Angsty, introspective BruceNat. Let me know what you think!

Thanks to MrsTater for her many helpful comments and some much-needed encouragement in the early stages of this ficlet, and to blueincandescence for betaing, offering excellent advice, and suffering through my accidental archaic word choices and my parenthetical statements with good humor. Much love to you both!

The Art of Invisibility

Bruce Banner had found many things easy to accomplish in his life.

Despite what his grade school teachers had often referred to as his "unfortunate home situation," his academic career was nothing short of meteoric, carrying him into plum jobs, professional prestige, and coveted military research contracts. He had even found that personal happiness wasn't outside his grasp, despite the lengthy shadows cast by his mother's gravestone and his father's prison bars.

When he'd finally left home behind, he hadn't set out with anything more than professional success in mind, but Betty had found him. She was the one facet of his short-lived success that he couldn't truly take credit for; Betty had all but cornered him in the university lab and asked if he wanted to have coffee. The happiness and success that avoided Bruce during his childhood seemed bent on making up for the fact during his adult years, and he found himself facing accusations of having appallingly good luck for the first time in his life.

Until the accident.

It was the dividing point of his life, an Anno Domini delineation without the implication of redeeming value. He'd woken in a crater, the facility housing their equipment a smoking ruin in the distance, the memory of Betty's scream ringing in his ears and her slack, bloody face the only image that would shiver into focus when he strained to remember. He'd learned very quickly what it meant to have a truly hard life after that.

The world's a hard place, boy, his father's angry voice had rattled through his brain often in those days. You better harden up or it'll eat you alive. Dad always did think he was too soft.

A few days on the run, and he'd begun to wonder whether the old man was right. But he had toughened quickly, tempering like the hardest steel in the crucible of freezing nights with no place to sleep and a growling stomach long after the money had run out. He'd learned to work for a day's worth of food, how to scope out places to sleep, how to seem appealing in interviews for factory work. It was a gray, grueling experience but he'd survived and discovered the most important skill of all.

Invisibility.

The art of moving through a crowd and attracting not a single pair of eyes, repelling every curious glance as surely as a perfectly polarized magnet. Wearing hats low over his forehead helped, along with the shuffling way he learned to move. But what got the job done was becoming invisible even to himself. So Bruce faded when he walked in public, folding in on himself mentally and physically and neglected to take note of himself when he moved in crowds. His hazy thoughts might have loosely coalesced into nothing, no one, going nowhere, had he ever stopped to quantify them. It was easy to believe the mantra, to embody it so thoroughly that the eyes around him slid past like he was empty air.

It helped that the mantra was true.

Remaining inconspicuous and unseen even in plain sight became Bruce's primary skill during the years he spent running from what he had become. There was freedom, he discovered, in moving without the appraisal of others. He found it endlessly ironic that in becoming invisible he'd found greater confidence than he'd known at any other time in his life. When you didn't occupy space, you could relax. When you didn't exist, what was there to worry about? He gradually realized that in his early life he had never properly developed his most natural skill.

Out of all the skills he had mastered in his life, being invisible was the easiest of all.

It took a certain type of self-image to make a great spy. The ones who were too solid in their concept of themselves, the ones who always remembered who they were under a cover — they were the ones who got made, and the ones who didn't make it. People who knew themselves stood out in crowds, like stones breaking the flow of a river.

Natasha Romanoff had learned to be everything and nothing all at once. She had learned so well, in fact, that it had been difficult to attach herself to certain characteristics when she started with SHIELD. She eventually identified a few predispositions, but they were faint and easy to slide away from. She'd never encountered anyone who could disappear as effortlessly or completely as she could, so Natasha considered herself as easily the best there was when it came to the art of invisibility.

That changed when she met Bruce Banner.

Bruce had a way of sinking almost into nonexistence that she begrudgingly admired. He could stop taking up space at will and she'd never seen anything quite like it. The first time she scanned a crowd for his face, she passed him over once before finally finding him, and she was sharper-eyed than most.

After that, she couldn't help but keep a watchful eye on Dr. Banner. It was even her job, for a time. She was his handler when the Avengers first assembled, and she felt positive that Fury had selected her for her pretty face as well as her skill with manipulation. But it was all moot when Banner cut through the manipulation too easily and was never overtly impressed by her looks.

