"You?" Bruce Banner asked quietly.

Bao-Dur gave a shallow nod. "Me," he said in an empty voice. The word was like a curse in his mouth. "It was me, Bruce. I built the Mass Shadow Generator on Revan's orders and detonated it when the General gave the command. I destroyed hundreds of ships and killed thousands of men and women... our men and women." He slowly let his gaze fall to the tabletop as he spoke, unable to look his friend in the face any longer. "I didn't lose control like you, either," he added. "It was my choice. I could have stopped it at any time, but I – I didn't. I killed those people. I did it. Me."

He could feel Banner's gaze on him, but he didn't dare meet it. He had never blamed Banner for his 'incidents' and he still did not, but it was one thing to succumb to the constant pressure of gamma radiation, and another to make the conscious decision to build a superweapon that would then kill ten of thousands of people. Self-loathing rose in his throat like bile. He wanted to walk out before Banner did so in disgust, but he couldn't bring himself to move.

The silence stretched until it became uncomfortable. Bao-Dur's remote, hovering in the air above his right shoulder, finally broke it with a gentle beeping. The sound startled both men from their respective reveries, and they each looked up from the table at the same time to meet each other's eyes.

"You won us the war," Bruce Banner said.

Bao-Dur shook his head slowly. It would take more than that to allow him to sleep easily at night, to suppress the memories of an uncountable number of lives coming to an abrupt close in the space of a few seconds. "I killed our own men, Bruce," he argued. "Would they thank me if they could? Or would they damn me with their sudden last breaths?"

"We were at war, Bao-Dur," Banner replied. "Everyone at Malachor V was willing to do what they had to do in order for us to win."

"Even die?" Bao-Dur demanded. "Even be killed by one of their own men?"

Banner shrugged. "They would have laid down their lives in battle against the Mandalorians. How is this any different?"

The Zabrak smiled bitterly. "You'd have to ask them."

Banner looked at Bao-Dur with an expression that would have been familiar to him if he could have seen it. It was the one that Bao-Dur had worn so often when the Zabrak was trying to convince Bruce that his 'incidents' weren't his fault and that nobody blamed him for them. Banner had never believed any of it, and now it seemed the roles had reversed.

"Do you want a drink?" Bao-Dur asked suddenly. "I could use a drink."

Bruce gave a thin smile and gestured to one of the waitresses. It was a measure of the seriousness of the situation that he ordered for both of them; he rarely drank, fearing to surrender even the slightest amount of control. Bao-Dur, on the other hand, was ready to drown the entirety of the day in a tankard of juma juice. First he'd heard of the destruction of his home colony; then a friend he'd presumed dead by his own hand had returned, and with him a whole host of unwelcome memories. Neither of the men spoke until the waitress returned with their drinks, and even then their glasses were half-empty before Banner broke the silence again.

"Bao-Dur," he said quietly, "we were losing that fight. You can say what you want, but without the Mass Shadow Generator, we would have lost. None of the ground troops there that day wanted to see that happen, and you prevented it. Without you, we could never have won."

"Without me," Bao-Dur answered easily, "thousands of those troops would never have died."

"No," Bruce said emphatically. "Because they were dying, even before you pulled that trigger. The Mandalorians were overpowering most of our men on the surface and in the fleets. And the – the dark energy, or whatever it was that surrounds that planet... it was sapping our strength and our morale, even corrupting some of the Jedi. We could not have won without that weapon, Bao-Dur. It decimated the Mandalorians."

The Zabrak raised his eyes from his glass to look at Bruce. "As did you."

Instantly, Banner's wide eyes and earnest expression vanished, replaced with the guarded look he wore whenever the subject of the Other Guy was raised. "That was different," he said instantly. "That –"

"Was it?" Bao-Dur asked. "Or did you hulk out because you would have been overpowered otherwise, in order to save yourself and the men around you?"

"I killed the men around me," Bruce hissed, his voice cracking with the effort of not shouting. "When I was done tearing apart the Mandalorians that menaced us, I turned on our own men. I had no control, Bao-Dur."

"Then you had no choice."

"Of course I had a choice. There's always a choice. I just wasn't strong enough or smart enough to overcome him. He – we – killed dozens of our own. My allies. The people I had worked with, fought beside, for months and years."

"Then you know exactly how I feel."

Banner opened his mouth to shout, but couldn't find the words. Eventually he said quietly, "That's different. You did what you had to do."

"As did you," Bao-Dur said simply. "You were being overwhelmed by the enemy, so you defeated them in the only way possible. If you cannot blame me for killing ten thousand times more of our men than you did, then you cannot blame yourself."

The two men looked at each other for a long moment. They drained their glasses to fill in the silence with something to do. They thanked the waitress when she came and refilled them and then they drank again. This time even the remote was quiet. Long minutes passed in which Bruce and Bao-Dur did nothing more than drink and attempt to sort through years of self-hatred and guilt.

"Maybe you're right," Bruce Banner said at last.

Bao-Dur looked at him over the top of his glass. "Maybe I'm wrong," he said evenly. "But if I'm not, and you're right too, then we need to stop doing this, Bruce." He gestured towards their drinks and the bar in which they were. "Sitting in bars, drinking until we can't remember anything anymore... We've got to do something more with ourselves, something useful. We need to find a way to... to help somehow."

"To make up for what happened at Malachor V," Bruce said.

The Zabrak nodded. "Exactly."

Banner stared into his glass. "Somewhere quiet, please," he murmured. "It's been harder to... keep control, since Malachor. It was an evil place. I think it... made the Other Guy stronger somehow."

Bao-Dur finished up his drink and put it aside. "Well," he said, "I've only got one arm, so I guess we both have a way to go until we're fighting fit again."

There was a tiny smile on Bruce's face. "Guess that's one way of putting it." He hesitated customarily before looking up from his drink. "But we'll... we'll get through it, won't we?"

Bao-Dur extended the hand that hadn't been lost at Malachor V. "Yes," he said earnestly. "We will."