A/N:

Ayup! Sorry, I'm late! This chapter got away from me a bit. I was hoping to fit everything into one, but I'm realizing now that that's not going to happen, so here you go! The first half of what's in my computer as one long 7,000 word chapter. I should have the other half out as the new Chapter 4 either tomorrow or the day after, so hopefully that makes up for my tardiness.

Happy reading, and let me know what you think!

P.S. I don't know whether this story has been added to some sort of list or what, but please stop leaving reviews and messaging me about commissioned art. If you want to make some fan art based on this story on your own time, that's perfectly fine, but I'm not going to pay you for it. Sorry!

~ August 17, 2012 ~

Natasha left quickly once it was decided that they'd wait to report Perseus Jackson and his armored friends to Fury. There was no point in hanging around and pretending to make nice with the others if they truly distrusted her as much as their arguments implied.

Behind her, Clint made their excuses and hurried after her. "Nat!" he called, jogging to catch up. When she didn't respond, he grabbed her by the shoulder. She allowed the contact only because it was Clint, perhaps the one person in the entire world she trusted not to hurt her, but she was still tense until he withdrew, and the glare she leveled him with would've turned a lesser man to stone.

He didn't react beyond a raised eyebrow—he'd been her partner for far too many years for that—but he did take a step back, raising his hands placatingly. "Natasha, c'mon. Talk to me. What's going on?"

The glare died immediately, replaced, to her horror, with the threat of tears. She blinked them back forcefully, summoning the anger that had driven her from the meeting. Her training ensured that not a single emotion showed on her face, but Clint knew her too well, and his expression softened immediately.

"They know nothing!" she hissed in Russian, hating his kindness and hating, even more, how much she now craved it. "How dare they complain about this soft government!"

Clint frowned, hands twitching in an aborted attempt to reach out and comfort. "This is all they know, Natasha," he replied, accent endearingly familiar, "SHIELD is better than the KGB but that doesn't make them perfect."

She huffed but held her tongue as Bruce shuffled down the hallway past them, shoulders hunched and tense in all-too-familiar overwhelm. He didn't acknowledge them, and Clint looked pointedly at his retreating back once he was out of earshot. "This 'soft government' did that to him." He didn't say what 'that' was, but they both knew. Natasha's ankle throbbed with the memory of it.

For a few precious moments, Clint thought he might have gotten through to her, but then, abruptly, her expression closed off. "He is only one man," she said coldly. "There were hundreds of us."

Without another word, Natasha turned and strode off down the hallway towards the elevators. Clint sighed heavily and followed after her. It was never going to be that easy, but some part of him couldn't help but hope, anyway.

"Natasha," he protested. Chasing his partner through the hallways of Stark Tower was beginning to get old. "Where are you going?"

The words 'Away from here' bubbled at the tip of her tongue, but she bit them back. Arguments with Clint always brought out a petty childish side of her, and besides, she actually did have a destination in mind. "Headquarters," she replied instead.

The elevator whirred softly as it rose between floors. 71, 72, 73—she kept her gaze steadfastly on the numbered display and ignored Clint as he came up behind her. "Nat," he said softly.

She could feel his eyes on her—could imagine the pleading and care they likely held and refused to look at him. "All the evidence from the rubble is being processed downtown. It won't be cataloged yet, so JARVIS won't have access to it. There might be something there that will prove useful."

The doors opened with a ding and she stepped inside without so much as a backward glance. Clint sighed and followed after her. "Fine. Then I'm coming with you."

Natasha reached forward and pressed the button for the ground floor, and as she stepped back, Clint could've sworn the corner of her mouth was curved ever so slightly upwards.

Breaking into a SHIELD evidence locker when they were supposed to be on vacation? Sure, why not?

Why did he keep letting her talk him into things like this?

Bruce left the team meeting shortly after the two agents and didn't stop until he reached the street. There was just something about being there with them—investigating strange sightings on security cameras they shouldn't have access to, debating permanently changing someone's life—that made him alternately want to scream or break down crying.

What was he doing? He didn't belong here among heroes and legends.

His legs itched to keep moving (always moving. never rest. not even for a second), and it was only the knowledge that he could never truly escape that kept him from running and never looking back.

Despite the recent attack, the streets were just as crowded and bustling as usual, and Bruce blended into them gratefully. He just needed a moment away—to go someplace where he could catch his breath and convince himself he wasn't being watched.

At the next intersection, he turned uptown and made for Central Park, craving the solitude that only nature could provide.

