Chapter 1: What Makes You Angry?
Chapter Text
“What makes you angry, Dr. Banner?”
The lights above him hum like old memories—constant, low, and too bright.
The lab is a church of clean lines and stainless steel. At night, it forgets itself, stripped of its purpose. No movement. No collaborators. Just the faint sound of machines finishing their final breath and the soft click of glass against glass.
Bruce moves through the space like a shadow unsure of its shape.
He cleans a beaker. He doesn’t remember dirtying it.
A mug of tea sits forgotten to the left of his elbow. The steam is long dead. It has bled out quietly over the course of an hour. Maybe two. Maybe longer. Time is soft-edged here.
He picks up a vial, studies it like it might speak to him. The label blurs. He sets it down.
He’s not thinking. Not really. Just existing. One motion to the next. The body knows the pattern, even when the mind is gone.
“What makes you angry, Dr. Banner?”
The voice doesn’t belong to the lab. It came from a room with pale chairs and a bowl of peppermints. A woman who smiled like she didn’t mean it.
He didn’t answer her.
Not really.
Now, the question hovers in the air like smoke. Heavy. Clinging. Filling the corners of the lab, the lungs, the blood.
He breathes in.
There’s no room.
He breathes out.
Still no space.
He runs a cloth over the table that was already clean. The motion gives him something to do. Something that feels like control.
Thump.
He freezes.
Not a sound in the room. Not really. But the air just shifted, like it flinched.
Bruce closes his eyes.
No. Not yet.
He opens them again. Looks at the sink. His reflection stares back from the chrome faucet—warped, unrecognizable. A smear of man.
He turns away.
The computer beside him blinks, reminding him it exists. The screen shows something important. It always does. Protein strands, molecular chains, a scaffold of letters that mean nothing right now.
He tries to read them. The words slip sideways in his mind.
He stands too fast. The stool creaks behind him.
He crosses to the window. Looks out. The city is a constellation of amber lights. People dreaming. People sleeping. People arguing with cab drivers or kissing strangers or microwaving leftovers.
He watches them like they’re on another planet.
In the glass, his reflection stares back at him. Doubled. Dim.
“Calm down,” someone had told him once.
As if that meant anything.
You don’t calm down a hurricane. You don’t whisper to a grenade.
You just pray it doesn’t go off in your hands.
“What makes you angry, Dr. Banner?”
His chest tightens.
He presses a palm to it. Not hard. Just enough to remember the ribs beneath. The heart under that. Still beating. Still trying.
The question folds itself into his sternum. Pressure.
He walks back to the bench. Sits.
Folds his hands like a child waiting for a verdict.
He knows how this goes.
His brain will circle for hours. The past will reach through the floorboards like roots. He will say nothing. He will sleep less. He will smile at breakfast and no one will know.
He glances at the clock. 2:14 a.m.
Sleep is a language he’s forgotten how to speak.
He picks up the cold tea. Drinks it anyway. It tastes like old pennies and regret.
Thump.
A whisper in his spine.
Thump.
The sound of his childhood, echoing from the dark part of the house.
Thump.
His hands tremble just slightly. Enough to make the mug knock against the desk.
He sets it down. Gently.
Everything must be gentle.
He doesn’t move for a while. Just listens to the machines breathe. Listens to the pressure build in the silence.
Somewhere, in the part of his mind he keeps locked and soundproofed, something is pounding against the walls.
He ignores it. He’s good at that.
He looks back at the computer screen. Still blinking. Still full of promises.
He thinks, I was supposed to make something good.
His thumb rubs the edge of the table. Small circles. Again and again.
“What makes you angry, Dr. Banner?”
He closes his eyes.
And this time, he doesn’t try to answer.
He just listens to the pressure.
Chapter 2: Thump
Summary:
The only sound that stuck in his head was
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
OR
Bruce recalls the last day he saw his mother alive.
Notes:
TW: Domestic Violence, graphic depiction of gore, bad dad Brian Banner
Chapter Text
There are sounds the body doesn’t forget.
Not words. Not screams. Not even cries.
But the spaces between them.
The silence before something breaks.
The hush before a door swings wide.
The echo of a breath held too long.
He was six. And very small.
The closet wasn’t very big, but he folded well.
He’d always been good at that—becoming smaller.
Small enough to vanish behind coats that smelled like mothballs and old winters.
