“MISSION OF MERCY”
Harvard University
Professor Bruce Banner
Living the Dream
Bruce Banner smiled to himself, adjusting his glasses.
He’d finally rid himself of the Hulk. Of ALL the Hulks, in fact:
The Savage Green Hulk - a childish, unthinking brute of unrelenting physical power. An engine of mindless destruction that got stronger and stronger with rage.
The Cunning Grey Hulk - a sneaky, manipulative, cunning adversary whose strength paled in comparison to the Jade Giant, yet whose devious motives were always suspect.
The Idealized Professor - a Hulk with the mind of Bruce Banner, the physical power of the Green Hulk and the devious, cunning tactics of the Grey Hulk. The most idealized version of the Hulk in Bruce’s eyes.
The Guilt Hulk - A lizard-like creature that represented all Bruce’s hidden, repressed guilt and shame concerning Bruce’s....tortured past.
The Devil Hulk - A chained monster at the back of his mind. Enraged at the world at large, dedicated to destroying it at all costs.
His colleague - Doctor Leonard Samson - had been instrumental in assessing and identifying all the myriad personalities that Dr. Bruce Banner had suffered from. Another colleague - Doctor Angela Lipscombe - and her neuropsychiatry machines had helped flake off and integrate the errant shards of Doctor Bruce Banner into one functional, thinking human being.
Together, the three of them had finally destroyed the one creature Banner had begun to think was totally indestructible.
The Incredible Hulk.
Now, thanks to their combined efforts, Bruce was finally free of the hulking albatross that had plagued the scientist ever since he’d saved Rick Jones on that fateful day in the Arizona desert. The day of detonation for Bruce Banner’s Gamma Bomb.
In fact, the trio had been able to use their studies of the Hulk’s fractured psyche and Lipscombe’s knowledge of neuropsychiatry to not only develop cures for two devastating diseases:
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS - or more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease - which Banner had come to seek Angela’s help for) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (which Banner had needed Samson’s help for). The trio had ultimately used a unique combination of neuro-psychiatric and psychotropic drugs in concert with siphoned gamma-radiation treatments (which was of course, Banner’s specialty). After years of research, they’d finally cracked the puzzle that could help so many afflicted with such diseases. Moreover, he’d hoped to use a variation of the compound to treat those afflicted with massive gamma radiation poisoning (the citizens of Freehold, for instance), but Bruce decided not to get too far ahead of himself.
Bruce smiled in his Harvard office as he continued to proofread their sixty-seven page paper that served as a definitive cure to both ALS and DID. He waved to a few of his students as they passed by his office window, satisfied that he’d finally shed his life of the Hulk and earned the respect of his peers and students.
“It wasn’t all for nothing,” Doctor Robert Bruce Banner said, smoothing out his tie as he waved. Despite all the tragedies he’d lived through as the Hulk, it seemed that the existence of that...abomination to science had finally, finally, done some good in the world.
Bruce Banner could live with that.
There was only one thing missing.
His office door creaked open, and his jaw dropped as a familiar woman came in. Curly brunette locks bouncing above a perfect face, containing a smile he’d memorized long ago. The scientist who’d helped cure two ravaging diseases and left a world of hulking, brutish madness behind him smiled up at the love of his life, somehow finally returned to him. With dry, parched lips, he finally spoke the name of the woman he thought he’d lost forever to that world he’d left behind.
“Betty.”
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Vegas Penthouse Suite
Marlo Chandler Gets Her Man
Living the Life
The beautiful redhead shook and moaned huskily above him. The entwined lovers trembled and sighed betwixt the climax of their night’s work. Sweaty and exhausted, their sighs echoed across the lavish expanse of the Vegas penthouse suite.
“My God, Fixit!” Marlo Chandler breathed out, placing a final, passionate kiss upon her lover’s grey cheek before collapsing right next to him among tossed, disheveled silken sheets. “That was incredible.”
“You know, you ain’t too bad yourself, toots,” the Grey Hulk laughed - a gutteral, cruel laugh, as his grey lips curled into a shark’s grin. “Glad you finally came to your senses. Chucked that half-wit you were shackled up with for a real man.”
The redhead glowered at him, pointing her finger in deadly earnest. “The name’s Marlo, not toots. And Rick was...fun. He was a good, good man. But...”
The grey shark’s grin returned. “But he wasn’t enough.”
