Chapter 1: Steve | A little sympathy, I hope you can show me
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.
Chapter 2: Jigsaw | I won’t just conform (no matter how you shake my core)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rise” by Katy Perry.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 24 August 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“And how has the day been, Jigsaw? What did you and Caroline go over today?”
It has agreed to sit in the room with the expert with the words, what the team that is not a cell is calling a “therapist,” but it has not agreed to do anything else. And so it sits in the room, curled up in the corner of the sofa, kneading at the top fin of the fish-looking soft thing. It is soft and it squishes under the fingers, and it is reassuring in the face of the “therapist.”
So is the dog, curled up on the floor between it and the “therapist.” The dog is always here for afternoon “sessions.” In the mornings, though, it has to face the “therapist” alone.
The expert with the words has not said any of the words, not early in the morning, not in the “sessions” yesterday or the introduction the day before.
The expert with the words has never said any of the words to it. It would be able to tell. It would find itself losing time, would suddenly discover that it was on the floor, would hurt and throb between the ears.
It knows what the words feel like when they are said. And the expert with the words, it is starting to think, is merely an expert, and has none of the words.
Or why wouldn’t she say them? Why would she hold off if she has what she needs to bring it under her control?
But she is a “therapist,” and they are experts with the words. It made a target of one such expert with the words. Tore out the target’s lungs and broke the target into perfect mirrored halves down the middle. Like a fleshy butterfly with wings so beautiful and glistening. The wires cutting into the target’s throat so that he could not say the words and bring it crashing down before the mission was complete. The tongue so purple and swollen, the eyes, shot through with blood and wide in the face.
Yes. The other “therapist” had met the right end. And now this one, this expert without the words, she lives in the hive building along with the other—the expert who helps it to remember the shapes it needs for making letters with the fingers instead of just the signs for whole words or concepts.
They do not live where the team that is not a cell lives. They live somewhere else in the hive building, somewhere for “business residents,” on levels of the hive building no one goes to but it when it needs to observe the experts.
It has observed. They are not HYDRA, not STRIKE, not evil. But they are experts all the same, are “therapists,” are not to be truly trusted.
It squeezes the fish-looking soft thing close to the chest and stares at the woman in the chair across from it. It stares and stares, sits there as it agreed to do, and does not move. There are two hours of “session” in the afternoons, every day since the day after the expert without the words moved into the hive building. Most of the two hours are still waiting to be over.
It hates the “sessions” with the expert without the words.
But it agreed.
“I see,” the expert without the words says with a nod. She writes something in a book. She is always writing things in a book.
This is the time when the expert without the words will bring out a different book and begin to read from it, stories of people who have been hurt and who recovered. Or stories called “news articles” about HYDRA agents who have been put into a “jail”—as though that will do anything at all to stop them from escaping. The best place to put a HYDRA agent is into the ground in as many pieces as it can manage.
Or it is when she will pull out her phone and tap on the screen for a moment before the phone begins to play beautiful music and they listen to it together with her sometimes interrupting the music to ask it questions.
Or it is when she will try to talk it to sleep without using the words that will do the job for her, telling it to focus on the lungs and the breathing, to count the beats of the heart, to tense and then relax each muscle from the top of the head to the tips of the toes while it inhales and exhales and counts and counts and counts.
Or it is when she will talk about how much progress is being made with the others on the support team. This is supposed to be a good thing, she means it to be a good thing, but it is not really. It has had enough of support teams. It does not want another support team, does not want the feeder to join with these experts and form a support team.
Support teams are meant to put things into order, and order comes through pain. It also has enough of that. It is imposing its own order on the body just by living, and there is always enough pain, and there is no need for external order.
It will not go back.
But the other asset would not let the experts try to take it back, has promised that it will be safe. It believes the other asset—the other asset would not lie to it—but the head does hurt when it tries to imagine how a support team would not try to take it back.
Instead of talking at it for two hours, the expert reaches into a bag and puts a stack of colorful paper on the low table between them. There are red and green papers in the stack, and gray and brown and pink, and orange and yellow and black.
She puts a pair of scissors on top of the stack of paper, and a big black marker, and a tube of something it cannot identify.
“We’re going to try something new today,” she says, “because after our session, it will be time to order pizzas for dinner.”
It swallows. Triangle bread.
It is always a good thing when triangle bread is being offered, even though it knows now that the flat meat circles on it and the little rounded bits of meat on it and the pinkish meat on it are all made out of pigs, which are a type of dog with a flat nose and a round belly and a curlicue tail that wiggles and bounces. It will not eat pigs. But there are still other things that go on top of triangle bread that it will eat, and there are circles of triangle bread that do not have any of the meat on them at all.
The expert without the words gets out a second pair of scissors and then brings out a stack of folded up circles, large and looking like the very edge of triangle bread. She unfolds one and then picks up a green piece of paper.
“I like bell peppers on my pizza,” she says as she carefully cuts a thin crescent of green out of the paper and places it on the circle. She cuts a few more pieces—eight pieces of bell pepper—and puts them on the circle.
It likes bell peppers, too. Red and orange and yellow and green ones. All of the colors they come in. On triangle bread and off of it.
“I also like mushrooms.” The expert puts the green paper down and gets the gray paper. She carves out a mushroom slice and adds it to the circle. Then five more. “Let’s see,” she says. “I want some ham on my pizza, too.”
Pink bits of ham join the rest on the circle she is constructing. It does not eat ham now, because ham is made of pigs, but mushrooms are very good. It would put many more slices of mushroom on its triangle bread than just six.
“Maybe I would like some onion.” Yellow slivers rain down on the circle. “And olives.” She cuts out little circles and then cuts them in half and cuts the middle bits out of the olives.
Both very good choices, the spicy sweetness of the onion and the salty brine of the olives.
It watches as she constructs all of the things that she will put on her triangle bread, getting steadily hungrier. Even though it has slices of innocent pig on it, her circle of triangle bread looks very tasty.
When she has finished cutting out shapes, she pulls the top part of the tube off the rest of it to reveal something like a very large chapstick. She wipes the paper shapes across the tube before sticking them onto the circle, talking about the things she’s putting on the circle as she does so, and layering the things for maximum coverage.
“This is the pizza I’m going to order,” she says, holding up her circle. “What pizza do you want to order?”
It has agreed to sit here in the room with her, but not to do anything else. But…
But what if it needs to show her what kind of triangle bread it wants in order to get any triangle bread at all? And it could not hurt anything to cut shapes out of paper. Or to stick those shapes onto a big circle. It could do that.
It could make a circle of paper triangle bread for her. It will just have to uncurl from the corner of the sofa and let go of the fish-looking soft thing in order to do so. It can do that. Yes. Just this once.
The “session” is nearly over, and it has two whole circles of triangle bread stuck together and most of the toppings for a third cut out, when the spell is shattered.
“Jigsaw.”
The expert without the words says it softly, but it freezes all the same, mid-cut, with the mushroom shape nearly complete and the rest of the paper hanging limply from the fingers.
“Are you afraid of me?”
It is not afraid of the expert without the words. It can dispatch her at any time. It swallows. She is not evil, though, and it would not dispatch her. But it can. If it needs to. If she turns out to be secretly evil.
“Or is it rebellion instead of fear?” she asks. “Because we won’t make much progress until we’re both putting in effort.”
The expert without the words smiles. “These sessions we have are not about changing you, Jigsaw. They are about understanding you. About giving you an outlet that you haven’t had before, a place to express yourself without fear of judgment.”
It… It does not fear judgment. Does it? The team that is not a cell has explained to it that no one will judge it or jury it for what it has done because of what was already done to it, and all it has to do is agree not to kill targets and attend all of these “sessions” with the different experts.
“If it’s rebellion, then please know that I don’t answer to S.W.O.R.D., or to S.H.I.E.L.D., or even to the Avengers. I am here for your benefit, and your benefit alone.”
But it does not want to be here, in this room set aside for “therapy” and for experts with words and without. It wants to be with the other asset. Wants to be napping, maybe. Or playing with the dog. Or walking in the park with the flying man. Or—
“And if it’s fear, know that I do not want to change you or control you. I only want for you to understand yourself, and to learn to understand others around you as well.”
It narrows the eyes. That sounds like it is a lie. Everyone wants to change it or control it. Even sometimes the other asset. The other asset wants it to look at glowing panels more, and to not kill anyone at all. The other asset wishes that it did not like vegetables and that it ate meat instead.
“I’m here to give you the tools necessary to do the work, but I can’t and won’t force you to use those tools. I’ll facilitate your work, but the work is yours to do or not do. I just hope you’ll put in the work.”
It stares at her, frozen with the paper and the scissors in the hands, hardly daring to move. It had almost forgotten that she was in the room before she spoke, had been so focused on the triangle bread and on the mushrooms. Had let the guard down. Does it want to do the work, if doing the work means letting the guard down in front of an expert without the words?
The “session” has gone by so fast, while it has been cutting up colorful paper and chapsticking it to other paper. Could all of the “sessions” go by this fast instead of dragging on for all of those minutes?
“Hey Jiggy,” the other asset says in greeting as it enters the room for assets. The other asset pauses the movement in the glowing panel and turns to look at it. “How’d it go?”
The other asset asked that the other times, too. The other asset really wants to know how the “sessions” go, and wants to make sure that no one has tried to take it back. The other asset cares deeply about the “sessions.”
It holds up one of the circles of triangle bread that it stuck together in the therapy room with the big tube of chapstick.
“Cool, I guess,” the other asset says with a confused frown. “You made construction paper pizza?”
It looks at the circle of paper triangle bread and then at the other asset. It nods.
It does not know how to explain the rest of it, what the expert without the words had said about work and fear and rebellion. And most of the two hours was spent making the triangle bread out of paper and sticky chapstick. So yes, that is what it did during the afternoon “session” today.
What will the expert without the words have for it in the morning? Or for tomorrow’s afternoon “session?” They cannot have more triangle bread, because there will be no triangle bread left by then and the feeder says that variety is good. So they will not get triangle bread again so soon.
Maybe they will make salads with the colorful paper shapes. Or they could make sandwiches by stacking paper shapes. Or burgers. There is a kind of burger that does not have any meat in it, and it does not taste the same as the meat burgers, but it also does not taste bad at all. It could cut out yellow potato sticks to go with the paper vegetable burger.
It sets the circles of paper on the table by the door where they will be out of the way, and then comes over to climb onto the sofa by the other asset. It taps the other asset’s ribs lightly with a finger and makes the question sign, a Y-shape pulled from the side of the head.
“Still hurting, same as the last billion times you’ve asked.” The other asset smiles to show that there is no hostility in the answer. “You remember how long it took my nose to heal after you broke it that time in Banner’s room. I’m not enhanced like you and Cap. I heal real slow.”
That is the truth. The other asset heals as though the other asset’s body does not know which way to put itself back together again. The ribs are still broken after a month. The nose is still tender after a month. The arm is still mostly useless after a month. A whole month.
If it had any reservations about coming back to the hive building instead of keeping the other asset with it out on the streets to complete missions together, it would have to give those up seeing how slowly the other asset heals. If they had not come back to the hive building, they would still be in hiding trying to heal up.
“You want to watch some of this show, or you want to switch it to the cake show?”
It looks at the panel. There is a woman in a bright red dress and a man in a white lab coat. It does not want to watch the woman in the red dress or the man in the white lab coat.
“Cake show, right?” the other asset guesses.
It nods and makes the sign for cake, and immediately feels bad for not even trying the finger letters for the word. There are two ways for it to say “cake” with the hands, and the evening expert who is helping it with finger shapes would want it to try to make all the finger shapes for the letters in the word.
“Cake show, it is,” the other asset says, pushing buttons on the control stick to put the cake show into the glowing panel.
The cake show lights up the panel, starting over at the beginning. It likes the cake show. It can watch the cake show for almost the whole time it is on before the show ends, without getting a headache. Even better, the other asset keeps the volume at zero for the cake show so that there is not any need to panic when the music starts playing too fast and the people in the panel who are making the cake start to get upset.
It can just watch them making cake and turning it into all sorts of other things. Party hats, like cones to wear on the head. Or purses like women wear in the streets. Or even buckets with sand and shovels inside them. Once, there was a machine that makes clothes, and it was made out of cake.
It signs to the other asset that there will be triangle bread later that night.
“Oh yeah?” the other asset says. “Cool. It’s been a while since we’ve had pizza. I’m thinking meat-lovers for mine. Sorry.”
It shakes the head. There is no need for the other asset to apologize. The other asset can have meat on the triangle bread. The other asset does not mind eating innocent creatures. Somehow, most of the team that is not a cell is fine with cooking and eating innocent creatures, but not with killing evil targets. It thinks that it will never understand.
Maybe this is what the expert was talking about earlier. To help it understand the others around it. It would like to understand.
In the meantime, there is cake to watch.
Chapter 3: Assets | And I do appreciate you being ‘round
Notes:
Running a touch late today, but here we are!
Chapter title from “Help!” by The Beatles.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Friday 24 August 2012 | 6:30 p.m.—
He watches his roommate out of the corner of his eye, pretty confident that he won’t be noticed. “Cake Off” is definitely attention-grabbing enough that there’s no risk of Jigsaw catching him not paying attention to the show.
Jigsaw has long since put his stuffed shark aside, the better to pay attention to the contestants trying to make cake look like a barnyard scene. And he’s not scrunched up in the corner of the sofa, but is sitting cross-legged on the cushion and leaning forward slightly as the cakes are assembled and decorated.
He’s definitely in better spirits than he was last time he came back from a session with his primary therapist. Yasmin seems nice, so it was only a matter of time before she got through to him. Maybe the arts and crafts helped. Or maybe it was the promise of pizza.
Yesterday, Jigsaw had come back with a stony expression that didn’t relax until they met with the speech therapist—Zoe. Clint never did find out what Jigsaw had hated so much about his two hours with Yasmin, and he’d been asleep for most of this morning’s far-too-early hour-long session with her, so he didn't get to see the outcome. Maybe Jigsaw was just upset it was two whole hours with her.
Three hours of therapy a day, every day of the week—that’d get on anyone’s nerves. And that’s not counting the food therapist, Caroline, or the speech therapist. Hell, Clint’s got Jigsaw’s therapy schedule on the door and he still can’t keep it straight without really concentrating. Part of that is that it’s only early days. They haven’t had a full week of this yet. But part of that is that there are just too many sessions with a therapist of some form or another.
Clint would object on Jigsaw’s behalf, but the others seem thrilled to have this setup, and Jigsaw himself seems determined to follow through on his agreement about the therapy. Clint figures they can try it for a month and then see about getting a little less therapy.
At least no one’s tried to point a therapist at him. He’d run.
Well, with his ribs and stuff, he’d amble off at a moderate pace, but he’d still get the hell away from any therapist who wanted to suck up three hours of his day, no matter how they wanted to split those hours up.
He brings the schedule to his mind. Morning sessions with Yasmin every day. Overkill, and too early in the morning, too. Afternoon sessions with Yasmin every day. Not only is that overkill, but two hours at a time is ridiculous. Then evening sessions with Zoe, where at least they’re working on fingerspelling and other useful things. Then Caroline still coming twice a week to talk about food.
Yeah, that’s just too much therapy.
And Cap’s got his own therapist, on top of that. At least Cap’s isn’t living in the Tower with them. There’s gotta be some separation between therapists and the people they’re therapizing.
Jigsaw waves a hand at him and then points to the screen, where the contestants’ final cakes are on display. It looks like a collection of barnyards on the judging table, not cakes. Clint’s always kind of in awe of how they do that over the course of forty minutes. Of course, he knows they have hours in the studio. But it’s still amazing.
“I like the one with the sheep,” he says. “All the fluffy little guys living their best sheep lives.”
Jigsaw signs “cow” at him and points again to the screen. And yeah, the cow cake is pretty cute, too.
In the end, the winner is not the one with the cutest barnyard critters, but the one with the best shingling on the barn itself. It’s also got some pretty neat-looking hay, Clint has to admit. If he were going to have a farm, he’d want nice shingles and hay in his barn.
Thankfully, he’ll never have to worry about having a farm. The closest he’ll need to worry about is that farmhouse that the team handed over to the FBI as a sort of apology for bungling the tracksuit mafia sting operations the FBI had been planning for months.
He hopes it turns out that the farm has some good HYDRA goons hiding on it, something to make sure the FBI is content with the exchange. Because they need to do something about the farm house, but aren’t nearly ready for Jigsaw to join them in the field, especially without Clint there onsite to remind him that they aren’t killing anyone.
Stupid ribs. Stupid arm. Stupid tracksuit mafia.
At least most of the tracksuit guys had survived. And with the kind of injuries that linger, so maybe there will be some thinking twice before reestablishing themselves in the same area. Clearly, “Ronin” took offense at them abducting Clint. So that would mean that New York is kind of Ronin territory, maybe, and that Clint is hopefully off limits now. He doesn’t want to have to watch his back. He’s terrible at doing that.
“Hey, you know that one lady you saved outside the bar?” Clint asks as the credits for the episode roll. “Same night you stabbed that guy in the ass seventeen times.”
Jigsaw perks up and signs “feed” before miming a braid, and Clint figures that’s about as close as they’ll be able to get to agreeing on who Monesha is.
“Yeah, she gave you a sandwich and stuff later on,” Clint says. Figures that would stand out to Jigsaw. “She wrote me a letter a while ago. It took forever to get to me, though. I only got it today.”
Jigsaw swivels on the sofa to give him his full attention, and Clint lifts the remote to turn the TV off. They aren’t up for watching too much “Cake Off” at once, anyway. There’s still a limit to how long Jigsaw can stare at a screen without getting irritable about it, even if what’s on the screen is cake.
“She helped Natasha and me when we were looking for you,” Clint says. “We told her we were going to get you help, and not lock you up. And she just wanted to know how that worked out. You know, since you’re not out there making your blood stars anymore.”
Clint shrugs. “I’m going to write back, let her know you’re safe, and tell her about all the therapy you have going on. You want me to include anything in the letter?”
Jigsaw ponders for a moment, and then gets out his pen and paper. So that’s a yes, just a yes with a bit of lag time. It generally takes him a while to write anything out.
It turns out that he’s drawing, instead. On one part of the paper is a picture of Lucky catching a ball, and a second picture shows a lady with braids holding a baseball bat over her shoulder. Between the two, he laboriously produces the word THANK in his shaky all-caps handwriting.
He tears off the sheet and hands it to Clint with a smile.
Clint studies the drawings. They’re in the same minimal style that somehow manages to convey form and movement with just a few lines. He remembers the ballerina and the spider that used to mean Natasha.
“Thanks,” Clint says. “I’ll make sure she gets this.”
Jigsaw thanks him with a sign and collects his shark to take to his room, presumably to take a nap in his pile of pillows.
Clint envies him the ability to just nap at any time and not seem to suffer for it later. If he tried napping, first of all the discomfort from his ribs would keep him awake once he got settled, but second off, he’d never manage to sleep later on. He already has enough trouble sleeping at night without risking a nap.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 24 August 2012 | 9:15 p.m.—
“Another trick we can use to help people understand what we mean when we can’t think of the sign for it, is to append a color sign.”
The expert with the signs demonstrates with “red,” her index finger coming up to dab at her chin twice.
“If we are talking about an apple and we can’t find the sign for it in our minds,” she says, “then we could do what?”
It knows the sign for apple, but it uses the hands to trace the sphere of an apple in the air, and then picks the air-apple and bites into it. It adds the sign for “red.”
“Exactly right. We can mimic the object we’re talking about. And we can add a color if that will help.” The expert with the signs nods her approval.
It does not mind the evening time with this expert. She is helping make sure others know what it is trying to say, and she has sweeping braids like the feeder with the braids before. The other asset comes with it, too, after dinner is over, though the other asset does not add anything to the conversation.
They talk about the green park, how it is different from the training room with its blue mats, but how both are places it might walk the dog with the flying man or with the other asset. They do not talk about how sometimes it cannot add a color because it cannot think of the word or sign for the color it is seeing.
But they did talk about that in last night’s “session.” The expert with the signs suggested that communication could be hard when the right words get stuck or were hiding somewhere, and it… It felt so understood. The expert with the signs knows how it can be, how it can think a thing so hard and yet not be able to sign it or draw it or write it.
“How was your communication today, Jigsaw?” asks the expert with the signs. “Did you encounter any roadblocks?”
It thinks about the cake show, about how it did not try to put the cake word into finger letters but instead signed the word with the claw-hand coming off of the flat palm. The expert with the signs had wanted it to try to finger spell some things today. It did not even try.
It will admit the failure. The expert with the signs can be trusted not to punish it, especially because the other asset is right here with it.
It signs “cake” and then puts the fingers into a C-shape. An A-shape. And then it does not know. There is a sound that makes a shape in the mouth when people say it, but there is no corresponding letter shape that it can make. It knows that the C-shape is wrong. “Cake” only begins with the C-shape. It does not have more than one C-shape.
“K,” says the expert with the signs, making the shape with her fingers. She waits for it to join her in making the shape, and then nods. “E,” she says, making the E-shape.
She slowly signs the letters one after another, the C, the A, the K, the E. It tries to follow along and cannot keep up. It loses her at the K-shape. That one does not like to stay in the mind.
“We’ll get there. Try it again.”
They spend a few minutes making finger letters for “cake” and then it is time to rehearse the colors. There is a rainbow of colors to go through, plus “pink” and “brown” and “black” and “white.” It only gets some of them wrong, though those are the same ones it got wrong the last time. It is hard to pull the right sign from the mind for the right color every time. It does not help that so many of them start with a B sound.
It should look at the other asset and use the other asset’s signs as a clue to what it should be signing, but that is not the way to do it, it knows. The other asset is not there to help it remember, but to keep it company.
“Tomorrow night, we’ll go over emotion words,” the expert with the signs says. “I have some colorful rocks for you to use, and also a chart you can have.”
It nods. There will be colorful rocks tomorrow, which it is looking forward to. And a chart, which it is not looking forward to. Charts are hard to read, combining the worst parts of maps with the worst parts of regular writing. There is nothing good about charts. The rocks, though…
They stop in the big kitchen to eat some of the remaining triangle bread, because it has done well with the expert with the signs, and also because it needs to eat a snack in the evenings. The feeder says that it should eat a snack in the mornings before meeting with the expert without the words, and also a snack after meeting with the expert with the signs, and also a snack in the afternoons between eating lunch with the other asset and meeting with the expert without the words again for the longer “session.”
It would have exhausted all of its local targets getting so many good food rewards every day, but now that it has so many “sessions” to be cooperative for, it can earn all of the food rewards without targets at all.
It still gives the team a target every day, though. Maybe they will act on one of the targets. It now has a whole country map to put targets on. The map is inside of a glowing panel, and it “zooms.” If it touches the map with the flesh hand, the map gets bigger inside the panel. The more it touches the map, the bigger the map gets until it does not get any bigger and it can jab a finger at a target and put an empty star on it. The targets that have been handled get filled in, red.
It has been giving the team that is not a cell targets in the original territory, lately, all the D.C. safehouses and fronts. The drop offs. There is a big empty star on the Triskelion, and it will not take the star off even if the woman in white argues that the target is no longer active as a target. The man with the eyepatch who used to be a someday target, he is supposed to be worrying about that one. But it still gets a star.
There are a lot of filled-in red stars in the original territory, because the other asset insisted they mark its previous mission completions as well as the targets going forward. But there are also empty stars, targets yet to be dispatched, safehouses waiting to be raided, fronts ready to be exposed for what they are and the occupants to be dealt with if they are complicit.
The strict woman with the bun has sent folder after folder of pictures for it to look at, also, “personnel records.” It looks at a folder every day and draws little stars on all of the pictures it recognizes, or the pictures with the names it recognizes. Some days there are no stars at all, and other days there are stars for almost every personnel record in the folder.
It does not know every HYDRA operative by name or by face, but it knows many of them.
Some of them it has only seen a few times, or has only seen as part of a mission briefing of who it might encounter while in the field, who are the “friendlies” it is to be sure to obey in the field or not interfere with. These ones are HYDRA, but they are usually lower down in the ranks. Still worth killing.
Others, it knows very, very well. Some of the others have worked on the metal arm, or have been present when it was time for the agents to get their dicks out and push into it, or have pushed into it themselves. Some of them even have letters in the skin, or were allowed to carve the tallies—the five and the five and the five and the two. The seventeen tallies.
Most of these are already dead, though. It hunted them down in the original hunting grounds and eliminated them. Sliced and sliced and emptied out their insides and sliced them up so small.
All of them, though, all of them that it recognizes get the stars. It is part of a process called “vetting” that is supposed to make S.H.I.E.L.D. a better organization without any of the HYDRA rot inside of it.
It likes looking at the pictures and drawing the stars where there is rot to be cut out of the organization. The strict woman with the bun also likes to send and receive the pictures. It is a part of the mission, the exchange of pictures.
“You think you’re up for some Fantastic Plumber Siblings tonight?” the other asset asks around a bite of refreshed triangle bread.
More work looking at glowing panels, not as easy as the pictures. Soon everything will be a glowing panel, when the glass and metal square the hamburger technician is working on is complete. It will miss the pads of paper and the pens. It is on the second pen already, and this one is purple.
It does not remember the signs for the part that is held in the hands with the buttons and rolling parts on it. But the expert with the signs is right that it can mime what it wants to say.
It pretends that it is the asset that is holding the piece of equipment that moves the tiny man in the glowing panel, and then taps the chest.
“Sure, we can both play.” The other asset takes another slice of triangle bread and bites into it while it is still cold from the refrigerator. “You want to be Martin or Louis?”
The red one. It likes to be the little man in red, not green. It signs “red,” the fingertip pulled down from the chin, and laughs so silently when the other asset pretends to pout with lips pursed to the side.
“Fine, I guess. I’ll be Louis.”
That it has been able to detect, the only non-color difference between the red man and the green man is that the red man goes first and the green man second. And if only the other asset is playing the game that has no terrible rewards or fun attached, then the other asset picks the red man.
It finishes its current slice of refreshed triangle bread and looks in the box for another one. Round meat, round meat, meat sphere, ah. Mushrooms and olives and green peppers. It takes that slice. There are no more of the slices that have only vegetables and no meat on them. This will have to be the last part of the nighttime snack.
Clint
—New York City | Friday 24 August 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
To say that his roommate is playing Fantastic Plumber Siblings is something of an overstatement. What Jigsaw is actually doing is exploring the level and trying not to fall through any holes in the floor or run into any of the mushrooms or turtles. He’s meandering through, taking his time, seeing all the nooks and crannies the game developers put in there. If anyone is going to find a hidden Easter egg, it’ll be Jigsaw.
Clint gives Lucky’s ears a scratch while he waits for Jigsaw’s turn to end.
Jigsaw’s turns generally take a while, since he’s, well… Clint gives a mental shrug, careful not to show his thoughts outwardly. It isn’t that Jigsaw is still getting used to the controls, or that he doesn’t have good hand-eye coordination for gaming. It’s that he’s still amazed something he does with the controller in his hands actually translates to what’s happening on the screen.
Maybe he’s still coming to terms with the idea that he is controlling Martin, the red-suited of the plumber siblings. Jigsaw’s not used to controlling others, but he sure is used to being controlled. Maybe even like the character on the screen, following every twitch of an instruction from a handler the way the character on the screen obediently plummets to his death with an errant nudge of the controller’s buttons.
“My turn?” Clint asks, like he wasn’t watching Martin collect the last of the coins before leaping headlong into a pit of spikes.
That’s another thing about playing with Jigsaw. Jigsaw always kills his little red-suited dude when he’s had enough of a certain level. Never completes the level, though he’ll face the boss at the end sometimes and die in the fight. He just wants to play around in the boxes of hidden coins and the sand or clouds or water or whatever the level consists of.
Jigsaw puts his controller down on the coffee table and squeezes closer to Lucky on the sofa, draping an arm over the dog’s side and gently stroking the fur.
“Right then. Louis is up to bat.”
It’s pretty late to be playing another level, but Clint starts it anyway. Technically, Jigsaw has to be up by… Clint thinks. By 6:30 to meet with his primary therapist. Or maybe it’s 7. Either way, he should definitely be trying to get some sleep now instead of staying up watching Clint play video games—literally now, because he’s looking at Clint’s hands and not the screen.
But while a good roommate would remind him of his morning obligations, Clint is not a good roommate. He is an enabling roommate. Or maybe Jigsaw is the one enabling him right now, instead of chasing him to bed. Because Clint should be going to bed if he’s going to “rest up” and let his ribs and arm and nose heal from the tracksuit mafia’s tender loving care about a month ago.
But resting up means all kinds of moving around right now. He’d have to get off the sofa. He’d have to put the controllers away, he’d have to go to his bedroom and take his shirt and pants off for bed. Thankfully he’s been able to make do with slippers this past month and doesn’t have to bend over and untie any sneakers. But the rest?
…Alright, he’s definitely not going to put the controllers away. What’s he even thinking with that? But the rest, he’d have to do. And the shirt is a button-up so it’ll come off easy, and the pants are some nice baggy sweats he had to dig out of the bottom of a pile of much tighter yoga pants, so they’ll come off easy, too.
But getting up will be a literal pain all through his torso, and he can just sit here until he absolutely has to go lie down.
He’ll just wake up with the dog on his legs, anyway, and maybe a stuffed shark in his arms, the sign that he’s had a nightmare. And maybe there’ll be a roommate curled up at his side, which is still a thing that happens sometimes when he wakes up in the middle of the night because it’s too damn hot in the room.
Jigsaw is like a humanoid radiator. Though thankfully, he hasn’t sprawled out on top of him since that first time however many weeks ago, because he’s also heavy as hell, and that would not be nice on Clint’s healing ribs.
Part of him wonders whether Jigsaw will sprawl on top of him after his ribs finish healing, if he’s only waiting for the opportunity. Part of him wonders why Jigsaw even sleeps on top of his bed at all, since it can’t be comfortable to contort himself into whatever shape will fill the space without jostling him enough to wake him up. Part of him wonders what Jigsaw gets out of it, because he’s got his own bedroom with its floor mattress and piles of pillows.
And a big part of him is sure that Jigsaw and Lucky are the reason he is able to sleep deeply enough that they can join him in some kind of weird pile. Because he still has nightmares, but they get interrupted more often than not by a protective shadow that keeps the Loki in his dreams from getting his way in the end. And he manages to sleep pretty well afterward.
At least until it’s time to drag himself out of bed for breakfast and do the whole day over again.
Notes:
It's still early days with Zoe, but they'll be working toward some good stuff once she finishes assessing where he is language expression-wise!
Content Warning: Jiggy spends some time reflecting on how he knows various HYDRA agents, which of course includes a note about the HTP happenings of the past, especially regarding being "pushed into" and all that.
Chapter 4: Assassins | Take my picture now (shake it ‘til you see it)
Notes:
Happy Mother's Day to anyone who feels like celebrating it. ^_^
Chapter title from “House of Memories” by Panic! At The Disco.
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 8:00 a.m.—
It cradles the camera in both hands as it makes its way back to the rooms that are for assets.
Five things that make it feel happy. It has to make a picture of five of those things. The expert without the words showed it how to hold the camera up to the eye, how to look through the little glass rectangle at the things, and how to press the button to make whatever it sees through the rectangle into a picture, a photograph.
It remembers the time the team that is not a cell showed it pictures of targets, all lined up on the ground against a wall and zip-tied so that they could be handed over to the FBI. They thought it would be happy to see the pictures, but it was just frustrated because none of the targets lined up against the wall were dead. That means they might all be free now, running around spreading their evil and hurting innocents.
The camera presses into the palm and fingers of the flesh hand, and it loosens its grip on the camera.
It must not break the camera. This is not like the hamburger technician’s “tablet,” where the hamburger technician is happy that it breaks so that he can make a new, better one. There is only the one camera that will spit out a photograph in hard copy with the press of a button.
Five things that make it happy.
Some of those things will be easy to pick and to make a picture of. The dog. The other asset. The food that they will eat for breakfast, or maybe the food they will eat for lunch. It will make a picture of the nest where it piles all of the pillows and the bedding, all the wonderful soft things to sleep in and under. That is only four things to make pictures of, though.
Maybe it will be able to make a picture of the map inside the glowing panel, with all of the stars. Killing HYDRA and similar targets makes it very happy. But while the map shows its previous missions with their red-star satisfaction, there are also some new red stars where the target was not properly dispatched, and some empty star outlines where the target is still available to be erased from the world.
That does not make it very happy at all. The map inside the glowing panel should be full of filled-in red stars, not empty star outlines. The team that is not a cell is doing more than before, but not yet enough. So the map will not work for the homework.
It will have to carry the camera around until it finds a fifth thing that makes it happy. Because all five photographs have to be made before the afternoon “session.”
Maybe it should not have agreed to cut out colorful paper vegetables to chapstick onto the round papers to look like triangle bread. Maybe by doing that, it has broken a fence that had been keeping the expert without the words at bay. Now that the fence is broken, she can give it “homework” to do, tasks assigned to it that must be completed before seeing her again.
It does not get to greet the dog when it opens the door to the rooms that are for assets, because the dog is not there. The leash bowl is empty, so the flying man is still walking the dog. That is too bad. It was going to make a picture of the dog right away. But the dog will have to wait until later.
In the meantime, there is its own nest to make a picture of, and the other asset will still be sleeping in the other room because it is still early in the day and the other asset does not like mornings. This may be the perfect time to make a picture of the other asset—safely sleeping without any horrible night images. Or the other asset might want to be looking the very best that is possible for a picture.
It sets the camera down on the table, so safe from breaking, and goes to arrange the piles of soft things so that the horrible baggy pants are all on the bottom, out of sight and hard to get to.
It is a daily task, sorting through the piles and making sure that the right soft things are available be grabbed off the top of the pile. Every day, the other asset digs through the piles looking for the horrible baggy pants, but sometimes the other asset gives up and wears better pants, pants that are snugger and hug the other asset's legs so beautifully. The other asset has very, very good legs.
Sometimes it thinks about really hiding the horrible baggy pants, putting them somewhere the other asset will not find them. But if the other asset keeps looking for them, then they must be things that make the other asset happy to wear, so it does not hide them. Just puts them out of reach.
It wonders if the other asset has five happy things, how the other asset would do with the “homework” it has been assigned. Maybe it is among the five things that make the other asset happy. That would be nice, to be the same in that, to make each other happy.
Natasha
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be, Clint,” Natasha says before taking a sip of her tea while Jigsaw studies her from across the kitchen island.
She doesn’t regret waiting to eat breakfast with Clint and Jigsaw after everyone else finished in the main dining room. It gives her time to be around both of them together—which is fascinating to watch—and frees her from some of the more tedious breakfast conversations the main gathering have to suffer through.
She does wish that she didn’t feel so watched the whole time, though.
“Not as bad? Not as—” Clint gestures with a forkful of eggs and inevitably drops some scrambled egg on the counter.
He irritably shoves the rest of the forkful into his mouth while Jigsaw reaches over to snatch the fallen morsel, his movements still so uncannily liquid that she’s not sure she saw him move at all. It’s not a surprise, though. Rare is the bit of non-meat food that drops without being rescued and eaten by Jigsaw.
“‘Tasha, I’m supposed to be resting,” Clint says around his bite. “Recuperating. Taking it easy. Not mingling with my one adoring fan.”
Clint exchanges his fork for his coffee mug and scowls into it. “If she’s even an adoring fan at all and didn’t just buy up my time out of pity because no one else wanted it,” he mutters, bitter as his coffee.
Natasha rolls her eyes and scoops up some of her fruit with her spoon—nectarines and strawberries this morning, some of Jigsaw’s favorites, as is evidenced by the lack of any left in the serving bowl while there is still a plate of toast available. Usually he saves finishing off the fruit for the end, but if it's nectarines, peaches... Those don't linger.
“At the minimum rate your time was set at,” she says, “no one would buy eight hours worth out of pity.”
It’s true there was a lot less action on Clint’s time in the auction than on the rest of their time; just the one bid, in fact. But Kate Bishop’s bid was staggeringly high. So high that she’d be guaranteed to be the winner of at least a few of Clint’s eight hours without having to keep circling back to rebid.
Which had come in handy since the in-person bidding had been interrupted by the HYDRA attack on the Tower. A lot of the earlier bids weren’t challenged later in the night, despite Stark’s app for the auction. That’s meant they raised less than they anticipated raising, but with Stark Industries matching it, they still brought in a sizeable amount to go toward rebuilding the homes and livelihoods of the City’s less fortunate.
Bishop is certainly not among those less fortunate. Her background checks out, though, which is more than Natasha can say for some of the bidders on the others’ time. Bishop comes from money and is a straight-A university student and president of the university fencing club. She’s got martial arts training. And while she’s only recently picked up archery, it’s likely she’ll be an expert before long based on her track record.
There’s no reason to believe she bought Clint’s time out of anything but a desire to spend time with him, probably for archery lessons.
Natasha risks taking another piece of toast from the stack under Jigsaw's watchful gaze and smears some jam on it, managing to be casual about the whole thing despite feeling Jigsaw’s eyes on her from the moment she moves toward the communal food.
Just one of the hazards of eating at the kitchen island with Jigsaw and Clint—Jigsaw’s eager enough to share whatever is his, but he’s less eager when unclaimed things are taken from the serving plates after the first round of portions have been distributed, like he's worried there won't be enough.
“She just wants archery lessons, is my guess,” Natasha says, knowing that her “guesses” about people’s intentions are better than most people’s facts, especially when paired with JARVIS’s background information.
“And who better to get them from than you, Clint?” Natasha asks. “Jigsaw, back me up here.”
Jigsaw obligingly, if somewhat awkwardly, signs that Clint is the very best at archery, following that up by insisting that it is a true statement.
Natasha remembers Jigsaw watching Clint in the range shooting arrows for four hours straight. He would insist that Clint was the best, and he’d be entirely earnest in his assessment. It helps that Clint really is the best.
Clint sighs and pushes his remaining piece of sausage around his plate with the last bite of his toast. “You haven’t even seen anyone else with a bow and arrow, Jiggy. But thanks.”
Jigsaw scowls for a moment and then repeats that Clint is the best. Then he pats his own ribs and left elbow and winces.
Natasha takes it to mean that Clint is still the best despite his recent injuries, or that Clint is only not currently training because of the injuries and will soon return to actively being the best.
“That’s right,” she says. “You haven’t lost your touch or anything. And you don’t have to demonstrate until you’re cleared to. She’ll be happy enough to have you correct her stance and suggest improvements to her grip.”
“I don’t need a pep talk, guys.” Clint drinks the last of his coffee. “I know I’m good. I just— Hell, I haven’t worn real shoes in a month because it hurts to bend over that far. I don’t want to get dressed up to meet the public.”
“You’d rather put it off another week and keep wallowing instead?” Natasha asks, knowing that the answer is definitely a yes. “Jigsaw can put your shoes on for you. He’ll even tie them.”
Jigsaw nods and holds the egg dish with the last of the scrambled eggs out to her, presumably to make sure she’s had enough before he finishes it.
Natasha gestures that it’s all his, and then watches as he does indeed polish off the last of the eggs—a full helping’s worth and his third this morning.
Jigsaw pauses long enough to sign “socks” and then resumes eating.
“There, see? He’ll put your socks on your feet, too.”
Clint tips his head back and looks at the ceiling. “Fine. I’ll accept the meeting request.” He groans. “But only because you’ll keep nagging me until I finally do it.”
Natasha grins. Success.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
It is so happy.
