How did we get here?
introducing the incredible bruce banner
the basics
your head will collapse but there's nothing in it.
biography
now i wish that i could live a little safer.
relationships
so i try to talk refined for fear that you'll find out i'm imagining you
the basics
Name: Bruce Banner
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Ethnicity: Scottish and Jewish
Realm/Universe: Earth-2978 (my own personal canon)
Age: 27
Mental age: 27
Birth date: April 8th
Birthplace: Dayton, Ohio
Height: 6’4"
Blood type: O-
Eye color: Brown
Hair color: Brown
Hair type: Straight
Scars: Cigarette burns on arms and legs
How did they get these scars?: Physical abuse
Birthmarks: One on the cheek
Right/left-handed(or ambidextrous perhaps?): Left
Describe their voice: Typically devoid of much emotion
Speech mannerisms: his biggest crime is his midwestern manner of speech.
Mental disorder/ailment(s)(If any): Depression, anxiety, addiction, BPD
If they have a mentally threatening disorder, what caused it to arise?: Trauma from childhood
Mental stability(relative to disorders): Not much!
How does this ailment effect their day to day life?: He's an impulsive wildcard, baby!
Current degrees
Phds
• Nuclear Physics
• Entomology with a focus on arachnids
• Chemistry
Masters
• Bioengineering
• Child Psychology (with a focus in mutants)
Bachelors
• Biology
• Archeology
A Shorthand Biography
• Born in Dayton, Ohio, Bruce had a rough upbringing. Rough puts it lightly.
• Bruce was abused to an inch of his life on the worst days, protected only by a mother's love on good days.
• When he was ten, he witnessed such an act of love, and the price of it, as his mother gave her life to protect him from the abuse of his father.
• He testified at the trial for her murder. Despite his eye witness testimony, the jury declared Brian not guilty by reason of insanity. His father was sent to an asylum, and Bruce was shipped off to live in New York with his aunt.
• This was his first taste of home.
• Bruce grew up a quiet boy with extraordinary skill. He could soak up facts and information like a sponge. it was his accelerated learning that got him into a fancy boarding school across the pond, where he managed to graduate at the age of sixteen, two years earlier than anticipated.
• When he returned from England, he enrolled in NYU with a double major in physics and biology, two topics his father told him he would never understand.
• He is now 27 with three PhDs in nuclear physics, entomology with a focus on arachnids, and chemistry.
• as of june, he has been diagnosed with stage 4 acute leukemia. it has metastasized beyond his blood. he has been given months to live.
• And the rest... is verse determinant.
Relationships
NOTE: Bruce is a multiverse, multiship muse. All these ships exist in separate universes unless otherwise stated
Tony
Dipper
Clint
Clint (part 2, electric boogaloo)
eddie
Jack
finding normal
In this verse, the Hulk came about by total accident. No cancer, no General Ross, just a manifestation of a man’s daddy’s issues. This is the fun verse. This is the verse where Rae can calm down. Eddie and Jack go in this verse simply because I think we all really, really need to chill out and give Bruce a somewhat normal verse. Also, he’s probably an Avenger by now. That’s sweet. This is a sweet verse. With Eddie, he teaches at Berkeley. With Jack, he teaches at MIT, the default Bruce Banner School.
This is just the fun verse. I wish I could say it’s deeper, but it’s not.
the experiment: route a
Tony and Bruce met in college, as dormates. Initially, it was hate at first sight. Bruce facing the end of a long-term relationship with an older man, Richard, Tony wasn’t even on his mind except to complain about how he left the room a mess. But eventually, the two began to warm up to each other. It wasn’t long until a freshly single Bruce caught himself making out with his intellectual rival in his fancy sportscar. Right after Tony decided to drive to Richard’s house to defend Bruce’s honor. Their beginnings were messier than most.
Bruce and Tony can’t exactly call their relationship a chill one. Not even weeks after getting together, Bruce was diagnosed with an aggressive form of acute leukemia. He was given months to live. The two were crushed, freshly in love only to be taken away from each other just as quickly as they came together. Tony fulfilled Bruce’s dying wish to get married, a month and a half into dating. They moved out of the dorms and into a nicer apartment, where the two could live out the rest of their time together in peace. But they weren’t lying down and taking it completely. Using Howard’s influence, Tony was able to get Bruce into a highly experimental treatment, one that seemed barely legal. But the two were desperate, and Bruce was the ‘perfect candidate’ after he aced a quick survey. One that focused a lot on fears.
The treatment did wonders. Chemo had failed them, but this new gamma-based cocktail of drugs had Bruce going from terminal to almost completely cured in a matter of months. It felt almost too good to be true. And it was.
Bruce began experiencing strange side-effects to the treatment. Extreme, sudden emotions caused his eyes and skin to glow green. No doctor for the study had an explanation, nor did they seem too bothered by it. But Bruce was growing suspicious. The study seemed so small, really, he never saw other patients around the building where it took place. One day, he happened by an open office door by chance. He walked in and found, to his horror, evidence that this ‘experiment’ was actually the work of the US Army, who was working on a science that would be able to tap into the fears of test subjects, and mutate their genetic code to manifest these fears as superpowers. It was the Army’s intent to take the sick and destitute, and turn them into human weapons. Even worse, Bruce was one of two surviving patients.
