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intrikate88See Me Angry, The Avengers (Bruce Banner | The Hulk), pg-13, ~1360 words
Bruce Banner's greatest secret is that he's always angry. It's almost funny that nobody ever guessed that.
Bruce says that it’s his greatest secret that he’s always angry.
It’s almost funny that that’s a secret. Like it was so difficult to guess. And yet everyone seems surprised.
He supposes it’s because they only associate his anger with the Distinctly Not-Jolly Green Giant. The Other Guy. They’ve carefully blinded themselves to the low simmer of daily existential anger. He can hope, somewhat distantly, that the blindness doesn’t get a good deal of SHIELD killed someday.
There are two sides to Bruce’s life. No, not the two everyone thinks of, Jekyll and Hyde; these two sides are completely different (or maybe, they’re not).
Bruce goes to South America, to India. Yes, he’s in hiding (not very well, it seems) but he’s there for a reason. There, children die daily of preventable diseases, from contaminated water, from untreated infections. If he had access to a first-world hospital pharmacy, he could swipe a ton of antibiotics, antivirals, antiparastics, antimalarials, anti-everything. It’s all so inexpensive that it probably would barely be missed. But in the communities he finds himself in, those inexpensive drugs are more precious than they can afford. So the sick die, the people drink dirty water, the girls with no futures spread their legs and their diseases to men who will just pass them along to some thirteen-year-old girl who might have even had a future, before she was told to lay back on a dirty mattress.
He watches these things happen every day, in almost every house he passes, and he does not smash one thing.
Not one damn thing.
Because these people, they have already been crushed. He is so angry that they are, but it isn’t their fault. He could go on a rampage of destruction and oh does he want to, but there is so little he could do that would change their lives for better or worse.
The Other Guy is never easy to suppress, but being utterly superfluous robs him of the motivation to need suppression.
The other side of Bruce’s life is one he tries to ignore, but the world has become smaller over his lifetime, too small for that. American foreign policy is pervasive, and there are radios everywhere, and even internet connections in the remotest of places. He’d like to rip them all out of the wall, out of the ground. Because this is what he hears: politicians, rich old white men with private doctors and the risk of obesity and heart disease, arguing to lower the amount of foreign aid from levels of pitiful to near-nonexistent, in order to balance the budget. All the while they drop more and more of that same money down the black hole of “defense”: as if multi-billion-dollar experimental super-soldier programs that created monsters like him defended those patriotic taxpayers in any way. All they did was create one disaster after another, the smell of burning money following behind.
And these two worlds meet in Dr. Bruce Banner: the government that owns his DNA and the irradiated cells in his blood trade the lives of the people Bruce is trying to save for repeated attempts to grow more versions of the Other Guy, like that does the world any good. As if, once they perfect their super-soldier program to their satisfaction, China/Pakistan/Iran/Russia/pick-your-regime won’t go ahead and do the same and create just one more.
Nobody ever wins an arms race. Bruce lives with all the people who lose.
At least until SHIELD grabs him off the street and forces him back into the world of government idiocy and lies.
Really, he wants to kill everyone. In those goddamn meetings with Director Fury and all the others, he stands in place, wills himself not to fidget, and calmly thinks murder. Murder. Murder until his face goes numb.
For variety, he’d like to set some people on fire, too.
Stark’s okay. Bruce can have a conversation with him. Stark, at least, wastes his own money, and when he fucks up, usually it doesn’t seem to result in a massive cover-up, conspiracy, and the leveling of Harlem. Or if it does, Stark writes a check for too much money to fix it, instead of denying that it ever happened and the people involved with said fuckup ever existed. Bruce has known a lot of bastards, but honesty is a new one.
It’s really not surprising the Other Guy came out and gutted the Valiant. SHIELD’s unfailing arrogance, bringing someone like Loki aboard and thinking they could hold him, and then being surprised when it all went wrong- yeah, he had some anger that certainly didn’t see the massive destruction of covert operations government property to be pointless. It was hardly superfluous action, to make SHIELD think twice about their moronic plans of derring-do. If they were budgeting to waste billions, he’d waste billions for them.
Because this second world that he lives in doesn’t expect anything more from him.
Except for this team. They all tiptoe around like Bruce might explode, all of them except for Stark, who eventually infects them all with his flippant trust in Bruce’s self-control. But out of the suit, Stark is basically a lonely self-destructive alcoholic, so maybe he knows something about the bounds and benefits of self-control. In this second world Bruce lives in, Stark trusts he’ll become the Other Guy only when he needs to destroy alien invasions, and it’s new that someone doesn’t expect anything less from him.
