hadriel_logs | you won't like me when I'm angry [open log]

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you won't like me when I'm angry [open log]

Who: Bruce Banner, Fear, and eventually open.
What: Bruce takes a pot shot at Fear, in revenge for the whole buried alive week. The results are catastrophic.
Where: Initially outside the clinic, then all over the city.
When: Feb 1st
Warnings: Hulk violence, plus injuries? Will update if it gets more specific.

It starts at the end of a clinic shift. Hawkeye hasn't made it in today, and Bruce is telling himself that the man is probably just busy, but anxiety is coiling tight in his stomach, because the clinic isn't doing so well. Managing the blisters alone from the mass burial has cleaned them out for bandages and ointment, and as much as he tries to scavenge more, supplies in the city are limited-

He shuts the door behind him, and turns around to see a familiar figure on the street out front. Fear has been so exclusively there over the network that he actually can't place him in person for the first few seconds, so he just stands there in a blinking daze.

About forty five seconds later, the first crash echoes through Hadriel's streets. Next comes the roar. Glass rattles across the whole town in windowpanes, and the Hulk begins to run, bringing chaos with him where he goes.

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Out on the street, Noah remembers his first conversation with Bruce, where Bruce had told him what he could do. That if he went all green and uncontrollable, what Noah should do is call Tony or Steve and get as much out of the way as possible.

Noah realizes with slow dawning horror that Tony and Steve are gone.

His first thought is to make a run for it anyway. He doesn't know how long Bruce has been on a rampage at this point, he might tire himself out (does he get tired? Will he turn back into the mild mannered Bruce Banner on his own?) and he did say to run for it. Noah would just be doing what he was told to do.

A sense of guilt still settles heavily in where his stomach would be if he was a living breathing boy still as he sort of edges to hide between buildings. He also remembers how upset Bruce was recounting how much damage he did like this, the people he hurt when he couldn't control it. Noah, technically, couldn't be hurt like this. Not by Bruce anyway. The memory of that grief gets him to come out from his hiding place again.

Maybe... maybe Noah can just ... talk to him... and he'll be normal again?

"Mister - Mister Banner? Bruce?"

It takes Arya a moment to realize that the person Bruce (if he's still Bruce at all) is attacking. It's not a person at all. It's Fear.

She springs into action at that moment, letting instinct drive her. Arya distantly remembers Bruce telling her she should run if he ever turned green, but it's not a memory she heeds, not completely. Arya grabs Needle and then she does run, but she runs towards green-Bruce instead of away from him.

She's able to use her small stature to her advantage here, ducking into smaller spaces that the much larger man can't fit through. Arya tracks him this way, darting from place to place as quickly as she's able.

Fear might not have been particularly badly damaged, but the city is a different story. This destruction is wrong, it isn't Bruce at all, and Arya realizes she can't do any good if she's hidden. So she climbs the outside of the store until she's standing on its roof, like she used to do in Braavos. Arya doubts green-Bruce will notice her if she's so small; she's got to get some height.

"Hey!" she shouts. "Give Bruce back!"

Hulk barely hears her, but the name filters in, Bruce.

Bruce, puny Banner.

He throws his head back and roars, so loud that if there were birds in the city they'd take flight. Lifts a slab of concrete and throws it, sending it skittering, splintering into rubble that sprays across the ground and towards her, as his breathing becomes laboured with stress, rage.

He starts running, heedless of any little people following him.

If Bruce had thought to plan for Noah being one of the people involved in talking him down, he would have mentioned this; don't talk about puny Banner. Don't bring up Bruce.

"Hulk!"

He roars- though it isn't easy to hear the shape of the syllables in the pure volume. He doesn't stop what he's doing, either, which is currently tearing down the trashed remains of an already tattered building, putting his massive body through stucco, then taking down a second wall in short order, as the structure starts to creak and tip under the sheer force of him and his rage.

Arya ducks, curling under her coat so at least the smaller shards of concrete won't pierce her skin. One manages to strike her upper back, and there'll be a bruise there soon enough, but it doesn't deter Arya. She's had worse.

Diplomacy clearly isn't going to work here. Arya wonders what green-Bruce wants, other than to smash things and roar really loud.

That gives her an idea.

She scrambles back down to the sidewalk and runs a good ways in front of him, shouting as she goes.

"Follow me! This isn't any good for smashing, it's all too small! You need something bigger! Like caves! All the rocks you could ever want for smashing are there!"

Arya isn't sure if that'll work, but it's worth a shot.

