Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 24 August 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Steve says. “It follows me everywhere I go, like this cloud of rage that just won’t dissipate.”
Steve looks at his hands. He knows it’s disrespectful to avoid eye contact with Dr Linda, but sometimes it’s hard to look at her while he’s talking. Like if he had to look her in the eyes and say these things, he’d never be able to speak.
“I thought, in the vault, I thought it would get even stronger. I thought I’d feel that anger, all the rage. I thought I would destroy things with the shield.”
He sees Dr Linda nodding in his peripheral vision. Dr Linda nods a lot. She also lets him talk himself out before offering any real reactions, and the reactions she does offer are just more questions. So he talks.
“I daydreamed about wrecking the vault so that not even S.W.O.R.D. could reassemble the things in there. Before the mission, and even on the way to the vault. I planned on it. I was going to sabotage anyone’s efforts to put those things back together again, so no one could use them again, ever.”
Tony had been planning to sabotage the FBI, to wipe all the files before they could get to them, to claim it was a mistake, that he’d just happened to use the wrong bug to grab files and the bug had destroyed things instead of gathering. Oops.
And Steve had known that would break down bridges and make it harder to work with the FBI for future missions. And he’d known it was a bad idea to do that. But secretly, he’d planned to allow himself to lose control, to destroy everything, and that would have been impossible to handwave as a mistake. But…
“But I just felt empty seeing it all,” he says, feeling like a failure as he recounts what actually happened. “All that rage just…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It went away. I felt empty.”
Dr Linda nods. “Did the rage go away, or did it go back inside?”
“Back inside.” Steve sighs. “When it really mattered, I couldn’t even destroy the machinery that hurt him. I had the opportunity to do it. I had the desire to do it. I had planned to do it. And I failed.”
“Is there another way to look at it?” Dr Linda asks. “A way in which you didn’t fail?”
“But I did fail,” Steve says. “All that equipment was disassembled and sorted and stored, and anyone from S.W.O.R.D. could put it back together whenever they wanted.”
“Is that a failure on your part, or was that the original plan?”
Steve has to give her that point. It was the original plan. But he’d made a new plan, known only to himself, that would keep his friend safe even if S.W.O.R.D. fell to HYDRA. And he’d failed to follow through on that plan because his rage wouldn’t cooperate and come out when it was called for.
“Steve?”
“It was the original plan,” he admits.
“So what I’m hearing is that you fell back on the original plan.” Dr Linda makes a note in her little book. “I don’t see a failure.”
“But I can’t reach the anger when I need it,” Steve says. “I didn’t break the machinery. I let S.W.O.R.D. take it away.”
“Did the FBI see the equipment?”
Steve blinks, looks up at her. “No. Tony got in their way with the file wiping and they were too upset about it to do more than argue with him.”
“And did you ruin your relationship with S.W.O.R.D. by going against the terms you’d both agreed upon?”
He shakes his head. “No. We did it by the book.”
Dr Linda nods. “So you can continue to work with S.W.O.R.D., even if the FBI is not all that fond of your team.”
“Yeah.”
He can see where she’s going with this. It wasn’t a failure after all, because he did what was best in the long run. He chose the practical course of action instead of the emotionally charged course of action, and that was for the best. A success, not a failure.
It still feels like a failure.
“Okay,” Dr Linda says in her easy, accepting tone of voice. But she doesn’t press the issue, doesn’t make him admit that she’s right. Instead: “You say you felt empty in the vault. Why do you think that is?”
Steve scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms until he sees spots. Therapy might be good for him, but right now it’s just making his head hurt.
“I’d already—” Steve shrugs. “I’d already seen it all, maybe. In Bakersfield. I saw the— the chair. And the tube. All the machinery. I’d seen it already.”
And he had, in the Bakersfield base. It had all been there, and more things besides. Chains. Hoses and tanks of gas. A bank of computer instruments, presumably for controlling the settings on that horrible chair’s arms reaching for the sky with their electric paddles looming overhead.
“Did you have time to process it in Bakersfield?”
Not even a little, Steve thinks. There’d been the Soldier—Bucky, as it turned out, or Jigsaw—and no time for analyzing the equipment in the base. There’d only been time to try talking him down, letting Sam do the talking mostly, and then there’d been Tony’s missile announcement, the lights had gone out—Jigsaw flipped the switch to off—and it had been a race down the hallways to try to reach him before—
“Steve?”
