The very first thing Steve woke up to was the groans of a sore Tony Stark, laying in the exact same position he had been left in by the Hulk.

Steve took a moment to appreciate the fact that he was still sprawled across Tony.

"Mmm," Tony said as he stretched, his eyes only half-opened. "Good morning."

"Good morning," Steve said, grimacing. He was wondering how long it would take before Tony realised what happened to his lab...

"Holy shit!" Tony quickly attempted to sit upright, only prevented by the table that was laying over his chest from Steve's makeshift shield. As soon as he realized, Steve sheepishly removed his arm from Tony's chest, and took the shield off of his arm.

Tony sat up, spinning his head in all directions. The entire wall of "military-grade steel" glass behind them was shattered, but not broken. And the door was left hanging open, by a single hinge. The window between the lab and the control room was completely caved in. It was only after Tony finished panicking about the state of his lab when he realised what was really wrong about this scene: Bruce was quivering in a tight fetal position in the darkest corner of the room, almost completely naked.

"Hey, Cap," Tony whispered, tapping him on the shoulder, "look."

With much effort, thanks to a lot of bruises from Bruce's Hulk, Steve sat up, completely awake and alert when he saw the state that Banner was in.

"Should we...?" Steve motioned at him and Tony and then over to Bruce.

Tony shook his head. "Give me a second." He slowly got up and moved to the control room, grabbing his cell phone and putting it to his ear.

Hello? The other end responded.

"Hey, Clint? It's Tony," Tony muttered in a hushed tone into his phone.

Damnit, Tony, don't you know how early it is? It's a Saturday, and you're calling me at 5 in the morning. Clint sounded pissed.

"I didn't realise... If you knew the kind of night had..."

Wild one, huh? I've had those before...

"No, no, no," Tony responded, shaking his head and grimacing as he did so. "Not in the way you'd really expect. Look, I need your help."

Sure, shoot. I'm up now, so looks like I won't be getting back to bed any time soon.

"Bruce had a sort of, well, meltdown, if you will, last night. And I need more than me and Captain New-Guy here to give me a boost of his esteem. I can try to explain the rest of it to you when you get here."

I'm sure I'll understand, Clint replied, there's not much I don't believe nowadays, what with Mr. Under-Age US Soldier and my girlfriend the secret Russian pro-rock-climber...

"I'll bet you ten bucks," Tony said. "See you in a few."

Yeah, ok. You're on, Clint responded, and Tony hung up the phone.

"Ok," Tony muttered to Steve, "here's the plan. I just called Clint. He'll be over in a little. Us childhood friends of Bruce's will try to console his pain, and you can try to come up with a story about what happened that doesn't involve, you know, us… and what actually happened..."

Steve held out his hand in opposition. "Yeah, yeah, I got it. You don't have to tell me all the details."

In their time waiting for Clint to show up, Tony ran upstairs and took a shower. Steve sat in the busted lab room, twiddling his thumbs and thinking of what he was going to tell Bruce when asked what the hell happened.

He knew that he couldn't just come up to Bruce and say, "so, after you put me and Tony in the control room, Tony made on a move on me, so I flinched and pressed the red button, locking you in the room with the gamma radiation and turning you into a giant green Hulk monster." Not only would that end Steve's own friendship with Bruce, but it would also jeopardize Tony's long-term friendship with Bruce as well.

No. He would think of another thing to say. Just not now.

After Tony came downstairs, they sat in the lab room, hoping for some time to think, when they heard the click of the door down to the labs.

"Hey guys, I'm here. What's-" Clint started, running down the stairs and sliding to a halt in the open control room. He cut himself off when he saw the state of the lab room.

"Holy Shit, what the hell did you guys do last night? How many girls were involved?"

Natasha, who had followed him silently down to the lab, punched him hard on the arm. "You idiot, it's a lab room. If they had girls involved, it would have been the pool, or the bedroom."

Tony chuckled nervously, trying to quiet them down. "No. No girls involved. Just me, Cap and Bruce."

"Sounds like a party-" Clint was going to start laughing, but he pointed to something out-of-the ordinary in the other corner across from Bruce. "...the hell is that?"

Tony walked over to the smear on the wall, and started rubbing the back of his neck. "Oh, hey. Looks like the rats did explode. Cool."

"What the fuck were you doing in here?" Clint shouted, and Bruce turned around, slightly coming out of his fetal position.

"...an experiment," he mumbled into his legs. Every jaw in the room practically dropped to the floor. Bruce had spoken, he was listening. Maybe that meant that everything was okay. Steve could see the tears welling up in Tony's eyes.

Clint's arms dropped his arms to his side, practically melting at the sight of his old friend. "What did you guys do to him?" He mumbled, monotone, running over to Bruce. He put an arm around him, taking off his jacket and putting it over Bruce's shoulder.

Tony came over and sat on the other side of Bruce. "We were working with gamma radiation, trying to see its impact on living organisms. Bruce walked into the lab room to prepare everything, and..."

"And I tripped over the chair in the control room, and slammed on the button," Steve finished Tony's sentence, looking down at his feet. Nothing could have satisfied his inner soldier more than taking the blame for himself.

"We tried knocking down the door to the room, but we ruptured a pipe instead, and we couldn't see what happened," Tony continued. The hitch in his voice proved how hard it was to throw Steve under the bus for all of this.

"I guess the gamma must've..." Steve was trying to describe what they saw, but he simply couldn't.

"You want to know what happened?" Bruce whimpered, tears welling up in his eyes. "Those two... those two idiots," he started to raise his voice, lifting a finger at Steve and Tony, "turned me into a monster. A big, green, out-of-control monster!" He started to shake, and looked up at Steve.

Bruce still had his soft, brown eyes, but they were gleaming with green around the edge.