The situation became much more frustrating when she couldn't help but watch him. She was always searching for any trace of anger or other triggering emotions, always watching the set of his shoulders, the tension of his hands, the expressions he wore. She decided that Bruce Banner could have been the inspiration for the saying "wearing one's heart on one's sleeve," because he was as expressive as a child, at least to those who knew how to look. Of course, she'd never seen a child that was so impossible to figure out, so buried under layers of sadness and rage and control until they were almost invisible behind them.

She purposely did not allow herself to dwell on the fact that she, along with the other trainees of the Red Room, might have been exceptions to that rule.

Bruce suppressed every feeling, and held back from speaking more often than not. So she watched carefully both before and after the Hulk incident aboard the airborne helicarrier, for all the good it did. She watched because it was her job.

That didn't explain why she kept watching after the Battle of New York was over and Banner was no longer her problem. She checked up on him through fleeting intel reports and passing greetings in SHIELD facilities and Stark's collection of houses over the swiftly flowing years. When they both moved into Tony's newly finished Avenger's Tower, she couldn't stop watching. Bruce was almost anti-matter, the way he negatively existed. He cast an invisibility field so intense that she sometimes wondered whether he had invented something to force people's attention away from him. But that couldn't be true; when he relaxed and smiled, he burst back into three-dimensional existence with the sudden brilliance of a supernova.

He seemed like another predisposition that she couldn't be quite certain of, another preference that might be easily let go. Weeks passed, and still she didn't understand him. Months went by, and she couldn't comprehend her fascination with him.

Until the day she did.

Bruce remembered the first successful lullaby more clearly than any other memory he had seen through the Other Guy's eyes. It was a moment flash-frozen in his brain, in their brain, fused as it suddenly had been in that moment. Natasha had spoken softly, reached out her hand, and somehow looked at the Other Guy and at him. She reached for both of them, acknowledged both, smiled at both. She touched the Other Guy's hand gently, and suddenly the choice to just come back no longer felt as impossible as trying to lift his head above an irresistible current. She saw him, therefore he must be here.

One push, and his mind was his own again. He hugged her that first time, overwhelmed by the freedom of being seen, and Natasha was almost startled. He wanted to tease her about the fact, but something in her eyes kept him from it.

Emotion was the only thing that seemed to come anywhere close to rattling Natasha.

She could be almost invisible when she chose, disappearing behind a smirk or a smooth, unruffled mask, but he saw the way her expression went a little too glassy and unreadable when news reports referenced the fall of SHIELD, saw the moment of blankness before she allowed a smile to surface when Steve called her his friend. She wasn't invisible, he realized.

She was lost.

He thought she looked less lost, sometimes. When they sat together after a lullaby, or watched a movie, or had a drink together and she asked about "running with it." He almost thought…

But that was impossible.

He remembered just how impossible when an Enhanced woman forced his transformation, and he woke up in another crater with nothing but shaky memories of screams ringing in his ears. There was no blood on his hands, but he could still feel it as surely as if it were dripping from his fingertips. Natasha was still and blank as they all but fled the scene of his crime, and he was glad that she didn't speak to him as she would have done under remotely normal circumstances.

She stared a glassier stare than he had ever seen on her face, and it frightened him. He would have sought her out for once, spoken gently to her as she always did to him when he needed soothing after his violent transitions — and he wondered just what sort of transition Natasha must have been forced into to make her stare like a woman condemned — but he couldn't. He looked in her direction, tried to see her, but he could see only himself, covered in dust and destruction. The screams rang in his ears again, and he faded away as he had learned to do so long ago. No one spoke to him, and he knew that his greatest skill was still intact despite his lack of recent practice.

He sat alone, and invisibility was a numbing balm to the fears that throbbed like a wound messily ripped open. Clint murmured something about a safe house, and he hung all his hopes on completing his disappearance when they arrived.

But Natasha's piercing gaze was waiting for him there. She was no longer staring off into distances only she could see; she turned her eyes to him, and he wondered how she seemed always able to find him. The safe distance between them finally dissolved when she spoke the words he longed for and dreaded all at once.

"I'm running with it. With you."

His dreams always did have a way of becoming nightmares. But he could wake from this one before it turned — she didn't have to follow him into this endless cycle of helpless hope and hopeless despair.

So he said, "There's no future with me."

What he meant was how can I find you when I can't find myself?