Fixit watched Marlo bite her lip and glanced downward. The grey creature caressed the lovely woman’s naked back and lifted a thick finger beneath her chin. A finger that was practically the breadth of her entire chin. He brought her eyes up to meet his.
“You can admit it to me, baby. You know the truth deep inside that lovely...” he glanced at her supple, bare bosom and licked his lips menacingly. He ran a thick grey finger along her glistening body gleefully, “...heart of yours.”
Marlo’s eyes met the cruel, conniving gaze of her lover. “Fixit. Joe. I just---“
He watched her gaze turn away from him suddenly. She looked upon the lavish, decorative expanse of their room: massive flat screen theater, expensive silken sheets upon a luxurious bedroom, a wine bar stocked with the finest liquors in Las Vegas.
She gazed upon her fur coats, his pinstriped suits, and all of the pictures of them together. He knew in her mind that she was comparing her new life now with her old life. The one with her and Rick, without all the lavish things Fixit was able to give her. And the sex... I mean, who could compare to what the monstrous Joe Fixit could provide? Fixit smiled to himself as he watched the redheaded beauty take it all in.
Sure, there were a few leg breakings Fixit had to dish out to make all of this possible. In the end, of course, wasn’t it all worth it?
“Yes,” she murmured quietly.
The Grey Hulk licked his lips.
“What was that, toots?” he asked, grinning. “I couldn’t heeeear yooou....”
“Yes, damn you!” the redheaded shrieked, smacking her fists against the Grey Hulk’s colossal chest in a sudden show of long-bottled frustration. The Hulk clenched his teeth in a smile, watching her puny hands bounce off his well-muscled chest. “Rick wasn’t enough! He wasn’t ever enough!”
Fixit sneered - his cruel laugh echoing across the entire penthouse suite. The Grey Hulk plucked the skinny Marlo off of the bed and placed her on top of his reclining form. Cradling her body in his, he kissed her - a passionless kiss, like the dragging of hard granite against bare skin. He smiled when she returned the kiss, feeling the fire of the love he knew she had for him.
“I love you, Fixit,” she said. “You, not him. I always have.”
“I know, Marlo.” He smiled. “I always knew you did.”
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Arizona Desert
The Savage Beast and the Wreckage of a Life
Living the Nightmare
The roar echoed for miles.
All around the green monster lay mounds of smoking wreckage and shattered detritus. The bodies of army soldiers, barely clinging to life. Broken bomb casings, artillery shells, twisted mounds of metal that were once Gatling guns. Tanks shredded like paper, torn asunder across miles of desert landscape. They’d even dropped a nuke on him, for all the good it did them.
That didn’t matter now. None of it did.
The green monster at the center had finally, finally proven it to them.
“HULK IS THE STRONGEST ONE THERE IS!” the great beast screamed, deafening words cascading across the smoke and the rubble in the ruined desert sands.
Shrieking - small and terrified before him - was a tiny, little speck of a man. One last obstacle to shred and discard. The puniest one of all.
“Hulk, please! For the love of God, please stop this! You don’t have to do this!”
The monstrous beast glared down at the useless human, his monstrous form casting an ominous shadow over the terrified scientist. The beast’s body blocked out the shimmering rays of the setting sun, turned green by gamma-radiated fallout clouds.
“Puny Banner,” the Savage Hulk smiled.
“Yes!” the small thing cried. “Puny Banner! You know me.”
“Know you...” the creature growled, shuffling ever closer. His thick green feet sank into the desert dirt with each step. “Trying to stop Hulk for years. Trying to KILL Hulk. Think you’re better than Hulk. Stronger than Hulk. Hulk will show you...”
“You and I are one and the same, Hulk!”
The scientist inched away from the advancing threat. With each puny step the scientist took backwards, the Savage Hulk took one massive step forward. There was no escape.
“If you kill me, we will both die! Don’t you understand that?” the scientist stared at the massive creature in front of him. He held his hands out in a gesture of peace - of weakness. “Don’t you understand?”
“Hulk understands,” the creature growled, scooping up the tiny human in his palm, as if he were nothing. He held the small thing above his head in an iron grip. “Does Puny Banner understand?”
“What--?” Bruce Banner asked, feeling the savage beast’s hands coil around him.
“Puny Banner calls Hulk a savage,” the angry monster growled, his green fingers tightening.
