9. Battleship, Sunk
"My. You certainly made that look effortless," said Jemma Simmons in the way that made Natasha think she ought to be standing on the set of Downton Abbey rather than in the hallway of NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences building, surrounded by a dozen or so unconscious Zodiac operatives. "You're even more efficient than Bobbi Morse. Wouldn't you agree, Fitz?"
He nodded, but Natasha only huffed an acknowledgment as she holstered her batons. Despite appearances, it hadn't felt effortless or efficient. She rolled her shoulders, aware once again of the snugness of her suit. Violence hadn't relieved her tension at all; she'd actually broken a sweat. Age must be catching up with her. More likely, it was the mental energy of trying to stay focused on her objective while Bruce would soon be out there with his own.
Before her thoughts could linger there, she drew her gun and continued down the hall, beckoning with a jerk of her head for Fitz and Simmons, each armed with icers, to follow. Although they moved quickly, she considered each step, scarcely blinking to ensure she missed nothing, when Tony's voice crackled over the commlink.
"'kay. The civilians are safe, thanks to our dynamic duo distracting Crablegs."
"The evac's complete? Already?" Mackenzie's deep tones didn't entirely mask his surprise. Natasha glanced at the watch embedded in her left gauntlet; it had been quick. "You're sure?"
"He's sure." That was Jessica Jones-one half of the aforementioned duo. The other, her husband, added, "Stark's doing a final scan of the monument and battleship, but yeah. Iron Legion's got 'em all."
The civilians were tourists-because of course the defunct battleship Cancer had weaponized was moored in a historic park. San Jacinto was the decisive battlefield in the Texas Revolution, Coulson, the history buff, felt was crucial information to include in his briefing. Before Thor and Hulk disarmed the USS Texas, the team had to clear hostages out of it, the battlegrounds, and the towering monument that was taller than the Washington Monument and presided over the site like a limestone Christmas tree, complete with a 220-ton star on top. Because everything really was bigger in Texas.
"They'll definitely remember the Alamo," Tony said.
"Maybe stick to referencing battles with less disastrous outcomes?" Bruce suggested, and Natasha grinned slightly.
"Is there a film about this war?" asked Thor.
"Starring John Wayne," Coulson joined the conversation. "Bruce, are you ready to suit up?"
"More like dress down," Tony said.
Bruce hadn't transformed yet when Natasha left for Johnson Space Center with Fitz and Simmons; Coulson might trust his control enough to send him on a mission, but no one, especially not Bruce, felt comfortable with the idea of setting the Hulk loose on the helicarrier. Although she hated herself for it, Natasha didn't share Coulson's confidence in his control. She shoved the thought aside as she picked up the pace leading the two scientists to the lab, along with what was happening on the other end of the now silent comms as Bruce Hulked out.
Transparent fingers swept his hair back from his forehead, lashing his skin and making his eyes water as Bruce stepped alongside Thor in front of the helicarrier's yawning bay door. Below, through the wisps of pollution which they thankfully couldn't smell from up here, he saw the smokestacks of the oil refineries that produced it, the indiscernible forms of Tony, Jessica Jones, and the Iron Legion hovering around the San Jacinto Monument like bees at a blossom, the white column's star-shaped shadow dark against the lawn, the World War II battleship Texas moored in the brown inlet of the bay like a toy boat in a rain puddle.
Gripping Mjölnir in one hand, Thor settled his free hand on Bruce's shoulder and said, voice for once not quite booming due to the roar of the wind and the helicarrier's engines-or maybe it was the roar in his own head—"Are you ready, my friend?"
"Readier than I've ever been."
As Bruce unzipped his track jacket, he felt Thor looking down at him. He tried to shrug it off along with the hoodie he handed to Mackenzie, but it only made him think of the expression Natasha had been watching him with ever since he suggested they re-join the Avengers. The way her eyebrows pulled together, furrowing in between, and her voice buckled when she spoke to him before her departure for Johnson Space Center.
I'll come as soon as you need me, she'd said, as though she was certain he would need a lullaby to come back. He, or the Other Guy, bristled at that, and he'd found himself unable to say anything more to her than, Be safe. From what, exactly, he couldn't say. When she brushed her lips over his, he only managed to give her a peck in return before she withdrew, though he'd wanted to pull her into his arms again, kiss her deeply to show her he loved her and understood-or wished he could understand-why she'd done what she had.
The part of him that didn't want these things, that couldn't understand anything but anger and aggression, was stronger.
"All right," said Mackenzie. "On my mark."
Bruce stepped forward, toes at the edge, and Thor followed suit.
"Three…two…"
"ONE," Bruce shouted, in a voice too deep and rumbling to be his own, more thunderous even than Thor's, and leapt out of the helicarrier.
"Damn it, Banner, that was supposed to be my mark!" Mack's voice hissed in his commlink.
