[MINGLE] Worried/Sick 2: Snake Expedition & Recovery!

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: Anywhere; multiple locations
WHEN: Apx. 19-27 November
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Serious illness and reactions to such, snakes, hallucinations

IMPORTANT NOTES: This is the second of two mingles. Please see the timing and general event details here.

Not putting any mod top-levels in this one — Just make sure you label your own top-level clearly as to whether it's Expedition or Recovery, and as always, whether it is OTA or not!

Please keep in mind the established plot details, but creative license is welcome and encouraged as long as it doesn't step on toes.

Comments

[notsoangry]

It was mostly about the Hulk. He was so tired and no cure was coming, and he couldn't keep doing it. Then he was forced to keep doing it. He hasn't thought about that dark period since being with the Avengers. There's no risk of him making that decision here, but there's plenty of risk in how dangerous it is for the soft and vulnerable doctor without a safety net. It has occurred to him, since he's already seen one Natasha leave, but clearly it hasn't stopped him from putting himself out there with her again. To him this is his only chance. He'll have to go back to the Hulk and all the things in their way there. It also is very real that he can only fully function as a romantic partner here. Not that he plans to bring that part up, it goes without saying.

"He's not here to save me anymore," Bruce confirms. He reaches out with his free hand to brush her hair back and cup her cheek tenderly. It's a small touch but a significant one for them. His thumb gently caresses her cheekbone. She is just so beautiful, and she cares about him. She was worried for him. "I couldn't go anywhere without a proper dance, could I?" He smiles at her with more warmth, dropping that hand so he doesn't overstay his welcome in her personal space. "It would be nice if just once I'm around you not looking ridiculous or like a wreck." He knows she's seen him after the Hulk enough times and so this is such a little thing, but it still bothers him. He needs to be at his best when he's wooing her!

[tothefly]

"You'd better not. Even if you were hallucinating, I was promised a date." The touch is a welcome one, honestly. She's not good at asking for these things. Neither is he, she knows, but still, he always somehow manages to be brave enough to reach out. Even after everything. She doesn't pull away; in fact, she leans into the touch, ever so slightly, lips barely brushing the heel of his palm. It's a relief, seeing him here. It's a relief, knowing he's okay, or on his way to being okay, and that in itself is a little terrifying, but if he can be brave enough to reach out, she can be brave enough to not pull away. He does, anyway, after a moment, and there's a part of her that regrets the loss, even as he says that thing that's so patently ridiculous she can't help a small laugh.

"You know, because appearances have always mattered so much to me," she says, but she's smiling at him as she does. "Honestly, we're almost at the point where I'd murder somebody for real shampoo. Don't worry, Banner, I still think you're cute." She nudges him with a shoulder that turns into a lean, an offer for contact she also doesn't mind. She'll sit here as long as he needs. Maybe a little longer, even.

[notsoangry]

Bruce is caught in the moment when her lips burned onto his palm, and the look he gives her is intense and fixed. He thinks very seriously about kissing her. They kissed the one time and it was so fast before she pushed him off the edge. He's starting to think that Tony has him pegged entirely right about what he feels for her, and that's both terrifying and thrilling. It's been over a decade since he allowed himself to want anything this way, and that's why it's intense, it's like a long forgotten box in his mind that was locked away. He blinks out of it before he can do anything rash, focusing instead on what she said, his weary mind catching up. "I ... what did I say while I was hallucinating?" Apparently talking about dates.

Bruce sighs good-naturedly and nudges her back. "I know they don't, and maybe I'm old fashioned, but usually you're supposed to try and look your best when ...." He is not going to use the word wooing out loud. "You're trying to impress someone." He brought Betty flowers and wore a really bad suit on their first date. He shakes his head. "I'm really bad at this. Can you give me a mulligan? I'm not even supposed to be this blatant." He told her he'd give her space and time and here he is throwing his feelings all over the place. You are such a mess, Banner.

[tothefly]

It's tempting. He'd almost died. She's got no illusions about that, but she's also got no illusions about how it would have affected her if he did. It would have hurt. It would have been a loss. Bigger than she might once have thought. Worse than most. It's a scary thought, and the urge to reassure herself of his presence, of their life, with a kiss? There are worse things. But this is Bruce. Bruce, who might see it as more than what it is, and even if that really is what it is, she still doesn't know if she can make that kind of promise. What if she vanishes tomorrow? What if he had died today, whispers the small voice in her head. She still doesn't know.

