sixthiterationlogs | Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Hello Darkness My Old Friend

WHO: Bruce Banner
WHERE: South Village Fountain
WHEN: 9/17
OPEN TO: Open to all!
WARNINGS: None yet

BUNKER/SOUTH VILLAGE FOUNTAIN

In the tube, Banner was unconscious. Nothing so restful as a simple dream, that would be too kind, instead his mind was restless. It was a waking nightmare, seeing people turn to dust before his eyes, seeing the looks of pain and loss on the few people in the world he still cared about, and the friend he knew best was missing, gone, who knows where. Everything was wrong. And now he was here. His hair was newly short and gray, his figure average and unassuming, and he woke up suddenly to propulsion that he couldn't possibly be ready for.

This wasn't really the first time he woke up somewhere he shouldn't be, in a place he couldn't remember; this was a common situation. It wasn't even the first time he was in the water, struggling to breathe, his limbs wildly flailing. But it was a rare occurrence that this moment of concern didn't follow with the feeling to the tip of his toes of the other presence waiting. Then again, he and the Hulk had issues. Issues not even close to being addressed. It meant he was vulnerable. It meant many things. Banner finally got himself together and swam up, figuring out which way was up, and broke the surface gasping. To where? To here. Where was here?

Exhausted and with a heavy heart, he sat on the edge of the fountain and breathed deeply, running hands through his wet hair. Nothing seemed familiar around there, but hey, it wasn't a planet geared toward trying to kill him or freak him out. So far. Don't jinx it, Banner. He sat there for a long time, he had no idea how long. He was in no hurry to move. The world was too much right then, and whatever this was, it was a few steps above.

The strangest part of everything was the clothing. The extras. Normally he woke up naked. So there was that one small good thing. It took him awhile before he was up and walking, but eventually it happened.

INN

At first he simply walked around. Nothing was familiar. In fact, he was fairly certain it seemed dissimilar from anything he'd known before. Some things were the same, yes, but Banner couldn't see how the Hulk brought him this far. And he was wearing clothes. What the hell was happening now? Was this another trick from Thanos? That made sense. He clearly liked to torture people. When he saw the inn, he paused. He tried to avoid people most of the time. It was too dangerous, he was too dangerous, except now he wasn't at all and that meant people he walked into could in fact be dangerous to him. He tried to reach out to see if the Hulk was still ignoring him.

There was nothing. No touch. No moment of anger or denial. No feeling whatsoever. Nothing. He was the only on home. At first he couldn't figure out what that meant. All these years later, how could it be? All the years trying to get here, and it just happened when he woke up. Stunned and overwhelmed, he could only stumble over to the outside wall of the Inn and lean against it. Not going in, just hovering there, and then he started to crumble down until he was sitting on the ground, staring off into space.

What was he feeling? Relief? Loss? Fear? Confusion? All of it.

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"Wouldn't be the strangest thing I've ever been called," Sam said, the corners of her eyes crinkling a little at the notion. Back home, she'd earned the titles 'Galatea of the Ordo Dracul' and 'The Blue Bitch' and, who could forget, 'The Great Experiment.' And she was pretty sure a few residents of the village were still thinking of her as 'Twilight Sparkle' after the whole network incident. All things considered, 'Dr. Resident Dumpster Fire' wasn't so bad. Her parents would have at least enjoyed the 'Dr.' part of it.

She walked over to the trash can, dumping out the remaining glass. It sounded like windchimes in the wind. She nodded over to her notebook, sitting on the counter. The paper was coarse, homemade. Jude had given it to her, shortly before disappearing from the scene. "Take a look," she said. "The first couple of pages are on the multiverse."