It doesn't- quite yet. He stares at her, and feels Banner turn over inside himself- and doesn't attack. There is a very human moment where his eyes go soft, where he looks near to calm. He could fold. He runs, instead.

He has a city to sack, after all. Bruce has had some resentment building up towards this place, and it's coming out here, and now.

There's a small surge of fear when he stops. Arya doesn't know if he's just inspecting her or if he's going to take a swing at her. Green-Bruce is unpredictable. Instead, there's that flicker of gentleness, and Arya smiles, hoping the smile will help the green go away.

It doesn't. He starts running again, so Arya starts running too. She's not sure how much more sprinting she can take -- green-Bruce is far faster than she is, and seems to never tire. "You're going the wrong way!" she shouts after him, panting. Arya has seen villages sacked, and she knows what happened to Winterfell. Hadriel might be a large prison, but she still doesn't want to see that kind of destruction happen here.

"Smashing this place won't solve anything!" Maybe an appeal to Bruce's science side will work?

It's not often that he appears in person- in fact, he hasn't done it before now. But he can sense the knot of fear radiating from this place and so he watches for awhile, curious to find the source of it, to see if he can replicate it. All that Bruce seems to do is putter around the building that he's claimed as a public hospital of sorts, and Fear wouldn't say he's disappointed, but he certainly feels as if the afternoon has been wasted.

Bruce locks up and Fear walks out of the air, stepping onto the ground below his feet and waits for the man to turn and see him. He doesn't have to wait very long.

"I have a question for you."

Normally, he'd settle for communicating over Hope's useful devices, but his attention is already focused on this place and he'd rather know his answers now, rather than get a response whenever Bruce feels like checking his phone. Fear's posture itself certainly isn't very threatening- for all that he looms over the network, he seems almost weedy in person, dressed in normal civilian clothes, hands tucked in his pockets. It'd be easy to mistake him for just another person caught up in the city if one didn't know better.

Ronan doesn't think twice. He doesn't have time to. The sounds of destruction seem to echo closer and closer to their part of the city and he's not the type of person to run for cover, so he grabs his trusty baseball bat and moves to leave the house, slamming the door behind him and running out into the street.

He's not an idiot. He knows who this is by now and he has some semblance of an idea of what's going on. Bruce has warned him enough times, even if Ronan is surprised by the size of him- but it doesn't matter and he won't back down. If there's even the slightest chance that he can distract Bruce long enough to keep him away from their house and everyone in it, then he'll take it.

His hand tightens on the baseball bat as Banner rampages closer to his street, and Ronan squares himself up, all seventeen year old human boy preparing himself to meet an incredible monster. After all, death is preferable to running, as long as you're facing down the thing that kills you.

Yeah, Noah did not get Hulk's name at all - crouching down and covering his ears against the volume of it - but he did get that calling him Bruce was not the correct thing and upsetting. Maybe something to do with how Bruce said he's not good at recognizing between friend or foe.

Noah really, really wants to run away. He finds it hard to believe that anything could calm this except time.

"- That's not helping anything!" He yells instead, the same thing Adam says when Noah's throwing his own temper tantrums.

Yes, he thinks, it will, and jumps- almost into flight, soaring from the ground to the lip of a building, and swing himself onto the roof with a wild yell, then leaping and flying again. He vanishes over the edge of a tower- but the destruction won't honestly be hard to track. He leaves more than breadcrumbs behind.

Bruce turns, and lifts his eyebrows at the sight of him. He doesn't actually answer, not right away; first, his nostrils flare, and he steps forward to get a better look at him.

No part of him is afraid, not even a little. All there is is a sense of building momentum, and a steadily mounting fury.

"It's you, is it?"

Another step, and another.

It's helping him, he would say. Instead, he turns, and looks at Noah. There's a beady eyed stare, a moment where it seems like he might see him, and a grunted warning.

Move the wrong way, and he attacks, that much is clear.

The Hulk rockets into the street, skids, stops, and then slams his fist through a bench, and shouts at the rubble, picking up a bit of board and flinging it hard, at the opposite side of the street.

The rage leaves him fairly writhing, screaming in fury and fear and frustration, a tremendous force set loose on nothing at all, trying hard to burn itself out.

[what in the hell is that?

usually peter knows better than to run toward the sound of rampant destruction, but this time...well, he recognizes the sound of agonizing rage when he hears it, and there's an uncomfortable twist low in his belly as his swadisthana tells him that something is very wrong indeed. following the sound of chaos is easy, but when he gets close enough to see...no way. no way that the green rage machine is the same person who had so gently bandaged his hands. except it totally is.]

