kore_logs | it whistles through the ghosts still left behind

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it whistles through the ghosts still left behind

Who: Bruce and Tony.
When: Day 51 (backdated)
Where: House 6, the town hall, the pharmacy turned clinic
What: After hearing about the Hulk killing a teenager, Bruce gets Tony and the two of them start to deal with the repercussions.
Warnings: A dead body, talk of fatal injuries, brief suicidal ideation.

The Hulk killed someone. Bruce is responsible for the death of a teenager.

He can't breathe. Though it's possible to put himself on autopilot and to compartmentalize what he feels, he can't keep it up for long or he'll explode, again, but different this time. This is the kind of explosion that led him to a gun in his mouth, and while he knows that's not a viable way out, he's not sure if -- once the ball really got rolling -- he'd be able to stop himself.

So he goes to find Tony. He needs a lift raft here, and maybe Tony can keep him afloat.

He finds him in the living room, and Bruce stops, hands clenched in front of him so tightly his knuckles are turning white. At first, he can't make himself say anything, but then he finally forces himself to, so when he speaks, it's as if the words are being cut out of him.

"He killed someone."

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When Bruce appears in the living room, Tony looks up from the mess of papers he has spread all over the coffee table. It’s not like the projections back home. It’s time consuming. It’s messy - between ink smears, graphite dust from the pencils, and little bits of erasure – but it’s all he has and it’s this or start writing on the walls. There’s an irreverent comment forming on the tip of his tongue, but when he sees the look on Bruce’s face, it immediately dies.

He wants to ask what’s wrong. It’s all over his face; confusion, concern, the beginnings of tense anxiety. And then Bruce beats him to the punch, and all that’s left on his face is confusion.

“What?” He almost asks who, but from the way Bruce sounds, Tony knows he means the Hulk. “When? Yesterday? I talked to him. He didn’t say anything about killing anyone.”

The devastation in Bruce's eyes hardens, and he grits his teeth before he answers.

"He had a busy day. I'm sure it just slipped his mind."

Why is Tony so convinced the Hulk would care? Isn't this proof enough that he doesn't care? That he's cold and callous and consumed with a rage that blinds him to things like caring about who gets in his way? He squeezes his eyes shut and clenches his hands tighter, digging his nails into the back of his hand.

If Bruce lets himself sit idly and stew, he won't be able to handle any of this, so it's best if he works through it.

"Someone left his body in the town hall. Will you help me take him to the clinic?"

“That’s not…” He trails off, torn between wanting to defend his friend, defend Bruce, and recognizing that an argument over whether or not the Hulk is dangerous isn’t appropriate right now. Tony isn’t well-versed in coping with problems, or knowing what to do when other people need to, but he thinks that Bruce doesn’t need to be alone with this and if he pushes too hard, that’s exactly what will happen.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Standing up, work forgotten, he brushes his hands on his jeans and starts for the door. He takes a minor detour toward the chair to snag his jacket, which he shrugs into as he turns to Bruce.

“Who was it? Do you know? Did they tell you what happened to the guy? In detail, I mean.”

No, he doesn't want to hear anything about how the Hulk's a good guy right now. The Hulk's a murderer.

Bruce pulls his jacket on once he sees Tony with his, and he's mainly trying to focus, to keep his thoughts together and let himself feel things, but not let everything get out of control. Tony's questions draw him out of his head, but that's good; he needs to focus to answer them.

"Nathan, a teenager who showed up not too long ago. It was Charlie who found him, but she didn't say what happened." He goes straight for the door, expecting Tony will follow.

The name isn’t familiar. Then again, neither one is. Tony knows he hasn’t spoken with everyone in the town, and he knows that their numbers fluctuate due to no pattern that he can discern. It’s not particularly alarming that he doesn’t recognize them.

Bruce is right. He will follow him, and he does, silently mulling over what he’s just said. The girl didn’t tell him what happened. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe Bruce is making assumptions.

Tony knows that he may be treading too close to the line with this, but he cares about both of them, and only if he didn’t would he be able to keep silent. “If she didn’t say anything about what happened to him, how do you know that it was the Hulk that did it?”

Bruce holds the door for Tony, and he can't contain how skeptical he looks.

"She said it was probably the Hulk. Can you think of anyone else today who might've gone on a rampage through the town? He tore the place up, Tony. I saw it. And I know he went after other people. Attacked people."

He has more patience and willingness to believe Tony when he extols the Hulk's virtues, but not when Bruce has to wash the blood off his hands. He can't let someone off the hook for a murder like that.

He has the sense to walk through the door before he turns to respond, getting himself well out of the way of it just in case he pisses Bruce off enough to slam it in his face. That’s the kind of reaction he’s worried about. Mundane things ordinary people take for granted, because even now, he’s not willing to jump on the Hulk Is Awful bandwagon.

