Here it is! The beginning of Part 4: the Final Part!
If you thought the excitement was over? You ain't seen nothing yet!
Special thank you to everyone who has steadily read and reviewed throughout this journey. Today I wrote the FINAL LINES for this story. Over time, revisions will be added, and grammatical errors corrected.
Discordchick: you are among the lucky few who are aware of this chapter
Fury-Natalia: thank you, thank you, thank you, so much for all your steady reviews. They make my heart swell EVERY time I see them in my inbox.
Amy. d. fuller: Oh the things I have in store. You know me, and you know my writing. Now how about we open this with a bang?
IceDragoness1: 2 weeks? all of it? OMG! Holy cow, that is some accomplishment! Well, I welcome you, heartily, to the Hawkeye Initiative fold. This has been my baby ever since the night Avengers came to the theaters in 2012, and I left afterward to eat at Applebees. I wrote Lithium Hawkeye, that night, on a napkin and receipt at the restaurant. I haven't looked back since!
Tanchik: I have a jug of water on my fridge shelf that I cleverly entitle "the tears of my readers". I think after today, you will have quite a different set of emotions to ponder:)
I Can Hear the Drums
By: Ezra Cross
Part 4: Reassemble
Chapter 36
Bruce Banner strode into the small medical room with his glasses already pushed up to the top of his head. It felt like ages had passed since he'd been released from the green fist of the Hulk to be himself for a while. In the advent of Clint's death, he supposed it shouldn't surprise him. The big guy didn't handle loss as well as his human counterpart. He preferred to avoid it, allow Bruce to deal with the emotion and spare himself. The doctor wished the feeling could be mutual.
Bruce considered luck must have been on their side. Naivety, a want to ignore the reality of the sacrifices around him, let the doctor cling to those thoughts longer than he should have. He knew the truth, as did every other man standing by Clint's side the day the ball dropped.
Barton saved them. He died to save them, and hardly anyone blinked an eye.
The door to his private medical quarter slid closed, and for a time, Bruce leaned back against it. This place had become his sanctuary in the last two weeks since the war ended. He could escape here, unbothered, save the few, terminal patients he occasionally cared for. They were gone now, and he was alone.
His thoughts drifted back to Clint's funeral. He remembered standing on the concrete lookout in Lakeheed, Alfheimr. He wanted to think of that time as letting go, celebrating the life Clint and so many others led, but he couldn't. All that remained in the hollow of his soul was utter devastation and unrest.
"What are we going to do? What are any of us going to do?"
Sighing with the exhaustion settling into his bones, Bruce tried to push that pain deep within himself. He'd lost Clint twice, the first time during the five-year gap the Infinity Gauntlet caused, the second was more obvious. It didn't make it any easier, but it was no worse. His tears were shed already.
For the others, it became something very different to handle. Tony had to be sedated. Only recently did Bruce trust him without the medications. Pepper didn't soothe him. He'd sent her through the first, and last, portal back to Midgard before the interplanetary devices were destroyed once and for all. The object of his hate fell on Thor, on Pym, T'Challa, anyone he leveled his gaze on commanded his unending wrath. Time might not heal this wound he'd suffered. Perhaps, nothing would.
Thor emerged from the horrifying wounds he'd suffered in the dark depths of the shattered stone crevice. They demanded from him every detail. Why had he come out without Barton? Why had he sealed the archer in? What was the insane Asgardian thinking? Why had he taken away their only chance at redeeming Clint?
When Thor was strong enough to answer, he spoke his words very carefully. He sat up in his cot, supported by Veurr, his Asgardian general, and Sif.
"I would never curse my friends, those I consider my only family, since the death of my father, to the sight I beheld there. Had there been anything left of him beside the rent flesh upon the walls, the shredded armor, his blood spread upon my hands, I might have emerged with something with which to honor. To bury. Believe me when I say, nothing of what he once was, remained. It is a revulsion I must forever carry. That burden will be mine alone."
Bruce closed his eyes as those words thrummed against him. Nothing left. Nothing but pieces of the archer, thrashed apart and eaten by monsters that nearly tore Thor's leg off at the knee. Bruce had to agree with Thor. That was not the way he wanted to remember Clint. The mental image alone, haunted him.