Not only has the other asset agreed to go to the green park with it so they can do fetching on the grass, but the other asset also has not dug around in the piles of soft things all over the living room of the rooms for assets. Instead, the other asset is wearing nice and snug-fitting pants and a purple button shirt for going to the green park.
And did not complain too loudly about it, either, as the elevator took them down to the ground floor.
This way it can make the pictures of the other asset and the dog where everyone is happy to be there, and the green park will be in the pictures, too, which is another thing that makes it happy.
The hive building is a very nice place to be, full of soft things and food, and not a prison now that it can go anywhere it wants to go. But being out of the hive building is nicer than being in it. If it does not go outside of the hive building for too long, it misses the breeze against the skin face and the way it can smell all of the things in the green park and the way it feels to walk on grass instead of hard flooring.
The flying man gets to go outside every day, twice a day, to take the dog for a walk. Sometimes it goes with them, but now that it has to have so many “sessions” with the experts, it misses the morning walks and sometimes the evening ones, too.
But that is a thing that makes it unhappy, and so it will not focus on that right now. Instead, it is time to unhook the dog’s leash and let the dog run around on the grass, and to accept the camera from the other asset so that it can begin to make the pictures it needs to give to the expert without the words.
“So you wanted to snap a photo of Lucky out here, huh? That’s your therapy homework? Pictures?” The other asset walks over to a nearby bench and slowly sits, obviously still aching.
The other asset looks so good and proper, sitting there with the snug-fitting pants and the purple button shirt. It does not even mind that the button shirt has long sleeves that obscure the other asset’s arms and shoulders. It is at least not a baggy hood shirt.
It holds up the camera, dares to put the camera to the skin face, and looks through the rectangle. Nothing jabs at the eye as it does so, nothing puffs air at the eye or squirts anything into the eye. The camera is safe still, just like it was before.
It takes a few steps back as the other asset frowns at it, steps back until all of the other asset is in the rectangle, and then lowers the camera. The other asset is frowning, and that is not happy. It signs “smile” with the one hand only, not daring to put the camera down on the grass where it could be broken. It only has the one camera.
The other asset gives it a confused smile, the eyes still frowning, but the lips pulled up in a bow. The other asset has nice lips, with a little scar on the one side of the mouth. The scar is new, from the tracksuit men, but it does not mind the scar at all, and it has not seen or heard the other asset minding it, either. A scar is just proof of resilience, of surviving bad times. The other asset is resilient, a survivor.
It raises the camera and pushes the button.
Just like with the practice picture that morning with the expert without the words, the camera makes its noise and the piece of paper comes out of the bottom, looking dark and blurry with a thin white border around the top and sides, and a thick white border on the bottom.
It takes the paper the rest of the way out of the camera and wiggles it in the air the way it has seen the expert with the words wiggle the practice picture, and the picture of the other asset on the bench gradually becomes clearer and clearer. The other asset looks so small in the picture. It will make another one, from closer. The other asset’s feet and lower legs will be cut off, but the rest of the other asset will be bigger and easier to see. It is an acceptable exchange.
“What, another one?”
It nods and waits for the other asset to make the confused smile face again, and the eyes frown a little less this time, but they still do frown. It pushes the button anyway. Only the other asset’s eyes are frowning. The rest of the other asset’s face is mostly a smile, mostly happy, if a bit confused.
It wiggles the new paper until the other asset appears, and this one is much better. It shows the other asset.
“Am I your homework, too, or did you just need evidence that I still clean up okay after I’ve been in slob mode for a month?”
The head tilts in confusion of its own. Slob mode? What is slob mode? Something about cleaning and not cleaning. The other asset is shaving the face occasionally, cleaning off the stubble. Wearing different clothes almost every day, even if there are many repeats of the same clothes. Eating meals and drinking coffee without worrying about rewards. Is slob mode not wearing shoes? The shoes do not matter. The other asset has what are called slippers that are fuzzy and soft, and much better than shoes for the kind of activities the other asset has been performing lately. How is any of that different from before the tracksuit men?
“That’s it, isn’t it?” The other asset frowns. “‘Tasha set you a task, too, since you have the camera for your homework. Prove Clint Barton isn’t a total slob.”
There it is again. Slob. What is slob?
It hands the camera and the pictures to the other asset for safekeeping and folds up the legs to sit on the grass. It signs “homework” and “happy” and holds up five fingers on the flesh hand. It makes the dog’s name sign, an L-shape tapped against the hip, and then the other asset’s name sign, an H-shape against the forehead. Then “eating” and “nest.” It holds up four fingers. Those are four of the things that make it happy. Four of the homework pictures.
The other asset squints at it as the dog returns from running around. The dog licks the skin face and bumps into the shoulder, and then sits beside it. It gives the dog a thumbs-up. The dog is a good dog and it is never a bad time to remind the dog of this.
“So you have to find five happy things for your homework,” the other asset says slowly, “and I’m one of them?”
It nods with a smile. The other asset is definitely one of the five things that make it happy.
“I rank up there with Lucky? And food? And your pillow fort in your room?” The other asset sounds as though this is unbelievable, as though it is telling a lie. “And here I thought I was just the first of your ‘same as’ group.”
That is not possible. The other asset is perceptive. The other asset would have been able to tell that assets are the same as each other even more than anything else could be the same as it. It signs “the same as,” the Y-shape moving between the shoulder and the other asset. They are the same as each other. Two assets, with two sets of tac gear, and two killing faces, and both of them controlled by evil before they met.
The same, the same, the same.
The other asset ponders this for a moment, and then returns the sign. They are the same.
The other asset raises the camera up and looks through the rectangle at it. “I want a picture of you and Lucky. Do you mind?”
It shakes the head and puts an arm around the dog. Smiles. The dog turns its head and licks the skin face and the camera makes its noise.
The other asset wiggles the resulting paper and then laughs. “I got it. Perfect timing.”
It holds out the hand for the picture, and then sees that the other asset made a picture of the moment when the dog was licking the skin face. It smiles. That is a good picture. The other asset is so skilled, to make a picture that good on the first try.
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 2:30 p.m.—
Steve puts the finishing touches on his report to S.W.O.R.D.—all is well, therapy is progressing smoothly, no incidents—and sits back in his chair at his drafting desk.
It’s not a complete lie. All is currently well, regardless of how it was going a month ago when they were scrambling to get Jigsaw back. Therapy seems to be progressing smoothly as far as he can tell, which is not at all because none of Jigsaw’s therapists report to him. The only incident to report is the Ronin incident from last month that they very carefully aren’t reporting.
So for the current situation, it’s completely accurate. It just continues to maintain radio silence about the Ronin thing and skims over some gaps in the reporting structure.
Steve could have just called up Arsenio, his contact at S.W.O.R.D., and made his report over the phone with him. But it’s far easier to lie by omission on paperwork than it is to do in person. No offhand comments to reveal an omission, no idle curiosity about specifics, and plenty of time to come up with appropriate answers whenever a follow-up question comes along.
He skims over the report one more time, checking for any inconsistencies that might come back to bite them, and then sends it along.
They’ve only been sending reports since after the auction, when S.W.O.R.D. reached out to verify that “the weapon” was secure in light of the breach in the Tower roof. His relief at having Jigsaw and Clint back had warred with his rage at his friend being referred to as a weapon, and he'd been unsure how to respond.
Natasha had helped him with that first report, creatively phrasing the truth so that it appeared Jigsaw was uninvolved in the Ronin incidents that followed. There’d been no need to even mention Clint’s run-in with the tracksuit mafia, or his injuries. Their attempt to track down Jigsaw in the aftermath of the auction was turned into an attempt to secure the Tower and chase down the perpetrators in order to defend Jigsaw.
Arsenio hadn’t challenged it.
In fact, Steve isn’t one hundred percent certain that Arsenio is reading the weekly reports at all. But Steve keeps sending them. They don’t want to inspire S.W.O.R.D. to send an agent to check on things in person. Jigsaw has accepted the premise of S.W.O.R.D. authority, but that’s different from being confronted by the reality of it in the form of a person coming to demonstrate authority.
And with his report sent, he has a few minutes before it’s time to assemble for their team meeting.
Steve closes the laptop and sets it aside. He could sketch a bit, try to work through some of his homework from Dr Linda. But he’d rather be in a better mood for the team meeting. Maybe a sudoku, then. He’s not putting off his homework. He will draw the scenes and ponder his emotional responses. Just when he has a stretch of time available for it.
There’s a knock at the door before he gets more than three numbers added to the sudoku grid, and Steve sets the puzzle book aside to go answer the door.
“Sam,” he says in greeting once the door is open. He smiles. “Come on in.”
“You get your reporting done already?” Sam asks.
Steve nods and closes the door. “Just in time, yeah. Anything come up you’d like to add? I can always send an amended report.”
“Nah, just coming to see you before the team meeting.” Sam sits on one side of the sofa and flips through the book of crossword puzzles on the coffee table. “Was wondering, actually. You and Bruce have been cooking a bit. Wondered if you wanted to try making some pie with me some time.”
Steve grins. “Sure. What kind of pie?”
Sam shrugs. “I’ve got a few recipes on my phone. I’m thinking fruit, though, since it’s summer and all. Cherry, maybe.”
Steve imagines a bowl of cherries, the both of them reaching into the bowl to take out individual cherries to slice in half and scoop the pit out of. Maybe their fingers would brush against each other in the bowl. And maybe they could try one of those lattice tops for the pie. Those look fun.
“Cherry pie sounds great,” Steve says. “We used to make apple pie sometimes. Now it’s just a cliché thing about America, but it was a lot of fun then.”
“You and Bucky?” Sam asks.
He shakes his head. “Ma and me. She’d handle the cutting and rolling out the crust, but I would mix things up and pour them in. I guess you can say my ma would make apple pie and I would help.”
“That counts as making, in my book,” Sam says with a smile full of warmth.
Steve doubts he will ever get tired of seeing Sam's smile. He can't wait to make that pie.
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
“So S.W.O.R.D. still hasn’t made any connection between Jiggy and Ronin?” Clint asks. “Not that I mind, or anything. We don’t want them drawing that line. I’m just wondering.”
Cap shakes his head. “I haven’t heard anything connecting them, no. I’m not even sure they’re reading the reports I send.”
“So they could be connecting the dots,” Stark says, “only they’re waiting to spring it on us.”
“What purpose would that serve?” Banner asks.
Stark shrugs. “Just being paranoid. Someone’s gotta do it.”
Yeah, well, if someone tries to link Jigsaw to Ronin, Clint is going to step up and take the blame for all of it. He’s got enough of the police reports memorized that he can accurately describe all of “his” actions on the days and nights the crimes took place. It would serve him right for even keeping the gear in his closet, and for not getting caught the first time Ronin rode the New York City skyline.
And it’s not like the tracksuit mafia would refute his claims. They’d be too terrified of the real Ronin paying them a visit to remind them to keep their mouths shut. Even though the real Ronin is Clint himself.
Or maybe Jigsaw is kind of Ronin as well now. They share the role, both having worn the mantle, and both having swung the sword. All of that. Now they aren’t just both assets, they’re both Ronin. He… Hell, he kind of likes the sound of that. Maybe he should get his head checked. There's enough therapists in the Tower for it, anyway.
Jigsaw had looked so good in the Ronin gear, too. And he doesn't think all of that was just because he was coming to Clint’s rescue, either. But just… in general. Fierce and lithe and flexible and all of those things, and armed to the teeth, and vicious. But also merciful enough to leave the tracksuit bros alive, if the definition of merciful gets stretched a little.
There’s not much merciful about getting hands cut off and knees shot out and spleens hacked up, after all. But it’s better than death.
“And do we have anything to actually show Jigsaw about our progress?” Natasha asks. “Or is it more what he’s showing us about his progress?”
Right, because of the pictures thing he has going on with Maria Hill. They’ve found what, a dozen HYDRA connections just through Jigsaw combing through personnel files? And all of them lower down personnel. Not outright operatives, but cleaning staff like that one janitor, Morrison, or data scientist types. One of the medical staff, if Clint’s remembering right.
Every batch of new applicants they get goes through Jigsaw now, and that includes the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel trying to get reinstated. Jigsaw isn’t a perfect vetting system, but he’s a nice added layer of security for background checking. He’s seen a lot of HYDRA agents in his time, seen a lot of records and files, heard a lot of names and voices. And he remembers all of that better than should be possible. Super soldiers.
Eventually, he’ll run out of information, though. Eventually, the people filtering back in to S.H.I.E.L.D. will be unknowns even to him. Eventually, HYDRA will get some people past his radar. But until then, it’s a nice way to spend part of his afternoon, and Hill seems to like Jigsaw more and more as the days go by. Clint thinks it's because Jigsaw is both eager to do the work and not able to add quips to the exchange.
“It’s mostly Jigsaw and his stars, honestly.” Stark looks sour about that. “We’re picking up a lot of good stuff on our surveillance, but it’s never enough to do more than pass it along to the police or the FBI, depending on how spread out the target is.”
Clint suppresses a sigh. Eventually, they’ll need to just act on something and get in trouble with the local authorities for it, or else Jigsaw will start thinking about going out and doing his own work again. They don’t need that, really.
“Now, if we could just raid a place that our murder bunny has put a juicy red star on,” Stark continues, “we could get somewhere. Just a little ice cream shop again, or a skating rink, or a shopping mall.”
Cap shakes his head. “We’re already on the FBI’s shit list for breaking their sting operation on the tracksuit mafia. We don’t want to also be in hot water with the police.”
“Jiggly-bear did more to stop the tracksuits than the FBI was ever going to do,” Stark mutters, “and he did it alone. No offense, Bartonio. But you weren’t much help.”
“I was a sack of potatoes,” Clint says with a grimace. “I was the opposite of helpful.”
And it still galls him that they got the jump on him like that and he was good for, what, good for suggesting that Jigsaw not kill the lot of them. That’s about it. Well, and he managed to talk Jigsaw into coming home. But that’s still small fries in the big picture.
Natasha puts a hand on his arm in commiseration. “You got him home. You brought him back in.”
“You were bait,” Stark says lightly, clearly making an effort not to offend. “Just in a different way than planned.”
Clint sighs. They aren’t wrong. He’s really just good for bait some days.
Tony
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 4:30 p.m.—
Tony enters his lab and surveys his kingdom. In here, he has all the power. But he still can’t go after HYDRA.
He’s tired of waiting for some target to slip up badly enough to become a target they can act on. Sure, he’s got a whole database of potentially HYDRA operatives courtesy of their murder hobo, and sure, every one of his targets from the list had turned out to be legitimately HYDRA so far. But apparently they can’t just act on Jigsaw’s knowledge without some kind of proof beforehand or things could go really wrong.
Bah.
Tony wants to suit up and ship out, starting at the Tower and spiraling his way outward throughout the whole of New York, taking out all of Jigsaw’s targets whether he has to blast the door down or not. He wants to treat the whole of HYDRA the way he treated that encampment of the Ten Rings. He wants to burn it all to the ground.
It’s horrible having to wait because “cooler heads” are prevailing.
Those cooler heads’ parents weren’t killed by HYDRA in a car crash. They didn’t lose their moms at seventeen the way Tony lost his. Some of those cooler heads might even be in HYDRA’s employ.
Not the ones in the Avengers or anything. But the government would do best to welcome HYDRA-cleanup services to sweep through their ranks and dox each and every HYDRA-loving one of their members. Make room for the very few decent eggs in the government. But even the politicians who aren’t currying favor with HYDRA are afraid to lose power, so nothing’s going to be done beyond the doxxing that followed the S.H.I.E.L.D. file leak.
So that leaves them, possibly able to go after dozens of targets, but sitting on their hands instead. Because if they do get it wrong, it’s a public relations disaster, and probably three or four other kinds of disaster on top of that. Better safe than sorry.
It’s just that Jigsaw hasn’t been wrong, has he? Every one of his hits has been a complete sleazeball bastard. Everyone he’s brutally ax-murdered has deserved it, either for what they’ve done to him or what they were doing or about to do to someone else.
And with a track record like that… Surely they can invest a little trust in his target list and go after some of these people, right?
Tony sighs, and then plays a quick game of eeny-meeny before picking up the tablet project to work on. He has plenty of time to perfect the apps on it, and plenty of prototypes of the hardware to make sure that things run okay. Because Jigsaw might find a way to break most of his hardware, but the real reason the tablet isn’t taking off is Jigsaw’s reluctance to look at the things too long.
Tony doesn’t know the way around that. It’s not a design flaw, it’s a user problem. He can’t make an electric screen any less of an electric screen, and Red October hasn’t shown any more fondness for holo screens than for physical screens. The best they’ve managed is a fifty-minute stretch of Cake Off before he rejects screens for hours at a time.
Based on his examination of the contents of the red Winter Soldier manual, Tony knows this is just a case of Jigsaw retaining old programming and not being able to get past it. But it’s been months since Tony first tried to get him to look at a TV monitor, and they’ve only gotten fifty minutes at a time of progress. That’s with Barton playing video games and some show about cake. And therapy.
But maybe the therapy hasn’t touched the tablet-screen thing yet. There’s a whole lot to go through on the therapy list. Maybe modern day technology isn’t high up on the list. And who’s he to complain about that? It just gives him more time to work on those food apps.
There are apps already out there that go over foods. Pictures and naming of foods, all that. But mostly they’re full of calorie counters and recipe ideas, and Tony is not going there. That’s not his job. The only thing he knows about Jigsaw and calories is that the man could always use more. And recipes? Yeah, no.
And he’s interviewed Zoe, the speech therapist, and those things are not what she’s working on with him, anyway. No. She wants matching games and category games and name-that-picture games. She wants word searches and crossword puzzles and different fonts on the keyboard. But not baby-style.
All Caroline wants is an electronic version of her food books. Those, he’s already got programmed, though he hasn’t downloaded them to Jigsaw’s tablet yet. He wants to finish getting some nice vector art of the remaining foods of the world before he pushes out the app. He has all of the current tiles that Caroline gave him to use as patterns, but there are still more to add.
Tony sits down at his programming station and pulls up his work on the latest matching game—animals. Jigsaw loves those things. And Tony can see why, even if a lot of them are tastier than they are cute, or else not worth much of anything.
Like turtles. What’s the deal with turtles? But there’s a lot of different kinds of them, and tortoises as well, and Zoe wants a whole level that deals with the two categories. Why? Tony has no idea. But apparently, it’s important that he be able to distinguish different turtles and tortoises from each other in this matching game, and that will help him communicate. Somehow.
Tony has a lot of degrees, but not one in how to communicate when you can’t talk. He’s just going on blind faith that this Zoe lady knows her stuff. Bruce picked her out among thousands of options, after all, vetted her thoroughly, flew her in, and arranged for her to live here for anywhere between one month and three to start out. He trusts Bruce implicitly, and so therefore Zoe gets some trust as well.
And Yasmin, the other one. She hasn’t approached him for any requests about the tablet. Just seems okay with him using anything to communicate, whether that’s signs or sketching or hauling a typewriter to therapy every day.
All he’d had to do with her was make sure he set up a system so she could continue to see her other clients remotely while she lives in the Tower. Because she’s another pick from across the country, licensed in more states than Tony thought therapists ever got licensed in, and it’s important to keep her client pool for when Jigsaw needs less hands-on treatment.
Eventually, they’ll both go back to their homes, Zoe and Yasmin. But not until they can get Jigsaw fully in the clear with screens. Maybe even not for a while after that. Because remote therapy is going to be harder for him—and might even be harder in general—than sitting on that sofa with the therapist right there.
Tony is taking that on their word. It’s not like he knows. He rejected therapy after the third session, back when he was a kid. What a waste. How pointless.
But it seems like it will do Jigsaw a lot of good, so who is he to complain? If anyone’s going to complain, it’ll be the Jigster himself, after all the therapy gets old.
In the meantime, Tony can make sure that his tablet has all the necessities on it, and maybe some games that are actually fun, too. Like maybe a shooter game, or a game where he can stab stuff, or draw all kinds of pretty red stars on top of things.
That should be an app. He should be able to draw a red star on anything, no matter what app is running. Maybe he’ll make a star button on the tablet itself that Jigsaw can press and then he can tap the tablet screen and a star will appear.
Tony switches to a new screen and begins work on this new app. It’ll need overwrite capabilities, and it’ll require a change to both hardware and firmware. But it’s definitely more fun than turtles.
Chapter 6: Assets | How dark is it in your mind?
Notes:
Have a special surprise midweek chapter~
Chapter title from “Now That We Are Alone” by The People’s Thieves.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
“Would you please label your pictures, Jigsaw?” The expert without the words smiles and holds out a thick black marker. “Just write below the picture what it’s a picture of.”
It scowls, but accepts the marker. It is obvious what these are pictures of. There is the dog, the other asset, the lunch they had—with peaches and cream, its favorite fruit. Its nest with all the piled up pillows and soft things. And the little plant that the ballerina woman gave it when they moved into the new rooms for assets. That is the fifth thing it eventually chose. A thing that makes it only happy and not unhappy.
But it has already made a start of doing as it has been asked to do, with the paper vegetables on the paper triangle bread circles. And with the camera. It might as well continue to do what it is asked to do, as long as it is asked, and not told. It will not follow orders from an expert, with or without the words.
It uncaps the marker and begins the painstaking process of writing out THE DOG on the bottom of the first picture. Then THE OTHER ASSET, which hardly fits and has to get smaller as it writes. Then the head hurts and the hand hurts and it wants to take a break from the writing. But it has three more to do. It writes out PEACH on the food picture, and THE PLANT on the picture of the little plant in its cheerful pot.
The nest picture is last, and it pauses before writing on it. Does the expert without the words expect it to write “bed” here, or can it write what the nest really is? It thinks for a while, and then decides to write THE NEST on the bottom border of the picture. It did not write the dog’s name or the other asset’s name on those pictures. It wrote what they really are. So it will do so here, too.
“Thank you, Jigsaw. I know that was hard to do, that letters don’t come easy to you.” The expert without the words holds out her hand for the pictures, and it passes them across the coffee table to her.
“You’ve done really well,” she says. “Can I ask you some questions about these?”
It hesitates, and then nods. She asked if she could ask. Did not just start asking. That is okay. It has decided that she can ask, and now she will ask. She waited. That is good.
“I see you’ve written ‘the dog’ here instead of ‘Lucky’ and ‘the other asset’ instead of ‘Clint.’ Can you tell me why?”
It blinks at her. That is what they are. They are the dog and the other asset. They have always been the dog and the other asset, from the moment it knew they were a dog and another asset. But it does have to admit that they are also Lucky and Clint. They do have names. But names are something special, to be used only when necessary and to be saved until then.
“Is that how you think of them?” the expert without the words asks. “In your mind, do you refer to them this way?”
It nods and hopes that is the right answer. It is the true answer, anyway. That must make it right. The expert without the words is the same as the expert with the signs and the feeder in that she wants it to tell the truth. Specifically, she cannot help it if it lies to her. She can only help it if it tells her the truth.
And it did enjoy making the pictures today, and chapsticking all the cut-out vegetables to the triangle bread circles. This expert might be more the same as the feeder and the expert with the signs than it originally thought. Maybe it does want her help.
“That’s a very interesting way to approach life,” the expert says. “I wonder what you refer to me as?”
She waits for it to answer, which it does not want to do. But she waits and waits, and eventually it picks up the pad of paper and the pen beside it on the sofa and takes the time to find the letter shapes that make up THE EXPERT WITHOUT THE WORDS on three lines of the paper. It does not like this pad of paper as much as the ones that came before it. It has blue lines on it, and they try to control where the letters go.
It puts the pad of paper on the table, with the words facing the expert.
She nods and smiles. “Thank you for sharing that. May I make a request?”
It nods. The expert with the words is always asking for permission to do these things, and that is very strange, but it is starting to really like that she does it.
“I would like it if you thought of me as Yasmin.” She makes a sign, a Y-shape across her chest like a sash. It must be her name sign. “Many people would prefer that you think of them by what they like to be called. I like to be called Yasmin.”
It looks at her. At the expert without the words. At Yasmin. It is a very short thing to write, though it does not know how the sounds would transform into letter shapes for a name. Names are not as straightforward as regular words.
“Could you tell me what you mean by an expert without the words? What words are these?”
So it was right. She is an expert without the words. She cannot say the words that will steal away time and make it fumble and fall. She cannot control it with the words, either. She has no words. Does not even know what the words are.
It does not want to add that knowledge to her expertise. It is safer that she not know the words. That she not become an expert with the words. With the words, she can condition it, can control it, can train it to do what she wants even if that is not what it wants. That is what experts with the words do. They train it to do things it does not want to do, things like getting on the knees or opening the mouth. Things like staying still and not fighting no matter what is happening to it.
It shakes the head. It will dare to not tell her this, and will see how she responds. If she gets angry at it, or if she accepts the answer.
“Okay. Can you tell me more about the expert part?”
Does she not even know what an expert is? She is an expert. It takes the paper back and frowns at the page for a minute. Two. How to explain without the risk of showing her how to do what it does not want her to do?
Eventually, it is able to write CONDITIONS IT and TRAINS IT on the page, on two more lines, and then shows her again.
The expert without the words—Yasmin—looks at the paper and is quiet for a moment. Then she looks at it, and her eyes are sad.
“I am not here to do either of those things, Jigsaw. I’m here to hear what you have to share, and to understand you. To help you understand yourself and others. Only to help you. Not ever to condition you or to train you.” She pauses. “Do you understand that? Or more importantly, can you believe me when I say it?”
It cannot believe her yet, no. It understands what she wants it to believe, but she is an expert, and even without the words, an expert has motives. Is never there just to help. Even the expert with the signs has a motive—to get it to communicate with the team that is not a cell. To sign more words and make more sense. She is training it, but in a good way, a new way, where learning does not hurt and there are only good rewards and never punishments.
“It’s something we’ll work on,” the expert finally says. “In the meantime, do you see yourself as an asset? Is that why Clint is ‘the other asset?’”
It can nod to that. It is an asset, is this asset.
“Can you also be Jigsaw?” she asks.
It nods again. This asset is called Jigsaw because the team that is not a cell refused to call it “the asset,” and were calling it the bucky instead. It did not like that. It is not a bucky.
It writes NOT THE BUCKY on the paper, making the fingers carefully form each letter. It takes a while, since the fingers do not want to write the shapes that make up the last word. But eventually it finishes and shows her.
“I understand that,” she says. “I think of you as Jigsaw, not as Bucky.”
It signs “good” at her, and takes the paper back.
“Someday, maybe you’ll think of yourself as Jigsaw first and an asset second. Jigsaw the person, who happens to be an asset to the team.” The expert pauses. Yasmin. Yasmin pauses. “How does that idea make you feel?”
It hunches the shoulders. It is an asset entirely and completely. The other asset helped it acquire a name and name sign, the J-shape followed by a sawing motion across the left hand. But it is just an asset with a name on top of it. It is an asset first, not a person at all, and it will become only an asset if HYDRA ever manages to take it back. But it will not go back. It will retire itself before going back.
“I sense that you’re feeling a lot of things right now, Jigsaw,” the expert without the words says. “Are you able to distill that into maybe one or two emotions?”
It pulls the shape for “wrong” out of the mind and signs it.
“It makes you feel wrong,” the expert repeats. “What about it feels wrong?”
So many things. It is wrong to think that, first. Because it is an asset first and only Jigsaw on top of that, like an additional and ultimately unnecessary layer. And it is wrong-feeling to think about going back, about being taken back. It has killed and killed to avoid being dragged back. It does not want to go back to being an asset only, to being punished and given bad rewards that hurt. To the fun and the jeering and the pushing into it. The dicks out, boys and the rest of it.
It does not want to answer the question, does not want to talk about the bad things that went before.
The expert nods after a minute of silence. “Can you tell me what makes you happy about Lucky? I really like the picture you took of him with the ball in his mouth.”
It sags back into the sofa cushions and pushes the current thoughts out of the way to think about the new ones. The new thoughts are better ones, happy ones.
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“I mean,” Clint says as he fiddles with one of the new thingamajigs on Natasha’s coffee table. “I get that we’re roommates. He obviously likes me just fine, better than the rest of you. No offense.”
Natasha smiles and waves him on.
“I just didn’t think I ranked up there with Lucky on the list of things that make him happy. Or food.”
“He could have had a hard time choosing five things,” Natasha says. “Maybe he picked three easy things and went searching for close seconds.”
“You think I’m close seconds, like a lower tier of happy things.”
Ugh, there’s that smile again, all Mona Lisa and mysterious-like. Natasha definitely thinks something very specific about why Jigsaw took his picture in the park today. Worse, she’s not sharing. Which means he probably won’t like it—and that it’s probably right.
Clint turns the thingamajig over in his hands. He doesn’t even know what it is, some kind of plastic loop where each of the links in the loop rotate a different way. And he doesn’t know why she has it, because he doesn’t visit that often and she never fiddles with things. Maybe she’s taken up fiddling with things.
“You don’t want to hear what I think,” Natasha says, confirming that he won’t like it. “But it’s obvious enough to everyone that you’re his favorite person by a long mile.”
Clink shakes his head, not disagreeing so much as just signaling how absurd the idea is. He’s pretty worthless as favorite people go. Natasha knows just as much ASL and has more in common with him. Cap has loads in common with him, even taking out the memories of their shared past. Even Stark has three months of things in common with Jigsaw instead of a measly three days.
“So it’s Lucky, food, his pillow fort, me, and a plant.” He can’t possibly rank higher than that. “I’m in the second tier with the pillows and the plant.”
Natasha huffs a silent laugh. “You’re in the first tier, Clint. You were important enough that he abandoned his killing spree to make sure you were safe and sound.”
And that’s true, but it’s still kind of unbelievable to him. Not only was he lucky enough that Jigsaw happened on the right bros and that said bros went to the right base of operations, but then most of the tracksuit mafia survived their encounter with the man.
There were a few who didn’t do so well in the hospital, but everyone at least made it that far—which is the polar opposite of Jigsaw’s prior tactics, and apparently done to make Clint happy.
And then he agreed to come back.
Clint’s not honestly sure any of the rest of them would have been able to convince Jigsaw to return to the Tower. So there’s that.
It’s just weird being someone’s favorite person. He can’t think of another instance of that, even when he was put together enough to date people. But that was years and years ago. And he was pretty awful as a boyfriend, and worse as a husband. There are reasons he kept getting dumped. Good reasons. Most of them related to him not really being put together after all. Forgotten dates, missed meetings, no flowers on Valentine’s Day. Sure, some of that was mission-related. But part of it was just him being a mess and taking that out on his partners.
And now he’s someone’s favorite person. And during a long stretch in slob mode, no less. At least he does clean up well, even if that meant his roommate putting on his socks and shoes for him after the first and only shower the last two weeks.
“I don’t think he’s abandoned killing in general, though,” Clint says. “I think when he gets a chance, he’ll go for it.”
“Oh, probably. As long as you’re not around, anyway. He wants to make you happy, after all,” she adds with a playful little smile.
Ugh.
“I think if I had to pick things that made me happy,” Natasha muses, “I’d take a picture of the whole team. Because my friends make me very happy.”
Clint grins. “What, even Stark?”
Natasha nods. “Even Tony Stark.”
Yeah, he’d count Stark in his friends list, too. Really, the whole team. But Stark is his insomnia buddy, a fellow connoisseur of coffee, a real lifesaver back when they were hunting Jigsaw down the first time.
“What would you take a picture of?” Natasha asks.
Ugh times two. He can’t just lame out and say he’d take a picture of the team. Natasha already said that. But honestly, the fact that his few hours of sleep are increasingly nightmare-free makes him very happy, and he has Jigsaw and Lucky to thank for that. And coming on the heels of talking about how he’s Jigsaw’s favorite person, naming Jigsaw is pretty telling—and not telling the truth. Clint doesn’t have a favorite person.
Oh well.
“I already took it,” he says. “Pinned it to the wall by the door. Jigsaw and Lucky in the park.”
Natasha gets a smile in her eyes but doesn’t let it take over her whole face. “So the favorite person bit is mutual, is it?”
“I don’t know—I like getting some sleep even if I have to overheat to do it.”
Because Jigsaw and Lucky do add an element of sweltering to the night. It’s worth it, though, for the few precious hours of sleep he manages with them on the bed with him. He generally turns the thermostat down before going to bed on the off chance he’ll be joined—and ends up freezing himself awake those nights when it’s just Lucky across his legs.
“I thought you were cranking the A/C up at night.”
“I am.” Clint winds the plastic loop around his finger and then unwinds it. “But he doesn’t show up every night. I guess it depends on his roaming schedule. I think sometimes he’s in the lab now with Stark, and sometimes in the gym while normal people are sleeping, and then sometimes when he checks in, he decides to call it a night.”
“No wonder he still snags a nap most days.”
“I want a nap most days.”
Natasha laughs. “I think you speak for everyone, there. Who doesn’t want a nap?”
Clint huffs out a laugh of his own. “Yeah, I guess we all want a nap.”
He’s supposed to be in bed right now, in fact. He’d bowed out of the speech therapist session so he could try to get more sleep ahead of this meeting with the Bishop girl. But who could pass up a chance to chat with a good friend about a conundrum?
“You know, I think he’s upset he can’t come watch me in the range with Kate.”
Clint knows that it would be a bad idea for Jigsaw to appear just as he is, but Natasha is the queen of disguising herself with just a few accessory changes. There’s gotta be a way she can work her magic on Jigsaw enough that no one will think there’s more than a passing resemblance to Bucky Barnes.
“You told him he wasn’t allowed?”
“Someone had to. He can’t just show up in front of a civilian looking like Bucky Barnes grew his hair out.”
Natasha grimaces. “But you didn’t say it that way, right?”
Clint shakes his head. “I used your terms, said he wasn’t ‘public-ready,’ which is also mostly the truth. He seemed to take it… okay. Not great, but not a disaster.”
“And you’re thinking he can become ‘public-ready’ with a ball cap and glasses the way Rogers was able to sneak into a Target with Wilson?”
“Well…” Clint crumples the plastic loop into a ball. “Yeah. Kind of. He can go the park without any of that, so I figure adding that will get him past any close-up scrutiny.”
“Hm.” Natasha looks at him like she can see the inside of his head. “Glasses are non-negotiables. With as thick a frame as he’ll tolerate. But I don’t think he’d like the way a hat obscures his field of view.”
“So we can’t do anything?”
“I’ll see what I can put together by breakfast tomorrow. But I think you should meet with Bishop alone regardless.”
Clint sighs and regrets it as his ribs remind him to be careful. “Why?”
Natasha smiles. “So you can meet your adoring fan without any distractions. So she knows she has your whole attention for that hour. She didn’t buy eight hours of the Clint and Jigsaw show. She bought your time. Yours alone.”
“But—”
“And so that he’s not identified before we’re ready for him to be identified,” she finishes. “Stark’s got public relations geniuses on the case, and their success depends on Jigsaw remaining hidden until everything’s ready for him to be known. The world is not ready for this version of Bucky Barnes.”
“I think this is the only version we have, ‘Tasha.”
“And it’ll go much more smoothly if he knows how to deal with the publicity he’ll get. He still won’t enter a room with the whole team in it, he’s only barely started his therapy, and while he’s signing more, he still doesn’t have any grasp of ASL grammar,” Natasha says. “You’d be throwing him to the sharks if you got him recognized now.”
Ugh. He hates it when she’s right like this.
“I just don’t want him to feel like he’s not a person, or like he’s not wanted.”
“Clint, I think he knows how happy we all are to have him here,” Natasha says. “How much we want him here. The other, that’s for his therapists to tackle. We're the support crew now, not the main event.”
Notes:
Does Clint continue to be clueless? Yes he does, haha!
Content Warning: There are some dark thoughts during Jigsaw's therapy session, including some brief references to HTP that happened in the past.
Chapter 7: Super Soldiers | Down we go
Notes:
Chapter title is from “Dark Room” by Foreign Figures x EJ Michels.
I’ll link the song title when I get home. Am posting on mobile during some medical fun times. Have an extra chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 9:15 p.m.—
The other asset does not come to tonight’s meeting with the expert with the signs. The other asset is going to try to sleep early tonight, instead, to be fully rested for tomorrow’s meeting with the auction woman.
It is fine, though. The other asset does not need to come to these “sessions,” and it is a good idea to try to sleep early. It is also tired and would like to sleep early. Even though it slept very deeply after the afternoon session with the expert without the words. Talking about what makes it happy is exhausting. All that writing, all the drawing, the signs. It is still tired. And it has to do it again tomorrow.
“So let’s explore how we can identify our emotions using the chart,” says the expert with the signs.
The chart is a circle printed on a rectangle of paper with three small holes on one side. It is full of spokes and words and circles inside of it, radiating out into three sections, the circle at the center and two bigger donuts around that. There are so many words on it. And colorful slices in the circle, like unevenly cut triangle bread.
It traces a finger around the outermost circle. The chart is coated with a thin sheet of plastic, so that it does not bend like a regular piece of paper. Slick, almost.
“So how are you feeling this evening, Jigsaw?”
It is tired, but also interested in the colorful rocks. The expert with the signs promised it colorful feeling rocks last night. It signs “interested,” since it can sleep any time but can only get colorful rocks right now. It wants the colorful rocks.
“Alright,” she says. “That’s on our chart. It’s one of the happy emotions.”
It looks where she points, and yes, there is “happy” in the innermost circle and “interested” is right next to in the next circle out. In the outermost circle by “interested” are “curious” and “inquisitive.” It does not know how to sign those words.
It is not even sure there is much of a difference between them.
“This chart can be useful when you can’t find the word for what you’re feeling,” says the expert with the signs. “If you know you feel angry, for instance, you can start at the angry wedge and from there, drill down into something more expressive.”
It reads some of the feeling words next to “angry,” so tiny on the chart. It hates charts. So hard to read with everything going on, the lines and the colors and having to rotate the chart to read the words. “Let down.” It does not know how that one feels. But it is very familiar with “aggressive,” and “frustrated,” and “critical.” It does not know it could be “bitter,” though. Bitter is a taste, not a feeling.
It puts a finger on “frustrated.”
“What is it that is frustrating you?”
…there are lots of things that frustrate it. The empty stars on the map, where it has pointed out a target and the target has not yet been eliminated. The chart with all of its words. The fact that it is not allowed to go with the other asset to meet the auction woman tomorrow because it is not “public-ready.” The lack of colorful feeling rocks.
“Are there a lot of things and you’re trying to pick one, or are the words not coming out?”
It holds up a finger. The first option. Too many things.
She nods. “Is one of the things happening right now, something that we can change?”
It points at the chart, moves the finger around to include the entire chart. That is something they can change. They can get rid of the chart, or at least put it away so that it gets to the colorful feeling rocks. Those must be next after the chart.
“Okay. We’ll try the chart another night. And Yasmin might use this chart, too, so you should bring it with you to your sessions with her.”
The expert with the signs motions for it to put the chart into the “binder” they started the evening with.
It is just a very big folder with thick, stiff flaps and three metal restraints that snap shut to trap the pieces of paper inside the folder. It binds the papers together like prisoners in a cell, and so the name it is given makes sense. It is a good name.
The sound the restraints make is not good. They pry open with little effort, and the chart on its plastic-slicked paper matches like it was made for the restraints. The three holes line up with the restraints perfectly. It slots the chart into the restraints and then braces itself for the snap of the restraints closing.
It wishes there was a little colorful book with pockets to slot little tiles into, like the food books the feeder has given it. There is no dreaded snap of restraints with those books. Just a gentle, silent opening and closing of the book. But if the chart were a little tile in a book, the words would be too small for anyone to read.
