Too Little Too Late

Bruce Banner

Banner and Hulk were having a quiet argument. To the outside eye, it looked like Bruce was talking to himself. Shouting at times. During his time off world, both his sides had learnt how to communicate. They shared the time out a bit more evenly now. Bruce listened more to what Hulk wanted or needed. Hulk liked that a lot. Even if the Hulk came out because of anger, he wasn't a mindless beast. On the contrary, he could be quite smart at times, picking up on things and feelings that Bruce didn't notice. They both didn't like what they came back to. The split, General Ross, Tony. Bruce had read the last version of the accords. They weren't as bad as Steve made them to be. Everything else was all wrong. It was hard to put one's head around all the events, let alone two. Both personalities didn't agree on the subject. Hulk was shouting a lot inside his brain. Bruce was eating headache medications as if it were candies. He almost missed the arena now.

After one too many fights, Hulk started refusing to take over. He was sulking. Bruce only thought it was a good thing. A bit of peace and quiet. More time for himself. That wasn't that easy though. Hulk was refusing to fight when needed, refused to talk to the team even. Especially not to Steve. The big guy wanted to talk to his Tin Man. That conversation, Bruce didn't want to have it anytime soon. He wasn't too good with confrontation. With all his PHDs, Bruce couldn't understand why Tony said yes to General Ross. After all the things the older man put him through, put his own daughter through, it was hard to understand why you would want to work with somebody like that. Bruce knew all about guilt, especially after Johannesburg. That wasn't an excuse. But he had to admit, Ross had been in a position of power back then. It would have been difficult to do anything without the general's interference.

It had been hard to see Wanda on the team. Hulk wanted to smash her. And not just a little bit. He wanted her dead. More precisely, he wanted to be the one to kill her. Each time they would see her, images of Johannesburg would come flashing in mind. Bruce wouldn't actually cry his eyes out if her death happened. His logical side was telling him that she could be useful against Thanos. She was powerful. They would need all the help they could find when the Mad Titan would come. Banner had seen enough of their enemy to know that. Plus, it looked like she was close to Vision who was, in essence, the mind stone. They had been a couple at some point, or had been the hope of something. Bruce didn't exactly know what happened between them and he didn't want to be told either. Wanda would still fight to save Vision at the very least. Hopefully. War Machine was back in the hero business after having been hurt during the civil war. Tony, despite his disappearance, had created braces that allowed Rhodes to walk and fly again. Bruce was very happy for him. He always liked the no nonsense colonel.

It would be good if Tony would come back too. Even if Bruce didn't like him all that much right now, they needed him. He had said once that they weren't a team. That they were a chemical mixture that makes chaos, a time bomb. He never imagined that it would produce an explosion of that magnitude. "1.21 gigawatts" would have yelled Tony and laughed at his own joke. And laughed some more when Steve would have had that "I don't know what you are talking about" face. The billionaire always used humour to diffuse a situation, even when the others didn't quite get him. Really, Bruce missed him just a little but only when he wasn't mad. The worst of all things was that he had no reason to be mad at Tony. General Ross was the secretary of defence just before the civil war. Stark didn't put him there, he was just playing the political game. Probably to get the best deal for the Avengers he could.

Steve tried to keep him in the dark. Thor wasn't that interested in the Midgard affairs outside of getting a place for his people and giving them a shot at a new life. All that with the preparation for the war coming. The god didn't think they would win straight away so he was in the better safe than sorry kind of approach. The man had lost nearly everything. They couldn't exactly blame him. Thor was probably doing some mourning of his own. Divinity or not, he had lost all of his family one after one. That couldn't be easy to handle on top of all the obligation of a king.