Hey! You, green guy! What's your deal?

[This? This is the closest thing his world has to a werewolf.

The Hulk stops, and sinks low, teeth bared in a subsonic snarl.

He takes one step closer, then another, asserting easily that Peter needs to be thinking about running, now. That, or showing a hell of a lot of throat. This pecking order goes in one direction only.]

[the hair on the back of peter's neck stands up, and he thinks vargulf, which is utterly ridiculous, because the hulk isn't a werewolf to begin with, although the comparison with losing his mind and destroying things to destroy himself might be at least a little apt.

running would be smart, but he doesn't run. probably couldn't, at this point. his knees are too wobbly. and then he actually does tilt his head slightly back and mostly to the side, baring his throat. there's something...odd...about him. like most of him is terrified but there's some part of him that isn't afraid, some part of him that isn't afraid of anything, a still point beneath the terrified thunder of his pulse, and that's the part that's looking out his eyes, putting his body at the hulks untender mercy.]

Yeah, I get the part where you can rip me in half. That's not your deal.

The sound of the roar in the streets outside is enough to have Lloyd grabbing up his swords and darting out the door after the noise. It's too early for the door to have opened again from what he's seen in this place so far, and after the excursion into the caves a week ago, the monster presence in Hadriel should be less of an issue in general.

And he doesn't recognize the roar, besides. That can't bode well for everyone here.

He follows the noise and destruction and skids into view of the Hulk just a few minutes later. It's big and green and definitely not anything that Lloyd's come across before, but there's something sort of... human looking about it? "Hey!" Lloyd shouts to get its attention, drawing his swords in front of him.

[Well, it usually is his deal, honestly- except that Bruce has been working for years on this, except that Peter is so literate at speaking animal instinct that even Hulk can't mistake anything about him as overtly threatening.

He grunts, and rocks back, glancing him over and then turning at a sound behind him.

It's a monster. A much better target for his ire, in fact. He tears off, to get the streets wet with some proper blood.]

He hears the voice, and maybe that would be all right- except when he turns, he sees the weapon. The Hulk looks at him for a second, and then bellows- roars, and starts to charge.

Aggression is familiar to him, and his answer to it is simple; smash. He clears meters in a matter of seconds, taking jumps that soar him over the slick, snowy stones, over the debris he's left in his wake.

Fear tilts his head to the side for a moment, recalculating the encounter. Bruce's reply isn't entirely what he was expecting, and if he had a fraction more empathy or social graces, he'd be able to understand the implications of this and try to diffuse it- but he doesn't.

"Of course it is. I came to ask you about this facility of yours- it's quite the hotspot for emotion in the city."

Whether he intends to thank him or berate him for it isn't quite clear, but Fear's demeanor and his tone is pleasant, if not curious. He clearly either has no idea about what's coming or is skillfully ignoring the buildup of it.

Right. The baseball bat in his hand is shorter and significantly smaller than the line of Bruce's forearm right now, and Ronan doubts it'll protect him for much, but he has to try something. This guy is going to tear up the entire street if he doesn't, and nobody lives down there, but he's not far off from the homes now, considering that Ronan just ran out of one.

He spends the next few minutes cutting a wide circle around the rampage before he hits a spot where he can easily backtrack into more ruined buildings and less populated areas.

Ronan slams the baseball bat against the ground then, cracking it hard and loud.

"Hey! Fuckface!"

This is something that Bruce will later call a tremendous mistake. No, Ronan. Don't enrage the Hulk.

He stops in his efforts, and turns at the sound of the aggression, big blunt teeth baring in a snarl, beady eyes narrowing.

The walk turns into a flat out run, and each step clears a little further- a foot, two feet, five, as Bruce splits open into a roaring, raging ball of fury. His shirt bursts away like tissue, his pants barely cling to life, his skin turns the green of bad thunderstorms, and he lunges through the air to pound Fear into a fucking crater.

He is very, very angry.

Forgive him, he's blunt and incredibly headstrong.

It doesn't protect him from feeling a sudden tremor of fear. Ronan does not get afraid, though, and he forces it down, willing his arms to move. Baseball bat. Noise. Away from the housing (away from Noah, who he supposes is dead and can't be hurt, but also away from Adam, and that's reason enough).

"Come on."

His heart slams against his ribcage. Ronan has a path he thinks he can follow, through the abandoned debris, that doubles back to the river. He wonders if he'll make it that far. Christ, he'd kill for a vehicle.

"Come on!"

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