"Oops," Hulk replied.
His grin made the unused muscles in his cheeks feel like they were tearing apart like the t-shirt that shredded as pectorals and biceps bulged from Banner's pale skin, now tinged green and darkening to a more vivid hue. It was a good feeling, though the thought of Banner made the smile fall. Hulk had wanted to break free for days now, but Banner held him back, like a dog on a leash. Now Hulk was free, falling toward the little boat below in the muddy water.
The grin came back. Falling from that height, at this speed, would make a big splash. Hulk almost grabbed his knees and tucked them to his chest, imagined himself yelling, Cannonball! He looked sideways at Thor, flying head-first pulled by his magical hammer. Hulk's friend, now. They could do cannonballs together, splash more. But then Hulk saw the serious look on Thor's face, and mirrored it as he remembered. Hulk and his friend weren't here to make big splashes. They were here to smash. That was good too.
Faster and faster they fell, the deck of the boat got closer and closer, and Hulk braced for impact. The metal deck made a very noisy clank as it crumpled beneath his feet. A boom when Thor's hammer hit it. Like playing with Mommy's pots and pans in the kitchen. Hey! Knock it off with all that racket! You're giving me a goddamn migraine. Didn't you hear me? SHUT THE FUCK UP. Hulk growled, looked around for the bad man who hurt puny Bruce.
Instead, he saw a crab skittering across the deck as the ship rocked. Waves poured over the sides. Smash and splash.
"You sunk my battleship!" buzzed a voice in his ear. Tony.
Hulk chuckled. He knew that game.
"Ha!" Thor laughed, too, but not at the Battleship joke. As the ship bobbed, water covering their feet up to their ankles, he looked up at Hulk. "You owe me fifty dollars, Stark! Banner's alter ego sports a magnificent beard."
He did? Hulk ran his hand over his chin. Hair prickled and tickled. He snorted.
"Prove it," Tony said. "Text me a pic."
"Hell no, you two better not be texting in the middle of a mission!" said Mack, but Hulk didn't think Thor and Tony heard him.
"Say cheese," Thor told Hulk.
He said cheese but forgot to smile, surprised Thor had a phone. He was still blinking from the flash when he heard Tony again.
"Damn! You have , right?"
"I can't believe you people ever saved the world," Mack muttered.
"Well, we did, and we looked good doing it," Tony said. "Big Guy, you never looked more handsome. What do you think, Romanoff?"
"Very distinguished," she said, but she didn't sound like she meant it. Hulk didn't know what she meant anymore. "Maybe less chit-chat and more taking out those weapons and finding Captain Crabby Pants so Bruce can come back?"
Hulk batted at his ear with the annoying thing in it. He didn't want to hear Tasha talk about bringing Banner back. Banner's turn had lasted too long, and Hulk had only come out to play. He did like the sound of smashing cannons and the Crab Man.
But Tony agreed with Tasha.
"Yeah," he said. "Bruce and I have a lot of scientific experimentation to do on why Hulk got a beard to match the drapes, but not the chest carpet."
Natasha deleted the pic and turned her attention from her watch screen to the door at the end of the hall.
"Do you all have smart watches integrated into your suits?" Fitz panted behind her.
"Stark thought they'd be useful. Mostly they exist for him and Thor to abuse our texting privileges sending selfies."
To Cap's eternal frustration. At least that was the only thing they were fighting about these days. Or the main thing.
"Can you really blame Thor?" asked Simmons, breathless not just from running.
"I wouldn't mind seeing Hulk with a beard," Fitz replied.
It wasn't that Natasha hadn't been curious about whether Hulk would keep Bruce's beard when he transformed, or that she didn't appreciate the comic relief when he actually had, but she had a new appreciation for Bruce's point of view when everyone around him seemed to treat the Hulk lightly, while he was just afraid of what the Other Guy would do. In this case, she was more afraid of how easily he'd transformed. How willingly.
They arrived at the lab door, and Natasha stepped aside, standing sentry while Fitzsimmons went to work. They had an access key card, but as expected Zodiac had hijacked the system to keep official NASA personnel out. Of course they had a Plan B, which scanned the room for body heat signatures as it unlocked the door. Then it was Natasha's turn again, entering head of the scientists to make sure they weren't ambushed by whomever, or whatever, waited them inside.
There was something, according to the scan, but Natasha couldn't find it as she made her rounds of the room which, despite state-of-the-art computers and instruments, still bore traces of the 1970s. Even with the previous decade's rash of alien invasions, government-funded science agencies still didn't get the funding the military ones did, and didn't compare with Stark-funded labs. A stool at the edge of the room, not beneath a desk, directed her eyes upward to an air vent. Spotting the missing screws, she raised her gun.
"Ventilation system," she said with a glance at Fitz, who'd stepped cautiously halfway through the lab door.