"Bruce, buddy," Tony started, rubbing his back in a back-and-forth motion, "calm down. This lab can't take another beating."

"You think," Bruce started breathing heavily, "that I can control this... this thing?" His voice hardly sounded like the Bruce that Tony knew and loved. It was deeper, like something bad was about to happen.

Clint came into the conversation. "It's not that we think you can as much as it is that..." he started backing away, taking his jacket with him, "that we know you need to try."

"I'm not that strong," Bruce said, his voice even more mutilated. His skin was starting to turn an eerie green. "I... can't..."

That was the breaking point. Bruce slammed his fists into the ground, grunting in both his voice and the Hulk's, heaving up and down. His muscles rippled, his entire body increasing in size.

"Uh, guys," Natasha began, "I haven't seen this thing yet, but my guess is that we need to figure out a way to get out of the line of fire. This isn't going to be pretty."

In the midst of getting away from the heaving Bruce, Clint pulled out his wallet and slipped a ten-dollar bill into Tony's pocket.

The two were next to Steve and Natasha now. "You do see how busted this lab is, right? There's no way it can take another beating from him," Tony realized.

It could only have been luck that Howard Stark stormed into the lab area just then, panic in his eyes. "Anthony Stark! What the hell are you doing?"

"Dad, what I'm doing isn't the problem. Bruce is becoming a green rage monster, and fast. We need to get a tranq in him."

"What?" Howard screamed, looking at Tony like he had two heads. "You think that I'm going to believe that I should tranquilize an innocent teenager? What should make me believe that Bruce is becoming..." he ran his hand through his hair, panicking, "becoming a..."

"...a green rage monster," Natasha finished, her voice eerily calm among the calamity of the current events.

Howard flashed an angry glare towards her. "Whatever is happening, I don't believe it. That is completely im-"

"You think it's so impossible," Steve said, "then turn around and look in that lab, and tell me that doesn't look absolutely impossible right before your eyes."

Howard turned, and his eyes grew as wide as saucers. "Holy-" he paused, and thought for a second, "Ok. I have something for this kind of thing," he ran to the neighboring lab control room, pulling out a nasty looking gun. "This is a military-grade Stark Tranquilizer. It-"

"Hurry, damnit!" Clint screamed. He grabbed the gun from Howard, ran into the lab room, and shot it, right before Bruce's hulk completely burst out.

The tranquilizer embedded itself in Bruce's skin, thankfully, and the big, green Hulk fell to the floor, surprisingly serene.

"What the..." Howard looked more confused than anyone had been about the entire situation. "Now that that... thing is down, for now, can someone please tell me what is going on?"

"Didn't he notice the thudding of our bodies being thrown across the room last night?" Steve muttered to Tony as they walked out of the lab room and up to the living room of the mansion.

"You do realize how far underground those labs are, right?" Was the only way Tony could respond.

After the entire description of the lab that went horribly wrong, the four went into the kitchen to get breakfast.

"So, does anyone have any ideas as to how we're going to be getting the Hulk somewhere safe? I mean, if Bruce decided to go all mean and green again, don't we want him someplace where he won't kill anyone?" Natasha asked.

Clint shrugged, and looked at Tony, who looked at Steve.

"Why do you immediately look at me for a solution?" Steve asked, throwing his hands in the air defensively.

"Well, you are the one who caused this entire thing," Clint mumbled, almost inaudibly.

Natasha rolled her eyes. "Or does someone want to tell me what really happened?"

"Ok, ok," Tony sat up, putting his hands on his lap. "You can't tell Bruce this, or at least not until he gets his inner Hulk under a bit of control. When Steve and I were in the control room, I got bored and..."

"...And he hit on me!" Steve interjected, yelling. He immediately quieted his voice. "He pinned me against the panel, moved his hand up my thigh, and I overreacted and slammed my hands against the control panel. It just so happens that I accidentally pressed the red button in the process."

"So, the blame is actually to be split across the two of you," Natasha analysed, stifling a laugh. "I'm sure that Bruce will be excited once he hears that."

"Yeah..." Steve said, rubbing the back of his neck, face turning red, "I hope he never does."

"Oh, come on," Tony said in a hushed tone to Steve, "don't pretend like you didn't like it." He winked.

"I'm going to go drag Bruce into a new lab. I'd appreciate some help, but you know... While you guys decide what you're going to do, I'm gonna get my archery equipment out of my trunk just in case," Clint said, getting up from his cushion-y chair.

Everyone gave him a look that basically said, "you have your archery equipment in your car?"

"What? Don't look at me like that," Clint glared right back at them, "I was planning on going to practice a bit at the range later." He left, returning through the front door with a large bow and a quiver of high-quality arrows already on his back. He swung the lab door open and bolted down the stairs.

"I'll go help him," Steve sighed, pushing himself up and following Clint down to the labs.

Both of them, later accompanied by Tony and Natasha, stared at the shattered glass wall and the broken door.

"Well, I can tell you one thing," Tony said, "we aren't getting the Hulk through that door."

"Easy solution," Clint grinned as he pulled out an arrow from his quiver. He loaded his bow, took aim at the already shattered glass, and fired.

It collapsed like the Berlin wall.

"Well," Natasha clasped her hands together, and stepped through the gaping hole, "let's get going."

Steve and Tony grabbed the feet of the Hulk, and Natasha and Clint grabbed the shoulders, bringing him out to the corridor.

"There's," Tony grunted, "a lab further down that-a-way that has a pretty big door, like a garage door almost. Designed for big robotics projects."

"Sounds like a good idea until Bruce decides to human down again," Clint chuckled. The team dragged Bruce's unconscious Hulk body down to the over-sized lab, and lay him down in a napping position.

"There. Now all we have to do is wait," Steve said, brushing his hands off.

So that's exactly what they did: they waited.