The hospital corridor was not a strange place to Bruce, he knew it well from the times he had walked these shiny floors in his own white coat. Walking the floors of this hospital, and more specifically, the floors of the ICU was not something he had ever anticipated. He walked fast, nearly two days in and as far as he knew there was no change in the status of Natasha but giving he had boarded the next plane to New York after speaking to Clint, he wasn't sure if that was still the same.
He could feel his body wilting, feel the effects of jet lag taking their hold but he had to shake it off. He was here for Nat. He was here for a friend, and that was all he allowed himself to believe at the current moment.
Nick Fury met him at the doors to the ICU. The old Director was missing his eye patch and carried a walking stick as part of an obvious disguise. Not that anyone, Bruce supposed, was still looking for the Director, not in a hospital ICU anyway.
"Doctor, she's through here."
Bruce nodded, following the director through the doors onto the ward and then immediately left into a side room.
Bruce stopped the moment he entered the room. He froze on the spot, looking straight at the bed in the centre of the room. Natasha was almost unrecognisable with her face surrounded by tubes, and her bed surrounded by machinery, beeping, clicking and flashing in perfect rhythm. Her eyes were shut, she looked as though she could be sleeping. He knew better, Natasha didn't sleep that way, she lay on her side, legs curled and facing outwards; ready for action.
Her amber hair lay flat on the pillow mapping her head like a protective bubble; or a halo. She wore no make-up and was dressed in a hospital gown. Her feet were bare, no compression stockings at that time, he could see red nail polish chipped on her toenails. He scanned her again, looking back at her face and heading for the machinery to check her vitals. Then he saw the evidence for himself. He felt sickened instantly.
Walking across the room he felt his hand outstretch towards her stomach. It was subtle, a woman with the fitness and muscle tone of Natasha usually made a pregnancy less obvious but with a trained eye, he could see her stomach was less flat than before.
"The Doc.'s recon around twenty weeks, she's kept it totally to herself. No med records, no scans, nothing. It's like she didn't believe it was actually happening."
Nick stood behind Bruce, arms folded but when the Doctor turned back he nodded and left the room. Leaving Bruce and Natasha.
Twenty weeks. She certainly did not look twenty weeks pregnant but the scans would tell more than the naked eye ever could. There was worse to the matter than her size, worse even than the fact she had sustained such horrible injuries. The worst was the maths, the dates. He was never sure - and no one ever could be with a woman who had been trained to treat promiscuity and casual sex as nothing even worth a thought - but it was too perfect; too ironic. The first and only time that Natasha had persuaded him to sleep with her had been roughly twenty weeks previous.
It wasn't as though he was ever going to forget that night, she was unlike any woman he had ever known - not that there had been many before the accident. She was confident and strong and knew how to get what she wanted, she had controlled him with every aspect of her being. He had thought it a miracle that the other guy had stayed in check. Now he knew there had been more than one miracle that evening.
He had never done tests, but he knew, knew his body was infused with radiation that nothing should survive, spermatazoa included. Natasha had been sterilized, he hadn't even realised she had a uterus in which to carry a baby. This was either a miracle or a very ill-mannered joke.
He checked they were still alone before drawing his glasses out his shirt pocket and sliding them onto his face. The vitals were good, from what he could tell she was steady. Snatching the notes from the bottom of the bed he flicked through her chart, everything was looking positive, so positive that he could almost feel himself shrinking as he relaxed a little more. The charts gave her usual signs, mentioned the swelling on her Cervical spine - C1 through C5 - and how much the swelling had decreased in the recent days. They had been reducing the medication keeping her in a comatose state for the past three hours, it would take a good amount of time from then still to know if she was going to wake up, and even longer to know if she was going to be healthy.
He glanced at the back page of the notes, foetal heartbeat was good, a healthy 140BPM. He stopped in his tracks when he glanced at the next sheet. He had never felt so stunned by an image he had seen so often, never seen something so special.
The next page was a printout, an image from an ultrasound scan. That little creature, which to his knowledge of scan imaging was completely perfect, that baby, was inside Natasha. She had been growing this little human being for nearly five months. And he had been clueless.