“Right,” she says once the chart is bound tightly. “Here’s another way we can communicate our feelings when the words won’t come. This isn’t as fast as the chart, and it isn’t as detailed. But it might be more fun.”
It freezes as the expert with the signs brings a small mesh bag of colorful rocks out of her shoulder bag. It was looking forward to the colorful feeling rocks, but if they are meant to be fun, to cause fun, to…
The mind is cluttered up with ways the rocks can be used to hurt it. They can be thrown at it. They can be heated up and used to burn it. They can be pushed inside of it until it aches. They—
“Jigsaw?”
It will not go back to having the fun. It does not want any fun.
The expert with the signs has put the bag of colorful rocks down on the coffee table and is looking concerned. She does not look like she is about to inflict fun on it. And the other asset said that no one would hurt it. But still. It is a dangerous situation now.
“Something I said has upset you. What was it?” The expert gestures—slowly, telegraphed—toward the pad of paper. “It would help me fix the problem if you would write it down for me. We have time.”
If it pleases the expert with the signs, then she might not have the fun with it. Writing the words down would please the expert with the signs. But the words themselves might not. Is it worth the risk of writing that it does not want the fun? Or is it instead worth the risk of refusing to write the words at all? Which will displease the expert with the signs the most?
The expert with the signs merely sits there, expecting. She sits there, and it sits here, and they look at each other. Finally, after a few minutes, it reaches to the side for the pad of paper. The expert will be more pleased if it complies and writes down the words. It is worth the risk of the words themselves making her angry.
It tries to clear the mind enough to bring the letter shapes to the front where it can match them to the sounds of the words and the way the words are supposed to look. It is more difficult with the need to comply burning hot in the stomach, but after several minutes, it manages to write NO FUN on the paper. It signs “please” and shows the expert with the signs the paper.
“If you don’t want to have fun, we won’t have fun.” The expert puts the colorful rocks back in the shoulder bag. “What is it about fun that is upsetting to you?”
Everything. All of the things about fun are horrible. It does not ever want to have fun again. It will not go back.
It swallows and then makes what it thinks it remembers is the sign for “everything.” It is hard to be sure it is remembering right under the pressure.
The expert blinks and then sits back a little in the chair across from it.
“What does fun mean for you, Jigsaw?” she asks. “What sorts of activities qualify as fun in your understanding of the word?”
It swallows. It… It does not want to… If it shows her, maybe she will do the things. If it draws them out, maybe… It is not an acceptable risk. It shakes the head.
“Alright. Let me tell you what sorts of things qualify as fun in my understanding of the word.” She begins listing things out on her fingers. “I like to go kayaking. I think that is really fun.”
It does not know what kayaking is. If it is really fun, then it must be terrible.
“I like to go swimming,” she says. “That’s fun for me, and it gives me a good workout, too.”
It does know what swimming is. Swimming is an opportunity for someone to drown it and then pull it out of the water and suck all the water out of the lungs so that it can be drowned again.
“I like to go watch movies in the theater. It’s fun to watch the movies with a lot of other people.”
It has been to a theater once, when it was stalking the researcher. People had streamed out of the theater together talking about the movie and how it was good or bad. It remembers thinking that the movie was good because it did not know what a movie was. Now it does know, but it has not been able to watch one all the way through. The head always hurts too much partway into it.
“I like to get together with my friends. We play fun board games and watch fun movies, and sometimes we just go to a restaurant and have a fun meal,” the expert with the signs continues. “To me, something that is fun is something enjoyable.”
Meals are good. And it has enjoyed the games that are played at the table with the other asset and the ballerina woman, and the clown man and flying man, but never all at once. But those games are specifically not fun. That is why they are enjoyable.
“If something is pleasant and enjoyable for all of the people involved, that’s the best kind of fun. And if we ever have fun, it will be that kind of fun, where you are enjoying what we’re doing,” she says. “If someone hurt you and called it fun, they were using the word wrong. That isn’t fun. Fun is when everyone is enjoying the activity.”
The expert with the signs stops talking for a moment, still looking at it, but with sad eyes.
It is glad she has stopped talking, because what she is saying does not apply to it. It is an asset, not a person. All of the people involved in fun did enjoy what they were doing to it. That is why it was fun, why fun is a terrible thing that it wants to never happen again.
“I would like to end our session on that note, Jigsaw,” says the expert with the signs. “I’d like you to think about what fun really means, and how HYDRA misused the word. Because I suspect HYDRA is responsible for teaching you the wrong definition of the word.”
It nods. They can end the “session” there. Maybe HYDRA defined “fun” wrong, and maybe not. The two definitions are not mutually exclusive. Only people enjoy having fun. Assets—except somehow the other asset—are not supposed to enjoy it. Fun is something that happens to assets, and it is never pleasant.
It picks up the binder with the chart trapped inside it, and hugs it to the chest. It needs to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. It can think about fun when it is for sure safe from fun. When the dog is there, and maybe the other asset as well. If the other asset cannot sleep, that is.
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 25 August 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
He’s not expecting Jigsaw to show up as he and Sam are putting cardboard pieces back in their individual baggies to be organized in the box. Jigsaw’s session with Zoe should just be ending. He wonders why they finished early, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
“Hey Jigsaw,” Steve greets him. “We were just putting things away, but if you want to play a round or two, we can get things back out.”
Jigsaw approaches their table in the common room, holding a three-ring binder close to his chest. Apparently, he got a handout in today’s session.
Steve bites back his curiosity to know what the handout was and how it was helpful. Therapy is a matter between therapist and patient, and he should not pry. Especially because Jigsaw might not really understand how that confidentiality works, and Steve doesn’t want to take advantage of that ignorance.
Jigsaw puts the binder down on the table and signs “play” and “why” to Sam. It’s been a month since he returned to the Tower of his own volition, and he still only uses that one sign as a general questioning sign.
“Sure, I could play another round,” Sam says. He starts pulling the pieces back out of their baggies and stacking them up. “This one is better with three or four people, anyway.”
Jigsaw pulls out a chair opposite Sam and sits down, looking at the pieces in their stacks.
He likes this game, Steve knows. They’ve played it before, and Jigsaw managed to win most of the rounds they played. Steve had won the others, and Sam had been a gracious loser about it.
It’s probably all the Tetris that Clint plays with Jigsaw that’s helped him win the game. It’s basically Tetris on a board instead of a screen, with the pieces coming up at random based on the shuffled cards and the rotation handled by a spinning wheel. Some of it is up to chance, but there’s a bit of strategy to how you play whatever pieces you’ve been dealt.
Steve pulls out the square cards with the piece shapes and colors printed on them and begins to shuffle them. It’s pretty late, so they’ll probably only play one round. But it’s nice to spend whatever time he can with Jigsaw. His friend has been trying to integrate into the team more, seeking people out to spend time with, but Steve will do whatever he can to get more of that time.
“So Pepper is giving me a tour of the new construction tomorrow,” Steve says. “Do you want to come with me?”
Steve’s only seen the inside workings of buildings made of wood, and he’d expressed interest at breakfast when Pepper had explained that they were finishing up one of the last sections of Chitauri-damaged Tower infrastructure Monday. He’d like to see how the building he lives in is constructed, and this might be his last chance—barring another explosion that takes out a chunk of the Tower.
Jigsaw seems to think about it while Sam and Steve finish setting up the game, and then nods. He taps the top of his wrist twice.
“She said ten o’clock,” Steve says. “I’m not sure how long it’ll take. We won’t want to get in their way or anything.”
Jigsaw signs “new space” with a smile.
And that’s true enough. The construction areas of the Tower have been off limits since Steve and the others moved in. Too many moving parts, too many workers, too much of a schedule to keep. Visitors at random hours might throw things off schedule or mess up whatever’s been worked on.
And it makes sense that Jigsaw would want to expand his territory to the entire Tower, to inspect the work and the workers, and to generally be able to go everywhere he wants to go.
“Well, we can go there for the tour,” Steve says. “I don’t think we’d be welcome to just show up whenever after that, though.”
“Not until all of the construction is complete,” Sam adds.
“Right.”
Jigsaw accepts his board and sets the upper boundary at the top. He seems content enough with the limitations on this new territory. At least, he isn’t scowling about it, or anything. Whether he’ll try to sneak past JARVIS after the tour is another question entirely.
They play the game for a few minutes before Jigsaw pulls his pad of paper out of a pocket and begins to write on it when it’s not his turn. Or rather, stares at the blank page for many turns before the writing begins to appear.
Steve tries not to look at the incomplete writing while they play. He’ll read it once Jigsaw is finished writing, if it’s intended for him. Otherwise, it’s Jigsaw’s business, and Steve will try to keep his eyes to himself. He does wish that the writing was starting to come more easily or more quickly to his friend, though. It’s painful to watch him struggle with the letters out of the corner of his eye.
Finally, though, the pad of paper is presented to both Steve and Sam in turn. It says FUN on one line, and WHAT IS on the next. Jigsaw’s expression is a mixture of curious and challenging, and Steve wonders what is going on in his mind.
“What is fun?” Sam asks. “Well, playing this game is fun, right? Walking Lucky is fun.”
Jigsaw’s expression turns to something more confused than before, or maybe it’s disbelief. Steve sometimes can’t tell what his expressions mean anymore. Not at all like during the War, or before, when he could read every single twitch of Bucky’s eyes.
Steve nods. “Right. And I like drawing things. That’s a lot of fun.”
Jigsaw draws a stick figure on hooks and jabs a finger at it.
“Yeah, that’s not fun. That’s torture.” Sam shakes his head. “Maybe it was fun for them, but that’s because they’re sadists.”
“Sadists like hurting other people,” Steve says. “That doesn’t make it fun.”
Jigsaw breaths out a frustrated—but silent—sigh. Over the course of a minute, he writes ASSET and an arrow from the word to the stick figure.
“Okay,” Sam says. “So they like hurting assets. That still doesn’t make it fun.”
Steve tries to think of times when he’s used the word around Jigsaw. Tries to think of how he might have been misunderstood to be talking about torture. He doesn’t think he’s said anything about it, but that doesn’t mean no one else has. A statement like “it’ll be fun” might sound very different to Jigsaw.
“In real fun, no one gets hurt.” Steve rotates the spinner for one of his actions, and then takes the piece that’s offered to him. It’ll fit perfectly on his board. “Like this game. Even when Sam lost, he was having fun. Right?”
Sam nods. “Because it’s a game, and it’s fun. Fun is something you enjoy. If you aren’t enjoying it, then it isn’t fun for you. Also, it’s your turn again.”
Jigsaw takes his paper back with a frown, clearly still digesting what they’ve said. He takes a piece off the spinner and slots it onto his board, then turns the spinner and takes another piece to put on his board before looking at Sam.
Sam’s actually not doing too bad this round. He’s got the most matching colors touching each other, though not the most tokens for completed rows. Completed rows tokens are going to Jigsaw’s pile, as his pieces fit together best.
“Does that make sense?” Steve asks. “About how torture and fun are totally different things?”
Jigsaw see-saws his hand.
Something about it is still bothering him, then. Steve tries to imagine what it is, and falls short. But Jigsaw’s taken his paper away, so he’s obviously done with the line of questioning.
Steve wishes, not for the first time, that he truly understood Jigsaw the way he used to understand him when he was Bucky. But he has to accept that he isn’t getting his friend back the way he was, but the way he is now. And however much he sometimes sees Bucky looking at him through those eyes, he has to remember that Jigsaw doesn’t want to be Bucky.
It just hurts, is all.
Notes:
Content warning: Jigsaw has another negative thought process in therapy, and thinks of HTP things.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
This is the second day in a row he’s showered. Maybe things are looking up after so long in slob mode. Or maybe it’s just that he’s afraid of stinking in front of this Kate chick and making a bad first impression.
Either way, he’s fresh and clean, and he couldn’t find any loose pants at all after his shower. Or even the looser button-ups he prefers to wear. Not that he looked all that hard. No, it’s jeans today, and a button-up that fits a little snugger than he likes at the biceps. It hadn’t hurt too bad to get the clothes on, and he has to admit that living in baggy sweats is probably not his best look.
For whatever reason, since he came back to the Tower, Jigsaw has taken on the duty of not only collecting clothes from wherever Clint dumps them and putting them into piles, but also then washing and drying those piles with the barely scented laundry detergent Cap had suggested. He even sometimes puts things on hangers in Clint’s disaster of a closet, though usually he just curates the piles of clean clothes in the living room.
It’s fine that Jigsaw’s getting in his closet more regularly now—the Ronin gear isn’t a secret anymore, and that tac gear and most of his personal arsenal is now stashed in the mini locker room for use on missions if needed, anyway, leaving loads more room in the closet.
And it was nice today getting out of the shower and having clothes right there in the closet to put on. Better than wandering out of his room and into the living room to find something to wear. Jigsaw might be onto something there. The piles are convenient enough for slob mode, but using the closet as a closet and not a weapons storage unit does have its merits.
And Jigsaw has apparently been very particular about which things go where. If Clint had wanted to wear his baggy sweatpants with the holes and stains that are so fucking comfortable and look like trash, he’d have had to go digging for them in a pile. Since he wanted to look presentable today, or even better than merely presentable, if he says so himself, he just had to grab for the first thing in reach in the closet.
It’s almost like Jigsaw has a system. Part of Clint can feel… something… going on with the laundry situation. He just doesn’t know what, yet.
At least he’s not packed into his clothes like sausage in a casing, the way Cap and Wilson dress for workouts. They look good like that, true, but it can’t be comfortable. He’ll take these semi-snug clothes over the other any day. And he might not be showing off like Cap and Wilson, but he still probably looks pretty good.
Not that he’s interested in impressing anyone that way.
Clint leans back against the back of the sofa and lifts his right leg up onto the coffee table, where Jigsaw is sitting with a pair of socks and Clint’s nicer sneakers.
“Thanks, again,” he says. “You don’t have to do this, you know. But I’m glad you agreed to anyway.”
Jigsaw shrugs and moves Clint’s foot to his lap to slide the first sock onto his toes and up the rest of his foot.
It should feel weird, or even a little nerve-wracking, to have the metal hand that crushed Natasha’s knee cupping his ankle, but Jigsaw is gentleness itself. His hands are warm—even the metal one—and steady, and Clint entertains a fleeting image of himself getting a foot massage. Which is odd. He usually hates it when people mess with his feet.
Clint cannot wait for his ribs to heal enough that doing this himself won’t hurt. It’s not that he finds it degrading that he’s getting helped like he was an invalid or a toddler. In fact, it’s really nice to have someone doing this for him. But he doesn’t want Jigsaw to feel like he has to play nursemaid. He doesn’t like being a burden.
He does kind of like Jigsaw’s new look, though. Natasha had brought a pair of glasses without a prescription to breakfast earlier for him to try out, and Jigsaw looks pretty good in them. He’s obviously still getting used to having them on his face, since he keeps reaching up to adjust them. But he does look good. The glasses really draw attention to his eyes.
And his eyes were already pretty striking.
Clint had been hoping that maybe Jigsaw would pass Natasha’s public-ready test and could come to this thing with Kate now that he has the glasses, but it turns out he’s going to go on some Tower tour or something with Cap and Pepper. Jigsaw hadn’t been too clear about what he would be touring, but Clint has gathered it has something to do with construction.
There hasn’t been much interaction between Jigsaw and Pepper in the last month, and there was even less the month before. So Clint’s looking forward to hearing about how that goes. And he’s glad he’ll have to miss the tour—so boring—but kind of miffed that the reason he’s missing it is this thing with Kate.
He switches feet when Jigsaw reaches forward and taps his left knee. Once more, a few strands of hair fall across Jigsaw’s face as he slides the second sock on.
“Did you ever think about using those hair ties Cap got you?” Clint asks. “It’d keep the hair out of your face without you needing to cut it.”
Jigsaw looks at him through that curtain of hair, head still tilted down but no longer watching what he’s doing. He raises an eyebrow in question.
Clint swallows.
“Not that cutting it is a bad thing. It’s your hair, and you can do what you want with it. If you like it the way it is, you can keep it that way. It looks good long.”
Great, now he’s rambling. His roommate probably doesn’t care about how long his hair is, and if he did care, he’d probably grab a fistful and hack it off with a pair of kitchen shears. Jigsaw is sort of no-nonsense like that.
Jigsaw sits up and studies him for almost a minute, before finally pushing his glasses up and tucking the strands of hair behind his ears. He mimes cutting his hair off with scissors and then asks why—or at least makes it into a question rather than a statement.
“Uh,” Clint says. “Just thinking of ways to keep it out of your eyes so you can see, is all.”
Jigsaw nods and puts Clint’s second shoe on before pulling the laces snug, testing the tightness, and tying the bow.
Then he pats Clint’s leg like Clint has seen him pat Lucky’s side and gets up, padding silently to the second bathroom. He returns with one of the hair ties, stretching it experimentally between his fingers.
He signs “why” and then waits.
What does he mean by that? Is he asking Clint to put his hair in a ponytail, because Clint will fuck that up. Or is he asking how to do it? Clint has seen Natasha put her hair up. He’s seen that enough times to explain it. He’ll try that.
Clint holds his hand out for the hair tie and puts his index finger through the middle of it.
“Pretend my finger is all of your hair gathered up behind your head, and my fist is your head,” Clint says. He twists the loop into a figure 8 with his finger through one of the holes, doubles over the hair tie, pulls it snug, and doubles it over a third time.
“If you want it tighter, you do the twist-and-loop more times. If you want it loose, you don’t do as many twist-and-loops.”
Jigsaw accepts the hair tie back, and loops it around his own finger a few times. He nods, and then tucks the hair tie into a pocket.
“It was just an idea,” Clint says. “For if you’re working on something and don’t want hair in your way.”
His roommate nods and then takes his pad of paper out of another pocket.
Clint gets ready to wait for a while. He has no idea what Jigsaw wants to say that would require writing part of it or drawing it.
So while his roommate works at the paper, Clint studies the laces on his sneakers. The bows are very neat, perfectly even, and double-knotted so that he won’t run the risk of having to retie them later. Clint traces the zig-zag of the laces across the tops of his shoes with his eyes. He tries not to think about how a single person bought all of his time.
He fails.
One person bought all eight hours. She placed her bids so high that no one challenged them. But did anyone else even want his time? Is it that he has only one fan but she’s obsessed with him? He can understand being obsessed with someone like Cap or Stark. They’re famous, and anyone who spent time with them would be able to claim bragging rights for years, talking about that time they spent an hour with their hero.
Hell, it wouldn’t even have to be a hero thing. The clout is there no matter how the winning bidder feels about the person they bought time from. There’s no clout attached to Clint Barton, and no clout for Hawkeye. He’s spent his whole career trying not to become famous for anything. And he’s definitely the least interesting Avenger.
Jigsaw taps his shoulder and shows him a picture of a face with long hair and a face with short hair, and the word BUCKY in the middle of them with a question mark. He puts a finger on BUCKY and then moves it to the short hair, then repeats the motion from BUCKY to the long hair.
“Bucky had short hair,” Clint says. He reaches over to tap the face with the short hair. “Maybe a little longer than this, but not by much. I haven’t seen a picture in ages.”
Jigsaw looks from him to the pad of paper, and nods. He looks satisfied, and Clint’s about to ask what that’s about when there’s a knock at the door.
Lucky gets up from where he’d been curled up in the living room dog bed and goes to the door, and Clint follows.
“Hey Cap,” he greets the man outside. “You’re here for Jiggy, yeah?”
“Hi, yes. Are you—” Cap looks over Clint’s shoulder and does something that’s not quite a double-take, but is definitely a reaction. “Glasses, huh?”
Jigsaw just looks at him.
“Are you ready to go meet Pepper?” Cap asks, recovering from the surprise and brushing off the rudeness of Jigsaw’s non-reaction.
Jigsaw nods and gives Lucky a rub behind the ears before joining Cap in the hallway.
Great. That just leaves him and the dog. And a meeting he has to get to. He looks at the clock. He’s got two minutes to avoid being late, and a whole cup of coffee to drink before he can leave.
Clint sighs. He doesn’t want to be late to everything in his life, it just happens.
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
Stupid cab taking forever to get to her and now taking even longer getting her to the Tower. Avengers Tower, and she’s going to go inside it again, but really inside it this time.
The auction doesn’t count, since that was just a public space reserved for conferences and things. Loads of people have been in there, so it’s not special. And it’s neat and all, but it’s not the part of the Tower she’s looking forward to. No, she’s looking forward to the actual Avengers part of Avengers Tower.
In the distance, several minutes worth of traffic ahead, she can see the gleaming Tower itself. The scaffolding along the one side is gone now. They must have finished the structural repairs, then. It hardly looks different from before, except maybe a little sleeker. Why not take the opportunity to redesign, after all?
Kate tries to guess which of the many windows she’ll be able to look out of. Maybe Hawkeye is currently looking out one of those windows waiting for her to get there. She checks her watch. Damn. She’s late. That’s not the first impression she wants.
She could probably make it there quicker by jogging the last part of the distance, at the rate traffic is moving. And on a Sunday morning! She’d guessed the traffic would be light when she planned her timing.
Kate digs around in her purse for her wallet and manages to keep everything else from spilling out at the same time. She pulls out a few twenties, enough to cover the fare and a tip and probably to make up for the rudeness of getting out of the cab early.
“Here,” she says, handing the money forward. “I’ll just get out here, since we’re stopped. It’s not that far.”
She gathers up her bow and quiver from the seat next to her and clicks her seatbelt open, and then she’s out on the street, weaving between other stopped cars to get to the sidewalk. Perfect.
It does end up being much quicker to jog it, and she’s got so much giddy energy that she hardly even minds the jog. She has to get some of that energy out now, anyway, or she’ll come off all wrong in front of Hawkeye—she’s going to really meet Hawkeye!
She hadn’t been able to get more than a glimpse of him on the auction floor before the lights cut out and the roof exploded. Every time she’d been getting close to him, someone would cut off her line of sight and he’d be gone. But he won’t be gone now.
Kate makes her way to the information desk, where a bored-looking receptionist directs her to the far elevator.
There’s a guard in front of that elevator, and Kate manages by some miracle of willpower not to grin ear to ear as she approaches him. She is an adult, even if she hardly feels like one sometimes and can’t legally drink yet.
“I’m Kate Bishop,” she says to the guard. “I’m here to meet with Hawkeye.” The grin breaks free and her cheeks hurt from the force of trying to keep it contained.
The guard looks at a tablet and then motions for her to proceed. “JARVIS will direct you to the range.”
The range! Where Hawkeye trains! She’ll be walking where he walks and maybe even shooting arrows side by side with him!
“Good morning, Miss Bishop,” says a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere as the elevator doors close. The elevator moves upward without her having pushed any buttons.
This would be JARVIS.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m here to meet with Hawkeye in the range.” She doesn’t bother to hold in her grin anymore.
“If you’ll proceed toward the left,” JARVIS says when the elevator comes to a stop, “the range will be down the hall. I believe Agent Barton is waiting for you.”
Kate swallows a squeak of excitement before it gets loose. “Thanks,” she manages.
Will he be wearing the uniform he wore when he saved her—and the City, she supposes—during the Chitauri attack? The black sleeveless tac gear with the maroon on the front? Or will he be wearing something else? What does Hawkeye wear during his time off?
“Hi Kate,” says Hawkeye as she opens the door to the range. “Welcome to the range.”
It turns out, he wears jeans and a purple button-up. And purple hearing aids. She didn’t know he was deaf. It strikes her how little she knows about him. Just his missions from the S.H.I.E.L.D. data leak, and his skill set from the same. And what she saw of him throwing himself off a building in the Chitauri attack only to shoot a grappling hook arrow while he fell and swing to safety.
Fearless.
Hawkeye is fearless in the face of certain death. And Kate? She’d frozen in front of a busted-open wall and just stared at the chaos. Couldn’t even get it together enough to flee.
But she’s working on that. You can’t get a therapist in this city for love or money these days. They’re all booked up solid after the Chitauri attack. But she’s still working on it. She’s got self-help books, and she’s a quick learner. She’ll be self-helped in no time.
“Hi,” she says, feeling like she can hardly breathe. “You’re Hawkeye. Oh my god, I’m meeting Hawkeye.”
He holds out a hand. “Call me Clint, please.”
Kate shakes his hand probably a few seconds longer than she should. “I’m shaking Hawkeye’s hand,” she says.
“Yep. So this is your hour, but I have to ask a question to start us off. Why me?” Hawkeye—Clint—asks. “Why my time? There were six us out there, and I’m the least interesting of the six.”
“You saved my life,” Kate says. “The Chitauri blew a hole in the building and started picking us off like an anteater in a broken termite mound.”
Oh god, she’s talking about termites in front of Hawkeye. How mortifying.
“One of them was coming straight for me, and you—” She shakes her head, feeling the awe well up in her chest again. “You were out there with just a stick and a string, and the alien exploded, right along with his glider. You shot him with an exploding arrow and saved my life.”
Kate swallows and grips her bow in a suddenly sweaty hand. “I swore I’d be an expert archer, just like you. You’re my hero.”
Hawkeye studies her for a minute, and Kate feels like she’s caught fire. Did she say the wrong thing? Did she come off too strong? Was the termite thing too disgusting?
“Alright,” Hawkeye says. He leads her to one of the stalls in the range. “Then show me what you got.”
Chapter 9: Tower | Lady mercy won’t be home tonight
Notes:
Chapter title from “Hammer to Fall” by Queen.
Posting tonight because tomorrow morning might be hectic. ^_^ Enjoy slightly early chapter.
Spoilers ahoy in the end notes, so please balance your need for warnings with your dislike for spoilers, and choose accordingly. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
So Natasha has given Jigsaw the beginnings of a disguise outfit to wear. No hat yet, but that is probably next up. Maybe gloves as well, though it’s summer and he’s not sure gloves would really disguise anything so much as draw attention to his hands.
And it’s probably for the best that he has glasses, too. Steve doesn’t need to disguise himself in the Tower. It’s okay if he’s recognized; he belongs in the Tower. Steve Rogers is supposed to be here, and Bucky Barnes is supposed to be dead. In a lot of ways, Bucky Barnes is dead. In the ways that matter, anyway.
His body, or most of it, is still alive and as well as can be expected after what it’s been put through over the decades. But the man inside…
Steve sighs.
The man inside that body has changed almost beyond recognition. Rejects Bucky wholeheartedly and refuses to be associated with Bucky. But for all of that, Bucky still stares at Steve out of Jigsaw’s eyes on occasion. The expressions are sometimes just the same, even a few of the mannerisms lately.
It’s not enough of a shift for him to be hopeful that through therapy, his friend might come back to himself a little. Steve knows he just has to accept what is and not wish for what might have been. But he’s still tempted to dream of a day when his friend is whole again, with at least a few memories of their lives together.
In the meantime, he’s just haunted by the ghost of Bucky in physical form.
“Are you looking forward to seeing the insides of the building?” Steve asks as they get in the elevator.
Jigsaw mimes a building falling down when part of it is removed, and then gives him a satisfied nod.
“We aren’t bringing the building down, Jigsaw. We’re just looking inside the walls.”
Jigsaw nods, and signs “later.”
Steve frowns. Clint would probably know exactly what Jigsaw meant by that. But Steve is at a loss. They aren’t bringing the building down at all, not even later. Hopefully, the building never gets demolished, unless it’s intentional in advance of rebuilding it, when everyone is safely moved out.
It hits Steve, finally, as they walk down the hall toward where Pepper waits for them.
Jigsaw wants to know how to bring the building down if he needs to do so, just like he brought that abandoned building down on the STRIKE agents who ambushed him in D.C. He’d found the right places to break the support structures, and had primed the building to collapse when he needed it to, with just a single shove.
Steve opts not to mention that he finally gets it, just because talking about destroying the Tower right before getting a tour of how it’s been reconstructed seems a bit off. Pepper might not appreciate it, to say the least.
Pepper is standing at a point in the hallway where everything is covered with plastic sheeting, including plastic flaps coming down in the middle of the hallway itself to serve as a kind of door. Steve guesses that’s to mark a point where non-construction folks are not meant to go. A way to signal that this is their workplace.
“Good morning, Pepper,” Steve says.
He takes note of Pepper’s slightly uneasy smile, and wonders if she’d been hoping Jigsaw would not end up joining him. Oh well. She’d said it was okay at breakfast.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing how the buildings of the future are crafted.”
Pepper’s smile remains a touch uneasy, probably because Jigsaw is studying her, but she doesn’t sound uneasy when she speaks. “Hi, Steve. Hi, Jigsaw. Are you ready to go in?”
“Ready when you are.”
Jigsaw nods once, his eyes never leaving Pepper’s.
Steve wonders if someone should talk to him about how unnerving it is when he stares at people like that. Even with the glasses, it probably sends the wrong signal. Or maybe it’s the right signal. Maybe Jigsaw means to intimidate others and let them know they are being assessed.
Pepper holds open the plastic sheeting for them, and Steve ducks inside the construction area, followed by Jigsaw and then Pepper.
Inside it looks pretty much the same as the rest of the hallway had looked. There are a few glassed in conference rooms, similar to the one that holds the HYDRA map where they keep track of Jigsaw’s targets and plan their courses of action. And some closed doors that lead to offices with solid walls. The lighting is the same, and the flooring, the walls.
It’s only when they get to the end of the hallway and look around at the two opposite wings that things begin to look like they’re still under construction. And even then, it’s obvious they just need to paint over the drywall and install the official lighting.
Pepper takes the hallway to the right, and Steve follows, trailed by Jigsaw. The further they go into the webwork of construction and rooms, the less polished things get, and the more workers they see. Steve’s surprised to see workers on a Sunday, but he guesses Tony can afford to pay them enough to work on a weekend.
Pepper
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
It’s not that she dislikes Jigsaw. She hardly knows him, certainly not enough to dislike him. And after everything he’s been through, she’s got a certain drive to see that he’s kept safe and rehabilitated. But in the meantime, he does unnerve her terribly.
She wishes he’d backed out of the tour, or that she’d told Steve she couldn’t be responsible for him and to disinvite him.
Despite the glasses and the longer hair, he’s still got Bucky Barnes’s face, and that is recognizable, even to people trying to get their work done instead of staring at Captain America. Steve being right there only increases the likelihood of Jigsaw being recognized.
At least most of the workers are sparing them a glance and then getting back to work. They all know Captain America lives here, and it’s hardly the first time she’s done a walkthrough. They get paid extra to be on the weekend shift, and they take their work seriously. She doesn’t expect there to be any issues.
Pepper points out where the tiles are being laid and the grooves along the corner walls where JARVIS’s wiring will be installed by a select few who are privy to the knowledge of how to do it.
And Steve, at least, gets an eyeful of the walls, the floors, the bones of the building inside and below and above what will be visible once they wire JARVIS in and finish the drywalling. He’s interested in the building process, clearly, is inspecting the insulation and the electrical wiring, the studs and support structures, and everything else that goes into it.
He even takes note of the thin beadwork of optic fiber cables already in place around the exterior windows. They might not be functional yet, but they’re ready to be once hooked up, allowing JARVIS a view of both the inside and the outside of the building.
Jigsaw, though, is hardly looking at the construction. Once he’s seen whatever it was he came to see, he becomes preoccupied with studying each of the workers they come across as they tour the space. He examines every face, observes their actions, and in some cases stares so intensely that the poor worker he’s staring at suddenly finds he’s needed elsewhere.
Each one seems to pass inspection, at least. She should hope they do. They’ve all been vetted by the construction arm of Stark Industries. And that’s a fairly thorough process, though it’s based primarily around work history and skills. The background check is deeper than a typical one, because there are secrets to keep safe here in the Tower, but it wasn’t a pointed background check. Just a generalized one.
And at least he’s not staring at her anymore.
And at least she’s not the only affected by his staring. One of the workers—Brett Harrell, she thinks—is particularly suffering under his stare. He’s trying to act normal, but he’s keeping his face averted, looking away from them in a way that’s just not natural while he crouches down inspecting a bit of trim where the wall meets the floor.
She supposes it’s not every day that the job site is so carefully scrutinized by an outsider, though. And Steve is really taking an interest in the work at this far end of the construction zone.
Pepper turns them around so they can work their way back to the the fork in the hallway and Harrell can go back to getting work done without all the staring, and as she does so, Harrell looks over his shoulder at them, as if to make sure they really are leaving.
And then several things seem to happen at once.
Jigsaw seems to move without moving, even more liquid than his usual oil slick flowing from one position to another. And he seems to move, but then is suddenly past her without her quite catching the movement despite looking straight at it.
And Harrell’s eyes widen as he pushes himself to his feet and takes off at a dead run down the last bit of dead end hallway, the only way to go if he’s going to move away from them.
And Steve shouts out for Jigsaw to stop, which doesn’t seem to accomplish anything, but just adds noise to the otherwise hurried movements and rush of things all happening at once. Steve takes off after the other two, and Pepper has a half a second to hope that if there is a problem, Steve will step in and solve it before anything goes too sideways.
She can’t be sure whether Harrell ducks into a room and is followed, or whether Jigsaw shoulder checks him through a door to a room, but Steve is on their heels, and Pepper finds herself following despite her desire to keep as far away from the commotion as possible.
What she sees in the room when she gets there is red splattered everywhere, pieces of glistening gray flesh—brain, she realizes—and skull fragments with hair still attached, an eye, teeth, and the wreckage of a man’s head as Jigsaw smashes a hammer repeatedly into the remains of Harrell’s face.
A scream forces its way up through her throat at the sight, and she fights the urge to run.
“JARVIS, get Tony!” she yells before remembering that this is as-yet unwired for JARVIS.
Pepper blanks on what to do next, clutching her phone tightly enough in her hand that she feels the case creak around it, and watches as the scene continues to unfold.
“Jigsaw, stop!” Steve yells, pulling at Jigsaw’s arm to keep the hammer from continuing its descent. “He’s dead, Jigsaw. Stop it.”
Jigsaw shakes Steve off of himself and glares up at them both, his glasses splattered with so much blood that he couldn’t possibly be able to see through the lenses and the rest of his face just as gory. His hair, his shirt, his arms. Everything is red. The carpet is red, too, and scattered with chunks of Harrell’s head.
Pepper feels like she’s going to vomit, and she grits her teeth against the sensation. She will not add to the mess. Someone’s going to have to clean this.
“What the hell, Jigsaw?” Steve asks, his tone hard and uncompromising.
Pepper watches in mute horror as Jigsaw reaches down and yanks Harrell’s sleeve up to reveal a tattoo on his bicep, something like an octopus with a skull for a head, in black ink with a red circle around it. A HYDRA tattoo, she realizes.
Steve seems to realize it at the same time, because his shoulders slacken a bit and he sits back on his heels.
Pepper slips out of the room and closes the door firmly behind her just as the first of the other construction crew members are arriving to find out what’s happened. Some of them have power tools in their hands with clear intent to use them to defend whoever is needing it.
“There’s nothing to see here,” Pepper says, keeping her voice moderated with effort. “Please, go back to work. It’s being taken care of.”
They hesitantly comply, lowering their power tools, and Pepper waits for them to disperse before calling the head of public relations, Charlene McKenzie, to come at once and find the right spin on what’s happened. They have damage control to do.
Steve
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 10:45 a.m.—
“How did you know?” Steve asks, his voice quieter now that Jigsaw seems calmer, if only calmer by comparison to swinging a hammer into a man’s smashed up face and skull.
Jigsaw indicates his face, drawing a circle around his face with a bloody index finger. He looks belligerent about it, too, though it’s a little hard to tell with the blood streaking his glasses. It’s mostly his posture that’s belligerent.
“You recognized him.”
Well that’s better than Jigsaw taking a guess and happening to be right. But it’s still not good. And Steve was right there, and still too slow to stop him. If Steve’s presence and reflexes can’t stop a murder, what does that say for the rest of the team? How can they be letting Jigsaw outside at all if he’ll go off like this in a split second with no prior indication?
“There are other ways to handle that situation, Jigsaw,” Steve says. “You can’t just go around killing any HYDRA personnel you happen to spot. It’s—”
Jigsaw whips off his glasses and waves them around like they make a difference to the situation. Underneath, it’s like he’s wearing a mask of clean skin in the middle of a bloody face, with just a few drips inching down to mar the effect.
“”It doesn’t matter if you wear glasses or not. Killing people in cold blood is wrong, and it goes against the agreement with S.W.O.R.D.” He can’t believe he has to explain this. Again. “We can’t keep hiding this shit. Eventually, it will get back to them.”
And when it does, what happens, then? Does S.W.O.R.D. keep him in a concrete box until he ages out of captivity and dies in his prison cell? Does S.W.O.R.D. try their hand at rehabbing him? Does S.W.O.R.D. step in to help, or to lock him up? And do they want to risk either response?
Jigsaw scowls at him and signs that Natasha gave him something called a “kill face” for the mission.
Steve doesn’t know what a kill face is, maybe that horrible mask he was wearing as the Soldier. But he does know that Natasha did not send him on a mission of any sort when she gave him the glasses to wear in public. He makes a guess about the kill face and goes with it.
“A pair of glasses is a disguise, Jigsaw. Not a— A kill face.”
Steve reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, belatedly remembering that his hand is slick with blood from grabbing Jigsaw’s arm. Great.
“And this wasn’t a mission. It was a tour. We were here to look at a building, not to hunt down HYDRA.”
Jigsaw signs that he’s always hunting HYDRA, plus “kill evil” and “never rest.” And then he gets his paper pad out—and they’re going to have to replace it now because it’s got blood on it from his hands now—and starts to write.
Steve closes his eyes and breathes deeply. The smell of blood is strong in the room, and Steve is reminded of the hotel room where Waldroup was torn to pieces, the way the carpet squished with blood in places, soaked through. This whole room will need to be redone. Carpet, drywall, baseboards. He doesn’t think they’re finishing by Monday anymore.
Finally, Jigsaw thrusts the bloody pad of paper at him, and what he reads sends his mind reeling: END OF THE LINE
Somehow, impossibly, that phrase has been in Jigsaw’s mind this whole time. Warped through the years, perhaps, but there. A kernel of Bucky, of what they shared, of their friendship, their partnership. And twisted to mean… To mean that he’s going to hunt down and kill all of HYDRA until the end of the line. Not, “I’m with you to the end of the line.” But an acknowledgement that he’s fighting to the end of the line.
And perhaps that he’ll do it alone if he has to.
Steve remembers telling Bucky that he could get by on his own. Bucky had told him that he didn’t have to. He wishes he could return the favor, could tell Bucky now that he doesn’t have to do this alone.
But it’s Jigsaw, not Bucky.
And Steve can’t start a killing spree just because that’s still Jigsaw’s first response to HYDRA.
Steve swallows down his memories, tries to focus on the here and now. It’s hard, because he doesn’t really want to. He wants to drown in the memories, to pretend that “the end of the line” means the same thing to them both, that this is Bucky’s way of reaching out to him through Jigsaw.
“We are hunting HYDRA, yes,” he eventually says. “But to capture them. To see them brought to justice. To stop them, not to kill them.”
Jigsaw shakes his head in obvious disgust, and Steve knows that now is not a time when he’ll be able to reach through that disgust to try to convince him of the validity of capturing HYDRA enemies. He’s not only set in his ways, but he’s just killed a man and has to defend his actions or suffer the possibly guilt-ridden consequences of those actions being deemed wrong.