“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. He’s supposed to be talking about his thoughts and feelings, not getting lost in them while there’s a therapist right there waiting to hear all about them.
“No, there was no time to process it. We were too busy trying to get through to him without spooking him, and then everything was coming down around us.”
And then he’d learned who the Soldier was. Then everything was coming down around inside of his mind, instead of just all around his body. Everything had seemed to crumble up, to collapse and leave him a boneless heap of sorrow. How could he have come close enough to see the Soldier’s eyes back in Washington D.C. and not realized they belonged to Bucky?
“So you didn’t have time to process what you were seeing in Bakersfield,” Dr Linda says, sounding like this is perfectly reasonable. “Would you say you processed it afterward? What you had seen in the base?”
Steve closes his eyes for a moment. Has he processed what he’s seen?
“I’ve gone over it in my mind a hundred times,” he says. “I’ve destroyed kevlar heavy bags in the gym. I’ve read that horrible red destruction manual of theirs cover to cover more times than I can count.”
Steve opens his eyes. “Surely I’ve processed it.”
“Perhaps,” Dr Linda allows. “But it’s a lot to process. And exploring it once, or even a hundred times, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve explored it fully. It might take one hundred and one times.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m tired of exploring it. It doesn’t help him for me to explore it.”
“Is it only worthwhile if it helps him, or is it maybe worthwhile to help yourself?”
He sighs. The whole “put your own mask on first” thing. The “it’s not all about him” thing. They keep rearing up and smacking him across the face, those things.
“It’s worthwhile to help myself.” Steve has told himself this enough times by now that he does believe it. Mostly. “I need to help myself before I can help anyone else.”
There’s a quirk of Dr Linda’s lips that he can’t quite read, not approval but not disapproval, not quite a smile.
“Then let’s talk about how you felt when seeing the equipment in the base in Bakersfield and how that differed from seeing it in the vault, when it chased your anger back inside.”
“And that’ll help me process it?” Steve immediately feels bad about his belligerent tone, but Dr Linda merely smiles.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says.
He doesn’t see how. Or where they’re getting. But he starts talking. At first, it’s about the base in Bakersfield, the rubble coming down, the moment when he unmasked the Soldier and found Bucky under the muzzle. The man he’d failed so many times, the man who had been there for him through thick and thin and who he hadn’t even recognized behind the mask.
And then…
While the clock on the wall says it’s been half an hour of talking, it seems like mere moments later that he’s shaking his head and holding back his emotions, clenching his emotions in his fists despite knowing the whole point of being here in this room talking to her is to embrace the emotions.
“Bucky was…” Steve shakes his head again. Keeps shaking it as though he can deny that he’s speaking at all even while the words tumble out.
“Bucky was everything. He was the only thing I had, the one thing in my life that was good and right when everything else fell apart,” he says. “When I had nothing, I had Bucky. And it hurts to lose that. It— It just kills me to lose that… again.”
Dr Linda nods, her hands in her lap over her closed notebook. “Go on, please,” she says after a moment of silence.
“You don’t understand. You can’t. No one can. For you, for all of you, it’s been years, decades. For me, I—” Steve sighs. “I lost my best friend and everything that was truly, genuinely, unmistakably good in my world half a year ago. It hasn’t been a whole year. It— It’s real fresh.”
“And you saw him again in Bakersfield, when you removed his mask,” Dr Linda says, her voice an odd mixture of calm and compassionate as she steers him back to Bakersfield.
Steve jerks his head in a nod. “Seeing him again, seeing him like that—”
Steve swallows as his mind brings up the image of Bucky speared by rebar with his lips smeared red with bloody froth from his lungs. His whole lower face no longer masked in that horrible metal muzzle, but still masked in blood. His eyes furious and terrified and completely devoid of recognition. So unlike on the slab in Zola’s lab during the War.
“Looking like this,” he continues, because he still sees some of that in Jigsaw’s eyes, “knowing that what’s been a few months for me has been nearly seventy years for him, and every one of those years filled with torture and killing, it—”
Dr Linda waits him out for several long minutes while Steve struggles to make himself speak.
