It was morning when the unmistakable crunch of tires meeting dirt and gravel startled Bruce from his light sleep. A white van stood, rumbling menacingly. It reminded Bruce of the monsters in the fairy tales his mom read to him when he was younger. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wished it would eat him. Panic surged through his body as the object of his nightmares stepped out of the driver's side of the van; more than anything else, his dad reminded him of the monsters in he fairy tales his mom read to him, too. Quickly following Dr. Banner were a team of terrified looking nurses with altogether more restraints than was needed. Dr. Banner held up a hand to stop the nurses and looked hard at Bruce, silently asking, "are we gonna have to do this the hard way or the easy way?" Bruce felt a twinge of pride in the fact that his father was afraid of him- he should be afraid of him, the monsters should always be afraid of the protagonist.

Bruce lifted his hands in surrender and sat on the ground, knees folded under him. Dr. Banner nodded wordlessly, and motioned for one of the nurses to handcuff his son and lead him into the van.

"I'm glad you finally decided to see reason, son," Dr. Banner said robotically as soon as he was in the safety of the van. "America thanks you for your contribution to science."

It took all of Bruce's restraint not to roll his eyes and say exactly what he thought of his father's brand of "science".

...

"Robert," a gruff voice roughly slurred out. "Robert, come here, I wanna t-talk to ya."

Robert Bruce Banner timidly stepped out of the small room he and his parents shared in the hospital and into the common area. It was too big, too white, too sterile, and not enough like home. Bruce wished he could be as swallowed alive in the expanse of white and grey tile, peeling, musty white paint, and hospital smell as he felt. Large, rough hands snaked their way around his shoulder in rough amiability, and the smell of drinking alcohol permeated the air in front of him. He felt barricaded on all sides.

Dad was drunk. Again.

"Robert, yer—yer a chip off the ol' block, you know that?"

Eyes straight ahead.

"I said, you know that?"

Answer him.

"Yes sir."

"Annn' tomorrow, we're gonna put you in school here. A special school- you'll be a teacher and a student! Imagine that—kin you imagine being a teacher at 5?"

"No sir."

"Iss a great opport'nity for ya."

He was shoved away from the taller man, stumbling a bit before racing into the room, and solidly shutting the door. Bruce wasn't stupid; he knew that he wasn't going to school. He was going to become a patient at the notoriously unethical Ypsilanti State Hospital. Ypsilanti was one of many government funded research psychology centers, where the CIA ran harrowing experiments on unsuspecting patients. Electric shock, prefrontal lobotomies, sensory deprivation, experimental medicines, and countless other techniques were used on mental patients in a search to find the perfect combination to unlock the secrets of the brain and its ability to be programmed. Bruce knew because his father was one of the lead psychiatrists who came up with experiments to try. At five, Bruce already comprehended medical journals and solved equations that could make even Einstein shake in his boots.

The first gift he remembers getting is a kid's chemistry set and refrigerator magnets. He and his mother would sit in the kitchen while the staff was off duty and solve basic algebraic expressions when he was only three. Instead of being proud of him, Bruce's father was a dangerous combination of terrified of him and scientifically intrigued by him. He no longer saw his only son as a child, but as an oddity- a freak of nature that had to be studied. And here was his chance to test his theories of mind programming not on the already broken, average intelligence mind, but on a perfectly balanced and brilliant mind. His current hypothesis was that with the right combination of traumatic events, subconscious suggestions, and electroshock therapy, you could cause the mind of a person without prior psychosis to splinter into several programmable alternate personalities.

Bruce had received his fair share of trauma. For as long as he could remember, he was being kicked around by a drunken shell of his father, and forced to listen to countless arguments between he and his mother about how he had been a mistake, an unplanned variable in the equation of their lives. While blessed with spectacular intellect, Bruce couldn't count the number of times he wished he didn't understand what was happening. Instead, he found refuge in books, his overactive imagination taking him to places he had only dreamed about. He retreated further and further into himself that it seemed he was the hospital's ghost. Nurses and doctors barely noticed him shuffling through the hallways of the residence hall, blending in as one of the many "unexplainable" and "tragic" shadows that cropped up in the hospital.

He knew what was coming next, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. So, he did what any five-year-old would do: curl up against his mommy and cried, a tiny mess of brown hair and glasses.

…

The ride to the hospital was long and the atmosphere was as stifling and oppressive as the humidity outside. The quiet terror and anger that had permanently set up residence in Bruce's psyche had taken over the apartment complex of his mind and were throwing a party, to which Bruce was not invited.

"He's the one who killed her. He's the one who made you like this. Let me kill him."

"Why won't you let me out? You hate him, so let me handle it. Pretty please?"

Bruce banged on the mental ceiling, and, for once, the party-goers quieted down. He had a plan, and he was in control, and it had to remain that way. He was doing this for Tony. Tony had given up so much for him, so it was Bruce's turn to stop being useless and save his best friend for once. (Of course, if Tony were there, Bruce thought dryly, he'd probably vehemently object to this plan. He'd say it was too risky, and he'd say that Bruce was not useless. Tony always said things like that. Bruce never believed him.)

