This, Bruce thought, feeling bullets whiz by his head, was exactly the kind of high stress situation he needed to avoid. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to place himself in the crowd in support. These people, his friends, almost family now, if he was being honest, had done more to support him than anyone had in years, and it seemed the least he could do was be here today. He might not be standing up there with them, but he figured being present at all was a step in some kind of direction.
He should have known that something disastrous would happen, and the second the first shot rang out, Bruce had a decidedly selfish and depressing thought. That no matter how many innocents get caught in the crossfire the one with the biggest body count is going to be him, because Hulking out right now in the middle of this many people could only end with scattered body parts and would prove to the world he was just the monster many of them thought he was.
“No,” he growled to himself, just a hint of that Other Guy’s patented growl in his voice. He could feel it coursing through his veins, but he held it back, forcing him/it back into the cage. Doctor you’re a doctor became a bit of a mantra as he held the other guy back, ducking down out of the line of fire and pulling civilians down with him. “Stay down,” he urged them to the ground, making them harder targets.
He found a girl with a compound fracture of her ulna, not from a bullet, but from the wild panic of the crowd. He soothed her the best he could and wrapped her arm as gently as he could, praying she can get to a hospital before the whole thing gets infected. Bruce winds his way through the crowd like this, ripping makeshift bandages and trying to stop bleeding, cursing lightly under his breath when he finds those that are beyond help.
He may always be angry, but he’s angrier still seeing this, because if someone had a bone to pick with all of them, why did they have to do it in public, and the Other Guy felt harder and harder to keep back. The bullets never seemed to stop flying either, and while Bruce trusted his friends to take care of it, he wished they’d get a move on.
It happened when he was crouched over a young mother who had a bullet graze by her forehead. Bruce felt someone else approaching, another man who seemed to be helping people as much as possible, and Bruce felt strangely grateful and momentarily less cynical about mankind. "Just a graze, I think. Can you hold her head up for me?“ he asked, keeping his voice soft, because Bruce was scared even raising his voice now would push him over the edge. He ripped a little more fabric off the arm of his shirt, and was poised to wrap it around the woman’s head.
At first, he was sure the shot fired was just another that whizzed by his side, and he looked up to the man across from him, worried he’d see a bloom of red across some part of his anatomy. There wasn’t though, and that was when he felt a dampness at his side. Bruce never knew if the Other Guy was to blame for weakened pain response, or if the adrenaline of the situation made it hard to process the trivialities like what was going on with his own body.
He put his hand to his side, and he could feel it start to happen, felt that control start to slip away. There was something almost triumphant about the roaring in his head, like the Other Guy was happy he was unlucky enough to get injured so he could come out and play. Bruce winced then, the pain of trying to push it all much more than the apparent hole in his side would ever be. "You might want to run,” he managed to choke out through clenched teeth.
Jasper liked to think of himself as a man who could offer a smile in most situations -- this, however, was most assuredly not one of those situations. Chaos reigned; chaos thrived; chaos almost won. He had next to no experience with things like this. His knowledge was nearly petty when people were bleeding out, but he tried anyways. Anything was better than just leaving people to suffer alone, and when he found another doing the exact same thing... Well, he hadn’t completely lost his smile, even then.
Doing as the man asked ( why the hell was the guy so familiar? was he on commercials or something? ), Jasper knelt beside the woman and tilted her head upward, whispering a whole lot of nothings to calm her down. He could almost feel the race of her heart, and he made sure the air around her was bright and shimmering. ( Yeah, his mutation felt next to useless in a place like this. ) “Look at that! You some sort of----” His question was cut off by the sound of another gunfire.
It was when the green flashed in the other man’s eyes that Jasper was able to place who he was. “Oh,” he stated, as if that one syllable accurately summed up the entirety of the situation they were in. “Look, pal, you help people, yeah? Could you keep doin’ that? Just for like...five minutes?” Offering about a hundred different prayers to the big man upstairs, he continued his plea. “I’m not leaving, not that I much could if I wanted to. Have you tried breathing exercises? I hear they do wonders.”