He considered the closest bed. What he wouldn't give to just jump beneath the covers and not come back out until they'd reached planet Earth again. But, on closer inspection, he realized that he wasn't the first one to consider the small medical bay as their private room. The bed was unmade, unkempt. A trail of clothing led straight inside, starting at a familiar pair of sneakers, and ending in a small pair of jeans. No shirt was in sight.
He looked around the immediate area for the bearer of the belongings, but found himself alone.
"Natasha?" he called.
The bathroom door slid open, and the woman stood against the doorway across from him, her arm draped in front of her stomach. A look of pure ill never left her face.
Bruce's heart plummeted into his boots. "Natasha! What happened?!" He covered the distance to her in only a few strides. He crossed one arm around her waist, and carefully guided her back toward the bed. It had been two weeks since Galactus destroyed their lives forever. The same time it took for the UIC-1 pandemic to sweep through the galaxy before. "You were vaccinated, right? Oh, what am I saying? Super-soldier serum! You can't get sick. What's wrong with you?"
Natasha allowed him to walk her back to bed, where she slipped beneath the covers and dragged the pillow beside her face. "I'm vaccinated," she said.
"Do you realize you aren't wearing any pants?"
"Yeah, I know."
Bruce leaned over, and turned the light on beside the bed to get a better look at her. She seemed pale, exhausted. "OK, give me the list of all of your symptoms. I don't care how remedial they seem to you. First, let me call Strange – "
Natasha grabbed his arm before Bruce could lift from the mattress, and prevented his leaving. Discretion was the name of her game.
"Fine, no consult. Is this why you came to my room?"
She nodded into her pillow.
"Symptoms?"
For that sort of discussion, she decided to look at him. "My back's killing me, I can't eat anything, I'm vomiting, nauseous, I have cramps that I can't even explain, and I feel like crap. I don't get sick. I've never been sick a day in my life. Shot? Yes. Stabbed? Yes. Never sick."
"I know your history, Nat. We've worked together for long enough. Roll onto your back, and let me feel your abdomen. Is Steve all right? Do you know?"
"I don't know, Bruce. I came here."
He nodded, attempting to placate her obviously edgy temper. He didn't want to state his current thought, that somehow everything she experienced now was a direct result of Clint's death. It was possibly the stress of it, watching him plunge to his death, could affect her physique, presenting the current symptoms. Though, with the likelihood of another outbreak of UIC-1, he didn't want to take any chances, either. Despite her vaccination status and her immunity to the pathogenic complex at large, he never wanted to eliminate the possibility of some genetic viral mutation infecting even the most competent heroes.
With his hands, as skilled as the neurosurgeon he'd become, he carefully palpated her organs. Everything north of her waist line, didn't take too kindly to his care, and she proved it by digging a few nails into his arm.
"Are the symptoms constant, or do they come and go?" he asked.
"Come and go. Worse, at certain times of day."
"How many days?"
"I don't know… three? I thought it was just – " she paused, letting Bruce's mind fill in the gap with Clint's name before going on. "but then it went away. It came back, and I thought maybe it was the food. It all tastes strange and smells off. I got sick again today."
Bruce's hands stopped. He considered a differential diagnosis, dismissed it at once, and then on a whim, reconsidered it. For a second time, he let the idea go and tried to focus on the reality of the patient he had before him. Natasha, born roughly in 1923, experimented on by the Soviet-run Red Room Operation, given their version of the super-soldier serum responsible for Steve Rogers' dramatic transformation. A living weapon that, literally, didn't age, fall ill, or as far as they knew, die of natural causes.
"Were you hurt in the evacuation and chose not to share that?"
"No."
"Have you ever had these symptoms before?"
"No."
"What are you taking, medication-wise?"
She shrugged. "I don't know what to take! I can't eat anything. I don't even want to smell anything. Keeping something down in a pill form I think, is out of the question."
"What about tests? Have you done anything already?"
"You're the doctor. I might set my own bones and field-dress bullet wounds, but I'm not exactly handy with my own blood tests!"
Lifting his hands in surrender, Bruce decided to stand and head for his supply desk. His private medical quarter had a grand total of three beds, compared to the much larger facility down a few floors. He was meant to care for those who were comatose, suffering severe brain injuries, or similar death's-door patients. When he designed the suite, he wanted the freedom of being away from the excitement of the triage unit, so the patients he saw could be afforded the quiet and solace they required to either recover or die peacefully. In the smaller, single bed suite just next door, Haladarrel Bywater had crossed the threshold to death. Since unloading the majority of their patients to the other fleet ships, Bruce enjoyed the loneliness. It allowed him a chance to grieve.
