Chapter 19
The city felt eerily quiet.
Steve stood on the sidewalk and looked around, taking stock of the situation. The Chitauri threat was gone, the aliens having collapsed lifeless where they stood when the missile Stark had diverted had detonated against their mothership in space. The streets of Manhattan, normally teeming with people going about their businesses, were deserted; the perimeter the police had set up at Steve's request had done its job. Instead, abandoned cars, broken Chitauri chariots and rubble from damaged skyscrapers littered the streets and sidewalks. An acrid smoke drifted on the breeze.
Stark Tower behind him was an island of activity in a sea of silence, now occupied by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who had arrived to escort Loki, the Tesseract and the scepter to secure locations. Thor and Stark had gone with them, while Romanoff and Barton had left to coordinate S.H.I.E.L.D. efforts to secure abandoned Chitauri technology before it fell into the wrong hands.
Steve knew what his next task was. As every soldier quickly learned, battles were only half the battle. The more somber tasks of locating and treating the wounded, of collecting the dead, of clearing roads and re-establishing supply routes, were just as essential to saving lives as defeating the enemy. And thanks to his improved resilience and endurance, he had long ago fallen into the habit of assisting with search and rescue as soon as the fighting was finished.
Sirens could be heard far in the distance, but there were no emergency vehicles in sight. There was no way for them to get here, where the fighting had been concentrated, thanks to all the rubble littering the streets. And while there were no people in sight, Steve knew the police had faithfully followed his order to get everyone indoors. There could be, and probably were, hundreds of injured people nearby, and no easy way to get them to the hospital four city blocks northeast of here.
A shout nearby suddenly drew his attention. A woman, calling for help. Without hesitation, Steve broke into a run, following the sound. He came around a corner and found a woman dressed in medical scrubs standing in front of a bodega with a truck smashed through the front. She was peering through a small gap between the broken wall and the truck, shouting something through it.
"Problem?" Steve asked as he drew up beside her.
"There's a guy trapped inside," she said breathlessly, glancing briefly at Steve. "There isn't enough room here for me to get in to him, but-" She looked at Steve again, properly this time, and suddenly stopped talking, giving him a slow up-and-down as a confused expression crossed her face.
"Is there another entrance?" he asked her urgently.
"Yes," she answered, still looking at him oddly, "around the back, but it's locked."
"Can he get to it?"
"He can't move. Says he's pinned under something."
"Show me."
She didn't question him, although she looked like she wanted to. Quickly she led him around the corner to a door marked "employees only" that was, in fact, securely locked.
"Stand back," he told the woman, and then with three quick chops with the shield's edge, he severed all three hinges from the door. After that, it was easy to lift the thick metal door out of the frame and toss it to the side. Ignoring the incredulous look the woman was giving him, Steve entered the building and called out.
"In here!" a man shouted back weakly.
The inside of the bodega was a mess. Collapsed shelving and spilled food items covered every inch of the floor. It took Steve a moment to see the man, lying on his back, pinned underneath a tall stack of shelves. He turned to look at Steve, his face dusty and bloodied.
"Please," he said hoarsely. "Don't leave me here! Don't leave-!" His eyes were wild.
He must have been trapped there, alone, for hours. More than enough time to get worked into a panic.
"We're not going anywhere," Steve said calmly. "We're going to get you out. What's your name?"
The man took in a ragged breath. "Charles."
"Just sit tight, Charles. We'll have you out in no time."
He glanced at the woman in scrubs, who had followed him in. "Are you really a nurse?" he asked her.
She looked at him levelly. "Are you really Captain America?"
"Well... I played him in the movies."
He picked his way over the rubble and carefully lifted the shelving off the man. The woman didn't wait for instructions, but silently grabbed the man's arms and pulled him out into a clearer space. Steve lowered the shelves back down to the floor and came around to evaluate the man. The woman was already leaning over him, checking his vitals.
"Charles? My name is Cami," she said calmly and clearly. "I'm going to take care of you, okay? Just lay still and try to relax. I'm going to tie up your leg, okay? Nice and tight. We'll get the bleeding stopped and then we'll work on getting you out of here." She was already pulling a dog leash off one of the sale displays nearby and sliding it under his leg just above the gash. The man groaned but obediently laid as still as he could.
