No. For one moment in
your life, just stop.
+ + + + + +
Steve inhaled deeply.
He rubbed his wrists again, feeling an aching tiredness settling into
his bones. He felt wasted and overdrawn,
sensations he had not known since before the change. He let the breath in his lungs go and it
escaped him too quick to be relaxing. It
smelled of the steak descending into his belly and he caught himself hoping
they were bringing more.
He ran a hand through the scraggly beard at his chin,
pulling through the crossed and knotted hairs.
His fingers twitched with a nervous energy as he looked around the
room. He had spent over sixty years of
his life on the run, in the wild, far from civilization and both its boons and
restrictions. The growing sense of
claustrophobia was new to him as well.
The click of the door handle turning made his hands flinch
into fists. He forced them open and
watched as the portal opened. He
expected operatives with restraints and weapons. He expected the leader in the
trenchcoat. He did not expect a middle
aged man in thick glasses and a labcoat, especially one that stood five four in
shoes and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. The man carried a file and was reading it as
he entered. When he saw Steve, his head
cocked back in surprise, as if he weren’t expecting someone to be there.
The man pushed his glasses further up his nose and closed
the file. He looked Steve up and down
with a hint of disbelief, as if he expected someone to reveal this meeting to
be a strange joke.
“Wow,” he said with the tone of someone looking at a lab
specimen, “you’re…big.”
The man noticed his stare and composed himself.
“Sorry,” he said, holding out his tiny hand,
“I’m…uh…Bruce. Dr. Bruce Banner.”
Steve took the offered hand, swallowing it in his muscled
digits. He shook it, instinctively
taking care not to break the fragile bones he felt beneath.
“Steve,” Steve said.
“Steve Rogers.”
“I know,” Bruce said with a nerd’s chuckle. “It’s an honor to meet you, Captain Rogers.”
“Steve Rogers,”
the posthuman corrected.
“Uh…right,” Bruce said, momentarily confused. “Anyway, I’m here to start your physical. I’m in charge of your blood work.”
Steve’s face and body hardened into a tense posture, ready
to defend itself. His eyes narrowed into
a glare. Bruce seemed to sense the
change in the atmosphere and put up a hand to ward off preemptive aggression.
“There’s no need to worry, Capt…Steve,” Bruce said, a slight
tremble in his voice.
“You can’t have my blood,” Steve growled.
“I’m actually here on General Fury’s orders,” Bruce
stammered.
“I don’t care,” Steve said.
“But I…” Bruce started to say.
His sentence died prematurely when Steve took a step closer.
“You are not
taking my blood,” Steve said.
An operative stepped into the room, drawing Steve’s
attention. He carried a pistol in a
quick draw holster at his hip and, to Steve’s surprise, a composite bow across
his back. Twinges in his leg and back
made him guess that this was likely the unseen archer from the Rockies.
“Problem?” the operative asked with an easy cockiness.
Steve looked at him with the same seriousness he had given
Bruce.
“I’m exhausted, starving, and unarmed, and I’ll still tear
you in half,” he told the operative.
“Stand down, soldier.”
The operative laughed.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “But I don’t think you have it in you.”
With dismissive ease, Steve pushed Bruce aside and stepped
up to the operative.
“Try me,” supersoldier said to soldier.
“Agent Barton,” Bruce said, drawing their attention and
indicating to the door. “Please – you’re
not helping.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” Barton said, turning and stepping
out of the room.
Steve watched him go and returned to his seat.
“Sorry about that,” Bruce said. “I would say something about military
bravado, but I’m…I’m not sure how you’d take that.”
“I didn’t mean to threaten you, Dr. Banner,” Steve
said. “But regardless of how you dress
it up – a physical or whatever – I know exactly why you want my blood.”
“But they’ll just sedate you and take it anyway,” Bruce said
in protest.
“At least I will not have played a willing part in it,”
Steve replied.
Bruce shook his head in regret. He tried to find the right words, and
failed.
Steve watched him go and resettled his resolve.
+ + + + + +
Bruce shut the door to his office and was greeted by
silence. He tried to calm his racing
heart, but his force of will was nowhere near enough. He scrambled to his desk and opened his
medicine drawer. He swallowed two pills
without water and practically fell into his chair.
He wanted nothing more than to fall into a slumber the likes
of which would be life threatening. The
pills travelling down his gullet were enough to knock out three men, but he had
been taking them too long for them to do much more than tire him out. He rubbed the sides of his head as the fog between
them. With the threat to his person
gone, his survival instinct gave way to disappointment.
When Fury told him that they had found Rogers, he felt on
the cusp of greatness. Of
vindication. The soldier was supposed to
be the key to unlocking the mysteries that he had spent (some would say wasted)
the last twenty years of his life on.
The super soldier project, even with the specimens already obtained by
SHIELD had been like trying to put together puzzle pieces that had lost their
ability to interlock. Rogers genetics
had been, allegedly, the source of it all – the precursor from which the
experiments had begun. To Bruce, the promises
felt hollow.
He chided himself for thinking that way. He told himself it was the tension of the
meeting that was souring his thoughts.
There was no reason to panic, despite Rogers’ objections.