Sam had drawn out several diagrams, trying to sum up everything she'd learned. There were twisted threads, labeled as Universe A, Universe B, and Universe C, all knotted together at a central point, with dotted lines indicating shared histories and jagged lines on points of divergence. Additionally, she'd jotted notes on theoretical means of powering some kind of artificial wormhole. And then, of course, there was The List, topped with the words 'Same world (?)' followed by names:

~~Bucky Barnes~~ Fucky Darns
~~Sexy British Lady~~ Peggy?
Second-Rate Guy
~~Dad Jokes~~ Clint
Danny
Claire
Mayor Hotdog
Tony

Bruce took her direction and went to the notebook. Scientists were usually very collaborative, the good kinds, but he knew that sharing notes was part of the job and also a sign of respect. Something he was always grateful for. He pensively looked over what she wrote, seeing the connections although she'd have to explain to him which universe was which. So whatever was going on, it garnered several universes, multiple people from each, and to what end. They probably had to figure out what the purpose was if they were going to reverse it, which he assumed people wanted to do.

He saw the first name and couldn't help but chuckle. "I'm pretty sure Barnes wouldn't appreciate that." Sexy British Peggy didn't ring a bell yet, but he tapped Clint and Tony. Those were the only names he recognized, but he was relieved to see them at all. "This must be my world. Tony's my best friend, and Clint was my teammate." Clint apparently retired and Bruce left earth entirely, so teammates they were no longer. And the team also was destroyed, so there was that. "I don't know the others, but I'm, um, not really a social butterfly, so."

Sam looked over at him, several expressions passing over her face at once. Horror. Confusion. Recognition. All of it quickly summed up with an ever-so-eloquent, "What the fuck?"

She brushed her hands off against each other and walked over to him, staring down at the page with a bit of resignation in the slump of her shoulders. "Another lab rat from that world? I swear, our Overlords play favorites." Which was...fine. In some sense. Sam wouldn't wish this place on her friends. And wouldn't wish her enemies on the place. But it was hard to ignore the fact how isolating the whole thing could be. She never saw Avery or Grace or Star or anyone she knew. Whereas it seemed like every last one of Fucky's merest acquaintances showed up without warning or ceremony.

...she probably needed to stop calling him that in her head.

"So you're from the world with all the superheroes?" she said, planting a hand on her hip and leaning against the countertop. "Please tell me you're not a supervillain or something. I'm not sure we have the capacity for it."

That was not what he expected, he was taken a little aback. "I guess they are. I'm not sure that spells out good things for us." He scratched his chin, it had been on the verge of getting bristle. A few days without a razor and it would fill out. "Our world is interesting on the outside, I can see it. It's always in a threat." He was relieved to see those names, but could tell it was making her distraught again.

The truth was, Bruce wanted to say he was. The Hulk was responsible for more deaths than several supervillains out there. But he figured what made a difference could be intentions. The Hulk never intended to hurt people, even people who were trying to hurt him. It was self defense. "I'm not, I was one of the Avengers, when the Avengers still existed. Our purpose was to stop the supervillains. Unfortunately, uh, we failed big time." His shoulders slumped and he rubbed one of his eyes, and this was an understatement. They failed beyond reckoning.

"The Avengers," she repeated. Probably not the British show from the 1960s that her adoptive parents seemed to love. But she got the gist. A group of super friends. Which meant that there was something 'super' about her new friend here. But after her experiences with Second-Rate Guy, she decided she couldn't come out and ask. "Well, that's fancy," she continued. "My group never even had a name."

Then again, they'd always had a name. But that was before they'd gotten into the business of saving--or rather, failing to save--the world.

"You guys don't exist in my universe. And our world ended in 2014. So in terms of failure, I think my world wins. I'm not sure it's really failure our Overlords are interested in."

Now there was an unexpected, new thought.

What if it was the effort they cared about?

"Yeah, it's a strange name. Tony came up with it. I'm not sure I'd ever say we're out for vengeance, but The Reactionaries doesn't sound great either. The Defenders might be a good one." They were defenders, but they also lost and usually had to react in order to win. "I think it was part of the marketing, we needed to have some kind of title." They were existing in the real world and out in the public, and Tony was an expert on the PR side of things. Or Pepper was. Either way, they all accepted the team title and went with it.