Seeing that she had everything under control, Steve picked his way through the rubble to the driver's side of the truck that had crashed through the front of the bodega, and looked in. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel with a bad head injury. Steve worked his arm through the shattered window and checked his pulse. Nothing. He was already cold and stiff. Nothing they could do for him.
He went back over to Cami, who had her patient stabilized now. "Can you carry him?" she asked, looking up at Steve.
"Yes. But I'm not sure where to carry him to."
"There's a triage center set up inside the office building across the way," she said, glancing out the window. "They sent some of us out to look for survivors."
Steve carefully picked up the man and followed Cami across the street and into the office building's spacious lobby, where row upon row of injured people were laid out on the floor, and a handful of medical personnel — mostly in civilian clothing — were bustling around, doing their best to treat everyone, although this was clearly a makeshift operation. There were far more patients than doctors, and not much medical equipment that he could see.
With Cami's help, Steve found a place to lay down Charles beside the other wounded people. Before he could straighten up, the man grabbed onto his arm.
"Thank you," he said hoarsely. "Thank you. I didn't think I was gonna get out." His face was pale under its layer of dust. "Thank you."
Steve patted his shoulder reassuringly. "Okay. You're gonna be fine now." He glanced over at Cami, who was already pulling rolls of bandages out of a box. "Who's in charge here?"
Her hands full, she nodded her head across the lobby. "Dr. Trenton. Over there, in the red shirt."
Steve walked over purposefully. Dr. Trenton was digging through a box, shaking his head.
"Still no disinfectant," he said grimly to someone else standing by. "There has to be more supplies somewhere around here." He glanced at Steve, and then did a double-take upon seeing his uniform.
"What's the plan for getting these people to a hospital?" Steve asked, making his voice as authoritative as possible. He didn't have the patience for explanations right now.
Dr. Trenton studied him for a moment, and thankfully seemed to decide it wasn't worth asking. "The plan is a lousy one," he said bluntly. "The National Guard said they were going to locate equipment for clearing the road — bulldozers or a crane or something — but they said it could take hours."
"Maybe I can-" Steve started, but just then they heard a woman's piercing scream. Both he and Dr. Trenton whirled, and a woman came bursting through the doors into the lobby with a terrified look on her face, just as a deep voice outside boomed so loudly that the windows shook:
"So many STAIRS!"
Seconds later, the Hulk came stomping down the street, swiping irritably at a mailbox on the sidewalk and sending a snowstorm of envelopes fluttering through the air.
"Stupid stairs!" he boomed, and he turned and fixed a fierce glare through the windows, where all the medical personnel and not a few of the patients were looking out at him fearfully.
Hulk took one step toward the windows, growling, and several people screamed. A few patients attempted to scramble to their feet, preparing to run. Acting quickly, Steve darted out the doors and caught the Hulk's attention.
"Hey! Hulk!"
Hulk took one look at Steve, and paused for a moment.
"Calm down," Steve said sternly. "There are injured people here."
"Cap calm down!" Hulk snapped. "Hulk hate the stairs!"
"There aren't any stairs here," Steve shot back, mystified. What was he going on about?
The Hulk growled angrily and kicked a fire hydrant. Instantly a fountain of water gushed straight up into the air. Steve sighed. Apparently asking the Hulk to calm down was like asking water not to be wet. Well, maybe he could at least direct the Hulk's rage in more productive ways.
"Fine. You want to smash? Smash that!" he said, pointing at a broken-down car parked in the middle of the road. Willingly, Hulk swatted it casually with the back of his hand, and the car skittered across the road and came to a noisy stop against the building. And just like that, part of the road leading to the hospital was clear. Hulk grunted with grim satisfaction.
"And that!" Steve said, pointing to a food truck that was blocking two lanes.
While Hulk was smashing the food truck into oblivion, Steve grabbed the bumper of a taxi cab and put his shoulder into it, churning his legs until he had the car pushed to the curb.
It didn't take long for the Hulk to catch on. Working together, they made their way down the street, pushing vehicles and tossing rubble aside as fast as they could. Finally, Steve put his hands on his hips and looked down the street, satisfied to see that most of the obstructions had now been cleared away.
