A/N: Hello and welcome to the second part of my Avengers saga. This story occurs after the conclusion of the previous one, Within. You will still mostly know what is going on here even if you choose not to read the first story. I hope you enjoy it!
XxXxX
Bruce Banner lounged in a leather recliner, watching cars pass in the dark. Avengers Tower was almost empty, its sleek, metallic halls spotless, shadowy, giving off echoes. Most of the lobby was dark, apart from the lamp next to Bruce. In just a few hours the sun would rise and streak through the windows, the glass doors would open, and hundreds of employees would arrive.
But right now, it was the most peaceful time of day.
An elevator dinged around four-thirty.
Tony Stark strolled out, dressed down in an oil-stained shirt and burned jeans. A rag was sticking out of his back pocket, smoking on one end.
He paused when he saw Bruce sitting there, gesturing, "You better have pants on under that."
Bruce habitually flattened the front of his robe, "What're you gonna do if I don't?"
"Call security, maybe. You can never be too careful with HR these days." Tony circled the lobby, looking out the front windows, making a few rounds before he flopped onto an adjacent couch.
Bruce had been living in the tower for two weeks now, and Tony always managed to find him in the mornings – even when he took his tea on the roof.
"I felt the ground shake an hour ago," Bruce said, sipping his drink, "Figured I was imagining it."
Tony patted one of the smoldering patches on his pants. "What were you doing up an hour ago?" He sighed, resigned, "I just bought these."
"Doing a little construction?"
"I'm in hardware mode. Having some… combustion issues. What about you?" Tony turned his dark eyes on Bruce, "Did you sequence my tomatoes yet?"
"I started it last night. Give it a few more hours."
Tony liked to hire innovators, and one of them created tomato plants that could grow and produce fruit twice as fast as anything else on the market – but they were still in the testing phase. Last year, they made the guinea pigs glow in the dark, and this year, they were completely destabilizing right after harvest – that is, they were melting. It was an interesting, multifaceted problem, but lately Tony had been focusing almost entirely on the colder, harder side of engineering.
Bruce was happy to help.
He spent the long days at the tower burying himself in research. Mixing evolution, gene manipulation, and biological and synthetic components was one of his passions – and he had nothing else to do. Before coming back to New York he had been thinking about taking a teaching position at Harvard. Nowadays, the future was hazy.
Besides, being here gave him a goal, a purpose. He was mostly working on the telecrops, but his ulterior motive was sprawled out on the couch beside him, scrolling through his phone.
Tony.
Bruce was worried about him operating all alone. Pepper was still with her mother, requesting some space after what happened with the Whisperer, and she was the one who usually dampened his chaotic personality. Without her, he meandered between tasks, between projects. Tony was brilliant, but sometimes directionless.
He was here, in part, to look out for his friend.
Bruce said, "What are you doing up so early?"
Tony kept a spontaneous schedule these days. He said, "You're not the only one who appreciates a little morning walk around the tower." He laughed at something on his phone. "Modern technology. We went from automobiles to photoshopping eyebrows onto animals within a hundred years."
"Are you… not sleeping again?"
Tony sighed, "You can pump the breaks on the intervention, there, Doc. I got a call from super-secret special agent Hill. She wanted to borrow some of my tech. Had to send it out manually."
Maria Hill had been rebuilding the shattered intelligence organization, SHIELD, from the ground up. Even with Nick Fury dead and most of SHIELD's official operating power taken away, Maria was a force to be reckoned with. And she was a friend.
"Is she okay?" Bruce asked.
Tony waved it off, "She told me not to worry, so this is me, not worrying."
"Are you worrying about anything else?" Bruce pressed.
"Can we skip the twenty questions today? Let me go ahead and answer them for you. Yes, I was thinking about Pepper, and no, I'm not spiraling into a deep, dark abyss because she won't call me back. I'm not a sixteen-year-old girl."
"I'm just trying to look out for you," Bruce said.
Tony groaned.
