The next day, Bruce was too busy to hassle Tony over something he would rather just forget about entirely. The fact that the wormhole had been situated over the tower meant that Tony had a lot of data to go through, and he'd invited Bruce to stay and help. It was a lot better prospect than scrounging for a living in far-flung countries, as he'd been doing. Bruce did have one condition, though. He made Stark promise to build a containment solution for the Hulk as part of the rebuilding process.
Though Stark Industries was headquartered in California, Tony's tower was a home away from home for Stark, and he planned to stick around for a few weeks to oversee his charity's work in helping New York City recover from the attack. All of the Avengers had been given apartments to use, though Bruce was pretty sure Steve Rogers had already found a place in Brooklyn, and both Clint and Natasha seemed like they were staying only temporarily.
The soulmate thing was setting off some concern meters for him, though. Of all of the places to have come across her, and at all of the times, this was the worst. Bruce could almost taste stability in the air, something he'd despaired of ever even detecting again. He ought to take her very existence here as a cue to leave. If she was dressed in scrubs, that meant she wasn't a tourist. She likely lived somewhere nearby, probably worked at a local hospital, and had almost certainly rushed to help when things turned bizarre and dangerous outside.
The only good thing about the situation was it couldn't be argued that the woman had any intention of meeting him while he was conscious. It didn't even hurt, her fear, as it might have as little as five years ago. She was wise, his soulmate.
Bruce left Tony's tainted tablet where he'd found it on the kitchen counter. Giving it back would broach a subject he intended to avoid indefinitely.
8888888888
"Tony, what's the login here?" Bruce asked. The past two days had been spent on the roof looking over what remained of the apparatus Selvig had built to create the wormhole. Rain was in the forecast that day, though, so they were down in the lab Stark had been populating with equipment in advance of finishing up on the roof.
"Texted it to you," Tony said, walking past with a large plank of wood. He was wearing gloves, but the edge of the thing was resting on his bare lower arm. It was Splinter City, waiting to happen. Bruce wondered exactly how oblivious to possible danger a person had to be to work with Bruce Banner, lab experiment gone wrong, and still not wear proper PPE.
"I left my phone in the apartment. Can't you just set it to the same password as the laptop we were already using? I have that one memorized already."
Stark stopped, letting the wood slide down onto the floor. Bruce winced. "No! You shouldn't ever use the same password twice, Big Green. That would just be irresponsible." He rolled his eyes and hefted the wood back up, heading over to the back wall where he'd set up a stack of coffee tins and a plastic bin at equal heights. Tony set down the wood on it, whipped a level out of his back pocket, and made a self-satisfied noise.
Bruce thought he had once seen those same empty tins going for a couple of hundred each on Ebay. They were from some rare, exclusive brand that weren't even sold at a flat price, but auctioned off, tin by tin, brand new. Did Tony even know they were anything other than extra fodder for his MacGuyverish approach to lab design?
"I'll be back, then," Bruce said.
"Okay, fine. But I didn't finish your playroom yet, so you're not allowed to smash me."
"Tony, I rarely know what you're talking about," Bruce said.
"I'll take that as a compliment. So here's the thing: I have access to probably some things that I shouldn't, thanks to some tech connections." He sat down beside the computer Bruce was trying to access. "One of those things is search data. I share it with SHIELD when they play nice. I've got not just what's searched, but where and by whom, if that information is available. There's a difference between someone searching for 'Banner, gamma, weakness' when it's somewhere in Sokovia two weeks ago versus a person at a public library in NYC searching 'Hulk, human, transform' just yesterday, right? And there was."
"What does this have to do with the password to access the computer you're leaning on, Tony?" Bruce asked, hoping he sounded patient enough to avoid a 'calm down' jibe.
"Footage of your girl," Tony said, grinning. "I think she knows who you are, now. And I know her name, thanks to the library system logging who uses their card for public computer access."
Bruce immediately pictured the black-haired woman from the tablet video and wondered if this one showed her face. Then, sanity returned. Nothing good could come of what Stark was doing.
"That's got to be multiple privacy violations, Tony! Honestly, can't you leave well enough alone? She probably wants to know how to avoid me, and for good reason."
"If you both play hard to get, neither of you will 'get,' you know that, right?" Tony said, hopping down from the table with a petulant frown.
"That's exactly the point, yes," Bruce said, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Well, how about this, then. You want to avoid her so much, you should know what she looks like, yes? Maybe know her name? Who knows, you might want to hire a medical team to run tests in the basement at some point, and you wouldn't want to accidentally hire your soulmate, how embarrassing, right?"