Bruce almost disappeared into himself like the old days when Natasha allowed him to see what she felt toward him. Being visible, she found, was infinitely more difficult than disappearing, and it required much more pain. But it was a pain she willingly bore when she coaxed him back with a lullaby made of whispered confessions and reassurances and they decided to leave together.

Over the next few hours, Natasha slowly began to take up space again. Bruce had once told her that the best way he'd found of preventing his transitions was a relentless effort to be present in every cell of his body. Disconnecting, he'd insisted, was the surest way to lose control. He was the wisest man she knew when it came to the management of monsters, so she forced herself to be brutally present in her body, to stay connected, even though her monsters weren't hiding in her cells like his.

He stood near her for most of that day. Her focus strayed to him, and she found that he made the steadiest anchor for her thoughts. She thought of telling him that, whether to make him smile or make him blush she wasn't quite sure, but Nick's appearance and his never-ending call to save the world interrupted before she could manage it.

She reminded herself that there was no need to worry about such a small loss. After this mission, she and Bruce would have all the time in the world.

Bruce remembered the last lullaby even more clearly than the first. Natasha's searching eyes — searching, always, for him — went wide with surprise when the gunfire exploded around them. He and the Other Guy were in agreement on very few things, but the importance of Natasha was one of them. Together they carried her to the helicarrier. Together they returned to the quinjet and sent Bruce's second most abominable creation plummeting to the ground below.

Together, they listened to Natasha's voice and reached for her one last time. From behind the Other Guy's eyes, Bruce abruptly realized that the happiness he craved wasn't in the memories he avoided — it was in front of him, on the screen showing her face, in a future he'd just started to imagine. She was looking for him, reaching and searching and asking him to come back to her.

It had been a mistake, he realized, to think of the future at all. The future was what it always had been: images running like sand through his fingers as he tried to grasp them. Hope, possibilities, love — all gone in the time it took to close his fist. It was easy for everyone except himself to forget, but the Other Guy pounded more things than buildings and streets into dust. When he saw her searching eyes and the hint of her smile, he could almost forget, too.

Almost.

(A fitting title for his biography, he thought in a distant, bitter corner of his chambered mind. Almost.)

The knowledge that had been crawling through his veins for days like the slowest of poisons finally reached his heart. He couldn't go back. But there was one thing he could do. One thing he had always been able to do. Together they lifted a hand towards her smile.

"We can't track you in stealth mode, so help me out. I need you —"

Bruce introduced the Big Guy to his greatest skill when they cut the call. Together, they were invisible.

Natasha had always known that Bruce was probably the more accomplished of the two of them when it came to the art of invisibility. But as she stared through the windows of the helicarrier's deck, trying and failing to tune out the static of the communications line that had connected them, she finally acknowledged to herself that he was certainly the winner in this particular contest of skill.

For the first time since she'd cracked the file bearing the name Robert Bruce Banner, she couldn't find him. She thought of waking to the rush of icy air and the impossibly gentle grip of two oversized arms, thought of his infinite care in settling her on the deck of the helicarrier, and wondered why he had decided against finding her.

Maybe he couldn't forgive her for choosing to save the world instead of disappearing with him. A life of invisibility with Bruce Banner — the thought still felt like an oasis flickering on the distant horizon, more visible than the quinjet against the darkening sky. For just a moment, she hated that fantasies were always more vivid than realities, and that the mind always saw more than the eyes.

But what had Bruce's mind seen during their last moments together? She had also been trying to save his faith in himself when she kissed him and then pushed him from her own grasp. Did he know that, she wondered?

But there was no point in asking questions only one person could answer, not when that person had disappeared. (Without you.)

She turned from the windows that offered no view aside from the smoking city falling from the sky, and stared instead at the solid, steel floor beneath her feet. Maybe there was some comfort to be found in the thought that Bruce had finally accomplished what he had always wanted. He'd escaped the surveillance of anyone and everyone. He had always found solace in invisibility; maybe he felt peace now. (Even if the possibilities for the other things he had felt, that she had felt, had disappeared with him).

Peace and invisibility. Maybe they were related conditions, she told herself, even though she knew from long experience that it wasn't true. Her eyes searched the sky until the light was gone and Nick Fury's voice ordered her to the Medbay. She remembered abruptly that she wasn't invisible, despite the hollow feeling that had opened up in her chest. Of course, feelings and realities never had much to do with each other. She left the bridge and its dark windows reluctantly, even though there was no reason to continue staring through them.

Bruce had finally made himself invisible, even to her.

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