Chapter 144
A broken landscape of pillars and jagged plateaus stretched out before me, dotted with towering piles of junk metal and ruined machinery. Scattered shards of green glass, the smallest still taller than I was, pierced the rock as if, somewhere high above, a Celestial’s window had shattered and the pieces had rained down. Other, equally random-seeming landmarks were scattered about—a handful of metal gears the size of buildings, balanced atop of each other and lashed together with equally-massive rusted chains; warped, leafless tree trunks that twisted into inexplicable shapes; and the decrepit remains of an old cargo ship that had somehow become beached between rocky outcroppings.
The burnt orange sky was empty of celestial bodies—no sun or moon or stars—but distant, unmoving colossal faces, each as big as a mountain, loomed ominously above the landscape, their skin washed out and grey. An impassive woman. The sneering face of Thunderbolt Ross. Another man that I didn’t recognise, his expression twisted with rage, mouth open in a silent bellow.
This place was… bizarre. An eclectic mishmash of concepts. Chaotic. Every mindscape I’d been in up until this point had been different, of course. Bucky’s Facility had seemed solid and oppressive, with a weight that bore down on you within its maze of corridors and rooms. Yelena’s had been more malleable—an idyllic impressionist painting of the childhood that she took refuge and comfort in. Even Thena’s, vast and non-human, had taken on the form of the World Forge, the place where she’d been created. Despite each being wildly disparate in tone and even how responsive they were to me, they’d all at least been a discrete, understandable thing. My first impression of Bruce’s mindscape, on the other hand, felt… inherently conflicted and oppositional, somehow. Like it was trying to be too many things at once, actively fighting my magic’s attempts to hammer it into something that made sense.
I found myself frowning as I stared up at the mountainous female face that dominated part of the skyline. It took me a couple of seconds to place the familiar features: Betty Ross, someone I’d seen very little of in my ‘visions’, stared back down at me, an inscrutable expression on her face.
“I can’t tell if she looks angry or just… sad,” Bruce’s voice came from behind me and I turned, surprised, to see that some inner aspect of him had stepped up beside me, looking more or less exactly the same as he did in the real world, right down to the clothes.
Huh. I hadn’t been to that many mindscapes, when it came right down to it, but normally I had to do a bit of running around and exploring before I managed to run into an actual aspect of the person whose mind I was in. The only other time I’d had someone waiting for me like this was when I’d gone into Bucky’s mind intending on releasing the Winter Soldier. Take it as a positive sign, maybe?
“It’s Betty Ross, right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I always kinda wondered why you didn’t reach out to her, after the Battle of New York,” I probed gently, looking for clues as to what part of Bruce he might represent. “You didn’t need to hide or run anymore, once the Hulk was a hero. Or maybe you did try, and I just didn’t see it?”
He grimaced and shook his head. “I wanted to, but… I wrecked her life, you know? Twice, even. If I managed it a third time? I don’t think I could handle that.” The aspect of Bruce went quiet for a moment, then sighed. “Sometimes it feels like the best thing I can do for someone is to just… stay away from them. Betty deserved a chance to be able to move on. And she did.”
I gestured toward the unknown face, the one screaming in anger. “I don’t recognise that one.”
“My father.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah… We didn’t get along so well.” He let out a huff of amusement tinged with melancholy, looking around at the rest of the fragmented landscape that surrounded us. “Man, this place is weird. What do we do now?”
I side-eyed him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re the expert, right? I thought you said you’d be interacting with, like, parts of me. Didn’t realise I was coming along for the ride.”
Wait, what? I frowned and turned to look at him more closely. “Bruce?”
He shifted under my gaze, looking a little confused by my reaction. “Uh, yeah?”
“Can you…” I trailed off, thinking for a moment. “Can you tell me what just happened? What were we just doing?”
“I mean, I don’t know. We sat down, you restrained me with magic, I closed my eyes like you said, we did some breathing, and then we were here.”
“You’re ‘Bruce’ Bruce? Like actually you? Consciously?” Wait, what? That wasn’t how this was supposed to work. How it had worked before.
“Uh. I think so?”
“Okay, well, that’s new,” I said, a little uncertainly. “Sorry. I, uh, I’m not sure why that happened.”
Bruce bit his lip, worry lines creasing his forehead. “I thought you knew what you were doing?”