It's easier to tease, to lean against him and the wall, a small smile playing on her lips, not cruel, just...a smile. For him. "You were having a conversation with Betty, while you were out of it. Said some very nice things about Tony, and about me. Asked what sort of date you were supposed to take someone on in a place like, this, since you can't exactly take someone out to dinner and a movie. I was a little unclear about whether you were talking about me or Tony, but honestly, I think dancing's a good answer, either way." The smile is still there, her tone faintly teasing, but there's an undercurrent of seriousness when she speaks again. "You know you don't need to impress me." And she's not going to answer the rest. After all, she's here, isn't she? She's here, sitting next to him, holding his hand, and she's not going anywhere just yet. That should be answer enough.

[notsoangry]

"Oh my god," Bruce rubs his free hand over his face. "I actually was talking to someone real." That doesn't bode well for some of his other fractured memories, and he's more than a little worried about apologies he might have to make later. Well deserved ones, if he remembers threatening to kill someone so distinctly. Great. He blushes, a full body one this time although she'll only be able to see his neck and face. "I was talking about you. I asked him those questions about you too, but uh, Betty would know best." He winces, because again, talking about exes, he feels like that's a gray zone, but he's also really tired of worrying about all the ways he's doing things wrong.

"We were friends before we dated. And I think ... now. In the way you can be when you don't talk to each other but could probably talk to a hallucination like you're still friends." There's his humor mixed in with some truth. Bruce glances over at her again, still blushing, but squeezes her hand. "She would love you. She was worried I'd never let people in again, but then all of you just sort of forced your way in." Bruce's love for Betty was pure, and that's why he feels as comfortable seeing her as a friend only now that they've both moved on. Nat's his friend too, and if she backed away, he could find that rhythm again with her after an awkward adjustment. Bruce is generally happy having people in his life at all, that's more than he expected.

"Were you there for the other hallucinations?" He thinks the answer is definitely.

[tothefly]

"Mm, I more or less stayed out of the conversation," she admits, but she recognizes the dread in his voice, the place where the awkwardness is coming from. "Felt like it wouldn't be fair, trying to rig things in my favor. She sounds like a great person." There's no jealousy or insecurity in any of this, and honestly no awkwardness, either. He's a person, a grown man with a history of his own. He lived a life before her, and she did the same. There's no shame in that, and honestly, there's no wrong way to do any of this, except for, perhaps, carelessly. There's not much she couldn't forgive, couldn't work around, if this doesn't work out. They're still friends. Friends aren't the kind of thing she gives up lightly.

The smile on her face fades as he asks the last question, and her fingers squeeze around his, holding tight. "Yeah. I was." She doesn't ask. He can offer, if he wants; he can talk, and she'll listen, and she'll never repeat a word to another soul. He knows she can keep secrets. If he wants to talk about it, she'll listen, but she won't force it.

[notsoangry]

"You don't have to rig anything, Nat. I think I've been embarrassingly open about that." Bruce isn't really surprised at Nat's lack of jealousy, because she has no reason to have any. Betty is his past, and he has the best kind of closure a relationship can ask for, with the other person being happy. But he's so uncertain of the rules of dating having never been good at it, but he shakes his head. Mostly at himself, not at her. "It's stupid for me to keep worrying about the right thing to say or do or wear is with you. The dating rules I used to know something about really don't apply to us." They were superheroes, Avengers. They'd been through hell separately and together. They knew things about one another that no one else did.

"I have a tendency to put things in a box so I can understand it better. So I know what to do better." He's a scientist and pragmatic to a fault. Bruce wants everything to be right, but he often ends up being wrong because of it. "But we can't be put in a box." It was more like they had several boxes together. Strangers. Teammates. Friends. Almost exes. Almost somethings. He caresses her palm with his thumb gently. "I'm still going to figure out a real date. I mean, if you decide you want one."

That thinking is so much better than the reality of how much she might've seen that he didn't want. But he sighs and accepts it. What else can he do? "I told Tony that one of the worst things about Ross was that I wanted him to be my father." Bruce was marrying his daughter. He worked on his project. He was desperate for his approval. He had no luck with father figures. "The thing is, I was absolutely right. He was exactly like my father." Bruce smiles without any humor to it. "He hated me on sight, didn't see me as a real person, and tried to kill me." It was just his luck, really, to stumble on the same kind of sociopath that he grew up with.