Simmons' scream ricocheted off the hallway walls, and Natasha pivoted just in time to see her crouched on the floor, broken bits of ceiling tiles raining down, and a figure running away, white lab coat streaming behind him.
"I've got an operative on the move!" Natasha shouted into the comms. "Do I apprehend, or stay and guard Fitzsimmons?"
"We can look after ourselves," Simmons said. "That seemed to be the only heat signature on the scan."
"Fitzsimmons are right, apprehend," Mack said, but Natasha was already clattering back down the hall after the escaped operative.
"I'll send backup, just in case," Coulson added. "Jones, can you-?"
"Already on my way."
"I could get there faster," said Tony.
"No-you're our eye the in the sky on the Hulk."
"He's fine. Just playing with his boats in the bathtub."
"Never leave a kid unattended in the tub," Natasha gritted out.
A bang from around the corner indicated her subject was in the stairwell. She hoped he wasn't going upstairs, but of course the footsteps thundered overhead, and she found herself retracing the path she'd just come with Fitzsimmons, leaping over bodies. If only he'd trip over one so she could catch up. No such luck.
"Heading for the roof. Anything up there I need to worry about?"
"Only me," Jessica replied, and Natasha burst out into the glaring sunlight jJust in time to see her teammate rocket into the man in the lab coat and tackle him to the ground.
He may have had the edge on Natasha in speed-and his head start-but he was no match for Jessica's strength. She subdued him while Natasha caught her breath and reported to Mack, who informed her SHIELD was sending an extraction unit to bring him in for questioning.
"Uh, Houston?" came Tony's voice over the comms. "We have a problem."
Jessica looked up from where she pinned the operative to the ground with her knee in his back, meeting Natasha's eye with her unimpressed look. "You planned to say that, didn't you?"
"I mean I didn't plan for Dr. Claw to disappear in a flash of light, but yeah. I had it in my arsenal."
Jessica snorted. "Right next to the repulsor rays."
"Cancer disappeared?" Coulson cut in.
"Literally or figuratively?" Mack added.
"He used the Zodiac Key," Thor replied. "It may be that it unlocks doorways to other worlds."
Over Tony's predictable quip about Narnia, Coulson said, "It may. But it may not, so let's shift our manpower to finding this guy."
"Great idea, Phil," said Tony, "but remember that problem I called about? All our Hulkpower is already looking for him. Aggressively, I might add."
Natasha's stomach knotted. Feeling Jessica's eyes on her, she was grateful for the arrival of the extraction pod to give her an excuse to look away.
"Mind if I jack your ride?" she asked the agent who emerged, giving her a puzzled look.
"We'll send you another pod," Coulson said. "Romanoff has a lullaby to sing."
The USS Texas had survived two World Wars, including the invasions of Normandy and Iwo Jima, only to be blown apart by her own weapons-well, her own weapons enhanced with tech they were pretty sure was alien-in her own berth. To add insult to injury, the Hulk was splashing around in the wreckage, picking up and tossing aside the flotsam and jetsam, creating even more as he tore off strips of steel that had remained intact during the skirmish to disarm the ship.
By some miracle, the pier used by tourists to board it was more or less undamaged. Natasha nevertheless crept down it slowly as if it had been, and despite the racket and his back being turned to her, she spoke softly, assuming he still wore his commlink.
"Hey, Big Guy."
Hulk froze. Exactly as she'd seen the Barton kids do when they were caught in the middle of doing something they shouldn't. Clearly he'd heard her, but after standing there for a moment, back muscles twitching beneath the green skin, he went on with prying up a panel.
Natasha continued her approach, but waited until the screech of steel tearing loose from its rivets died to speak again.
"Sun's getting real low…"
At that Hulk pivoted, water churning around his calves, not quite facing her, though she saw his face in profile, the bearded chin tilted upward as his eyes scanned the sky. The features so like Bruce's in some ways, in others not, brow, nose, mouth distorted by rage. She shuddered, remembering the face it reminded her more of, viewed through a pane of shatterproof glass.
"No," growled Hulk, eyes meeting hers now. "Sun not low."
She'd almost forgotten she was dealing with the more verbal Hulk. Not that this was the first time he'd spoken to her; after his stint in space, Bruce had made great strides in merging his own intelligence with Hulk's physical prowess, and he spoke to her and to the others during the Infinity Wars. It was, however, the first time he'd ever really argued with her with this much petulance. She remembered Clint talking about the mythical "terrible twos," and how the kids' wills had become more difficult to negotiate when they could express opinions and logic as well as use words.
"You're right," she acquiesced, gaze drifting over his huge shoulder to the pale disc of sun that shone hazily through the smog and smoke of burned out explosions. "We're a few hours from sunset."
He grunted as if vindicated, and turned away from her. "Hulk busy. Find Crab Man."