He felt for her in that moment, understanding the sense of loss and guilt that came with failing to do something important. "I'm sorry about your world. We were trying to defeat this man named Thanos, he believed killing half the universe's population was the way to achieve world peace. We didn't stop him, and now I don't even know what number of lifeforms were snuffed out. Beyond trillions." Bruce wasn't really sure if he could emotionally deal with it. He felt numb about it. Like it happened to someone else, that he was looking through blank eyes as people around him dropped into dust. "We saw our people die, unable to stop them from disappearing. Bucky was one of the first." At least one of the first that Bruce saw. He saw Steve's face.

"What happened with yours? Unless that's a very intrusive question."

Well. That was...a lot of information. A lifelong Star Wars fan, not to mention vampire, Sam liked to think of herself as being pretty good at following complicated and convoluted plotlines. But Bruce definitely threw a curveball at her there. She had to press her lips together for a moment to take it all in.

"Okay," she said, after a few seconds of silence, nodding her head once. "I have, like, a million questions." Beyond trillions, possibly.

What had happened to her world had been bad. The Rain of Fire had been...bad.

But literally killing half of the universe's population? In light of the fact that she knew extraterrestrials were science fact in their universe, that was just...staggering.

"I'm gonna need you to back up the bus a second, here. Let's start with this Thanos guy. What's his deal?"

Bruce actually half-laughed when she said she had a million questions, because yes, he completely understood why. He was still trying to figure it all out himself. "Thanos is an alien. He goes to planets, kills half of the population at random, and moves on. I don't know why he decided this was the right thing to do, but he believes it." He did wonder where Thanos came from, what motivated him, but not enough to dwell. Their only job was to stop him, and they failed. He remembered the look in Thanos' eyes. The determination. The certainty. It was the worst kind of crazy.

"And having that drive and an army, multiple armies, is bad enough, but there were these stones. The Infinity stones. They're made of pure cosmic energy, each one representing an aspect of life." It sounded ridiculous when he said it out loud, but he already told the story more than once, and he'd seen it to be true, he knew it. "When he got all of them, he had more power in the universe than any being, so all he had to do was snap his fingers and make his dream into a reality." His eyes were haunted by the memory of that snap. It echoed in his ears. "And then they were gone, just like that."

Sam grabbed her notebook with all the desperation of a drowning man clinging to a buoy. She started to jot down notes as fast as possible, but there was so much information that she resorted to a certain shorthand.

Alien guy. Sith tendencies. Clone armies. Assembles stones. Becomes Captain Planet. Kills half of everyone.

She'd have to work on nuance some other time. Anyone else reading the notes would think she was crazy. And they'd probably be right. But at least Sam understood her own crazy, at this point. Or tried to. Admittedly, their Overlords liked to test that.

"And that's the last thing you remember from your world?" she asked, without looking up. "This guy going on his Donkey Kong rampage." She didn't mean to belittle the cost. But black humor was pretty much Sam's only defense mechanism. She'd made more than her fair share of jokes about the Rain of Fire.

Not that Avery or anyone else ever got them.

"That is..." She finally looked up, blue eyes filled with genuine sympathy, something as rare as a unicorn when it came to Sam. "...awful." There really wasn't anything better to describe it. Mere words failed and she was no poet. "That is fucking awful."

Bruce didn't mind black humor. He took it for what it was. "Yeah, we had no idea what to do next. We mostly were just all standing there, dealing with the losses, wondering what to do next. And now I'm here." To process grief on that level was probably impossible. Once they got back to civilization, they would just see constant devastation, and struggle for the world to right itself. If it could. If this wasn't the start of a civil breakdown and people acting their worst in desperation.

