Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

“Because I love you,” said Betty.

The truth was he was surprised to hear that. With all that had happened, he hadn’t even thought that a possibility anymore. He couldn’t help but wonder how much of what she was feeling was genuine, and how much of it was wishful thinking, that she was trying to make herself believe she was in love with him because, considering the circumstances, the notion that it had developed naturally just seemed absurd.

“How is that possible?” he finally asked, giving voice to the doubts he harbored. “You—neither of us—we don’t even know who I am.” There was a pause and he turned away, kicking through the rubble. He was beginning to think he had no clue what love was anymore, or what the purpose of it was—and certainly he didn’t know whether he was worthy of it or not. He didn’t even feel like a man. More like a half-man, his psyche splintered into so many pieces that just having someone look at him made him feel unclean.

She went to the broken window and stared out at the desert.

“We’d better go back,” Bruce said finally.

“Yeah,” was all she said in reply.

Their journey back was remarkably silent. On the trip out, Bruce had studied the ways in which the army kept the facility hidden, finding them to be a fascinating distraction. Coming back, however, he couldn’t dwell on anything but the empty feeling he had inside. She loved him. He wanted that to mean something. He wanted to love her. He thought he did, but he’d always thought that in the past and it hadn’t been enough. Was it enough now, particularly considering what it was he had to overcome?

An armed escort led Banner and Betty down the hall. At the door to his containment cell, they paused. Betty turned to Banner. “I’ll see you,” was all she said. Hardly a deathless protestation of impassioned love. What the hell do you want from her, part of him scolded. He had no answer. He was starting to wonder if there was a damned thing in the world he did know. She gave him a little wave as she left, like a chum from school dropping him off at his house at the end of a busy day learning readin’ and writin’ and ’rithmetic.

The door to the containment unit slid shut behind him. Just before it closed completely, he turned and watched Betty vanish from sight on the opposite side of the door. She wasn’t looking over her shoulder at him. That was smart. Never look behind you. It was pointless to dwell on what was past, and it left you less prepared for whatever might be heading your way.

Betty walked briskly down a corridor toward the central control room, convinced that Bruce thought she didn’t love him despite her protests to the contrary. And she was reasonably sure he didn’t love her. That alone was enough to make her heart sink to somewhere in her gut, but that wasn’t the biggest problem.

Her biggest problem was that her attempts to get through to Bruce, to help him reconnect with the world, had so far failed miserably.

She was certain that the main reason Bruce changed into the Hulk was his feelings of isolation. Everything—from the kids who had made fun of him as a child, to Talbot and his frankly abominable actions of a couple of days ago—served to feed into the Hulk’s perception that the world was a battleground and he was but a piece moving through it, a piece that was hated and despised by everyone else.

Betty placed her thumb on a biometric reader at the door to Command and Control, also known as C and C. The door remained locked. She tried it again, and still it didn’t respond. She blew air impatiently between her lips, rubbed her thumb against her blouse to try to remove whatever random dirt or oil was causing the picky lock to malfunction, then tried yet again.

Then she looked more closely and saw that there was a red light on the lock. It wasn’t just failing to identify her. It was outright rejecting her thumbprint.

“What the hell?” she murmured, then she heard loud voices from within. The door slid open to reveal her father. She looked at him with a question on her face, and received the answer in the very next second.

Glen Talbot was standing just inside C and C. He looked a bit weary, wearing a dark blue suit and a crisp white shirt with the tie loosened; he had the sort of haggard expression one usually has after having undergone a sustained argument with Thunderbolt Ross. He looked as if he had been roughed up, as well. But he also had, most dangerously, a smug look on his face.

“Hey, Betty,” said Talbot, “I would love to chat, but I’m pressed for time. I’ll let your dad deliver the news.”

She turned and again looked questioningly at Ross. With a quick shake of his head, he said, “Not here,” took her by the shoulder, and guided her down the hallway. With every step they took, a sense of dread rose higher and higher within her.

The last time she could recall Thunderbolt Ross looking this upset was when she was a kid and insisted he take her ice skating. Her father had fallen on the ice so many times that he had point-blank told her if she ever spoke of it to someone else, he would disown her. She’d asked him about it years later, and he’d sworn that he absolutely meant it . . . and that it still held.

When he told her of what had just happened, however, that incident paled in comparison. He dropped into the chair behind his desk and came right to the point. “Your access has been revoked. NSA has decided to hand over study of the . . . the threat . . . to Atheon, and they have explicitly limited my jurisdiction,”