There’s a knock on the door, and Jigsaw is somehow on his feet and in a defensive pose with the hammer at the ready before Steve even remembers that Pepper is out there.
It’s not Pepper alone who opens the door, though, but Pepper and a black woman with her hair pulled back in a blue scarf.
“This is Charlene,” Pepper says by way of introduction. “She’s going to fix this mess.”
So this would be the public relations expert that keeps Stark Industries looking good despite whatever Tony does to the contrary.
Charlene surveys the scene without much of a visual hangup, and Steve mentally salutes her fortitude. Then she studies Steve and Jigsaw in turn.
“Alright,” she says. “You two are going to go the back way to your rooms so no one sees you before you clean up. Pepper, gather the workers up send them home for the day, first. Give them their full day’s wages, though.”
“As you know,” Pepper starts, “there’s been an incident?”
Charlene nods. “Exactly. Stick with the basic script. No details.”
Steve watches Pepper slip back out of the room and then looks back at Jigsaw. “At least put the hammer down,” he says.
Jigsaw glares at him and drops the hammer before slipping past Charlene, who gives him a wide berth to avoid getting blood on her clothes, and out into the hallway.
No doubt he already knows how to get out of here without being seen. Steve, though, will gladly wait to follow Charlene to a back stairwell.
And then… He’s got a lot of thinking to do.
Notes:
Content warning: Sudden gore in this chapter, though it doesn't last very long.
Chapter 10: Clint | Well it’s the time for that messing to end
Notes:
Chapter title from “Lion’s Den” by Bruce Springsteen.
Trying a new thing today and posting during my lunch break. I've got over 50 chapters lead on the posting schedule, so I can afford to eat away at the buffer like this a bit. ^_^
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
Walking into his room has never felt quite this much like walking into a lion’s den as now. Come to think of it, it’s never felt even a little like that, but now it kind of does. He’s just not sure what to expect, is all.
Will Jigsaw be on the sofa with Lucky, maybe paging through a food book and pondering an early lunch? Will he be in the bathroom showering off a bucket’s worth of blood and brain bits? Will he be in his own room minding his own business or napping or maybe playing with one of the fidgety toys his therapist gave him? He still hasn’t figured out the Rubik’s cube.
Or will he be nowhere at all, skulking around in the air ducts or getting out some pent up aggression in the gym? Not that there’d be that much still pent up after exploding a guy’s head with a hammer.
Clint looks at his phone, reading the texts again and looking at the picture that accompanies them.
Yeah, exploded is the right word. That guy’s head is all over that room. It’s a wonder Jigsaw didn’t add a star to the mess. Maybe he’s given up adding stars. Or maybe he just didn’t have time. It’s unlikely Cap would have let him draw a star anywhere, after all.
Oh well. Time to face whatever’s going on in there.
Clint opens the door to his and Jigsaw’s rooms and sees that there’s no Jigsaw in the living room and also no Lucky at the door to greet him. But the leash is still in the bowl, so the dog’s somewhere in the room unless Jigsaw managed to shower and also vamoose to parts unknown with his dog.
Clint shuts the door behind him and puts his phone in his back pocket as he heads further into the living room. A peek down the short hallway indicates that the second bathroom is open, so not occupied by a showering assassin, and that said assassin’s bedroom door is closed, which is a first. Jigsaw’s never shut that door to his knowledge, preferring maybe to keep it open so he can hear everything going on in the rest of the suite of rooms.
He heads to their fridge and pulls out a bottle of water, looks at the coffee maker for a moment, and then pulls out a second bottle of water instead. He could definitely use a coffee, but he doesn’t want to spend the time making coffee before checking on Jigsaw. He’s the assassin whisperer, after all, and it’s time to get to whispering.
Clint brings the bottles of water to the door and tries to make as much noise with his feet as he can while doing so. The last thing he wants is to startle his roommate. He knocks on the door lightly, certain that he’s been heard.
“Hey Jigs?” he asks. “It’s just me out here. Can I come in?”
It occurs to him that Jigsaw has no way of telling him he can come in while the door is closed and Clint can’t see him, but also that there’s no way to interpret the lingering silence in either way.
“Uh, make a noise or something if I can come in.”
There’s more silence, and Clint’s about to decide that no, he cannot come in, when something hits the door with a sharp thwack and falls to the floor with a thump. That’s one way to make a noise. Not quite the clapping or the knocking on the wall or the snapping of fingers or anything that Clint was expecting. But still a noise.
Clint opens the door slowly, making sure of his welcome instead of just barging in, and sees the partially complete Rubik’s cube on the floor in front of him. So that was what got thrown. Better that than Stark’s fancy tablet that doesn’t get much use yet. Maybe they should get Jigsaw a bell he can ring if someone’s allowed to come in.
Jigsaw himself is burrowed in his pillow fort with only his head and one arm out, and as Clint enters the room fully, that arm is withdrawn into the tangle of blankets that surrounds him. He looks decidedly pissed off at the world, but there’s not a trace of blood in his hair or on his face. The glasses are folded up on the two-foot serving platter that serves as a nightstand for him, also perfectly clean. The pad of paper, though, still has some blood on it.
And Lucky noses out from among the pillows, but opts to remain largely on top of Jigsaw instead of actually coming out to say hello.
That figures. Jigsaw is still his primary person, after all.
“I got you a bottle of water out of the fridge,” Clint says. “I know your food lady wants you to drink lots of water.”
He sets the bottle near the glasses on the serving platter nightstand and then backs off to sit on the floor up against the wall. It’s borderline excruciating getting down that far, and he knows he’s going to regret it when it comes time to get back up. But he wants to be sort of level with Jigsaw, and short of lying down on the ground, this is it.
It’s kind of like old times, this. Jigsaw buried in blankets and stonily silent and mad at everything, and Clint sitting there in silence just being present and hoping to make a difference.
After about ten minutes, Clint opens his own bottle of water and takes a drink.
“So my meeting with Kate went well,” he says. “Apparently, I saved her life back when the Chitauri were attacking, and now I’m her hero or something. She wants to be an expert archer.”
Jigsaw at least looks at him while he talks, which is something.
“She even brought her own bow and practice arrows to the meeting. It’s nice equipment. She’s obviously able to afford the best, even just when starting out.”
And now that he thinks of it, her buying up all his time was just another way she can afford the best. Because as Natasha said, who better to teach her than someone as good as he is? It’s strange thinking that positively about himself. He hasn’t done it in a long while. It’s a nice change. Maybe he could get used to it, for the next eight weeks, anyway. They’d agreed to meet Sunday mornings.
“I’m meeting her again next Sunday, same time, same place.” Clint takes another drink of water. “Maybe my ribs won’t hurt so much then. But if they do, do you want to tie my shoes?”
Jigsaw blinks, finally, and a single finger peeks out from the blankets. One. That means yes. They’re back to the yes/no system, maybe, unless Jigsaw feels like crawling out of his blanket burrito.
“Thanks,” Clint says. “I appreciate it. So do you want to talk about what happened with you and the tour?”
Jigsaw draws the finger back into the blankets, but doesn’t put two fingers out, either. So there’s really no answer there.
“I got filled in by text, but I want to understand your point of view. Because the other side is saying you murdered a guy in cold blood as he tried to run away from you.”
That gets Jigsaw to drag Stark’s tablet closer to himself, and to draw on it for a while.
Clint waits him out. It’s impressive he’s using the tablet of his own volition; he’ll have to let Stark know it’s gaining a little traction with his roommate. Maybe they can eventually do away with the pads of paper. Consolidate all his food books into one program on his tablet, make it so he only has the one thing to really carry around all the time.
Finally, Jigsaw turns the tablet toward Clint. It shows a very clear drawing of the HYDRA logo in black and red, and then an arrow pointing to a stick figure’s upper arm. There’s also a hammer in the stick figure’s belt, and another arrow to the stick figure’s head with KNOW next to it in typed letters.
“You saw a construction guy while you were on the tour, and you knew he was HYDRA because you saw his face, and you knew he had a HYDRA tattoo on his bicep?”
Jigsaw nods. Then he swipes the image away and a new image appears, this one a pair of glasses with KILLING FACE and MISSION typed out. Typing really is faster for him than writing, though not by a lot. It does seem to come to him easier, though, when he doesn’t have to make the letters himself.
“Cap said you thought that,” Clint says. “That the glasses were meant to be a sign that you could kill if the need came up.”
Clint shifts a bit, trying to find a more comfortable way to sit. There is no comfortable way to sit, though.
“If Natasha gave you a mission, though, you’d know it because she’d put it right out there. No chance for misunderstandings.”
Jigsaw turns the tablet around again and draws some more. What he eventually shows Clint is a drawing of a clock with all twelve hours marked and an arrow that goes all the way around the clock.
“Oh,” Clint says. “You’re always on a mission. Right? The mission never ends?”
Jigsaw nods.
“That’s not really doable in the long term, you know,” Clint says. “You’ve got to be able to turn it off and rest. You can’t be on guard all the time. It’ll wear you down.” And boy, doesn't he know that, having been on guard against Loki for so long after getting free of him.
Jigsaw reaches for the pad of paper on the serving platter nightstand and tosses it at him.
It’s turned to a page that says, among blood smears, END OF THE LINE.
“That’s really not healthy.” Clint sighs. “And I know I’m one to talk, but trust me. You have to set it down sometimes, and you can’t just work at the mission until you die.”
If that’s what it really means, “end of the line.” He’s not sure what else it could mean. Even if he’s always on the mission, there’s gotta be an end to it, and that end might be when all of the HYDRA mooks out there are dead, or it might be when someone finally gets a lucky hit on him. It’s definitely a fatalistic approach.
Jigsaw nods his head, belligerent.
“No, you can’t,” Clint says. “That’ll just mean you get worn down quicker, and that’ll mean you slip up. You can’t afford to slip up.”
His roommate is frowning now, and gestures for him to keep talking.
“If you slip up, one of two things happens, Jiggy. You could end up killing an innocent by mistaking them for someone else. What if this guy had turned out to be a non-HYDRA twin brother or something?”
Jigsaw blinks at him.
“You can’t just go full murder-party based on a face and hope you’re right. You could slip up, and get it wrong, especially if you’re always looking for the next target. The other thing is, you could get yourself killed. Or captured. And I’m guessing you don’t want either of those things to happen.”
There’s a shaken head. But then he’s working at the tablet again, and what comes out of that is not an admission that Clint is right, but the typed words IT KNOWS EVIL.
And they’ve been here before.
“I know you know evil. You wouldn’t purposely go after an innocent. What I’m saying is that you could get it wrong if you’re too focused on seeing HYDRA everywhere. There’s a balance you need to strike between being vigilant and being paranoid.”
Of course, it isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you, and they really are out to get Jigsaw. But the point still stands. If he’s too vigilant, he’ll start seeing HYDRA where there isn’t any HYDRA, and then they have real problems. Not that they don’t have problems now, but they’ll be bigger problems.
You can find ways to excuse a murder here or there if the victim is a scumbag. But if it’s a mistake, if the victim shouldn’t have been targeted at all, that’s harder to sweep under the rug.
“You remember when you got me out of the tracksuit mafia’s clutches, and you didn’t set out to kill any of them?”
Jigsaw nods.
“What happened to that idea?” Clint asks. “You said you did it for me. Do you think you could see your way to doing that for yourself? Maybe maim HYDRA goons instead of killing them?” That’s not much better, but it’ll be an okay bridge between killing them and merely capturing them.
Jigsaw narrows his eyes, either in thought or in disagreement, Clint can’t tell.
“You know it’s a lot harder to keep people alive while maiming them than to kill them.” Clint knows he knows that, because Jigsaw kept his victims alive while torturing them to death before they found him.
“And some of the tracksuit bros you hurt ended up dying from their injuries, so you still need to work on moderating your force. Maybe think of it as a challenge to keep the next one alive?”
Jigsaw turns the tablet around to work on for a while, and Clint can only hope he’s writing something like “you’re right” on the tablet. Or maybe “okay” or something like that. A general agreement to try to maim people instead of killing them.
What comes out after several minutes is less an agreement and more a statement: YOU WANT THEM ALIVE
Clint nods. “Yeah, we really, really do.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and circles “you” with his finger.
Oh. This is about doing Clint a favor again. It’s about what he, Clint, wants, and not about the team at all or about what’s right or wrong. There’s probably a good reason not to go down that road. Probably one of the therapists this Tower is crawling with could tell him in a heartbeat why he shouldn’t accept being singled out like this. But he’s going to do it.
“I want them alive, yeah. I really want them to live.” Ugh. It feels like such a lie, because he doesn’t actually care so much if they die. They’re scum. But he doesn’t want them tortured to death or beaten with hammers or stabbed in the ass with a machete.
“You know why I want them alive?”
Jigsaw shakes his head.
“Because someday, you might look back on this and feel really bad about doing it. I don’t want that for you.” Clint gestures in the direction of Natasha’s room. “Natasha’s been trying to wipe away her murders for the Red Room for almost a decade now. She’s still upset by what she did.”
Jigsaw doesn’t seem to think that’s a very good reason, possibly because he’s not planning to survive his mission, ultimately.
“Also, we’re only able to help you and have you in the Tower at all because S.W.O.R.D. took over from the criminal justice system. Otherwise, you’d be a hunted target for all the murders,” Clint says. “And if you didn’t have S.W.O.R.D. in your corner protecting you from the courts, it would be bad. I don’t want you to lose that.”
Clint watches his roommate for any sign that that was a significant enough reason to aim for maiming instead of killing. He doesn’t see one, but he also doesn’t see a sign to the contrary.
“Are you angry that I want you to leave them alive, or just confused about why?”
Jigsaw holds up two fingers. So, confused still. He isn’t accepting either reason as a good one for keeping HYDRA alive.
Clint debates spinning tales about prison and how horrible the inmates have it, but that runs the risk of reminding Jigsaw about his first month in the Tower, and it doesn’t mean much if Jigsaw’s convinced that surviving targets get to escape from prison.
Once more, Clint bemoans the Triskelion escape. If Blackburn hadn’t arranged that big escape plan, there wouldn’t have been any fuel on the fire of Jigsaw’s certainty that captivity is easily escaped. Jail time would have been considered a kind of justice, maybe, instead of death being the only answer to the problem of HYDRA in the world.
“Well, at least there’s that,” Clint says. “I’ll take confusion over anger any day. I really do have your best interests in mind here. I know it doesn’t seem like it. But I want you to live a long life and not have regrets.”
Jigsaw points to him and makes the “why” sign.
“Hell yeah, I have regrets. I’ve told you about them, even.”
Jigsaw makes Loki’s name sign, the L-shape curled up from the temple, and then shakes his head.
“You mean, what are my regrets that aren’t about him?” When Jigsaw nods, Clint continues. “Okay, well you know I was Ronin for a while. The tac gear you borrowed, with the sword.”
Jigsaw smiles and nods, and there’s something in the bow of his lips, something in the eagerness of his eyes, that makes Clint feel warm inside despite the subject matter.
“Well, I killed a lot of people as Ronin, and they didn’t all need to die. A lot of them were just henchmen, just stupid bros following orders and grabbing wallets, or in charge of counting cash or selling identities.”
Not that those are great occupations, but the people in those occupations don’t necessarily deserve a sword through the guts and twisted, and they don’t deserve a shuriken to the eye and lodged in the orbital bone before their necks get broken. They don’t deserve to be slashed nearly in half at the belt, and they don’t deserve to get their heads smashed against the curb until all their teeth come out.
Ronin was a brutal time in Clint’s life. He’d been going through some things before he’d been sent after Natasha, and he’d channeled those things while working to convince her to join him in S.H.I.E.L.D.
He starts describing some of those violent encounters, but stops when he sees that Jigsaw is soaking them up like Clint was bragging about them.
Jigsaw gives him a thumbs up when he stops—“good job,” when the sign is directed at the dog—and smiles encouragingly, waiting for him to continue.
“No,” Clint says. “These are things I regret, Jiggy. I have nightmares about doing them to people I care about. I wish I hadn’t done them.”
Clint shakes his head. “Those are mistakes I made in my life, things I wish I could go back and change. I’m not proud of them.”
Jigsaw frowns and pulls the tablet closer to himself to write something.
A few minutes later, Clint reads NO MISTAKE and KILL EVIL on the screen.
“But that’s the thing, Jigs. They weren’t evil. They were bad, but bad is like evil-lite. It’s misguided, maybe it doesn’t have access to better choices, maybe it’s desperate. But it’s not like the people who hurt you. It’s a matter of degree.”
Clint flips to a new page of Jigsaw’s pad of paper. “Toss me the pen, will you? I want to draw something for you.”
Jigsaw complies, and Clint draws a line across the page. He puts “innocent” and “guilty” on opposite sides, and then draws a line up and down in the middle of that with “good” at the top and “evil” at the bottom.
“Here,” he says, showing him the paper. “It’s not an either-or situation. And it’s not innocent versus evil. Really, no one is completely innocent. They might be mostly good, but they’re still probably a little bit guilty of something, whether that’s cheating on a test or stealing office supplies.”
Jigsaw studies the lines.
“But guilty people aren’t necessarily evil, and evil people aren’t necessarily guilty of doing evil things. And good people can be guilty of things, and everything’s all kind of mixed up in the middle of the chart.”
Clint’s starting to feel really good about this explanation. It’s at least getting a studious look and not a dismissive one.
“So you can’t just decide someone’s too far over in the ‘evil’ camp and kill them. It’s all a matter of degree, you see? There’s a range,” Clint says. “What kind of HYDRA guy was the one you killed today? You recognized him, so you must have seen him before.”
Jigsaw draws an upsilon on the tablet and shows him.
Ugh, one of the STRIKE Upsilon guys, or at least one of their civilian contacts. They had a whole network, just like the Kappa guys with the police.
“Okay, so they mostly cleaned up messes, right?” Clint asks. “They didn’t usually go in for making a mess.”
He points to a spot on his chart that’s kind of midrange evil.
“I’d put him here, about, unless he was a total sleazeball worse than the rest of the Upsilon guys. Evil, sort of, but not really guilty of anything major. But someone like Barkholt or Rumlow, they’d be all the way over here in the ‘evil’ and ‘guilty’ space, and maybe it’s good to kill them.”
Clint wishes he hadn’t said that last part, but since he knows those two assholes are among those who carved their initials in Jigsaw—C-BAR and B-RUM—he kind of feels like Barkholt deserved to die like he did, and Rumlow maybe deserves even worse.
Jigsaw’s eyes narrow at the mention of Barkholt and Rumlow.
“But you get how there are degrees?” Clint asks. “Not everyone falls into the same spot on the chart, and so not everyone needs to get the same treatment. And since we can’t be sure where they fall, we should opt not to kill them, just in case they don't deserve it.”
Jigsaw takes his sweet time writing out a response to that on the tablet, and Clint is pretty sure based on the mulish expression on his face that it’s not going to be a glowing endorsement of the chart and the idea that people shouldn’t be killed.
And he’s right. What finally gets turned around toward him are the words: IT HATES CHARTS
Clint blinks.
“Oh.” He isn’t sure how to respond to that. “Is that because this chart is right and you’ll agree to only maim people from here on out?”
Jigsaw merely swipes back to the words YOU WANT THEM ALIVE on a previous screen.
“I guess I’ll take that as a victory, then,” Clint says. “You want to sulk in here for a while or come out and play some video games?”
Jigsaw holds up one finger.
“That's cool. You mind coming out of your pillow fort and helping me up before you go back to sulking?” Clint asks. “I’m not sure how I’m getting up without help.”
Jigsaw gamely shrugs off the dog and crawls out from within the pile of pillows and bedding. Lucky gets to his feet as well, shaking himself thoroughly and coming over to lick Clint’s face.
“Good boy, Lucky,” Clint says, ruffling the fur at the dog’s neck. “You’re a good boy.”
Jigsaw holds out his right hand and gets Clint to his feet with a minimum of effort and pain on Clint’s part, and then picks up the Rubik’s cube to bring it back to his pillow fort.
“You want me to come get you when it’s time for lunch?”
His roommate nods and then crawls into his blankets and curls up.
“Alright. See you in a couple hours.”
Chapter 11: Tower | But I’m willing to give it another try
Notes:
Chapter title from “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O'Connor.
Did you know that google docs has a character limit? It does. I had to split my doc in order to keep writing. I guess this story is going to be really long, after all, just like Matador was. 😅
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
She knocks on the door and then prepares to wait a bit.
Clint is in there, she knows, but he might be talking with Jigsaw about this morning’s murder, or he might be on the sofa and hoping she’ll go away rather than him having to get up to get the door. Maybe Jigsaw will open the door for him. He’s been playing nursemaid for a month now, whenever Clint lets him.
Natasha raises her hand to knock again when the door opens and Clint looks out at her.
“We’re having curry for lunch,” she says. “Time to order a pizza.”
“Ugh.” Clint moves back so that she can enter the front room. “Potatoes or tofu?”
She laughs. “Probably both, not that it makes a difference to you.”
Natasha looks around the room for Lucky or Jigsaw and sees neither. They may be spending some quiet time in Jigsaw’s room, then, Jigsaw because he wants to be alone and Lucky because Jigsaw needs the company.
“So everyone on the team knows, right?” Clint asks as he resumes his seat on the sofa. “About the guy this morning?”
Natasha nods and settles in the chair opposite him. “Everyone but S.W.O.R.D., I think. Not even Nick is telling them. We’re really doing a terrible job of reporting the incidents along with our progress.”
She hopes their weekly reports these last two months have been detailed enough. No one from S.W.O.R.D. has reached out for a more detailed assessment, so it might be okay. They’re certainly taking the hands-off approach to a whole new level, though. She had expected Rogers to have to do more than give weekly updates on how things were going, or at least submit to a monthly in-person report.
That may change now that there are therapists involved to the extent they are. Or it may change if they learn how difficult it’s proving to be to iron out the nonlethal details for Jigsaw. But hopefully they can continue to keep that under wraps.
The story they’re going with on this morning’s incident is a suicide. Pepper’s public relations staff is busily spinning the strands of that story, planting ideas in the other workers’ minds that they maybe heard a noise before Pepper’s scream, and the workers themselves are supplying that Harrell was aloof and never quite fit into the group of them. They knew something was up.
What they didn’t know—and won’t ever know—is that their coworker was a HYDRA plant. And there are feelers going out to do a discreet background search on every other Tower employee, whether from Stark Industries or any of the other smaller businesses they rent space out to, to make sure there aren’t any others.
“Did you talk with him about it yet?” Natasha asks.
Clint nods. “I think we got somewhere.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, the 'somewhere' was back where we were a month ago, but it’s definitely somewhere.” Clint seems to understand that he’s making no sense, and he continues after a pause. “The only reason he can see to maim people instead of killing them is that I want them to be alive.”
Hmm. That’s a certain kind of progress, even if it’s not exactly a forward movement. If they want Jigsaw to leave his victims alive, they just need to make sure Clint is by his side every moment of every day there could be a possible victim around. Not ideal.
“Do you think it applies when you aren’t around now?” she asks. “Because that might be what the difference was this morning compared to when he blew through the tracksuit bros.”
“That’s what I figure, yeah. I tried explaining your ledger, tried talking about Ronin, tried talking about S.W.O.R.D. It just came back around to me not wanting him killing people.” Clint raises his hands, palms up. “I’m not sure what else to say.”
“It’s a good start. A good continuation,” she corrects. “We already started a long time ago. But these things aren’t always very straightforward.”
Clint rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, ‘recovery isn’t linear.’ I know the drill.” He shakes his head. “I just wish he wanted these things for himself, and not because I want them for him.”
Natasha smiles. “You’ll get there. It took me months to come around, and I was nowhere near as deep into trauma as he is.”
“But do we have months for trial and error?” Clint asks. “We’ve got an agreement that basically says there’s a hard cutoff to the murders and going forward it’s nonlethal. We’ve already got the tracksuit bros who didn’t make it, the STRIKE team that got eviscerated, the Ronin stuff we're hiding, and now construction dude with his head smashed to bits.”
Clint sighs. “I don’t know how many more hiccups in the progress we can keep under the radar.”
Natasha switches to signing. “S.W.O.R.D. thinks of him as a sentient weapon, remember? We’ve never calibrated this weapon,” she signs. “It’ll take a few tries. They understand it in those terms, at least.”
Because at S.W.O.R.D., they are dealing with the situation as if he were a sentient weapon, after all. The best way to avoid any of these things going to a trial, since a weapon can’t be held responsible for firing itself.
Clint follows suit, understanding the need to avoid being heard talking about Jigsaw as though he were an actual weapon the way they are pretending on the paperwork.
“Well, I don’t want them coming in and trying to calibrate him the hard way,” Clint signs.
Natasha doesn’t, either. Especially if the hard way means putting him under that halo in the wiping chair and starting over from scratch. It might be a way HYDRA thinks is perfectly appropriate for their Soldier, but it’s not going to happen on her watch. Or any of their watches.
And even though S.W.O.R.D. has the equipment for it in their hands, she can’t think that they’d let it happen, either. There’s a reason Nick trusted them to help him after the S.H.I.E.L.D. infiltration came to light. And they have to be able to trust someone, even if S.H.I.E.L.D. could still have a few moles in it. S.W.O.R.D. was never infiltrated, at least not to the same extent.
Sam
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
“Please don’t tell me you told me so,” Steve says when Sam opens the door. “I know you did.”
Sam shakes his head, knowing full well what he’s talking about. What else could it be after the text he got with the pictures of Harrell? “I did not tell you this would happen.”
He gestures for Steve to come in. “If I thought he was going to go off for just anything,” Sam continues, “I wouldn’t go walking Lucky with him. Ever.”
Steve sighs and comes in, choosing one of the chairs to sit in. “I didn’t expect him to— I just…” he sighs again. “Are we making any progress at all? Sam, I thought when he left those tracksuit guys alive that we were getting somewhere with him. And then this. It feels hopeless. I feel hopeless.”
And after Jigsaw’s had a few therapy sessions, too. Sam does get where Steve’s coming from. But with recovery, it’s an upward spiral. It might look like going in circles, but it’s also going up.
“That guy was deep enough in HYDRA to have a tattoo, Steve,” Sam says. “I’m not saying he deserved to die, or to go the way he went. And I’m not excusing Jigsaw’s actions. But there’s a reason Jigsaw snapped the way he did. Being a part of HYDRA is a death sentence where he’s concerned and that hasn’t changed.”
“But he left the others alive. Or tried to.”
“They weren’t HYDRA. They’d hurt Clint, so he got violent about it, but they weren’t HYDRA and Clint said that Jigsaw left them alive for his sake. Because he knew Clint wanted them alive.”
Steve frowns. “He knows I want people left alive, too. That we all do.”
Sam bites back a smile that he guesses Steve won’t appreciate. “No offense, Steve, but you’re not Clint.”
It’s obvious that Clint means more to Jigsaw than any of the rest of them do. Whether that’s as obvious to Clint as it is to him is another matter.
“The answer can’t be to shackle Clint to him 24/7,” Steve says. “Though I’m not sure either of them would actually mind.”
Oof, there’s a hint of bitterness there. Steve is definitely among those of them who recognize Clint’s special status in Jigsaw’s eyes. And it’s still bothering him. But he’s only had a handful of sessions with Linda, and they’ll work through that eventually.
“How’s Pepper taking it?” Sam asks, not wanting to get dragged into the other messy topic. He’s already said his piece on making friends with Jigsaw, and the rest is for Steve’s therapist to handle.
Steve runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I didn’t see her after she left to send everyone home. But she did scream when she saw it.”
That’s natural enough. Sam can’t be certain he wouldn’t have had a similar reaction to entering a room to see a man beating someone to death with a hammer. He’s seen some shit in Afghanistan doing pararescue, and he’s seen pictures of Jigsaw’s earlier kills. But it’s different when it’s happening in front of you and you can’t do anything to stop it.
Doing pararescue, he was right in the thick of it specifically to save the wounded and put a stop to the violence. He made a difference. He solved problems and prevented atrocities. He had agency and could put it to use. Except when Riley was shot down. Then he was up there just to watch.
Hell, he sometimes still has nightmares about Holly, the woman who got stabbed to death in his car on the highway after his steering wheel got ripped out. And he’d hardly known her, and certainly hadn’t known she was HYDRA. It just hits different when you can’t do anything but watch the shit go down.
“Well, hopefully she’s got someone to talk to,” Sam says.
It might be hard to find a new therapist in New York City after the Chitauri attack, but Pepper probably had someone already lined up just to hear her out about working with Stark. Sam is just lucky his old therapist agreed to squeeze him into his roster, though it’s over the phone rather than in person. He’ll take what he can get.
“She can’t tell anyone who isn’t already read in, though,” Steve says. “Right?”
Sam shrugs. “It’s hard to say. She’s probably got someone who can hear that there was a workplace incident and someone died in front of her, and similar vagueness.”
Steve seems to accept that, and Sam takes a moment to study him while Steve looks down at his hands.
Therapy is good for him, but they’ve only had a handful of sessions. It’ll be good when they start really digging around in Steve’s trauma, unearthing the things that are too painful to share. And as Steve starts getting to a better place… How does Sam want to approach him? They aren’t in the middle of a manhunt. All of the reasons to push aside his attraction are either gone or going away.
Is he ready to try to snag a few dates with Steve, and maybe more? Or is it not quite time for that yet? His last date was stabbed in the face over a dozen times in his passenger seat. It’ll be hard to top that date in terms of how awful it turned out.
He might as well give it a try once Steve’s a bit further with his therapy. He’s gotten the feeling every once in a while that Steve likes his company more than a little. Worst case, things are awkward for a few days.
Who knows. Maybe this time next month, he’ll be dating Captain America.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
It lets an arm drift down to pet the dog, curled up on the floor the way it is curled up on the sofa. The dog’s tail swish-swishes in happiness. The dog loves to have its head stroked, and the fur scratched behind its ears, and the ruff at its neck petted. With the dog, everything is simple. There are things the dog likes, and it can do those things, and the dog will be happy.
Things are not simple with the others around it in this hive building.
The other asset and the rest of the team that is not a cell want it to not do something. They will be happy with the absence of an action. There is no action that will make them happy. So why bother trying to make them happy?
Except for the other asset. It definitely wants the other asset to be happy. And more than that, it wants the other asset to be happy with it. But there is so little it can do to make the other asset happy. There is the absence of killing, but when is it even going to get another chance to demonstrate that it can leave a target alive? There are no more targets in the hive building that it knows of.
And so it watches the glowing panel and pets the dog and wonders what else it can do to make the other asset happy with it.
The other asset does not seem disappointed or angry. Does not seem to be unhappy with it. The other asset has had the conversations with it and with the ballerina woman, and that is that. But the other asset wants the targets alive, even the HYDRA targets, and it… It wants the other asset to be happy with it, but it also wants to kill the HYDRA operatives it finds, wherever they happen to be.
That is the only thing the other asset has asked of it, though: Leave them alive.
Other than that, there is nothing it can do to make the other asset happy with it. All it can do is make sure the other asset is safe from anything that would hurt the other asset, whether that be injury or nightmare images. It can watch over the other asset and protect the other asset, can treat the other asset as a different kind of mission, one of the most important things.
But it does not feel like enough.
The other asset pauses the game with the little red man safely at the midway point in the water level with plenty of life and coins. The other asset looks at the phone on the arm of the chair.
“Shouldn’t you be in your afternoon session with Yasmin?” the other asset asks. “It’s after three.”
It does not want to go. There will be a lecture just like the clown man gave it, all about how it should not have killed the target, that there was no mission—when there is always a mission!—and no killing face. It does not need to hear that again. It does not want an expert, even one without the words, to tell it that it has done something wrong.
Especially not when it was right.
“You are going, aren’t you?” The other asset sounds worried for it. And that is nice, but not necessary.
It shakes the head and pulls the legs up into a tighter ball than before. It does not want to go. It wants to stay here, curled up on the sofa with the dog and the other asset, thinking in circles and struggling to keep the eyes trained on the glowing panel despite the twinge building into pain behind the eyes.
“Uh, won’t you get in trouble if you just don’t show up?” the other asset asks. “I think you might get in trouble. I get it, though. You just need a break from all the therapy.”
It does not know what it needs. It does not feel good, but it does not feel bad, either. It feels tired, maybe. Tired of everything. Tired of hearing about the mission being wrong, tired of having to defend its actions, tired of experts and their charts.
Even the other asset has presented a chart.
It closes the eyes and turns over to face the back of the sofa, trusting the other asset to guard the back while it is vulnerable. It is safe to sulk with the other asset watching over it. And the other asset has described this as sulking, so it must be sulking. It will not think about punishment and getting in trouble. The other asset will protect it from that, too.
“Alright,” the other asset says. “I get that.”
The other asset unpauses the game and the music for the water level starts up again, the little sounds as the little red man in the glowing panel swims around collecting things and avoiding the big fish.
It lets the sounds wash over it, lets them fade away, lets them become nothing at all as it filters them out and focuses instead on the sounds of the handheld device that makes the little red man move. The clicks of the buttons, the swivel of the little discs where the thumbs can rest and can move in circles. It likes those sounds, the sounds that are actually in the room and do not come from a glowing panel.
It also likes the sounds of the other asset urging the little red man to swim faster or dodge faster or move out of the way faster. Lots of effort sounds, even though the only things actually moving are the other asset’s fingers.
It likes the other asset’s efforts. It also likes the other asset’s fingers. So nimble and quick, so well controlled, all of the letter shapes coming easily. The other asset has excellent fingers.
And for many weeks now, though, those fingers have had to be dedicated to the games in the glowing panel or for things that should not take effort at all, but that do because of the other asset’s ribs. It has not been able to hear any effort that goes into shooting the tiny fangs on sticks into targets in the range. The gentle thwick of the bowstring and the hollow thwump of the target being struck.
It wants to watch the other asset do what the other asset does best again, and it has to wait until the other asset heals, and the other asset heals so slowly. It feels like it will never again get to watch the other asset’s muscles move so perfectly and the other asset’s limbs held just so, all the exertion and hardly any sign of strain.
At least the other asset has given up on the baggy pants that it hates so much.
The other asset’s phone makes a chime noise, and the other asset pauses the game again to pay attention to the phone instead.
“Uh, should I say you’re fine but not coming? Yasmin is worried about you.”
Worried about it?
But it is not in any danger here; no one will punish it and the other asset especially will not let the expert punish it. And even if there was punishment on the way, that is something for assets to worry about, not experts. What is there for her to be worried about?
“She says she hopes you’re okay after this morning.”
It frowns. The expert hopes that it is okay? Not waiting to scold it for doing the right thing? Not lined up to lecture it? But worried? About it? Hoping that it is doing okay?
It should go to the room where the “sessions” happen and let her know that it is okay. It twists around and sits up, careful not to put a foot on the dog, and signs “late” at the other asset, and then “coming.”
“You want me to let her know you’re on your way?”
It nods and stands up, gestures for the dog to come with it. They are late to the afternoon “session,” and will need to leave right away.
Chapter 12: Jigsaw | I’m so tired of on-my-own
Notes:
Chapter title from “Tired of Being Alone” by Al Green.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
The expert without the words—Yasmin, it reminds itself—looks up from her notebook as it slips through the doorway with the dog. She smiles and puts the notebook down.
“I’m glad you decided to come to our session, Jigsaw,” she says. “I was worried about you.”
It is not sure how to respond to that, so it does not respond, but comes fully into the room so that the door closes behind it, and climbs onto the sofa to sit beside the dog. It looks at the expert without the words attentively, waiting for the “session” to start.
“I understand that you killed a man earlier,” she says, her voice perfectly calm and not even a little bit angry about it. She sounds even a little curious. “Can you tell me why you did that?”
Because the man was a HYDRA operative. That is obvious. It will never go back, will never let another be dragged back in its place, will never let evil just go about its business. It will kill all of the HYDRA agents it finds, wherever and whenever it finds them.
Except that the other asset wants them to live. That is still a sticking point.
The expert without the words is waiting, and so it signs that the man was HYDRA, evil, a target, and that the mission is to kill evil, HYDRA, targets. That the mission is the most important thing. The— Yasmin seems to understand what it means, just like the other asset usually does. That is a relief. It does not want to have to write the words, and it does not want to draw the symbol for HYDRA.
“I'm wondering, are there any other things you could have done? Ways you could have handled that?”
It nods. It could have broken a window and thrown the man out of it to his death. It could have ripped the man’s head off at the neck. It could have ripped only the top part of the man’s head off, grabbing through the eye sockets and pulling and pulling and pulling. It could have strangled the man, or torn the man’s throat out, or broken the man’s neck. It could have broken open the man’s ribs and removed the inside parts of him, really emptied him out of all his evil.
“And what are some of those other ways?” the expert asks.
It does not have the signs for all of these things. All of the other ways it could have handled the HYDRA operative, the ways it could have dispatched the man. So it draws the other ways on the pad of paper with the pen.
It takes multiple sheets of paper to fully draw all of the ways it can think of that it could have killed the man. There are more, if it thinks longer, but this will do. This is enough. There was not time for some of the other ways, and it did not have a glittering fang to use. Those are still stolen from it.
It holds out the paper, and the expert without the words reaches out to take it, leaning forward in her chair across the low coffee table from it.
She looks at the first page, studying the contents without giving anything away on her face.
Does she approve? She could not approve, though. She is supposed to be changing it, fixing it, making it so that it will not do any of these things again. Conditioning it. That is what experts do. Except she says that she is only trying to understand it, to help it understand itself and the others around it. So maybe she can approve.
It watches as she turns the pages, one after the other, studying each in turn for something it cannot see. The pages are very straightforward. There is no mystery.
“I'd like to understand more. How do you feel about what you did?” Yasmin hands the pad of paper back. “How did it feel when you did it?”
Good. It felt alive, completing another mission, dispatching another target, making the hive building safer for the team that is not a cell, for the woman with the long red hair, for the dog. How does it express that? How to explain?
It tries, signing “good” and “good job” and “mission” and “life.”
“So you felt good. Happy, maybe?”
It nods. It felt very happy.
The expert without the words pulls a circle chart from the notebook beside her, the same one with all the words on it for feelings that the expert with the signs had given to it to be trapped in the binder.
“If we start with the happy section, what sub-feeling would you say you felt?” She hands it the circle. “Would you please circle the right slice of the circle?”
It sighs, so silently, and reads the words on the wheel. It circles “proud” and holds it back out to her, but she does not take it.
“And will you circle one of the sub-feelings of that one, please?” she asks. “Think about how you felt in that moment, what most closely matches it on the wheel.”
It circles “successful” and then thinks about it and adds a circle around “confident,” too. It felt all of those things. Proud of its kill, successful in its mission, confident that it had done the right thing.
It holds out the wheel to show her.
“Good. And how did you feel when other people reacted?” she asks. “Circle the feelings on the chart like we did for happy. In the moment of their reaction, how did you feel? Think about Steve and Pepper, and about Clint. Their reactions.”
It felt angry. It still feels angry. It circles “angry.” And from there… “Let down,” yes, “betrayed” by the lack of appreciation for the kill, by the clown man not always being on the hunt, for the insistence that killing was wrong when it was clearly right. And “frustrated” and “mad,” which both have a kind of fury attached that it circles as well. “Infuriated” and “furious.” Both the same, but from different wedges.
The expert without the words nods when it shows her the chart with all the circles. “And how do you think Steve might have felt at that moment?”
Stupid. That is not on the chart, though.