The closest entrance wasn't far, but as much as Bruce wanted to spend the 20-minute journey in his own head, he couldn't help but take in the destruction as he walked. The city was decimated. Entire buildings had collapsed, burying anyone who might have still been inside under thousands of pounds of rubble. Huge chunks of asphalt were torn out of the street, and sooty blast marks were visible on almost every available surface. He hadn't been in New York during 9/11, but this seemed so much worse than the devastation he'd watched through the news ten years ago.

He was almost to the park when he ran into a sudden crowd blocking the way. They were gathered around a staircase leading underground into a subway stop, though the sign indicating which one had been partially melted. Littering the ground around the entrance was a hodgepodge mixture of flowers and half-melted candles.

Bruce's heart jumped into his throat, and he swallowed thickly before carefully making his way towards the front of the crowd.

A single framed photograph was placed at the center of the impromptu memorial. It showed a woman, maybe in her late 20s, dressed in a formal blue NYPD uniform. She was holding her hat under one arm, and her smile was large and well-worn.

Behind the image of her kind eyes, the staircase leading down into the station was entirely black, looking almost like it had been painted in messy flailing strokes. At the bottom was a single pool of brown, dried unevenly in the rough shape of a body.

"She saved me," a woman sniffled, setting down a bouquet of red roses. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked, and there was a glassy quality to her eyes that Bruce recognized as an unfortunate combination of shock and grief. "You're supposed to give white flowers to the dead, but I couldn't find any." Someone nearby—a friend or family member maybe—pulled the woman into a hug and shushed her gently. "They killed her because she was protecting us, and I couldn't even find her the right flowers!"

Bruce looked again at the stain at the bottom of the steps—a line in the sand held until their dying breath—and the horror that rose in him turned so swiftly and violently to rage that he had to turn away.

Onlookers complained as he shoved past them, but for once, he didn't care.

Let them see him. Let them recognize him for who he was so that that woman could know that it was his fault, not hers, that that police officer was dead.

This wasn't fair. How could Loki still live when all those innocent people were dead? In what universe was that justice?! He should have let the Hulk kill him when he had the chance. At least then the abomination he carried inside him would be good for something.

Bruce crossed the street without bothering to check whether the coast was clear and all but ran down the first path he saw into the park. It was severely overgrown but blessedly deserted, and the rich smell of soil and green things immediately cooled his boiling anger so that it congealed somewhere behind his sternum instead, clinging and heavy and feeling an awful lot like heartache. It was a weight he was unfortunately familiar with, and he looked around desperately for something he could use to ground himself outside of his own dark thoughts.

Central Park was beautiful this time of year. Everything was blooming, and the trees formed a cool canopy that provided a welcome reprieve from the stifling New York summer heat. The dust that hung in the air after the battle was finally starting to settle, and the afternoon sunlight was comfortingly warm as it fell on his skin. Bruce stood still for a moment, closing his eyes and focusing on just that sensation until his breaths eased and the green tinge began to fade from his vision.

When he opened his eyes, it was to a part of the park he'd never been to before, so he resolved to explore until he felt more fully centered.

There was a large body of water at the end of the path, and his feet crunched satisfyingly through the gravel as he made his way toward it. Water was always nice. Maybe he could sit and feed some ducks for a little while before he headed back to the Tower.

The further he walked, though, the clearer it became that his relaxing afternoon wasn't to be. His first clue was the absolute lack of noise.

The quiet of this path was why he'd chosen it, but now all he could feel was vaguely unsettled. Why could he not hear other people nearby? Where were the squirrels and screaming cicadas that characterized Central Park in the summertime?

He stopped, and the silence pressed in, all the trees and shrubbery almost seeming to breathe with him. He couldn't even hear the street anymore, though he couldn't have walked far enough for that to be possible.

"Hello?" he called hesitantly.

A warm summer breeze sent the leaves rustling, and maybe it was just him finally cracking, but something in the gentle white noise sounded almost like laughter.

Goosebumps rippled across his skin, but Bruce shook off his unease. This was ridiculous. They were just trees. They couldn't hurt him.

Something moved through the bushes behind him, and he whipped around to find a crow staring at him with its beady black eyes. It croaked, clacking its beak together noisily, and as it hopped from branch to branch, Bruce realized it was the first bird he'd seen since entering the park.

No wonder it was so quiet. But where did they all go?

Bruce crept towards it warily, and the crow watched him with more awareness than he thought it ought to have. When he reached the edge of the path, it bobbed its head once and flew off, landing a few moments later on an odd-looking lump in the underbrush.

Bruce hesitated. Was he really about to start following a mysterious bird? He squinted, hoping to make out what the lump was without leaving the path, but it was no use. The massive maple tree it was positioned beneath cast too much shade for any details to be visible without getting closer.