Small enough to slip between the wooden slats and disappear into shadow.
The air inside was still. Dry.
The kind of stillness that feels like warning.
Like something about to happen.
The house was a quiet place.
Until it wasn’t.
And that night, it wasn’t.
The first sound was a voice. Not loud—tight.
The kind of voice people use when they’re trying not to scream.
He couldn’t make out the words.
Only the shape of them.
Drawn thin and sharp, like wire pulled too tight.
Then came the thump.
It wasn’t loud.
Not like in the movies.
It was soft. Heavy.
The kind of sound that makes the floor seem closer.
He heard her cry out. Once.
Quick, like a twig snapping.
Then—another thump.
He didn’t cry.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t blink.
A coat sleeve brushed his cheek. The others swayed slightly, like trees in wind.
He didn’t move.
He knew this rhythm.
It had played before.
But not like this.
This one lasted longer.
Dug deeper.
There were no footsteps.
Just silence.
Then a door slammed, and the house exhaled.
He counted to twenty.
Then thirty.
Then fifty, just in case.
When he stepped out, the light had changed.
The yellow bulb overhead turned everything to paper.
Flat. Washed out.
Like the world had been erased a little.
His father was gone.
The room had been… arranged.
Blankets tucked. Cushions fluffed. Lamps switched on.
Everything in its place.
Except for her.
She looked normal—at first.
Human, all the way to her neck.
But past that… no.
If he hadn’t seen it happen, he wouldn’t have known it was her.
Her head was caved in. Crushed like a rotten pumpkin, barely held together by skin.
Unrecognizable.
Surrounded by blood that hadn’t dried yet.
He didn’t scream.
Didn’t run.
It didn’t look like his mother anymore.
It didn’t look like anyone.
And maybe that was why the grief didn’t come.
Not yet.
He stepped closer. He shouldn’t have.
But he did.
His bare feet made no sound.
He looked at the blood for a long time.
Not crying. Not panicking. Just watching.
It wasn’t like in the cartoons.
It was darker. Browner.
Real.
He crouched.
Touched it with one fingertip.
Sticky.
She was gone.
No one told him.
But he knew.
The silence said so.
The police came later. Or maybe it was days.
He doesn’t remember how much time passed, just that someone knocked too softly, too late.
A hand on his shoulder.
A pen scratching across paper.
He remembers the shine of someone’s shoes.
The clipboard.
That they took his name and didn’t look him in the eye.
The blood was scrubbed away. The rug replaced.
The silence stayed.
No one talked about it much.
Like it hadn’t happened.
But he knew.
He saw.
They said words like unfortunate.
Tragic.
But never sorry.
He doesn’t know if there was a funeral.
Maybe he wasn’t invited.
Maybe no one thought to tell him.
All he remembers is packing a bag without knowing how.
And a woman arriving with a coat and a stone face.
Someone said, “Aunt Elaine.”
She didn’t kneel.
Didn’t hug him.
She nodded once, like she was signing a form.
Like he was being transferred.
He was driven away in silence.
The car was cold.
He pressed his forehead to the window and watched the neighborhood bleed into distance.
He dreams about the thump, sometimes.
Never the scream.
Only the thump.
The weight of a body hitting the floor.
The dull snap of bone into drywall.
The way everything can shatter so quietly.
Years later, someone in a suit asks him,
“What do you remember most about that night, Dr. Banner?”
He doesn’t answer.
Because he still hears it.
The thump.
That’s all.
That’s enough.
At the Tower, sometimes—when it’s late, and everyone else is asleep—he presses his palm to the cold tile floor.
Just to remember that it’s clean.
That he’s here.
That he lived.
But the pressure never leaves.
Not really.
It just learns to hide better.
He was six.
And there are sounds the body doesn’t forget.
Bruce Banner remembers them all.
Chapter 3: Teeth
Summary:
She only ever said it once:
“You’re just like him.”
But you could always see it in her eyes.
OR
Bruce recalls his short time with his aunt Elaine.
Notes:
TW: Brief depiction of violence (biting).
Chapter Text
He did not remember the drive.
Only the silence of it.
The kind that pressed in, even through the hum of tires on wet asphalt.
The woman in the front seat hadn’t spoken. Her hair was pinned too tightly and it didn’t move, even when the wind pushed through the cracked window. The coat on her lap was brown. Her eyes were grey.
