Chapter Twelve

Bruce stared at the table in front of him, refusing to look at any of the others. Steve and Tony were next to him, the woman they had brought back at the opposite end of the table. Maria was glaring at them from the side of the room. What Tony had just told him before they sat down echoed around his head. Blonsky. The council had wanted Blonsky, not him; they thought the Abomination was a war hero, and that Harlem had been Bruce's fault.

"You don't know what you're doing, Stark. Hornet wasn't part of the initiative," Phil's voice over the phone said sternly.

"Neither was I," Bruce said quietly, before he could stop himself. He wanted to go, to get away from the tense soup of politics the team was suddenly caught up it. Vaguely he heard Steve call after him, but Bruce carried on until he was half way down the corridor.

After all he had done, the council still wanted Blonsky as an Avenger, despite the destruction he had wrought. Bruce didn't have a problem with them not wanting him, that would have been a relief.

"Bruce." He stopped at Maria's voice, turning around slowly.

"If I wasn't an Avenger, why did you drag me in?" Bruce asked her. Tony had said Phil sent him to talk to Ross and annoy him into refusing to hand Blonsky over. That didn't explain why Natasha had come for him in Calcutta.

"When Coulson and Fury wrote up the Avengers Initiative, you were on it. The council refused, they wanted Blonsky instead. Stark helped put that out of the question." She explained it too well, too quickly for him to do anything but nod. "Are you leaving?"

"I just wanted to get out of there," Bruce answered, shrugging. He hadn't had a plan when he walked out except to leave them to their bickering. "I could do with some air."

"Then I suggest you try the roof, Ross has just made another move." Bruce felt the colour and heat drain from his face at that. "He wants to reverse the decision he made when Stark asked him for Blonsky. He wants to exchange you both."

"No, no he can't." Bruce was walking again now, almost running down the hallway, the only thought in his mind was to leave, to run again.

"Bruce, he won't." Maria stopped him with a light hand on his arm, turning him around to face her. "I told you I'd deal with Ross. He won't get his hands on you." The steel in her made him believe her, almost.

"The council-"

"Let us deal with the council. He won't get to you, Bruce." He nodded, his shoulder relaxing slightly. They were spies; Maria was one of the best, so why did he trust her? "Will you go back to the conference room?"

"No, I don't think I have anything else to add." Loud footsteps behind them, Pepper's unmistakable heels on the floor made them turn, and Bruce felt Maria step away, not realising how close they had been standing.

"Bruce, I thought you were all in a meeting." Pepper gave them both a bright smile. "Are you guys done?"

"No, Tony and Steve are still in there." Bruce felt slightly sorry for her; Anne had definitely caught Tony's attention for all the wrong reasons.

"That's alright; it was you I wanted to talk to anyway. Could we?" Maria slipped away into the walls or air, which Bruce decided was part of SHIELD initial training. He followed Pepper at a polite distance, wondering what she could want with him. Her caution at the idea of him had fled when Tony elaborated on the falling out of the sky incident. Nothing he could say would change her mind; he had become Pepper's new favourite person.

"She turned up in the lobby just as I was coming in." She, Bruce wondered. "I'm just glad you didn't have to keep her waiting long." Pepper opened the door to a lounge Bruce didn't remember seeing before. "I'll leave you two to it."

Bruce stared at the woman sitting on the cream sofa, who jumped up as soon as she heard them come in.

"Bruce!" Betty gave him a watery smile, taking half a step forward. Bruce just blinked, trying to get his head around the ghosts that popped up.

"Betty." His voice sounded dull and less than pleased, making her smile falter.

"Hi." Hi, Bruce thought, almost too detached from himself to feel angry or bitter. Hi, after everything. "Miss Potts let me up. She seemed to know who I was."

"It was probably in a file." Bruce certainly hadn't mentioned her, and he didn't really want to give her the impression he had.

"Oh. How are you?" Neither of them had moved to sit down, they both just stood facing each other, awkwardly.

"Fine and you?" She nodded, and didn't quite look him in the eye. "Why are you here, Betty?"

"I came to see you, to see how you were. I heard, the whole thing a few months ago, it was all over the news." Bruce turned away from her slightly, looking at the wispy pictures on the wall. He wondered if this was Pepper's lounge or something, it was distinctly un-Tony-like.

"Why?" he asked her again. "Why come now, when-" Bruce broke off, unable to keep thinking about that day. When Betty didn't answer he had to carry on. "I waited. For two days, I sat there waiting for you. I was only going to say good bye." He couldn't look at her, scared she was going to cry or say something that would unlock the heavily fortified parts of his mind.