“Have you forgotten where we are? This isn’t Happytown, USA, Bruce.” He doesn’t look as skeptical as Bruce, but his voice is dripping with it. And a quiet note of sarcasm, too. “Yeah, I get it. The Hulk busted up the joint. I was there too. I saw it. But I’ve been here for a while, and people dying isn’t really a new thing. Maybe he had something to do with it, but it’s just as likely that it’s a coincidence, too.”

Bruce laughs, a hollow, broken sound, and he starts them toward the town hall. Tony's faith in people is one of Bruce's favorite things about him, but it's a major problem when Tony believes so hard that he misses everyone's faults. Bruce can't be too upset with him about being so positive it becomes a negative, but it really creates a problem sometimes. Like with the Hulk.

"You want more than circumstantial evidence to prove the Hulk did it? Okay. When we find him, we should be able to find out soon enough whether or not the Hulk killed him."

“Yeah. I do want something more than circumstantial evidence.”

But that’s not all that he wants. Because even if the Hulk did do it, even if there’s no shadow of a doubt, Tony still isn’t going to condemn him.

“And if he did do it, I want to know why.” Tony can’t tell if this is one of those moments when Bruce needs his personal space or when he needs it punctured. His impulse is to reach out to touch his arm, though, and that’s what he does. “Because that means Nathan isn’t exactly innocent.”

And that earns another laugh. He almost takes his arm away from Tony, but he stops before he moves. That kind of outburst isn't acceptable, and he shouldn't push Tony away like that. He doesn't think that would send a good message to him about how much Bruce does really trust and love him. So instead of pulling away, he takes a minute to close his eyes, and then he reaches for Tony's other hand, holding it in both of his own.

Come back to Earth, Banner.

"Unless Nathan was riding in a tank and firing at the Hulk with missiles, I don't think we can blame the victim here." The fragility is gone from his voice now, replaced by a deliberate calmness.

At best, he’s expecting to be tolerated. At worst, shoved away. That Bruce takes his hand is surprising, and he smiles slightly, the tiniest, mildest of smiles. It doesn’t last, though. It can’t. Not in the face of what is a serious matter, despite how willing he is to defend the Hulk.

“Then it was an accident,” he says, squeezing Bruce’s hand. “And that doesn’t make it all right, but it doesn’t make it—” Don’t say ‘end of the world.’ It’s the end of the world for that guy. “—as horrific as if it was premeditated.”

He’s speaking from experience here, even if he doesn’t like to revisit that portion of his life. But maybe Bruce needs him to go down that road, and for him, he will. “I know. I’ve killed people too. There’s a lot of blood on my hands, Bruce, and I've learned to tell the difference.”

He should point out that Nathan's death could be an accident -- unless the Hulk killed him on purpose, and they have no reason to rule that out yet. But Tony changes topics, and Bruce frowns, becoming concerned as he squeezes Tony's hand back.

"What are you talking about? When your company was making weapons?" He can see what Tony's driving at, he thinks, and he doesn't like where it's going because he's going to wind up agreeing with the idea that Tony has blood on his hands.

"You made things that could hurt people, and someone else took that power and destroyed things. You blame yourself for that. Tony, you're mixing your metaphors. Their blood is on your hands the way Nathan's blood is on my hands. The Hulk is directly responsible for his death; he killed him. And I killed him too, by proxy."

He knows that he’s got blood on his hands. They’re dripping with it and nothing he does, no breakthrough in clean energy, will make up for that. Bruce doesn’t need to agree with him. He already knows that it’s true.

“It’s not the same. The Hulk isn’t a weapon. He’s not designed to kill. And if he did, if he did, it was either self-defense because he was threatened or an accident because he doesn’t always know his own strength.” He can say doesn’t always know because he’s seen firsthand that the Hulk does know how strong he is. But Tony’s been angry enough himself that he knows that when emotions are running high, sometimes it’s easy to forget.

“That’s why we need to know what happened for sure and why. Because once we know, we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. If it was him in the first place, which I’m really not willing to assume at this point.”

"There are some people out there who'd argue with you over that. And even though they didn't tell me the real nature of what I was working on, the Hulk was born out of an attempt to recreate the soldier serum to make an unstoppable soldier. To make a weapon out of a person." He stops and presses his lips together, cutting off his words before he keeps going. Breathe, come on.

"Maybe that's not all he is, but you can't deny his faults just because you like him, Tony. You can't think that you and I are guilty of these things without blaming him too."

He sighs and squeezes Tony's hand again before he nods at the town hall.

"Let's go see if we can figure out what happened."

“I know what he can do, Bruce. I recognize his faults.”

Tony isn’t lying. He doesn’t do it as often as his reputation might suggest, and even if he did, he wouldn’t do it about something so important. And because he’s being honest, he doesn’t bite off the rest of what he’s thinking.