He quickly let go of the sheets of paper, allowing them to slap down on each other and pushed the chart back onto the bottom of the bed. He turned and headed away for a second.
This was wrong, no, this was cruel. He could not have children, he could not biologically be the Father of this child and yet everything about this, it all pointed to that night. Had Natasha really been playing around, been with other men? Something, and maybe he was naive, but something made him trust the beautiful woman lying motionless in front of him. She had seemed so honest with him.
Then again, he reminded himself with a deep sigh, that was her job. She had been raised to manipulate anyone and everyone so why should that end now?
Bruce found himself getting closer to her, his eyes settling on her stomach. It was almost laughable, he thought to himself, to see the infamous Black Widow in this condition, to see her vulnerable and the most traditionally female that she had ever been. He wasn't fully aware when his hand reached out and rested ever so slightly on her swollen belly.
His breathing hitched. That could be his child, he could be around twenty weeks from becoming a Father, so why did he not feel anything positive about this.
There was a sudden bump against his hand, the fabric of the hospital gown coming up to meet him from deep underneath. A kick. The fetus was already moving, wriggling around and doing so to the point Natasha must have known it was in there.
It, he or she, was going to become a real person, was going to become part of the life of someone, and it deserved something special.
He perched on the edge of the bed, gently massaging the area where the baby had kicked, feeling how Natasha's belly had become soft, malleable to accommodate the life inside her. Bruce wondered what she thought, wondered if Natasha cared about the little one she was growing. yes, Natasha had never seemed the mothering type, but she had never had the opportunity to behave in that manner. As a Doctor, Bruce knew the reports and stats on women who were infertile, knew that many of them felt less of a woman, less feminine and less confident, all things which did not summarise Natasha in any sense.
He could only presume that there was a reason why she hadn't had a termination, especially as she appeared to be working as per her usual style. She was far from stupid, Natasha would have known she risked injuring herself, risked inducing a miscarriage. Natasha also appeared to have landed on her back, was she trying to protect her baby?
Bruce sighed, glancing up at the frosted glass window in the door. His mind felt just as frosted over. He couldn't see what the right answer was, couldn't see the best way out. If Natasha did not wake up, they would maintain her body for the sake of the baby. They would likely bring her to term and then deliver via Caesarean section before switching off the life support. That way there would be a child- a child which shared his DNA- who had no mother. If Natasha died, would he take on the baby, could he take the baby? Could any superhero raise a child singlehandedly let alone one who didn't always fit the mould of a hero?
What would happen if he didn't take the child? That was another big question that he couldn't answer. At birth, they would have no way of knowing if the Hulk was likely to have been passed on to the infant, what if it was adopted and then the parents were to later learn about its father? That could have dramatic consequences for security, for the safety of fellow children; for the safety of its parents.
Then again, could he, as the original Hulk, teach his child how to help themselves, how to control themselves?
He glanced down at Natasha's stomach once more, to the suit of biological armour that protected this small child. If only it could remain inside her forever, remain safe and oblivious to the world around it.
She might wake up. She might. She might not, and if she does what's to say the level of damage that had been done to her spinal cord. Natasha would have no life if she didn't have her career and that thought made him sure she was not enduring pregnancy for her own gain.
He needed to think about her, think about the motives behind the little life which was trucking on within her body. He didn't want to consider the idea but only one thing made sense.
He thought about Stark, back when they had first met a few years back. Tony had tried to tell Bruce to embrace himself. To embrace the two people that he was and not to think of the Hulk as a bad thing. Of course Tony had not said it so eloquently, but it made him think. Was Natasha thinking the same? Was she trying to help him?
Either way, he knew what he had to do, knew that the best way out was for him to leave, to head straight back out the hospital doors and never come near Natasha, or the child, ever again. He stood, a pool of anxiety forming in his stomach, making his heart race. Bruce thrust his glasses back into the pocket they had come from, bundled up his coat and went to leave.
He paused.
His eyes found the monitor beside the bed, the heart rate. The beats were increasing, her oxygen sats were rising. He heard a choking sound. Natasha was choking on the breathing tubes. Her eyes were moving.
She was waking up.