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Bryce Banner is always angry.
This is what she says to Steve Rogers as she walks toward the leviathan, one woman against a writhing, screaming mass of flesh and metal, scales and fins.
She feels the burn of radiation deep in her core, and she smiles, wide and feral, and she -
- well, she gets angrier.
++
This is not, of course, where it starts - it starts with some incredibly unscrupulous science, which is how she ends up in Bhagalpur, staying under the radar, teaching herself medicine on the fly.
“Just you and me,” Natasha Romanoff says, and Bryce knows that she’s lying with every fiber of her body, from her earring comm to the gun she can’t see.
When Bryce slams her hand down on the table, Natasha doesn’t jump backwards, but she does have her gun up in less than two seconds, cocked, barrel cold against Bryce’s forehead even in the humid night air.
“That was me,” she informs Natasha. She doesn’t say you’re not the only one who can live and breathe threat, you’re not the only one who’s a living weapon.
“Stand down,” Natasha says, and at least she has the grace to admit it, if not to look abashed.
++
“The top ten floors of Stark Tower,” Tony Stark says to her, leaning across his workbench, smile just a little too bright. She can’t tell if he’s leaning forward out of eagerness, or perhaps to show off his arc reactor. “You’d love it - candyland.”
“I doubt it,” she says. Mr Stark? Tony? One of them invites familiarity and the other a cheap joke, and she’s not sure which is which. “We’ll have to live through this first anyway.”
“It’s an open offer,” Tony says, and then he jabs her in the side with the probe.
It hurts like fuck, and she jerks away.
“Don’t do that,” Steve says.
“I can take care of myself,” she says, “and I have it under control.”
“How do you do it?” Tony says, head cocked. “Bongo drums? Chocolate? Multiple orgasms?” It’s half curiosity and half Tony being his jackass self, inasmuch as she can tell.
“You - “ Steve chokes. “Have a little respect, okay, maybe you don’t like me, but you could at least maintain some professionalism.”
“Talk to my interns about professionalism,” Tony says, leering.
Bryce shrugs and goes back to her graphs, her tables. At least data will never make her want to punch a hole in the roof.
++
The deck plate gives way and she falls, heart jumping into her throat, until she clangs against a grate - solid ground again. Beside her, Natasha reports in. Bryce’s heart is hammering and her breathing - isn’t working, she can’t get air. Logically she knows that she must have hit her solar plexus on something, like say the floor.
Illogically, this makes her furious.
“Bryce,” Natasha says. “Bryce, look at me.”
And Bryce does, and she sees - manipulation, she sees secrets and lies and debt, she sees dead soldiers screaming, in flames, sucked out into the thin air and the clouds, wrapped up in a neat government-labelled suit of armor.
She sees everything that she’s been running from for so long.
By then her breathing is coming a lot more easily; it takes her a few minutes to realize that she’s also punched a hole in the auxiliary power supply to the lights and also a wall or two, by which time she’s already thrown Natasha at a wall.
So it goes.
++
She wakes up in a pile of bricks.
“Are you an alien?” a man with a broom asks her.
“No,” she says.
“You have a condition, ma’am,” he says.
He throws her a pair of pants and a shirt, both oversize, which is probably just as well.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do.”
++
“I’m always angry,” she says to Steve Rogers, because it’s true. Tony Stark has his genius for a weapon, and Natasha has her debts as knives, and Steve has his faith - and she’s never seen faith like that before, not in a God or gods, not in people, not in country - and then there’s Clint, who she hasn’t quite figured out yet. Given time she will, and the fact that he was possessed for more than half the time she’s known of his existence should probably count for something.
Bryce Banner smiles, girds herself in hot-burning rage, and lets it consume her.