“Hulk, please...”
“Puny Banner doesn’t understand savage,” the Savage Hulk grunted, his left fist coiling around Banner’s chest as his right fist coiled around his legs. Bruce felt a horrible pressure inside his chest as his waist began to twist all on its own.
“Someone, for God’s sakes! Anyone, help--!”
PLUCK.
The Savage Hulk separated his tightened fists with little effort, ripping Bruce Banner’s entire body apart at the waist. The scientist’s life’s blood poured upon the jade beast in a messy, putrid gush as everything that was once Bruce Banner fell upon the Hulk’s well-toned body. Snorting, the Hulk tossed aside the last bit of detritus into the desert sands and wiped away the entrails from his body. Leaving nothing, save the blood.
“Banner understands savage now.”
The beast looked upon his hands, covered in wetness.
“Huh. Hulk Red now. Not Savage,” the beast muttered with a sudden smile. “Red Hulk.”
The reddened Hulk leapt away, finally able to leave all the weak parts of his life behind.
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Avengers Mansion
The Bedroom of Doctor Robert Bruce Banner
Reality At Last...
The glittering woman with the golden skin arose, gently gliding a hand along her lover’s neck.
“Betty?” the scientist murmured, half-asleep.
“Yes,” she spoke. “I can be that for you.”
The golden woman touched his chin and guided his mouth to hers. She kissed him passionately, watching Bruce’s eyes flutter with happy, wistful dreams just as his eyes had done since the moment of her arrival.
“Oh, Bruce. My lovely, wonderful, dreaming Bruce.”
The golden woman collected her purple garments, slinking them back across her supple form with the grace of a beautiful angel. Her crimson lips smiled, watching the dreaming Bruce Banner sigh peacefully in the tangled mess of the bedroom. She looked around the rest of his room - cluttered with scientific notes and diagrams of all the mysterious and magical things he was working on for the Avengers.
The tall woman slinked over to his worktable - making nary a sound - and glanced upon his notes. Diagrams for new armors. Improvements to the Avengers Mansion safeguards. Gamma radiation studies. Even ideas for various disease cures jotted away among his many notebooks. Cures for ALS, DID, and gamma radiation poisoning were among the top entries, however incomplete the research might have been. He’d had to restart the notebooks from scratch each time a new chapter in his complicated life began.
“The irony is that being an Avenger was the Professor’s fondest dream,” the golden woman spoke, idly fingering the research that could have helped save so many lives. “Pity he’s bottled up inside that wonderful mind to take advantage of this life. Betty’s death hit him the hardest, after all.”
She gazed back at the sleeping scientist.
“You think staying in the Avengers Mansion keeps the world safe from the beautiful creatures inside of you,” the glittering woman idly mused, glancing up at the hidden security cameras she’d long ago shielded herself from. “You think they will all stay hidden away forever?”
The lithe woman in the flowing purple garments slinked toward her dreaming Bruce, gliding a gentle hand across his bare chest. “I wish I could tell you I’d been here. I wish I could tell you all the wonderful and terrible things that are coming for you, my love. Though, I hardly think you’d believe me, considering our sordid history together. The best I could do - for one night at least - was give you everything you’d ever desired. The last fleeting moments of calm before the coming storm.
“I gave Bruce Banner a life with the respect he deserves, attaining all the myriad accomplishments denied him by his...condition. I gave Joe Fixit the redhead he’d always wanted, no matter how much he denied this to himself. I even gave the Savage One inside you the power to finally destroy the person that had chained him for so long before it could destroy him. The Professor, I’ve finally reunited with his lovely wife Betty. Oh, Bruce, if only I could tell you about Betty...”
The glittering woman smiled down at him sadly.
“Don’t worry, Bruce. I’ve also given Guilt and Devil what they desire as well.”
The golden woman kissed Bruce upon the forehead as her whole body began to shimmer.
“This will be that greatest gift of mercy I can bring you, my love. The end of your life as you know it.”
She smiled as the rest of her body shimmered away, and the last vestiges of her voice echoed into the darkness.
“Pity I can’t let you remember me. Not just yet. Perhaps one day...”
With that, the woman known as Mercy was gone.
Bruce Banner’s sleeping form rolled over in his bed, all of his myriad aspects smiling in their blissful dreams of happiness until the sun came up.
NEXT: The Incredible Hulk Volume 2, #1 - by Jason McDonald!