Bruce was happy to sit in silence while he finished his tea. Tony folded his arms behind his head and stared through the glass panels that separated the lobby from the sidewalk. It was busy out there already, cars passing, headlights casting long shadows.
Tony looked peaceful for once, content to do nothing.
When a couple of hours had passed, and daylight started creeping over the street, Tony rolled off the couch. "Hey, you're coming to that thing tonight, right? Because if I have to go, you have to go. I'm not facing a mob of geezers spouting war stories alone – I get enough of that from Cap."
"Yes, I'm going. It's really important to Sam, and he's a good friend of ours."
"I'm not sure if I would call Sam a good friend. A friend, for sure, but good? Neutral. Why does everything need an extra adjective?"
It was about to get crowded in the lobby.
Bruce retreated to the Octagon – the stupidly-named floor of the tower that Tony had designed to house the team. It was very homey, the elevator opening to a cozy living room with a classic, puffy couch and a flatscreen mounted to the wall. Hallways on either side led to eight rooms, hence the name. His was on the end of the left hall, denoted with a black tag that read 'Banner.'
His room had a leather recliner and a west-facing window. Bruce settled in with a book, letting his mind wander. It was just the two of them in the tower right now, as far as Avengers went. Steve was in DC with Sam, Nat was on a mission somewhere in Europe, and Clint was on vacation. Thor was – well, Bruce had no idea what Thor did with his free time.
It left him living in the Octagon alone. Bruce relished the peace, the quiet, the total lack of chaos.
His phone rang.
It was Nicholas Freeman.
Bruce smiled, "Nick, good morning."
Freeman sounded positively cheery, like he always did. "I hope I didn't wake you."
"No, no. I was already up. Insomniac. I was just about to head your way."
"You're still in the city, then?"
"Yeah."
"I was wondering if you might bring me something – a catalyst. I think Mr. Stark keeps it in his labs, but rarely uses it. It might work for us as a stabilizer."
"A stabilizer…? Does that mean…?"
Freeman had a smile in his voice, a sweet kind of glee, "We're very close, Bruce. It could be a matter of weeks, maybe even days, until your suffering is over."
Days.
Days.
It could be days before the Hulk was gone forever, just a nightmare of the past. Bruce might be able to find some normalcy again, some peace. He could go into a crowded room without worrying about threatening the safety of everyone in it. He could be angry, scared, hurt, without literally falling apart, without becoming someone else, something else.
The big guy stirred inside, as if he understood the sentiment and disapproved.
"I never invited you in," Bruce said. "And it's time for you to go."
XxXxX
Bruce had a hard time getting to the house. His RV got stuck in an embarrassingly small patch of ice and snow and he walked almost a mile, coat bundled tightly, to reach Freeman's private home – a gift from a government very interested in his research. It was a tiny wooden thing, almost like a beach house with no ocean, isolated in rolling hills.
Freeman was standing in the door when he arrived, beaming, "Come in. I just made cookies."
"Cookies." Bruce sucked in a warm, chocolatey breath, sinking into his usual seat at the table. A scalding cup of tea and a plate of cookies awaited him.
Freeman took the seat adjacent to him, at the head of the table. He was over seventy, with an excessive silver beard and limbs so thin he looked like he might snap in a stray wind. Despite having the appearance of a cartoon scientist, Freeman was one of the most brilliant people Bruce had ever met. He was at the forefront of Enhanced-Person studies, the pioneer of the cellular biology behind superhuman abilities.
He was an asset to SHIELD, and a friend.
"How have you been these past weeks?" Freeman asked.
Bruce shoved a cookie in his mouth. Sometimes coming to see Freeman was like visiting his grandparents. "Normal, I guess."
"How is your team, after your ordeal?"
Bruce had told Freeman what happened with Tony and the Whisperer, holding back anything he thought should stay within the team. The Avengers were shaken, not shattered.
"Tony is back to himself, and Steve is completely healed. He's been in DC with Sam." Bruce produced a vial from his pocket. "I brought the catalyst. Tony has stockpiles of it."
