“You are an honorable man, Banner.”

You don’t feel particularly honorable, scrolling through a chart listing the levels of gamma radiation found in blood samples taken from evacuated civilians. So you make some non-committal noise, a little unsettled by what you’re finding and in no mood to deal with a cape-wearing golden retriever someone’s taught to walk upright.

“I’m just a scientist,” you’re about to say, when Thor continues. Something about his tone is cautious, less than entirely congratulatory.

“Now we all know that well. You made a difficult choice, but a noble one. A warrior’s choice, do not be ashamed of it.”

You stop scrolling.

“What?”

“You would have taken your own life, rather than face capture. You know your own nature well, Banner.”

You laugh, and even you know how tired you must sound. You’re used to stupid, insensitive, probing questions, but coming from Thor -- who will never understand, who culturally cannot -- that’s a new one. It had to be for some reason, of course, something to nudge a man over the edge. Like maybe a dead wife you didn’t know about. Death before dishonor. It couldn’t be that you just wanted it all to stop.

“Capture didn’t really come into it, I’m afraid.”

“Then how?”

Thor’s standing closer than you’re comfortable with; he may not even know it. But you take a step back, even if that means turning away from the display you’re working on.

“Look, I happen to have a condition.” (And wasn’t that the truth.) “The past few years have been-- overwhelming. Things looked pretty dark for a while, and I couldn’t handle it. That’s as much as I really want to talk about right now.”

Concern turns the corners of Thor’s mouth, or maybe he just thinks you’re being evasive, but either way he doesn’t intend to leave. He sets a broad hand on your shoulder.

“You mean the great green one inside of you. Who spat out the bullet.”

It’d be great if he could stop calling it that.

“It’s something I’m living with, it’s not like the other guy. I’m still me, just -- very unhappy. And it comes and goes. ” (Not a lot of going any more. When you were younger it used to be practically reversed -- you’d get manic, crackling with energy and wit and creativity, useful for pulling all-nighters on research papers and fun at parties. Remember when you used to be funny, Bruce?) “When I’m depressed I push people away. I start taking unnecessary risks. My work in the lab starts to suffer. I get... short with people. I hurt people.”

Is it any surprise people don’t like you when you’re angry?

“The Banner I know would never do these things,” Thor responds firmly. But he’s not fooling anyone.

“And what do you know about me? We work together. Sometimes we fight together. It’s not even me you’re fighting with, it’s the other guy, and what do you think about his personality profile? Does he seem happy and well-adjusted to you?”

You’ve been working very hard to keep your voice down, to keep your tone down, but that’s the end of that. Anger flares in your gut, from the usual smoldering fuse to a hot little flame, and you take a deep breath to quash it back down again. Thor blinks with startlement, crossing his enormous arms.

“You have adjusted very well! You are friends with the Captain, the man out of time, with Stark--“

“I don’t have any friends here.” You tag along, you always have. He looks astonishingly hurt. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s not your fault. It's It’s nothing to do with all of you, it’s just not what I’m here for. And it’s hard to make any deep personal connections when you’re well-known for being a ticking time bomb.”

“My brother meant to slay himself,” Thor blurts. “On the bridge -- I saw him let go.”

You wince a little.

“Is that what this is about?”

“You have heard him speak, you know of his condition. The men of SHIELD have him in a cell. My brother has gone mad. He no longer knows what he does.”

You want to shoot back something about Loki ripping people’s eyes out, but you probably shouldn’t be talking when it comes to loss of life and property damage.

“When he tried to kill himself, it was before all of this happened, yes? And then he was falling through space for a while.”

You’ve never been that kind of crazy. Loki is psychotic, crazier than a box of hair; compared to that, you’re a case study in well-addressed grief and the success of cognitive behavioral therapy. But something in the scene Thor lays out, the fall, Loki plummeting through sheer void and not dying -- if he was conscious for that, color you shocked if he came out the other side with a brain like scrambled egg. Back when anyone apart from Thor cared how Loki felt -- despair, days and weeks and years of sheer solitude in despair. And his biology wasn’t really disposed to make it easy for him to check out, either. Maybe less violently (and you tasted despair then, once the change had gone away from you and you were left in the literal actual wreckage of what you’d done) but no less bitter.

You're not about to forgive him, but suddenly the sheer unmitigated gall of all his plans, his sloppiness, even goading the Hulk into beating him into a sack of meat and splinters, all makes a funny kind of sense. You're a doctor, and you're not that kind of doctor, but it doesn't take a consultation with the DSM-IV to recognize some kind of divine death wish.

“Thor, your brother still wants to die.”

“I forbid it!”

Great, go and tell him that, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled comes out as “That’s not the way it works, Thor. Right now he can’t, in any case, suicide watch is standard for high-risk SHIELD captives. But you might not be who he wants to talk to right now.”

“Am I not allowed to take an interest in my own brother’s safety?”

Maybe it’s because older siblings aren’t really your area of expertise, but this is... you don't know how to feel about this.

“There’s just not a hell of a lot you can do for him. Right now he hates you.” You may not have firsthand experience with the little shit, but the other guy certainly does, and he’s not his biggest fan either. They’re whipping up some kind of gag for him down in R&D after he made a National Guard representative try to blind himself. “Right now Loki needs a psych evaluation, but that’s going to be a little--“

“A what?”

“They’re going to send in a couple doctors to talk to him, get a little insight on the nature of his, uh, madness.”

You can picture them using Thor for that, actually -- the same way they threw Natasha to the wolves to get him to blurt out his big plan. Psych’s never been your specialty, even from the other side of things. You know what you know more or less on your own; letting a trained professional outside of SHIELD’s stable know about the specifics of your situation is asking for a serious misdiagnosis. But whatever they’re doing with Loki -- he’s a criminal, a terrorist, in a big way. They’re not going to treat them like Thor’s little brother who got mixed up in some bad stuff and stopped taking his pills. If they do send Thor in there to talk to him, to stir him up -- Loki gets violent and there, guess we’ll just have to keep him chained to a rock for the next 80 years. Or maybe not. The only people who still think Loki might be of use to the organization are the ones who haven’t had to deal with him.

“He was not always this way,” Thor says, defensive and pitiful. He looks close to tears. It’s unreal. “He would not have done this in his right mind. He did it to hurt the All-Father, to hurt me --“

“The thing with killing yourself is that it seems like a good idea at the time. It’s efficient, it’s quick, and if you do it right it won’t even hurt. Generally you don’t even care about that. If your brother really did let go, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’d been planning it. It just came into his mind when he was particularly vulnerable.”

Will Thor mistake that for ‘weak’? They aren’t the same thing where suicide is concerned. Maybe you had a long day and the only path to get home takes you over a bridge, and every time you even think about it, you wonder what it’d be like to hit the water. You wonder who’ll take care of your notes when you’re gone and realize you don’t really care. It’s not about feeling bad or good, you could have had a great day and you’d still be thinking, what if, what if, how cold’s the water? If my brains hit the pavement before the rest of me, maybe this time.

You can’t hold a knife without rapidly assessing where best to put it. You can’t cross a bridge without the thought of jumping off of it. You avoid buying new razors and you avoid getting behind the wheel of a car. Little moments. Weak moments.

The fact that you know it won’t work doesn’t kill the urge. It just makes it more inventive.

“Listen, can we take this somewhere else? Mental health is a... complicated subject.”