"Good smash!" he said approvingly, turning to look at the Hulk… who had just raised his clenched fist over a shiny blue convertible parked at the curb that had miraculously escaped harm during the battle.
"No! Not that one!" Steve shouted in alarm.
Hulk dropped his fist, and the convertible exploded into a million bits of twisted metal and shattered glass. The Hulk gave a satisfied grunt.
"Hey! Hulk!" Steve shouted, pointing his finger sternly and injecting all the authority he could into his voice. "Stop smashing!"
Hulk growled and waved a meaty hand dismissively in Steve's direction before turning back toward the convertible, raising his fist to smash it a second time.
"Wait!" Steve shouted, getting an idea. "I have something bigger!"
The Hulk paused, fist hovering over the convertible, and peered at Steve curiously. "Big smash?"
"Yes!" Steve said eagerly. "Big smash! Down there!" He pointed down the street to the foot of Stark Tower, where the crumpled letters R and K lay strewn across the street, the last obstruction remaining between the triage center and the hospital. The S and the T had landed on the rooftop of a nearby building, but the A, oddly enough, was still neatly affixed to the top of Stark Tower. "This way!"
Steve took off at a sprint toward the roadblock, and to his relief Hulk forgot about smashing cars and followed him in great leaping bounds that shook the ground. Hulk was slow to build up momentum, but after a block or so he started to gain on Steve, coming up behind in a sprint now swift and — to be honest — terrifying.
"Too slow!" Hulk boomed as he pulled even, and without warning Steve felt a huge hand close roughly around him, and suddenly his legs were pedaling uselessly in midair as the Hulk snatched him up.
This was no glorious flight through the air, pulled by the power of a magical hammer and held in the safe and secure grip of Thor. No, this time Steve was flopping around like a rag doll as Hulk swung his arms back and forth, legs churning powerfully, heading straight for the roadblock.
"Put me down!" Steve gasped, but he could barely squeeze out the words thanks to Hulk's iron grip around his middle. Hulk's only response was to launch himself high into the air, and then it was as if everything was moving in slow motion, the two of them rising up at an almost leisurely rate — Steve had time to catch sight of several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents looking at them through the sixth-floor window of Stark Tower, mouths agape — before they reached the peak of the arc and then descended, gaining speed rapidly until the Hulk came down with all the grace of a 10-ton megabomb.
Steve felt the jarring impact in every bone of his body as bits of the letters R and K exploded in every direction. The Hulk roared in satisfaction and began stomping gleefully on the mangled remnants, rattling Steve until he felt like his teeth were coming loose from his skull.
"Let go!" Steve insisted, beating his fists uselessly against Hulk's hand, and to his surprise Hulk actually obeyed and dropped him casually onto the ground, where he crumpled into an ungraceful heap amid the wreckage. Steve staggered to his feet, nearly tripping over a fallen streetlamp, and then straightened up, shaking broken glass out of his hair and trying to regain some semblance of dignity.
The Hulk roared with laughter. "Cap smash!" he boomed, giving Steve a not-so-gentle shove toward the pile of rubble.
Steve had no intention of smashing anything, but now that the letters had been broken down into smaller pieces, he had no trouble grabbing a steel beam and dragging it to the curb. After a few minutes of him moving rubble off the street, the Hulk caught on and left off stomping in favor of kicking things to the side. It wasn't long until they finally had the street completely clear.
Steve could see a handful of people emerging cautiously from the triage center, surveying the scene. Steve caught the eye of Dr. Trenton and gestured silently for them to go back inside. He didn't want them bringing out the injured until the Hulk was well out of the way. He wasn't quite as wild as Steve had been led to believe when he'd watched the footage Coulson had shown him — Hulk did seem to understand well enough who was friend and who was foe, at least — but he was also just as capable of hurting someone by accident as on purpose.
"More smash!" Hulk demanded, looking around expectantly in search of a new target.
"No more smash," Steve replied, and he acknowledged a weariness deep down in his bones. He was capable of fighting for days at a time without sleep, but even he had his limits, and he sensed he was close to reaching them. "No more fight."
