One last big thanks to my beta, irite.

I posted two chapters at once, so make sure you read the chapter before this one if you haven't.

The flight from the giant floating base to Stark Tower was unfortunately very short.

So short, in fact, that Bruce didn't even get very much time to consider how enormously stupid his current course of action was. No, he didn't get to waver from his newfound resolve at all. Things were happening so quickly that he didn't get to deliberate, or worry, or anything. He could only move forward.

And that was fine with him, honestly. Right now, he had to look forward. Had to focus on fixing what he had allowed to happen. He'd spent too long deliberating and worrying, and look at all the good it had done. No, now it was time to focus on the future.

As short as it was, though, the trip to Manhattan was not short enough. By the time they got there, there was already a portal open above the building, pouring...thousands of some kind of creature into Manhattan.

Bruce looked up at it in awe. He'd never even imagined something like this being possible. Even after reading Dr. Foster's papers, he'd thought that this kind of construct was still years, if not decades, in the future. And yet here it was in front of him, mocking everything he thought he'd known about physics.

"Stark," Romanoff said into her headset, interrupting Bruce's reverie. "We're heading northeast."

Bruce didn't hear Tony's reply, but a moment later they were banking around towards Stark Tower. Out of the front of what Rogers had called a 'quinjet,' the Tower came into focus. And atop the building, there were two men fighting.

One, Bruce clearly recognized as Loki. He'd never forget that face. Or that outfit. And the other, well, Bruce assumed that was the elusive 'Thor.' Looked like he'd shown up after all, like Tony had thought he would.

Bruce wondered, briefly, what else Tony may have been right about, before he focused on the scene in front of him.

Thor was huge and seemed to be holding up against Loki fairly well in their fight, which was impressive. Especially given the fact Loki had a magic spear that he was using to fire blasts of energy at Thor.

Thor didn't seem to perturbed by that, though. If anything, he seemed to be holding back, trying only to disarm Loki. To Bruce, that spoke volumes about their relationship.

As Bruce watched, Loki fired a blast at Thor, and, taken by surprise, it knocked Thor's feet out from under him. He went skidding across the balcony they were fighting on, and Loki looked up, then, towards the approaching quinjet.

A moment later, Barton was firing the plane's guns at Loki and Loki was firing back. The guns aboard the quinjet did little to faze Loki, but the blast of energy that Loki fired from his spear had a rather alarming effect on the quinjet. Alarms began shrieking as the blast impacted, and Barton muttered a terse, "Damn it. We're gonna go down."

His calm tone was deceptive, but the way he began flicking switches and pulling levers was decidedly more telling, as was the tense look Romanoff shot him.

Going down?

Bruce concluded that a plane crash would likely hinder his goal of staying in control. And that was central. He had to stay in control, had to make sure he could keep the Other Guy focused. Bruce took a good half-second to think about it all, to weigh his options. Then he made his decision. This was, after all, not the time to deliberate. That's what he'd been doing for the last few days, and it had gotten him nowhere. Now, it was time to act.

And this wouldn't be the first time he'd jumped out of an aircraft, after all. This one, at least, was a lot closer to the ground.

Bruce quickly looked over at Captain Rogers, who was eying him cautiously. The idea of a plane crash didn't seem to be throwing him too much. But then, Bruce supposed, it was probably kind of familiar to him. As awful as it was, Rogers had already survived a plane crash, or so he'd explained briefly as the quinjet left the SHIELD base. What was one more, especially if the world was ending?

"Banner?" Rogers asked. "You got this?"

Bruce figured he meant 'is this going to make your ugly green side come out' but was too polite to say it in exactly those words.

"Yeah," Bruce answered. "I've got this." Then, he unfastened his seat belt and attempted to stand. The quinjet had begun to spin lazily, though, as Barton did his best to guide it gently to the ground, and it took him a second to get his balance. When he'd gotten to his feet, he called calmly, "Open the back."

To his credit, Barton did as he was asked without question. Whether it was because he was too busy trying not to crash the plane into a building or because he trusted Bruce to know what he needed to do, Bruce wasn't sure. And he wasn't going to ask.

"Dr. Banner?" Rogers asked. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to do this my way," Bruce answered, making his way towards the back of the plane and trying very hard not to think. "You need the Other Guy, and I need to keep him under control. This is the only way it can happen."

"But...you're not angry."

Bruce snorted a tiny laugh. He'd been having one hell of a week. One hell of a life, honestly. And at this point, he knew one thing for certain. "Captain," Bruce said, hanging onto the back of a seat to remain upright as the jet spun idly through the air, "I'm always angry."

Then, he jumped out of the back of the plane.

By that point, they were only a few hundred feet above ground—Barton had maneuvered the plane to keep their descent as slow as possible—and that gave Bruce a few seconds in which he could consider exactly how bad this idea really was.

