Fic: In the Void of their Skins; PG
In the Void of their Skins
Fandom: Avengers (movie)
Summary: After the catastrophe and adrenaline have faded, Bruce deals with the strangeness of returning to the States.
Warnings: Discussions of illness, death
Spoilers: Avengers movie plot points
Thanks to embroiderama, for giving this the once-over!
Note: I wasn’t really interested in writing about lepers and I’m not 100% sure that that’s what Banner was doing in India-different articles say different things. Anyway I pulled the info I had about outbreaks and stuff and incorporated that here, along with other sources. I just wanted to write an immersive experience to contrast with that of being back Stateside.
In the Void of their Skins
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Theirs is the little death, placeless and respiteless…
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Bruce trudged down the dirt path, flanked by steadily rising foothills, climbing and climbing on either side. Dust crowded the air, thickened in his lungs, and his legs hurt and his feet, he knew, were bleeding. He adjusted his grip on the bag containing everything he owned, hauled it up over his shoulder to rest on his back in an attempt to take some of the pressure off his arm. Everything he owned was in that bag, and though it didn’t amount to much, everything he owned was heavier than anything he’d ever had to carry in his life for any real distance.
Before, he hadn’t given much thought to the weight of things. Now, it made up the fabric of his world.
He passed few people on the road. A handful of locals, farmers maybe, old men mostly. Some with pack animals, one with a grizzled old dog. He stood aside once for an army truck, turned his face away, but the soldiers paid him no mind. Maybe he barely stood out to them, coated in dust, the same color as the road. Maybe they just had bigger fish to fry. They were gone in the time it took for him to consider it, the growl of the engine fading and silence descending rapidly. He wondered if he’d see them in Moreh.
His stomach growled, but he only had some white bread and a boiled egg in his pack, and was miles from the border crossing and even farther from a town large enough to disappear in. He’d need to wait another three hours or so before he even thought about eating. That was just good sense. The pain in his feet was getting worse, though, and finally he surrendered to the limitations of his body, slung his pack on the ground and sat down on the side of the road. He hauled his shoes off and hissed as his socks peeled away dark and damp. He couldn’t go much farther like this. He passed a hand across his face, smearing blood over one eyebrow, and lifted his eyes to the distant peak of a mountain whose name he didn’t know. The sky was distant and blue, and the slopes were green-fading-to-grey. Serene clouds drifted beyond the crags, and Bruce found it in himself to smile, just a little.
And then he woke up.
His eyes opened. Sudden but undeniably, they opened, and he was staring up not at a sky or even the ceiling of a broken-down lean-to threatening to rain dust into his eyes, but at a smooth white surface, unmarred by time or entropy. He heard his breath stutter, felt his body chill with it, and made a noise somewhere between dismay and disbelief. A hand flailed out, almost of its own accord, and pushed across his face. Raked back up and through his hair. He pushed himself upright off of an enormous, soft pillow, shoved at bedclothes the color of dark wine and warm with the heat of his own body.
The mattress didn’t make a sound as he slid off of it. He couldn’t help the shudder that passed through him. The smoothness of the sheets was vaguely nauseating. He pressed his hands against his thighs and stood beside the bed, looking around.
No mountains here. Though the dream, at least, had been accurate, and he was sure the mountains in Burma still stood.
That was a comfort, anyway.
His stomach growled, and he thought briefly of white bread, boiled eggs. But no. They were long gone. Years gone. He felt their absence, a brief but solid ache.
There was a robe draped over a nearby chair, but he padded over to the sofa where he’d placed his old bag, dug out a threadbare cotton button-up and linen slacks, and went looking for breakfast.
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He stopped to eat his lunch near the border, in the dubious shade of the thin trees crowding the low, sloping hills. There was no checkpoint that he could see, from this distance, but he’d passed enough soldiers coming and going to assume that there would be at some point. Certainly for a foreigner, footsore as he was.
