One
"Bruce." Molly is looking at him, eyes already glowing. "Does it hurt?"
"Uh." He struggles with words; with the Other Guy bubbling under his skin, his thoughts stutter and stop. "Every - every time."
"I'm sorry." The last thing he feels, before the Other Guy takes over, is her taking his hand.
Two
“Molly, I can’t -”
He looks up at her desperately, like he’s begging her to escape the bomb-blast (run, run away as fast as you can, you can’t catch me), and suddenly realisation hits her: she’s seen this before, at Xavier’s. Some emotions can’t be helped until they run their course; sometimes there’s nothing to do but absorb the pressure and fix things later.
“Bruce, if you can’t stop it, then let it happ-”
“NO!”
He’s only getting angrier, panicking, but she keeps talking. “I’m here, I’m here, nobody’s gonna get hurt, Bruce. It’s okay, I promise, but if you can’t fight it then don’t and we’ll deal with it, okay? It’s going to be okay.”
He still doesn’t believe her, or maybe can’t bear to believe her, but all he says is ‘please’, low and guttural and probably heart-breaking if she weren’t too busy trying not to freak out to pay attention to that kind of thing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, and holds his flashing-green gaze. “It’s okay, Bruce.”
And it totally isn’t okay, not in any alternate universe, but either he can’t fight it any longer or he does let it happen, because suddenly bones crack and sinews and clothing tear like a long, painful lightning sizzle, and then it’s– him.
The Other Guy.
Molly stares up, and up, and does some hasty reconsideration of her previous ideas concerning what she’s going to continue thinking of as the Hulk, even though she knows Bruce hates that name. She’d said, once, that he and Bruce were not the same person, but the more she looks at the Hulk the more she can see Bruce. It’s like looking at a Bruce made out of plasticine: even his hair is different, but Bruce is still there, in the eyes and mouth and shape of the jaw. She’s not afraid, suddenly – she was never afraid of the Hulk himself (because Bruce isn’t scary, could never be scary) but although she’s worried about how upset Bruce will be when he comes back, she isn’t scared. They can fix it, she thinks, because he hasn’t tried to hit her yet, and somehow she doesn’t think he will.
“Hey, Big Guy,” she says, and smiles. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Three
She knows as soon as she hears him shout her name that their chances of getting through this without the Hulk as a guest star are basically shot, but she wouldn't let that stop her even if she knew that for certain.
On the plus side, at least it gives her an idea of his location; maybe she'll have to break the whole place apart to get to him, but she'll do it.
Which means that she can either try to keep him calm and make herself the target, or keep quiet and let him take his chances... And, well. Who is she trying to kid?
She was born to be the target, after all.
"I'm coming!" she yells, a promise to him and a threat to anyone in her way, and begins to run.
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camwyn for all her help. <3 The title comes from the Oscar Wilde quote ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’
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