But he was done worrying, done over-thinking, and he pushed those thoughts away and focused. Because he had to do this before he hit the ground. It had to be his choice.

There's nothing like trying to find something buried deep inside of yourself while plummeting towards the earth, but Bruce knew he could do it. Failure was not an option.

And so he reached inside himself for that white hot spark of anger that he knew was there.

He latched onto it, and his world went green.

Battle. Lots to smash. Flying things. Need to stop them. Work with lightning man.

Get the insect men. Leave the people.

Fight.

Cornered. Pain.

Swarm of insect men with guns. Hurts.

Smash.

Inside. Where? No idea. Need to go, need to fight.

But. Someone's here.

It's Him.

Loki. Loki tried to control Hulk. Loki used Hulk to hurt people.

Rage.

Loki is small, weak. Not like a human, but close.

Leave him on the ground. He won't move.

Back to the battle.

"So, do you want shawarma? 'Cause I want shawarma."

"I don't think anyone wants shawarma."

"Shut up, Rogers. We're getting shawarma. As soon as Banner wakes up."

Bruce, as it turned out, did not want to wake up. He was stiff and sore and tired and—

Oh yeah. Alien invasion. Loki. Tesseract. And these people talking around him? Probably the people he'd just saved the world with.

Well. Bruce knew better than to assume. Barely conscious, he croaked, "We won, right? Aliens are gone?"

"Yeah, we won," came Tony's voice. "You don't remember?"

Bruce groaned and sat up slowly, ignoring the way his joints popped as he moved. As he did so, he was surprised to find that, actually, to some extent, he did remember. It was hazy at best, and largely incoherent, but there was something occupying that space in his memory.

He remembered anger, of course; his mind had encoded that in vibrant shades of green. He remembered something big, too, something...flying. A ship? No, not quite. Whatever it was, he was fairly sure he'd destroyed it.

And Loki...there was something about Loki, too.

But what?

With a groan, Bruce cracked his eyes open and sat up. He was on a couch in what seemed to be some kind of apartment. One wall was windows, and most of them were broken. There was a huge crater in the floor.

"This your tower?" Bruce asked, chasing the residue of a memory. It seemed...familiar, somehow.

Puny god...

"Yeah," Tony answered. He'd ditched the Iron Man suit in favor of jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt, and he was lounging on a nearby chair, resting his legs on what had once been an ottoman but had now mostly been reduced to rubble.

It occurred to Bruce then to check and see if he was dressed. Mercifully, it seemed like the SHIELD-issued pants he'd been wearing were extraordinarily stretchy, and enough of them had survived to preserve his modesty. That was a relief. Generally, he preferred if people didn't see him naked, at least while he was unconscious.

That particular action reminded him of the other thing he had to ask. "And, uh, did I..."

"You were great," Rogers stepped in. "I don't think we could have won without you."

Bruce let that sink in for a minute, frantically scanning his memories. There wasn't a lot there, but he thought he remembered trying to stay away from people. That seemed too good to be true, though. He asked "Really?"

"Yeah, really," Tony said. "Didn't I say you'd be great?"

"...No."

"Oh. Well, I meant to. Anyway," Tony prompted again. "Shawarma?"

Rogers, who'd turned to look out a hole in the wall that had once been a window, chided, "Lay off, will you?"

As it turned out, though, Bruce was starving. And he happened to love shawarma, though he couldn't figure out why Tony was so fixated on it. "No, it sounds good. I, uh, wouldn't mind some more clothes, though."

It somehow didn't feel awkward at all asking, as if saving the world had eliminated any of the social tension generated by the fact he was nearly naked and needed to borrow a stranger's clothes.

"Sure," Tony answered easily. "I've got just the thing. I'm thinking...green." He stood up and bounced away.

Bruce wondered where Tony's energy was coming from. Adrenaline, maybe. Probably. Or caffeine.

He took the opportunity to look around a little bit. Barton and Romanoff had not, to Bruce's surprise, left. He'd figured that, as SHIELD agents, they'd be needed back at base. Apparently, that wasn't the case. They were talking quietly to each other several yards away, near Tony's bar. Thor was still present as well, sitting in a chair and staring moodily at his hands folded in his lap. Rogers was by his window. None of them, it seemed, had bothered to shuck their gear yet.

"How long was I out?" Bruce asked, trying to find a clock that worked. He was unsuccessful.

"About an hour," Romanoff answered brusquely. "SHIELD came and took Loki in for questioning. But they want us to lay low for a little while."

Huh. SHIELD had taken Loki in, but had left him behind. Apparently, Fury had chosen to overlook Bruce's role in all of this, despite his earlier attempt to take Bruce into custody.

Of course...maybe that had been the director's intention all along. Maybe he'd just been trying to steer Bruce towards doing what he wanted him to do, had never intended to arrest him.