What is on the chart is disgusted, and that is what it read on the clown man’s face while he had told it all of those stupid things about better ways to handle the situation. How he could be disgusted by the sight of evil spilled out and no longer free to work its will on the world, though, that is a mystery. He said that he hates HYDRA. He said that they were all fighting HYDRA. He was in a war against HYDRA. But he is disgusted when HYDRA operatives are killed?
“Disapproving,” “disappointed,” “awful,” “repelled.” All of the sub-feelings should be circled, and all of the feelings even further out as well. The clown man had disapproved of it, had sounded disappointed to be telling it those things. Maybe less awful, though, and he had tried to stop it by grabbing the arm, so he was not repelled.
It circles those things, “disapproving” and “disappointed.” The feelings that go with those two are “judgmental,” “embarrassed,” “appalled,” and “revolted.” Did the clown man feel those things? He had acted judgmental and appalled, his face had shown revolted. Was he embarrassed? It is not sure about that one. It does not know much about embarrassment. Has never been embarrassed, it thinks.
It decides to leave “embarrassment” uncircled and to circle the rest of them. It starts to show the expert its work, but she asks the next question before it can fully turn the chart around toward her.
“And how do you think Pepper might have felt at that moment?”
Are they going to do this for everyone involved? How did the other construction men feel? How did the cleanup crew feel? How did the ballerina woman feel hearing about it? How did… It sighs. This will take forever.
The woman with the long red hair had felt… It scans the wheel. “Fearful,” it decides. And “surprised.” Though why she should have been surprised, it does not know. It was obviously going to attack the target. But still, she had somehow not known that. After a minute to think, it adds circles around “scared,” “frightened,” “startled,” “shocked,” and “dismayed.”
This time, it does not bother to try to turn the chart around to show it to Yasmin. She will just ask about the other asset next. It looks up at her.
“And Clint?”
So predictable, once they started this circling business. Next will be the ballerina woman, it is sure.
It studies the circle with all the feelings on it. How had the other asset felt in the moment of reaction? It… it does not know. The other asset heard about the killing of the target, the mission completion, and had reacted somewhere else. Had only come into the room that is just for it to talk about everything after the reaction had already happened.
The other asset might have been surprised and then confused and then… what is disillusioned? Or maybe… oh no. What if the other asset felt let down and betrayed the same way it had felt let down and betrayed when the clown man had rejected the rightness of the kill?
It had let the tracksuit men suffer for their actions instead of killing them, and the other asset had been so happy about that. But now it has killed a target and what if the other asset had thought that it would no longer do that? What if the other asset thinks that it had lied? Had made a promise that it did not make? Had broken a promise?
It should go and make sure that the other asset does not feel… but it should not try to control what the other asset feels. And it is still in this “session,” and should not leave the room until they are finished.
But what if the other asset is disappointed in it? Betrayed by it?
It does not want to circle those again, does not want to disappoint or betray the other asset.
“Is this one giving you trouble?”
It nods.
“Alright. We can come back around to it later.”
That will not solve the problem of the other asset possibly being disappointed and feeling betrayed.
It points to the word “disillusioned” and shows her what it is pointing at. Asks what it means, using the question sign. The other asset might have been surprised to learn that there was any HYDRA operative to be killed, and from surprised, might have been confused, and then could have been this other thing. That is probably better than disappointed or betrayed. Maybe the other asset was just disillusioned.
“Disillusioned is when something you thought was really good turns out not to be so good after all.”
That is just as bad as the other two.
“Do you think Clint is disillusioned with you?”
It does not know! What if the other asset is disillusioned with it? What if the other asset thought that it was good, was the same as, and now thinks that it is bad, different, not the same as after all?
“Jigsaw,” the expert says, “I would like for you to check in with yourself right now. How are you feeling?”
Afraid. It feels afraid. It does not want to do this anymore.
“Can you point to your feeling on the wheel?”
It does not want to. It hates charts. It hates this chart especially.
The dog inches forward to put its head in the lap, and it lowers the hand to pet the soft fur of the dog’s face and ears. The expert without the words tells it to take its time, and it does not want to do that, either. It wants to get this over with, get to the end of the “session” sooner so that it can go beg the other asset to be the same as it still.
Almost a minute later, it does point to the chart, puts a finger on “fearful” on the circle.
The expert without the words gives it a concerned look. “What is it that you are afraid of, Jigsaw?”
It shakes the head and traces the fingers along the contours of the dog’s head and face, petting the top of the dog’s head, rubbing the dog’s ears gently between the fingers. The dog is quiet, except for the soft thumps of its tail against the sofa cushions. It is a good dog. The best dog. Not like any other dog it has ever encountered.
It used to think the dog was broken, because the dog would not bark at it or attack it. And that is what dogs do. They bark at it and attack it. They do not lick with their tongue or thump their tail with happiness. But not this dog. This dog only makes a soft wuff noise to get its attention sometimes, and this dog licks and licks at the skin face.
“Are you worried that Clint won’t like you anymore?” says the expert without the words after several minutes.
It nods. It signs “the same as,” the Y-shape moved from the shoulder outward and back again, and then the H-shape on the forehead, the other asset’s name sign.
“You’re worried you’re not the same as Clint anymore,” the expert—the— Yasmin says. “What is it that makes you the same as Clint?”
They are both assets, are both at home on the rooftops at night, both have exact aim, both have been controlled by evil and got free of it. It kills with fangs and talons, sharp blades made to slice apart the target. And it has killed with many other weapons as well. The other asset has tiny fangs on sticks that the other asset fires into targets and enemies, and the other asset can choose to kill or not kill with the tiny fangs on sticks.
It can also choose to kill or not kill, now that it is free. But it chooses to kill, and the other asset wants them alive.
How to explain? It will have to draw and draw and draw.
It draws weapons, and targets—both the round-and-flat kind and the people—and rooftops and assets on those rooftops. It draws Loki and writes B-RUM beside the horned man. Writes EVIL on the page near them both. It even writes FREE WILL on the page, though that takes nearly a minute to produce all the lines of the letters that make up the words. ASSET is much quicker. And the killing faces are easy to draw.
It does not know how much of this will make sense to the expert without the words, but it can hope that she will understand some of it at least. These are the things that make it and the other asset the same as one another. Things that they have in common, that makes them assets together, this one and the other one, the Jigsaw and the Hawkeye.
The expert without the words watches as it draws and writes the words on the paper, studying the lines on the pages it fills in the pad of paper. Her eyes follow the arrows it draws, connecting the pictures together and indicating the order to look at them in.
After several minutes, it thinks there is nothing more it can write or draw that would explain how they are the same, the two assets.
“There are a lot of similarities, it looks like.” The expert smiles. “Is it important to be the same as Clint, or can you be your own self, apart from him?”
It is very, very important. If it is the same as the other asset, then it is not alone, will never be alone again, will always be the same as the other asset instead. But what if the other asset is disillusioned with it, thinks that they are no longer the same as each other, are different? What if it has ruined their sameness?
It points to all of the things on the page, all of the sameness, signs “important.” It is the most important thing, other than the mission. Being the same as the other asset. The other asset and the dog. The mission. They are all so important. But what if that is ruined now?
“I understand that you want to be just like Clint, Jigsaw,” says the expert without the words. “But what about being yourself? Can that be important, too?”
It shakes the head. What does that even mean, to be itself? It is an asset, is this asset, is Jigsaw. What else would it be?
It has been many things, though. It has been a fuck rag. It has been an asshole. It has been a bucky. It has been a shit smear. It has been soldat, a Soldier. The Soldier. But it hates those things. It has never enjoyed those things. It has enjoyed being the same as the other asset. That has made it so happy, and now maybe there is no more of that.
“What are some of the things that you do differently than Clint?”
That is the problem. If it kills and the other asset does not kill, then the things that made them the same as each other, the things on the pages, were they not really similarities? Were they never the same as each other, it and the other asset? Or—
“Jigsaw, what is Clint’s favorite color?”
It blinks at her. Signs “purple.” The other asset likes that color more than any of the other colors, even more than black or gray. The other asset looks good in purple.
“Is your favorite color purple?”
It shakes the head. Signs “red.” It does like purple. Purple is a pretty color, and it looks very good on the other asset. The other asset looks very good wearing purple. But it will always like red better than purple.
That is another thing that is not the same. Another way it is different. Another way that it has ruined everything!
The— Yasmin smiles, not understanding at all. “Well, there’s one difference. You like red and Clint likes purple. Does that one difference make you no longer the same as each other?” she asks. “Or is it just a minor difference?”
It thinks, and then holds up two fingers. It is the second option, just a minor difference. The problem is the major difference. The killing or not killing. What matters is whether the other asset thinks they are no longer the same as each other because of the killing it has done today.
It signs “kill” and puts the sign over to the left, where the metal arm is. Then signs “life” and puts the sign over to the right. Signs that they are not the same as each other.
“You think that killing your targets makes you very different from Clint, then, who does not kill his targets?”
It nods mournfully, burying the fingers in the thick fur at the dog’s neck and holding onto the dog for comfort. The dog is the best dog. The dog thumps its tail and lolls its tongue out.
The expert without the words studies it for a while, looks concerned. If she is concerned that it is not the same as the other asset anymore, then there is no hope.
“What if killing or not killing was just like the favorite color, though?” Yasmin asks. “Is there a way that you can still be the same as Clint even though you killed a man this morning?”
Can it? It does not know. The other asset would know. The other asset could tell it whether they are the same as still. The other asset could also tell it that they are not the same as each other, that it is too different now that it has killed again. The other asset was not happy with it for what it did. Was unhappy.
Was possibly disillusioned. It hates that word. It hates the chart that has that word on it.
“What are some ways you can find out if Clint still thinks you’re similar?”
It could pay attention to the other asset, to how the other asset acts around it, to see if the other asset treats it differently now. The other asset would treat it differently, it thinks, if the other asset was disillusioned with it.
It cannot ask, though. If it goes up to the other asset and points at the chart, at “disillusioned” on the chart, what if the other asset nods? What if it gets the answer it does not want? What if the other asset confirms that they are not the same as?
“Could you ask Clint if he still thinks you’re the same as each other?”
It… It does not want to find out that the other asset is disillusioned with it, though.
“The best way to find out is to ask,” the expert without the words says. “That way you don’t have any misunderstandings.”
She makes it sound like it will be easy, and maybe it would be. If the answer was a good one, was the same as, still.
And it can ask the other asset. It can go to the other asset and sign “the same as” and then the question sign. Can hope that the other asset returns the sign and nods, says that they are the same as, that they are both assets together still.
And it could study the other asset. There is nothing wrong with studying the other asset. It enjoys doing that already.
The expert without the words lifts her phone from beside her on the chair and taps at the surface of it. Soft music comes from the phone, all the sounds of it smushed together into several tones that are also all one tone, shifting from high to low.
The music plays for several minutes while it pets the dog and avoids looking at her or at the stupid, stupid chart with its “disillusioned” and all of its other words.
Finally, though, the expert speaks again.
“Jigsaw, I don’t think Clint is disillusioned with you, but for your homework tonight, I want you to ask him how he feels about what happened today, using the chart in your notebook. It's important to acknowledge our feelings, and to think about what others might be feeling as well.”
It looks up at her, feels the eyebrows tighten toward each other. It has to do homework, and it does not want to do that. Does not want to hear the other asset reject it. But the expert is an expert, and does not think that the other asset is disillusioned. So maybe…
“Will you do that for me? And Zoe can discuss with you later tonight if you need help asking him.”
It nods. It has to do the homework.
“Thank you. It’s important that we learn how to be ourselves in addition to being like our friends, you know. It’s possible to be very, very similar to someone—the same as them, even, in a lot of ways—and still be ourself.”
It does not think it believes her. She is an expert, but that does not make her right.
“How are you feeling about Steve’s reaction right now? And Pepper’s?” Yasmin asks. “Not in the moment, but after thinking about it for a while?”
The music plays soft and almost twinkling from the phone resting on the arm of the chair across the coffee table from it.
It does not want to think about the clown man’s reaction, or the woman with the red hair’s reaction. But… But it feels sad. And lonely. Disappointed. Isolated. It is the only one that knows how to handle HYDRA, and the others do not understand. The others think that it is wrong.
They all think that it is wrong, when killing HYDRA is the only thing it can do that is always, always right.
Chapter 13: Tower | Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on
Notes:
Chapter title from “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—
He’s not sure what to expect when Jigsaw comes back from his therapy session today. On the one hand, maybe she got through to him about murder where Clint couldn’t, and Jigsaw’s going to come back and want to talk about it, maybe agree that Clint was right. On the other hand, maybe she tried and just ended up pissing him off. Or maybe they didn’t talk about it at all, though Clint can’t easily see that option. Yasmin is bound to talk to him about it.
But he’s got his hearing aids turned way up to hear him approaching with Lucky’s collar, and the sound on the tv is off, so maybe he can anticipate a mood before one walks in the door based on the rhythm of the collar jangling.
When the door opens, though, Clint hasn’t been able to determine from the jangling of the dog’s leash and collar whether Jigsaw’s happy or upset or anything in between. He only hears the collar tags because he’s paying more attention to that than what’s on the tv.
Lucky slips in the door first, turning a circle until Jigsaw can get his leash off and set him loose to sniff the room and make sure everyone and everything is where it should be. Clint greets Lucky with a rub behind the ears and watches Jigsaw carefully, tentatively, make his way around to the sofa with his binder.
Usually he leaves that binder on the table by the door, even though it’s clearly his and Clint knows better than to look though it. It’s as though Jigsaw doesn’t want the notebook inside his room with his other things, wants it to be apart from him a bit. And that’s okay. But now Jigsaw’s got it open in his lap, and is studying it, looking like he's preparing himself for some mighty undertaking.
From where he’s sitting, Clint can see it’s a circle like a pie chart or something, only with really tiny slices of the pie. Some of the words on the chart are circled.
After a moment, Jigsaw flips the page to another of the same picture, this one laminated and without any circles drawn on it. He scoots the binder over on the sofa and points a finger to one of the words on the circle.
Clint accepts the binder and looks where his roommate was pointing. “Disillusioned?” he asks.
Jigsaw nods at him, and then asks whether they are the same as each other or whether they are this other thing, disillusioned.
Clint frowns and looks at the chart more closely. “Disillusioned” is next to “confused,” which he certainly is. And next to that, in the center of the chart, “surprised.”
“I mean, I’m definitely confused,” Clint says. “But as far as I can tell, we’re still the same as each other.”
That’s Jigsaw’s way of saying that they are similar, that they’re both assets and share a bond over their similarities—including being controlled by others for however long and doing things under that control that they wish they hadn’t done. It’s what allowed Clint to get close to him in the first place, months ago, when they first brought him in and he was a wary stray cat about things.
He definitely doesn’t want to lose that, especially not now that he’s kind of come to depend on their connection a bit.
“We just disagree about some things,” Clint says. “Like vegetables and murder.”
Jigsaw seems relieved to hear it, but also like he isn’t quite sure he believes it.
Clint wonders what the hell happened in therapy this afternoon.
“Did Yasmin say we weren’t the same?”
Jigsaw see-saws a hand. Then he pulls out his regular pad of paper and starts writing.
“Because we’re definitely both assets and all that, still. If you think of it as being the same as each other, then that’s what we are. Same way you share some things in common with Natasha, Cap, Stark. Even Banner, though you haven’t had much of a chat with him yet.”
Finally, Jigsaw turns the paper toward him. BE ITS OWN SELF is written on the page.
“Well, I mean…” Clint starts. “Individuality is great. We don’t have to be exactly the same about everything to still be friends and have lots in common. Like vegetables. You love them, I hate them. And killing people. You think it has to be done, I think it shouldn’t be done.”
Jigsaw points at “disillusioned” on the chart again, and Clint starts to understand why his roommate hates charts so much. This thing. All these words and things, and who knows what Jigsaw even means by pointing at that one in particular?
Jigsaw points at Clint, and then the word, and then himself. He adds his question sign.
Clint blinks. Clint, then disillusioned, then Jigsaw, then a question. Clint disillusioned Jigsaw? That doesn't make sense. But the other way around...
“Am I disillusioned with you?” Clint guesses.
Jigsaw nods.
Clint has to laugh a bit at that, though he cuts his chuckle short when Jigsaw’s eyebrows twitch into a worried frown.
“I’m not disillusioned at all,” he says quickly, trying to reassure him. “I know where you’re coming from, Jigsaw. I know something of the kind of torture you’ve been put through, and I admire the hell out of you for emerging from that as kind and gentle as you did.”
Jigsaw’s shoulders relax a bit, though he still holds an obvious amount of tension.
Man, therapy was supposed to help, not get his roommate all tense over nothing. Clint sighs.
“Do I wish you didn’t have a thing for murdering people in horribly messy ways? Yeah. Am I surprised by it? Confused by it? Disillusioned because of it? No. It’s something we’ll work on.”
Jigsaw studies him for almost a minute, seeming not to notice that Clint is getting uncomfortable as the stare lingers. Then he signs “the same as” with all of the confidence he’s had about that in the past.
Clint nods, smiling. “That’s right.”
Pepper
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 7:00 p.m.—
Tony slides into his chair as the first dishes are being passed around, clearly having almost forgotten to come to dinner, despite her text about it.
“So JARVIS finished his background checks already,” he announces. “Headless Harrell is the only HYDRA mook who made it into the Tower, so we shouldn’t have any more problems with hammers.”
The hammer is hardly the problem with the Harrell situation. It’s what Jigsaw did with the hammer, and… She holds in a sigh and passes the pasta salad. And a big problem is that Harrell even made it inside. She supposes they should have suspected that HYDRA would have been able to infiltrate Stark Industries to some degree. But it’s galling that they missed someone slipping in, and that they had to find out the way they did.
And can she even blame Jigsaw? She doesn’t know the full list of atrocities committed against that man, but she’s certain from what she does know that she’d be murderous if anyone had hurt her that way and then showed up later like nothing had happened. Anyone connected with that would get far more than a side eye.
But maybe not a hammer through the head several times.
“I’m glad it’s just the one employee,” Pepper says, not remarking on his colorful way of referencing the dead man.
“I’m surprised it’s just the one,” Natasha adds. “Upsilon is good at infiltration and laying low. I’d have thought if they had one, then they had at least three agents in Stark Industries somewhere.”
Pepper accepts the bread basket and takes a piece of the garlic bread without parmesan cheese on it. There’s already cheese on the shepherd’s pie, and she doesn’t need more than that.
“Well, now that we know there aren’t any more, we can let Jigsaw move around again without restrictions.” Steve scoops up some of the garden salad with the tongs. “Not that I think we restricted him this afternoon.”
From what she knows of Jigsaw’s schedule, they wouldn’t have needed to restrict him. He’s been in therapy most of the afternoon, and with Clint the rest of the time. And JARVIS would have steered him clear of anywhere with civilians who could be torn apart, surely.
If only Clint had been there during the tour. She’s positive that Clint’s presence would have prevented Harrell’s death, even if the man had come away from the encounter for the worse. She’s not sure how many of the workers will buy the suicide excuse, after all. But a simple matter of arrest, that would have been different. Not as demoralizing.
“You know, I think our space buddy Thor would really appreciate the Jigster,” Tony says. “They both have a thing for hammers.”
Pepper gives him a look and he boyishly shrugs his shoulders.
“It’s true.”
“Why don’t we talk about things that are more appropriate for the dinner table?” Pepper asks. “I hear you’ve all met with your donors. How are those meetings going?”
“Surprisingly well,” Bruce says. “My donors have been academics whose departments paid for the spot, so we’ve been able to discuss the finer points of astrophysics, among other things.”
Bruce smiles. “I’m giving guest lectures—teleconferencing, of course—at two different universities in the coming fall semester.”
He looks pleased beyond words. Pepper imagines he has been missing the academic world since his incident with the gamma radiation. It’s nice that he’ll be able to participate in that world again, if only virtually and by telephone.
“I got some academics, too,” Steve says. “Not all of them. Some of my slots seem to have gone to news organizations, and those will take some planning. But my first meeting, I just… talked.” He shrugs. “They wanted to hear what it was like in Brooklyn, in the War, in the future.”
“Were they writing about the time periods?” Sharon asks. “Or more from a biographical standpoint?”
Steve ponders it for a moment, then answers. “Biographical, I think. They wanted my take on various issues and seemed surprised by some of what I had to say.”
Pepper should probably talk with him about that—particularly before he has those interviews with the press. There’s honesty, which they’ll be shooting for, but there are different ways to present that honesty that will do anything to his reputation from bolster it to sending it crashing. Not many are aware in recent years of just what Steve stood for, and how many people today would count as bullies to him.
That she knows of, Clint’s went well that morning, with a very happy Kate Bishop setting up the remaining seven sessions and getting on the guest list on sight.
And Tony’s told her all about meeting with a potential business partner, one they won’t be pursuing a relationship with. They’ve only just gotten it fully clear to all their erstwhile partners that Stark Industries really is out of the weapons-dealing business. They won’t enter negotiations with a company that has ties to the military complex and muddy the waters again. Not after it took them years to clear those waters.
Natasha’s the only one who still has to meet with her donors, and that’s more a case of JARVIS continuing to sort through their backgrounds to see whether they’ll be issuing a “no thank you” and a refund for the bid. Things apparently become trickier the further into the intelligence community you’ve been in your life. And Natasha literally started her young life deep into it.
Steve
—New York City | Sunday 26 August 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
Steve could just go down to the gym for his evening workout, and he’s tempted to do that. But lately, Sam has been sitting in the common room on their level of the Tower and reading instead of heading down to the gym himself, and Steve… kind of wants to just spend time with him.
He studies the board games in his second room. They could try Forbidden Island again. But that’s better with more players than two, and he doesn’t want to count on someone to come by and join them for the game to be fun. They could do Codenames, but that’s also more fun with more people.
Maybe just Monopoly. That can take forever, but they can just quit when they get tired of it. Or Ticket to Ride. It’s pretty short, but they can play repeatedly, and it’s been pretty fun. Steve finally picks his last choice, sliding the game free from the pile. Sam likes this one, he knows.
Steve takes the game with him to Sam’s door and knocks to see if the man’s there before trying to find him in the common room. There’s no answer, and so Steve makes his way down the hall to the common room.
And there Sam is, sitting on one of the sofas under a lamp, a book in his lap. He’s about halfway into it, whatever it is, but he’s not so engrossed in the contents that he fails to notice Steve coming into the room.
“Want to play Ticket to Ride?” Steve asks in greeting. “We could play here instead of moving up to the other common room.”
The other common room being the one Jigsaw will have to come through on his way back from his therapy with Zoe. By staying here, he ensures there won’t be any interruptions or new additions to the game, and maybe Steve is specifically interested in spending time with just Sam tonight.
“Set up here?” Sam asks, sliding a bookmark between the pages. “Not upstairs?”
Steve shrugs. “I don’t mind. Either way, but here’s closer.”
Sam smiles and nods. “Alright. Let’s play right here.” He gets up and brings his book to the gaming table off to one side of the common room, turning on the overhead light as he passes it.
“You want to get drinks and I’ll set up the game?” Sam asks.
Steve nods. “Beer or something else?”
Beer doesn’t do much of anything to him—alcohol in general is useless with his metabolism, as he found while trying to mourn Bucky back in the War—but the flavor is okay. Sam might enjoy a bottle of beer, anyway.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “One of the microbrews Stark keeps this place stocked with.”
Steve proceeds to gather up and open a pair of beers and get a couple of napkins to use as coasters. Coney Island Brewery supplied these beers, and Steve can’t help but smile at that. Maybe when they have some down time, he can take Sam there to Coney Island and check out the amusement park and the brewery. And maybe if he can stop talking about the times he and Bucky went back before there was a brewery, Sam will enjoy it.
“You want blue, right?” Sam asks. He’s already gotten out red for himself—another sign that this is a Jigsaw-free game, because Jigsaw likes red enough that Sam goes for green when Jigsaw might show up.
“Blue’s good,” Steve says, setting Sam’s beer down on a napkin and going around to the other side of the table. He takes a drink. “Beer’s good, too.”
They both accept all three of their starting tickets, and begin amassing cards.
“You feeling any better about this morning?” Sam asks.
Steve thinks about it for a minute while pondering his next move. Is he feeling better? No. Not exactly. But he’s feeling a lot less surprised. It should have occurred to him that his friend might see something HYDRA-related and act on it without thinking, or that his only thought would be to kill the HYDRA operative he saw.
The surprising thing, then, is that even the Tower had been infiltrated, though to a vanishingly small degree. And Jigsaw’s actions make sense. He can’t condone them, and he can’t feel good about them, but he can understand them. He suspects if he’d known Harrell was HYDRA, he’d have done something similarly lethal using his fists.
“I think I’m less surprised,” he finally says. “That does help. But it doesn’t take away the underlying problem, which is that he sees extreme violence as the solution to the exclusion of other solutions.”
“Time and therapy will handle that,” Sam says. “He’s still on a hair trigger for HYDRA, and he’ll need to unpack that to dismantle the trigger.”
Steve nods. “I just wish I could help speed that along somehow. I know I can’t. I have to work on my own stuff first. But it would be nice.”
“A lot of things would be nice, yeah.” Sam takes a drink. “But you’ve got the order of things right in your head, so just keep at it.”
Steve stops himself from saying that he has to in order to set a good example. It’s not all about Jigsaw. It isn’t. It can’t be. He just has to keep telling himself that.
He cashes in four white cards to get his next train.
Sam groans that he needed that train, but gamely draws more cards and looks for another path to his current destination.
“So what are you reading?” Steve asks with a gesture at the book.
“The Knife Thrower,” Sam says. “It’s a collection of short stories that are kind of bizarre. But it’s really interesting. There’s a story where a man marries a bullfrog and has a guest over who has to pretend this frog is the missus, and it’s just a bullfrog. But it sits on the table when they eat, gets brought out to the porch to chat about things, everything.”
“That does sound interesting,” Steve says. “Can I borrow it once you’re done?”
“Sure. You’ll have to tell me which story you like best.”
Steve grins. “I can do that. I’ll even write you a book report, if you want.”
Sam laughs, and Steve can’t help but grin even wider.
“You do that, Steve,” he says. “You do that. I want a full report.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“Was it my turn or yours?” Sam asks after looking at the board for a bit.
“Yours, I think. You drew cards but didn’t put any trains down.”
Sam nods. “Right, right.” He studies the board a bit more and then heaves a sigh. “I guess I’ll take the train to Montreal.”
He cashes in his cards and puts a few train pieces on the board, as close to the north side of the map as he can reach without getting up.
Steve starts to put the trains into place, and he doesn’t know how it happens, but his fingers brush Sam’s, and… and stay there.
Sam looks at him across the table with a little smile and makes no move to withdraw his hand.
Steve swallows, and then moves his hand further toward Sam, and then they’re just holding hands.
“This okay with you?” Sam asks softly.
Steve nods. “Wish the game board wasn’t in the way,” he says. “Or the table.”
Sam’s smile widens. “Put the game away and take our drinks up to the roof?”
There’s still a bit of construction around the area HYDRA busted through during the auction, but there’s also plenty of space up there where they can sit and look out over the city.
“Sounds great,” Steve says.
Maybe he can draw Sam up there some time. He used to draw Bucky on the roof of their tenement. Bucky’d always gotten a kick out of, enjoyed posing for things Steve was working on. Maybe Sam would like to feature in his sketches, too. He’s got a smile Steve would love to capture in his new charcoal pencils.
Sam gives his hand a gentle squeeze and then lets go to start packing away the trains and cards, and Steve feels the warmth of his hand lingering.
He’s really looking forward to the roof.
Chapter 14: Survivors | Lately, I’ve been, I’ve been losing sleep
Notes:
Chapter title from “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic.
Chapter Text
Brandon
—Boise | Tuesday 29 August 2012 | 8:45 a.m.—
The thing that makes it hard to get over his fear and focus on his new degree is that it wasn’t a fake conspiracy theory that everyone he was connected to in D.C. was actually part of HYDRA. It was real. The politicians he’d associated with, the other aides he’d spent time with. The psychiatrist who graciously took his case pro bono. All of them, HYDRA.
And while the ninja who killed them all had somehow known he wasn’t knowingly involved in that, he doesn’t know what the tell was. What is it about him that made the ninja pass him by? And for that matter, what was it about him that made him a good candidate for recruiting into HYDRA?
Because that has to have been the goal of putting all those HYDRA guys around him. He got caught up in some kind of twisted HYDRA web, and the ninja had cut him out of the web—literally—and left him terrified and shaking on his ass in a blood-soaked hotel room.
And he doesn’t know why. It’s easy for others to say it was chance. But how could it have been chance that the ninja let him live, and that this horrible terrorist organization had tried to scoop him up? Did they just try to recruit all the young political aspirants that happened to be in the area? Was it just rote grooming of the new up and coming crop of politicians?
Or was there something about him, in particular, that drew their attention? And if so, has he done enough to change that thing by changing his entire life around? He can’t see the benefit to terrorists of a potato farmer, even if he does focus on the genetic manipulations possible with the crops.
But he didn’t see the earlier net, either.
It’s becoming easier, a little bit, to believe that the ninja wasn’t actually following him out west. That the ninja had truly dropped all interest in him when he’d dropped him in that hotel room. He still has his nightmares, but now they’re mostly about him failing to get out of HYDRA’s grasp, of him coming home one day to find that his family has been kidnapped and is being held until he agrees to work with them.
The meds help, though. His current psychiatrist has gradually upped his dose to the therapeutic amount, and it really is doing wonders. The problem is the delusion that Dr Miller is just another HYDRA groomer that he simply hasn’t noticed yet. He takes the anxiety meds because they help him function, but he still can’t shake that stupid, silly fear.
Maybe someday he’ll have what it takes to walk into an appointment with Dr Miller and not worry about walking into a trap.
Clearly, today is not that day.
Brandon steels himself for a moment, and forces himself to open the door to the building, to navigate the stairs, walk down the hallway, and open the door to the waiting room. To sit down. To stay there, with his hands spread on his knees to keep them from bunching into fists.
The clock says he’s gotten there just in time, and the way the office door opens just a minute later confirms it.
“Brandon?” Dr Miller asks with a pleasant smile that could be hiding anything.
He gets up and walks past his psychiatrist into the office itself, with its soft sofa, its fleece throw, its kinetic sand, its huggable throw pillows. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly as he sits down and pulls his favorite pillow onto his lap to hold onto.
“How were things this past week?”
Brandon nods. “Not as bad as the week before. Um. The sleeping pills helped a lot. I got a lot more rest. I don’t feel as tired anymore.”
“That’s good. How about your anxiety levels?”
Brandon thinks about the way he caught sight of someone’s charm bracelet with little red stars jangling from it while he was piling up bags of potting soil in the nursery he works at parttime. The way he froze like a fucking statue right there with the potting soil in his arms. The way he’d eventually managed to move again only to hide in the bathroom and cry for something like fifteen minutes, until the shift manager came to check on him.
He shrugs. “I saw red stars. I know I did. It was a charm bracelet. She reached past me to take down a pot to look at.”
Dr Miller acknowledges that with a muted hum and a nod. “And how did you handle that?”
Brandon flashes a miserable grin he doesn’t feel. “Well, I didn’t wet myself this time.”
He explains what had happened instead, feeling stupider and stupider as he gets to the end of the story. “I’m lucky I still have a job. I don’t know why they put up with me.”
“As hard as it might be to believe, there are people who care about you in this world, Brandon. And you explained your situation while interviewing, though I’ll say again, you did not have to.” Dr Miller smiles. “They hired you despite the anxiety. I’d say your manager was genuinely concerned for you, and not looking for a way to accuse you of slacking off.”
“But what if the nursery is secretly a HYDRA front and that’s why they hired me anyway?” Brandon’s said it before, in earlier sessions. Has even told Dr Miller that he was afraid he was HYDRA sometimes.
Dr Miller doesn’t get upset to go over old ground yet again, though. He simply nods. “Well, let’s check the facts again, and see if anything has changed.”
Brandon sighs. He always feels so stupid after checking the facts, even though he also feels relieved. He’d rather be stupidly paranoid about nothing, than have them actually be after him.
Sergei
—New York City | Tuesday 29 August 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
He’d said it. He’d told Mikhail they should make their move when the Avengers had their auction. Open to the public. Not too big a price tag to get in. Wreck their shit while they least expect it. Ruin their fundraising party. Make them look bad.
But no. No, they’d had no bros to spare, Mikhail had said. Wait to get the bros out of jail, then think about going after some Avengers, maybe, if they’re alone.
Mikhail knows what he’s doing, Sergei had thought. Mikhail has a plan, Sergei had thought. Mikhail is right, Sergei had thought.
Mikhail was wrong. And Mikhail is dead now. They’d been transported in the same ambulance, and put in the same recovery room. But Mikhail had his guts scrambled around by Ronin, and Mikhail was a fighter, but not enough of one to beat sepsis.
If they had raided the auction, they would have gotten their asses beaten by the Avengers. Sergei knows this. There is a chance they’d get their brains bashed in by their leader’s metal shield. Sergei knows this.
But a handful of bros getting roughed up by the Avengers is nothing compared to dozens of bros getting hacked and slashed apart by Ronin, all because they went with Mikhail’s idea to nab one lone Avenger instead of risking the whole team.
Sergei is one of the lucky ones. He has a stump for a right hand now, but he is already left-handed. It will not be so bad. He can still write. He can still feed himself. He can still clean up after a messy shit.
He will get a hook, maybe. He will have a badge of honor, to have survived Ronin. He will get put in a special prison once the trials are over. Or he will get bought out from under the Americans by the bratva. Bros looking after bros.
And if anyone comes to him later, either in prison or out of it, and says to him, “Bro, bro, we can take that Avenger, he’s alone,” or “Bro, bro, let’s go after Ronin for what he did to us, bro,” he will stomp on that bro’s idea with both feet, and maybe jab his hook hand into the idea, too.
Because Ronin left them alive to tell a story, and that story is not to mess with Avengers. Especially the arrow guy.
Monesha
—Washington D.C. | Wednesday 28 August 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
Monesha hangs her jacket on the hook behind the door and heads to the kitchen to get a drink. After the double shift she’s had, she deserves at least a glass of wine to unwind with. Maybe she’ll see what’s on the tv, watch a show or two. She’s got a later shift tomorrow. Maybe she’ll have two glasses of wine.
The first thing she sees in the kitchen is a pile of envelopes and magazines, the coupon flyer, and what appears to be a postcard. It’s a bigger stack than usual. She puts off her quest for wine and rifles through the pile of mail on the counter, looking for the electric bill—the utility she’s responsible for—and anything else that might have come her way.
She might borrow one of her roommate’s magazines, too, for a bit of light reading with her wine. And the electric bill will need to get paid, but that can wait until the weekend, when she gets paid.
About halfway through the mail, she sees an envelope with a signature across the flap and a bright green tree frog stamp. She can’t read the signature, but she doesn’t need to. Its return address is Avengers Tower.
Monesha holds the envelope in trembling fingers, the rest of the mail forgotten.
A response to her letter. She’d sent her letter out a month ago, and never heard back. She’d looked for a response for a while, but then gave up when none arrived and the weeks stretched on. Part of her had assumed it was just a matter of the top secret nature of the situation, that the man who rescued her had disappeared into red tape and bureaucracy forever, if he wasn’t dead or wasting away deep in a government cell.
But part of her had hoped.
Monesha takes the letter upstairs to her room, unopened. She doesn’t know what to expect inside. Will it be a form letter taking note of her interest and regretting to inform her that the matter is none of her concern? Will it be a note explaining that the search that ended in Bakersfield had resulted in her rescuer’s death?
Or…
Could it be that he’s alive and well, that he’s with the good guys and not the STRIKE team that had been HYDRA the whole time. She doesn’t want to learn that the terrorist organization took him. He deserves better than that. And the agents… Barton and Romanoff… They’d promised they were going to find him and help him.
She closes her door and sits at her makeup table, and then carefully opens the envelope.
There are two sheets of paper inside, or rather, one sheet of actual printer paper and one torn off piece of paper from a half-sized notepad.
The smaller paper… She bites her lip. It’s a drawing of a dog—her rescuer’s dog, with just the one eye—with that tennis ball in its mouth. And a drawing of her, with the baseball bat. And there in between, there’s a shaky all-caps THANK written out wide to take the available space. Either he ran out of room for the S, or maybe he has language issues.
With the scar she remembers on his throat, the LI, it might be language issues. Maybe he can’t speak at all and is just learning to write. He clearly already knows how to draw, because the drawings he’s made are immediately recognizable to her, even though there aren’t many lines involved.
She carefully sets the paper aside and turns her attention to the letter itself.
To Ms Fowler:
I got your letter today, and I wanted to let you know that he is doing very well. He’s safe here with us in Avengers Tower, even after the explosion. We’re working on rehabilitating him after everything he’s done and everything that’s been done to him, just like we promised you.
Thanks again for your help in identifying him and chasing him down. He remembers you, by the way. I asked him if he wanted to pass along a message, and he wanted to send this drawing to you. Hope you like it.
If you’re ever in New York, come on by. He’d probably be thrilled to see you again.
Until then,
Clint Barton
So it’s not a form letter, clearly. And… there’s an invitation to come visit. There’s clearly something secret about the situation, since her rescuer isn’t named and there’s not a lot of detail. But it confirms her hopes as having come to pass, and something deep inside her belly finally unknots, some bit of stress she had been carrying without realizing it.
He’s alive. He’s well. He’s safe. He remembers her. He’d be thrilled to see her, maybe. And he drew her a picture of the night they met outside her apartment, which…
Monesha smiles, even as her eyes start to sting with emotion.
He saved her life, and all she gave him was a sandwich and some cheetos. A bit of fruit. A tennis ball and some leftover chicken breast. Her life, for one meal and a dog toy. It seems like such a paltry offering on her part, but she couldn’t have done more in that moment.
She wonders how sincere the invitation is. She might be able to get a bit of time off, and the train to New York City is only about three hours. It could be a day trip. She could bring that dog some toys, and…
She doesn’t know what she’d be able to bring for her nameless rescuer. What would he need or want now that he’s living in Avengers Tower and being cared for? Maybe some nice pens and notebooks for him to draw in. He must like to draw.
Yeah. It’s still not enough to thank him for saving her, but it’ll be something more than a meal.
Valorie
—Washington D.C. | Thursday 29 August 2012 | 1:00 p.m.—
Valorie tosses her laptop bag in the passenger seat, following it up with her purse and water bottle. That’s three client meetings down, and only one more to go today. Though it’s an open house, so she needs to be sure she has the address right. She can’t be late for this.
But the clock on her console once she starts the car indicates she has plenty of time before she has to start driving. She might as well check her phone for personal messages, do her daily Etsy order perusal, maybe even check out some of the Red Star Killer forums she follows.
Valorie gives the parking garage a practiced glance—no one in sight. No one lurking or waiting to ambush her. Anyone who approaches will be seen from her peripheral vision. It’s safe to check her phone, to relax her vigilance a little bit. She reaches into her purse and blinks at her phone.
Four hundred thirty-seven new orders since she last checked her Etsy shop. That’s definitely a spike in sales. There must be some movement on one of the forums, or maybe someone posted her jewelry on Reddit again.
She thumbs through the orders. Red Star pendant earrings. Red Star necklace. Red Star stud earrings. Twelve Red Star key chain charms. Another order for the pendant earrings. A third order for the pendant earrings. Red Star t-shirt, size large. Red Star notebook with charm. Three Red Star charm bracelets. More pendant earrings. Those are really popular.
