Chapter Text
Of all the strange and unexpected things that have happened to Brooke Banner in the past few days, somehow the most unbelievable of all is the fact that Toni Stark has offered her not only full access to her ten floors of R&D but also a permanent apartment in Stark Tower—protection, a haven, a home if she’d like it. She can’t say that she’s entirely surprised, but it’s still a bit much to process—it’s a sudden change, even for her.
The R&D levels become home quickly enough. She feels like a kid at Christmas, attacking the labs with a joyous zeal and adjusting to the coffee-fueled banter between Toni and JARVIS that punctuates the heavy metal blasting in the background. She’s still not used to life in the rest of the Tower, though, and she wanders around in a cautious sort of daze, tiptoeing especially around Peter Potts. Around him, she can’t help but feel like some stray dog that Toni dragged in, “oh please oh please can we keep her, I promise she won’t make a mess and smash up the penthouse…again…”
But five days after Torra takes Loki back to Asgard, she wakes up to find an envelope sitting on her living-room table, her name written on it in neat, precise handwriting. Inside there’s a map of Manhattan with clothing stores and restaurants marked off, a debit card, and a post-it note that reads:
“Use it or lose it—P.P.”
Brooke sighs and smiles to herself, pocketing the note and the card as she heads toward the elevator.
Toni’s nowhere to be found, so Brooke ventures out on her own down towards SoHo, hoping that she’s remembered enough of the city’s layout to not have to use the map Peter’s given her. Though she could easily walk there from the Tower she takes the subway out of her own stubborn defiance, testing, proving to herself that she can now. Grand Central station is still little more than a smoldering ruin in the aftermath of the invasion, but one would hardly know it for the swarms of people ducking in and out between the cleaning crews. The train itself chaotic and crowded, but the Other One merely purrs beneath her chest, almost as if to say, “That all you can throw at me, sweetheart?”
Cheeky bastard.
She knows Peter’s marked out various boutiques and shops for her, but she’s drawn to the various street sales up and down Broadway, examines their colorful floor-length skirts in a wondrous curiosity. She buys some more practical clothes from the Gap and Banana Republic (she’s never been a fashionista and doubts she ever will be), but on her way back she stops at the first vendor she passed and buys a purple-and-cream wraparound skirt, with a kitschy beaded necklace to match.
It’s mid-afternoon by the time she returns to Stark Tower, and though she could go back to the lab she decides instead to change into her new purchases, indulging in the newfound notion of leisure time. She wanders up to the penthouse, intending to take advantage of Toni’s flatscreen TV and X-Box, but stops short as she catches a glimpse of herself in the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
She eyes her reflection critically, running her hands slowly over her hips and down the silky fabric of the skirt. In Calcutta she’d started to gain back the weight she’d lost over the years, but she could still stand to steal back another five pounds or so from the Other One. The combination of the skirt and tank top makes her look about ten years younger, which at her age is nothing to complain about. It’s the first time she’s dared to wear a skirt or jewelry in nearly ten years, and she looks herself up and down once more before letting out a slow grin. She twirls once and gives herself a brief, self-satisfied nod. She wouldn’t be rushing towards pencil skirts anytime soon, but this is a start—and a pretty darn good-looking one, at that.
“Belle of the ball, are we?” says a voice from behind her.
Brooke lets out a strangled shriek and whirls around, searching for the source of the voice. She finally spots Hawkeye perched on top of a bookcase in the back corner of the penthouse, sitting crossed-legged and watching Brooke intently.
“Jesus God, Barton,” she gasps, holding her hand to her chest, breathing heavily, “why do they bother to give you the bow when you just can give people heart attacks for sneaking up on them?”
Barton doesn’t answer, but simply eyes Brooke with a look that managed somehow to be both piercing and detached.
“So Fury was right,” she says, her tone curious, “you really do have a handle on this thing, don’t you?”