But that was too much to think about today. Or maybe ever. Because that would meant that Fury had been manipulating not only him, but Tony, too, and probably everyone…

Yeah, he wasn't going to think about it. Bruce just raised one tired eyebrow. "...And going for shawarma fits that description?"

Romanoff's only response was a shrug.

Tony reappeared a few minutes later with clothing that was blessedly not green, and Bruce went to get changed. When he came back, everyone else was standing in an awkward half-circle waiting for him.

"So, uh, Dr. Banner," Rogers started, rubbing the back of his neck. "This is Thor," he said abruptly, gesturing towards the huge blond guy. "And I don't think you ever got formally introduced to Agent Romanoff," he added, indicating Romanoff, "Or Barton."

Apparently, Rogers was going to ignore the whole Bruce and Barton had been 'working together' for Loki thing. That was fine. Bruce gave a small wave and a mumbled, "Hello."

Thor nodded, then stepped forward. "I would like to apologize formally for what my brother has done. I assure you that his actions towards you will not go unpunished."

Bruce hadn't really been thinking about that—what Loki had done to Manhattan seemed a little more pressing that what Loki had done to Bruce—but he appreciated the sentiment. He replied, "Um. Thanks. I think."

"Great, introductions are out of the way," Tony announced, striding towards the elevator that (Bruce hoped) was still functioning. "Let's go get some damn food already, geez. I can't believe I almost died on an empty stomach."

Bruce blinked, but decided to let that go. It seemed like Tony was prone to exaggeration, and categorizing the battle as a near-death experience fit that.

Conversation was sparse over lunch-slash-dinner, consisting largely of grunts. As it turned out, saving the world burned a lot of calories that required replenishing. Or maybe everyone was just too tired to utilize their jaw muscles for speaking.

It wasn't until everyone had just about finished that someone broached the topic of 'what now.' It was, in fact, Tony, and he did it by saying, "What now?"

"We're gonna have to deal with Loki," Rogers said. He looked at Thor. "You got any ideas about that?"

"My brother will be charged for his crimes in our realm. He must pay first for what he has done to our people." He offered no further details on what that was, and Bruce found that he didn't particularly want to know.

He'd had about enough of Loki.

"Good luck selling that to Fury," Romanoff muttered. "He's gonna want Loki to stay here." Then, to Barton, "Get your damn leg off my chair, I want to stand up."

Barton frowned but did as he was asked. He didn't seem overly inclined to argue with Romanoff, but Bruce didn't know if that was their normal relationship dynamic or if it had more to do with recent events.

Rogers ignored their exchange, instead observing, "There were more people than just Loki at play here. We have a lot of cleaning up to do. Literal and metaphorical."

At that, Bruce frowned. He couldn't forget that he'd been one of those people. He'd helped Loki, and—

"Dr. Banner's already spoken to Fury about that," Romanoff said, stretching. "The director's got teams looking into the connections Loki made long before he launched his attack."

She said nothing at all about Bruce's role in anything.

And that was that. No one else had anything to say about Bruce's part in what had happened, either. They all had to know—they'd been on the Helicarrier, as the SHIELD base was apparently called, when Loki had attacked—and the Other Guy wasn't exactly subtle or stealthy. And yet, no one seemed to bear him any ill will for what had happened.

Maybe what Tony had said earlier, on the Helicarrier, was true. Maybe what had happened...wasn't his fault. Maybe no one thought it was.

That was...different. And for the first time, Bruce let himself feel, just a little bit, that he'd actually done something right. The thing with Loki, he hadn't handled that well. But he'd managed to control the Other Guy, had helped save the world, was, as ridiculous as it sounded, a 'hero.'

Him. A hero.

The next person to speak was Tony, and all he said was, "So, Bruce, you wanna crash at my place for a few days? I've gotta have a spare room somewhere that didn't get blown up or something. And I kinda owe you one."

To be honest, Bruce wanted to hop on a plane and get away from here as fast as he could. Before Fury or someone else remembered that he was Loki's accomplice. But there probably wasn't going to be any planes flying for a while, and maybe it was better if he stuck around, in case he needed to explain more about what he knew or what he'd done. It looked like SHIELD wasn't going to go after him, and maybe he could help catch the actual bad guys.

So he answered, "Uh. Sure. If you don't mind." Then the second part of what Tony had said registered. "What do you mean, you owe me one?" Maybe there had been something to what Tony said earlier, about nearly dying...

Tony reached over and clapped Bruce on the shoulder. "Let's just say that your alter ego plays a mean game of catch. Anyway, I wouldn't offer if I minded. Besides, I've always wanted a pet physicist. Now I just gotta convince Pepper that we need to keep you."

Bruce wondered, then, what, exactly, he was signing up for.