Valorie smiles as the orders fly past on her phone. So many people interested in her merchandise, interested in the guardian angel the press maligns as being a serial killer. Protector of the innocent, more like.
She’d thought interest would die down as the news started to move on from the D.C. Slasher and Red Star Killer. As the news drifted away from Ronin. But interest has remained strong, at least on the forums she follows. Every once in a while, a news story or a post on the forums will result in a whole weekend spent manically packaging up merchandise and printing shipping labels to meet the demand.
Valorie opens her favorite subreddit, /r/RedStar. There’s the post she expected to find, yes. A picture of the pendant earrings and a gushing review, plus her Etsy shop URL. Tons of comments about how the red stars on her merchandise are subtle and tasteful, but still show support for the man they communally tend to call Mr Red Star.
There’s also a post positing that the Ronin serial killer up in New York had been Mr Red Star in a disguise. BigDongJohn makes some of the same points she’d earlier considered, about the methods and the timing of the so-called lab accident at Avengers Tower. Valorie had hoped no one else would come to that conclusion, just on the off-chance that it was correct.
She frowns and opens it up to read the comments. Hopefully there’s a healthy argument against the premise. The post hasn’t been downvoted into oblivion, but it’s also not been upvoted to the high heavens.
Valorie is pleased to find that most of the comments consist of a pair of mods arguing about whether the post belongs in /r/RedStar or if it should be reposted to /r/Ronin instead. There appears to be some reference made to a chicken sandwich, which she doesn’t understand, and anticipation of the whole post being locked down.
One comment in particular makes her smile: sin-sational-chowder has pointed out that Mr Red Star would never stop making his blood stars or start merely slicing throats. He’s dedicated to his M.O. and wouldn’t deviate from it.
General consensus agrees with them.
That’s good. She doesn’t want anyone to truly believe that they are one and the same, Ronin and her avenging angel. Because if they are the same, then the Avengers plucked him out of Bakersfield and held him captive for a month before someone broke him out, and then probably recaptured him.
She’d rather he run free. And she’d rather everyone in the media consider him to be truly gone so that he will be free to reinvent himself. She doesn’t believe for a second that her rescuer would just up and stop protecting people, but she’s more than willing to believe that the blood stars were a phase, that he’s moved on to less violent means of protection.
All she knows is that her bank account for her Etsy shop is doing very, very well, and if a time should come when there’s a need to pool funds to get Mr Red Star the legal defense he deserves, she’ll be able to return some portion of the favor he paid her in this very same parking garage.
She heads to the D.C. community Facebook group focused on him. Hm. There’s a Red Star meetup this Sunday. Valorie reads the details of the gathering. It looks respectful, focused on the survivors and on the good that’s been done.
Maybe she’ll go.
Chapter 15: Therapists | Don’t walk around the down and out
Notes:
Chapter title from “Try A Little Kindness” by Glen Campbell.
(Yes, I know actual polaroids don’t work this way and that they do fade—and faster if you cut them up—making them less ideal for scrapbooking. For the sake of this story, let’s assume it’s a camera and film custom designed by Tony and that the custom setup bypasses these problems with the layers and all that.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Friday 31 August 2012 | 6:45 a.m.—
It’s still mildly unsettling to live in the same building with her patient, though their paths have somehow never crossed. It’s just the knowledge that they could cross, that logistically they should cross often, that it’s always difficult to encounter a client outside of therapy—and that she still hasn’t determined how that would play out with this patient.
But as she settles her things in the room they have earmarked for therapy sessions, she reminds herself that in this situation, everyone already knows the relationship between herself and Jigsaw, and no harm could come of them interacting outside of her temporary office.
It’s not her ideal environment for therapy—she would take the coffee table out if it were up to her, and bring in more color. Hang more relaxing art on the walls, perhaps. But it is still a workable space.
Currently, there’s space for some of Jigsaw’s creations to live in the room. That might be therapeutic for him, to see his emotions on display and not figuratively trapped in a binder. But it might prove triggering for Linda’s patient. And vice versa if any of Steve’s art ended up on the walls.
Today is the day she’s introducing the art of scrapbooking, though, which should solve some of the blankness of the room by filling it up with materials to choose from. Jigsaw responds very well to the creation process, whether that be her first attempt with the pizza or her latest photography homework—take five pictures of things you do during the day. So he should respond very well to creating a scrapbook.
It’ll be a change of pace from the last several sessions, all of which have touched on some aspect of Sunday’s murder. She may have signed a dozen different nondisclosure agreements—some for S.W.O.R.D., some for S.H.I.E.L.D., some for Stark Industries, and some from Stark in the name of the Avengers—but that doesn’t preclude her discussing it with the team, and especially with her patient.
But she gets the sense that Jigsaw is tired of discussing that, and that he’ll start closing himself off again if she pursues it today. She understands, also, that progress in his therapy is one of the conditions of the clemency that’s been extended to him, and she won’t risk derailing their progress by pressing the issue right now.
They aren’t anywhere near finished with the subject matter—have merely scratched the surface, really—but she does feel good about the progress they’ve made so far.
In her forays into understanding and unpacking the motivations and morals behind the murder, she’s learned more about the difficulties her patient has with the concept that he can be—and is—a person in his own right, apart from anyone else, and more than a mere category of being with a handful of purposes. Missions to accomplish. Entertainment to provide.
He’s deeply entrenched in his identity as an “asset,” and while she knows the term can apply to people in the Avengers’ field of work, she also knows that in this case, it’s not a stand-in for “agent” but simply signifies an object that can be put to use. That he accepts a name doesn’t change his nature as an asset, in his mind. It just distinguishes him from Bucky.
Her patient also refuses to consider that the man he killed might not have been evil. All of HYDRA is evil, by his reckoning, regardless of role or tenure. And anyone who freely and knowingly associates with HYDRA is therefore evil as well. And evil must be ripped apart in any number of extremely violent ways in order to protect the innocent.
She’d been briefed, somewhat, on Jigsaw’s actions earlier that summer. It was one of the final pieces of information handed over to her after Bruce’s vetting process—his connection with Bucky Barnes and with the D.C. Slasher and Red Star Killer.
So while Sunday’s murder was shocking, the nature of the murder didn’t come as a surprise to her, though it was unfortunate. And there’s no reason for it to color her impression of Jigsaw, since she knew it was a possibility. She's glad she had several hours to process it herself before trying to help Jigsaw process it, of course. And it is something that they’ll need to circle back around to after taking a break from the subject.
She wants to help him break that dichotomy of evil versus innocent into the full spectrum of human nature and behavior, and to recognize himself on that spectrum as a human being, a person who is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, who can make mistakes and who can recover from those mistakes.
Who was deeply wronged, and who can choose what to do with that.
Because it all comes back to what he’s been through and how that has shaped his thought processes and beliefs. Working to process that foundation of pain and fear and to make decisions that aren’t unduly influenced by that trauma will greatly reduce his tendency toward murder. It’ll also help him in every other aspect of his life.
She hears the jingle of Lucky’s collar and, predictably, nothing else while she’s setting up the last of the scrapbooking items. She smiles. Lucky doesn’t always come to the morning session. Sometimes Sam is walking him still. But the sessions always go better with Lucky than without. Jigsaw lets himself explore further and challenge things more when he has his dog near him.
“Good morning, Jigsaw,” she says as he closes the door behind himself and climbs up onto the sofa with his curiously smooth movements. “What are you feeling this morning?”
Jigsaw opens his binder and looks at his laminated feelings wheel. After a moment, he points to “peaceful” on the wheel.
That’s a new one. He’s been unfocused, sleepy, indifferent… even rushed. But nothing from the Happy section of the chart before. She’d like to unpack that, learn how his evening and early morning went to lead to him feeling peaceful, but she has an agenda to meet this morning in order to give him the background he’ll need for their afternoon session.
“Thanks for letting me know how you feel. I’m feeling excited this morning.” Yasmin smiles. “Today we’re going to use those pictures you took yesterday to start a scrapbook,” she says.
“And then, if you like it, we’ll keep adding to your scrapbook as we go along.”
Jigsaw signs “why” at her, which she’s learned to interpret as a variety of things, all of which contain an element of curiosity. When he does challenge things, it’s never with a belligerent or sarcastic question.
“Scrapbooking is when you take pictures of things you do, places you go, people you’re with… And you add any tokens or keepsakes from the activity, like a ticket stub from a movie outing.” Yasmin brings her sample pages out of their folder and sets them on the coffee table between them.
“And you turn them into pages of memories that you can look back on, complete with little writings and stickers, cut up bits of ribbon, whatever you like.”
Jigsaw gingerly picks up the scrapbook pages and examines them. The pages show Yasmin on the beach last year during a vacation. She’s got the recipe for her cocktail written off to the side of one page, plentiful cutout pictures of herself in front of palm trees and under umbrellas, and of meals she ate, plus notes to herself about how she felt. There’s also a tiny packet of sand from the beach on one of the pages, and one of the flattest shells she found.
This isn’t the only set of pages dedicated to her vacation, but they’re the pages that only feature her, and not her family. The folder is a sample in all ways, featuring a variety of scrapbook options and methods.
And Jigsaw is definitely fascinated with all the little embellishments. It bodes well for the project, and he should get a lot out of it. The prospect of being able to keep physical copies of things that he can use to spark a memory will appeal to him, and it should help him express himself and share what’s going on inside himself with those he shares the pages with—while keeping them private from others.
“We can scrapbook about happy times, or scary times, or sad times. We can capture anger in a scrapbook, too. We can choose the design elements to reflect our memories or the feelings attached to them, and that can help us process these things.”
Yasmin presents him with an empty scrapbook complete with plastic pockets to protect pages and acid-free paper.
“We’ll start small,” she says, “but scrapbooks can get very large and inclusive or can be really narrowly focused on one event or time. This afternoon, we’ll put together some pages of the things you did yesterday and today. For now, let’s put together a page about Lucky.”
Lucky is always a safe bet.
Linda
—New York City | Friday 31 August 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
“Before we get into my stuff, is there anything in particular you want to focus on today, Steve?”
It’s not always best to start off with an opening like that; there are plenty of clients who don’t want to tackle the reasons they’re here and who will need to be coaxed to the crux of their issues. But Steve Rogers is not one of those. He’s perhaps too earnest, even if he’s still getting used to being so open with someone.
“I’m worried about Jigsaw,” he starts. “It’s just that I haven’t been spending as much time waiting in his path this week, and so I’ve hardly seen him. And he and I never did discuss the incident over the weekend afterward, so he might think I’m angry at him. Or avoiding him. Or don’t want to spend time with him.”
Linda nods, but lets a moment of silence reign before speaking, just in case there’s more to it that he wants to add on reflection. She’s tempted to take his subject at face value and use it to revisit their last session, where he’d glossed over a violent incident involving Jigsaw and another man and then insisted that he couldn’t be angry at Jigsaw once he knew the man was HYDRA.
But they’ve already spent an entire session discussing that subject and whether Steve was in fact angry at Jigsaw for his expression of violence despite his knowing the risks to himself of engaging in said violence. They hadn’t gotten very far in their exploration, since Steve was adamant that Jigsaw didn’t deserve his anger, and therefore couldn’t be the target of that anger.
She would rather not dedicate another session to what Jigsaw might be thinking or about how best to help or approach Jigsaw. She is here for Steve’s benefit, not Jigsaw’s. Jigsaw has his own team. So she opts to branch off of Steve’s opening concerns, purposely jumping to a conclusion that should land them in much more productive territory.
If he’s not spending time waiting for Jigsaw in various places, he must be doing something else with that time—spending it, perhaps, with someone else. And who else would he be spending that time with than the man he’s dating?
“So I take it things are still going well with Sam,” she says. “That you’re spending more time with him, instead.”
Steve nods, his cheeks flushing slightly. “It’s just that I don’t have as much time as I thought I did, I guess. I still need to plan for any raids we can do, and I can’t train less than I do—I need to get the energy out and stay in good form for when we can get back into action. I’ve been trying to cook some meals with Bruce that aren’t breakfast. And Sam and I… Spend time together.”
“And what do you think the answer is to the situation?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I brought it up.” Steve sighs. “I don’t want to see less of Sam, but I don’t want to let what I had going with Jigsaw fade away. I think I was getting somewhere with him until the… incident. And I really enjoyed making shepherd’s pie with Bruce. Tony’s getting the sparring bots better every iteration, and we really need to be team training.”
Linda smiles. Steve is juggling a lot of relationships, trying to routinely spend time with the whole team when that team uniformly refuses to adopt a routine. Particularly if he thinks that his growing relationship with Sam is taking away from his ability to form a friendship with Jigsaw.
“Relationships take work,” she says. “Effort on both sides.”
She doesn’t know how much effort Jigsaw is making to befriend Steve, though she’ll grant that he’s reacted well to Steve’s overtures. But those overtures are purely on Steve’s part that she knows of.
“I’m trying, though. There has to be a way to juggle everything.”
“You have a new type of relationship with Sam,” she says, “and also your other relationships with your team and friends. But you’re right. It’s absolutely possible to retain and even grow these relationships in step with each other rather than in competition with one another.”
Steve looks relieved to hear it. “How do I do it, though? Friendships just happened growing up, and during the War, too. What friendships I had.”
“Where do your priorities lie, Steve?”
“I’d feel like a real jerk ranking everyone.”
She smiles. “When we first started meeting, you were just beginning to explore your chosen hobbies. You were making small talk with Jigsaw. You were training extensively. Let’s look at how you’ve spent your time this week.”
Steve frowns. “Okay.”
Linda stands up and goes to the small whiteboard that hangs on the wall by the door. It’s not her ideal office arrangement, but it will do. She draws a large circle on the board, taking up most of the space but leaving some room for labels.
“We’ll start with the activities of daily living. These are things like eating, showering, dressing yourself. What percentage of your time do you spend on these ADLs?”
Steve looks at the circle for a minute. Then: “Maybe about ten percent? Eleven?”
She draws a slice about that size and labels it ADLs. “And sleeping? Including time spent trying to fall asleep.”
Steve rubs the back of his neck and squints. “I probably don’t sleep enough. Maybe six hours?”
“And that includes trying to sleep?” she confirms.
He nods, looking sheepish.
“There is no judgment here, Steve.” She draws a line to make a quarter slice of the pie. “We are merely marking down what is, so that you can adjust to better match your priorities and values.”
“Right,” he says. “I know that logically, I just—” He shrugs. “I guess I just feel like I’m not going like how my priorities look on the whiteboard.”
She smiles. “That is why we’re visualizing it. And remember, the pie chart we draw now merely reflects how you’re currently spending your time. You aren’t satisfied with that, which is why we’re going to see if there’s anything we want to trim down or expand.”
“I want to expand the time I spend with Jigsaw. I just don’t want to take away from the other things.”
Linda nods and labels the sleep quadrant of the circle. “What percentage of your time do you spend training? I’m including your mission preparation as well as your exercise and similar.”
Steve sighs. “Too much. Everyone says it but Jigsaw, and he’s always on the hunt for HYDRA, so his endorsement isn’t worth much where balance comes in.”
“So…” she prompts. “How many hours in a day, would you say?”
“…easily nine hours a day. Ten.”
“So forty-five percent. It would be a full time job, and then some.” She draws the line, labels the slice, and turns to face him again. “You have less than a quarter of your pie left. What do you do with the remaining four and a half hours of your day?”
“Break testing the sparring bots,” he says, “spending time with Sam—we walk Lucky earlier in the morning than he did before, so we can talk and enjoy the park before working out and then cooking breakfast.”
She nods. “And?”
“Looking for Jigsaw, waiting around for him to appear where he usually is at various times. Sessions with you, and the homework you give me. Trying to spend time with Natasha and Sharon, Bruce. Clint is usually a package deal with Jigsaw when I do find him. And my hobbies.”
Linda labels the last slice “social time + hobbies” and caps the dry erase marker.
“I’d like you to draw this pie chart, Steve. For homework, I want you to reflect on your values and see how they line up with how you’re spending your time. There’s a disconnect currently, which is why you are feeling spread thin, and we can correct it.”
Any changes Steve makes to how he’s spending his time will need to align with his values if they’re going to stick. She won’t tell him to work out less or get more sleep. That’s for him to decide based on his values, and she can’t answer that for him.
“Some of these categories seem like they could overlap,” Steve says as he draws the pie chart. “Sam and I spar, and we spot each other for weights. That’s Sam time but also training.”
She hopes that Sam will insist on keeping or even expanding the “Sam time” that isn’t spent in the gym or walking the dog.
“Yes,” she says. “There’s a lot of room for overlap. Life is a chaotic and messy thing, and rarely fits neatly into the containers we make for it. We simply do what we can to keep things orderly.”
Caroline
—New York City | Friday 31 August 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
They covered a variety of ways to prepare tofu on Tuesday, so she knows the meal she’s brought for them to share will go over well. Mildly spicy noodles packed with vegetables—including the much loved baby corn—and chunks of tofu.
They also explored the presence of hunger and fullness cues, which are going to be a struggle with this client. He’s been deprived for so long that every cue feels like a hunger cue, and he’s been eating far too much at every meal to make up for it, feeding a sort of phantom hunger. Part of that is his enhanced nature—he will always need to eat more than an unenhanced but highly athletic human being—but she knows that he must feel uncomfortably full after at least a few of his meals.
The task will be helping him distinguish the sensations his body is sending him and then convincing him to acknowledge and follow those sensations.
And of course there’s also the task of gradually decreasing the amount of food he’s eating at any given sitting so that his body doesn’t have to deal with being overly full. She would rather he eat six or even seven meals a day than gorge himself on three, and his body will appreciate spacing those meals out as well.
Jigsaw is on time with his new purple proteins book—focused exclusively on vegetarian proteins—and his green vegetable book. She expected nothing less. He’s only been late to their meetings the one time, and that was when he hadn’t known they were meeting and had to go get his book.
“Hi Jigsaw,” she says. “I see you have a camera with you today. Is that homework for Yasmin?”
He nods and takes a seat, looking eagerly at the pair of styrofoam containers with their noodles. Then he pulls his pad of paper from the stack of books and flips to a previous page, where SCRAP BOOK is written in his characteristically shaky handwriting. Around the two words, he’s doodled a book with what look like borders and ribbons around various shapes.
“Are you going to take pictures of today’s lunch?”
Jigsaw nods again and then points at her and the camera and makes the “why” sign.
“You want me to take the pictures for you?”
He shakes his head and holds the camera up to his face, pointing at her.
“Ah. Yes, you can take my picture for your scrapbook. Thank you for asking. That’s very polite—some people don’t want to have their pictures taken.”
She wonders whether that was something Yasmin went over with him or if it’s something he decided on his own. Maybe Yasmin will mention it in her weekly report on their progress.
“We’re going to do things backward today, and instead of learning about something new, we’re going to identify all of the vegetables and proteins in our stir fried noodles.”
He licks his lips and nods, his eyes darting toward the cartons and then back at her.
It doesn’t take them long to identify all the vegetables and the tofu, though it does take a while for Jigsaw to arrange samples of each vegetable together on top of his noodles for a photo shoot. Red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, sugar snap peas, carrots, mushrooms, broccoli, baby corn, water chestnuts, and a bit of green onion for garnish.
She can imagine him carefully cutting out each vegetable, or selecting just his favorites—those will be the sugar snap peas and the baby corn—for his scrapbook.
When the photo shoot is done, including a picture of her, a picture of the overall pile of noodles with all the vegetables mixed in, and her taking a picture of him holding a glistening ear of baby corn in his hand, they resume eating their meals, and she only has to remind him to slow down and enjoy the food twice.
About halfway through Jigsaw’s carton of noodles, it’s time.
“Jigsaw, what would happen if you didn’t finish your noodles?” she asks. “If you didn’t eat it all, and you left some behind?”
She can’t place any part of him that doesn’t tense up at the thought, from his face to his right hand. Maybe his left hand. It would be hard for the metal to tense up.
Caroline makes no move toward him, instead bringing a forkful of peppers to her mouth to give him time to think. That’s particularly important with Jigsaw. If she gives him enough time to think through his answers, sometimes he will overcome his fears and tell her what he really feels about the question.
In this case, she imagines that he’s worried about being seen as ungrateful for what’s given and therefore getting less food the next time around. Maybe he’ll be concerned that there will be a punishment for not cleaning his plate. Maybe he sees food as a form of affection and doesn’t want to reject that affection and go back to being starved of both food and affection.
There are as many possibilities as there are clients, and this client in particular has been through a lot.
He draws a picture on his paper of a figure being fed through a wide hose, and then a face with a tongue out toward the floor, lapping up a puddle. He writes VOMIT on the page as well, and then WASTE NOT WANT NOT, his hand shaking badly the whole time.
“If you didn’t eat what they gave you to eat, they would force feed you until you were sick,” she says, hating the words as they pass her lips, “and then make you lick that up.”
Jigsaw nods. He looks serious, but not angry. He’s explaining what happened, but there isn’t any judgment attached to the events, no sense of having been wronged or of that as having been wrong.
“That was then,” she says. “This is now. Hopefully you know that now is very different from then.”
He flips to another page where he’s previously written IT WILL NOT GO BACK.
“No,” she says. She’s seen him write that before, and Yasmin will have her hands full trying to work on pronouns and personhood with him. “No, you aren’t going back there. I can guarantee you that nothing like that will happen if you don’t finish every bit of your meal.”
He takes a few hurried bites anyway, and she holds back a frown that will only be misinterpreted. She’s familiar with people who’ve been starved, either by themselves or by those with authority over them. She’s familiar with the effects of that after the starvation ends, and his responses don’t deviate from what she would expect. It still makes her sad that he’s been through all that.
“What happened with the fruit that was left over after we ate our fruit salad several weeks ago?” she asks after letting him get through more of his meal.
Jigsaw puts the fork down with obvious reluctance, and then signs that he ate it. He frowns, and then indicates that Clint hadn’t wanted any.
And from what she’s heard of Clint Barton, the man has an aversion to vegetables on principle, and probably extends that mistrust to fruits. It doesn’t surprise her that he wouldn’t want to partake of the fruit, even though it was mostly citrus and grapes left over if she remembers correctly. Fairly popular fruits.
“So you didn’t finish it right then and there, and nothing bad happened. You got to eat it later, instead.” She pauses. “So do you have to eat all of your noodles now?”
He’s already eaten all but perhaps a quarter of the noodles and all of the vegetables and tofu. It wouldn’t hurt him to finish it, or to leave the rest. It’s purely a matter of his fullness cues and his satisfaction levels. If he’s full and satisfied, he’ll learn to stop eating. If he’s full and not satisfied, he’ll learn to find something else to satisfy him, maybe a dessert item. And if he’s hungry, he’ll learn to realize that and keep eating because of that hunger.
But it will be a struggle getting to that point of intuitiveness when eating.
Jigsaw nods, and holds up a finger to emphasize that the answer is yes, he does have to eat it all right now.
“Do you want to eat it all?” she asks. “Are you still hungry?”
The nod comes quicker this time, automatic rather than considered, and Caroline nods back at him. She won’t challenge his claim of hunger. It’s far too early in the process for that. She’ll give it, and him, more time before she presses the issue.
“Alright. If you’re still hungry and you want to eat more, then you can and should eat more. But remember in our last session we talked about fullness cues,” she says. “I want you to check in with yourself as you eat, and to honor those cues when they appear. There can and will always be more food available, so you can always eat again later if it turns out you were still hungry after all.”
Some day, she hopes, he will be able to believe that.
Notes:
Content Warning: During Jigsaw's session with Caroline, there is discussion of his treatment by prior feeders, including note of vomiting.
Chapter 16: Therapists | Lend a helping hand instead of doubt
Notes:
Chapter title from “Try A Little Kindness” by Glen Campbell.
If you’re interested in playing the vegetable word search, you can find the one I modeled it after here: https://thewordsearch.com/puzzle/16/types-of-vegetables/
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Friday 31 August 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
Yasmin watches with a smile as Jigsaw carefully cuts out a star shape around a particularly photogenic mushroom on a bed of noodles. He’s taken all of his pictures during the session with Caroline earlier, and even looking at the pictures is making him happy.
In the center of his page, he’s glued a series of consecutively smaller decorative border circles with a circular cutout of the noodles on top. Different starring vegetables feature in closer cropped pictures, with red marker lines connecting them to the main circle.
She wonders what he’ll ultimately do with the photo of Caroline, or with the surprisingly adorable photo of himself holding a piece of baby corn with a gentle smile that hints at excitement.
It’s quite a different design from the page they made together about Lucky earlier that morning. And that earlier scrapbook session had certainly revealed a lot about her patient.
She’d assumed they got Lucky after Jigsaw arrived at the Tower, possibly as a way to help him adjust, but no. Lucky had found Jigsaw after an ambush had gravely injured him, and then spent all his time since then at Jigsaw’s side.
Yasmin thinks about how confusing it must have been to try to dissuade a scary dog from following him, only to have the dog prove to be the gentlest of the gentle and stick to him like glue. Jigsaw hadn’t demonstrated any residual confusion or even anger about the ambush. He had emphasized that Lucky is a different dog, a good dog that’s broken and doesn’t bark, unlike attack dogs. But even then, there’d been no emotion attached.
They still have a lot of work to do to access those buried emotions, to properly address them so he’s free from the weight of them on his shoulders.
She opens the scrapbook to the first completed page while Jigsaw studies the composition he’s currently working on that will go into the binder next.
She’d never noticed that Lucky’s name tag spelled LUCY. She’d noticed that it was a red star and had assumed that was intentional to match his arm, but… She remembers the news reports about the pet store murder, the clerk cut into twenty-five pieces and scattered around the store, the animals set free, the complete chaos of the crime scene.
And now she knows that he’d gone back to take the collar and tag, the leash. Resourceful of him, to get back in and evade the police investigating the scene. And there’d been a sort of pride about him when he’d explained to her how that had happened. She’s glad he has things to feel proud about, but they’ll work on widening that pool of proud things to include things that don’t revolve around murder and theft.
Far more positive is what he’s labeled YELLOW FUZZ BALL on the page under a sketch of Lucky with a ball in his mouth. That’s one of his favorite things to do with Lucky, along with TUG above a drawing of a rope with knots in it. There, he’d expressed some emotion, had smiled and become more animated. She’d like to see him like that about more things more often. Just another thing they’ll work toward.
From his enthusiasm about the current scrapbook page, Yasmin can tell that most of his session with Caroline was enjoyable, but she knows that Caroline had planned to begin tackling his scarcity mindset and the resulting overeating. That can’t have been pleasant. And since there’s time enough to nudge her patient toward exploring that and still ending their session on a positive note…
“I’m seeing a lot of vegetables and delicious food on your page, Jigsaw,” she says. “What did you and Caroline talk about while you ate? Do you want to include any notes to yourself about that, something to look at later to help you remember?”
Jigsaw looks up from pasting a cropped picture of himself with the baby corn in the bottom right of his page. He doesn’t look surprised by her line of questioning, but he does look reluctant. Still, he pushes the scrapbooking project to the side and gets his pad of paper out, turns it to a previous page, where he’s drawn what she can only think of as atrocities committed against him. Force feeding from a hose, lapping vomit from the floor. The phrase “waste not want not,” which clearly has deep significance.
So now, they begin the work of unpacking his internal responses to Caroline’s challenge.
“You talked about what things were like before, when you were in captivity,” Yasmin says softly. “What was it like to discuss that?”
Jigsaw shrugs.
“Could you use your feelings wheel to find a feeling that matches what you felt like while you were discussing that with Caroline?”
He nods and reaches over to open the other binder with his handouts in it, studies the laminated feelings wheel, and then points to “nervous.”
“What were you nervous about?”
Yasmin doesn’t imagine for a moment that he feared Caroline would do any of those things to him, or even that the rest of the team would. And he’s never seemed to be able to connect to any sense of shame or humiliation, so he likely didn’t worry about Caroline thinking differently about him with the new knowledge.
Jigsaw signs “why” at her, looks like he honestly doesn’t know the answer to her question.
“Sometimes we can feel things and not know why we feel them,” she says, keeping her tone reassuring. “But something about your discussion made you nervous. Was it the subject matter? Your past?”
He shakes his head.
“Could it have been something Caroline said before that?”
Jigsaw thinks for a minute and then spends a few minutes writing. Eventually he turns his paper toward her, and it reads in his all caps writing, WHAT IF DID NOT FINISH on two lines without any punctuation.
“Caroline asked you that?” When he nods, she continues. “And you drew what has happened in the past, when you didn’t finish a meal.”
She picks up her phone and puts on some soft ambient music. Jigsaw had not seemed calmed by this music at first, but nothing she’d done at first had gotten through his stubborn, non-participatory shell. Once she got him opening up a little, he’d seemed to accept the music as something to help him focus.
“I’d like you to draw for me what would happen today, if you didn’t finish everything at the dinner table,” she says. “Will you do that for me?”
Jigsaw points to his scrapbooking project with a frown, clearly preferring to do that.
“We’ll pick that back up tomorrow morning,” she says. “For now, I’d like it if you considered some potential results of not eating all of your dinner tonight. What do you think will happen, now, with the people around you now?”
He nods and starts putting things in a stack and capping the glue stick. It doesn’t take him long, and so she allows the procrastination tactic. There’s plenty of time left in their session for it, and her next client had to cancel their phone appointment, so she can extend her session with Jigsaw today if needed.
“Remember that no one is asking you to eat less of your dinner. I am only asking you to think about what might reasonably happen if you did eat less of it.”
For the next twenty or so minutes, she watches as he draws on a fresh sheet of paper. There’s a series of sketches of a progressively smaller pile of food on a plate, and a sketch of a figure with a star on its left arm holding its arms over its stomach. And something she can’t quite make out at first, but which she eventually determines is a figure with a star on its left arm being asked questions by what must be key members of the team.
“So you’re concerned that if you don’t eat everything that is provided to you, there will be less provided in the future,” she says. “And that you will be very hungry later. And that everyone will want to know why you didn’t eat as much.”
He nods.
“What would happen if you were hungry later?”
He makes a scooping motion with one hand over the palm of his other hand, the sign for “earn,” and then draws a star on his paper. He adds the sign for “eat.”
From her briefing when beginning work with him, she knows that stars drawn like that, on their own, signify completed missions, targets killed, success. From the rest of it, she takes it that he feels he would need to earn additional food to eat if he was still hungry. Since he doesn’t run actual, individual missions, she isn’t sure at first how he would earn this extra food, but then she remembers the map where he’s been adding stars over potential targets.
“You would have to find a target and add it to the map in order to earn something to eat?”
He nods.
“Is this because it’s additional food outside of your meals and snacks, or is that the reason you add targets to the map? Have you been earning your food this whole time, even in the Tower?”
Jigsaw takes a minute to write on his pad of paper, and eventually shows her where he has written REWARD and drawn a line connecting it with the piles of food on plates.
So that’s it, then. Another layer to the starvation he’d been subjected to. He still feels the need to earn his meals, despite Caroline’s efforts to date. And she’s betting the meals he did need to earn back in his captivity weren’t sufficient or varied. The conviction that he must earn food would certainly linger, even if addressed. And if there isn’t any true belief behind it, the behavior could still become compulsion out of habit.
“Do you still think that food is a reward that you earn?” When he nods, she continues. “What if it wasn’t a reward, but was just something that you were entitled to?”
He doesn’t have an answer to that, or else he’s keeping his reaction well controlled without revealing anything.
“A lot of people connect food with rewards, or treats for doing especially hard or taxing things. You’re not alone in that, Jigsaw.”
Yasmin doesn’t want to step on Caroline’s territory, and this particular area is far from her specialty. She chooses her words carefully. Hearing this idea from another one of his support team might lend it some additional strength.
“But while food can be a reward or a treat, it doesn’t have to be that. Sometimes—most of the time—food is for nourishment, to fuel our bodies so that we have the energy for living. It’s a basic need. Denying you food until you perform a task is something your captors would do, but is it something your current friends would do?”
It takes him a minute, but he does shake his head.
“Would they want you to be hungry?”
This time he shakes his head immediately.
“Would they deny you food if you were hungry?”
He shakes his head again.
“So do you need to earn your meals by identifying targets?” she asks. “Or by doing something else for a reward?”
Jigsaw hesitates, looking uncertain. Then he shakes his head again, slowly, frowning as though he knows it is the answer she’s looking for and leading him toward, but doesn’t quite believe that answer himself.
She makes a mental note to incorporate this into her checkpoints. It’s clearly taking him a while to accept these new pieces of information that conflict with the facts of his prior existence. Even knowing logically that that time is over and he won’t need to earn any food, even hearing it repeatedly from Caroline and now from her as well, it will be hard for him to stop providing targets.
When he doesn’t add a target before eating, it will nag at him until he does add a target. The trick will be gradually weaning himself off of that pattern and not substituting some other behavior as a form of earning food.
Thankfully, she knows that his therapy team is patient enough to help him through the transition away from earning rewards.
Zoe
—New York City | Friday 31 August 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“Tonight we’re going to do a word search,” Zoe says. “This is a kind of puzzle where you look for words inside of a grid of letters.”
She hands him a sample puzzle, only seven color words in a ten-by-ten grid, and then points out one of the words—“brown,” hidden in the middle of the grid.
“The words can be up and down, back and forth, even diagonal,” she says. “Your goal is to circle the words you find in the grid, and then cross that word out below the grid.”
He draws an oval around the letters that make up “brown” on the page, and then crosses out the word at the bottom.
“What is the sign for that color?” she asks. “Let’s practice the signs for the colors while we’re at it.”
“Brown” is a hard one for him. He regularly gets the colors that start with B mixed up with each other, though the signs are quite different. But he takes his time sorting through the signs in his mind and successfully signs the right one, his middle three fingers waggling as he holds his hand up as though waving to her.
“That’s the one,” she says, returning the sign. She sits across from him and gestures for him to put the paper on the table between them. “Let’s try to find ‘red’ now.”
Jigsaw nods and looks at the chart. Over the course of a minute or two, his shoulders gradually tense up.
He is probably looking at the grid as a whole rather than scanning it for individual letters, and it’s not working for him. She’s not surprised. With his issues expressing himself in writing, she knows that letters are just shapes most of the time, and only hold meaning with effort on his part.
“One trick to these if the words don’t catch your eyes is to scan each row for the beginning letter of the word, and then to look all around that letter for the rest of the word. So we would look at all of the Rs in this puzzle.”
He nods again, but looks somewhat daunted by all the letters in their jumble.
And she knows that letters are hard for him—both in writing and in signing. Reading is something he finds easier, taking information in rather than expressing information. But this is the right kind of challenge to get him connecting letters with the words they make up instead of just the sounds they make when people say them. It’s far from impossible, even with the specific damage he’s suffered to his brain, but it will be a challenge.
She thinks they’re ready for this challenge.
“Why don’t you use your finger to scan the rows,” she suggests. “We can start at the top and work our way left to right, then left to right, and so on, to be sure we don’t miss any.”
Jigsaw finds the word after getting to the third row in the grid, the same R that made up “brown” leads to “red” going down. He draws an oval around the word just like he’d done around “brown” and crosses the word out in the list.
“Do you want to try ‘green’ next?” she asks. “It’s next on the list at the bottom.”
They spend several minutes looking for words in the grid, and with each discovery, Jigsaw seems more confident in the strategy of looking for the first letter and then all the letters around it. Eventually, she hopes, some of these words will pop out at him, without him needing to scan each row looking for them. But in the meantime, this definitely works. And the scanning of the letters has some benefit as well, so nothing is lost in the practice.
When he finally discovers “purple” going up from the bottom to the top, he circles the word and scratches out the last of the colors on the list. He sits up and signs “mission accomplished” with a smile.
“Excellent,” she says. “And the sign for ‘purple’ is…?”
He makes the sign with the K-shape instead of the P-shape, another common issue with his fingerspelling. The two shapes are identical, after all, just rotated differently.
“Close.” She shows him the sign with the P-shape and he shifts the orientation of his signing to match. “Are you ready for another?”
He nods, looking borderline enthusiastic, which surprises her a bit, given the struggle he’d had with the practice word search. But she’s always known that this client was up for a challenge and had far more going on in his mind than he could express. He’s almost always been receptive to her exercises, and even accepted the feelings wheel with a little routine use of it.
“Alright,” she says. “I have two copies here of a vegetable word search. One is laminated, and you’ll keep it in your binder to keep practicing with just your eyes. This one, though, you can write on.”
She hands Jigsaw a sheet with the word search on it.
There are twenty words to find on this page, all of them vegetables that Jigsaw should recognize from his vegetable book. Hopefully they are words he’ll be pleased to find, and he will enjoy the puzzle instead of getting frustrated by the jumble of letters. The grid is much, much larger to accommodate the larger list with longer words, but it should prove to be within his range at the present.
His eyes widen at the sight of the grid on the page she hands him, and then he smiles at the words on the list. He signs “plant” at her with that smile still in place, and then settles in to start looking for words.
“If it’s easier, you can use a highlighter to highlight the words you find,” she says, setting a highlighter on the table. “It’s entirely up to you.”
He ignores the highlighter, as she’d suspected he would. The shakiness of his handwriting is entirely due to his mind trying to perform the letters, and not at all due to any weakness of his hand.
It’s quiet for the rest of the session, with Jigsaw intently working at the word search and Zoe planning their next session based on this one. Perhaps they can try a crossword puzzle with colors. She can have the clues be swatches of the colors, and he will need to name them and write that in the puzzle. A good introduction to the practice of crossword puzzles, after which she can give him something more challenging.
She suspects there will be an additional challenge for Jigsaw that other clients wouldn’t have—his ignorance of so much of the popular culture and history that make up most crossword puzzle clues. She will have to make her puzzles up with words that he knows well. Names, perhaps, and fruits and vegetables, objects that can be described without using clues he has no concept of.
If he were interested in a particular topic, that would help. Gardening would be a good one, or a book or movie with characters and place names and plot devices. She’ll have to keep a watch out for subjects that interest him that aren’t going to encourage interests they’d rather he not pursue, such as killing his enemies.
Chapter 17: Avengers | Ready to watch? (Imma slip it in the tape deck)
Notes:
Chapter title from “VCR” by Tyler.
I may be moving in the extremely near future. (cue excitement and stress and uncertainty) So we'll probably be going to just Sunday or just Sunday and Wednesday updates for a while as I get ready for this possibility. Also, my replies may take a little longer, but I will definitely still reply. I love getting your comments, and I love replying to them just as much. You guys rock! ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Bruce
—New York City | Wednesday 5 September 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
They may not be working on the same things, Tony preferring the mechanical side and Bruce the physics side of things, but Bruce is glad Tony lets him have a bit of the main lab instead of setting aside a separate room for him to work in. It’s much less lonely this way, more akin to working with colleagues like he used to before the gamma ray accident.
His current project is setting up some slides and similar that can be used to augment his upcoming lectures now that the fall semester has started. It’s more academically oriented than strictly lab oriented, but it’s still a fun experiment in its own right. What will students find appealing enough to pay attention to when it’s just Bruce Banner and not the Hulk giving the lecture?
He’s been working on the project since after dinner, scanning the notes his bidders had passed along about where their classes should be in the curriculum when he’s going to be delivering his lectures, and what departments the graduate students will be coming from. Mostly Physics, some Chemistry and Astronomy. Possibly some other majors from other departments across the campus.
It’ll be quite a crowd. He hasn’t delivered lectures in a while, and it’s unlikely he’ll be able to practice in front of an interested, live audience. Maybe Jigsaw would pay attention, though he wouldn’t understand most of it at the level Bruce will be addressing. He likes to pay attention to Tony in the lab, in any case, and might expand that attention to him.