He nodded, feeling emotion well up in his stomach, in his throat, making it tighten. He had so much less to lose than the others, but Bruce was someone whose purpose used to be to better humanity through scientific discovery. So he cared, every life lost was too high a price. "It was. He won. We usually do manage to stop the bad guy. Not perfectly, loss is always a part, small failures that still matter, and I think we believed we still had a chance." Against all odds. They won against bad odds before. It was bound for their luck to run out.

"I don't know yet, if his snap was for all life in the universe, or sentient beings. Did it wipe out half of the animals, half of the plants? If so, more people will die, resources aren't infinity. And with the population cut in half, that half could be the people who make the world function." Bruce shook his head, rubbing fingers through short hair. "How he thought this was helping just goes to show his madness, and his inability to understand the consequences. He left planets and that was it."

The sad part was that Sam could almost understand this guy's logic. Not that she agreed with it, of course. She absolutely emphatically didn't. No one who survived the Rain of Fire, who had lost relatives in the Holocaust, could ever possibly condone the slaughter of half of all life. But she could understand it.

Kindred logic, really. Maybe even Predator logic, a fact that she hated.

But Bruce had said it himself. Resources were finite. That's where the logic lay. Cutting down half of the population cut down half of the drain on those resources.

Sam felt a sour taste in her mouth.

She crossed the room, grabbing one of the bottles of murky vodka she'd been stockpiling. "Here," she said, walking back to offer it to Bruce. "Sounds like you could use this."

Thanos was far from logical, although Bruce could the feeling from his short time meeting him that he arrogantly thought he had the entire galaxy figured out. He knew men like that in his life, just not someone this level of power and cruelty. He might think it was necessity, but there was a part of him that enjoyed it, or so Bruce felt. No one who actually cared and carried the weight of his violence would continue it, unless it was a part of their core. He regretted and grieved over every death on his head, and avoided creating more. Thanos was a monster, and they couldn't beat him. He was too powerful and his certainty was too pure.

He glanced up at the offer and hesitated only a few moments before taking it. "Thanks. I don't usually drink, but I think this is as good a time as any to start." Bruce understood the instinct to drown in sorrows, honestly. It seemed simpler than the feeling that was pressing down on his chest. Survivor's guilt, he intellectually understood, as well as a mountain of worse. He felt bad simply drinking from her bottle, it was clearly hers, so he got up and puttered around the kitchen briefly to get a glass. And since it seemed rude not to share it with her, he brought her back another one. This one hopefully not to break.

"Maybe that's why we're here, part of it at least. The people from my world, they're fighters, they've seen tragedy and survived it. It sounds like you're one too. So the people in charge, they could want the type of people who could struggle past what is thrown at them." The liquor was intense on his tongue, but he swallowed it down in moderation.

"I don't know about a fighter," Sam said, quietly picking up her glass and pouring the vodka into his. "More like a survivor." And an experiment. But that wasn't a good opening for someone you'd just met, she supposed. "Although it's crossed my mind from time to time that the Overlords graciously hosting us might be trying to build some kind of army."

A thought that really led to more questions than answers. But Sam had no shortage of time on her hands to come up with increasingly worst-case scenarios.

"My world was ended by decidedly terrestrial means." She sighed, resting her chin in her palm. "And not quite as neat and tidy as a snap and fifty-fifty odds. We call it the Rain of Fire. My brother came up with the name. After the Creedence Clearwater Revival song."

Avery wasn't exactly known for being up on pop culture, so it was always quite memorable when he managed to get one right.

"A group of assholes--we call them Predators, they call themselves Titans--caused a sweeping communications blackout coupled with sending every single orbiting body around the earth crashing down into the most populous cities. LA got hit with bits of space station. People died...horribly."