[tothefly]

Natasha understands the urge to put things in boxes for better categorization and study. She isn't a scientist, but there's always been a need for compartmentalization in her life, and she is very, very good at putting things in boxes and keeping them there. It's what she'd originally done with her feelings for him, before she'd ever confessed them in the first place: kept them in a box, weighed her options, measured risk vs. reward, need vs. want. It wasn't always so cold as that; it was rarely cold, but... she'd always been good at choosing what was necessary, and not necessarily what was selfish. And then things had fallen out the way they had, and she'd put those feelings back in that box and not taken them back out. Until now. Until this second chance she hadn't known she'd ever get, because second chances weren't the kind of thing people like her got. Can she really be blamed for not wanting to give up that chance?

"I wouldn't say no if you asked me out," she says, and there's a faint smile in the words. "Movie might be a little hard, but dinner isn't impossible." The words fade, though, and she sobers again as she listens to him talk about Ross. Ross, whom she already had no love for, Ross, a dangerous man with a dangerous set of ideas in a position no man of his ilk should be in. She has her own ideas about Ross and how to handle a problem like him. Those she doesn't share with anyone. And they aren't the problem at hand. She can hear the problem in his voice, hear the guilt.

"That doesn't reflect on you," she tells him quietly. "Who they are, what they did. You aren't any less just for wanting a father." And you aren't them, she doesn't say, not yet, but the words are there, too. She can see the parallels that he might think were there, but the Hulk is nothing, nothing at all like those men. Nothing at all. And neither is he.

[notsoangry]

"Sometimes I think it does. My father was a mad scientist who got people killed when an experiment of his went wrong." Including his own mother. "I didn't want to be anything like him, but then I did the same thing." Bruce sighs and closes his eyes, leaning his head back on the wall behind them. "It wasn't the radiation that created the Hulk entirely, the radiation could have just killed me. But it was my brain that made it happen, my flaws, my DNA." His demons became reality. He spent most of his life suppressing himself, living in anxiety and fear and shyness, and it was all pieced together into the disaster.

"Abraham Erskine, the man who created the Super Soldier project, posited that the experiment could go wrong based in part on who the person in it was. So a good man, like Steve, became a better man." The experiment wasn't exactly the same, Bruce used more radiation than he should, he was skirting around some of Erskine's better suggestions to poke and prod and try to make it better. He was showing off, honestly, which was so foolish. "The Hulk isn't to blame, Nat, Bruce Banner is to blame. The experiment going wrong, me, the death and devastation from the Hulk, me, Ultron, me. I'm the mistake." She's seen him in this state before, after Johannesburg, and also in that bedroom when they revealed too much of themselves to each other. Seeing his father again was bringing it all back.

There may be more than a few tears shimmering in his eyes, but really, he can't really force them away and doesn't try. "I want to go on a date with you. I'm crazy about you. But I don't know that I deserve it, that I deserve you."

[tothefly]

She can see the connection he's making there, the fallacy inherent in the statement. That because Steve was a good man already, he became Captain America, the super soldier, and because Bruce was a bad man, he became a monster. It isn't true. For a variety of reasons, chief of which is that it really just doesn't work that way, and as good as Erskine was, half of Steve's development was just random chance. She can't tell Bruce that. Just like she can't tell him that she doesn't deserve to be on the pedestal he's placing her on. She knows just how well it works when she tries to put them on even ground, when she shares a part of her bloody history in an attempt to make him understand that she measures things differently. She'd never figured out, exactly, how to do this the right way, but she at least knows the wrong ones. So she doesn't tell him that his father was awful, and she doesn't tell him that he didn't make mistakes, and she doesn't tell him about the things she has done and the choices she has made and the ghosts that still follow her.

Instead, she listens. She listens, and she lets him get all of it out, and she's quiet for a moment, looking at their hands, at her fingers tight around his. "You've made mistakes," she says quietly, "and you've gotten people hurt. You've made choices, and those choices have had consequences. But that doesn't change the fact that you are one of the best men I have ever known." She shakes her head slightly after the words, not a dismissal, but perhaps heading off any protest that he might want to make. "I know. I've spent my life in a lot of questionable places with a lot of questionable people. But I've known good men. Everything you did with us. With the Avengers. Every day you went out there, and you became the thing that you thought was the worst of you, you let that happen, and you did it because people needed help, and you trusted us to bring you back. You did it to help, and you did it to try and make up for mistakes you'd made, and every single time you know what you asked me? Every time you came back, you'd ask me if you'd hurt anyone." Her fingers squeeze a little tighter, grip firm around his hand as she looks at him, tears and all. "I've known a lot of bad men, too, Bruce. You are not one of them."

