"There's Banner! Over here, Dr. Banner! Bruce! Bruce! Is there a link? What's the link? Bruce! Professor!"
Bruce tried to press his electronic ticket against the subway turnstile. His briefcase and shoulder bag slipped awkwardly onto his wrist as he pushed thru into the station. "I have no unofficial comments at this time. Look out for my press conference at eleven-thirty this morning."
:::
...NO LINK TO HULK +++ HELICOPTER FIREBALL - NO LINK TO HULK +++ HELICOPTER FIREBALL...
Sue flipped her safety glasses closed and tossed them into the sterilization receptacle on the workbench. She had been staring at display screens all night.
"Something's not right, Bruce," she said. He stared back blankly at her hanging his trenchcoat on a makeshift hanger. She noticed that he had at last been persuaded to spend some of his stipend on a Ben Sherman shirt.
"No 'hello'?" he replied tightening the knot of his functional necktie. He unlocked the briefcase and pushing it into an open box locker. "I've been trying to help by working over at the Stark building. It's all very stressful. 'Hello' might help."
"Hello Bruce," she said curtly. "Something's not right."
The giant picture window looked Uptown away from Grand Central and Battery Park. Usually the sunlight would spill in giving golden glow to the Park and the rooftops along Park Avenue. Today was different. A horrible indigo cloud of concrete and heavy metals was being corralled and tended by tiny floating drones and street-level cleaning vehicles.
"Let me adjust the light levels," said Bruce. He picked up a plain remote and and pressed a simple button. The radiation shutters slowly descended without noise or ceremony.
"You can't make it go away," said Sue. Automatic light level detectors activated the internal natural light panels.
Bruce sighed and tapped the monitor screen. "I wanted us to work without distraction ," he said. "That's why I got NYU to let us use this place. Stark would just have
"Fine," she said. With a blink she activated the smallest bank of TV screens. Rolling news licked in from Fox, CNN and . All focussed on the same story.
"Why do they keep saying the Hulk was involved?" She spoke aloud as if she had been asking the same question for hours.
Bruce pushed his spectacles firmly onto his nose. "You know the big guy wasn't. You know exactly where I was at the time." He tried not to meet her gaze.
He saw Sue's cheeks flush. He could feel the air around her head pulsing out. It made his ears pop.
"And besides," he said. "They say the Hulk wasn't involved."
Her eyes met his eyes in a steely glare. "Exactly. They keep saying it. Why do they keep saying it?"
He looked over to the monitor screen analyzing the library of dust samples. "It's an easy hit for lazy journalists. Hulk smashed this. Hulk smashed that. Hulk made it rain. Hulk made the gas prices rise."
She raised her left finger to her lips. "Shh. Bruce. Just let me think."
"I am letting you think." He tapped the screen and set the algorithm going to crunch the data.
"Shh", she hissed again. The patterns on the screen had caught her attention.
"It'll be a while before we get anything meaningful," he mumbled.
"Shut up!" she exploded. A pulse of her force-field swept the notebooks and instruments from the bench. Bruce felt a psychic punch to his face. He shook his head. It had been a surprise.
He tried to recall the mantra he had to repeat whenever he got angry. But he had been surprised.
"Bruce," he heard her shouting. "No, Bruce!" His head was swimming and little spots of black and green started spin around the edge of his vision.
"Sue?!" he growled falling to the floor.
Another psychic wave engulfed him, but it was her words that tore right thru him, deflating all his rage.
"I love you, Bruce."
:::
...DEAD / MISSING +++ TRAIN WRECK LEAVES FOUR DEAD / MISSING + TRAIN WRECK...
Bruce felt his shirt collar was unbuttoned. He was lying on the floor of the laboratory with bright light glaring in hieyes. It seemed to surround him. He flickered his eyelids to clear his vission. The lab was still intact. But, then, he had suspected it would be.
"We must find his body," Sue demanded. She was totally indifferent to him lying on the floor. She kept her hands clenched and stared down at the lunch tray, little rolls of sushi rice and fish untouched in front of her. She had hung up the lab-smartcoat and now wore a heavy woolen sweater against a perceived chill.
"I assigned every micro-machine I could find to sift thru the rubble," said Bruce. "And Ben is pushing aside anything that gets in his way." He looked up to his workstation. One of the subroutines was flashing a DNA match from the debris of the rubble. "Don't worry," he tried to say. But she must have seen what he was now seeing. There was a miniscule match to Reed's DNA in the dust particles.
Sue slapped her fingers on the tabletop. A burst of her force-field swept the dishes sharply sideways. "Too late to worry, Bruce. But a bit of understanding would help."
A soft chime alerted them to a visitor at the reception counter. The head of NYU security was standing in her dark blazer with a stiff smile on her face.
"Excuse me," she said. "Professor Banner asked me to remind you that he has a press conference at 11.30." She pretended not to notice his disarray. "Should I postpone?"
He pulled himself up then leant forward and gripped at the nearest workbench. "Don't say anything, thank you. I'll be there in a minute. Can you find me a college necktie?" She nodded and turned smartly on her heel before disappearing.
"Shall we both go?" he said quietly, trying to turn the situation back to some kind of normality.
She stared at the remains of her lunch for several heartbeats before replying. "Why didn't you change, Bruce?"