At least his socks were clean now.
He scattered the last of crumbs clinging to his hands, but wasn’t ready to stand up just yet. His legs throbbed and the back of his neck was dry and probably red. He had a feeling this would be the last chance he had to rest for a long, long while, and he wanted to savor it.
When he got across the border, that’s when the work would really start.
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Tony said, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Bruce looked up from his toast. “I didn’t go anywhere. I mean I-” he waved a hand, “I’ve been here.”
Tony glanced at the toast and his sharp eyes, Bruce thought, probably took in a whole lot more than his culinary preferences. He tried not to grasp at the front of his shirt or fold in on himself, hoped he didn’t flush with anything approaching shame. He was glad the other man couldn’t see his bare feet behind the counter, toes curling around the metal rim of the stool he’d perched on. He didn’t meet Tony’s gaze.
“Well it’s been two days, I figured that was enough time to get settled in, get the lay of the land. Haven’t seen you around so I figured you were getting up to…whatever it is you get up to on your own. And I know there’s at least one lab here you’ll like that you have to see, and JARVIS told me you were awake, so…”
Bruce swallowed another bite of toast. Not long ago two pieces of bread had been something of a bounty. He deliberately wasn’t thinking about how overloaded the sleek silver refrigerator in the corner had seemed when he dared to investigate, or why he’d eschewed everything in it out of sheer despair of ever comprehending it all, and gravitated to the bread left on the counter and the toaster scattered with crumbs.
He said, “I’d like to see the labs,” and Tony grunted and wandered over to the fridge. Bruce deliberately didn’t watch him futz around inside for a few minutes, and ignored the cold air creeping across the floor to curl around his bare toes. He couldn’t really ignore the moment Tony shut the door, though, or the way he roamed back in Bruce’s direction, hands still empty, because apparently he wasn’t hungry.
Food wasn’t really an issue, around here.
Bruce swallowed the last of his toast and stood up.
“Let’s go,” he said, and followed the other man out of the kitchen. It wasn’t until they’d gone down five levels in an elevator that made no noise and were actually standing in a lab worth more than the last three villages Bruce had stayed in that Tony looked down, and the noise of surprise he made at Bruce’s shoeless state was unmistakable.
He didn’t say anything, though.
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They were asking for his papers, and he was fairly certain the ones he had were good. Completely fabricated, of course, but enough to get him across the border. Anyway it wasn’t as if he had no reason for trying to cross into the border town-he’d been asked. Specifically requested, in fact, and even if he found himself cooling his heels in a local lockup he was confident that he wouldn’t be there for too long.
Nevertheless, it was a relief when he spotted a familiar, glossy head bobbing its way through the crowds on the road, and a tiny hand waved in his direction.
“Doctor!” And then she was there, all four feet eleven of former director of the Women’s Health Care Organization out of New Delhi, hair greyer than Bruce remembered, back as ramrod straight as ever.
“Dr. Chattopadhyay,” he greeted her, and even smiled. When she turned to the nearest soldier and barked out something clipped and demanding, he managed to dredge up a little sympathy for the man as he jumped and stammered.
Just a little, though. He’d need most of it for the people he’d come to see.
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He eventually figured out how to open the windows in his room. Was deeply relieved when he discovered that they could be opened, that being on the thirty-third floor didn’t mean everything was sealed and the world eternally locked out. The air blowing in was cold, fiercely so, and the noise and stink of the city reached even this height. The stars were invisible, the darkness barely more than a suggestion. There would never be a night in this place, never a moment of stillness to interrupt the perpetual noise and chaos. Nevertheless, he found himself sitting on the glossy hardwood floor by the open window, in the warm light of a table lamp he’d stolen from its perch by the leather sofa, cross-legged and thumbing through one of the few books he’d managed to carry through the last few years of his travels.