“But since the faults are what everyone wants to focus on, I think someone has to inject a little perspective. You know, be the voice for the guy who doesn’t have one.” Fight for him when no one else will. Stand beside him when everyone else turns against him.

He won’t keep harping on it though, and shakes his head. “And as for this Nathan guy. She tell you where in there we're supposed to find him?"

"I know that's what you're doing," he says softly. He can't really be angry at Tony for that -- well, he's not angry about it anymore, and he can recognize that any objections he might have to Tony taking that role are rooted entirely in stubbornness and his (pretty justified) bias against the Hulk.

This won't be an argument they'll ever settle, not to either one's satisfaction. As long as the Hulk can push his wait through and rampage like this, Bruce will never be completely on his side.

"She took his body into the town hall." And he'll let the matter drop if that's what they're doing. He starts down the path again, but he decides to keep holding Tony's hand.

If Bruce isn't letting go of his hand, he's not going to be the one to do it either. His fingers curl just a little tighter, deliberately not letting go.

“You been in there?”

Tony hasn’t. Not since that Stane guy claimed it as his own. That’s how he sees it, anyway, and there’s something about the guy, beyond the name he shares with a part of Tony’s past he’d like to forget, he just doesn’t trust. Better, he’s thought, to give the place a wide berth than to go in and end up inevitably causing some kind of ruckus.

“I haven’t. Is there some kind of…” There’s no delicate way to say it. “…morgue in there or something?”

Even if this Hulk thing may never be resolved between them, Bruce wants it to be clear that he's fine with that, that he and Tony can fight about it but it won't change anything. So he keeps holding Tony's hand too, and the pleasant side benefit is that he gets to be comforted a little as he heads to pick up the body of an innocent person his alter ego killed. Probably.

"Not really since Stane settled in, but I explored around in the first few days we were all here. Almost two whole months now." He can't decide if the period of time sounds too short or too long to be true.

"But no. Charlie wanted to bring him inside somewhere so he wasn't out in the open, exposed. I guess the town hall was the closest place."

Two months. It feels like they’ve been here for so much longer than that. So much has happened, so much continues to happen, that home seems further and further away with every passing day. Tony misses it. He misses the people that he’s left behind and the security that comes from being free in a world that isn’t someone else’s trap. But he’s gained something else here that he doesn’t know if he would have gained at home. Or perhaps if he had, it would have taken so much longer.

“Okay, so…” He has no idea who this Nathan person is, and with his luck, he’s going to turn out to be some four hundred pound giant, but he isn’t going to make Bruce carry the body of the guy that the Hulk may or may not have killed back to the clinic. “Let’s collect the poor bastard and I’ll carry him to the clinic. You’re on door-opening duty, okay?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Bruce has been through enough. He’s going to handle the body until they get it where it needs to go. He can do that much for him, at the very least.

"I can help," he starts to protest as they approach the doors of the town hall, but he stops as he realizes what Tony's doing, and he lets the sentence trail off there. Instead he turns a grateful, if sober, smile on Tony and then tugs open the door.

There's Nathan, laid out on the floor. His head is caved in from being thrown against a building and landing headfirst against the stone, and though Bruce has a strong stomach, he's maybe not equipped enough to handle this. Even still, he doesn't let himself look away.

He'd let go of Tony's hand when they were coming inside, but he reaches for it again now.

One look at Nathan’s body is all it takes for Tony’s lips to thin and his stomach to clench uncomfortably. It’s not quite nausea, he’s not exactly squeamish, but it isn’t pleasant to look at. And it certainly doesn’t smell that great either. Yeah, he loves Bruce. There’s no way he would ever do this for anyone that he didn’t love.

His hand is there, ready and waiting. He takes hold of Bruce’s when he reaches for him, gives his hand a squeeze that’s both supportive and meant to remind him that he isn’t alone.

Tony takes deep breath, knowing that it’s only going to get worse on the hike to the clinic. He’s done worse things. He can do this. No problem. First, however, he looks at Bruce. “Examination at the clinic, okay? Let’s just get him there before we start worrying about anything else.”

He nods and wonders if Tony's plan is going to work out, if he'll be able to carry him on his own not for strength reasons but for cleanliness or logistics. He breaks into a hollow, empty laugh.

"We should've brought something to cover him up, or wrap him in, or..." Breaking off, he tries to get a grip on himself; once he sort of has one, he squeezes Tony's hand again.

"You sure you don't want help? It might be awkward carrying him."

A tarp or a sheet, hell, even a plastic bag would’ve been nice. It looks like there’s brain leaking out of the caved in side of his head, and just for a second, Tony’s looking at a fallen soldier he’d just been talking to minutes ago, laying on the ground, blood and something slushy looking oozing out onto the ground as gunfire pierced the hot desert air. But he’s not in Afghanistan, this isn’t the middle of an ambush, and he’s a goddamn grown man. He isn’t going to have a panic attack over a dead body like weak little child.