A knock startled him, practically out of his chair. The door opened without his say so, which
aggravated him, but he forced the frustration down.
Two men entered the room, both dressed similarly to Bruce
and both equally familiar to the stressed scientist.
“Bruce,” one of them said with friendliness that Bruce
didn’t not entirely share. He was tall
and etched with greying strips of hair, blessed with that charming handsomeness
that some men touched on the far side of middle-aged.
“Reed,” Bruce said, trying to keep his annoyance in check.
“Is it true?” Reed asked.
“Is he here?”
“Hi, Bruce,” the other man said. He carried himself comfortably, neither
dominant nor submissive. He was a man
Bruce had come to respect and appreciate over the course of thirty years, and
while Bruce counted no man as friend, he came close. Bruce smiled for him.
“Hi, Richard.”
“Don’t hold out on me,” Reed said, taking a seat across from
Bruce’s desk and immediately leaning forward in the chair. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
Bruce’s silence served to answer.
“What’s he like? Have
you taken a sample?” Reed asked,
insisting.
“He smells like a pig that’s rolled in shit,” Bruce
said. The words served to push Reed back
into his seat in growing frustration.
“And no, I did not.”
“Well,” Reed said, standing up. “Let’s go get it.”
“No,” Bruce said with more authority than he intended. “He’s not exactly friendly right now.”
“So the proof that our work has potential is a few doors
down and you’re telling me I can’t see him or his bloodwork,” Reed
growled. “I’ll assume that this is
Fury’s doing. I’ll talk some sense into
him.”
Before either of the other two men could speak, Reed stormed
out of the office as a man on a mission.
“Remind me why we brought him in, again,” Bruce said.
“Because you said we needed the world’s foremost radiation
expert,” Richard said with a wry smile.
“If your theory has changed since yesterday, I’d be happy to escort him
out.”
Bruce chuckled at that and sat back in his chair.
“How’s Peter?” Bruce
asked.
“He’s…he’s good,” Richard said hesitantly.
“You should bring him in,” Bruce said. “He’d be a kid in his own personal candy
store. Hell, he’s smarter than half the
people in this building calling themselves scientists.”
“I suppose hanging around a bunch of us nerds would get him
to socialize a little,” Richard remarked, half-joking. “Remember that week at Hopkins? We got twelve hours of sleep in five days.”
“Don’t remind me,” Bruce said, also half-joking.
“I’d do it every week for the rest of my life if it meant
Peter would enjoy himself in high school,” Richard said.
“He’ll be fine,” Bruce said with more confidence than he
felt. Comforting a stressed father was
not exactly his niche. “You’re a good
guy, Richard. You married a great woman. Your boy is going to be something special.”
“Sorry to get melodramatic,” Richard said with a smile. “Dragging this back to the original topic –
tell me: what did you think of him? Of
Rogers, I mean.”
Bruce looked Richard in the eye and saw the raw hunger for
knowledge that possessed all true scientists.
His polite demeanor and genuine friendliness could never fully disguise
it, and if Bruce was being honest, he had to admit it was one reason why he
liked Richard so much.
“He really did stink,” Bruce said. “I don’t think he’s showered in seventy
years. But it was worth the smell.”
Richard’s eyes lit up, and Bruce imagined his own were doing
the same. He looked away, thinking back
to the meeting from a few minutes before as if it were already a cherished
memory.
“He is potential in human form,” Bruce said, feeling inspired
to one of his rare moments of drama.
“The sheer power in his body – it was like looking at a demi-god. He had to be six seven or six eight. He probably weighed three hundred
pounds. Every movement was precise. I don’t care for Reed all that much, but I
understand why he’s impatient. I want to
get him into the lab.”
“Bruce, remember he’s a person,” Richard said, his warning
tone bringing Bruce back from the land of imagination. Bruce looked at him quizzically and saw that
the hunger had blended with a sense of caution.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, he’s a person,” Richard repeated. “You know the file as well as I do. He was a kid when they enlisted him. A kid with ideals and who didn’t have the
body to match them. They made him into a
‘demi-god’, as you put it, and I doubt he has ever come to terms with what that
means. You said he wasn’t friendly,
right?”
“Yes,” Bruce said, considering Richard’s words. “He refused to voluntarily give up his
blood.”
Richard smile sadly and shook his head.
“He doesn’t want anyone else to be an experiment,” Richard
said. “Or maybe he doesn’t want anyone
to be a failed experiment.”
Now it was Bruce’s turn to shake his head.
“Aren’t we past this?” he asked rhetorically. “We’re working on genetics, Richard. We have the potential here to influence the
next step in human evolution in a beautiful direction. The risks are part of the science. We’re too close now, and right down the hall
is living evidence that if we do it right, it can work.”
“You sound like Reed,” Richard said with another sad laugh.
Bruce scowled and looked away, annoyed again.
Richard slapped his thighs and stood, trying to step away
from the conversation before it devolved into an argument. He moved to the door, but stopped before he
left. He had one more thought to leave
behind.
“Consider the line between ‘demi-gods’ and monsters,
Bruce. I can’t imagine it’s all that
clear.”
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