Dr. Bryce Banner | H U L K

That 'playlist on random' writing meme, part one. Because my playlist is apparently depressed. Content warnings for child abuse and death.


 

1. There's a ghost in my lungs, and it sighs in my sleep -
Wraps itself around my tongue as it softly speaks
Then it walks, then it walks with my legs.

Bryce doesn’t remember the Hulk. At least, not consciously. Something in her, something that runs on pure emotion, remembers. She looks at the broken-down buildings and the smashed structures and something stirs in her – pride, an aftertaste of satisfaction. Anger. She pushes it away, tells herself she blacks out completely when she’s the Other.

(Anger has always been the Other. Ever since she was old enough to understand what emotions made her father strike out the way he did, she’s handled her own anger delicately, like a beast that would hurt the ones she loved if it slipped out. As a result, she internalized it and redirected it at herself. One of the therapists she saw while working on her undergrad made her do exercises, practice feeling it without shying away. She dutifully looked at charts of activities she could engage in to constructively handle her rage without letting it take over. But when the time came, she clenched her jaw and quietly hated without a word.

2. Benedicta tu in mulieribus.
(Blessed art thou among women.)

Her mother was always gentle with her. Never cruel, never angry. Where Bryce came to expect pain from her father, her mother helped her believe in kindness. Her mother would soothe her bruises and murmur softly that her father would be nice again, really, he just had a bad day or his job was too stressful or he had one of his headaches.

“See,” she would say, holding up a picture of her and her husband on their wedding day like some holy relic of a paradise gone by. “See, he loves you. He loves both of us. He just has trouble showing it sometimes.”

And later, when she finally decided that Brian had wasted all his chances to come around, she doesn’t bother packing, just rushes Bryce out to the car in the early afternoon. She’s hugging Bryce, telling her everything’s going to be okay now and she was sorry, so sorry she didn’t have the strength to do this before, when he found them.

There was so much blood. Bryce remembers staring stupidly at the rapidly-growing pool of it from the car, thinking about how red it was, how vividly it stood out against her mother’s green sweater. Like Christmas. Like rage.

 

3. You can hear those distant bells, and you know they'll never leave.
It's like your church is crying out, like the wolf calls to her young.

There’s years, blessed years, when her life is at peace. She’s granted a full scholarship to MIT and distributes her time between rocketing through higher education and an intense regimen of therapy. By the time she moves on to graduate school, she feels almost normal.

She meets Betty in one of her classes; they’re the only two women taking the course, and they band together out of necessity, for protection. But something beautiful happens, and they continue to spend time together, even without mutual education binding them together. They become friends. And later, tentatively, lovers.

In a way, the accident could almost be a relief. Her life was so perfect, so happy, so fragile, up until then. At least when it all goes to hell, she doesn’t have to wonder anymore when it will shatter, by whose hand will it be destroyed.