The Hulk growled briefly, looking irritated… but not angry. Come to think of it, he had seemed more playful than angry the whole time they'd been cleaning up this mess. Was it possible the Hulk was running out of steam, too? He didn't seem physically tired, but maybe he was calming down a little. After all, even the angriest man couldn't stay angry forever.
"Yes," Steve said firmly. "Time to go home."
"No home!" Hulk waved a massive hand dismissively.
Steve paused. Did he mean he didn't want to go home? Or that he didn't have a home to go to? He realized he had no idea where Banner was originally from. He had apparently been on the run for more than a year, an outcast, feared and hated. Maybe all doors were shut to him now.
"I know," Steve said gently. "I can't go home either. But I have a place." He gestured in the direction of his apartment. "You can come. We could..." He cast his mind about, trying to think of what would be an enticement to a beast with the temperament of a child. "...play Galaga?"
Hulk creased his brow and grunted in confusion.
"Yeah, I don't know what it is either," Steve admitted.
"Hulk fight," Hulk said, thumping his chest proudly with both fists. "Banner play." He wandered away, but after only three steps he suddenly went down on one knee, cracking the sidewalk with his weight, and slowly sank down onto his hands and knees, groaning. Concerned, Steve hurried over to him, but drew back in surprise when he realized Hulk was shrinking.
It took only seconds, and suddenly Bruce Banner was the one on his hands and knees, shirtless and dusty, the green tinge fading from his skin as he moaned softly, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
"Dr. Banner," Steve said in relief, coming down to crouch beside him. "You okay?"
Banner gave him a bewildered look and then slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, gathering in the too-loose waistband of his pants with one hand. Looking small and pale, he leaned back against an overturned dumpster, tipping his head back in exhaustion, gray-dusted curls damp and sticking to the sides of his face. Steve waited, giving him a chance to catch his breath. Finally, Banner licked his dry lips, flopped his head to one side, and looked at Steve with naked dread in his eyes.
"Did I kill anyone?" he asked hoarsely.
"Chitauri," Steve said promptly, and Banner closed his eyes momentarily, looking intensely relieved.
"Don't you remember?" Steve asked curiously.
"I never remember much," Banner said wearily. "Just... flashes. Images, all jumbled up." He scrubbed tiredly at his face and then looked around at the piles of rubble lining both sides of the street.
"Oh, man," he muttered. "Did I break all that?"
"Actually, you helped me clean it up," Steve reassured him, and quickly explained everything that had happened since Banner had transformed into the Hulk.
"Are you telling me..." Banner squinted one eye a little, looking skeptically at Steve. "...that the other guy actually listened to you? Did what you told him?"
"Yeah. Mostly."
Banner let out a slow breath, looking quietly amazed. "Maybe it's better when I choose to do it," he said softly, almost to himself. "Maybe then he's not so crazy..."
He shifted position, using both hands to push himself upright from his slump against the dumpster. He got himself sitting up straight, but he nearly lost his grip on the stretched-out waistband of his pants as he did so. Fortunately, he managed to yank up his pants and maintain his dignity just in the nick of time.
"Every time," Banner muttered, gathering the material around his waist and holding it tightly with both hands, looking embarrassed.
"Too loose is better than too tight," Steve said dryly.
Banner gave him a curious look. "You say that like a man who knows what he's talking about."
"Right after my transformation," Steve explained, "I had to chase a Hydra agent through the streets of Brooklyn, barefoot and in pants that were-" He paused. "I don't even want to tell you how many sizes too small they were. I used to be a little guy. Those pants were cutting into all the wrong places." He shuddered, remembering.
Banner laughed, forgetting his embarrassment, as Steve had hoped he would. Just then, they heard the sound of engines, and looked over to see that vehicles were emerging from a parking garage and pulling up in front of the triage center, where medical personnel already waited with patients to be loaded in them. Within minutes, they would undoubtedly be driving past Steve and Bruce en route to the hospital.
Steve glanced at the shops behind them. "There's a clothing shop," he said, nodding toward it. "Want me to try to find something for you?"
"Yeah," Banner said, looking down self-consciously. "I better get dressed before I really start scaring people."
"Okay. Don't move, I'll be right back."