She was not cruel.
But she was not kind.
Her house smelled like wood polish and boiled cabbage.
The walls were beige. The carpet was beige.
Everything was quiet—except the clocks.
There were a dozen of them.
All ticking out of time with each other, like no one had ever agreed on how to move forward.
She showed him to a room with a twin bed and a desk that didn’t fit.
A plastic globe sat on the corner, turned wrong, so that the South Pole stared up at the ceiling fan.
She told him where the towels were.
Then left.
No one said goodnight.
No one said welcome home.
Aunt Elaine did not yell.
She didn’t need to.
Her silence was its own kind of noise.
She moved through rooms like a ghost: present, but untouchable.
Every step measured. Every glance brief.
She never looked at him too long.
She fed him, clothed him, sent him to school.
Checked boxes.
Maintained the routine.
But when he tried to say something once—about the dreams, or maybe the blood, he doesn’t remember which—she had just looked at him, lips a thin line.
And said nothing.
Jennifer was her daughter.
Two years older.
She was loud where the house was quiet.
Messy where the kitchen was neat.
Bright where the air was stale.
She liked to sing to herself when she played.
Sometimes she’d pull Bruce into it, make him be a monster or a pirate or a prince—
He was never very good at it, but she didn’t mind.
She called him “Bug.”
He didn’t like it.
She did it anyway.
It happened in the backyard.
A game of tag turned too fast.
He tripped.
She laughed.
He got up, breathless and stinging with scraped knees and something else, something he didn’t have words for.
She teased him—lightly, carelessly, like kids do.
He told her to stop.
She didn’t.
And then—
Teeth.
He doesn’t remember deciding to do it.
Just the taste of her arm.
The way she screamed.
He let go immediately.
The mark was red, angry. But it didn’t bleed.
She was fine.
Scared, but fine.
But Aunt Elaine came out.
And saw.
She didn’t shout.
Didn’t gasp.
Just froze.
The moment crystallized: her shadow long on the porch, Jennifer crying, Bruce with his mouth open to explain—
And her eyes.
Like she saw a ghost.
Or worse.
“You’re just like him,” she said.
Quiet. Sharp. Final.
He didn’t speak again for three days.
He still remembers the look in her eyes.
Not fear, not even hate.
Recognition.
That was worse.
That meant it was true.
After that, she stopped brushing his hair before school.
Stopped asking what he wanted for dinner.
Stopped sitting in the living room with him at all.
She didn’t hit him.
She didn’t say unkind things.
She didn’t say much at all.
But he felt it.
The shift.
How her eyes slid past him.
How her mouth pinched tighter.
How Jennifer wasn’t allowed to play alone with him anymore.
He started doing his own laundry.
Started making his own sandwiches.
Started turning the globe in the dark, over and over, like maybe if he found the right country, he could disappear into it.
Sometimes, he tried to be better.
Quieter.
Smaller.
He lined up his shoes exactly.
He organized the pantry alphabetically.
He memorized the times the clocks struck so he could flinch before they rang.
But nothing worked.
Her eyes stayed cold.
And the house felt colder with them.
One night, Jennifer knocked on his door.
She had a flashlight and a stolen cookie.
She whispered, “I’m not mad,” and that was almost enough to undo him.
She told him about a boy at school who got a lizard stuck in his sleeve.
She giggled, and he tried to laugh too.
But it didn’t reach all the way.
Still, he held the flashlight when she fell asleep beside him.
It made the room feel safer.
A small sun in the dark.
Aunt Elaine found them in the morning.
She didn’t say anything.
Just stood in the doorway, eyes scanning like a scanner, like a report she had to file.
Jennifer got sent to her room.
Bruce stayed in his.
No one explained why.
But he didn’t need an explanation.
He already knew the rules.
And what happened when you broke them.
It wasn’t a bad place.
No fists. No shouting.
Just order.
And pressure.
Like he was always being watched.
Not by Aunt Elaine. Not directly.
But by the house itself.
The clocks. The silence. The walls.
They remembered things.
They whispered at night.
He sometimes woke to the sound of ticking from inside his pillow.
He pulled it apart once.
There was no clock there.
But he still heard it.
When the school asked for a parent-teacher meeting, she sent a letter instead.
“Bruce is quiet,” it said.
“He doesn’t cause trouble.”
It did not say he cried when other kids fell.
