Bruce talks in his sleep, Kamala notices.
It’s been a few weeks since she ran away (since she had no where else to go, since she was outed as Inhuman, since the power in her put a target on her back), and there he was, for her to convince him to be a hero.
Then again, sometimes, she wonders if it’s Bruce that wants to be a hero. If there is something else, someone else, behind his eyes. Listening and judging. And that makes her think; no one knew much about the Hulk before everything fell apart.
He was big, he was strong, and he wasn’t chatty. The general feeling, she’s seen over the years, was that everyone agreed he was a monster, but not a cruel monster. Just something wild and angry, but pushed to do good by Bruce Banner.
She’s seen those eyes. They aren’t human. They pulse green like the light of an explosion going off, like a door slowly opening with something else behind it, but it is the most intelligent gaze she’s ever seen, with so much pain and furtive energy that nothing can settle down for long. The Hulk is not the one that needs pushing, she supposes: when he told her to run away to safety, it had not been Banner’s voice that spoke to her, full of desperation that someone small and frail might get hurt.
Bruce Banner is a lot more complicated than she thought. And when he talks in his sleep, his voice changes.
His throat pulses and twists, muscles standing on end, veins swelling like cables; his voice ratchets to a growling snarl that is not good with words and bursts out in brief explosions of words, and then it thickens into a more smarmy voice. Astonishingly, it’s vaguely accented, with a hint of Las Vegas in there, a casual diction that feels very strange from him.
Sometimes his mutterings are a deeper voice; not growling, but so bassy that glass clatters. At times, there is the calm word choice of a professor, with vague qualities from all the others, as if they flow together in that moment. And sometimes they are poetic, in their fashion, but very curt. And finally, there’s a final one, welling out of the dark and his dreams.
The last one reminds her of her own father. She’s not sure what to make of that.
But more and more, as AIM strides across the world, she hears him talk at night. It’s hard not to. She’s sleepless more often than not these nights. Dreams are, all too often, awful reminders of what she’s lost and probably won’t ever see again; she cannot stand to see the faces and voices of her mother and her father, her friends and community, left behind, and sitting still makes her think too much of how wrong things could go.
So. She glides across the floors of the old helicarrier. Her legs writhe and slacken like wet noodles, muscles stretching and morphing with her bones into an unrecognizable mess that still has a tensile strength.
And she hears voices, muttering amongst each other, and she abruptly feels as though she is listening to something she shouldn’t.
His voice fades to whispers, furiously arguing in turn, and once again, she can’t escape the idea that its the echoes of something escaping from him; the debate of a system, from within him.
It doesn’t sound like several people bickering. It sounds like people who are very worried, past the point of all rationality and desperation.
“The green door is opening.”
“Something is behind it.”
He trails off, his breath ragged, twisting in the shallow space of the night.
She doesn’t know why. But suddenly, Kamala is afraid.