He loaded one of the stainless steel trays with a few supplies, and returned to set them beside Natasha's bed. Along the way, he kicked her discarded clothes aside in a pile. He'd see to those after he got the lab tests running.
"What are you thinking?" Natasha asked.
He harrumphed noncommittally, hoping it would be enough to satisfy her curiosity. Pulling her arm from beneath the blanket, he tied a rubber tube across her bicep, and felt for her vein in her arm's crook.
Natasha watched the red liquid shoot into his syringe. "I'm serious. What do you think is wrong with me?"
Bruce filled the first tube, attached a second to the vacu-tainer, and waited for her blood pressure to assist in filling. "Well, let's be honest. If you were normal, I would say you have the flu. Since you aren't, it becomes more complicated. I'm concerned you have UIC-1, but you've never been infected in the past. That means either you got lucky, or this virus is different."
"Different, sounds not good," she said.
"Different isn't good. That's why I asked if Steve felt all right. I'll check on him myself. Discreetly, if you want." Bruce finished with her blood draw, removed the tourniquet, and rolled the tubes between his fingers. "I want you to take your pulse and respiratory rate for the next four minutes while I get this running in the machine. After that," he produced a small cup and set it within her reach. "I want you to pee in that. It'll tell me if your kidneys are concentrating urine. If not, then your back pain could actually be kidney pain. That's also bad."
Natasha held the bandage he taped to her arm. "Some bedside manner, doc. Aren't you supposed to coddle me and make me feel better?"
"Not at 3 in the morning after dragging myself here to pass out. Besides, bedside manner and you, don't mix." He removed the watch from his wrist and passed it to her. "Start timing your heart rate. I'll be back in a bit."
Bruce headed into the adjacent room, not bothering to drag the door shut behind himself. There were some airs he put on for patients. All doctors did. It was their professional attitude. Like a second personality, it masked over his face, filled his speech in kind, blasé tones, and made him laugh a deal too much. Bruce wasn't big on physical contact, but Dr. Banner-the-Neurologist knew well the psychosomatic influence a gentle touch had on the mental wellbeing of a patient. These were things he considered and performed with those he typically treated.
The Avengers, though, were not normal. Tony, for his part, would call bull in an instant if Banner went into doctor mode with him. Natasha, too, didn't trust the Dr. Banner personality. It was too cold, detached, calculating. Given the events of late, cold and calculated seemed preferable to the thinking, feeling, Bruce Banner. Thinking, meant memories. Memories, meant Clint, and that . . . he still hadn't brought himself to face that a second time.
He worked at his bench to get the samples properly separated, inserted, and running in their cascade of machines. Everything he worked with was state-of-the-art. Whether the species he sampled was Earthling, Frost Giant, Xandarian, or other, the machine had the ability to properly code and calculate thousands of true values, and give him exact details on blood group abnormalities. He was positive that Dr. Castillo, a good friend and foremost Earth expert on alien and mutant physiology, would sell her left leg to keep one of the devices.
He felt a presence in the doorway, and turned to see Natasha leaning there. She held out the cup he gave her with the sample inside. With gloves already on his hands, he took it from her, and headed to a second workbench to run the third lab values.
"You should get back in bed. The results only take minutes, but I might be a while assimilating what they mean," he said.
"Assimilating," she mocked, padding in on bare feet. She found a stool and perched on it. Her personality had changed the way Bruce's had. The Natasha which rallied the troops, led them screaming into battle with a plan, a direction, and a steadfast goal at survival, faded to the Black Widow sitting beside him. An assassin didn't have to feel, the same way a doctor didn't have to if he chose it. One day, her wall would crack, and so would his.
"I'm feeling a little better. I threw up again."
"Clint's?" he asked, indicating the shirt she wore.
Natasha looked down at herself and shrugged. "His things are still in our room. What's left of them. No one ever took them out, as long as we've been away. I'm not really sure what to do with them. I wanted something to sleep in, and I just put it on I guess."
"I saved everything," Bruce said, tenderly. He felt it, the chink in his armor almost gave way. Before the emotion had a chance to snatch him up, he returned back to his work. It had been two weeks, and half of that, he spent as the Hulk. The other half, as Bruce. They'd just come from the last World Council summit, arranged their flight plan, evacuated the wounded, and headed for home. He was too busy to feel.
