Bruce Banner. (doctorbanner) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-07-20 11:14:00 |
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The list of things Bruce didn’t care to think about too closely was a long one, at the moment. It was sufficient to know - to be faced with the insufferable irony in the moment - that he was, once again, lingering in the dim interior of the jet while yet another wild goose chase raged on around him. Whether it was his fault, whether it stood any chance of resolving well or even soon, what the damage was likely to be - all of that he’d set aside, for now. They weren’t questions that had simple answers. They probably weren’t questions that had pleasant answers. But just now, they mattered marginally less than the day’s objective: find out what the latest threat to global security/survival wanted with a largeish stockpile of indestructible metal, and make sure it didn’t come to pass. It would have been easier to keep his mind on the matter immediately to hand if their communications weren’t operating at roughly the level of two tin cans on a string, of course. Stuck spinning in the navigator’s chair with nothing for company but static (punctuated with periodic bursts of desperate-sounding incoherent garble), he was having a hard time keeping his mind from heading in dark directions. “Come on,” he muttered, not for the first time, guiding the equipment through the usual steps to get it synced up with the rest of the team - as, not for the first time, it completely failed to comply. “For fuck’s sake.” He wasn’t quite sure how long it had been, but suddenly he decided it had been too long, and, fed up, he launched himself out of the chair, grabbed one of the portable units (and, as an afterthought, a weapon, which he slung awkwardly under his arm, an unaccustomed weight that was unlikely to do him much good, but which it would have felt irresponsible not to take at all) and engaged the hatch. If he was going to sit around playing ham radio, he could at least do it where there was better reception. The locus of the action was some distance away, so he only made a cursory check of the surroundings before disembarking into the clearing where they’d landed. There was tree cover all around, fading after twenty or thirty yards into a wide, flat expanse to the west, and so after securing the jet behind him, he set off in that direction, paying more attention to the set in his hand than to the gun knocking against his hip. He only really had any practice with one of them, anyway. “I want the big one,” Wanda told her brother even as she leaned on him - but her eyes were focused on a different target, someone entirely more intriguing. As Ultron had said, she would tear them apart from the inside, and while she’d started with the rest of the Avengers within the ship, there had been one noticeable difference. The one that was called monster. Whether that was true or not wasn’t for her to say, but he too had caused destruction to her people, and this was a part of Ultron’s plan, and so - for now - she would follow it. In reality, she didn’t have to be close to do what she did, not particularly, but she’d never tested her limits, and so it was better to be nearer to her prey. After directing Pietro to get her closer to their ship, she crept a few feet closer, even, staying out of his eyesight but moving towards the open hatch. He had made this almost too easy for her. Shaking off the effects of the archer’s strange arrow, Wanda lifted her hands and spun out a little bit of energy, sending her power into the mind of the dark-haired man who so worriedly watched for his friends. As Bruce stepped over a patch of muddy brush the light seemed to shift, tinted for a moment with that plum color of perennially anthocyanic leaves. He glanced up, found only sky, and turned his attention back to trying to coax a better signal - and started, almost dropping the set to the red earth. There in front of him, set some distance into the flats (which were quickly being overgrown with the scrawny azaleas, hydrangeas, and myrtles of an unkempt suburbia) was a little house. Its exterior might have been sweet if not for the dingy residue on the siding, the drifts of pine straw in the angles of the roof, the window screen that had tumbled to the ground behind an overgrown patch of butterfly weed: the overpowering impression of neglect. The bare window gaped at him, black and empty; and in the silent, baking heat, broken only by the listless sound of a faraway wind chime, it called to mind nothing so much as an open grave. A shock of affront went through him. Something inside him stung like he’d been slapped in the face, and although all he wanted was to turn his back and run to the jet, he started toward the front door as though compelled by some outrageous insulted, shoulders squared, hands clenching. By the time he grabbed the handle he was barreling with rage, clumsy, his thoughts erratic and clouded. He knew this feeling. It was the moment - usually so brief he hardly had time to notice it - when the walls between his insides and the world were thin enough that he could break them. It was the second when his deep, visceral frustration, the rage of a child who couldn’t form words and couldn’t reach things and couldn’t run fast enough, rose close enough to the surface that, in half a second, it would finally break free. But it didn’t. That liminal moment stretched out, an endless corridor rather than a doorway. His shoulder slammed into the door, but it didn’t splinter. In a haze, he grappled with the lock and the handle; with a sick satisfaction, he felt the latch give like the crunch of breaking bone. He shoved the door open and it flew on its hinge to slam into the wall and bounce back with a shudder. Something cracked. (He could see the dent in his mind: star-shaped and shallow, a pit of crumbling plaster.) The foyer flowed into the upstairs hallway in a way it never had in his childhood, but he had a dreamer’s indifference to incongruities. That the view from the windows was alternately Dayton, the arctic, Harlem, and the wilds of West Bengal fazed him not a bit. Geography had spun itself around like a compass on the fritz, but the impulse he felt was without reason or direction, so - what did it matter? There was a noise, soft and furtive, behind him - at the head of the stairs. He turned on his heel, hungry for something to lash out at. His blood pressure spiked, a scattershot surge of anticipation that sought neither satisfaction nor relief but simply an outlet, something to pour itself into like the wind fills up tunnels: there’s always more wind. And there she stood, pale, frozen, with her hand on the banister, a plum-colored shadow (the shade of dark leaves) sagging under one eye. God, he hated her. In the same instant, they both moved - he was faster. His hand shot out to grab her throat, and she twisted, struggled, wrenching her chin up as he wrestled her back against the wall. The mirror hanging over the landing at the bottom of the stairs (it had been there ever since he could remember, since he’d first grown tall enough to stand on his toes and look himself in the eye) showed two vague, grappling figures, grey and indistinct. There was a crack. Where he’d thrown her down the stairs, there was blood on the wall, seeping into the shallow, crumbling dent in the shape of a star. She lay on the landing, covered in red shadow. He realized then that he couldn’t make out her face - surely he’d seen it, before it was all blood and tangled hair, but he couldn’t remember. He started down the stairs, slowly, one unsteady step at a time, and the fury condensed back into his center, packed in impossibly dense. Fear and dread rushed in to fill the vacuum. Betty, he thought. Or - his mother. Someone, perhaps, he hadn’t met yet. His breath came shorter. He wanted to run - back upstairs, or away into the back yard, where in summer the leaves were thick enough that you could pretend the house wasn’t there at all. But he kept walking. As he descended the stairs his eyes never rose from the floor. The mirror looming in front of him terrified him - after all (he told himself) who wouldn’t be afraid to find that monster staring back at them? He, more than anyone, hated that face. He knew, though, from the shape and the feel of the boundaries of his body, from the pain in his fist as he smashed the mirror in its frame, that the face looking back at him would be the one he woke up to every morning. The mirror clattered in shards around her body. He caught sight of himself - of himself, just himself - in one of those jagged fragments before her fingers closed stiffly, painfully around it in a desperate, doomed bid for a weapon. The fear contracted; the rage expanded. And he brought his foot down on her hand, shattering the image into countless pieces. He only had time to suck in a breath - and then, with violent speed, he felt himself rip open. For once, it took a moment (a minute? time was slippery) to realize what was happening. He didn’t know it, in fact, until it had already happened. And then most of him disappeared. Of all the animals in the world, Wanda was perhaps most like a cat – curious, even when it would have been best to remain ignorant. Whenever she spun her way into peoples’ minds, she was observer only; never a participant. They never saw her there, never felt the trespass, so in the long run, there was no harm done…aside from what they did to themselves. And so she stayed near, only a few feet from the good doctor himself as he fell into madness. His vision seemed to start the way others did – where he was became where he never wanted to be again – creating a place that may have once been wanted but not now. The house drew him in and with him, the witch herself. He began to physically move away from the jet itself and she very nearly considered taking it, but instead she followed after Bruce, wanting to see what would happen, where he would go in his mind. Yes, some could shake off the effects of what she did if they tried – but sometimes, the person didn’t want to – and sometimes they simply couldn’t figure out how. The sudden violence – the breaking of the door, was a surprise, and her breath caught faintly. The dent he saw in his thoughts she could see just as clearly, and so she continued to follow along. His mind was like a carousel, one that never seemed to stop, and she was willing to be along for the ride, for now. As he turned at the faint sound, she looked as well and for a moment she was amazed by the fierceness of his emotions…and with that, she realized – the Avengers, these people – they were no one special. They were as human as she and Pietro. They were nothing but the culmination of their own emotions, like all men. But they had killed her people and they would answer for it. His anger turned to grief and fear and Wanda began to draw back, moving away from Bruce both physically and mentally. She could sense, then that her work was done – he had brought this on himself, after all, because she didn’t give people new thoughts – she only brought out their fears and forced them to face them. In fact, it could almost be considered a favor…depending on what you did with it. As he started to change and she sensed the wrath return and take control, Wanda was swift to signal her brother to come for her and remove them both from the vicinity. Just as Pietro picked her up, she caught a faint glimpse of green and gave a small smile, then focused her attention back to where she and her brother were going, to rendezvous with Ultron’s army for transportation to wherever it was he wanted to take them next. |