HULK | BRUCE BANNER (MCU | AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON)
. ⚛︎ *. ˗ˏˋ ⚛︎ ˎˊ˗ *⠀
❝STIMULUS❞ (Hulk & Fem!Reader)
Hulk persists. Even alone. Even when he doesn’t want to be.
Or How Hulk feels when the reader-insert is talking him down after a mission.
SFW, character study, angst and fluff, hurt/comfort (and then hurt again)
Companion fic to “Sensory Input”. (Pic source - Avengers: Age of Ultron)
1k+ words
There’s a thrum that buzzes through his body when Hulk gets to smash like this. When the hurt little people cause him can be easily rectified with his fists and the crushing force of his speed and muscle mass crashing into vehicles and guns and reducing them to scraps.
Even if the constant problems grate, the fact that he can get rid of them — if only for this short time before the next insect takes to bothering him, or bothering Banner to get to him — brings a bone deep satisfaction he’ll likely never be able to quantify.
That fleeting satisfaction cannot be reached until everything that hurts him has been smashed, however, and Hulk is not blind to the soldiers still so readily preparing to shoot at him.
All the while he avoids the team — his team (?); caught between the desire to help and the need to warily stay away in case they turn on him.
Hulk survive. Alone.
And when the alternative was staying in a world that only brought hurt his way, he preferred being on his own too.
“Hey Big Guy,” a voice crackles through his head. Hulk whips his head in the direction of the ear it comes out stronger through; his brows furrow and his lips curl into something of a snarl. “I’m just signing on to tell you the fight’s done and all that. Can you reel yourself back in, and go find Iron Man?”
At first all the voice reminds him of is Banner.
Puny Banner.
He’s inclined immediately to steer clear of it to some degree, shaking his head to dispel the sudden appearance of a woman’s words in his ear so connected to the man who treats him like a plague.
Then the voice speaks again, and the words fully register.
“Hulk, come on. I know your big green ass can hear me. Your tracking dot is literally still moving.”
Stomping towards another wayward weapon — the shooty thing that barraged him with bullets that felt no more painful than mosquito bites, but that made him grit his teeth and growl anyway at how bothersome they were — Hulk tilts his head.
The pounding in his heart that fuels the bulging veins throughout his towering form skips.
The words make sense in that way they always inexplicably do whenever his heart isn’t pounding quite so loudly — Hulk doesn’t question it; doesn’t think to question it — and for a moment he even finds them funny.
He grumbles something of a laugh in response, even as the voice’s connotation with Banner sticks.
Gaze landing on another of those shooty blocks he’d crashed his way through earlier, a mean grin pulls at his mouth. The voice temporarily forgotten, he lunges.
Smash.
He was good at that.
Hulk was the best at that.
Even after he’s ran through and pounded his fists into everything that shoots at him, or that he’s far more occasionally aimed at by Captain America or some other Avenger, he’s still not tired. Is hardly satisfied either.
“Hulk,” the voice comes again, soft and commanding all the same. “You finished now? Ready to head back to the jet?”
Hulk stops stomping through the tepid forest then, powdery bits of concrete raining from his shoulders and the raven hair atop his head, the sound of bad men’s screams left in his wake overtaken by the voice in his ear. Images of a woman he’s grown very familiar with over the last year flash through his mind— kinky black curls, dark glittering eyes, soft brown skin, and the crest of a fond smile aimed his way.
For once in the last decade, too, that bit of good memory isn’t tainted by Hulk’s own knowledge that he didn’t live it.
The gamma giant huffs out a deep sigh, his shoulders droop, and he lets his head stop swiveling (to stop looking for more threats) around him. He can picture you now, the faint outline of you reaching out to him and pressing the pads of gentle fingers over the green skin of his palm. Of your soft grin and the fascinated look you’d given him a few months ago before urging him closer with a tug on his finger.
You’d been wide-eyed, but not with fear.
Hulk holds onto the warmth that reminder spreads through him, grunts a little to urge you to speak again.
With a chuckle, you do. “What,” you joke, voice lilting, “you don’t want to go back yet? Are the rest of the Avengers shit company, Big Guy?”
Hulk sighs again as you talk, jaw working as the air rushes from his nose. It takes a slew of moments before he can work out his response, unused to needing to do more than grunt and growl or being acknowledged in any way that requires he speak at all.
“No,” he grunts, voice rumbling lowly from neglected vocal chords.
From where he can hear you in his ear, you gasp. Without being able to see you he can’t grasp whether that’s bad or not.
His knee jerk reaction is to tense up. To assume you’re upset and that all your words that make him feel light and make his heart slow will turn snarling.
When all you do afterwards is let out a coo, then, Hulk finds himself squinting at a bird perched on a tree and watching him warily.