Professor Bruce Banner
Living the Dream
Bruce Banner smiled to himself, adjusting his glasses.
He’d finally rid himself of the Hulk. Of ALL the Hulks, in fact:
The Savage Green Hulk - a childish, unthinking brute of unrelenting physical power. An engine of mindless destruction that got stronger and stronger with rage.
The Cunning Grey Hulk - a sneaky, manipulative, cunning adversary whose strength paled in comparison to the Jade Giant, yet whose devious motives were always suspect.
The Idealized Professor - a Hulk with the mind of Bruce Banner, the physical power of the Green Hulk and the devious, cunning tactics of the Grey Hulk. The most idealized version of the Hulk in Bruce’s eyes.
The Guilt Hulk - A lizard-like creature that represented all Bruce’s hidden, repressed guilt and shame concerning Bruce’s....tortured past.
The Devil Hulk - A chained monster at the back of his mind. Enraged at the world at large, dedicated to destroying it at all costs.
His colleague - Doctor Leonard Samson - had been instrumental in assessing and identifying all the myriad personalities that Dr. Bruce Banner had suffered from. Another colleague - Doctor Angela Lipscombe - and her neuropsychiatry machines had helped flake off and integrate the errant shards of Doctor Bruce Banner into one functional, thinking human being.
Together, the three of them had finally destroyed the one creature Banner had begun to think was totally indestructible.
The Incredible Hulk.
Now, thanks to their combined efforts, Bruce was finally free of the hulking albatross that had plagued the scientist ever since he’d saved Rick Jones on that fateful day in the Arizona desert. The day of detonation for Bruce Banner’s Gamma Bomb.
In fact, the trio had been able to use their studies of the Hulk’s fractured psyche and Lipscombe’s knowledge of neuropsychiatry to not only develop cures for two devastating diseases:
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS - or more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease - which Banner had come to seek Angela’s help for) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (which Banner had needed Samson’s help for). The trio had ultimately used a unique combination of neuro-psychiatric and psychotropic drugs in concert with siphoned gamma-radiation treatments (which was of course, Banner’s specialty). After years of research, they’d finally cracked the puzzle that could help so many afflicted with such diseases. Moreover, he’d hoped to use a variation of the compound to treat those afflicted with massive gamma radiation poisoning (the citizens of Freehold, for instance), but Bruce decided not to get too far ahead of himself.
Bruce smiled in his Harvard office as he continued to proofread their sixty-seven page paper that served as a definitive cure to both ALS and DID. He waved to a few of his students as they passed by his office window, satisfied that he’d finally shed his life of the Hulk and earned the respect of his peers and students.
“It wasn’t all for nothing,” Doctor Robert Bruce Banner said, smoothing out his tie as he waved. Despite all the tragedies he’d lived through as the Hulk, it seemed that the existence of that...abomination to science had finally, finally, done some good in the world.
Bruce Banner could live with that.
There was only one thing missing.
His office door creaked open, and his jaw dropped as a familiar woman came in. Curly brunette locks bouncing above a perfect face, containing a smile he’d memorized long ago. The scientist who’d helped cure two ravaging diseases and left a world of hulking, brutish madness behind him smiled up at the love of his life, somehow finally returned to him. With dry, parched lips, he finally spoke the name of the woman he thought he’d lost forever to that world he’d left behind.
“Betty.”
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Vegas Penthouse Suite
Marlo Chandler Gets Her Man
Living the Life
The beautiful redhead shook and moaned huskily above him. The entwined lovers trembled and sighed betwixt the climax of their night’s work. Sweaty and exhausted, their sighs echoed across the lavish expanse of the Vegas penthouse suite.
“My God, Fixit!” Marlo Chandler breathed out, placing a final, passionate kiss upon her lover’s grey cheek before collapsing right next to him among tossed, disheveled silken sheets. “That was incredible.”
“You know, you ain’t too bad yourself, toots,” the Grey Hulk laughed - a gutteral, cruel laugh, as his grey lips curled into a shark’s grin. “Glad you finally came to your senses. Chucked that half-wit you were shackled up with for a real man.”
The redhead glowered at him, pointing her finger in deadly earnest. “The name’s Marlo, not toots. And Rick was...fun. He was a good, good man. But...”
The grey shark’s grin returned. “But he wasn’t enough.”