The crow made a rough caw, seeming to beckon him over, and well… how could he resist that? He was a scientist; investigating the unknown was what he was made for. And it's not like his habit of jumping headlong into these investigations without the proper preparations could mess up his life any more than it already had.

Bruce stepped off the path, scanning the ground carefully as he went. The last thing he needed right now was a case of Poison Ivy.

As he got closer, the smell of wet soil and flowers was slowly overtaken by something rank—like a mixture of the squirrel that had died in his walls that one time and the beach at low tide. Needless to say, it was unpleasant. But he pushed through, his curiosity at the birds' strange behavior too much to overcome.

He could see there was more than one crow now, hopping around the lump and blending so seamlessly with the shadows that they appeared to melt into them when they weren't moving. His crow—the one that had tempted him from the path—was perched on top, staring at him. He stared back and idly counted its friends, the memory of a nursery rhyme tickling the back of his mind.

'One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a death, four for a birth'… What did seven stand for, again?

The area immediately surrounding the maple tree was oddly bare, so when he finally pushed his way through the last layer of bushes, there was nothing obstructing his view of the bodies in the clearing.

Bruce stumbled back in shock, tripping over a stray root in the process and landing hard on his backside. Closer to the ground, the smell of decay was stronger, and he was forced to lift the collar of his shirt to cover his mouth and nose lest he throw up what little breakfast he'd managed to get down that morning.

There were three of them, gathered together in some sort of grotesque pile at the base of the tree. Their distinctive armor and the remains of one of those laser spears made it clear that they'd once been Chitauri, but after four days left to rot out in the open, they were barely recognizable beyond that.

How were they here?

SHIELD was quick to swoop in and gather up any alien technology that was left on Earth after the battle. Alien remains, in particular, had all been spirited away to a facility somewhere almost overnight, presumably to be dissected and studied. Fury was nothing if not thorough, so how had these three been passed over?

"Why did you bring me here?" he asked his crow, too distracted by the stench and looming sense of dread to feel self-conscious about how stupid he probably looked talking to a bird.

It cawed at him chidingly, pecking the wood beneath its feet, and that's when Bruce realized that the branch it was perched on wasn't growing behind the bodies as he'd initially assumed, but through them.

A new sort of horror crawled down his spine as he forced himself to examine them more carefully, taking in the gaping mouths blossoming with leaves and mangled limbs encased in roots. After four days, it was impossible to distinguish between the pre- and post-mortem wounds, but something deep inside him whispered that somehow—impossibly—the tree had killed them.

Hands shaking and with eyes never wavering from the scene in front of him, Bruce withdrew his phone from his pocket and fumbled with it blindly until he got the camera app opened. He needed evidence of this, both for his own sanity and to show his team later.

The crows were all staring at him now, eerily still and dark eyes fathomless. At the first click of the camera, they flew off, cawing angrily, and behaving for the first time since he'd first run into them like normal birds.

In their absence, the silence of the park pressed in once more, and Bruce suddenly found that he couldn't stand it. The thought of staying here, in this clearing that stank of death and secrets, was so repulsive—so wrong—that he immediately turned and fled, heedless of the risks of his reckless dash through the underbrush.

He broke free of the treeline, chest heaving, only to find himself somehow back on the street. Traffic flowed easily around him, no one paying him any mind despite his sudden emergence and dirty, wild-eyed appearance. The Guggenheim Museum loomed from across the street, white façade imposing and familiar, despite the scorch marks now marring its walls.

Bruce turned in a circle uncertainly. How had he gotten here? He'd entered the park through the 6th Avenue entrance and hadn't walked far before encountering the bodies. There was no way he'd walked almost 2 miles without realizing. Had he blacked out?

He collapsed into a nearby bench, moving to put his head in his hands and almost hitting himself in the face with his phone in the process. The screen was still on, glowing brightly in the fading evening light, and Bruce stared at the picture he'd taken numbly.

'Well,' he thought hysterically, 'I wanted a distraction. I think this probably qualifies.'

The bodies were no less grim from a distance, and the clock in the corner of the screen blinked at him accusingly. Five hours had passed, somehow, in what felt like thirty minutes at most.

What was happening to him?

Bruce hunched over, body automatically cycling through the breathing exercises to stave off a panic attack even as his mind spiraled ever downwards. He needed to get back to the Tower, show this picture to Tony, and have someone reassure him that he wasn't losing his mind.

'Please. It's all I have left,' he begged, standing and beginning to stumble his way down 5th Avenue.

Behind him, deep in the park in a glen that should have been shrouded by Mist, a dryad melted from her tree and stared after the strange mortal man with a frown. She could feel her sisters nearby, pulsing with worry–question–confusion, and sighed.

That didn't bode well.