Brooke raises an eyebrow. “Glad to know Fury thinks so, at least. I don’t think many of your spy friends would be too quick to agree with him on that.”
Barton shrugs. “Be kind of hard to doubt it, after last week. It’s just…another thing to see it in action.”
Brooke walks across the penthouse, mirrors Barton as she perches cross-legged on a bar stool. “So what brings you here, Agent Hawkeye? SHIELD business?"
Barton’s face clouds over. “Getting away from it, actually. Had my de-briefing with SHIELD today, to make sure my mind was officially de-bugged of Tesseract crap.”
Brooke winces.
“Official procedure, standard debriefing, the usual shit” Barton says. “But I…”
“Say no more,” Brooke interrupts as she crosses behind the bar and opens the liquor cabinet. “Pick your poison, Agent.”
Barton raises an eyebrow of her own as she takes Brooke’s place on the barstool. “Stark won’t mind?” she asks.
Brooke gives her a mischievous smile. “Toni told me I’m allowed to take whatever I want from the Tower. I’ve been holding back all week, but I think now’s as good a time as any to start taking advantage of her hospitality, don’t you?”
Barton gives a little smirk of her own and shakes her head. “Whiskey on the rocks, then,” she says, tracing a pattern in the fine layer of construction dust that still coats the penthouse bar.
Brooke pours a glass for Barton and uncorks out a bottle of wine for herself, rolling her eyes at Hawkeye’s look of surprise.
“One glass is not going to bring out the Other One, Agent, never fear,” she says, “I happen to enjoy wine, and I learned moderation long before I started playing with gamma rays.”
Barton snorts. “Wasn’t gonna say a thing, Doc,” she says, “These last few days, I know what it’s like to have people judging your every move. I’m just watching from a distance, here.”
Brooke raises her glass, “To getting out from under SHIELD’s eye,” she says, “at least for a little while.”
“Good riddance for the day,” Barton says, the barest trace of bitterness in her voice. She clinks glasses with Brooke and downs her whiskey in one quick gulp, grimacing slightly as she slams the glass back down onto the bar.
They sit in silence, and Brooke studies Hawkeye subtly, carefully. Out of the six she fought alongside last week she knows Claire Barton the least, having been out of commission when Romanov finally brought her out of Loki’s grasp. She doesn’t appear to be the type who lays her cards out on the table—she’s clearly a woman of few words in mixed company, though the few times Brooke has spoken to her she’s displayed a clipped, acerbic wit that threatens to outpace even Toni’s. Watching her now, though, Brooke notices dark circles under her eyes, and a haggard, haunted look that is all too familiar.
“Can I ask you something, Doctor Banner?” Barton asks as she stares at the ice slowly melting in her glass.
Brooke turns to her, curious. “Shoot.”
“It’s…kind of personal.”
Brooke spreads her hands wide. After the Helicarrier she wonders if anything is ever going to seem “too personal” again.
“Shoot,” she repeats.
“When you change,” she asks slowly, “are you…still you under all of that? Like…” she hesitates, and the rest spills out in a rush. “Are you conscious of what’s happening? Do you remember things while you’re, well…green?”
Brooke takes a long, slow sip of wine before answering. She has a feeling she knows where this is coming from, and where it’s going.
“Have you ever been surfing, Agent Barton?” she says at last, “or swimming in the ocean with really big waves?” Barton nods. “You know how it feels when you slip and get caught under a wave? You’ve got the huge pressure of the surf twisting you, pushing you down, and you need to come up for air but you’re trapped underwater? That’s…that’s what it’s like, when she breaks out. Sometimes I’m aware of what’s going on, in the dimmest sense, but usually it’s just vague sensations, through miles of haze and murk. I don’t remember much, even if I’ve got things under control—Toni had to give me the play-by-play of the battle last week after we all got shawarma.”
Barton snorts. “That must have been interesting,” she says as she pours herself another whisky. She drinks this one more methodically, a calculated sip every ten seconds or so. Brooke wonders if this is a habit or a deliberate rationing.