Fixit watched Marlo bite her lip and glanced downward. The grey creature caressed the lovely woman’s naked back and lifted a thick finger beneath her chin. A finger that was practically the breadth of her entire chin. He brought her eyes up to meet his.
“You can admit it to me, baby. You know the truth deep inside that lovely...” he glanced at her supple, bare bosom and licked his lips menacingly. He ran a thick grey finger along her glistening body gleefully, “...heart of yours.”
Marlo’s eyes met the cruel, conniving gaze of her lover. “Fixit. Joe. I just---“
He watched her gaze turn away from him suddenly. She looked upon the lavish, decorative expanse of their room: massive flat screen theater, expensive silken sheets upon a luxurious bedroom, a wine bar stocked with the finest liquors in Las Vegas.
She gazed upon her fur coats, his pinstriped suits, and all of the pictures of them together. He knew in her mind that she was comparing her new life now with her old life. The one with her and Rick, without all the lavish things Fixit was able to give her. And the sex... I mean, who could compare to what the monstrous Joe Fixit could provide? Fixit smiled to himself as he watched the redheaded beauty take it all in.
Sure, there were a few leg breakings Fixit had to dish out to make all of this possible. In the end, of course, wasn’t it all worth it?
“Yes,” she murmured quietly.
The Grey Hulk licked his lips.
“What was that, toots?” he asked, grinning. “I couldn’t heeeear yooou....”
“Yes, damn you!” the redheaded shrieked, smacking her fists against the Grey Hulk’s colossal chest in a sudden show of long-bottled frustration. The Hulk clenched his teeth in a smile, watching her puny hands bounce off his well-muscled chest. “Rick wasn’t enough! He wasn’t ever enough!”
Fixit sneered - his cruel laugh echoing across the entire penthouse suite. The Grey Hulk plucked the skinny Marlo off of the bed and placed her on top of his reclining form. Cradling her body in his, he kissed her - a passionless kiss, like the dragging of hard granite against bare skin. He smiled when she returned the kiss, feeling the fire of the love he knew she had for him.
“I love you, Fixit,” she said. “You, not him. I always have.”
“I know, Marlo.” He smiled. “I always knew you did.”
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Arizona Desert
The Savage Beast and the Wreckage of a Life
Living the Nightmare
The roar echoed for miles.
All around the green monster lay mounds of smoking wreckage and shattered detritus. The bodies of army soldiers, barely clinging to life. Broken bomb casings, artillery shells, twisted mounds of metal that were once Gatling guns. Tanks shredded like paper, torn asunder across miles of desert landscape. They’d even dropped a nuke on him, for all the good it did them.
That didn’t matter now. None of it did.
The green monster at the center had finally, finally proven it to them.
“HULK IS THE STRONGEST ONE THERE IS!” the great beast screamed, deafening words cascading across the smoke and the rubble in the ruined desert sands.
Shrieking - small and terrified before him - was a tiny, little speck of a man. One last obstacle to shred and discard. The puniest one of all.
“Hulk, please! For the love of God, please stop this! You don’t have to do this!”
The monstrous beast glared down at the useless human, his monstrous form casting an ominous shadow over the terrified scientist. The beast’s body blocked out the shimmering rays of the setting sun, turned green by gamma-radiated fallout clouds.
“Puny Banner,” the Savage Hulk smiled.
“Yes!” the small thing cried. “Puny Banner! You know me.”
“Know you...” the creature growled, shuffling ever closer. His thick green feet sank into the desert dirt with each step. “Trying to stop Hulk for years. Trying to KILL Hulk. Think you’re better than Hulk. Stronger than Hulk. Hulk will show you...”
“You and I are one and the same, Hulk!”
The scientist inched away from the advancing threat. With each puny step the scientist took backwards, the Savage Hulk took one massive step forward. There was no escape.
“If you kill me, we will both die! Don’t you understand that?” the scientist stared at the massive creature in front of him. He held his hands out in a gesture of peace - of weakness. “Don’t you understand?”
“Hulk understands,” the creature growled, scooping up the tiny human in his palm, as if he were nothing. He held the small thing above his head in an iron grip. “Does Puny Banner understand?”
“What--?” Bruce Banner asked, feeling the savage beast’s hands coil around him.
“Puny Banner calls Hulk a savage,” the angry monster growled, his green fingers tightening.
“Hulk, please...”
