His hand stays wrapped around hers, squeezing it back. It takes a moment to process what she says, but the word 'safe' hits him right in the gut and he nods listlessly. She's right, the tranquilizers are relentless, clouding and dulling all of his senses until he's asleep again. Bruce has no idea how much time passes, it could be twenty minutes, it could be four hours. He doesn't dream, at least that he can remember, and he wonders if they had explored every possibility, elimninated any window that Hulk might try to grab and make an appearance.
The second time he wakes up is, well, different. He feels like he's been pulled from an aquarium, the fuzziness, the feeling of floating, the dullness and the haze, its all gone and a thousand different sensations assault him, the pull of bandages against torn skin, the pinprick ache of fresh bruises- real, normal, human pain, enough of it to elicit a faint groan from him as he stirs, now covered up to the shoulders with a blanket. His lungs are resentful of his near-drowning, and he sits up for a moment, coughing, finally opening his eyes to look down at himself, a patchwork quilt of bandages and blooming purple-blue skin. It's a reasonable price to pay, he guesses, for avoiding capture. Although, after a moment, he honestly assumes he didn't "avoid" anything. He was rescued.
It doesn't take him long to immediately resume his prone position, shifting the blanket aside, and rolling over to the cooler side of the mattress. He takes a moment, staring into space, listening to (and trying to quiet) Hulk's indignity over being sedated, which he saw as being tricked. He's so tired, emotionally speaking, and the fact that Hulk made him, even in this mild-mannered, easily-bruised human state, a physiological nightmare is hard enough to deal with even without the threat of imprisonment. Confused, overactive metabolism, constantly fighting to keep both a 5'7'' scientist and an eight-foot green leviathan on their feet could be helpful, but not today, and he can tell by how hot the room is (or isn't) that he's running a pointless fever that won't actually fix anything and will flame out when it wants to. Naturally. Bruce found his body liked to hit the panic button on occasions such as this, when it perceived "trauma" despite the fact that it wouldn't actually kill him. For a second, he contemplates going back to bed.
A pre-Avengers Bruce would have leapt out of the bed and crawled right back out onto the street, in search of a boat or a plane that would take him to a new hideout, come hell or high water, but now he just can't, despite a newly-remembered sense of panic, not the vague idea of being chased, but actually coming face to face with someone who could harm him. The presence of someone else in the bed helps him to still a bit, though, and he realizes that Natasha's still here, hasn't left his side, and that this isn't his room, but hers. From trace memories, it's not hard to piece together what she had to do to get there, and he checks her over, looking for injuries, and he finds some, traces of blood (maybe not her own) and bruises starting to peak through like watercolor paint on canvas. He's lost a bit of his filter in the moment, looking up at her with warm but tired eyes, indescribable gratitude and fondness etched onto his face. Pain clouds his expression after a moment. "We need-" the tongue is apparently the last sense that wants to catch up and he stops for a moment, blinking back his exhaustion before pushing forward. "We need to get out of here." he says, swallowing hard.
2087
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