"I'm not at all a fighter. I just recently got into one of the only real fights of my life, and I was in a super suit at the time, and I still almost died." It was not great, honestly, and if those were the people they needed in this place, well, it was going to be a tough learning curve. But Bruce did survive. So maybe it was doable. "To build an army they would need to give us reason to follow them. Maybe in exchange for sending us home?" Nothing was outside of the realm of possibility now. And it would be a good incentive for people who wanted to find their family and friends again. But he suspected there were plenty who wouldn't be willing to fight for their captors no matter what.

He looked surprised, his eyebrows lifting. "You look a little young to know Creedence Clearwater Revival. Unless their music has had a comeback." Which wouldn't be that unusual, old bands did it occasionally. He'd been gone from earth too long to know, but then again, they were clearly from different earths. Of course he realized how stupid it was to react to that particular part when she explained the rest. A calamity, a vicious one from the sound of it. Gruesome violence, and for what? There was no reason he could think of that would ever be worth it.

"I'm sorry. That's terrible." He drank a little more, it was still intense, but it was a good distraction too. "There's a saying that every villain thinks they're the hero. Or that they're doing the right thing, somehow. It might be why they wanted to be seen as Titans." It sounded like on multiple verses, people would always find a way to destroy each other and behave badly. Bruce sighed. "Is that when you found yourself here? Maybe that's part of the answers. They take us from defining moments or tragedies in our time."

Sam smiled absently. "I was adopted by an older couple. Guess I developed their taste in music. And anyway, I'm older than I look." And, honestly, good music was good music. Just like good art was still good art. Titian had died a gazillion years before Sam had even been cooked up in the lab. His work was still pretty dope. To say nothing of Leonardo and the other Ninja Turtles.

"And no," she added. "That wasn't when I got whooshed here." She paused. "And 'whoosh' is the scientific term."

She refilled his glass. Not because she thought he needed more of her rat poison, or anything. More of a stalling technique, as she debated how much she wanted to share.

Well. What the hell? What did she have left to hide?

"No, it was about six months after the Rain of Fire. The last vestiges of...well. We were planning a full-frontal assault on the Predators. Ironically, that also involved super suits..."

He really should know better than to assume ages from looks alone. Thor was over a thousand years old and still looked twenty years younger than him. She could very well be an alien, or something else, he shouldn't assume everyone was human. Bruce took the liquor from her, and he knew this was going to be a very short amount of effort before he started to feel it. It tasted like how he was always certain intense liquor would, and he had no metabolism anymore. He was honestly okay with this.

"I'm a scientist, I approve of whoosh, I'll back you up, Doctor." He waited to see if she was going to open up at all, because it was up to her and he wouldn't push outside of how much he'd done already. Bruce listened and nodded when she began to speak, a very active listener, leaning forward, his full attention on hr.

"Super suits are always useful. How did it go?"

Sam frowned a little. "I wouldn't know," she admitted. "I got whooshed here before the showdown." Which, honestly, created a pretty toxic emotional soup for her. There was, of course, anger over the fact that Avery was in the middle of brainwashing her. A sense of shame, like she'd let her friends down by not being there. And, of course, some relief, because only a fucking moron wouldn't be afraid of what was waiting for them. And Sam wasn't a moron.

Most of the time.

"Sometimes people around here disappear," she said. "There's a theory that they're sent back home, to the exact moment they left. Personally, I think that's bullshit and they're really just dead on a dissection table somewhere. But if I end up being sent home to the battle, I'll let you know how it went."

She raised her hand, pretending to toast him.

"I'm sorry. It's difficult, not knowing what is coming, even if you suspect it won't be good, you still don't know." Bruce wondered if he would prefer not to know about Thanos. Not living through that would be easier, yes, but that question mark would at away at him. And make him feel useless, stuck so far away from the fight. It was an impossible situation. Ignorance was bliss.

He might be getting tipsy. He felt fuzzy around the edges, for sure. "Hmmm, I mean, it could be both. If they can take people from a timeline and then put them back in, they can copy them and put one back and use the other. So if that were the case, all you could hope for would be the copy that goes back." Bruce was not much of an optimist, to say the least. He had an extraordinary way of finding depressing parts of anything. "Cheers." He did toast her, and didn't spill, so he would say he was doing okay. It was warm in there.