"Funny." It was a known secret that, thanks to their nondescript soulmate words, neither Tony nor Pepper had known they were the ones who had triggered them for each other. They'd both spent time and resources trying to track down the person who'd said their words. The realization had taken years.
"Bruce. Brucey Bear. Pistachio Studmuffin. Take it from me, okay? Resisting soulmates is resisting the inevitable. Pep and I took 'let's pretend this is a platonic match' thing for a ride for a really, really long time, and all it did was bring us back to the station. You should trust the expert on this," Tony said, dropping into the desk chair and tapping out a complicated password like it was as easy to remember as 'password12345.' He leaned back and smiled at Bruce. "Don't make me have to kidnap you in a cave for three months to get you to see the light."
"Yeah, I don't think that would go well for you or the cave," Bruce said. "I can assume you've booby trapped this with another video, then?"
"Facial shot, yes. Boobs? Sorry, the monitor was in the way."
Bruce ignored the childish comment, even if it was a bit witty. "If I watch this will you stop?"
"Oh, goodness no."
Just like before, the video started right away. In an overhead view, a black-haired woman walked into the entryway for what Bruce assumed was a library. Her shoulder-length hair was held back from her forehead with a cloth headband, and she was wearing a purple shirt similar in color to one of Bruce's favorites. He shot a sidelong look at Tony, wondering if he knew about the shirt. He'd probably never hear the end of it, if his friend figured that out.
Then, something occurred to him.
"I thought you said you had search data?" Bruce asked. He was starting to question how cavalierly his friend was taking this project of his.
"I cross-referenced that with the surveillance. Come on, it's not like it was hard."
The view changed to the side, watching her walk through a large room to a bank of computers at the back. Again the view changed to a quite close perspective, slanted across her face as she sat down at the nearest computer.
"Lucked out, there. That camera is static," Tony said.
Bruce should have had the strength to look away, but he didn't. His soulmate had a heart-shaped face with a small nose that turned up a little at the tip. Her eyes were blue, so clear and rich in color that even the surveillance camera caught the color. She was pretty. Maybe even more than pretty.
The sight of her struck him like a blow. Even in the year 2012, soulmates were considered the most important factor in relationships. Maybe people who didn't believe in them weren't considered mentally ill anymore by the more conservative, family-oriented groups in the world, but there were rude names for women with black soulmate words who were out looking for a long-term, non-bonded relationship. That's the life the woman he was looking at had in store for herself. Just by virtue of being magically, painfully linked to him.
"Turn it off," Bruce said darkly. "I have work to do on this thing."
"But you'll miss- here, look," Tony said.
In a window at the right hand corner of the full-screen video, a view of the computer his soulmate was using popped up.
"How-" Bruce started.
"It's like you don't know me at all," Tony scoffed.
She scanned her library card and a box popped up. Inside was a name. Cicely Besnard.
Knowing her name made the situation more real for Bruce, in a way that having silver-tinted words didn't. Until now, the black-haired healthcare worker was only an archetype, a helpful person whose exact shape and name were undefined. She was a real person now, no longer an abstraction he could pretend wasn't relevant.
As Bruce watched, she tapped 'confirm' on her name and address (he deliberately didn't look, but assumed Tony already had it written down somewhere) and brought up a browser window. Instead of typing immediately, though, she stopped, looking up as if trying to remember something.
Multiple emotions crossed her face. Her eyes widened, lips pressing together before they curled up in the sort of smile that implied the person had a secret. Bruce supposed she did. After a few seconds, she mouthed something he couldn't decipher from lip reading and started typing.
The computer view showed the words. 'Hulk, human form, transform.' The results appeared, showing a few YouTube videos of people in green makeup using their graphics skills to pretend they were transforming from the Hulk into themselves. The top non-video result, though, was his Wikipedia entry, with his name.
This time Bruce understood what Cicely Besnard said, even without hearing her words, because it was his name.
"See? Interest, not fear," Tony said.
"I'm not afraid either, Tony, but I have no intention of doing anything about this," Bruce said, gesturing at the screen. "In fact, I suspect this woman looked these things up at a public library because she doesn't want the results on her home computer or her phone. This is proof that she's the kind of smart, concerned person I thought she was. She's keeping this soulmate thing away from her home and work life, just like I'm going to."
Bruce let himself look one more time at the blue-eyed, black-haired woman that fate had designated as his soulmate. "I'm sorry, Cicely," he said, and closed the program using Force Quit.
"What home life?" Tony muttered. "You know, standing on some kind of self-hating principle like this doesn't do anyone any good." Tony told him.
He did actually know that, but Tony hopefully would never know what it was like to love someone as much as he'd loved Betty, only to discover that it was his actions that had put her in the hospital. The most generous, caring thing he could do for his soulmate would be to stay far, far away from her.