There was no one in the shop — the owners had no doubt fled hours ago when the battle started — but Steve easily entered through a shattered window and found some clothing that looked like it would fit Banner. He pulled off the price tags and left them on the counter with a hastily jotted note explaining the situation, promising that he would come back later to pay. He'd left his wallet with his civilian clothing back on the helicarrier, and somehow he doubted Banner still had his.
"So where is everyone?" Banner asked after Steve had handed him the clothing and he'd stepped behind the dumpster to dress in privacy.
Steve told him, adding: "We're all supposed to meet up again later for lunch... or dinner?" He realized he had no idea what time it was, or even what day it was. Between the chaos of the battle and all the time zones he'd traveled through on this mission, he'd lost track of how long he had been awake now. It felt like a long, long time. "At the Shawarma Palace. Tony insisted. Don't ask me what shawarma is."
"Oh, they had it in India," Banner said easily. "It's good." He emerged from behind the dumpster, now fully dressed, and then gingerly lowered himself back down to sit on the curb, still looking a little shaky.
"Sorry, it just takes me a while to come back down from this," Banner said apologetically. "If you have somewhere to be, you can go. I'm good."
But Steve didn't quite believe him. Banner obviously found the transformation process traumatic, both physically and emotionally, and it didn't seem right to leave him alone now.
"We got the path cleared for the ambulances," Steve said, sitting on the curb next to him and trying not to wince; the Chitauri energy blast he'd taken to the torso still stung, although he'd refused to let it slow him down. "I think we've earned a break."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the emergency vehicles drive past on their way to the hospital.
"Steve, can I ask you a question?" Banner asked after a while.
"Yeah."
Banner hesitated for a moment. "This is probably a long shot, but I don't suppose Dr. Erskine ever told you anything about his formula that he didn't put in his notes?"
"Nothing technical," Steve said, sorry that he couldn't give Banner better news. "I probably wouldn't have understood it if he had. He did tell me that the serum amplified whatever was already inside a man."
"I'm familiar with the personality-amplifying effects," Banner said. He laughed humorlessly. "Believe me, I'm familiar. It's the physical transformation I'm interested in. If I could understand what went right with you, then maybe I could understand what went wrong with me, and then maybe I could fix it." He sighed wearily. "I would really like to not do this anymore."
"I thought the gamma radiation was where it went wrong," Steve said, although he suddenly wondered: what was it that Bruce Banner had been so angry about before his experiment, that it had been amplified to such an extreme degree?
Banner shook his head. "The gamma radiation is responsible for the instability of the transformation. It's why I transform, and then untransform, and then retransform, and why I can't always control it. But it isn't what made me look like a... a... a monster. I mean, look at Johann Schmidt. He didn't use gamma radiation or Vita-Rays or any kind of radiation at all, only the serum, and look what he turned into."
"He had an imperfect variant-" Steve started.
"Did he?" Banner asked. "I mean, it worked, didn't it? Wasn't he just as strong as you?"
"Yeah," Steve agreed reluctantly. He'd had Schmidt on the ropes for most of their fight, but he knew it wasn't from a mismatch of power. It was just that Schmidt hadn't fought on the front lines alongside his men. He had never developed his fighting skills. He'd wasted his gift.
"The serum worked for all four of us," Banner continued. "Made us just as strong and fast and tough as it was supposed to. But you were the only one who didn't turn into something inhuman. Why?"
"Four of us?" Steve repeated, startled.
Banner squinted at him a little. "Didn't S.H.I.E.L.D. tell you about Emil Blonsky?"
"No one ever tells me anything," Steve said, feeling a surge of irritation. Maybe he wouldn't be so flat-footed all the time if Fury would just share basic information with him.
"Blonsky's an interesting case," Banner said, his eyes going distant. "He was an Army man, like you. They gave him a dose of the same serum they gave me, one that had been derived from a sample of your blood. No radiation, just the injection. And it worked really well... at least at first. He didn't have any kind of visible transformation, but he became very strong. Probably on par with you. And then they sent him to try to capture me... and he couldn't do it. He couldn't beat the Hulk. So Blonsky decided that what he got wasn't good enough, and he bullied General Ross into giving him a second dose of the serum."
"It was too much?"