“God, it makes me mad,” he says. “Makes me just—” Steve forces his fists to unclench and studies the crescents left in his palms by his fingernails. “I never had a chance to stop missing him. There was too much going on when he died. And now he hasn’t, but he still has.”
Steve risks a look at Dr Linda. He’s not sure what he’s afraid of seeing in her eyes after his emotional blathering, but there’s nothing but compassion there. Not a scrap of judgment. Despite him carrying on like this.
“He’s as dead to me now—as unreachable, as absent, as gone—as he was at the bottom of that ravine,” Steve manages. “But I still see him. He’s gone, but he’s haunting me out of Jigsaw’s eyes.”
Steve lets the door close behind himself and lets out a deep breath.
Therapy is a lot harder than Sam had let on. Talking about things he’s never talked about, revealing things he’s never revealed. And to someone who’d started out as a perfect stranger. It goes against every instinct in himself, all of which tell him to shut down in the presence of a stranger, an outsider, to keep these things to himself, to let it all out only in the physical violence of a fist against a punching bag.
It’s been a month now, since Jigsaw came back of his own volition after the auction debacle and his escape. Since they first pissed off the FBI by ruining a handful of raids against Clint’s “tracksuit mafia.” Since they raided that bank vault and found everything waiting there inside it that Jigsaw had said would be there. Waiting, perhaps, to be used.
It’s been a month, but it feels so much longer.
And behind the door he just closed, Steve knows that Dr Linda is writing out her notes on their session, is maybe planning her next appointment with him, what she wants them to go over next Tuesday. Something about that—about someone else planning something he can’t anticipate, but for his own good—doesn’t sit right with him.
It’s probably just that he needs to get used to the therapy process. He’s only been seeing Dr Linda for two and a half weeks, after all. And therapy takes a long time to work its magic, according to Sam.
Steve fights back a yawn—he’s gotten plenty of sleep and shouldn’t feel exhausted like he does—and composes himself. Time to present himself to Jigsaw as an example of how therapy is good and welcome, and how it doesn’t change anyone for the worse.
It’s something he’s taken to doing after his sessions, just casually happening to find himself wherever Jigsaw is, so that Jigsaw can assess him for damage done by the therapy and find him in sound health. He’s not even sure it’s still needed, now that Yasmin, Jigsaw’s new therapist, and Zoe, his speech language pathologist, have moved in and been properly observed through the air ducts.
“JARVIS, where will I find Jigsaw?”
“Jigsaw is participating in break testing in the main lab, Captain Rogers.”
“Thanks,” Steve says. He starts walking.
He really shouldn’t be surprised to find that Jigsaw is spending time with Tony this morning. Tony has been working on some opponent-bots for the Tower’s resident super soldiers to square off against in the gym, and who better to test the robots against than their eventual sparring partner?
That, and Jigsaw has declared Tony to be “the same as,” to use Clint’s terms. The two of them have a lot in common, and now that Jigsaw is aware of that, Tony has become somewhat less frightening to him.
“Faster?” comes Tony’s voice from the lab up ahead. “I just beat my own personal record, and he wants me to do it faster?”
Steve can make out Jigsaw’s grin of challenge through the glass wall as the man signs “you can’t.”
“You wanna bet, Jigglebells?” Tony sweeps something off the table they’re standing around and pulls what appears to be an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock out of a box. He grins back at Jigsaw. “Let’s go!”
Steve watches from the doorway as Tony swiftly disassembles the clock, taking each piece and separating it from every other piece. Jigsaw catches a wayward gear and puts it back in the pile Tony’s making of the parts.
“And now,” Tony says, “J-man, time me.”
“Certainly, Sir.”
A glowing timer flickers to life on one of the screens.
There’s a flurry of motion on the table as Tony reassembles the clock, but Steve ignores it in favor of watching Jigsaw’s face during the assembly process. The expression is earnest, curious, eager, enthralled. Completely open and fascinated by what’s happening with the parts.
If Jigsaw’s hair were shorter, if Tony had a mustache, Steve could be watching Bucky pestering Howard back during the War, challenging him to rifle assembly at high speed and hinting at being ready for the next of Howard’s gadgets to make an appearance in their field kit.
Bucky had loved to pester Howard, and Howard had eaten it up.
Steve swallows the memories down and reminds himself that this is Tony and not Howard. That his friend has rejected being “the bucky” and has instead chosen to go by Jigsaw. That there isn’t an active war zone in the traditional sense surrounding them.