Bruce had deduced that his father and Tony's father were working together on something. He knew that Tony's father had funded Dr. Banner's research on mind control, and had expressed support for the use of one special 5 year old patient to undergo the process. He knew that running away from the hospital put a strain on the business relationship between the two, and according to Natasha, Mr. Stark was currently- probably unbeknownst to Dr. Banner- planning on destroying whatever arrangement they were working on once he got his side of the bargain. That was obviously Tony, who he could assume was already in his father's custody. Extrapolating from the entrepreneurial and ambitious nature of Mr. Stark (at least, from what Tony had told Bruce about him), it could be assumed that once Mr. Stark had Tony, he was going to try to capture the entire group to impress his employers.

From the earlier phone conversation with his father, Bruce gathered that he was mostly unimportant to Mr. Stark, as the scientific field had given up on mind control. However, he was his father's golden ticket to getting in good graces with his funders, and Dr. Banner was planning on using Bruce to capture the rest of the band of runaways so that he could have more subjects to test on. The two things the two had in common were betrayal and a desire to capture Steve, Thor, Loki, and Natasha. Bruce had a plan to use those two desires as a weakness that would ultimately end up with the group reunited, and Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner left in the dust, jaws agape.

Of course, Bruce held no illusions about himself. He would end up a test subject indefinitely, or in prison, or dead. He was not the focus of the plan- it was to get Tony back to the rest of his true family, and to get them on the road safely and as far away from danger as possible. Even if the group didn't want him, he still cared about them, and most of all, he cared about Tony. He cared about him enough to face his dad again and to use himself as collateral damage. In fact, the thought comforted Bruce. He often thought about ending his life, and at least this way, it'd be for a reason. He could die with a clear conscience- or at least when he was being tested on, for as long as he had his own memories and his own thoughts, he would think of Tony and the others being free and happy, and that would give him strength. He was unimportant to this story. In the universe's story, he was, ultimately and fundamentally, unimportant.

Bruce smiled.

…

"How is the patient reacting to electroshock therapy, sleep treatment, and constant suggestions?"

There was something familiar about that voice. Bruce stirred.

"He keeps asking about why he's here; where his mom is; how long he's been here. He still remembers, Dr. Banner."

"Impossible. Almost all of our patients have broken already. I wonder if his brain capacity has anything to do with his increased brain activity. We need to move him to 'the room'."

"Doctor, he's still a minor, sensory deprivation could do permanent damage."

"Do I look like I give a damn? The CIA funds us to find answers, not to define morals, Betty."

"What is it that we're supposed to be finding answers for? He's your son. Is whatever the hell their paying you for really worth it?"

"That is for me to know, and you to not find out. But what I can tell you is that we're here to help mankind, and sometimes, you've got to think outside of the box."

Bruce mumbled something about his mother coming to get him and tried to open his eyes, but the drugs were too powerful. He began squirming, and the mumbling became more insistent. The unrelenting, sickly sweet smell of mint-poorly-masking-alcohol overwhelmed him, and all he wanted to do was to get up and run.

"He's been awake for his five minutes, put him back under, and the next time we wake him, he had better be in 'the room'. Do you understand me, Ms. Ross?"

"Yes, Doctor."

Bruce felt himself being dragged, kicking and screaming back to the cocoon of misty uncertainty; his soul in a type of limbo that only comes from being in a deep, dreamless sleep.

…

Dr. Banner felt like today was going relatively wonderfully. Stark had adhered to the plan that he had laid out for him, and gotten his son back. The little brat hadn't talked yet, but with the CIA's interrogation prowess at Stark's disposal, it shouldn't be long before they were out searching for the pain-in-the-ass delinquents and Banner would make sure everyone knew it was his efforts that apprehended them. If Tony wasn't assurance enough, all he had to do was administer the right cocktail to Robert, maybe use a few electrical zaps and a trigger word, and the kid would spill all of his secrets like a gutted fish spills its innards. He hadn't bargained on the team abandoning Robert, but he guessed that with Stark's son gone, there was no one to vouch for him.

Dr. Banner flicked his eyes up to the rear-view mirror and focused on his...son? He never felt much fatherly instinct towards the little freak. Robert was conceived after Dr. Banner had injected himself with a formula he was testing that left him in an altered state- the results were like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. He was certain that the formula had warped his blood stream, warped his DNA, and left him as a monster. After sleeping with his wife, the effects of the drug wore off, but Dr. Banner knew that whatever was in him had to have passed to the baby that was conceived. Robert could fool everyone else with his manners and niceties, but Dr. Banner could see. His eyes were too smart, and they hid an evil that had to be contained. Rebecca didn't understand that her little "Bruce" was actually a monster who was just waiting for him to let his guard down to strike them both. It was all his fault, but it was now his responsibility to protect his family from the monster posing as a child. That's why these mind control tests were the perfect solution to an unending problem. This child was still a monster, but at least, Dr. Banner thought, the reigns were in his own hands now.