“Puny Banner doesn’t understand savage,” the Savage Hulk grunted, his left fist coiling around Banner’s chest as his right fist coiled around his legs. Bruce felt a horrible pressure inside his chest as his waist began to twist all on its own.
“Someone, for God’s sakes! Anyone, help--!”
PLUCK.
The Savage Hulk separated his tightened fists with little effort, ripping Bruce Banner’s entire body apart at the waist. The scientist’s life’s blood poured upon the jade beast in a messy, putrid gush as everything that was once Bruce Banner fell upon the Hulk’s well-toned body. Snorting, the Hulk tossed aside the last bit of detritus into the desert sands and wiped away the entrails from his body. Leaving nothing, save the blood.
“Banner understands savage now.”
The beast looked upon his hands, covered in wetness.
“Huh. Hulk Red now. Not Savage,” the beast muttered with a sudden smile. “Red Hulk.”
The reddened Hulk leapt away, finally able to leave all the weak parts of his life behind.
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Avengers Mansion
The Bedroom of Doctor Robert Bruce Banner
Reality At Last...
The glittering woman with the golden skin arose, gently gliding a hand along her lover’s neck.
“Betty?” the scientist murmured, half-asleep.
“Yes,” she spoke. “I can be that for you.”
The golden woman touched his chin and guided his mouth to hers. She kissed him passionately, watching Bruce’s eyes flutter with happy, wistful dreams just as his eyes had done since the moment of her arrival.
“Oh, Bruce. My lovely, wonderful, dreaming Bruce.”
The golden woman collected her purple garments, slinking them back across her supple form with the grace of a beautiful angel. Her crimson lips smiled, watching the dreaming Bruce Banner sigh peacefully in the tangled mess of the bedroom. She looked around the rest of his room - cluttered with scientific notes and diagrams of all the mysterious and magical things he was working on for the Avengers.
The tall woman slinked over to his worktable - making nary a sound - and glanced upon his notes. Diagrams for new armors. Improvements to the Avengers Mansion safeguards. Gamma radiation studies. Even ideas for various disease cures jotted away among his many notebooks. Cures for ALS, DID, and gamma radiation poisoning were among the top entries, however incomplete the research might have been. He’d had to restart the notebooks from scratch each time a new chapter in his complicated life began.
“The irony is that being an Avenger was the Professor’s fondest dream,” the golden woman spoke, idly fingering the research that could have helped save so many lives. “Pity he’s bottled up inside that wonderful mind to take advantage of this life. Betty’s death hit him the hardest, after all.”
She gazed back at the sleeping scientist.
“You think staying in the Avengers Mansion keeps the world safe from the beautiful creatures inside of you,” the glittering woman idly mused, glancing up at the hidden security cameras she’d long ago shielded herself from. “You think they will all stay hidden away forever?”
The lithe woman in the flowing purple garments slinked toward her dreaming Bruce, gliding a gentle hand across his bare chest. “I wish I could tell you I’d been here. I wish I could tell you all the wonderful and terrible things that are coming for you, my love. Though, I hardly think you’d believe me, considering our sordid history together. The best I could do - for one night at least - was give you everything you’d ever desired. The last fleeting moments of calm before the coming storm.
“I gave Bruce Banner a life with the respect he deserves, attaining all the myriad accomplishments denied him by his...condition. I gave Joe Fixit the redhead he’d always wanted, no matter how much he denied this to himself. I even gave the Savage One inside you the power to finally destroy the person that had chained him for so long before it could destroy him. The Professor, I’ve finally reunited with his lovely wife Betty. Oh, Bruce, if only I could tell you about Betty...”
The glittering woman smiled down at him sadly.
“Don’t worry, Bruce. I’ve also given Guilt and Devil what they desire as well.”
The golden woman kissed Bruce upon the forehead as her whole body began to shimmer.
“This will be that greatest gift of mercy I can bring you, my love. The end of your life as you know it.”
She smiled as the rest of her body shimmered away, and the last vestiges of her voice echoed into the darkness.
“Pity I can’t let you remember me. Not just yet. Perhaps one day...”
With that, the woman known as Mercy was gone.
Bruce Banner’s sleeping form rolled over in his bed, all of his myriad aspects smiling in their blissful dreams of happiness until the sun came up.
NEXT: The Incredible Hulk Volume 2, #1 - by Jason McDonald!