It was an old book, one he’d been given after an unfortunate incident at the border left him stranded in Hungary without a visa or even the bag he’d carried across the border on the back of a farm truck. The old woman who’d put him up for two weeks had given him the book the day he’d taken his leave from her, along with a small packet of oranges, already peeled, and a few sandwiches of unidentified meat that Bruce had been all too happy to receive. She’d pressed the old book on him with hands that trembled ever so slightly, skin as thin as paper, and he’d spent the next six months learning as much of the language as he could so that he’d never again need to say ‘Thank you’ in English, or German, or any other language she didn’t understand. The book had been an invaluable reference in his pursuits, and a source of consolation on long cold nights when the reality of his situation crashed down on his shoulders and tried to crush him into the earth.
He wondered sometimes if she was still alive. Toyed idly with the idea of going back to see her again, assuming he could remember which neighborhood, which street, which building. Wondered if she’d even remember him, if he did manage to track her down.
That was how Tony found him, when he wandered into Bruce’s room at midnight for some reason while eating an apple, and he stopped short just inside the doorway and stared at Bruce in his little circle of lamplight, and the noise of the page turning was louder than anything drifting in from outside.
“What,” he said, crisp as the apple he’d brought to his mouth and then lowered, unbitten, “Exactly, are you doing?”
“What?” Bruce looked up, peered out into the dark room, and blinked. “Tony?”
Tony waved at the sofa, leather and plush and gleaming, said, “You know I gave you that for a reason. Don’t try to tell me it’s not comfortable because I tried it out myself.”
Bruce shrugged, looked back down at the book. Rested dry fingers on drier pages. “I know,” he murmured. “Just.”
Just it was wrong. It felt wrong, felt lazy just to sit in it, felt sinful, felt excessive. He didn’t need it, didn’t need much of anything. There were times when a floor to sleep on indoors was more of a luxury than he deserved, times when a crowded room full of drooping medical technicians and desperate relatives was enough to bring him nearly to tears of gratitude. He wasn’t being deliberately ungrateful. It was just that nothing about this place felt right, or comfortable, or grounded.
“Listen.” Tony stepped a little further into the room, hesitated briefly, then said, “You don’t have to...if you don’t like it I mean… if you’d rather not be….”
“No,” Bruce says, and starts to get up and nearly knocks over the lamp, grabs it and rights it and shrugs and says, “It’s fine, it’s just…just different. You know.”
Tony’s free hand twitched, a little, maybe in the direction of his chest. Bruce didn’t ask.
“Yeah,” the other man said, quiet in the dark room, “I do know.”
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He remembered reading about the Smallpox eradication campaign, the drama of it, the sweeping catastrophe of a single outbreak in a region, the devastating cost in human lives. At the time he’d been sitting in the well-loved library of a venerable university, surrounded by the quiet susurration of pages and the murmur of voices, and it had all been both very immediate and terribly distant.
Now he squatted on his haunches to stare into the eyes of a girl no older than ten and wondered if it had been anything like this. The helplessness coupled with the fierce urge to fix this. The problem was he didn’t even have a proper lab, didn’t have the tools to tackle the problem beyond basic emergency response efforts-yes, quarantine them, yes block the roads, yes keep out travelers, no there’s no medicine, no we don’t know what it is, yes, we’re doing the best we can.
He was deeper into the foothills than he’d ever imagined being, far from the border, feet newly bandaged and up to his eyeballs in mysterious cases of a bacterial disease he hadn’t been able to identify. In all fairness, no one had been able to and it wasn’t as if this was even his area of expertise. But he was the only doctor in the area besides Chattopadhyay and she’d asked him to come, and how could he have said no?