Or that he drew pictures of broken pumpkins.
Or that he never raised his voice, even when pushed.
It did not say he still flinched at doors.
Or that he stopped eating meat after the dream with the butcher’s knife.
It said he was fine.
Once, he overheard her on the phone.
Something about custody, and paperwork, and too much trouble.
He didn’t catch all of it.
Just the tone.
Exhaustion.
Regret.
Resentment.
The kind of voice people use when they’re talking about a job they hate, or a pet they didn’t want.
He went back to his room and folded his clothes without being asked.
Even the socks.
The worst part was the mirrors.
There weren’t many.
But the few that existed were polished to a shine.
Sometimes, he caught himself in them.
And every time, he looked for the parts of his father.
His nose.
His jaw.
His hands.
He didn’t want them.
But he had them anyway.
Years later, when a therapist asks him about his time there, he says,
“It was… structured.”
And that’s all.
Because it was.
Clean. Predictable. Cold.
No love.
But no bruises, either.
Just a kind of slow freezing.
Like being packed in salt and left.
You don’t rot.
But you don’t grow, either.
He left that house with straight As and a suitcase of shirts that didn’t fit.
He wonders if Jennifer remember all of it.
The flashlight.
The cookie.
The teeth.
He hopes she doesn’t.
The clocks still tick in his memory.
Out of sync.
Out of time.
Out of reach.
He dreams in beige sometimes.
And when he wakes up, he makes tea.
Just to feel the warmth.
It doesn’t last.
But it helps.
For a little while.
Chapter 4: I’m Not Angry
Summary:
He once told Natasha, “I’m always angry.”
But that wasn’t true.
What he meant was: I’m always trying not to be anything at all.
Because anything can become too much.
And too much becomes him.
OR
Bruce recalls the accident.
Chapter Text
He hadn’t meant for it to happen.
But that’s how these stories always begin, don’t they?
Not with lightning and drums and madmen in towers. Not with monsters born of curses or gamma. Just a boy who thought he could fix something broken.
Maybe himself.
Maybe the world.
Maybe both.
It began with chalk dust on a college blackboard. Symbols like languages from stars. Equations that curled inward like grief. Beautiful things, in their own way. And Bruce—thin, quiet, invisible Bruce—saw the shape of them and thought: I can do something with this. I can make this mean something.
He was young then. Still hopeful. Still whole in the way people only are before they realize they’re not.
The lab smelled like metal and sterilized promises. He liked it there. The hum of machines, the click of keys. A heartbeat he could control. Everything followed a rule, a code. If you respected it, it obeyed.
The work was clean. It had purpose. Radiation, regeneration, resilience—he wasn’t building a weapon. That’s what he told himself. It was defense. Evolution. A safeguard against the chaos people kept calling “peacekeeping.”
The project had funding. Government signatures. He never asked why they were so eager.
Sometimes, when he dreams, he sees the numbers again. Not the accident—just the math before it. Endless, elegant, and entirely his.
He had good intentions.
People forget that part.
And then—it wasn’t math anymore.
There was heat. A roar of light.
Not a bang. Not even a scream. Just the sensation of too much all at once.
Then a body on the ground that didn’t feel like his. Bones that bent in wrong ways. Blood loud in his ears. And something… else.
A presence in his chest that didn’t belong.
He woke in pieces.
They told him later what happened. What he did.
But they never said who.
They meant the Hulk. They always did. But they said “you.” Like he’d chosen it. Like it was him.
He saw the footage, eventually.
What they’d called a “containment failure.” What they whispered was “a test gone wrong.” What the world later screamed was “a monster.”
That first transformation—he doesn’t remember much.
Just the feeling of everything in his skin coming apart. The scream behind his teeth. His body turned inside out with a force that wasn’t rage but something far older. Something closer to survival.
But they called it anger.
They always did.
Bruce Banner wasn’t an angry person. But they never believed that.
They looked at the aftermath, and they decided: this is what fury looks like. This is what happens when a man loses control.
They didn’t ask what kind of control he’d lost. Or if he ever had any to begin with.
From then on, he was never just Bruce.
He was a warning.
A weapon.
Even when he tried to do good, the camera never found his hands when they healed. Only the ones that destroyed.
He once saved a child from a collapsed building in Mumbai. The kid couldn’t stop crying, but he clung to Bruce’s leg like it was the safest place in the world.