In the last few days he'd been a pawn, a monster, and a hero.

What was next? Friend?

The Battle of Manhattan, as it would later be called, had been brief.

Brief, yes, but not without its cost. Hundreds of lives were lost during the battle, and billions of dollars in property damage were racked up in the space of an hour.

But everyone agreed it could have been worse.

Much worse.

After a semblance of order was restored, stories began pouring out of the city. They differed greatly, from people who hadn't actually witnessed the attacks to people who had supposedly been saved by one of the good guys in a bank. What they agreed on, though, was that a few people took a stand to put an end to what the media was terming Loki's Army before it could gain a foothold on Earth. There was Iron Man, of course, and Captain America, looking like someone dug him straight out of the 1940s. There was the guy everyone was calling Thor (the hammer and the lightning gave it away), and a pair of highly-trained combatants that no one could identify, no matter how many tabloids later tried.

But the one that really surprised people was Hulk. The creature who'd been credited with nearly destroying Harlem only a few years before made a comeback, this time to save the city. And without him, it was largely agreed in the weeks following the attack, Manhattan would have crumbled before the invasion.

They were the city's saviours, the team heralded as heroes. As the united front that had saved the entirety of humanity from subjugation and probably death.

And no one knew how near they had come to being one crucial element short.

It took two days for SHIELD to finish up with Loki and for Thor to arrange for his brother's deportation back to Asgard. Agent Romanoff had been right, of course. Fury was reluctant to send Loki off to some unknown place, but Thor was very convincing. And really, who was stupid enough to argue with a god?

For those two days, Bruce worked frantically.

Between him and Selvig, who remembered a fair amount of what the Tesseract had 'told' him, they managed to construct a device capable of holding the cube and focusing its energy.

Tony was fairly helpful in that endeavor, as well, donating the resources of his R&D department which were, largely, unharmed and helping them with the specs of their design.

Bruce, Tony, and Selvig brought the device to the location that Tony had received via text message the night before, and there they found the rest of the team.

And Loki. In handcuffs and muzzled.

Which, to Bruce, was extraordinarily satisfying.

When Loki saw Bruce, he narrowed his eyes in a way that abruptly made Bruce's feeling of satisfaction shrivel up. It was not a friendly look. It practically screamed 'this isn't over,' and Bruce knew that Loki was conniving and clever enough that he might very well make a comeback.

But for the moment, Loki was contained, and Bruce wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Besides, the unfriendly look on Loki's face paled in comparison to the glare that Barton was shooting the demigod's way. Barton's sunglasses did little to hide his vitriol. Loki looked at Barton, smirk evident even beneath the muzzle, and for a moment, Bruce worried that Barton might just deck Loki right in the mouth, muzzle or not.

Then Romanoff whispered something in his ear, and Barton relaxed immediately, his frown turning into a small, smug smile.

Thor, apparently realizing that his brother was vastly overstaying his welcome, took the device that Bruce and Tony offered him, and Loki reluctantly took the other handle. Thor twisted his handle and then the two of them were gone, leaving Bruce with about a thousand pages worth of experimental write-up that he needed to do.

He looked over at Tony, who shrugged and jerked his head back towards his car, so everyone said their goodbyes and slowly splintered off in various directions, a SHIELD agent stepping forward to assist Selvig, who hadn't been looking well. Bruce made a mental note to check up on him in a few days.

Tony and Bruce walked in silence, at least until they were both in Tony's car, at which point Tony said, "We are going to copyright the shit out of that design. I don't know if it's ever gonna be useful again, but damn. Interdimensional travel, man."

Bruce nodded. "Yeah, but...if they took that thing to wherever...couldn't they use it to come back?"

Tony glanced over at Bruce. "You're a little ray of sunshine, aren't you?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Worrying...kinda comes with the territory." He shrugged. "Loki's gone, that's what matters, right?"

"Right," Tony agreed. "I bet it's gonna be like, ten years before someone tries to take over the world again."

"Ten years? And I'm the ray of sunshine?" Bruce replied.

Tony shrugged. "It's only a matter of time, don't you think?"

"Probably. And the kind of tech we're dabbling in...seems like anything is possible these days." Bruce frowned.

"But at least there's 'the Avengers' now, right?" Tony said, glancing over at Bruce and raising an eyebrow. "One hell of a team."

That was true. Things might be getting crazier, and someone might get it in their mind to take over the world, and Loki might very well decide to come back and finish what he'd started, but...for the time being, at least, the world was defended.

And he, Bruce Banner, awkward physicist slash green rage monster, was part of the team charged with Earth's defense.

He never would have seen that coming. It wouldn't have happened at all if not for Loki.

Maybe, Bruce thought, these things happen for a reason.

Thanks for reading! Please excuse my sappy ending. Leave a review if you want.