"You do look tired," Natasha said.
Bruce removed the gloves from his hands and deposited them in the trash. He approached and sat across from her. "I think we all are."
"I forget sometimes how long it's been since I've seen you. The real you."
He understood. The Hulk was needed more lately than the intelligence of the doctor he borrowed a body from. "I missed you too."
"I didn't say that."
"But I know you meant that." One of the machines sounded an indicator tone, begging for attention. Bruce sighed, rolled his stool along the floor to see it.
After taking his time to consider the screen, he read the results out loud. "Your white count is elevated. That may be a few things. Stress, illness, or . . . well I guess that's not really possible. Never mind. You're mildly anemic . . ." Another machine chime sounded, and Bruce tapped a few keys to bring the results onto the same screen. He scrutinized the values all at once. "Folate, low. Iron, low. I might run some clotting profiles on this to make sure your coagulation is normal. I'm worried it might not be."
He tapped a few keys on one machine, spun around to another and entered the test requested. Giving it a second thought, he ordered an additional test. "Your basic vitamin and mineral levels are low, so I'm going to check the rest. Have you been eating?"
"A little during the day. Not that it's staying down."
"Blood in your stool?"
She gave him a look. Not receiving her answer right away, Bruce glanced over above the rim of his glasses.
"Look, I'm not asking because I have some perverted curiosity about your bowel movements, Nat. I'm asking because your blood values are telling me you are anemic. That means you are losing blood or not making it. If you are losing it, then where? It's not in your urine, because I already have the results for that."
"No, not that I've noticed," she answered stiffly. Natasha didn't really understand the concept of embarrassment when it wasn't Clint standing beside her, making a fool of himself. She was a private person. Even though Bruce was acting as her doctor, she only had so many things she was willing to share with him.
Bruce typed some more into his data recorder and sent the tests through his machine catalogue. He turned in place and considered what results he still hadn't gone through.
"Dehydration . . . dehydration ... liver values on the low end . . . that's strange. Some of your mineral levels are normal, and others low. As in abnormally low. Your clotting times are a little slow too. You, personally, tend to have higher than normal levels in all of those from the nature of the soldier serum. You are losing ketones in your urine, which means your body is breaking down a good deal of fat. There's also a considerable amount of protein, but no sign of infection." He pulled off his glasses. "You're a mess."
"Gee, thanks."
"No, I'm serious. The screen's negative for UIC-1. Your kidneys are working fine, and even though your liver values are a little off, it's not enough to cause those blood abnormalities. You don't have enough iron or vitamin B, and you are showing signs of stress. What was your heart rate?"
Growing more concerned by the minute, Natasha told him the number she counted. She watched as Bruce factored that into his mental diagnostic database and attempted to describe something, or a host of somethings, that might explain her current ailment. It was difficult to miss the expression on his face that said clearly he had something in mind. She didn't know exactly why he decided to not share his thought. It seemed he warred with himself over it, though.
"Whatever it is, just say it," Natasha demanded.
Broken from his trance, Bruce looked over. "I'm sorry, it's just . . . let me run something else. You go lie down again. I want to take another feel of your abdomen. It's not serious. Deadly, I mean. And I don't think it's a virus either."
Natasha didn't move. She glared the doctor down as he input another series of codes into his diagnostic machine. When he finished, he returned his glasses to the brim of his nose, and offered her his hand.
"It's me, Nat. You can trust me, my judgment, and my diagnosis. Please, humor me for another few minutes, and I think we'll have a real idea of what to do next." Bruce's doctor voice crept up on him whether he liked it or not.
Her distrust, though slightly improved by his assurance, kept her skepticism internalized. She took his direction and returned to the bed. Foregoing palpating through her borrowed shirt, Bruce instead drew the blanket up to cover her lower half, and pulled Clint's shirt up to her breast bone. With her lying exposed beneath him, the doctor's trained eyes made a careful, detailed assessment of her. Nothing particular seemed amiss.
"Enjoying the view?" Natasha asked.
Bruce ignored her. He felt along the rim of her pelvis, where the old scar from a gunshot wound once highlighted her hip bone. It was gone now, just like all of Tony's scars. Bruce watched her face as his hands slid toward her middle, and gently upward by her abdomen. Natasha's earlier discomfort hadn't improved any, regardless that she professed to feeling better. What Bruce thought he might feel, was also appreciably absent. He took the edge of Clint's shirt, and pulled it back down to cover her up again. Her crescent-shaped eyebrow stated the question.