"Coulson and his agents are on it." Natasha was already standing at the end of the dock, or she'd have continued toward him. If he wasn't going to come to her, she might have to swim out to him. "You did well today. Your part's done. So could you let Bruce come back? Not that it isn't good to see you. It's been a while."
"Bruce not come back. Not to Widow."
Natasha cringed at his use of Widow. A big clue, if his attitude hadn't already made her well aware that he wasn't at all pleased with her. She reached out toward her, started to retort, but he cut her off by flinging a panel into the water, intentionally shy of the pier.
"Hulk not trust Widow. Widow visit monster who hit and hurt and…" His voice dropped to a growl. "…kill Mother."
"I didn't mean-"
His fists crashed against the remnants of a bulkhead. "NO MORE LULLABIES!"
Before Natasha could ask whether he meant no more lullabies sung by Bruce's mother, or no more of the lullaby with her, he leapt off the ship and bounded through the river.
The aroma of cinnamon and brown sugar wafting from the oven lent a hominess to the efficiency kitchen in the functional Avengers Facility quarters. She'd pilfered the ingredients for cinnamon toast from the Facility's common kitchen, along with tea, in an attempt to recreate their old post-mission routine. When they were fighting Thanos, that had usually included showering together, maybe having sex while they were in there, but today she hadn't even asked Bruce if he wanted company, just let him go in the bedroom alone, the click of the lock ringing as loudly in her ears as the thunder of Hulk's rage against the battleship.
It had been Thor who found him, miles up Buffalo Bayou, and convinced him to transform back into Bruce by telling him he could wear his cape. The sight of Bruce wrapped up in it, blood red against his pale skin, muddy and mottled with bruises, when the quinjet picked them up, had been alarming to her and embarrassing for him, and she'd given him a wide berth, unsure how much he remembered of Hulk's reaction when she attempted the lullaby, or how much of those sentiments he shared.
The kettle shrieked, and she snapped to take it off the burner. In the silence that followed, she noticed the absence of the shower in the background. How long had Bruce been finished? She poured the boiling water over the tea leaves, and while it steeped cracked the oven door to check on the toast. When she closed it again and turned, Bruce was emerging from the bedroom.
"Good timing. Toast's almost ready…"
Her words died as she noticed belatedly that the hand not clutching the back of his damp hair hung loose at his side, fingers wrapped around the handle of his duffel bag.
Swallowing the fear that knotted in her throat, Natasha said hoarsely, "I thought we were going to stay here tonight."
They'd talked about it on the quinjet. It was just about the only thing they'd talked about, not wanting to drive back to Ithaca so late. That, and the fact that the USS Texas was long overdue for renovations due to leaks, only there hadn't been enough funding to complete the repairs or the dry berth project. The state Parks and Wildlife Department would be grateful for the generous donation from the Stark Foundation, as well as for Hulk necessitating them if it meant the historic ship hadn't been brought down or used for nefarious purposes by a terrorist organization. He hadn't seemed to care about any of that, though.
"Not that I wouldn't like being home," she added, taking two mugs and saucers out of a cupboard.
"I'm going to the city," Bruce said in that tight voice that sounded like he'd barely moved his lips. "Tony said I can stay in the Tower."
"What about your classes? The semester starts Monday."
That was her protest? Not What about the adoption? or What about us?
"I'll figure something out. Video conference, or…" Bruce's gaze had drifted to the computer in the corner of the living area. "I just think…after what happened in Houston…We could use some time apart."
"The Big Guy doesn't trust me because you don't trust me."
It's not you I don't trust, his voice whispered to her from years ago. She willed him to say it again now.
He didn't.
He did say, "It's not that. Not just that. I jumped out of a helicarrier, for Christ's sake. Hulked out because I wanted to."
"Because of me."
Bruce pressed his lips together, dark eyes looking at her sadly. After a moment he huffed out a breath and said, "I get why you did it. Or I want to. I just…need to get my head around it. I'm not saying it's over, Natasha."
Not yet.
His nose wrinkled, at the same moment that the smell of burning reached her nostrils. She stuffed the oven mitts onto her hands and yanked the oven door open, recoiling as smoke billowed into her face. Reaching in anyway, she pulled out the pan which held crumbling lumps that looked more like charcoal than cinnamon toast.
"You should go back to Ithaca," she said, willing herself not to cry. "I'll stay here. Or…Go to Clint's. I haven't been in forever."
"No. You go home."
Against her will a tear fell, sizzling on the hot baking sheet in her hands. It wasn't home if he wasn't in it. Didn't he understand that yet?
"I should be the one to go," Bruce said. "This is my thing."
"You're right." Natasha wheeled around, the burned toast plopping onto the tile. Not bothering to pick it up, she tossed the pan in the sink and strode past him, listing to one side to avoid knocking shoulders with him. "Running away is your thing."