“They go to sleep and don’t wake up,” she’d told him simply, on the truck ride into the hills, sharing out slips of dried fruit and Kurkure. “The symptoms are so generic that we’re still struggling to pin down the culprit. All we know for sure is that it’s contagious and our best bet is isolation right now. But people come to see the infected and it’s all we can do to keep them out of the village. Before our team got here the roads were as open as you please. Now we have runners chasing travelers as far as Kolkata, but catching them before they reach the city is nearly impossible. It’s been a week since we finally sealed the border, and shutting out the outlying farms has only made everyone unhappier than they already were. I’m getting reports from the road but I have no idea how long it’ll be before this thing hits the urban population.”
He didn’t ask ‘Why me?’ Despite his limited experience with on-the-ground outbreaks of this kind, it was clearly All Hands on Deck. If nothing else he could swab out infirmaries and help with administration of medicine. Palliative care was better than nothing.
“I’m going to be the only American there,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. There wasn’t much chance of SHIELD tracking him down all the way out here, but he was still going to stand out, no matter where he went.
“You might not be here for very long,” Dr. Chattopadhyay said grimly. “If this starts to spread through Kolkata, we’ll need someone on the ground there as well.”
Now it was a week later and he was staring into the gummed-up eyes of a child ravaged by a disease with no name, and he could barely say two words to her. “It’ll be okay,” he tried, and with a wet cloth gently wiped at her eyes, one large hand cupping the back of her fragile skull. “We’re going to fix this.”
When she died two hours later he went and stood under the blue indifferent sky and clenched his fists and held on to his anger. Made it into something he could use to ride the tide of this impossible thing.
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Bruce gave up on the bed, that third night, because it made his back hurt and his heart ache and he was no longer so tired he didn’t care where he slept. Instead he hauled the horrible enormous pillows off, pulled blankets out of the closet, and curled up by the open window with the light off and one hand splayed on the closed cover the old book. His bag wasn’t that distant-if he scooted too far in one direction his back brushed its reassuring solidity. The room around him is huge and the noise, both within and without, is constant and annoying. He’d slept in far worse conditions, and if the blankets smelled like fabric softener and tickled his nose, well, at least there are no cries of mourning wafting from outdoors, and the walls didn’t occasionally shower the floor with dirt. No one else in the room was breathing, but out in the city were millions of lives, so he supposed that had to count for something.
Once he squatted outside a makeshift infirmary and scrubbed a mattress so stained with illness it would never be clean again. His hands had long ago cracked and bled and healed and cracked again, and there were no gloves but it didn’t really matter since his immune system had been upgraded and he could do these kinds of jobs without fear. Half the original team was down with the mysterious sickness and he’d taken on duties he’d never been trained for, learning on the fly. In a week he would leave for Kolkata, armed with a treatment that at least would slow the illness and buy time for the aid workers to develop something more effective. Three months later he’d be in a shack talking to a SHIELD assassin. When he agreed to go with her he would leave nothing more than a brief message telling Dr. Chattopadhyay’s assistant where he’d gone.
Fate of the world, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Now he was curled up on the floor of what amounted to a penthouse owned by one of the richest men in the world and he was trying to remember the taste of the air in the mountains. He curled up a little tighter and rubbed his bare toes against the back of his foot. There weren’t even any scars, but the callouses were still there.
He would keep them, he thought, for a while.
-the end-
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Title and quotes from Belitt’s English translation of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, V.
Not feathered with iron, portentous in dying-not that way
the impoverished spawn of the hamlet inherit you, Death:
They wear in the void of their skins a more urgent subsistence,
a thing of their own, poor petal, a raveling cord,
the mote in the bosom that never confronted its quarrel,
the forehead’s arduous sweat drop that never was given.
Theirs is the little death, placeless and respiteless,
a morsel of dying no second renewal could quicken:
a bone or a perishing bell-sound razed from within.
I opened a bandage of iodine, steeping my hands
in the starveling despairs that would murder their dying,
but nothing declared itself there in the wound, nothing came forth:
only space of spirit where vaguely the bitter chill blew.
Some references used:
http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/border-maps.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18156861
http://alittleadrift.com/2012/05/vegetarian-travel-burma-myanmar/