This wasn’t how it had worked with anyone else whose mindscape I’d been in. I’d met two different aspects of Bucky in his—a young, beaten down and resigned Bucky, and the Winter Soldier himself (or maybe it was three, if you counted whatever Zola had represented). Thena had had hundreds of different parts of her, plus the shadow of Arishem. I’d only seen one version of Yelena in hers, but she’d still been a representation of her inner child, not straight-up Yelena. The Westview not-Hex was a bit of a special circumstance, but it had still been a bit mindscape-y, and there’d been multiple aspects of me in it.
Then again, the ‘rules’ for mindscapes did seem to have a lot of variability. This was probably just an extension of that principle, an eccentricity of Bruce’s mind. It might even be a good thing, if he could help himself work through things.
“I do,” I said firmly, then hesitated. “Mostly. Everyone’s mindscape is a little different, okay? There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution when messing about in people’s heads—it’s more of an art than a science.”
“Oh, great,” Bruce said, a little sarcasm leaking into his tone. “So what do we do, then?”
“We need to get our bearings,” I told him. “This place is pretty chaotic, so we need to get a better understanding of how it all fits together.” Hopefully, phrasing it like that instead of saying ‘just wander around looking for anything interesting’ made it sound at least a little bit more like I had an actual plan.
We started walking, descending a wide, gentle slope for a minute before passing between a cliff spiked with jagged outcroppings, each connected to the ground by thick chains, and a teetering pile of trashed scientific equipment. Next to the broken machines was a tall piece of the green glass, the surface polished and clear. As we went to step past it, however, we paused.
Reflected in the glass—faint, but clearly visible—was the Hulk. Or not? While he was still big, he wasn’t quite as big as the real Hulk. It was like Bruce had been caught halfway between the two forms. Though the glass was green, the skin of the not-Hulk also seemed washed out, somehow. Grey. Looking more closely, his features were sharper, too, his jaw squarer. The figure shifted, mirroring Bruce’s movements as though it was his own reflection.
“Like a funhouse mirror, almost,” Bruce said, holding up an arm. There was a pensive expression on his face. “This looks… familiar, somehow.”
Cautiously, I reached out and touched the glass with my fingertips. I wasn’t reflected at all—Bruce’s odd grey not-Hulk was the only thing visible in it. The glass felt cool to the touch, but was otherwise unremarkable. I shook my head. No idea what this was. “Let’s keep going,” I said.
As we continued to navigate our way through the broken cliffs, we found other glass fragments, with other distorted versions of Bruce and the Hulk reflected within them. It was weird, too—despite the mindscape’s dreamlike, surrealist imagery, there was a sense of solidity about it. It didn’t feel flexible or malleable at all, like the others I’d been in. It felt aged, somehow. Like the accumulations of junk had actually accumulated, rather than being conjured up wholesale.
Skirting around another pile of wreckage, a figure came into view, as if he’d been waiting for us—the Hulk, essentially as he had appeared the last time I saw him. He was standing on a jutting piece of rock a good ten feet or so off the ground, his hands flexing and clenching into fists at his sides as he stared down at us. He was breathing heavily, his chest visibly moving with each huffed breath.
I raised my hand in a little wave. “Hulk! Hey!”
“Go away!” the over-muscled green giant responded, already loud and hostile. “Leave Hulk alone!”
“Here we go…” Bruce muttered next to me.
“We just want to talk,” I called up at him. “Come on, big guy. Why don’t you come down?”
The Hulk took a step back, every muscle in his body tensing up, his eyes fixed on me. “Wanda put Hulk in air jail! Hulk hate air jail!”
“I’m not gonna put you in air jail, buddy,” I said, both hands held up in a disarming gesture. Not unless he forced me to, at least.
He huffed loudly, a sound halfway between an animalistic grunt and a scoff of disbelief. I tried taking a tentative step forward and he responded immediately, turning and launching himself into the air with a massive leap that sent him flying up and over the cliff above him.
I swore under my breath, faint ripples of red energy collecting in my palms and playing across Bruce’s silhouette.
“Uh, what are you—”
Bruce’s question was cut off by his own yelp of surprise as the two of us shot into the air, following after the fleeing Hulk. We crested the edge of the cliff just in time to see the Hulk take off again with a second running jump like he’d been shot into the sky with a cannon.