“Yep. I got it. Don’t worry,” he says brightly, like things inside him are starting to feel too loose and unstable. It’s the way that Bruce laughs, like all of this hurts him. To stop it, Tony would go back to Afghanistan; he can carry a body. He’ll just take a shower afterward.

Letting go of Bruce’s hand after one more squeeze, he takes a deep breath, crosses over to it, hunkers down, tamps down on the sudden roil of his stomach as he lifts the heavy bastard thing, and straightens up, giving Bruce what tries to be a smile as his back protests. “See, piece of cake!” Spongy, brain-colored cake... Don’t throw up, Stark. Don’t you dare throw up. “Lead on, fearless leader.”

He sounds way too cheerful about carting a particularly disgusting looking dead body, and Bruce isn't buying any of it. He watches, concerned, as Tony picks him up, and then he decides to shrug out of his jacket. Bringing it over, he drapes it over Nathan, covering his upper half, including his head. He tucks the coat against Tony so it won't slide around either.

"We'll switch halfway." He doesn't phrase it like a question because it isn't one. As much as Nathan's body troubles him, it seems to be troubling Tony too, and so they ought to share this.

He pulls open the door and then watches Tony to make sure he can make it through without the fragile good mood he's thrown up falling apart. Bruce can see through it pretty easily.

Covering the worst of the body’s injuries is exactly what he needs to be able to breathe easier. Not having to see the extent of the damage means that he doesn’t have to compare it to things he’s seen before, and that means no involuntary visitations to the past. Once he’s cleared that hurdle, he doesn’t feel so nauseous anymore, and though he doesn’t protest Bruce’s declaration of switching off, he resolves not to do it.

Bruce has enough to deal with. He can handle this.

He’s steady as he makes his way to the door, and just as steady walking through it. For half a second, he considers making a joke, but no matter how he looks at it, it will be horrifically tasteless and he changes his mind.

“You know, maybe we should make a place. In the clinic. Uh, for stuff like this. I mean, it’s already happened before.” With Coulson. And that woman. Blurting out morgue just seems indelicate, though, and he can’t bring himself to do it.

"Yeah... Yeah, it's starting to seem like that would be a good idea." Bruce wrings his hands together before he makes himself stop, and he shoves them in his pockets instead. He hangs back so he's walking beside Tony, and his eyes keep drifting to Nathan. He decides he may as well watch him anyway, watch Tony for signs of struggle, watch the jacket to make sure it stays in place.

"I found a freezer that's good for..." Bodies. He's actually not that ruffled talking about these things in a general, medical sense, but Tony's carrying a corpse, so maybe he should be more sensitive to the layman.

"These situations. In some garage near the clinic. Maybe we could appropriate it, move it over to the back room?"

The best way to keep his mind off of carrying a heavy, bloody body through town is to keep his attention mostly focused on Bruce. Tony’s terrible at dealing with his own problems, but he can deal with other peoples. Sometimes even successfully, though he’s aware that his rate of success is directly proportional to how little he has to do with the other person’s problem in the first place.

At the moment, he notices Bruce’s hand-wringing, and he’s seen it often enough now to put the pieces of that puzzle together. When he does it, he’s upset or disturbed or otherwise emotionally uncomfortable. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Nathan’s body is the culprit.

“Actually, yeah, we could. Give me a day or two, I could turn the back room into a freezer. Or at least a room cold enough that, if it comes down to it, we can keep bodies fresh until we have to bury them.”

"Wow, really?" Not that he doubts Tony is capable of that; it's more the question of whether the town has enough material that would let Tony work his particular brand of magic. And while Bruce would like a morgue for the obvious and unfortunate reasons, he also likes the idea of Tony having a project outside of not getting eaten by his ridiculous tiger.

"That would be good. I would appreciate that, Tony. Thank you."

He fiddles with a bit of paper in his pocket, willing the clinic to be closer.

"Hopefully we won't need ti much anymore, but it's not looking good, honestly."

“If I can find the materials,” he says, trying to shrug and failing due to the weight in his arms. It looks like some kind of jerky twitch and he rolls his eyes, feeling dumb. “Yeah. It won’t take me very long.”

Of course, finding the materials is the difficult part, and the part of this whole mess that’s been giving Tony problems since he got here. Still, whatever Bruce has found is a start, and he’s good at making the most of scraps.

“Better to be prepared than not be, right?” He takes a deep breath and looks ahead, trying to gauge the distance between them and the clinic. “One day at a time, Bruce. That’s all we can do.”

Edited 2013-03-31 22:57 (UTC)

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it whistles through the ghosts still left behind

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