[notsoangry]

Bruce really doesn't want to hear good things about himself, because when he curls into himself like this, usually it leads to a lot of self-recrimination and grief. Eventually he shakes it off and goes back to his life, but it's not gone. It's repressed and set aside. But he lets her talk. He listens and tries to believe her, and maybe it gets easier as she talks. Natasha has her own dark side and her own demons, he knows that. Neither of them are great at seeing the good in others, full of skepticism and bad experience. Except that was partly what the Avengers gave them. A cause. People to believe in. A future.

Of course he asks every time if he hurt anyone. Bruce Banner himself wouldn't hurt a fly. He caught spiders and brought them safely outside. He brought centipedes to leafs and found safe ways to set butterflies loose. He braked for animals and took in stray dogs while on the run, sometimes giving half his meager food to them. He wants to be a good man. She thinks he is, and who is he to question her? "I have a temper, but deep down I'm all fluff," he echoes with an exhausted half-smile. "I still think you've got lousy taste in men, kid." But he's glad for it anyway. He lifts her hand to kiss her knuckles like that first walk, a sweet gesture they both seem okay with.

"Nat, will you go on a date with me?" It seems like he might as well. She's continuously seen him at his worse and can still look at him like this. He'd be an idiot not to ask.

[tothefly]

"Exactly. And hey, I could do worse." Of course he doesn't want to hear it, but maybe he should. A reminder that he isn't a terrible person, no matter how much he might feel like one, from someone who has never lied to him, even when it might save one or both of them heartache. It's better than a reminder that no matter how bad he might think he is, she's done worse. Bruce Banner might not hurt a fly, but Natasha Romanoff has hurt many, many things far worse, and not always for a good cause. Maybe that's why she can see the allure of this place, see the trap. It's a chance to start over. Make different choices.

She can't quite bring herself to regret this one, no matter how it might end up.

"A date? Hm, I mean, my schedule's pretty full, but I think I could pencil you in," she says, and her tone is faintly teasing, an attempt at returning to normalcy, comforting routine. He can't repress forever, and maybe she'll push a little at those edges another time, when he's not still weak and recovering, but for now, she's here, and so is he, and a date sounds nice. "What about next week sometime, after everyone's recovered and things are calmer?" Hopefully calmer, anyway.

[notsoangry]

It's such a simple thing, to ask for a date in the most complicated of situations, but this seems huge to him. She was his first kiss since Betty, and now she would be his first date too. Strangely enough, if it wasn't for the nightmare he just went through, Bruce might not have asked. They're in such a tenuous place, but he's tired and beaten down and he really wants to be with her. In this room, as friends, out on a date, as more than, whatever it is, that's what he wants. He's not going to second guess it. He might think she has lousy taste, but she's a grown woman. If he's what she wants, he's what she'll get.

"I'd appreciate that," he replies dryly. "Pencil and not a pen? Harsh." Bruce nods, knowing he's not close to recovered himself. He's weak and the fever's only barely gone. He has to go back to the hospital and be a doctor, and he doesn't want to, he wants to stay here and be a man flirting with a pretty girl. "We'll get better, who knows if we'll get calmer." He smiles. "Wow, now I really want to smack myself for thinking being in a Little Red Riding costume was a big deal." It did lead to some laughter for them, and by the end of the night he had drinks with friends and relaxed. It was strange, but even now, only barely alive, he still really liked this place and what it was offering them.

Blame it on his mind. After a beat, he blinks a few times. "You know. I think we completely missed Thanksgiving."

[tothefly]

If it weren't for the nightmare they've just lived, she might not have said yes. She'd told Tony at the very beginning that she wasn't about to rush into anything, to let Bruce rush into anything, but he'd almost died. She hadn't realized how much she'd grown to count on the Hulk's inability to die, on Bruce's safety no matter what. She'd lost so many people, and here was one she would never lose that way. And then the loss of the Hulk, and then the illness, and now...it's not a proposal. It's not a declaration of undying love. But a date--a date sounds just about the right speed. "You telling me we have that kind of technology? In the year of our lord 1890, or whatever this place is?" Her answer is easy, amused. It's not relevant. "You know you're the only one on my dance card, anyway. With or without lacy petticoats." It takes her a very, very long time to let anyone in. A longer time to want to. He's an exception to a very large rule. A silly thing like a costume wouldn't change that. Just look at what they've been through together.

It's easy to just lean over again, nudging his shoulder, and let herself stay there. Eventually he's going to have to get up, to go rest, to go be a doctor again, but until he's ready she'll sit here as long as he likes. "Maybe. Probably. It's not a holiday I ever paid much attention to, honestly. Does it bother you? Missing it?"