"To say good bye?" she echoed softly. Bruce just wanted to leave, to go back into the corridor and walk away from the sudden hell hole being around there had become. It was only Maria's words, that subtle warning not to go out that stopped him.

"I never wanted to drag you into that. I shouldn't have in the first place. I just wanted to say good bye." He found himself holding the back of an armchair, leaning on it to keep himself grounded. He couldn't look at her, whatever was on her face he couldn't make himself see it.

"I'm sorry," she said finally. "Bruce, I-"

"You should go," Bruce said, a little more harshly than he intended. "The General is still after me, you're not safe here. You shouldn't have come."

"He is? Bruce, I thought he would have left you alone, now you're a hero." He stepped away when she tried to come over to him, backtracking towards the door Pepper had shut.

"I'm not a hero, Betty. If that's what you came to find, then I'm sorry but you're wrong. Nothing's changed. There are still people looking for me, this is just another stop before I have to leave again." That wasn't strictly true but he wanted her gone, almost as much as he wanted her there.

"I thought you'd be able to go back to being normal, if you could control him now."

"No." The door behind him opened, making him jump. Bruce was caught between two dark haired women as Maria stood in the doorway.

"Agent Mede's down, she needs medical assistance." There was silence for half a beat and Bruce finally looked at Betty. She wasn't even crying.

"I'll be right there," he said, the doctor's voice coming on automatically. "You should go, Betty, and be careful." Maria didn't say a thing as they walked out, for which Bruce was grateful. He ignored the quiet call of his name from the lounge.

"Agent Mede is being moved to the medical suite on this floor," Jarvis said.

"What happened?" Bruce asked, trying to block out Betty and concentrate.

"Mede is down, she was sent after Hornet, who got away."

"Someone tell Juliette these people are dangerous, before you send her after Jupiter or Hemlock." Bruce pulled back the covers of one of the beds in the medical suite, taking in stock of what Tony had put in place. Three beds, a machine he didn't recognise that was probably something to do with the arc reactor, and standard IV, heart monitors and a side room for X-rays. "Pepper didn't want to leave anything to chance."

Maria closed the cupboard Bruce had been in the process of opening to look for supplies, slipping in front of him quickly.

"Are you alright?" she asked him. He debated lying, as useless as it was.

"No, but I'm probably better off that Juliette is right now." Before she could say anything else Clint came through the door, carrying his partner like a limp rag doll. He automatically put her on the bed. Bruce checked for a wound, finding none. "What happened?" he asked the two agents. Natasha had come closer, standing unhelpfully close to the bed.

"Jarvis alerted us, a bit too late, that she wasn't moving. She was unconscious when we found her," answered Clint. Bruce found an oxygen mask, worried by how ragged and weak Juliette's breathing was.

"Was there evidence that she fell?" Bruce ran a hand along her spine, checking that they hadn't broken anything.

"Not hard, it looked like she just collapsed." Natasha hadn't said a word, unmoving as Bruce worked around her.

"Was there a needle? A dart, anything that looked like it could have introduced a toxin?"

"Yes," Phil said, coming in with Steve and Tony in tow. "Here." He handed Bruce a tiny needle. "There's a SHIELD doctor on the way as well."

"Bruce can manage, can't he?" Tony asked, standing too close. Bruce knew he couldn't exactly tell them all to leave, but he did his best to try and make them stand away from the bed.

"I learnt how to deal with third world problems, cholera, that sort of thing. Juliette would do better with someone who actually went to medical school. Natasha, please, I need to get her hooked up to the monitors." Phil took a hold of the redhead's arm, pulling her out of the way.

"We'll give you some space," said Steve, ushering Tony out, Phil navigating Natasha towards the door. Bruce didn't understand what it was they were saying to each other, but they were out of his bubble of concentration that centred on Juliette. Only Clint was still there, and he was helping to set up the machines.

"I had to pass as a nurse for three months," the archer explained. "Stark has an analysis machine for a blood sample." Clint was calmer than Bruce expected him to be, it being his teammate who was unconscious on the bed.

"Why is she sent after the super-humans?" Bruce asked as he prepped the needle.

"She's the killer, and she can outrun Tasha. It's about time someone told us what we were going into before we met it, it might give us a fighting chance." Bruce recognised the underlying anger in Clint's voice and let it rest. There was something between the agents he didn't have any business delving into.

"It's the toxin, not whatever Hornet could do," he told Clint quietly.

"You don't know that, Bruce." There was the haunted look in the archer's eyes that hadn't been there in months, not since the aftermath of Loki.

"No, but people who can kill with their minds don't bother with poison."