a big guy that gets all little

Bruce had a steadily increasing collection of unreturned texts and messages on his phone, and today he was determined to return at least a few of them.

One, maybe. Even just one would be an accomplishment.

Easier said than done, though: he'd spent the past few days (and in some ways, most of his life) trying to be as uncommunicative as possible, making himself inessential to other people. It was reflexive, and hard to stop.

He was going to spend most of his time in the office today staring at his phone, it looked like. He felt pretty pathetic.

In his office once again and ready to (gulp) interact with students, Bruce was looking into some more active meditation techniques to conceivably try in class next week. Mindfulness was definitely not his go-to method for himself, so there were still plenty of types that he could teach, but he thought next week's class should be a significant departure from yesterday's. At the very least, it should be something that didn't make students want to fall asleep.

He snorted. Maybe Osho drumming meditation would catch students' attention.

But no, he wasn't that mean. Usually.

Bruce felt weird about this moving arrangement for a lot of reasons. One of the smallest factors was the fact that, as he walked the last few steps to his new house with just a medium-sized backpack on his shoulders and a coffee thermos in one hand, he realized that this probably wasn't how most forty-two-year-olds did things, and he was pretty sure his new roommates would be aware of that. It just looked a little weird.

Then there were obviously the larger factors, like what if he Hulked out in the house and what if he needed to take off in a hurry and he had roommates he needed to explain the situation to, and then right back to the big one, for real, what if he Hulked out in the house?

All in all, this was proving to be a little stressful.

Not too stressful, though. 'Too stressful' would be getting moved to another floor again over at the Arms Hotel. This was a safe, non-green-zone level of stressful.

So, he knocked on the door, and if this turned out to be a mistake, at least... well, at least nothing. He just hoped it wasn't.

[[for the roommates, should they so choose!]]

There was a partly-bandaged dummy sitting in Bruce's office now. This was a mistake, because Bruce would not admit it, but he kept spotting it out of the corner of his eye and getting rather startled.

Other than that, he was here, settling in and feeling rather twitchy about even having an office again. His name was on the door. People could find him. Like, on purpose.

...Communal living was going to be a real shock to the system once that happened.

[[open office hours!]]

I demand to be in the front car of this bandwagon. Wait, does that make me the bandwagon driver? SURE. I am the bandwagon driver.*

* Don't tell anyone, but I don't have a bandwagon driver's license. Shh.

I have two newbies now, which puts me at the character cap for the first time ever oh my god, but this post is way image-heavier than I expected it to be, so, uh, let's just start with this guy.

( Dr. Banner And The Other Guy )

( TA Call and GIFs )