Bruce stole the files that proved this study to be a total fraud that was covering up horrible, painful deaths. It didn’t take long for those in charge, namely General Ross, to realize what he had done. As punishment, Ross had Howard and Maria Stark killed in a staged ‘car accident.’ The news crushed Tony.
Now the boys are on the run, Bruce not fully realized as a Hulk just yet. But the Army is onto them both, and intend to finish the job, weaponizing Bruce for their own war efforts. The two are searching for the other surviving patient, Betty Ross, who they also believe to be the daughter of the general. If anyone had answers, it would be her.
self-testing
Mason Pines and Bruce Banner are soulmates. For three years, the two have been inseparable. The cancer diagnosis, therefore, crushed them. Bruce, unable to sit by and let himself die, began to test on himself. His research at Oregon University involving the super soldier serum led him to consider the potential of using the serum to cure his own cancer. He created a cocktail involving an incomplete version of the serum, mixed with a little radiotherapy. Suddenly, Bruce was looking and feeling a lot less sick.
While he never got muscles or a 75 year long character arc, Bruce did experience certain powers, including glowing green eyes and super strength, that seemed to only get stronger when he grew more emotional. Eventually, he became addicted to the serum, craving the power and alertness it gave him.
The Army caught wind of Bruce’s experiments and began to check in on him more and more, trying to buy the formula off him, going as far as using the general’s daughter to tempt him into giving it up. Bruce refused, never truly trusting the US Army to be responsible with such a still unstable, incomplete idea.
Ross managed to steal away the formula anyway, then attempted to have Bruce killed by staging an ‘accident’ at his lab. A nuclear meltdown that caused the serum in his system to permanently damage his genetic structure. And thus, the Hulk was born.
Bruce and Mason are soulmates, but a giant green monster might be the biggest relationship trial yet.
the experiment: route b
Bruce was a successful professor at MIT who was also constantly working towards expanding his higher education. The man taught nuclear physics, was popular among the students for being thorough in his lesson plans, and overall was leading a life he had never thought possible for him. But everything changed when he was diagnosed with cancer.
Doctor Banner, determined to keep the now-perfect life he had achieved, sought out every treatment available to him. At one point, a mysterious man approached him to tell him about a new experimental drug that was still in its trial phases. Bruce jumped at the opportunity, a man desperate to live his life again.
Of course, the trials were actually the army building human weapons using fear, Bruce attempted to expose it, and he was promptly kidnapped and sent to a prison-like complex where other experiments were being held. It was there that he met Betty Ross, a woman with breast cancer whose father, the general, forced her into the experiment. The two fell in love, and when Bruce was taken away for the final leg of the experiment, Betty orchestrated a prison break.
It was too late for the both of them, already turned into weapons. By the time Bruce woke up from his first transformation, he was thrust into a mass escape, where Betty sacrificed her own freedom so that he could run, find a way to expose the government’s crimes, and save her from a fate worse than death. Her Hulk was to be used in warfare, against her will. Her sacrifice stopped Bruce from experiencing the same fate.
While on the run, Bruce formed a shaky allyship with Clint Barton, an agent of SHIELD. He began to feel torn between growing feelings for the agent, who was surprisingly sensitive to the matter, and his lingering feelings for his lost love, Betty. The two are searching for her, so they can expose General Ross’ crimes once and for all.
verse masterlist
10 secrets about post-hulk bruce
1. he can play the bass quite well. he started when he was 13 and angsty, took a music class at the city college he was enrolled in. he can still play but likes to keep it on the DL simply because it's fun to have a secret talent.
2. while attending uc berkeley, he found an abandoned classroom and turned it into a private minilab, and managed to hide it from faculty for the duration of his time there.
3. bruce has been growing increasingly dependent on sleeping pills to be able to rest.
4. bruce is technically immortal and his aging has slowed substantially. he fears that his slowed aging and inability to die will leave him to watch all his loved ones to die, and his search for the cure is rooted in his fear that he will live too long and gradually become less and less human because of it.
5. when bruce was freshly on the run, he hid in a man's remote house in the country for a week and a half straight. that man caught him and when bruce panicked, he hulked out and fatally injured the man. he's not quite sure if anyone has linked him to that crime.
6. bruce's greatest fear in life is losing his humanity and becoming his father.
7. bruce's greatest dream in life is to have stability. he believes he will find stability in settling down, and is quick to fall in love because of this.
8. when bruce was a child, he accidentally killed a bird. he broke down and buried the animal, feeling immense grief for an entire week over it. he has never told a single person about this except mason or tony, depending on the verse.
9. bruce's mother would sing him all the pretty horses to sleep until he was five years old. he hasn't told a soul this, because it's the only shred of private details he has left of his mother, as her death and murder trial was sensationalized in the media.
10. when his father was released from the mental institution, thirty years after killing rebecca, bruce sought out and killed his father.