“Wanda!” Bruce hollered, his arms and legs flailing in every direction as he tried and failed to exert some sort of control over his flight through the air. With a flick of my hand, I restrained his limbs, straightening him out and pinning him closer to me as we skimmed over the tops of the tallest rock and scrap formations, following the Hulk’s path through the landscape.
The green giant roared in frustration as we caught up to him, jumping away again and bouncing across the landscape like he was a video game character. He was only a touch faster than me, and the moment he paused to get his bearings again we caught up easily. It happened two more times before he finally stopped, landing on a plateau and turning to face us, a frustrated expression painted clearly across his face.
We’d seen a few more landmarks, as we’d flown over the terrain, but I was a little surprised at the intact structure that sat on top of the plateau. It looked like the containment cell that Veronica, the Hulkbuster’s support platform, could deploy, but writ on a much larger scale—at least three times the size of the original, the metal slabs making up the walls almost impossibly thick. A half dozen of the massive chains we’d seen in other parts of the mindscape sprouted from the sides of the structure, pulled taut over the edge of the plateau and stretching down to great anchors sunk into the ground. Around the shell, interspersed seemingly at random between the truck-sized metal chain links, were equally-large Stark tech pillars, the same that formed the edges of the containment. As we drew close, the sharp smell of electricity and ozone filled my nostrils.
The Hulk had landed at the edge of the plateau, next to where one of the giant chains spilled over the edge. We touched down a dozen metres away—close enough to make another attempt at talking, while hopefully staying far enough back not to spook him again.
“Hulk, please!” I called out, trying to sound as friendly as possible. “Let’s talk.”
“What you want?” the Hulk snapped back. “Banner not supposed to be here.”
I exchanged a cautiously optimistic look with Bruce. “Sorry, big guy,” he called out. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Talk, talk. Banner talk too much,” the giant grumbled.
“What do you mean Bruce isn’t supposed to be here?” I asked.
The Hulk straightened slightly, shooting me a dubious look. “This where Banner make Hulk stay. Banner only come when Hulk go. Banner no remember, but Hulk always remember. Because Hulk is Hulk!” He slapped a massive palm against his chest with a loud thump to emphasise his point.
That was easily the most words I’d ever heard the Hulk string together at once. Was he more articulate because we were in the mindscape? And what he was saying was… I turned to look at Bruce, but from his expression he was just as confused as I was.
“Hulk is Hulk,” I agreed, which seemed to placate the green giant somewhat.
“What do you mean?” Bruce asked. “You stay here? I come here?”
“Out,” the Hulk flicked his hand in a shooing gesture, then brought it back into his chest. “In. Only one out.”
Bruce frowned. “I don’t understand. I’ve never been here before, Hulk.”
“Banner has. When Hulk out, Banner in.”
My companion shot me a helpless, confused look. “I don’t remember being here before.”
“Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “Hold on. I think he might be talking about fronting. Like Dissociative Identity Disorder. This… isn’t what I expected to find.”
“DID?” Bruce looked between the Hulk and me. “But I thought you said that he was just a part of me?”
“That’s what you said,” I reminded him. “I was just… Hang on. Let me think for a second.”
It was starting to feel like—once again, surprise surprise—my assumptions about what I was going to find in a person’s mindscape had been completely wrong. It was a little frustrating. Every single time I’d done this, I’d found something that had contradicted my previous understanding. Then again, maybe I was expecting a bit too much of myself if I thought that six months and a handful of cases was a reasonable timeframe to become a self-taught expert on a field as complex as the mind.
I felt like I might be overstepping, diagnosing without a psychology degree, but this really was looking more like a case of full-blown Dissociative Identity Disorder. Not a fractured and broken psyche like Bucky, but distinct, fully-formed multiple personalities. I didn’t really know all that much about DID, apart from some of the terminology. Individual personalities were called alters, and the person as a whole was a system. When an alter was in control, it was fronting. The Hulk had basically just told us that this was where one alter hung out while the other fronted.
Then, this place… I’d thought mindscapes were almost entirely imposed. There was no reason for something like the Facility to literally exist within Bucky’s mind, for example. Up until now, my understanding had been that a mindscape was essentially created by interfacing my magic with a person’s mind, causing it to resolve into an inner world, some understandable place that I could interact with. But what if someone already had an inner world? A space that they’d created within their mind—had been in regular use, even—for years?
