Bruce Banner. (doctorbanner) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-04-25 16:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, bruce banner (mcu) |
Who: Bruce Banner (MCU)
When: Friday night/Saturday morning
Where: The cold-hearted streets of the city love forgot His bedroom.
What: A dream!
Rating: Low; tobacco, alcohol, and possibly the use of the word "gams."
Midnight. The city that never sleeps. There’s a mist coming off the river, yellow and heavy in the glaring lights of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s thick, sluggish, clammy like a basement in spring, moving up Fletcher Street like a drunk day trader staggering under the weight of failure and and a borrowed jacket. There’s nowhere to escape it: the city is choked with it tonight. It smells like foreboding - and bourbon. Or maybe that’s him. He turns his collar up against the night, and the brim of his hat down in the hazy pool of a street lamp. Yes, he’s six or seven fingers deep in the stuff, but he isn’t that drunk. Not really. He left the bar before he wanted to, after three (or was it four?) glasses of what that place tries to pass off as top-shelf, always a little too sweet and a little too acid to be the real deal. The girl behind the bar was making him sorry; he couldn’t stay. She’s sweet, she’s young, she has a smile that jumps out at you like it isn’t afraid - and (he likes to think, although he’s never seen them from his place in his chair) a pair of legs that put you in mind of a couple of vertical asymptotes. He didn’t want to go home, not to his cold bed and his empty shelves, but he couldn’t stick around her. He likes her too much for that. What’s got you down, she asked him, but what was he supposed to say? What’s his story to her, or to anyone? It’s the same story, a thousand years old. Older. He’s a used-up man looking for redemption in all the wrong places, chasing what he’ll never catch, and winding up at the end of every hunt in the same dead-end alley, the corner of whiskey and bitter. What’s got him there tonight? More of the same: he followed all the clues; he knew he had his man; but when he got there, all he found was a whole lot of nothing - and the feeling that someone, somewhere, was laughing at him. Could he tell her that? No. His pride made it stick in his throat, the way it always does. So he smiled and asked her about her sister and he left, thinking she was a little bit - maybe - like the girl he left behind. But she isn’t, of course. Nobody is. Nobody ever will be. Now it’s just him and the streets - and the millions of souls that swim in this particular eddy of the Lethe, in various states of ambition, despair. He stops on Pearl Street to light a cigarette, and maybe he imagines it, but the flame seems to gutter as though the oppression in the air has stifled the very electron density necessary to the formation of this most common of plasmas. But eventually, it lights, and he breathes in, gazing up at the matrix of windows in the building looming over him - some lit, some dark and blank. You’re out there - somewhere. Maybe on that fire escape. Maybe in that cab taking the corner just too slowly - maybe in the shadow darting across the road. But all he sees, in the scratched, grafittied glass of a bus shelter, is his own reflection. Gray, washed out. Sleepless. He hasn’t shaved in a week; his tie is hanging on for dear life, but losing the battle. And he’s done it to himself. He knows this: he has no one else to blame. But at least he has someone to run after. Maybe he shouldn’t run so fast. When the game’s up, what will he have left? He’ll leap that chasm when he comes to it. For now - he's out there, somewhere. He'll find him. And god damn it, he'll have back what's been taken from him. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. Seven o’clock in the morning. Stark Tower. Bruce stumbled to the bathroom, allowed himself ten uneasy seconds of bleary contemplation (it had been a while since he’d had a beard) - and then promptly took up his razor, and resolved not to eat so many wasabi peas so soon before bed. |