Later, the headlines said: “HULK CAUSES STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE.”
Not that he’d been there already, helping.
Not that he’d been human.
They didn’t want that version.
They wanted the green one.
The angry one.
The one who roared and smashed and turned cities into graveyards.
And Bruce hated it.
Not the Hulk.
Not exactly.
He didn’t like him. He wasn’t sure he ever could. But he didn’t blame him, either.
How could he?
The Hulk hadn’t asked to be born.
Bruce had built the lab.
Bruce had pushed the button.
Bruce had stepped into the fire thinking he was immune.
The Hulk had come out screaming.
And they both had to live with that.
Still, it was easier to blame the other guy.
To call him it. To say he did it.
The truth was heavier. More complicated.
The truth was that somewhere, deep inside the bone-white blast of memory, Bruce had felt it—how easy it was to let go. To stop clenching his fists. To stop apologizing. To stop being small and scared and human.
There’s something about being that big. That indestructible.
It terrifies him.
Because part of him liked it.
Not the damage. Not the wreckage.
But the freedom.
The release.
The silence inside the rage.
The fact that, for once, no one could touch him. Not his father. Not the suits. Not the endless march of people with clipboards and guns and questions.
They couldn’t hurt him if they couldn’t reach him.
And the Hulk was untouchable.
But Bruce wasn’t. And every time he returned, smaller and quieter, the world looked at him like he was the problem. Like he was the shell the monster wore. Not the other way around.
“You’re always angry,” they said.
He wanted to scream. No I’m not.
I’m always afraid.
But fear doesn’t get headlines.
Anger does.
So they painted him with it. A wide, ugly brush.
Bruce Banner: angry scientist. Angry genius. Angry green thing that breaks the world.
But Bruce knew the truth.
He wasn’t angry.
He was tired.
Tired of being looked at like a loaded gun.
Tired of being asked what his trigger was.
Tired of walking into rooms where everyone’s voice dropped a little, just in case.
He’d trained himself to breathe slow. Speak soft. Keep still. He knew how to shrink.
He’d spent his whole life trying not to take up space.
The Hulk was the opposite.
He was all space.
And noise. And strength. And presence.
Bruce hated that people thought they were the same. That the Hulk was what his anger looked like. Because he didn’t feel angry. Not most of the time.
Just… heavy.
Like the emotion had nowhere to go.
Like it was pressed into him. Folded under skin. Waiting.
They called it a coping mechanism.
They didn’t understand.
It was survival.
He didn’t talk about the Hulk much.
When they asked, he shrugged. Made a joke. “We’re not exactly on speaking terms.”
But it wasn’t that simple.
The Hulk was him. And wasn’t.
Like a bruise that lived inside his DNA.
A scar with lungs.
Some nights, he dreamed from inside the other body. Felt the ground crumble under his fists. Heard the thunder of his own voice, not as rage, but as need.
Not let me out.
But don’t put me away.
And he always woke with that ache in his chest. The knowledge that he was not one thing.
That he could never just be Bruce.
Even if he wanted to.
Especially if he wanted to.
The world didn’t let him.
They never asked if he was okay. Only if he was stable.
They didn’t ask what he needed. Only what he could control.
He’d learned to say the right words. “It’s fine.” “I’m okay.” “It’s under control.”
What he meant was: It’s not happening yet.
He tried to bury it in formulas. Routines. Tea.
Little rituals that reminded him he was still him.
But sometimes, it slipped.
Not in ways the world noticed. But in ways he did.
The heat behind his eyes when someone touched him too fast.
The clench of his jaw when someone shouted.
The phantom ache of a roar in his throat.
Not because he wanted to hurt someone.
But because there was still a part of him that remembered how good it felt not to be afraid.
He envied that.
And he hated that he envied it.
Because the Hulk didn’t hate himself.
Bruce did.
That’s the difference.
He once told Natasha, “I’m always angry.”
But that wasn’t true.
What he meant was: I’m always trying not to be anything at all.
Because anything can become too much.
And too much becomes him.
KaraTutiiro on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Apr 2025 09:19AM UTC
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MoonMustBeFate on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Apr 2025 08:36PM UTC
Last Edited Mon 21 Apr 2025 08:42PM UTC
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darkhaze20 on Chapter 3 Tue 13 May 2025 11:16AM UTC
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