"What about the people who might be here who are dead already? Either way they're dead, so this might be the only life they can hope for from now on."

"It's not really living," Sam said. "I mean, yes, biological functions are happening, along with all the rest of the science. And I don't mean to get philosophical about it, because I"m really, really not a philosopher. But is living under these conditions really living? Our choices are extremely limited. We're on the knife's edge all the time. Our Overlords mess with our minds, with our DNA. Are you really alive if you're a lab rat?"

It was a genuine question. Sam didn't have an answer. She really wasn't a philosopher. She was just tired. This place had worn her to the bone and she was pretty close to losing it.

Fortunately, there were more glasses to break before she accidentally hurt someone.

For now.

"Of course, I'm speaking from a unique perspective here. My world has some interesting scientific proof of a sort of life after death." She shrugged. It was better living than...this.

"I have a little experience with living basically the lowest possible way. I don't know if I'd say whether it's worth it or not, there were times I didn't think so." But Bruce couldn't die, so there was no real direction to go there, other than acceptance of his situation. He wasn't sure if it was the booze or that he'd gotten away from that darkness that made him comfortable referencing it. Usually he was too embarrassed. Admitting to your lowest point was awkward. "But yeah, I'd say living is probably better. It's a natural impulse of the living, to want to struggle to keep it. When your body starts dying, your system tries to fight it. Life forms are strong and adaptable, otherwise wouldn't exist."

He wasn't entirely sure what he was saying, he felt like he might be rambling a little now. It was mild philosophy, but more based on what he was seeing himself from a medical perspective. Even if the mind was willing or ready, the body still fought involuntarily. He was tipsy for sure.

"Yeah, we don't have any guarantee. Nothing that says we'll be anything other than meat in the end. I didn't used to believe in it, outside of theoretically concepts, but I don't know. Once you meet gods and superheroes and see half the universe die because of aliens from space, an afterlife doesn't seem as impossible." In fact it just made him a little more open minded than his original thought process used to be. "I've been to two other planets, three now, with this place. Didn't think was possible." They were limited by their imagination. He focused on her again. "What's your afterlife like?"

She liked the way he wove science into his philosophy. In her world, he would have been a prime candidate for the Ordo Dracul. Not that Sam would have wished Kindred existence on him.

Or...like, anyone.

Ever.

Ever, ever, ever, fucking ever.

Ironic that the conversation was heading in that direction. But Sam didn't mind, any more. The people here were waaaay too easy-going on any number of scores. Most of them offended her. But that there hadn't been torches and pitchforks pointed in her direction...yeah, that didn't completely suck.

"Oh, I never said 'afterlife,'" she said, giving him a sly smile. "I said 'life after death.' Biological. Not spiritual."

She set her wrist on the counter between them, the inner part up and exposed.

"Try and find a pulse, doc."

It was one of those moments when Bruce was trying to listen to her and follow a direction, having babbled in what he thought was impressively coherent sentences. But when you sway and realize, oh wow, I'm actually drunk, and that's what happened to him. His brilliant mind was trying to slog over that experience, and instead he couldn't make sense of it. He knows she's saying something. Something great and important and interesting. Also her hair is really nice! He thought she might want to hear that, but no, that was unwanted compliments and he was a stranger, so he probably should wait until they had more than three (??) conversations before that.

He put his hand on her wrist, but not to test her pulse. Just to make sure he knew which one of her was real. "I really want to do the thing that you're talking about, but I think I'm maybe ...."

Drunk. "Gimme ten minutes, I'll be right back." He was pretty sure that was supposed to lead into him walking away, and he managed to wobble fairly well all things considered toward what he was really hoping was a bathroom or something useful. Only to make it there and basically pass out. Whoops.

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Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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