He watches it right back, curbs the urge to reach out for it, to feel the soft feathers along it that he gets the sense memory of, only because he knows the destruction his touch can bring.
Giant, balled fists tremble.
Hulk doesn’t want the bird to die. Hulk not too stupid not to know that much.
“Alright,” you murmur sweetly again, and Hulk’s fists unclench with his next gust of breath. He feels a lot less heavy when he watches the bird fly off unharmed. “If you want to relax by yourself, that’s fine. You want me to leave you alone?”
Tiny Woman no leave Hulk alone, he thinks immediately. Translating that sentiment to words as you lapse into patient silence doesn’t come quite as quickly to him, though.
Hulk’s simply too unused to talking, hasn’t said much in general since that one night after fighting Abomination and Betty’s tears and her name stuttered from his tongue.
The only name heavy on his tongue now is yours, however, falling past equally heavy lips as he works his way through the consonants and vowels of it with stilted pauses. In his head it strikes as deeply familiar. In his mouth, however…
“Y/n…stay,” he eventually gets out, words falling like lead boulders at his feet but finally out regardless.
You make a high pleased sound — no matter how muffled — that Hulk registers as such with no small amount of contemplation.
“Okay, Honeybunches,” you murmur, and Hulk finds he enjoys the coiling feeling he gets in his stomach when you call him that.
With a great huff, he sits. Going criss-cross on wet, decayed leaves and partially melted snow. Body crushing fallen branches and leaving an indent in blemished snow immediately.
Hulk doesn’t mind that the snow is seeping water into the faded purple bottom of his pants and that’s mainly because he’s too preoccupied listening to you. To paying close attention to the inflection of your words as you ask him more questions. Asking for more conversation.
For his part Hulk really only answers you through a series of grunts and grumbles. Back to being monosyllabic once more. Talking took too much energy.
In a rare turn you don’t ask him for more than what he’s willing to give, though. Even actively taking what he does give you and interpreting things like his low, short grumble when you ask him about how he likes the cold to mean he’s not a fan correctly.
Hulk likes that.
Large hands curl loose in his lap the longer he sits there with you in his ear. Part of him is angry that he won’t be able to stay like this forever, that something will inevitably come along to hurt him again because that was all his life seemed to ever be: pain and anger, hurt and loneliness.
Another part of him — a part that gets slightly larger the longer he thinks about you and gets to hear your laugh after he chuffs lowly, positively, when you ask him if he smashed anything interesting — envies Banner and the reality Hulk knows to be true that you're his.
Larger parts of him than those can feel his eyes starting to close— wishes for your hands on him again and the unique smell of your scent around him. For your physical presence and the ability to gaze green eyes down on you himself again, not through Banner’s limited perspective.
Hulk frowns, doesn’t think it’s fair Puny Banner gets to have everything while also forcing Hulk into danger he didn’t agree to; only to lock him away in darkness after the pain and the howling fury pumping gamma green faster through his veins has battered him.
Hulk doesn’t want to sleep right then, either, but you snort and call him by that sweet name again and he can feel Banner perk up somewhere in their mind.
“I’m glad the mission wasn’t too hard on you,” you’re telling him, whisper soft and with a tone of voice that brings the imagery of your two-toned lips curling into a frown to his mind.
Hulk frowns for a completely different reason, even as the thought of your upset clenches uncomfortably at his stomach, and gives a rough shake of his head.
Banner’s consciousness prods at his own with more force than before. Hulk stands with a start, heart no longer settled, and swats at it like it’s a physical thing. Hand cutting through the air in front of his face with a sharp thwack.
“Hulk?” you question, the alarm in the call of his name making him queasy.
Or maybe that was the feeling of his eternal organs beginning to grow smaller than he can utilize.
Hulk lets out a deep, caustic growl that trembles the air in front of him, teeth bared.
He looks around wildly, eyes wide and breath fast and more scared than he’d ever appreciate, as he shrinks. He stumbles forward. The large hand he uses to catch himself on the trunk of a tree isn’t as big as he knows it should be. His body shudders succinctly enough he bites down on his molars until they hurt and screws his eyes shut with a wallowing grunt.
He tries to call your name and this time his vocal cords don’t even attempt to work under his own power.
Your voice fades out halfway through you speaking words he no longer has the privilege of understanding.
Then Hulk’s gone.
NOTES: Hope you enjoyed!!! 🫶🏾
Whew! Okay, that kind of hurt my feelings to write and that was not the plan. Like, this was just supposed to be a lil fluff companion piece to the smut in the Bruce fic, but now it’s kind of some fluff and a lot of angst, and I don’t even know anymore.
btw: if you’d like to leave a comment I’d very much appreciate it!