Bruce had once wanted (tried to) kill himself. He doesn’t want to anymore: maybe more than half of him has some purpose. Maybe he can have friends who see that purpose. But SHIELD and the Department of Defense and a whole host of mercenaries and probably more than a few alien entities also see him as having a purpose, one worth more than voiceless people dying far out of view, so Bruce still wants to kill everyone. Just, you know, in general.
Agent Romanov, of all people, is sympathetic. He apologizes profusely for nearly killing her, and she shrugs philosophically. “People try to kill me all the time.”
“What about when your friends try to kill you?” he asks cautiously.
“Sometimes they’re the ones trying the hardest. I could kill them for it, but it solves nothing.” She hesitates. “Everyone I know dies, sooner or later. I can’t really be sentimental about it, anymore. Just because I can kill them if I feel like it, and I usually feel like killing everyone because they’re all violent morons, doesn’t mean there is any reason to, no matter what they’ve done. There’s always a mutated monster or Chechen bomb or car accident that could happen. Why should I eliminate an ally while I still have them?”
Bruce can’t quite decide if that’s comforting or not. Cultural differences, he supposes; the Russians he’s met tend to accept life as it happens, especially the shitty parts. Or at least it’s a slightly more comfortable thing to assume than the fact that Natasha might consider him a friend and might not be bothered if he were missile target practice tomorrow.
“Are you really angry all the time, like you said?” Agent Romanov asks.
“Yes,” he replies. “I mostly want to kill everyone, too. For the same reasons.”
“So why aren’t you always... the Other Guy? If you’re angry, if you want to, why don’t you just kill all these idiots?” She uses his name for his monstrous companion.
Bruce scratches the back of his neck. His fingers, his body, just feel and look like those of a powerless academic, itching for social change and the end of the way things work now, and doing nothing more than fuming about it. Nobody who looks at him has to know what he is capable of. “Because I can,” he says. “I can be angry, but I don’t do anything about it, not more than anyone else can do. Because I could do something about it.”
“And it’s a bitch of a mess to clean up afterwards, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says, knowing that she’s not really talking about bleaching the blood off of floors, “it really is.”
Bruce Banner's greatest secret is that he's always angry. It's almost funny that nobody ever guessed that.
Bruce says that it’s his greatest secret that he’s always angry.
It’s almost funny that that’s a secret. Like it was so difficult to guess. And yet everyone seems surprised.
He supposes it’s because they only associate his anger with the Distinctly Not-Jolly Green Giant. The Other Guy. They’ve carefully blinded themselves to the low simmer of daily existential anger. He can hope, somewhat distantly, that the blindness doesn’t get a good deal of SHIELD killed someday.
There are two sides to Bruce’s life. No, not the two everyone thinks of, Jekyll and Hyde; these two sides are completely different (or maybe, they’re not).
Bruce goes to South America, to India. Yes, he’s in hiding (not very well, it seems) but he’s there for a reason. There, children die daily of preventable diseases, from contaminated water, from untreated infections. If he had access to a first-world hospital pharmacy, he could swipe a ton of antibiotics, antivirals, antiparastics, antimalarials, anti-everything. It’s all so inexpensive that it probably would barely be missed. But in the communities he finds himself in, those inexpensive drugs are more precious than they can afford. So the sick die, the people drink dirty water, the girls with no futures spread their legs and their diseases to men who will just pass them along to some thirteen-year-old girl who might have even had a future, before she was told to lay back on a dirty mattress.
He watches these things happen every day, in almost every house he passes, and he does not smash one thing.
Not one damn thing.
Because these people, they have already been crushed. He is so angry that they are, but it isn’t their fault. He could go on a rampage of destruction and oh does he want to, but there is so little he could do that would change their lives for better or worse.
The Other Guy is never easy to suppress, but being utterly superfluous robs him of the motivation to need suppression.
The other side of Bruce’s life is one he tries to ignore, but the world has become smaller over his lifetime, too small for that. American foreign policy is pervasive, and there are radios everywhere, and even internet connections in the remotest of places. He’d like to rip them all out of the wall, out of the ground. Because this is what he hears: politicians, rich old white men with private doctors and the risk of obesity and heart disease, arguing to lower the amount of foreign aid from levels of pitiful to near-nonexistent, in order to balance the budget. All the while they drop more and more of that same money down the black hole of “defense”: as if multi-billion-dollar experimental super-soldier programs that created monsters like him defended those patriotic taxpayers in any way. All they did was create one disaster after another, the smell of burning money following behind.