I glanced again at the Hulk-grade prison of metal and Stark tech that shared the plateau with us. If Bruce and the Hulk were completely separate alters, and these two were just them, straight-up, then… I looked questioningly at the Hulk, gesturing toward the containment shell with one hand. “Is someone in there?”
“Other Hulk,” Hulk said. He shifted a little in place, looking away, as though the idea made him uncomfortable. Well, that felt a little ominous.
Bruce’s eyes widened slightly. “What do you mean, ‘Other Hulk’?”
“Other Hulk!” Hulk repeated, sounding more annoyed as he turned back to glower at the smaller man. He waved one huge hand toward the prison. “Banner should know. Banner made prison.”
“Oh, please,” Banner snorted. “I didn’t make this. If I knew how to make things here, I’d make… I dunno. Beanbags or something. Not all this.”
“Of course Banner made prison for Hulk!” Hulk practically snarled back. “Banner is prison for Hulk!”
“Oh, I’m a prison for you, huh?” Banner said, eyes flashing angrily. “And what about me? What about all the crap you’ve put me through?”
“Stupid Banner! Stupid, puny Banner knows nothing!”
“You’re a monster. You ruined my life!”
“No! Hulk not monster! Hulk never hurt Banner, but Banner always want cure for Hulk! Want to take Hulk strength from Hulk and lock Hulk in darkness!” He slammed the back of his hand against the giant metal chain next to him demonstratively, his voice rising with anger. “And if Banner can’t, Banner try to kill Banner instead!”
“I… That’s not…” Bruce hesitated, suddenly looking a little less sure of himself.
The Hulk huffed, breathing heavily, then seemed to deflate a little, his shoulders sagging. “Banner rather die than let Hulk live.” His voice sounded like it was almost on the verge of breaking.
Slowly, I started to walk over to him. He tensed up again, watching alertly, but let me approach until I was standing right next to him. Reaching out a tentative hand, I gently touched his wrist. He flinched back reflexively, letting out a sudden huff of air. He almost looked scared. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to inject as much reassurance into my voice as I could. “No one’s going to hurt you.”
“Everyone hurt Hulk,” he said. “Hulk only come out to hurt, and to hurt. Hulk… Hulk always hurts. All the time and always.”
I shot a quick glance back toward Bruce. He looked… stricken. Almost paralysed with shock.
Moving very, very slowly, I reached out to touch the Hulk again. He looked down at me, his expression wavering and uncertain, and raised his own hand vaguely toward mine. My fingertips touched one of his—just one of his fingers was nearly as big as my whole hand—then he turned his hand over, resting the back of it against my palm. “I’m sorry, Hulk. I don’t want you to hurt,” I said softly.
He stared at our hands touching for a few moments, then looked past them to meet my gaze. “Why?” he asked. “Why Hulk have to hurt so much?”
--
A harsh, metallic taste flooded my mouth, as if I’d sucked on a penny so hard it’d dissolved entirely across my tongue. An acrid bitterness clung stubbornly to the back of my throat. My stomach gave a hard, warning twist and I had to swallow a wave of nausea, pressing the back of my hand to my lips as if that could somehow keep the taste from crawling any deeper.
“You okay?” Bruce asked.
“Bleugh,” I rasped. “Yeah, just… bleugh.” I coughed and forced myself to swallow, but the taste didn’t go away. “I’m sorry this wasn’t more helpful. We should probably give the Hulk some time and space to think about things. Try again in a couple of days, maybe.”
We’d stuck around for a few more minutes in his mindscape, talking to the Hulk, before the two of them had gotten into a shouting match again and I’d judged we’d needed to call it for the day.
“Are you kidding? This was… Being able to just talk to him, it’s huge. I mean, he’s still an asshole, but I never thought that something like this would be possible.”
I let out a small sigh, still smacking my lips in a vain attempt to work away the bitter taste in my mouth. “I really wish I could remember exactly what you’d said, back in the original timeline. As far as I remember, you said you’d integrated the Banner/Hulk identities, but now, thinking back on it?” I grimaced. “You didn’t really act like you’d combined the two together. You were basically just… Bruce. But in the Hulk’s body. Like you were piloting him around.”
“…Maybe I lied,” Bruce said quietly.
I shook my head. “Or maybe you were just wrong about what you’d done. It might not have been deliberate.”