Tony pumps a fist in the air as soon as his clock is back in one piece, apparently under the time limit.
“Ha!” Tony crows. “And before you say ‘faster’ again, Jigster, I still need you to poke around with the new tablet.”
Jigsaw scowls briefly, then picks up the clock and turns the knob on the back to make the hands spin around. He leaves the clock on 10:45 and then points to it with a raised eyebrow. Checking to see if his time sense is still accurate, perhaps.
“Yep. You’re good, Jiggle-boo.” Tony passes a tablet across the table and cranes his neck to look over at the door where Steve is standing. “Spangles. Welcome to the lab. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Steve comes inside and waves a greeting to Jigsaw, who has picked up the tablet. “Just got out of my therapy session, and wanted to see—” He didn’t plan out a reason for him to be there that doesn’t include “prove to Jigsaw that I’m okay.” Great.
“—whether you were making any progress on the sparring robots,” Steve finishes with hardly a hitch. “JARVIS said you were break testing. I thought I might help.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and holds up the tablet he’s been turning over in his hands with distaste.
“Right,” Steve says. “I see that now. You’re working on making sure the tablet won’t break when you use it.”
It’s Tony’s other project, or one of his many: making a tablet that can pick up pressure from both Jigsaw’s metal and flesh hands, and that will stand up to the kind of wear and tear that comes from being brought everywhere, having metal fingertips stabbed against its surface, and occasionally being thrown down in frustration.
The goal is to replace pen and paper with tablet and stylus or fingers, and to roll in his various food books with the pictures of food in them so he only has the one thing to carry. So far, the limitation seems to be with Jigsaw, not the tablet. He doesn’t like looking at screens, though he’ll do it for short periods of time as needed.
In order for the tablet to be a success, they’ll need to convince him that it’s worth looking at the screen.
“Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it,” Steve says. “I’ll be in the gym for a while if you want to test out a ‘bot.”
“Tomorrow,” Tony says. “I’ve got the new parts machining as we speak.”
“Sounds good. Bye, Tony. Bye, Jigsaw.”
They wave him off, and Steve heads down to the gym like he said he would.
Chances are low anyone else is there, and after his therapy session, he does kind of feel like beating the sand out of a kevlar heavy bag.
Apparently, he hasn’t processed anything even once, let alone a hundred times. There’s processing—which he hasn’t been doing—and ruminating. And rumination, according to Dr Linda, is one of his strongest skills when it comes to his friend. Also high on his skills list is beating himself up over things he has no control over.
But he’s not sure how to go from ruminating to processing. It can’t be as easy as just talking to someone about it instead of thinking about it. And it can’t be as easy as drawing his feelings.
Steve selects a heavy bag and hangs it up before wrapping his hands.
That’s his own project for the weekend: drawing his feelings. Dr Linda hadn’t put it that way, but that’s what she told him to do. He is supposed to draw what the red star book calls the “prep room” from the Bakersfield base, exactly how he saw it, Soldier included, and take note as he does so of how he is feeling. Then he is to draw the bank vault, and compare how he’s feeling.
The rules are simple, as well. No negative self-talk, no accusations, no rejecting his emotions as not being the right ones. Whatever he feels, he feels, and he needs to accept it.
It doesn’t sound like a difficult homework assignment, but he can see the potential pitfalls clearly. Because part of his brand of rumination is thinking about the might have beens, the should haves, the could have dones. “Don’t should yourself,” Dr Linda has told him time and again.
Steve can’t seem to help that, though. There are just so many things he should have done differently, at so many stages of everything.
From back in the War, holding on, choosing a different way to tackle the mission of capturing Zola, something—anything—that would have kept Bucky out of HYDRA’s hands. To how they handled Jigsaw when they first brought him in. To how he’d tried so hard to push his own need for Bucky onto a man who doesn’t remember being Bucky and didn’t—doesn’t—want to remember.
He gives the heavy bag an experimental smack with each fist, testing the wrappings on his hands more than anything else, and then begins a measured series of punches, keeping his feet moving and throwing in a kick every once in a while. A physical workout to go along with his mental one. Something to make him properly exhausted instead of just mentally and emotionally exhausted.
It might not be what Dr Linda asked him to do, but it’s just what the doctor ordered.