Tony doesn’t seem likely to have the attention span necessary for receiving a lecture, though he’d be remarkable at delivering one on any of the subjects of interest to him. The others might be polite enough to sit in the room, and that’s about all he can ask for on astrophysics and string theory.
Tony’s been gone for all of half an hour—a kitchen run for more snacks—when he comes back holding not snacks but a brown paper package the size and shape of a taller than average paperback book, about one inch thick. He goes around to his workstation, looking down at the package with a frown.
“What’s that?” Bruce asks.
Tony holds it up and gives it a shake. “Sounds like a VCR tape.”
Bruce blinks. “From?”
“Anonymous donor, let’s say.” Tony tears open the brown postal paper and stares down at what does happen to be a tape. “No return address. No labels. Not even any stamps. Just addressed to me and left in the mail room. Made it through the scans, so it’s at least not a bomb.”
Bruce doesn’t ask if he’s going to watch it. Of course he’s going to watch it. He’s probably got a VCR somewhere in here that will play it in a sandbox so that there’s no risk of whatever’s on the tape corrupting anything else in the lab.
“Kind of an odd medium to be sending messages through,” he remarks. “Not very many people even have the equipment to play those anymore.”
“Mhm.” Tony sets the tape down and starts rummaging around in a back room, where he’s predictably got the right equipment for the job at hand. Rather than bring any of that equipment out into the main lab, Tony merely returns for the tape and then disappears again to keep tinkering with his setup.
Despite his own curiosity about the tape, Bruce leaves him to it. It’s Tony’s tape, after all. It was sent specifically to Tony, and that’s the only thing written on the packaging that he saw when Tony held it up. Well, it was addressed to Anthony Stark, specifically, which may turn out to be a clue as to who sent it, but which is only a quirk of naming conventions at the moment.
He’s just about put the tape out of his mind and resumed his focus on the task at hand when he hears what sounds like machinery pushed off a table and onto the floor, accompanied by Tony growling out an invective.
“JARVIS!” Tony follows up with a shout. “Find whoever sent this tape. I don’t care who you have to hack, find him. Or her. Or them. Find me the sender!”
Bruce can’t imagine what’s on the tape that would garner that reaction, but his curiosity is matched only by his desire to help Tony keep what cool he has left and not do anything rash. He gets up and makes his way to the back room, where yes, there’s a pile of equipment in a jumble on the floor, shoved off the table in a fit of rage.
“What—” Bruce starts as he comes around the other side of the table, making note of Tony’s clenched fists as he does.
The screen is dark, and the black and white video footage is a little blurry. Not a quality camera, maybe a street camera.
Bruce watches along with Tony as a car comes onto the screen from the right and slams into a tree. The engine begins to burn under the hood. A motorcyclist comes into view, maybe coming back around to investigate the crash? Was there a near-collision, and the car swerved to avoid the motorcyclist?
The motorcyclist opens the trunk of the car, seems satisfied by what he sees, and then goes around to the driver’s side of the car. And— And it’s clearly Jigsaw in the Winter Soldier garb he’d worn during their hunt for him. He reaches down and lifts an old man from the ground by his hair, and then dispassionately beats his face in before putting him back into the driver’s seat of the car.
Bruce holds his breath as the Soldier goes around to the other side of the car and reaches in, and Bruce can’t make out what happens in the footage itself, but he must be killing the passenger as well. That’s all that makes sense. The last thing that plays before the film cuts to static is the Soldier looking into the camera, his eyes the deadest Bruce has ever seen them, and shooting the camera out.
The footage starts over again, with the car careening into the tree and the engine catching fire from the crash. Bruce looks away from the screen.
“What is this?” he asks softly. He knows full well what he’s seen, or he thinks he does, but he can’t place the significance to Tony of this particular mission of the Soldier’s, before he fought his way to freedom.
“The Winter Soldier killed my parents,” Tony says, his tone soft and dangerous. “And someone wants me to do something about that.”
Oh no. That would certainly warrant the reaction, and then some. It might warrant more of a reaction, still. It might even warrant—
“You know he wasn’t in control of himself then,” Bruce says. “His eyes are empty in that video. He looks half asleep. Even his movements are sluggish.”
“Oh, I know,” Tony says darkly. “And I know he’s done more to avenge my parents than anyone alive, has killed more HYDRA agents than anyone.”
That might be enough to avoid the worst of the ramifications, then. Tony might not plan to take his anger out on Jigsaw for what Jigsaw was made to do in the past. That would be ideal. Tony seems marginally calmer now, still a live wire and dangerous to cross, but reasonable in the face of the facts.
“What do you plan to do?”
Tony shuts off the video footage and then carefully removes the tape from the VCR. He holds it like he’s afraid it will break and any clues it holds will be destroyed before he can make use of them.
“Find whoever sent me this,” Tony growls. “Make them regret it.”
It makes a certain amount of sense that someone who had this video footage and meant harm would send it. Someone in HYDRA, almost by definition. If they couldn’t come in and kill Jigsaw as they’d planned to do during the auction, then maybe they think they can turn the team against him and get the Avengers to do it for them.
Or at least get them to send him away or treat him badly enough that he escapes again. Then he’s on the streets and they can resume their own hunt for him. They might intend to split the Avengers with the footage, see who backs Jigsaw over Tony and vice versa, at least cause them to be a less effective team because of the division.
So they know—or can guess—that someone within HYDRA sent the tape. But finding out who exactly did it… JARVIS is on it, and that’s going to have to do for now. The AI is the best suited to the task.
In the meantime… “What do you plan to do right now?” Bruce asks.
“I’m going to see if Spangles wants to spar with the Iron Man armor. Get some of this out of me before I do whatever it is they want me to do.”
Bruce nods. “That sounds wise. And the tape?”
Tony swallows and puts the tape carefully down on the VCR player. “I’m going to deal with that tomorrow. When I’m thinking straight.”
Tony
—New York City | Wednesday 5 September 2012 | 9:30 p.m.—
So they think they can play him? They think he’s some kind of sleeper weapon of rage they can use against their damaged goods? Ha. They wanted him angry, whoever sent that footage, and oh, he’s angry alright.
Tony punches the button to the gym level harder than is necessary, briefcase of armor in the other hand.
But he’ll lay even odds that the Jigster doesn’t even remember doing that, that he didn’t remember Howard or Maria, that they were just the latest assignment. And it’s bad. It fills him with rage that his parents were just an assignment like any other. They should have been special. They should have—
They shouldn’t have been killed at all.
And he’d thought it was a wreck HYDRA had engineered, based on the files he saw in the Bakersfield base before the missiles destroyed everything. He’d known it was HYDRA at fault. He just hadn’t guessed that it was more than a car crash, that it was a car crash followed by two individual murders.
And why and how had HYDRA had a camera just conveniently placed on the roadside? Why had their weapon shot out the camera after the murders instead of beforehand? Why hadn’t his arm shorted out or looped the camera? They know that feature can be turned off. Was this before they added the feature or was this a special case where they turned it off for this mission?
To what end? For what purpose?
The only thing Tony can think of is that it could be used for exactly the purpose they are currently using it for—for upsetting the surviving family. For manipulating him. For trying to guide his hand and force a confrontation on their terms.
Who thinks so far in advance? Who in the 90s would have thought that it would be a good idea to have this exact video to send to him at some amorphous time in the future? Surely they couldn’t have expected their weapon to get out of control and be taken in by a team like this one, to live in a Tower like this one.
What else could they have used it for? Just to torment him because that was fun? Did they anticipate that he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and someday need to be reminded of how his father had died?
It just doesn’t make sense that they’d set this up on camera when the wisest course of action would have been to ensure there was no camera watching the road in the first place. They had to have dictated the exact point on the road where the crash had to happen to even capture this footage.
It points to some kind of mad preparation mindset, to have arranged this for so many just-in-case scenarios. What other garbage do they have in their files, ready to be sent to try to sabotage what the Avengers are doing with their murder hobo?
And what the hell had been in the trunk of his father’s car? A secret prototype, he knows, from the Bakersfield data. But of what? Something S.H.I.E.L.D. had in their files, something HYDRA had in its files, something… maybe that Howard kept in his files? Locked away, secret, lost and waiting to be found?
Tony clears away a space big enough for a Capsicle-worthy sparring match, taking into consideration the need to avoid destroying the rest of the gym equipment with a repulsor blast. This has to be purely physical, anyway. He doesn’t want to hurt Rogers. He just wants to get his anger out.
Satisfied, he opens the briefcase with the portable armor and lets the suit assemble itself around him. Not as strong as the regular armor, not as thick or heavy, won’t deal as much damage. That’s exactly what he wants for this, anyway. Something that can take Cap’s punches and kicks, that can handle the shield slamming into it, but that won’t be too overpowered.
They learned a lot in that tape, a lot of things that really piss him off. But they also learned that Jigsaw knows how to ride a motorcycle. Or knew at one point. 1991. How many wipes have there been since then, and how deeply buried or completely erased has the knowledge been? Maybe he doesn’t know how to ride a motorcycle anymore. He certainly hadn’t remembered Howard after some forty-five years had passed.
He has a lot of the same curiosity about the machinery in the lab as his father had said Bucky had had—now that he seems confident none of it will be used against him, anyway. So the core interest is still there, but the knowledge of Howard is long gone, whether that be the knowledge of him as a person or the knowledge of having killed him.
“Tony,” Steve greets him from the gym’s locker room. He’s wearing his Captain America uniform, just as JARVIS had advised.
Good. So he knows this is a real spar and not a practice round. He’s prepared.
“What makes you suddenly interested in sparring?” Cap asks. “I believe your words last time were ‘hell to the no,’ when you refused to participate.”
“Got a tape in the mail,” Tony grits out. “Jigster killed my parents.”
“Oh my god,” Rogers breathes out.
“1991. It wasn’t just a car crash. Need to vent a little.”
“Tony, I—” Rogers shakes his head. “Anything I can do to help. We can spar as long as you like.”
Tony flips his helmet down. “That’s it?” he asks. “Sparring?”
Spangles looks at him with an open expression Tony can’t wait to put a fist through, just in a sparring sense. “Is it enough for now?”
And… Tony takes a breath, lets it out. “Yeah. For now. It’ll be enough. Wasn’t really him, anyway.”
Rogers nods. “Alright. We’ll start on your signal.”
Steve
—New York City | Wednesday 5 September 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
They’ve been sparring nearly an hour, and Steve’s even starting to get a bit winded. It’s the best workout he’s had in… Well, ever. Even his sparring with Sam in the Falcon armor isn’t quite as fast paced and forceful as this. The full body armor really packs a punch. It’s an actual workout, something that tests his reflexes as well as his strength, something that demands he use all of his speed to block blows and short repulsor bursts alike. It’s maybe a little too invigorating for this late at night, but he bets he’ll sleep well for doing it. If he doesn’t dream too much, anyway.
This is what he’d hoped for months ago, when trying to arrange team training sessions and learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses so that they could better plan for each other’s needs in the field. It’s just a shame that the reason they’re doing this is so horrible.
He blocks a repulsor blast with the shield and sends it up into the rafters, diminished considerably by the deflection, and then charges back in with his fist.
It’s a good sign that Tony is taking his grief and anger out on him instead of Jigsaw. Steve is happy to be a sparring partner for anyone who wants to spar, but Jigsaw… doesn’t quite seem to understand sparring. Doesn’t appreciate it, in any case. Has been derisive when hearing about it.
A motion to the side grabs his attention almost long enough for him to take a metal fist to the face, but he deflects the blow and moves to Tony’s other side with his shield twisting his arm back.
“You’re afraid of the robot?” comes Clint’s voice from the doorway. “There’s no robot. That’s just Stark.”
Steve blocks another blow with his shield and holds the block long enough to take another look at the door, where he sees Jigsaw shaking his head and signing “robot” insistently and with no small amount of fear on his face. He points at them—no, at Tony.
This is not good timing. Tony is here specifically to distract himself from his parents’ murder, and Jigsaw is probably the last person he needs to see right now.
A metal boot sends him flying back onto the mats, and will definitely leave a bruise.
“Eyes on the ball, Capsicle!”
Steve holds his hands up. “Time out. Are you okay with an audience?”
Tony looks over to the door, sees the other two, and drops his arms to his sides.
Jigsaw inches further behind Clint, putting the archer between himself and Tony and looking downright worried.
Steve doesn’t think there’s any reason for the fear, even now. He’s a little surprised by it, in fact, since Jigsaw has spent lots of time in Tony’s lab, which is lined with armor suits. He’s surely seen enough of the suits to not feel apprehensive around them any longer.
He hears Tony raise his helmet, and watches as Jigsaw’s eyes widen.
“See?” Clint asks. “Just Stark.”
Jigsaw signs “robot” again, looking like he doesn’t believe what his eyes are showing him.
“No robots here, Jiggleypuff,” Tony says, his tone a bit flat. “Still working on those.”
“Now is maybe not a great time, Jigsaw.” Steve gets up to his feet. “We’re working on some stuff. Try back in a couple of hours?”
Jigsaw nods and pulls at Clint’s arm. Clint just shrugs and gives them a wave before he and Jigsaw disappear behind the door.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Steve says. “We can go again if you like.”
Tony sighs. “I think I’ve got most of it out,” he says. “He doesn’t look anything like in the video. It’s like he’s alive now and was dead then, just a zombie.”
“The video?” Tony had mentioned tape, but… Maybe that’s the same thing.
A muscle jumps along Tony’s jaw. “They sent me a video tape of it. They recorded it, when they sent him after them. After my parents.”
Steve lets out a breath.
He shouldn’t be surprised that HYDRA would do that. If they had footage of that then of course they would take whatever opportunity presented itself to fragment the group or set them against Jigsaw somehow. But why had they recorded it in the first place? How could they have known they’d have an occasion to use the footage?
“I’m sorry, Tony,” Steve says. “Do you know where the tape came from? Maybe we can—”
“JARVIS is working on it. We’ll find out where that tape came from, and we’ll take them down, whoever they are. Wherever they are.” Tony gestures and his armor begins to put itself back into the open briefcase lying off to one side.
Steve watches the pieces slotting themselves into place. He has no idea how that’s happening, how each piece somehow knows where to go and has the power to go there of its own volition. Just another case of technology in the future looking like magic.
“When we get enough to go after them,” he promises, “then we’ll go after them, Tony. They don’t get a free pass.”
Notes:
Dun dun dun! we knew this had to happen, right?
Chapter 18: Assets | Are you holding back, like the way I do?
Notes:
Again--responses to comments might be a bit slower than usual, but I will definitely respond! Responding to comments is half the fun of posting! ^_^
Chapter title from “Crush” by David Archuleta.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 5 September 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
Clint’s actually pretty impressed that Cap has what it takes to tell Jigsaw to essentially go away down in the gym. Every sign to date has said that he’d welcome Jigsaw with open arms during pretty much any and every moment of the day or night, no matter what he was doing at that moment, or who he was doing it with.
Playing a game? Jigsaw can join. Having a snack? There’s enough for Jigsaw, too. Going on a walk with Wilson? Jigsaw can tag along. Sparring or lifting weights? Jigsaw can watch. But maybe Jigsaw’s somewhat indifference to him has finally broken that wounded puppy acceptance of anything Jigsaw dishes out.
If so, good for Cap.
“So you want to go up to the range instead?” Clint asks in the elevator.
Jigsaw reaches out and touches his ribs lightly, his head tilted questioningly.
“I think I’m okay to shoot some arrows finally. I’ll use a bow with a lighter draw weight. It’ll be okay.”
And if it isn’t okay, Jigsaw will be on hand to get him back to bed, and to fish out the sling for his elbow and all that. Probably wake up Banner and get him up there to check his ribs for new breaks or rebreaks or whatever.
But it’ll probably be fine. It’s been about six weeks since he got his ribs busted, and his arm has been feeling great, even if his ribs still twinge every once in a while. Besides, he needs to practice before Sunday if he’s going to actually shoot some arrows with Kate. He doesn’t want to start out on Sunday and have to stop like he’s a pathetic loser. Better to know beforehand whether he can do it.
Jigsaw looks at him like he’s not sure he believes that it will be okay, but ultimately nods. He signs “archer” and a thumbs up.
“JARVIS, take us all the way up to the range,” Clint says.
“Certainly, Agent Barton.”
Clint watches Jigsaw’s face while JARVIS speaks, and there’s not even a flicker of understanding. He shakes his head.
“Still not listening to JARVIS?” he asks.
Jigsaw gives him a proud smile and a nod.
“I’m telling you, JARVIS is a good thing. You’re supposed to listen to him. Even if he’s a voice without a mouth.”
Because that’s what JARVIS is in Jigsaw’s terms. A voice without a mouth. Maybe if JARVIS was a face on a screen, it would be easier for Jigsaw to actually pay attention to what he says instead of blocking him out. But it’s not worth the effort right now. Right now, he’s going to have too much on his hands supervising Jigsaw in the range for the first time.
For whatever reason, he’s never expressed interest in joining Natasha or Sharon in the range, and Clint hasn’t had much reason to go to the range other than to train Katie-Kate—and that’s only happened twice.
But Jigsaw had enjoyed the hell out of watching Clint before the auction and the tracksuit mafia and all that. So he’s bound to enjoy watching from inside the range instead of just plastering himself against the windows like a kid banned from a candy shop.
The elevator deposits them on the right level, and Clint heads down the hall with Jigsaw right on his heels.
“You okay with Stark?” Clint looks back at Jigsaw for the answer.
The answer is a shaken head and “robot” followed by Stark’s T-shape over the chest name sign. He adds “the same as” while shaking his head in disbelief.
“They really are the same. All of those suits in the lab are just that. He can put them on and he becomes Iron Man.”
Jigsaw signs that the robots are hollow, and Clint nods. But Jigsaw just signs that he has to see inside of them to believe it.
“Well, maybe Stark will let you look in each and every suit to make sure they’re all empty,” Clint says. “But if he doesn’t, you’re going to have to believe without the proof.”
And it might be that there’s an issue with Stark right now. Because the more he thinks about it, the more likely Cap would have been ecstatic to receive them in the gym instead of turning them away. It’s basically his long-held goal to get them all training together, and Jigsaw and Clint showing up of their own volition during a sparring match, well.
But he’d said it wasn’t a good time, and Stark hadn’t had many quips about anything. Maybe something’s up. He’ll probably get a text about it later.
Until then, he opens the door to the range and gestures for Jigsaw to go ahead of him. The gym might be off limits until Cap and Stark finish whatever it is they’re doing, but the range is wide open.
It takes Jigsaw several minutes to admire all of the weaponry on pegs at the back wall, the guns, the knives, the throwing stars. There’s a precursory inspection of the ammunition, as well, and then some semi-reverent caressing of the fletching on a quiver of practice arrows.
Clint lets him explore for a while before he takes one of the bows off the pegs at the back and gives it an experimental draw. His arm doesn’t protest, and his ribs only protest a little. He might be good to go. And he might not—it’ll depend on how long he spends at this, how hard he goes, how far he pushes himself.
He decides he’s only going to shoot one quiver and then take a rest and reassess his ribs. That’s the responsible thing to do.
“I don’t know how much you know about range safety, Jigsaw,” Clint says, “but while I’m shooting, you have to stay behind me. It’s for—”
But Jigsaw is nodding, is climbing up to perch on a stool behind him, and Clint just nods.
“Right. Like that.”
Okay, Barton, he thinks. Time to see what you’ve got after the embarrassment of a trouncing the tracksuit bros gave you.
The fact that his roommate is behind him, watching intently and at close range, doesn’t have anything to do with the hint of nerves he feels. He’s already proven himself in Jigsaw’s eyes. Now it’s time to prove to himself that he’s recovered enough to train some. That’s all. Nothing more.
There’s definitely no need to impress anyone.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 5 September 2012 | 11:30 p.m.—
The first few of the other asset’s shots are slow, precise, measured. They are test shots, obviously meant to stretch muscles and tendons, to push bruised ribs just a little to make sure they can take the shifting and the pressure.
And the other asset’s back muscles and arm muscles move so deliciously under the other asset’s shirt. Not a sleeveless shirt, but one of the snugger button-up shirts that are easier to put on than the t-shirts that require lifting the arms up over the head. The other asset is still healing—heals so, so slowly.
And the other asset’s legs are strong and solid, the pose perfect, just like before. The stances are held just long enough to line up the shot and then the release, the follow-through, the thwack of a tiny fang hitting home. Perfect. So perfect.
The other asset is a beautiful thing to watch, and now it can watch from so much closer than before. Can really appreciate the nuanced twitches of muscles, the angles of expertise in every part of the other asset’s stance, the curves and planes of the other asset’s body as fang after fang thwack into the target.
One of the baskets of fangs is shot in this slow motion, with these deliberate, strong movements, and then the other asset brings the target forward—a star of fangs in the center!—and pulls out the fangs by their sticks. Even doing this, the other asset’s movements are sure and swift, practiced despite several weeks of inaction.
The other asset’s craft is buried deep in the arms and back, deep in the legs and hands, deep in the other asset’s body so that it cannot be forgotten after a recovery period. The other asset remains as fit and skilled as before.
And the other asset sets up a new target, sends it back to the farthest point in the range. Begins again with the renewed basket of fangs on sticks. Goes through them so much more swiftly, firing and firing and firing, even firing two of the fangs at one time! And then three!
It watches and watches, leans forward to see even better, finds that the hands itch to reach out and touch the other asset’s back and shoulders. The other asset is just so skilled, so competent, so perfectly formed with such a beautiful figure.
Another basket of the fangs is added to the rotation so that the other asset does not need to pause to retrieve the fired fangs so often. The patterns become more complex in the target, become letter shapes and stars and circles, rings of circles, all of the fangs so perfectly placed.
The other asset’s shirt darkens with sweat as the fangs on sticks trace out a star around a small circle, and then a bigger star around that, each of them quivering in place after striking the target. The other asset is putting in so much effort, is pushing the boundaries of healing ribs, is performing so perfectly.
It does not even know how much time has passed when the other asset finally pulls the last of the fangs out of the target and puts it in the basket with the others and then doesn’t set up a new target. The other asset is finished, then, is not going to continue to make the shapes in the targets, will not make the range reverberate with the thwack thwack thwack of skilled shooting.
“Wewph,” says the other asset, putting the baskets of fangs on sticks back among the other archery equipment and hanging the bow up on the pegs. “I think I might have overdone it.”
The other asset did that perfectly. What is the other asset talking about, overdoing it? It frowns at the other asset and somehow keeps the hands to itself instead of reaching out to test the strength of the other asset’s ribs. If the other asset has damaged them, then pressing against them would hurt the other asset, and it will never do that.
The other asset shakes out the arms and wipes at the forehead, all the physical hallmarks of exhaustion, but the other asset’s eyes are bright and energetic, full of accomplishment and pride. The other asset’s cheeks are flushed with the exertion, too, and it does not know that the other asset has ever looked as good as now.
It smiles encouragingly and gives the other asset two thumbs up. The other asset has performed marvelously.
And the other asset blinks and looks away. There is the sound of the other asset’s throat clearing. Then: “You, uh, wanna go back and try the gym?”
Does the other asset want to watch it perform now? In return for performing for it? It can do that. It will perform so well, and will impress the other asset as it has been impressed. But only if the clown man and the… the robot technician? But it would rather think of him as the hamburger technician. That is much happier to think about.
It will go to the training room if the other two are not there. The clown man did not want it to be there, and the robot—the hamburger technician is the robot!—was there fighting the clown man, and it does not know how to take the robot down if needed. It is not safe to be in the training room with the robot.
It nods and mimes climbing up a wall. They will see if the training room is available.
“Awesome. I think I’ll just watch, if that’s okay. I don’t think I have parallel bars in me yet.”
It nods again—it nods so much these days. It’s easier than the one-finger-two-fingers method of agreeing or disagreeing.
They get back into the elevator and go down.
“You excited about the field trip with Caroline Friday morning?”
It is very excited. They will go outside of the hive building together, and the other asset will come with them. They will go to one of the buildings with the food inside and the metal boxes behind them full of treasures and rewards. Maybe it will get to show them how to pick through the contents of the metal boxes to find the best treats.
“Think we’re going to Gristedes,” the other asset says. “Probably going to buy more vegetables.”
Mm. It smiles. The other asset does not like vegetables—had complained that the word search it is working on is all about vegetables and not something like candy, whatever that is—but does not begrudge it the vegetables that it likes. They do not need to work on vegetables the way they need to work on killing targets.
That is something the other asset does begrudge it, but does not think less of it for. The other asset just wishes that it would not do it. And so it will not, at least when the other asset is around to be disappointed if it does kill a target.
It is sad that they will not be able to go hunting together, because of the different outcomes for the targets, but that is alright. They can still go to the building with all of the foods in it together, even if all they will take away from the building is vegetables. They can hunt vegetables together in the metal box behind the store.
The training room is empty when they arrive, and it piles up several of the blue mats so that the other asset has somewhere soft to sit while it climbs the walls and leaps between the bars and wears the body down before they go back up the elevator to sleep.
“Thanks,” the other asset says, sitting on the piles of blue mats. “Have a good time, Jigs.”
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
Last time he came down here with Jigsaw to work out when everyone else was asleep, his roommate had taken his hoodie off so the baggy fabric wasn’t in his way. Clint half expects him to take the t-shirt he’s currently wearing off the same way, but he leaves it on. It’s apparently snug enough that there’s no need to remove it.
And he’s surprised by the part of him that regrets that. But most of him makes sense—most of him is glad the shirt stays on, that he doesn’t have to get an eyeful of all those scars littering his roommate’s torso, front and back.
All the names, the combinations of letters that serve as signatures of HYDRA past and present, with the ever-present tally marks beneath them, always in three sets of five with two lines left over. Seventeen. One of the trigger words in the red star book that will apparently take Jigsaw down if called out without interruption.
Clint sighs. He has no idea if those still work. He doesn’t even know how they’d find out other than reading them and seeing what happens or happening to be in the field with him when the worst thing happens.
He doesn’t want either thing to happen, himself. Doesn’t want to see what the end result is if all those words do get called out in order. Doesn’t want to see his roommate drop under the onslaught of them. It was bad enough watching the first handful of words during the footage of that STRIKE ambush in D.C., not knowing how long it would take before he wouldn’t be able to get back up and fight back.
He’d like to think that there’s been enough time gone by that the words just don’t work well anymore. But maybe they’re still strong, maybe they’re just waiting to strike in the worst possible moment.
Jigsaw is practically a blur in the air between the parallel bars, spinning around so fast in spins and flips that Clint feels dizzy on his behalf. But he knows full well his roommate isn’t dizzy. If he was dizzy, he would slow down or keep to one pattern of motion or something, maybe put in more static holds. But he’s twisting and leaping with all the surety he’s ever had. And too smoothly for Clint’s eyes to keep track of.
It’s really impressive, despite his knowledge that this is nothing, really, when compared to what Jigsaw’s capable of. The man’s just playing around right now, having fun, even if he never, ever calls it that.
Because Jigsaw still doesn’t like that word, “fun.” And for good reasons, Clint supposes. If he’d been through any of what HYDRA called fun, he’d hate the word, too.
Jigsaw is having fun with inverted poses now, defying gravity with balance and core strength that make Clint just a little envious. Unfortunately, his t-shirt isn’t that snug, and Clint can make out a narrow band of his lower torso, including the C-BAR and tally marks along his lower back.
There are a lot of letter combos on his roommate’s skin, hacked in often enough to scar or burned into him with the same regularity. The C-BAR is the worst of them, to Clint. Because that’s his name, his letters, his first name and the first three letters of his last name, same pattern as the HYDRA asshole who put it there—Cody Barkholt.
The C-BAR is big, takes up the whole stretch of Jigsaw's lower back, engraves itself on Clint’s eyeballs even after Jigsaw flips the right way up and his shirt comes back down to cover his back.
Barkholt is dead, his insides scooped out like the inside of a pumpkin and his outsides carved up in stars, but sometimes? Sometimes it’s just not enough. Sometimes Clint wants the chance to kill the bastard himself.
What’s worse is that he knows Rumlow has his fucking B-RUM carved on Jigsaw somewhere, and Clint’s seen his whole torso, front and back, and has not seen it. There’s not much real estate left after the torso is used up, and Clint doesn’t like it when his stupid brain starts trying to imagine where Rumlow put his mark. That man wouldn’t let it be smaller than Barkholt’s.
But it’s probably smaller than the A-PIE that Pierce left on his ribs. Bigger than the D-TOL, and all the rest, though.
Rumlow is still in the wind, and Clint is torn between wishing the man would show up and let himself be taken in and put through the kind of hell he deserves, and wishing the man would just disappear forever and not bother Jigsaw at all.
Because from what he’s gathered from his roommate, Jigsaw is terrified of Rumlow, and Clint’s not sure if capturing Rumlow would help bring him closure or just reopen all those fears for him. Especially if they do manage a capture instead of a kill. After all those STRIKE agents escaped the Triskelion holding cells—and ended up attacking the Tower itself—Jigsaw has very little faith that anyone captured will ever stay captured.
They do need to capture him, though, instead of letting him die in a fight. Rumlow has information they need, is high up enough in the ranks to have some serious insights into, well, into Project Insight, at the very least. Probably into Zola, too, and whatever else HYDRA has going on.
The motion of Jigsaw swinging from the parallel bars to latch onto the rock wall distracts him from the rumination on Rumlow, and Clint can’t help but admire again the core strength that lets him cling to the wall and not bounce right off of it. His roommate is like a spider the way he climbs, never a faulty or hesitant move, just sure and steady slithering along the wall like it’s the floor or like gravity isn’t a thing.
Clint thinks back to when he first saw Jigsaw, back when he was just the Soldier, back when they didn’t know the first thing about him, back when they were hunting him down and pretty much failing to capture him at every turn.
And he’s still got it. All of that creepy-smooth oozing movement that seems so inhuman as he works his way around on the rock wall, bypassing easy handholds for ones that will actually pose a challenge. Somehow, Clint finds it isn’t as creepy as he used to find it. Now it’s just his roommate moving along a rock wall.
He pats his ribs. Someday, maybe someday soon, he can join his roommate on the wall, maybe show off a little more, show Jigsaw what he’s capable of on the bars, on the wall, on the rings. Show him some real circus shit and see if he likes what he sees.
Maybe they can work with each other, maybe grab each other’s wrists and fling each other around in the air.
Clint would trust Jigsaw to catch him.
Chapter 19: Tower | We’re more than just a slice (of American pie)
Notes:
Happy 4th of July, for those celebrating it. ^_^
Chapter title from “Slice” by Five for Fighting.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
On the screen, the Winter Soldier stares dead-eyed at the camera, raises his arm, and shoots. The footage cuts out.
So that’s what made Cap steer them out of the gym last night. Holy fuck.
As the video loops, he looks over from the screen to Stark, who is staring grimly straight ahead instead of watching it.
Yeah, their little trip to the gym last night was definitely bad timing. He can’t even imagine how bad it would have been if they’d just walked in while Stark was in fight mode. Jigsaw’s already afraid of the “robots.” If one of them attacked him in the gym…
And Stark can’t have had a great night, if he resorted to sparring with Cap after seeing this thing play through. Stark was always thinking of sending sparring bots to do his part of the teamwork training, and had been very much in the “no thanks” camp when it came to sparring himself. So to put on the armor and go at it with Cap…
Clint’s not sure Stark misses his dad any more than Clint misses his own, but it’s one thing to not like your dad, and another thing to watch someone you know beat your dad to death on film. After all, Clint wouldn’t want to see someone kill his dad, for instance, even though his dad beat him half deaf once when he was young, and killed the family dog. And for all he knows, Stark actually liked his mom, so…
He breathes out a sigh. A shitty thing, all around, for all parties involved. And sent in the mail?
“So that came in the mail,” Cap confirms, almost as if he’d read Clint’s mind. “We think it might be part of HYDRA’s strategy.”
The video shuts off partway through another loop.
“Trying to get under our skin,” Stark says. “Cause a rift, maybe. They think they can get me mad at our murder hobo, instead of mad at them, maybe. Or something. Well, it won’t work.”
Natasha frowns. “What can we tell from the tape itself?”
Stark shakes his head. “Not enough. It’s old, but probably a copy of a copy, so we can’t tell much about the original from this. JARVIS is still working on where it came from.”
Banner nods. “And when we do know where it came from, we can go after the sender.”
“And then there’s the other mystery of what prototype was in the trunk.” Stark drums his fingers on the table. “They sent him after whatever was in the trunk, they must have, because he checks the trunk before he kills them.”
“And finds whatever he’s been sent for,” Natasha agrees. “There’s not much animation to his features throughout, but there’s a flicker of satisfaction, something to the set of his shoulders, when he’s looking in the trunk.”
“Yeah, and I think we can see some of what Jigsaw’s triggered state looks like,” Clint says after a moment of silence. “The dead eyes, the blankness. Doing everything like he’s still dreaming or something.”
“Triggered state?” Wilson asks. “Oh,” he continues. “Those trigger words from the ambush.”
Clint nods. “Yeah. Some of these sluggish movements look kind of like the times he stumbled after one of the trigger words were yelled at him.”
“So maybe they’ve sent us some clues they didn’t mean to,” Stark says. “Some insights into what to expect if they triggered him, maybe. And the trunk.”
“I just don’t get why they’d send it, though,” Clint says. “You already know HYDRA killed your parents. You learned that months ago. Does it matter what tools they used to do it?”
Stark shrugs, his shoulders tight. “If it came out of nowhere, it might have mattered. If we’d gotten this before I knew. I don’t know. But I did already know.”
“Where is his mask, in the video?” Sharon asks. “We could see his whole face. He looks straight into the camera.”
“They seem to have staged this particular murder with his face showing on purpose,” Banner says. “Perhaps in case they needed to burn him, if he escaped. They may have other footage of him that they could send out that would identify him while he completed a mission for them.”
“Do we need to get ahead of this, then?” Cap asks. “Maybe go ahead and make our own announcements, get the lawyers active, something? Just in case something like this gets leaked like all the S.H.I.E.L.D. files did.”
Stark shakes his head. “Already talked with the PR people about this. They recommend we keep up our silence. Don’t let anyone push us into revealing anything until we’re ready—and by we, I mean Jigglesworth.”
Which might never happen. That’s always a possibility. Or it might be a year or even longer before he’s ready for the public to know about him.
“Think we need to postpone tomorrow’s field trip?” he asks. “He’s got the glasses thing down, but…”
Natasha shakes her head. “We’ve already cleared the grocery store. We don’t have any evidence that they’re going to send anything like this to a tabloid or even a respectable news source.”
She gestures toward the dark screen. “All we know for sure is that they think this will upset Stark, maybe turn him against Jigsaw.”
“Which it won’t do,” Stark says. “I’ve got JARVIS sorting through dear old Dad’s records from the crash and earlier. He had a prototype of some sort in his trunk that night, something HYDRA wanted. I’m going to find out what.”
Sam
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
“Are you excited about your interview?” Sam asks as they head toward the kitchen.
Steve shakes his head. “I’d almost forgotten about it with this other thing.”
Sam can see that. He’s not surprised, in any case. Watching your former best friend brutally murder another of your old friends on film is enough to distract from what is likely—hopefully—going to be a total fluff piece of an interview. One of those things is important and has lasting ramifications. The other… is a fluffy interview.
“Wish it was more academics looking to write a biography,” Steve says. “That way it would have some value going forward and wouldn’t just be me complaining about the way bananas taste in the future.”
“There’ll be some value in it, even if you’re just talking about bananas.” Sam pulls out his phone to bring up the recipe he’d emailed himself. “It’s the future’s look at Captain America, man with a plan, alive and well in the modern age. It’ll make your fans smile.”
That’s odd. Why does he have an email from Riley’s old account? Did someone hack the— No. He’s not going to look at that right now. He’s also a man with a plan and that plan is to make a few cherry pies with Steve for the team to have for dessert. He’ll look into that email when he’s on his own, instead of letting it derail his time with Steve.
They have four pounds of cherries to pit, and no time for mystery emails from a ghost’s email address.
“I guess,” Steve says. “But I’d still rather be interviewed by someone else.”
“Well how do you feel about pitting cherries? Because we have about three hundred cherries to pit.”
Steve gives him a grin. “I’m all for it. We’d better get a move on or there’s no way we’ll get them all pitted by dinner, let alone made into pies.” He reaches for the paring knives in the bottom of the knife block.
“Oh, no,” Sam says. “We are not doing this the old fashioned way. This is the future, Steve; we have cherry pitters.”
Sam digs around in the tool drawer and draws out a cherry pitting tool. “Or at least we have one of them.”
He gets out a colander and the cherries from the fridge. “You can start by rinsing off the cherries, and then I’ll show you how to use this thing.”
Steve, as it turns out, gets a real kick out of pitting cherries. Which is good, because Sam can set him to doing that while he makes the pie crusts they’ll need using a food processor—another of the marvels of the future that Steve just shakes his head at.
They have two pies to make, plus about a pound of cherries for snacking, and Sam has the crusts made and split up for chilling by the time Steve’s got the cherries pitted—a mixture of dark sweet cherries and brighter red tart cherries. And it looks like a bloodbath on Steve’s side of the kitchen from all of the cherry juice.
“Next, we’re cutting half of them in half, and half of them into quarters,” Sam says. He gets out a paring knife and hands it to Steve before getting one for himself. “ Now we’re using the knives.”
Steve laughs. “Guess I was jumping ahead earlier. The pitter is way better than scooping out pits by knife point.”
“Didn’t do much to keep your hands from getting juice stains, though,” Sam says, reaching over to trace the red staining Steve’s thumbnail. “Going to have to fix this before your interview tonight. Should have had you wear gloves.”
“Or I can talk about cherry pies to go along with the new bananas.” Steve sets his knife down and reaches over to rest his hand on Sam’s. “Wouldn’t mind telling them about learning the ropes in the kitchen of the future.”
“Better that than your surprise at the Twinkie still being America’s favorite snack cake.” Sam grins at him and turns his hand over to hold Steve’s. “Because they are.”
Steve shakes his head. “I remember when those came out. Bucky and I were going to buy some, just as soon as we could afford something frivolous. Still haven’t had one.”
“Well, the company that makes them went bankrupt in January, so we’ll have to get you some pretty soon.”
“They what?”
Sam shrugs. “Maybe they’re more America’s most famous snack cake and less America’s favorite these days.”
“Guess so,” Steve says, his fingers fitting perfectly between Sam’s.
“The pie things need to chill for a bit,” Sam says. “The crusts especially, but the cherries need to macerate for a while, too. Get all their juices flowing.”
“Sounds like we have a bit of time to kill, then,” Steve says. His eyes trail down Sam’s face, resting on his lips. “Any ideas for how we spend it?”
Technically, they should spend the time cleaning up. Rule one of keeping a clean kitchen is clean as you go. But he’d rather sit down in the common room with Steve after just a quick hand wash and maybe get a little kissing in. No one’s around to watch them. Or maybe they can feed each other leftover cherry halves, the sweet ones.
“Several,” Sam says. “Why don’t we clean up a little and head upstairs for half an hour?”
“My room or yours?” Steve asks, leaning in for a chaste kiss.
“Yours,” Sam murmurs. Steve’s sofa is built for a super soldier, and will easily stand up to what he has in mind. “Sturdier sofa.”
Steve laughs softly. “I like the way you think.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
So many cherries!