Robert was vacantly staring out the window with a smile on his face while muttering to himself. He was so unassuming, so small and mousy.

You could send him into enemy territory and then let him loose and no one would believe the damage he was causing while they were watching him with his own eyes.

Did Dr. Banner regret using his son for the experiments? Not one bit. He'd do it again- in fact, he would be after a day drive and an airplane flight. To be perfectly honest, the doctor was chomping at the bit to see the long-term effects of the programming on Bruce's mind, to test which words could still elicit a change in him, to finally have the evidence that the research he did was worth the money spent, and worth spending more money on. That damned hospital decided to grow a conscience and wouldn't allow him to experiment on anyone under the age of 18, so of course the results were going to be spotty. The mind loses its malleability as it ages, so when you take a child it obviously would have better results. Those short-sighted idiots in the Board of Governors and the CIA's scientific research head- the annoying, smug prick of a man, Stark- all stopped believing before the experiment was over, but he'd show them. He was a visionary and they were stuck in the past. Dr. Banner couldn't wait to prove them all wrong.

...

"Well, Dr. Banner, I have to hand it to you... you know your stuff. The CIA is going to have a field day with this," Howard Stark crossed his arms across his chest and took in the sight that lay before him.

"You did it... You crazy son of a bitch did it. Look at that. It took some years, but here they are. Perfectly programmed soldiers," grumbled Thaddus Ross, the man who oversaw the physical training of the recruits.

"And the best part is that their trigger is subliminal- not a word, or a picture, or something that can accidentally be triggered. No, they have to be in the situation—one where their fight or flight responses are triggered more stronger than normal. Of course, there are a few kinks to work out, we need to shorten the training time, for example, but—" Dr. Banner shrugged in pseudo-humility.

Years of torture techniques combined with experimental psychology and military training had produced breathtaking results, and he was to thank for it. Even his sniveling, too-smart-for-his-own-damn-good son turned out to be worth something. It had taken some extra work, but he proved to be the most successful, the most volatile.

A dozen of tiny, blank faces stared forward, bodies erect, at attention. A dozen minds molded into the perfect assassin, and if they failed their mission or got caught, their alter would self-destruct, leaving no prisoner to be questioned. But now came the hard part: reintegrating them back into society; having a basic knowledge of how to carry yourself so no one paid any extra attention to you. Taking Bruce home to mommy would prove to be Dr. Banner's most difficult challenge.

"Bruce, honey, you barely touched your food."

"I'm just not hungry, mother."

"Brian, talk to your son..."

"That was an order, Robert Bruce Banner," Dr. Banner whispered with venom in his voice, testing out a trigger to a separate alter altogether, that only he knew. Bruce's pupils dilated and he felt the now familiar feeling of his soul falling into blackness, only to be replaced by a serial killer's. Kicking the dinner table, grabbing the knife as it began its descent to the floor, and coolly and precisely karate chopping his father in the chest, Bruce was as deadly as a cobra. Dr. Banner looked up nervously as his son towered over him, knife glistening with dark beauty in his hand. If eyes are supposed to be windows to the soul, Bruce had nothing in him but pure hatred. He had cultivated a killer, and now he was going to pay for it.

"The bird goes back to the cage!" the man called out frantically, causing Bruce to fall to the ground, seemingly unconscious. Simultaneously, a searing, lightning sharp pain shot through his arm, followed by a rush of heat.

"The little bitch stabbed me! Stabbed his own father!"

Instead of being met with sympathy, he was met with a verbal assault from an irate Rebecca. Finally, she ran at him, raining her fists down as hard as she could, but barely serving any purpose aside from further angering her husband.

"What the hell did you do to him, Brian!? ANSWER ME! Why is my little boy fighting? He hurt another patient yesterday, he's depressed every time he comes to visit... What did you do? Tell me, or God so help me, I will find out, and I will go public about everything that's been happening here! I'm tired of it!"

She collapsed, sobbing into Brian's unwounded shoulder. He shushed her, and began to rock her gently from side to side. Snaking the hand of his good arm around Rebecca's head, he wove his fingers through her honeycomb hair, pushing her face into his shoulder.

"Honey, what are yo-"

And with a gentle twist and yank, Brian Banner removed the knife from Rebecca's carotid artery and placed it in Bruce's small, lifeless hand. Now all he had to do was play the waiting game.

Air too thick. Brain hurts. Can't think straight.

Bruce pushed himself off of the floor and, for once in his life, wished that he could see white again. The floor was a sea of red, and a knife clattered to the floor as he sat up. His father was staring at him, mouth agape, tears pouring with a mass of honeycomb colored hair and purple and green floral print pressed tightly into his side. Bruce opened his mouth, but no words could form. His father nodded grimly, reaffirming every fear, every nightmare Bruce had ever had.

"The police are on their way."

And so, at the young age of 9, Bruce ran and never looked back.