And these two worlds meet in Dr. Bruce Banner: the government that owns his DNA and the irradiated cells in his blood trade the lives of the people Bruce is trying to save for repeated attempts to grow more versions of the Other Guy, like that does the world any good. As if, once they perfect their super-soldier program to their satisfaction, China/Pakistan/Iran/Russia/pick-your-regime won’t go ahead and do the same and create just one more.
Nobody ever wins an arms race. Bruce lives with all the people who lose.
At least until SHIELD grabs him off the street and forces him back into the world of government idiocy and lies.
Really, he wants to kill everyone. In those goddamn meetings with Director Fury and all the others, he stands in place, wills himself not to fidget, and calmly thinks murder. Murder. Murder until his face goes numb.
For variety, he’d like to set some people on fire, too.
Stark’s okay. Bruce can have a conversation with him. Stark, at least, wastes his own money, and when he fucks up, usually it doesn’t seem to result in a massive cover-up, conspiracy, and the leveling of Harlem. Or if it does, Stark writes a check for too much money to fix it, instead of denying that it ever happened and the people involved with said fuckup ever existed. Bruce has known a lot of bastards, but honesty is a new one.
It’s really not surprising the Other Guy came out and gutted the Valiant. SHIELD’s unfailing arrogance, bringing someone like Loki aboard and thinking they could hold him, and then being surprised when it all went wrong- yeah, he had some anger that certainly didn’t see the massive destruction of covert operations government property to be pointless. It was hardly superfluous action, to make SHIELD think twice about their moronic plans of derring-do. If they were budgeting to waste billions, he’d waste billions for them.
Because this second world that he lives in doesn’t expect anything more from him.
Except for this team. They all tiptoe around like Bruce might explode, all of them except for Stark, who eventually infects them all with his flippant trust in Bruce’s self-control. But out of the suit, Stark is basically a lonely self-destructive alcoholic, so maybe he knows something about the bounds and benefits of self-control. In this second world Bruce lives in, Stark trusts he’ll become the Other Guy only when he needs to destroy alien invasions, and it’s new that someone doesn’t expect anything less from him.
Bruce had once wanted (tried to) kill himself. He doesn’t want to anymore: maybe more than half of him has some purpose. Maybe he can have friends who see that purpose. But SHIELD and the Department of Defense and a whole host of mercenaries and probably more than a few alien entities also see him as having a purpose, one worth more than voiceless people dying far out of view, so Bruce still wants to kill everyone. Just, you know, in general.
Agent Romanov, of all people, is sympathetic. He apologizes profusely for nearly killing her, and she shrugs philosophically. “People try to kill me all the time.”
“What about when your friends try to kill you?” he asks cautiously.
“Sometimes they’re the ones trying the hardest. I could kill them for it, but it solves nothing.” She hesitates. “Everyone I know dies, sooner or later. I can’t really be sentimental about it, anymore. Just because I can kill them if I feel like it, and I usually feel like killing everyone because they’re all violent morons, doesn’t mean there is any reason to, no matter what they’ve done. There’s always a mutated monster or Chechen bomb or car accident that could happen. Why should I eliminate an ally while I still have them?”
Bruce can’t quite decide if that’s comforting or not. Cultural differences, he supposes; the Russians he’s met tend to accept life as it happens, especially the shitty parts. Or at least it’s a slightly more comfortable thing to assume than the fact that Natasha might consider him a friend and might not be bothered if he were missile target practice tomorrow.
“Are you really angry all the time, like you said?” Agent Romanov asks.
“Yes,” he replies. “I mostly want to kill everyone, too. For the same reasons.”
“So why aren’t you always... the Other Guy? If you’re angry, if you want to, why don’t you just kill all these idiots?” She uses his name for his monstrous companion.
Bruce scratches the back of his neck. His fingers, his body, just feel and look like those of a powerless academic, itching for social change and the end of the way things work now, and doing nothing more than fuming about it. Nobody who looks at him has to know what he is capable of. “Because I can,” he says. “I can be angry, but I don’t do anything about it, not more than anyone else can do. Because I could do something about it.”
“And it’s a bitch of a mess to clean up afterwards, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says, knowing that she’s not really talking about bleaching the blood off of floors, “it really is.”
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 03:39 am (UTC)this is excellent
this is very very excellent
no subject
Date: 2012-05-10 11:52 am (UTC)The Other Guy is never easy to suppress, but being utterly superfluous robs him of the motivation to need suppression.
THIS.
This was really, really satisfying. Bruce is one of those characters who I don't have a real handle on but this fic makes him make more sense to me.