Bruce was so used to seeing the Hulk as a disease. A symptom of his condition. Being able to actually talk with him in their mindscape was probably the first time he’d ever even seriously considered the idea that the Hulk was a person—a separate being with thoughts and feelings of his own.
“Look,” I said slowly as I got my thoughts in order. “I’m not a psychologist, but what you’ve got going on looks like Dissociative Identity Disorder to me, more than anything else.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said with a grimace. There was an edge of reluctance in his tone, like he didn’t like what I was saying, even if he couldn’t find it within himself to disagree.
“I don’t know how DID works, really. But I mean, if you’re a system, then maybe you need to think about… being a system. Having a system.”
“I don’t know if that’s even possible,” he said, resignation leaking into his tone.
“You’ve gotta try, though. Right?”
“We’re so messed up,” Bruce said, shooting me a half-hearted smile. He sounded tired. “The Hulk and me. We’re messed up and dumb and angry and we don’t know how to fix it. ‘Why Hulk hurt so much?’ but that’s both of us, really.” He paused, eyes dropping to the floor.
I reached out, gently taking his hand and squeezing it. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I don’t know why,” he said quietly. “All this time and I still don’t know a damn thing.”
--
Natasha found Steve sitting in the corner of one of the common room’s couches, rhythmically moving a pencil over a sketchpad. Sam had claimed one of the armchairs opposite him, nursing a lukewarm mug of black coffee while he scrolled on his phone. She walked over, dropping down into the other, currently-unoccupied armchair, and watched them for a few seconds.
Steve paused mid-stroke, looking up from his sketch to give her a brief smile. “Hey, Nat.”
“Hey,” she replied. “Got a sec?”
“Sure.” Steve closed his pad, putting it down on the coffee table in front of him before giving her his full attention. “What’s on your mind?”
“We should hire a psychologist. Someone with high-level clearance, living here at the compound. Full time, or near enough.”
Her words made Sam look up from his phone, eyebrows raised with interest.
“I’m listening,” Steve said.
Nat leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Bruce, Wanda, Bucky… They all need it. And I mean, those are just the most obvious ones. All of us do, really. If we’re being honest with ourselves.”
Sam exhaled softly through his nose and set his coffee down on the table. “She’s right. I’ve actually been thinking the exact same thing.”
“You’re a counsellor. Some of the team already talks to you,” Steve pointed out.
“Yeah, sure, I ran VA groups. And I’m happy to do what I can, of course I am, but the stuff this team’s carrying? Trauma, sure. Grief, guilt, identity stuff, reintegration after combat, all that? That’s in my lane. But some of what’s going on here is way outside my specialty. Besides,” he said, tapping two fingers against his chest. “I’m part of this. I fly missions with you. I get shot at with you. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it means I’m the last person someone’s gonna want to unpack their head with. It messes with the team dynamic. It’d be better to have someone outside the situation.”
“Someone independent,” Natasha agreed. “Qualified. Somebody who isn’t in the chain of command, isn’t on missions, isn’t carrying team politics into the room with them.”
Steve nodded slowly. “It makes sense. Right now, everyone’s just doing their own thing. We ask people here to carry a lot. More than most. If we can do something proactive—something that keeps people steady, or catches things early—then maybe we avoid bigger problems later.”
“It’s maintenance,” Nat said. “We maintain our gear. We need to maintain ourselves.”
Sam gave a small nod. “Exactly.”
Steve’s gaze drifted past Natasha toward the far wall, unfocusing slightly. “You think Wanda will go for it?” he asked. The question was curious, not accusative.
“Wanda’s been pretty supportive when it comes to other people getting therapy. She knows it can help. If we sign up for this as a team—all of us—I don’t think she’ll make a fuss.”
“Tony’s not going to like it,” Steve pointed out.
Nat let out a small snort of amusement. That absolutely was the real obstacle, wasn’t it? Tony hated the idea of being analysed and managed almost as much as he hated the idea of needing help.
“For what it’s worth,” Sam said. “I don’t think this has to be framed as anybody policing anybody else. You make it a resource. Normalise it. Regular check-ins, voluntary appointments, crisis support. Something structured, but not punitive.”
Natasha shook her head. “Don’t worry about Tony. I’ll handle him.”
Steve let out a small huff of amusement, reaching forward to retrieve his sketchpad again. “Sure. Good luck.”