Freeman took it, turning it over in his hands. It was a small yellow vial, capped with metal on either end – a simple chemical catalyst. It would be exotic and probably useless in any normal lab, but tony had accumulated some of the most unique chemical components in the world. He was always pushing the boundaries between what was and what could be.
"I've been working with the samples of Captain Rogers' blood," Freeman said, setting the catalyst gently on the table and pulling a folder from a stack behind him. "I put together some new sequences using a technique I developed last year. When he created Captain Rogers, Dr. Erskine was working with extremely limited resources. He understood the outcome of the serum, but not its mechanic – the how. Look at this and tell me what you see."
His folder held a series of images, DNA sequences. Freeman had scrawled all over them, written notes, highlighted base pairs.
Bruce picked up on an abnormality immediately. "Is that… new?"
Freeman nodded, "A new base. You and Captain Rogers have this anomaly in your DNA, in an almost identical location. And it gets more interesting. From my work with other Enhanced individuals, I have compiled other sequences that felt familiar to yours. I pulled them all up to view comparatively. I've isolated the abnormalities here."
He spread three pages on the table, lining them up. Each had a name, a serial number.
Bruce ran his hands over the sequences, picking up on the oddities.
He dropped his cookie.
"A common thread linking me to the Enhanced…" he murmured.
"Not just you, but Captain Rogers, as well. I think I may have found the most basic building block of abnormal abilities. Each is different, but the parameters I pulled from yours and Captain Roger's DNA has allowed me to isolate some variation of this new base sequence in nearly every Enhanced sample I have access to."
And then he said the magic words.
"I put together a trial for you, to see if we can neutralize it."
The room got heavy. It literally shivered around him. Bruce rested his cheek on his hand to keep himself steady. A discovery like this was not only a breakthrough in this field, but in all of them. Biology was the foundation of life science, and the genetic code was the foundation of biology. It was responsible for all things that floated, walked, and flew on this planet.
A new sequence was a challenge to the things that built his reality.
Without that foundation, a void opened up below him.
Freeman said, "Are you okay?"
"Just having a small existential crisis. I'm fine."
"Do you want to go ahead with the trial? We can do it now."
Bruce almost said yes. He almost jumped at the chance. He could get rid of the Hulk right here, right now. But as eager as he was to get the ball rolling, he also had reservations. There was always a little voice in the back of his mind warning him not to make it worse, not to pull the Hulk out permanently, to punish the Earth with his wrath.
"I have a party tonight," Bruce said, covering his uncertainties with a reasonable excuse. "I have to drive to DC. I should leave soon, actually."
Freeman smiled sadly, "I think they would understand."
"I know they would, but I promised Steve I would come. Its for a veterans outreach center – a good cause. Sam has been working on it for months."
"Your health is also a good cause."
Bruce smiled reflexively. "I know it is, trust me. I'll be back later. I really want this, but the Hulk has been around for a long time. One more night won't change anything."
Freeman seemed ready to argue, but then he suddenly dropped it. "Okay. Fair enough. But hang around for a bit. I want to try something with this catalyst, and I think you'll be interested in the results."
Bruce was itching to call Tony, to tell him about this earthshattering discovery, but there was no turning Freeman down. He had done so much for Bruce – a few minutes was nothing.
He waited almost half an hour.
Freeman had disappeared into his vault, taking the catalyst and a few empty vials down with him. Bruce ate the rest of the cookies, poured over the DNA sequences, and then wandered around in front of the vault door, inspecting pictures on the walls, the state of the carpet. He hoped Freeman would see him hovering and remember that he was in a hurry to leave.
A low hissing sound caught his attention.
Bruce tapped on the vault door, "Hey, Nick? I think you have a gas leak or something. We should probably…"
His heart was suddenly racing.
A thick, yellowish fog poured into the room.
Bruce reached for the vault door, but before his hand made contact, the room went black.