#(oy. please accept my sincere apologies for the wildly dysfunctional and honestly unfair way this man views his every human relationship)

[despair-with-walnuts]

"Hello, Bruce."

She sits beside him; a comforting, familiar presence.

"I heard you were looking for me."

His mouth opens to ask, but the words fizzle out while still behind his teeth. Because he knows.

Like every other thing that’s living, that has ever lived, Bruce Banner recognizes Death on sight. It can’t be otherwise. Every living thing in some way knows its fate. It remembers it as an old belonging, of sorts. Every living thing, whether it’s conscious of the fact, knows how to die.

(Unless something has gone… wrong.)

He doesn’t think about this. He doesn’t think at all. He gazes at her as if in a trance, or like an infant staring into the sky.

“I didn’t think it’d be like this,” he murmurs. “With you being… you know, a person who actually shows up… or it coming on without me noticing. What happened? Can I ask? It had to- it had to have been quick. Or maybe all the radiation finally got me?”

He thinks, briefly, on those whose paths he’s crossed, doorways he’s darkened longer than he ever had a right to, despite open invitation to do so. Pleading, in some cases. Banner feels a pang at the realization that there will, in fact, be some who will grieve for him, whether or not it makes sense. In the same way they loved him, really. But another feeling bubbles up in him at the thought that one way or another, it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s done. He’s free.

He doesn’t even mind the animal panic bucking like an unbroken horse in the back of his head. It doesn’t belong to him, after all. And if Death is here already… there’s no way out of it. Not even for the strongest.

“Where am I going? Is it anywhere?”