"Let me see the result of that test, and then we'll decide," he told her.
"You didn't find what you thought you would," she assessed.
"It doesn't mean the test is negative," Bruce replied.
"And you knew that. You think something's growing in there."
Natasha sat up. When she wanted to know something, there was no way to stop her. A person hardly had to speak under her careful scrutiny in order to give her the answer she sought out. "That's it, isn't it? You think I have a mass or cancer like Clint or Tony did. You think I might be dying too."
Bruce visibly released the breath he held. Standing, he said. "For once, you didn't read my mind. You must be feeling sick."
Surprised at herself, Natasha swung her feet over the side of the bed. What could she be missing that Bruce so obviously caught onto? Sure she didn't exactly have twenty plus years of licensed and unlicensed medical treatments under her belt by comparison, but that didn't mean she wasn't fairly familiar with the human body. If she didn't have the most common universal virus, then what did she have?
That memory faded into her, the one where, in desperation and fear, she took a handful of pregnancy tests all at once. Pepper had walked in on her and, together, they awaited the results. A Kree warship had descended on them instantly, thrashing the Tower and sending the tests flying. Pepper wanted to wait, hang back, and find at least one in the masses of rubble. Natasha prevented her. She had her answer already. One of the tests had landed near her, close enough to read the lines.
Negative.
Why she ever thought she could have a child, Natasha didn't know. It was a stupid, ridiculous thought. A fantasy brought on by desperation. Clint was dead. She'd only married him to make the man happy. She'd hung her entire life on saving the man, and he was gone. It was time to move on. Bury him on Alfheimr, and learn to forget. Expunge him from every memory as if he had never existed.
In an effort to escape her probing, Bruce retreated next door to babysit his results. Natasha considered following him in, but something held her back. He'd already tried to shake her off twice now. Maybe that meant bad news was on the horizon and he wanted the opportunity to form his thoughts in private before having to face her. What did it matter if she got sick? Everyone died someday.
Poised over the workbench, Bruce glared at the computer monitor with a level of complete shock attempting to overcome his soul. It couldn't be true, could it? Sure all of her symptoms indicated this one result, but seeing that in bold print meant so much more than simple suppositions. Was this reading right? All previous history argued against it. Bruce, for his own peace of mind, wanted more. To get that assurance, he would resort to a test that Natasha might understand immediately the implication of. He had to tread lightly.
Searching around his lab, he attempted to uncover the handheld scanner. It was tucked beneath the corner workbench. It didn't have much use for neurology cases, as the depth penetration failed to pass through skull bones. With the device in hand, he checked the results a fourth time, shook his head in disbelief, and returned to the adjacent room.
Natasha zeroed in on the scanner instantly. "Why do you have that?"
"Natasha, I don't want you to panic."
"I didn't say I was panicking, I want to know why you think you need that to tell me why I have the stomach flu," she said, standing now. He worried she might run for it. Like a cornered mountain lion, she straightened her back, arched her neck and squared off against him. If she had her gun, he had no doubt the weapon would already be cocked, loaded, and facing his forehead.
Holding up the scanner by its handle, Bruce offered his other hand out in supplication. He crossed the room in an arc, closest to the door, as if he might cut off her attempted escape. He had no idea how he was going to explain things to her in a way that would stop her panic. Foregoing any warning, he came straight out with it.
"Natasha, according to your symptoms, the blood work, and the specific test I just ran, twice, you have a very simple diagnosis that I cannot explain. I can tell you what that is right now, or you can let me run this scan on you and confirm it firsthand."
Her shoulder angled a little more, pointing her body sideways as if she was in a duel and meant to make herself a smaller target for him to shoot. With no pants, no shoes, and only Clint's oversized shirt covering her figure, the move lost none of its implications. She could terrify a grown Kree warrior with a simple nod of her head, if she'd so wanted.
"Tell me what's wrong with me," she said.
Bruce gathered his strength, breathed in, and said...
"You're pregnant."
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
oh yeah. i did it.
you know how hard it is to tell a negative test result from one line or two after five of them get mixed up in an explosion? apparently pretty hard.
Please review! this ride is no where near over yet!