor in the basement. He was grateful it was there, though he hadn't expected to be showing up so soon after learning of its existence. The doctor on duty documented the places on his body which signaled a healed injury, since a little smeared blood was often the only indication anything had even happened.
"Hey, Bruce," Tony said, poking his head in the door to the exam room.
Somewhere in their consent forms there had to be one that allowed Tony permission to nose around like that. Bruce wondered if he ought to check, for HIPAA compliance sake, at the very least.
"Are you that hungry?" Bruce asked mildly. "You could always go without me."
"Star of the hour? No way. Just checking in," Tony said. "Need me to grab your clothes?"
"Would you?"
When the door shut, Bruce smiled to himself. A stressed-out Stark seemed to soothe sooner with a task. He made a mental note to watch the video of Tony's fall. It would either come up in conversation some random time while they were working together, or it wouldn't, and Bruce would need to bring it up. Their friendship was new, but he valued it.
The door opened again as the doctor whose name Bruce had already forgotten was examining his lower back and torso.
"I may have added some flair," Tony told him. Bruce doubted it, but he'd check, to be sure.
"Dr. Banner, are you aware that your Soulmark has changed?"
"What?"
Both Bruce and Tony spoke.
"Saving my life and getting the girl? You're a regular hero, Banner," Stark said.
Bruce looked down, smoothing his hand out along the words on his left flank. Sure enough, the words were silver instead of black. "There was no 'getting.' There will be no 'getting.' He shook his head at Tony.
"There's a mirror-" the attending physician suggested, gesturing to the full-length mirror along the wall in the corner of the room.
He almost didn't want to check. Actually finding his soulmate was the last thing Bruce wanted to happen. He'd had the words for thirteen years at that point, a number that he ordinarily wouldn't care much about, but which felt symbolic.
"Hulk doesn't have any, does he?" Tony asked.
"No," Bruce murmured.
They were silver, all right. The words, 'Something tells me you almost certainly have a vitamin deficiency!' were a little less obvious than they had been that morning, the color lightened as if touched by a real-life photographic filter.
"Can you confirm that you have no memory of them being spoken?" the doctor asked him.
"Yes." He only ever spent a few minutes unconscious after transforming back anymore. The woman must have been there to see the actual shift. His soulmate- a person he'd never really pictured meeting as much as running away from, at least for the last few years -had probably watched him shrink, his body adjusting to the size differential, and commented on one of the many logical medical consequences.
"I'll find her for you, don't worry," Tony said, standing beside Bruce, his hand coming down in a solid, collegial clap on Bruce's opposite shoulder.
"Please don't," Bruce said immediately. He crossed the room and started pulling on his change of clothes. Ordinarily he would have taken off the shorts and changed to new ones, but today? After what he'd just learned, it would be safer if he just left them on. Tony's reaction to his rejection showed that Bruce might have a fight on his hands.
"Oh no no no no," Tony said. "Soulmates are good. Don't do the manfully alone thing about this. Whoever this woman is, her existence is meant to make life better for you. You could use some of that. A lot of that."
"Even if that's true, there's nothing about my situation that would improve a 29 year old woman's life. Nothing," Bruce reiterated.
"You can't possibly know that," Tony argued.
"Tony. Find another post-alien-attack hobby, okay?" Bruce finished buttoning up his shirt and, just in case Tony decided to expose his new condition against his will, tucked it in.
"Even if I promised you not to, you wouldn't believe me, so I'll spare us both the lie," Tony said. "Besides, it's Shawarma time."
8888888888
Tony surprised him by saying nothing else about it for the rest of the day. Bruce made the mistake of assuming this meant his friend had decided to meddle without involving him. There was no chance Tony had decided not to meddle at all.
That night in his Tower apartment, there was a StarkPad waiting for him with a sticky note telling him the temporary password. Bruce sat down and tapped in the code, and immediately, a video began to play.
It showed a scene from the streets of New York. On the sidewalk a group of people were crouched next to an older man whose head was cradled in an older woman's lap. Kneeling beside the man was a young woman with her hand on his wrist, clearly taking his pulse. She stood, speaking to the older woman for a few seconds before an ambulance pulled up. A group of around four bystanders helped the older man onto the gurney while the young woman comforted the older woman.
The young woman walked up to the ambulance, spoke to the EMT for a second, and then the camera followed her walking about a block, the view changing in quality and angle. It was obviously a stitched-together series of surveillance videos.
The woman herself seemed to be wearing scrubs, which didn't surprise Bruce, given what he'd observed so far. Her hair was black, held back in a ponytail. He couldn't clearly see her face in any of the videos so far shown. She turned a corner, and the video quality improved a great deal, probably because she was walking past a parking lot. Suddenly, she stopped, backed up a little, and then stopped again.
Despite himself, Bruce was curious. He wouldn't put it past Tony to have the camera pan over to a fully-integrated scene of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up at some point- but what he saw instead was himself, or rather the Other Guy, stumbling to the ground and rolling on one side, only feet away from the black-haired healthcare worker.
Bruce hit pause, meaning to put the device down, but it didn't pause. The woman walked closer, covering her mouth with a hand as the Hulk started shrinking down into Bruce. Again, he tried to pause the video, turn it off, something, but it continued playing.
There was no sound, but her head bobbed as if speaking. As she crouched down and reached for his wrist, he saw her draw back in shock. The woman leaned over, looking closely at his left side. Then, to Bruce's complete shock, she reached out and touched his hair almost tenderly before standing up and running back the way she came.
"Yeah, I bet," he said, when the video finished. The black-haired woman was his soulmate, and the second she'd realized that fact, she had run in the other direction.