“So you’re not…you,” Barton says slowly, “When the Other One comes out. You don’t have any control over what you do when the Big Smash breaks through. So why do you feel so guilty?”
Brooke starts. This was not how she’d expected the conversation to be going.
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” Barton says, “I saw the look on your face when you apologized to Nikita for going after him. And that was only after a near miss--I know you’ve done worse.”
“That’s different,” Brooke replies, her frowning at the mention of Agent Romanov, “I scared him, and I did it deliberately. And then when the Helicarrier happened, after all of…I owed him an apology for that.”
“No one owes Nikita an apology for anything, least of all you,” Barton says sardonically, “I’m not going to get in the middle of whatever issues the two of you have, but know he…he’s got a lot of his own baggage, he was assigned to you for awhile, but he’s not going to hold that against you. Especially for something that you technically didn’t do.”
“Look, Barton, it’s not as simple as that,” Brooke replies, “It’s not like—” it’s not like you and Loki. “It’s not like she’s a completely separate entity. She never goes away—she’s just buried down deep, same way I am when the shoe’s on the other foot. I’ve always had the rage—a parting gift from my family, you could say. All it took was a science experiment gone wrong to personify it and expand the blast radius.”
“But that in itself was something out of your control,” Barton snaps, “I’ve read the file. You couldn’t stop that accident from happening, couldn’t stop what happened to you. So the questions stands, Doc. Why do you feel so guilty?” Her voice is strained, her face so twisted in grief that Brooke can’t imagine that they’re only talking about the Hulk.
Brooke sighs. She suddenly feels old—old, careworn, and somehow even more bone-tired than she’d felt after waking up in the rubble of that abandoned building post-Helicarrier.
“I don’t,” she says simply. “Not anymore. Guilt…guilt helped to tear me apart, Claire. I don’t know what Romanov’s told you, but…guilt caused me to get low. Lower than I ever want to be again. And if you allow yourself to think that way…you can’t. You recognize what you’ve done, but you’ve got to see, too, that it’s out of your control and it does no one any good to stab yourself with self-pity. You recognize that other people did this to you, made you this way, and you make promises to them. You step up, you find a way out, you learn how to get a handle on your life again…”
She stops, wondering if she’s gone too far. But all she hears is a soft, quiet “hmph,” and Barton turns, finally, to meet her gaze.
“And you heal yourself,” Brooke finishes gently, “SHIELD granting you any sort of shore leave anytime soon?”
Barton scoffs. “I could ask the same about you,” she retorts, “Fury’s convinced you’re going to start packing up back to play Noble Doctor in India any day now. Can’t be good for your health, after all the smashing you’ve been up to.”
Brooke shrugs. If she were being perfectly honest, she hasn’t thought much about what she’s going to do now. Grateful as she is for all Toni’s offered her, she still can’t stop herself from instinctively treating this time in Stark Tower as an extended vacation and not much else. She doesn’t know how she feels about staying in Manhattan, a constant reminder of so many things gone wrong. She’s wary, warier than she’d care to admit, of remaining stateside for long. Even as she senses on an intellectual level that the events of the past week have been a gamechanger, her memories of Army’s near-constant pursuit loom large in her mind. At the same time…
“I don’t know yet what I’m going to be doing, Claire. And you can tell Fury that much, if she asks. I’m watching and waiting. We’ll see what happens.”
Barton rolls her eyes.
“Well, as long as you’re ‘watching and waiting,’ I’m gonna be around,” she says, “Don’t think Fury’s putting me on any long-distance missions for awhile yet. So…if you want to get out of your science-cave, get away from Stark…I know a bunch of comedy clubs that do shows around the city. No one in SHIELD’ll go to them, they don’t have much of a sense of humor there, but…”
Brooke smiles faintly.
“I’d like that,” she says, “Seems like it’s something that would be good for the both of us.”