Banner waggled his head noncommittally. "It did make him even stronger. He had an incredible healing factor. There were some... mutations, though. Nothing dramatic — he still looked mostly human. But I think it was then that Blonsky started to go a little crazy. Like you said, the serum amplifies what's already inside, and he was driven by ambition. He was obsessed with it. He tried to fight the Hulk again, and he got thrashed. He knew it still wasn't enough, so he did something-" Banner exhaled sharply, a look of disbelief crossing his face. "-something incredibly stupid. He managed to get his hands on a sample of my blood — my gamma-irradiated blood — and he took a transfusion of it."
Steve was horrified. "He turned himself into another Hulk?"
"Worse," Banner said grimly. "He turned into something bigger, uglier, and meaner. An abomination. He got drunk on power and went on a rampage through Harlem, breaking everything in sight just to prove that he could."
"Is he still out there somewhere?" Steve asked, feeling a surge of alarm.
Banner shook his head. "Ross did the same thing to Blonsky that he wanted to do to me," he said quietly. "The same thing fate did to you. He put him in cryogenic freeze."
Steve felt an instinctive stirring of sympathy, even though he believed Banner that Blonsky was too dangerous to run loose. What would happen if or when they ever thawed him out? Time could steal things from a man that he could never get back.
"Anyway," Banner said, "it makes it pretty clear that the nature of the physical transformation isn't connected solely to the composition of the serum. If it was, Blonsky and I would have turned into the same thing; we got the exact same variant, and it was even catalyzed by the same type of radiation. There must have been some other factor in Erskine's original formula that we haven't identified yet. Some secret he never wrote down. I just haven't been able to isolate it." His frustration was plain.
"It can't have been easy, trying to research all that while you were on the run," Steve said.
"Not exactly," Banner admitted. "Tony invited me to come use the lab equipment in his tower, but..." He shook his head. "What's to stop the Army from coming after me again?" He glanced around the deserted streets. "I should probably disappear again right now, while I still can." He sounded reluctant, though.
Steve thought for a moment. "The Hulk just saved a lot of people, and he was seen doing it. Maybe people will think of you differently now."
"Not Ross," Banner said positively. "He thinks of me as a weapon, not a human being. He'll never let me be. You were smart to go to S.H.I.E.L.D. instead of back to the Army. If I were you, I'd stay a million miles away from that man. He doesn't give two figs for people as people. They're just tools to be used... or discarded. If you ever became a thorn in his side, he'd put you on ice, too."
"I'll try to keep that in mind," Steve said, and then asked curiously, "Bruce, don't you have anyone who can support you while you work through this? Any family?"
"There's no one in my family I'm interested in keeping in contact with, let's just put it that way." There was an edge to Banner's voice that warned Steve not to pursue that line of questioning any further, and out of respect for Banner he immediately dropped it.
"What about you?" Banner asked after a few moments. "Did you have any family that got, you know, left behind? Back in your time?"
"No," Steve said softly. "Just friends."
Banner mulled that over for a moment. "Well, I'm not in the habit of sounding like a Pollyanna," he said mildly, "but it is possible to make new friends." He gave a tentative smile to Steve, who immediately understood it for the offer that it was. He smiled back and nodded, accepting it.
"And if you don't mind me giving advice... you should accept Stark's offer," Steve said. "He would protect you." He met Banner's eyes firmly. "And so would I."
TO BE CONTINUED
Author's note: I knew when I set out to write this story that I wanted Steve to have a good one-on-one bonding moment with each of the Avengers. When it came time to write the Bruce-Steve scene, I did my usual research into their interactions in the movies to get something to work with and discovered... there are almost no Bruce-Steve one-on-one moments in the MCU movies! There is their first meeting on the helicarrier, which is nice but brief, and there's the scene in Age of Ultron when Steve gives his "blessing" for Bruce to pursue Nat, and... that's pretty much it! I think there was a bit of a missed opportunity there. I know they had lots of Bruce-Tony moments because they have the great "science-bro" angle, but Steve and Bruce have the "super-soldier bro" angle as well as more similar personalities.
Also, if you're interesting in learning more about how and why the super-soldier serum works the way it does, may I suggest you give my story "The Third Life of Steve Rogers" a try?
Let me know what you thought of this chapter, and leave a review!