It looks around the other asset’s shoulder at the massive bowl of cherries in the refrigerator and the smaller bowl of cherries beside it. The bigger bowl has cherries that are cut up, and the smaller bowl has cherries that are whole, except that they have been shot through the middle and all have teeny tiny bullet holes in them.
Both bowls look delicious, filled with cherries and waiting to be devoured.
“Huh,” the other asset says. “I thought there’d be something good in here for our snack.”
But there is! There are two big bowls of cherries to eat! Delicious cherries with their tart sweetness, their taut skin that pops under the teeth and the soft inside bits, so juicy and perfect.
The ballerina woman reaches around the other asset to pull out a block of cheese and a thick log of meat.
“There’s plenty to eat, Clint,” the ballerina woman says. “We’ll have this with some crackers, just to tide everyone over.”
It swallows. Will they not also have some of the cherries? There are a lot of cherries, and they are in bowls. Foods that are in bowls are for eating. The team that is not a cell is as obsessed with bowls as with plates—putting foods on and in things before eating them. And here are cherries already in bowls. One big bowl for it, and the other, somewhat smaller bowl for the ballerina woman. The other asset will not eat cherries.
It puts a finger on the ballerina woman’s shoulder—she flinches—and then signs “cherry” at her. It asks why they are not eating cherries.
“Those are earmarked for pies, I think,” says the ballerina woman. She moves to close the refrigerator, nudging the other asset out of the way. “There’s crust chilling, too.”
Cherries do not have ears to mark. But it sounds like the cherries have been set aside for something else. For pies, whatever those are. But… all of them? It cannot have any of the cherries at all?
It watches the ballerina woman cut the block of cheese into smaller slabs, and then cut the slabs into cracker-sized pieces. Then she begins cutting up the meat log.
They are supposed to eat a snack now, according to the schedule the feeder gave it, but while there are cherries right there for eating, the ballerina woman wants to cut other things up to eat as a snack instead. They could already be done snacking if they had started on the cherries. Then back to the range where the ballerina woman was having so much fun shooting guns and the other asset was looking so perfect with the fangs on sticks.
“We’re not having cherry pie for dessert tonight, are we?” the other asset complains. “Is there ice cream?”
The other asset goes back to the refrigerator to open the other side where there is food in cryo storage. The other asset groans.
“There isn’t even any good ice cream to have instead. Just some kind of raspberry ripple garbage.”
It wonders what ice cream is. Maybe it will find out later. Maybe it will not.
“Something tells me you’ll live, Clint.” The ballerina woman smiles and dumps all of the cheese pieces onto one side of a plate—always a plate—and the meat pieces onto the other side. “Anyway, if you ask JARVIS for more ice cream, it’ll show up by dinner time.”
The other asset makes a semi-disgusted face and walks to the pantry shelves to pull down some crackers in their little cardboard prison to put the cheese and—ugh—the meat on. It will only eat the cheese on the crackers. And only because it cannot have the cherries.
If no one offers the food to it, then it should not reach for the food, especially if the food is in a special bowl to be turned into something else. Pie. What is pie, anyway, that cherries turn into so that they cannot be eaten beforehand? Not even one cherry?
The ballerina woman leads the assets out of the kitchen—away from all of the cherries—and to the room beyond the room with the long table and all the chairs. The room the team that is not a cell signed all of the books in so long ago, before its escape and return.
It is time to eat the cheese and the crackers—but not any cherries—and then they can go back to the range.
That is something that it very much wants to do. Not so that it can make use of the range—it would not get very good training out of throwing things in plain straight lines in stalls like the range has—but so that it can enjoy the others using the range. Especially the other asset. But the ballerina woman is alright as well. Very good with the weapons she chooses.
“Sure there’s nothing you’d rather be doing?” the other asset says around a bite of cheese and meat. “Instead of going back to the range, I mean.”
It looks at the other asset closely. Does the other asset not want to go to the range again? Is the other asset tired? Do the other asset’s ribs hurt? It does not find any evidence of these things. It makes the sign for archery and gives the other asset a thumbs up. It will always want to watch the other asset with the strong, skilled poses and sure movements.
“You don’t have homework?”
It shakes the head. The— Yasmin. Yasmin did not give it homework in the morning “session” today. They are “taking a breather” so that it does not get overwhelmed with tasks. This afternoon, they will work together on the tablet with its glowing panel and all of the options. That will prepare it for the field trip tomorrow.
“Don’t wanna play a board game or something?”
Maybe the other asset actually does need a rest and is just not showing it physically. The ballerina woman looks curious, has a light in her eyes that means she is thinking things very quickly.
It mimes playing a game on the table, putting imaginary pieces down on an imaginary board and drawing an imaginary card. It nods. If the other asset would rather play a board game, then they can do that. It is not a fun kind of thing to do, just something that assets can enjoy, and so there is no danger in playing that sort of game.
The other asset looks to the side, squints at the shelf with the colorful boxes on it—all of the games. There are these kinds of not-fun games in all of the common rooms now. Different games in different common rooms, but always some games in every common room.
“What about Parcheesi?” the other asset says. “That’s pretty quick. We can be out of the way before everyone starts lunching.”
That would be good. They should not be there when the team that is not a cell gathers for a meal. They are going to eat after, just assets, or maybe also with the ballerina woman. She has joined them more and more, and the feeder is happy about this, so it does not object. Also, the ballerina woman is not so bad to spend time with.
It wonders if the hamburger technician would join them someday. He is not so bad to spend time with, also, and they can eat hamburgers together. The others can eat the meat hamburgers, and it can eat the hamburgers that are made out of plants.
It puts another piece of cheese into the mouth without bothering with the cracker. It wonders what is for the upcoming meal, whether any of the cherries will be offered to it.
So many cherries.
Chapter 20: Avengers | I’ll be with you from dusk till dawn
Notes:
On hour two of a six-hour medical adventure, so have a “please distract me” chapter! ^_^
Chapter title from “Dusk till Dawn” by ZAYN & Sia. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-eS-_olx9M
Chapter Text
Sam
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
He wishes he hadn’t opened the email from Riley’s email address. But he did, and here he is, dealing with the mess in his mind.
Sam has seen Riley fall too many times to count.
Most of the time, he falls the same way he fell in life—while Sam watched, and couldn’t help or stop it or do anything but watch. Most of the time, it’s just before the sun comes up, that twilight dimness that picks out only a few details and muddies the rest. Most of the time, there’s Riley on the rocky ground, bloody and gasping, frothy red pulses coming quick and shallow as he tries to breathe.
It’s only a handful of times his brain has invented a new perspective for him to view the fall through. And none of those could come close to seeing Riley fall from below.
But that’s what’s in the email. Photographs, dozens of them, of him and Riley in the air, of him in the air and Riley falling, of him in the air and Riley on the ground, of them both on the ground, Sam bending over his partner and knowing that he can’t do anything but comfort him as he dies and make sure he isn’t left behind. They’re dark, even a little blurry due to the time of day. But they’re real enough.
Things Sam has seen in his dreams, his nightmares, his waking moments sometimes, when things are bad. But these… These are all from the ground. These are taken through a zoom lens with a crosshairs imposed on it. These include some images of the man who shot Riley down, dressed in tan leather tac gear instead of black, but it’s easy to make the tac gear black in his mind.
The Winter Soldier, hair hanging like a curtain while he sights through the scope of a grenade launcher, arm covered against a glint in the desert dawn but fingers exposed and metal. Something about the pose, something about the casual disregard for how uncomfortable or even impossible that pose would be for a long stretch of time, just cements the man’s identity in Sam’s mind.
Could it be that some other soldier with hair that long and messy had a metal hand and a sniper’s skill in Afghanistan? With that strappy, torso-hugging leather tac gear? Able to shoot a grenade launcher from a stance like that? Sam doubts it.
So Stark got his video tape, and now it’s Sam’s turn to receive unwanted mail from a mystery source that does nothing but upset him.
Sam scrolls through the photographs again. The whole of that wretched night plays over again in his mind. All the ordinance exploding, their rescue mission going up in literal flames. Needing to get out of there or someone would need to come rescue them, next. And then, the shot that took Riley out of the gradually lightening sky.
And all his efforts to save him amounted to nothing.
There’s a knock at the door, and Sam closes his email and sets his phone down on the coffee table, face down. It’s Steve’s knock, and Steve doesn’t need to add this email to his list of things to be upset about—at least not tonight. Sam can brief the whole team on the email later, send the pictures to JARVIS to be analyzed, something.
And he’s got his phone appointment with Joe, his therapist from D.C., coming up. He can go over this then, get it sorted out, all the memories and the bitterness, the urge to blame Jigsaw just because it would be easy to be mad at someone right now, and Jigsaw’s the closest viable target.
Sam gets up and answers the door, giving Steve’s interview clothes an appreciative look. “Hey Steve. Come on in.”
He lets the door close on its own, and wraps his arms around Steve’s waist once they’re fully in the privacy of his suite of rooms. “I take it your interview went well?”
Steve breathes him in and exhales slowly. “It’s over, anyway,” he says. “Still feels like a waste of time.”
Sam manages a smile and leads Steve further into the living room. “It’ll be good for your fans. Did you mention Twinkies?”
Steve laughs softly and lets Sam nudge him onto the sofa. “It didn’t come up. I did mention bananas, though. Talked about food in general being a lot better now. We used to boil things a lot.”
Sam sits next to him on the sofa. “You mention baking your very first cherry pie?”
Steve reaches for his hand and laces his fingers with Sam’s. “I did. And I talked about vaccines and all the improvements to the culture of the future.”
Sam’s stomach twists about uneasily for a moment. “You didn’t come out during a fluff interview, did you?”
“I didn’t what?”
“Talk about how you like guys the same way you like girls. Come out of the closet as bisexual.”
“Oh.” Steve ponders that for a moment, no doubt making mental notes on the linguistics. “No, I didn’t. It didn’t seem to be any of their business.”
Sam sighs and leans over against Steve’s side. “It isn’t anyone’s business but yours. And mine, because we’re dating now. You don’t have to hide, but…” He shrugs. “There are ways to announce certain things, and ramifications you’ll want to be aware of. That’s all.”
“Noted.” Steve reaches an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “There’s already enough going on without any ramifications,” he says. “Unless those ramifications are that you’ll kiss me.”
Sam smiles. “Of course.”
“But maybe tell me what’s wrong first?” Steve asks. “Because something’s wrong. I can tell.”
His smile slides off his face like it had been held in place only by wet glue. So much for waiting until tomorrow.
“Alright,” he says. He reaches for his phone and pulls up his email, pulls up that email, with the pictures. “Here. Someone sent me this earlier, just like Stark got that video.”
Steve accepts the phone and frowns as he scrolls through the photographs. “This is Riley,” he says softly. “The night he died. And—” Steve lets out a breath.
Sam imagines he’s seen the pictures of the shooter now.
“I’m sorry, Sam. This isn’t right. They shouldn’t be able to do this, to make you relive these things.”
Sam tries to brush it off. “It’s not your fault. And it’s not his, either.” Even though it would be so, so easy to blame Jigsaw.
Steve puts the phone back on the coffee table and shifts on the sofa to face him, pulling one leg up off the floor to maintain the position.
“I know,” he says, pulling Sam to nestle in his arms. “But that doesn’t make it any easier. If it was me, if someone sent me pictures of Bucky falling from that train, or of the impact, or…” Steve shakes his head. “Tell me what you need, Sam.”
Sam lets himself relax into Steve’s hold. Steve’s arms are like extensions of the wall of warmth that is his torso. He rests one of his hands on Steve’s forearm and just breathes for a minute.
“This,” he finally says. “I just—”
He needs to be held, needs to be loved, needs to know that he’s cared for and he’s in the here and now and not the there and then, that he can let go. That he can be weak and soft for a while, that he can allow his feelings to take control, that nothing will go wrong when he does.
“I need this,” Sam says.
Steve strokes his shoulder gently, moves his hand in circles along Sam’s back. “Then I’ve got you, Sam. I can do this all night.”
Steve
—New York City | Thursday 6 September 2012 | 11:30 p.m.—
He really can do this all night.
It’s no imposition, holding Sam on the sofa like this. Instead, it’s warm, it’s nurturing, it makes his stomach feel fluttery, and it makes him feel like he can actually put things back together. Sam’s heart, for one.
Steve would like to say he can’t understand what Sam’s going through, but… who was Bucky but his right hand man, his closest friend from childhood on, and even more. And he can remember very well hanging onto that train, utterly helpless to help, while Bucky got smaller and smaller, and while every inch of him longed to just let go and try to follow where Bucky led.
He didn’t get images of Bucky sent to an email address or anything like that. But he’s getting glimpses all the time of Bucky through Jigsaw, reminders of what he’s lost while it’s still fresh to him.
So yeah, he can get it, can understand some of how Sam must be feeling, and it hurts. That’s how Sam’s feeling—hurt. Heartbroken. Ambushed by those pictures, that email. Like he’s been stabbed in the ribs when his back was turned.
And if Steve can be a bandage over that, holding him until he can feel better, until he can heal, until he can look at life with brighter eyes, then Steve will be that bandage in whatever way he can.
That said, what if Sam’s going to wake up with a horrible crick in his neck from falling asleep against him like this and being allowed to continue to sleep like that all night? That’s not very good bandage behavior, letting Sam get stiff and sore from sleeping wrong.
Steve presses a kiss to the top of Sam’s head, gauging the reaction and judging him to be truly asleep. He won’t mind being put to bed, then.
Steve has vague memories of being put to bed by Bucky after falling asleep somewhere he shouldn’t have—usually on their sofa or slumped forward on the table over a sketch. He wonders, as he carefully lifts Sam up, whether Sam will have a pleasant memory of being carried to bed.
It’s more complicated than Steve had remembered to actually pull the sheets down and settle Sam into them while still holding him. He has newfound respect for Bucky doing it back before the War. But he gets it done, pulls the sheets back up and tucks Sam in snugly, plants another kiss against Sam’s forehead.
Sam looks peaceful against his pillow, and Steve takes a minute to reassure himself that Sam really is sleeping peacefully before he takes a few steps back and settles into the bedside chair for the remainder of the night. He said he could offer comfort all night long, and he can. Just, in a way that lets Sam sleep more peacefully. He’ll be there if Sam needs him in the night.
And Sam might. Steve’s had his fair share of sleepless nights and waking nightmares since discovering Bucky buried in the rubble, since realizing that his friend is instead Jigsaw. Seeing the glimpses of his friend after what was, in many ways, a death. So it stands to reason that Sam might wake up in the night and need someone to talk to about all of this. And Steve will be there for him.
A large part of him is just angry on Sam’s behalf. And Tony’s. The losses they’ve been through in life at HYDRA’s hands. And now HYDRA is rubbing that in their faces, trying rile them up, disturbing the peace for the sake of it.
But as much as he hates that HYDRA won’t leave them alone, Steve can’t help but think that it’s ultimately a good thing that HYDRA has sent these things to Tony and to Sam. The plan might have been to turn them against Jigsaw by playing on their emotions, but with JARVIS on their side, these two attempts are just more avenues they can use to find HYDRA.
That’s been one of their biggest problems, trying to find an actual target they can act on as Avengers, a target where they have the appropriate level of force behind them and can conceivably get belated permission to act instead of being seen as unfairly using their combined power to target private citizens.
JARVIS will be able to find something, even if it’s just a trail of single agents passing along a package on orders from the invisible hand of Zola. The trail has to lead back to something, to somewhere, to someone. And when they find the source of that trail, they can act on it. The source will be somewhere that has access to the sort of taped footage Tony got, the images that Sam got. Maybe a base.
If HYDRA wants to play this game, wants to poke them when they’re minding their own business and trying to get their heads back together, then so be it. They’ll strike back.
Sam
—New York City | Friday 7 September 2012 | 5:30 a.m.—
Sam’s alarm goes off while it’s still dark out, giving him plenty of time to get dressed, get a pre-breakfast snack in, get a workout in, get a shower—in whatever order, so long as fetching Jigsaw’s dog for a walk comes last.
But while the alarm rings, it doesn’t ring more than once before getting shut off, which is weird enough that Sam sits up to investigate: his alarm clock is on the dresser by his chair so that he’ll have to get out of bed to turn it off, and his chair happens to be filled by Steve.
Suddenly, the events of the prior evening dump themselves into his head. Riley. The email. The photographs. But also, being held by Steve, wrapped in strong arms and bundled close, being able to just be soft and weak for a short while instead of needing to hold it all together and be a good role model and whatever else.
“You put me to bed, huh?” Sam says with a smile. Steve could have settled him onto the sofa just as easily—or probably more easily—but he went the extra mile and tucked him into bed.
“Told you I could do this all night.” Steve smiles back at him. “I didn’t want you to get a crick in your neck. Sorry if I overstepped.”
Sam shakes his head. “You didn’t. I haven’t been tucked in like this since I was a kid. It’s nice.”
Of course, he’d be a little more comfortable if he was in his boxers and a t-shirt, but he hardly expects Steve to feel comfortable undressing him at this point in their relationship. Someday, maybe, Steve will feel comfortable undressing him and getting into bed with him, but Sam will keep dreaming of that until they’re there.
“What did you do all night sitting there while I slept?” he asks. “Other than watch me.”
Steve shrugs. “Thought about things, mostly. We might have a better chance finding a HYDRA base with these pictures and the video. JARVIS will have more to trace back to a source of some kind. Maybe the place where Zola is.”
Sam can see that. “I’ll forward the email to Stark.”
He should have done that last night, the moment he opened it up and saw what it contained. But he’d been justifiably upset, and the data isn’t going anywhere. They haven’t lost too much time. And it’ll be good to attack another HYDRA base, maybe one where they’d be a little more hesitant before sending missiles to self-destruct the place.
He flips back the covers and slides his legs out, sits up. In a way, it’s convenient he’s still dressed from the night before, so he can just toss on some shoes and go get Lucky for a walk. After he sends that email.
“You want your phone?” Steve asks, holding it out to him. “I brought it in after I got you tucked in for the night.”
Sam accepts his phone and forwards the email without looking at the pictures. He doesn’t want to greet the day by watching Riley get shot down, especially not when he’s going to pick up Lucky right after this and will probably have to make some kind of small talk with the man who shot Riley down.
That’s going to take some getting used to. It was better when he thought it was HYDRA in general, and not this particular coerced and brainwashed prisoner of HYDRA pulling the trigger. Something to talk to his therapist about. He knows he can’t afford to take anything out on Jigsaw. Not if he wants to move forward instead of getting stuck in the past.
He’d been angry for so long after losing Riley, had been angry at the situation and everyone involved in the situation—even Riley. Knowing more details now doesn’t change what happened, doesn’t (or shouldn’t) change anything. He’s already dealt with this. He just needs to talk it out a few times, preferably with someone who’s already helped him through it and can pick up where he left off.
“Want to join me walking Lucky this morning?”
It’s something they’ve done most of the days this week, but it always pays to check instead of making assumptions.
“Sure,” Steve says. “And then after we bring him back, maybe we can go a few rounds in the gym before we get breakfast started.”
Sam smiles. Their new routine. Except today is the day Clint is joining Jigsaw and Caroline for a morning grocery store excursion. Sam’s already agreed to keep Lucky until they get back so the dog doesn’t have to wait alone in their room for too long.
“But I’m keeping Lucky the whole morning, remember?” Sam asks. “You can go on and get a workout in, though. I’ll meet you in the kitchen after.”
“Skipping a workout won’t kill me,” Steve says. “We’ll just go on a longer walk with Lucky. Maybe play in the park for a while.”
Sam waits for Steve to fetch his ball cap and glasses from his room before they head to the elevator to go up to Clint and Jigsaw’s rooms to get the dog.
It doesn’t take long at all, and if Jigsaw is looking at their linked hands with an intensity that makes Sam a little uncomfortable, Steve doesn’t seem to notice. Anyway, Jigsaw seems more curious than judgmental. Like he’s trying to figure out why they are doing that.
Sam feels more sad that Jigsaw has lost the understanding of such a simple sign of affection than anything else. The discomfort is probably based on something else—based on Riley, probably, which isn’t fair to Jigsaw.
“We’ll take good care of him,” Steve promises. “And when you get back from the store, you can come get him.”
Jigsaw seems mollified by this, and after taking a picture of the three of them by the door—Lucky sitting between them with his leash on and a new tennis ball in his mouth, and Sam and Steve standing behind him with their ball caps on—he signs his desire that they have a good day.
“We will,” Sam assures him. “We’ll play in the park for a long time.”
It will be a good day. Sam won’t allow anything less.
Chapter 21: Jigsaw | Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you
Notes:
Chapter title from “Queen of the Supermarket” by Bruce Springsteen.
Posting early because I've got a pretty hectic Sunday coming up. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 7 September 2012 | 8:00 a.m.—
The dog is in good hands, maybe still playing in the park with the yellow-fuzz-ball and the flying man and the clown man. It would have liked to bring the dog into the field for this, but it knows that it is better to leave the dog somewhere safe instead of putting the dog at risk.
And the field is always a place where the dog could be at risk. Even if this is not a mission.
It looks out of the window between the front seats in the car. It is not in the back of the car, the far back, where it is dark and bumpy, but is in the center back of the car, between the other asset not close enough on the left and the feeder too close on the right. And wearing a belt across the hips that will prevent it from escaping the car immediately if there is a need for it. But the feeder and the driver—the researcher with the curly hair—had insisted on the belt. So it is wearing it.
The car feels so different when it sits in the middle like this. It feels… wrong. It should be curled up on the side in the far back of the car, tucked in tightly and able to pop out at the first need and spring into action. But the other asset had insisted that it ride in the car like a person back when the ballerina woman and the researcher with the curly hair had picked them up after the tracksuit men had been seen to. And so that is the only way it is allowed to get into a car now.
It cannot climb in the far back where it is safe from being seen, where it is hidden from view, a secret weapon being transported.
The feeder on its right is holding the camera for taking pictures in the field, and it holds the tablet in its own hands. The other asset’s hands are empty, open and slack as the other asset leans against the side of the car, head against the window and eyes closed. The other asset is so tired.
It wonders if the other asset would like for it to reach over with one of the hands and link their fingers. It remembers what it saw in the earlier morning, the way the flying man and the clown man had linked their fingers, each hand holding the other hand, how their fingers had twined between each other and held each other close. It had looked… It had looked like something that felt nice to do.
But it had impeded their motions, taking up an entire hand like that just to hold onto another hand. It had left them with only two functional hands between them instead of four functional hands. That cannot have been a good thing in any kind of situation where having more functional hands would be better. It had worked okay for them, though, and they had looked happy to be doing it, to be holding onto each other’s hands.
Is that something that it can do with the other asset? The other asset’s hands do not have anything else to do while the other asset is sitting in the car. The other asset might not mind losing the functionality of one hand this way. And it… It wants to hold onto the other asset. If it cannot or should not grab onto the other asset’s arm or touch the other asset’s back and shoulders, maybe it can hold the other asset’s hand.
“So to recap,” the feeder says, “we are going to go inside the store and pick out the food you want, and then go through the line to buy the food. Only after we buy the food can we leave the store with that food.”
It nods. They went over this in the hive building, before leaving. It cannot eat any food inside of the store, and it cannot take any food outside of the store without buying it. The other asset will be buying it with a piece of plastic that can be shown to people to obtain things, and then it can eat the food.
So much more complicated than the metal boxes behind the store.
It pushes the glasses up onto the bridge of the nose. They still feel so weird on the face, but they are necessary for leaving the area around the hive building. It does not want people looking at it to think that they are looking at the bucky, and the ballerina woman had explained that it might not be the bucky, but it still looked like the bucky. The glasses make it look less like the bucky. That is a good thing.
And the glasses might not stay in place the way a proper killing face does, but they still serve as a separation between it and the field. That does not mean that it can kill, though. So many rules.
It nods again as the feeder explains that they will stand in a line and pay for all of the foods they select before they can eat any of the foods. It knows. What it does not know is whether it can put a hand inside of the other asset’s hand and hold on. That sounds like a very good thing to do, while there is no need for functionality in the hands involved. It can hold the tablet in just the one hand.
The other asset did not want to wake up so early, but did it anyway. And the other asset put on some very nice clothes, snug jeans and a t-shirt that shows off the lower parts of the other asset’s arms. The other asset can put on shoes and socks alone now, which is sad. It enjoyed holding the other asset’s feet in the hands, feeling the weight of the other asset’s legs in the lap. Looking at the other asset from so close.
But it is happy that the other asset’s ribs no longer hurt so badly. That is more important than putting socks and shoes on the other asset’s feet.
The other asset stirs as the car pulls into an empty stretch of asphalt and stops. They are here! It can see the store with the food and the alley that will lead to the metal boxes in the back with all of the treasures to find that do not require standing in a line or exchanging papers for food or showing plastic for food. With the metal boxes, it is possible to eat a treasure as soon as the treasure is discovered. So much more efficient.
“Okay,” says the other asset, suddenly alert. “So here’s what we’re not going to do, Jiggy. Kill anyone at all. Maim or hurt anyone at all. Even if they’re HYDRA.”
It frowns. This again.
The feeder politely looks away from the conversation. It is not her place to say whether a target is killed or not killed. She is a feeder, after all. Her focus is on whether or not it can eat a food.
The researcher, though, looks at it in the little rectangular mirror in the front of the car. It is not the researcher’s place to say whether a target is killed or not killed, either. He is a researcher. But he does not do what researchers do, so maybe he does have some say.
“So if you see someone you think is from HYDRA,” the other asset says, “what are you going to do?”
It scowls and signs “kill” just to express what it wants to do, even if it knows that it should not, and the other asset shakes the head.
“No. Come on. What are you going to do, for real?”
It sighs. It pulls on the other asset’s t-shirt and then points out the window.
“You’re going to get my attention and then point them out to me?” the other asset asks.
It nods. They already talked about this, and it already agreed—just for this trip into the field—so it does not know why there is this need to clarify everything. It will not change the mind and do what it has agreed not to do. It will not forget what it has agreed to.
“Okay, good. That’s really good. What do you think I’m going to do then?”
It blinks, pushes the glasses up the nose with a finger. They did not talk about this part. It does not know what the other asset will do with the information. The other asset did not bring the tiny fangs on sticks or the bow that shoots them. The other asset does have a knife in a pocket—it saw the other asset slip that inside the pocket while getting ready to leave. Will the other asset attack in its place, and maybe sever some ligaments or otherwise cripple the enemy?
It hesitantly signs the question sign. What will the other asset do?
“I’m going to snap a picture of them on my phone and send it to JARVIS,” the other asset says. “We’ll get the goon added to our watch list.”
…the other asset is being very disappointing right now.
“That going to be okay?”
It wants to shake the head and insist that the other asset use the knife in the pocket, maybe carve up the HYDRA target’s face so that the “goon” will be very noticeable and easier to follow later.
Instead, it forms the fingers of the right hand into an O shape and then a K shape, the one after the other, not quick, but smoothly. It is very proud of the hand shapes. It has been practicing with the expert with the signs for a very long time to be able to sign the O and the K like that.
“Nice,” the other asset says, tone full of respect and admiration. “You’ve been working on that, haven’t you?”
It nods and grins.
“Thanks for going along with the plan, even though you don’t like it and don’t want to.”
It nods again. It likes it when the other asset is pleased with it.
There are flowers in front of the store, in little plastic pots all lined up on shelves. And very big pumpkins. And wooden planks in weird shapes and painted white with big black eyes and holes for mouths. And things that are like bats but made out of fuzzy balls with shiny plastic wings. And…
It takes a step back.
And there are little people made out of dried up yellow grass that are wearing bags over their heads and clothes on their bodies and that have been nailed to sticks.
It does not know what those are supposed to be for, but it does not like them. It has been nailed to sticks before and it does not like looking at little grass people nailed to sticks, even if the little grass people get to wear clothes instead of being naked and vulnerable while being nailed to the sticks. And the bags over the heads. It has had a bag over the head, so that it does not know what punishment is coming next, or where the punishment will strike it.
It does not like the little grass people nailed to sticks at all.
They should not go inside of the store. They should go around to the alley behind the store, to the metal boxes, where no one is nailed to anything and there are piles of squishy treasures to be found and devoured without having to stand in line or look at the little grass people.
“Jiggy?” the other asset asks. “You okay?”
It shakes the head and dares to pull at the other asset’s arm. They should go to the metal boxes instead. It will show the other asset how to find a good reward, will show the feeder all of the rewards waiting in the metal boxes.
“Well I know the bats aren’t going to bother you,” the other asset mutters, and then looks at one of the little grass people. “Is the scarecrows? Because they’re just decorations. And tacky ones, at that.”
Decorations? It has never seen anything like the little grass people used to decorate anything. What is inside if there are little grass people nailed to sticks waiting outside?
“We aren’t here for the Halloween decorations,” the feeder says. “We’ll go over Halloween closer to October.”
Is Halloween, then, when the nailing to sticks happens?
“Come on, Jigs,” the other asset says. “Let’s get inside, yeah?”
It gives the little grass people all of the distance it can manage, slinking closer to the pumpkins and the flowers and keeping the other asset close as well. The other asset should not go close to the little grass people and the bags and nails and sticks.
There are more little grass people on the other side of the glass doors, and the doors themselves hiss ominously when they open, like in a lab where someone might get quarantined for breaking open a poison or an illness, where there are plenty of researchers who would love to slice it open and experiment on the insides.
The metal boxes behind this store are so much safer. But the feeder is marching forward without any fear, the researcher does not object to anything, and the other asset is only holding back at all because of it.
“Here, Jigsaw,” the feeder says once they are all inside. She hands it a plastic basket with metal handles and it tucks the tablet under an arm to accept the basket by the handles.
“We can only buy as much food as will fit in this basket,” she says. “We don’t need any more. Does that sound right to you?”
It looks at the basket in the hand and then at the gigantic baskets on wheels, metal cages like the plastic ones it has seen women pushing babies in, big enough to hold several of these smaller plastic baskets worth of food. It loops the little basket over the arm and points to the big baskets on wheels. Why can’t they buy that much food? If they are going inside of this store, are spending time here in the field and everything, why not buy that much food?
The feeder smiles. “Someday, we can come buy groceries for a whole meal for the team,” she says. “How about that?”
They can do that now. So much food will fit in one of the gigantic baskets.
“For right now, since we’re just starting out, we’ll buy only enough for learning about the grocery store. We’re practicing right now, and we can always come back and get more food later.”
It follows her further into the store, looking back at the gigantic baskets on wheels and imagining how much food would fit into one of them. And there are so many of the gigantic baskets. They could fill up more than one of them!
But the feeder is in charge of this mission, and the feeder has decided that they will only fill up this small basket, so it turns to face front again and all thoughts of the gigantic baskets disappear from the mind in an instant.
There is just… so… much… food!
There is just so, so much of it. There are piles of food. Actual, overflowing piles of it! A huge mound of bagged cherries! A whole box of pumpkins with more just sitting on the floor. Big and little, orange and green and yellow and white, bumpy and smooth, rounded and oblong and flattened. Bags of grapes! So many of them, in all of the colors—there are bright red grapes, and green ones that are ovals and blackish-purple grapes and it could fill up the little basket just two steps into the store!
And there are flat round things that look lumpy, and flat pumpkin-looking things that are covered in orange grains, and muffins studded with blueberries, and pies like the cherry pie that had been for “dessert” last night after the chewy buttery bread and the stew with all of the vegetables and squashes inside of it. All of these things just stacked on top of each other in their clear plastic prisons and waiting to be devoured.
It licks the lips and swallows hard. Beyond the piles of food—whole piles of food!—that are close to it, there is a huge open room with more piles of food. The walls in the distance are lined with foods all the way up past the head’s height, and there are several piles in the middle of the room, as well, a maze of food piles. It has never seen this much food in one place before, has never imagined this much food in one place, or even in many places. There are many metal boxes worth of food just sitting in a room waiting to be… to be “purchased” before it can eat any of it. Yes. They must buy it first.
It tears the eyes away from the heaps of food and looks at the tiny basket hanging over the arm, the miniscule basket, the sub-optimal basket that will only fit an insignificant scrap of food inside of it. No wonder there were the lines of nested baskets on wheels. With this much food, how could anyone settle for just a little basket of it.
The feeder prompts it further into the store, and it takes a few steps forward, going around the bags of grapes and cherries, the muffins and pies, the flat things. There are so many piles everywhere it does not know where to look.
Mountains of fruits and vegetables. Signs hanging from far up in the ceiling—it is a warehouse full of food! Signs say things it does not bother to read. It can see all of the foods with its eyes. Why does it need a sign to tell it what is there?
It allows itself to be nudged a few more steps, sees a cart full of cups of liquids and urns with ladles inside of them. Soups and stews like last night? In plastic cups with lids. And with loaves of bread inside of bags as well. Bread that can be dipped into the soups and stews. It grips the tablet so tightly in the hand.
What is it supposed to pay attention to? There is food everywhere, everywhere it looks, and it does look—it looks all over the place and there is more food than it can process in any one look.
“Why don’t we start further into the produce section?” the feeder suggests. She steers it past another stack of pies and little muffins and more flat round things, past breads and more breads, some long and thin and others short and squat and some sliced and some with things on top, and some with holes in the middle.
It reaches out for a shiny pink and red speckled apple off the side of the nearest pile of fruit, and then brings the hand back close to it. Is it… allowed? Can it just reach out and take food from, from, from everywhere?
“Go ahead, Jigsaw,” says the feeder. “I’ll hold your basket and you can pick whatever you want to buy that will fit in the basket.”
It lets her take the basket away from it, and it looks all over before reaching back out toward the apple, so shiny under the lights, so pink with the red splotches and speckles on it, such a pretty apple, and not red or green, but pink! It picks up the apple and brings it up toward the face, toward the nose, breathes in deeply. The apple smells like an apple, but not like the apples it has already eaten and smelled. It smells… sweeter, but mild.
“Would you like to buy that apple?”
It nods, and then slowly puts it into the basket the feeder holds out toward it with a smile.
“What else would you like to buy?”
There are peaches a little way away. Soft and fuzzy to the touch, and smelling so good. So, so good. It loves peaches. There are some words written on little signs under each tier of the mountain of peaches. White peaches, yellow peaches, cling peaches, and also nectarines and apricots and… It puts three whole peaches into the basket, nestling them carefully so that their delicate skins don’t bruise or break.
And there is a plastic cage of strawberries over there—it takes a few hurried steps to the side—with their green tops and their plump red bellies ready to be bitten into and to gush over the tongue and crunch under the teeth, but they need to be bought first, yes. It picks up the first plastic prison box with the idea that it will put the berries in the basket, but underneath there is an even redder group of strawberries. It takes that one instead. So red and not even any white or greenish bits.
Oh, and over there, all the bell peppers! There are green ones and red ones and yellow ones and orange ones, and right in that same wall stack of peppers there is something long and white like an enormous white carrot, as thick as the wrist! It puts several peppers into the basket and then holds up the white carrot and tilts the head.
“That’s a daikon radish,” the feeder says. “Mildly spicy, crunchy. You would enjoy it, I think.”
It puts the white carrot into the basket.
“This is like my worst nightmare coming to pass,” the other asset mutters to the researcher. “We’ve skipped over all of the good stuff, and we’re loading up on the nasty veggies without even a single cookie in the basket.”
“How fortunate that you will not have to eat any of it, Clint.”
The other asset sighs. “I’ll still have to share a fridge with it.”
It ignores the other asset and the researcher and puts a gigantic green acorn in the basket. The acorn has an orange spot on it, and it looks like the bright orange sweet squash that was filled with delicious vegetables and mushrooms that one time. It adds another acorn to the basket as well, with an even bigger orange spot. Then there is the deep purple eggplant that does not look like an egg or a plant, but that is so spongy and delicious when cooked up.
Oh, and there are the orange-inside potatoes, too, all pointy on the ends. And bananas, yum, a whole cluster of them together, joined at the end. It can share those—the other asset enjoys eating bananas. And there are some onions—yellow ones and red ones and white ones, all papery and crispy looking. And then a bag of lettuces, so many different kinds of lettuce in one bag!
And right there, a cucumber, so waxy and green. And look at those tiny carrots in the bag! They are like the baby corns, only these are carrots and do not have all the detail of the pointy ends and the frilly green tops. They are just like little carrot finger things. And they look so good in their bag.
The other asset pokes at some okra spears with a disgusted expression, and then picks up a tiny warty pumpkin from a stack of them. The rest of the pumpkins in the stack start to move, and the other asset shoves the tiny warty pumpkin back into the stack, trying to stabilize the pile.
It is running out of space in the basket, and the researcher has taken over the basket. But there is room, it decides, for a little jar of olives. They are not in thin rings, like on triangle bread, but are like black grapes floating in a clear liquid, with little red things shoved in the base of them.
What else will fit on top of the basket without rolling off?
The game where the shapes come down from above and get rotated to see how they can fit below is perfect practice for how to arrange things in the basket so that the most things fit inside of it at once. It failed to plan ahead, and had to keep moving things around so that the peaches did not get crushed. But that just put the peaches at the top where they could roll off of the top of the small pile of foods in the basket.
It turns around in a circle, looking at all of the fruits and vegetables that are piled up around it. It reaches for something like a tiny furry potato. It will fit on top of the basket. But that is about the last thing that will fit, and it will be precarious.
“That’s a kiwi,” the feeder says as it gently adds the furry potato to the basket. “Sweet and tart, with crunchy seeds inside. You peel it before you eat it.”
It nods. It will peel the furry potato before eating it. It will also stand in a line with the furry potato so that the other asset can buy it first. They must buy the food before they can eat the food.
“Well, Jigsaw,” the feeder says. “Do you understand a little better now about how there is always more food available? How you can take more time to enjoy the food you have because it won’t go away and it’s easily replaceable?”
It nods, the fingers itching to add another furry potato to the basket, or maybe some celery to balance on top, or a cabbage that it can hold. It should have put a cabbage in the basket. It missed the opportunity to put a cabbage in there.
And there is a reddish non-apple thing with some spikes on one end—“a pomegranate,” supplies the feeder—that won’t fit in the basket. It wants to know what that is, what it is like inside, and it cannot find out because it will not fit inside of the basket!
“I think it’s time to check out,” the researcher says. “Anything added to the basket now is just going to roll right back out.”
It nods mournfully, looking at the piles of food everywhere that it is leaving behind. So many treasures, and it only gets to put the tiniest amount in a small, small basket.
Maybe they will return later, will go back out into the field and use a big basket on wheels. It can have a pomegranate, then.
Notes:
Content Warnings: A bit of internal worry thoughts about crucifixion and similarly torturous events. Nothing explicit, though. Also, a lot of glowing descriptions of foods. In case you are going shopping soon and don't want to find random things in your cart.
Chapter 22: Assets | And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips
Notes:
Ack, I got so behind in comment replies! Sorry it took me a whole week to respond to most of you. Know that I read the comments as they came in and also kept on re-reading them when I needed a pick-me-up. Thank you all so much. I'm hoping to get more time this week to answer things in a more timely fashion.
Chapter title from “Queen of the Supermarket” by Bruce Springsteen.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Friday 7 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
It’s a juggling act getting all of this health crap out of the basket and onto the conveyor belt without things tumbling to the ground. But he’s pretty damn good at juggling, and like hell is he letting Jigsaw’s precious peaches get bruised.
When he gets the whole mess of fruit and veg onto the belt, he adds two large snickers bars, because they need a break from all this health crap and he’s getting hungry, anyway. Plus, he’s paying. If he’s going to be swiping plastic for all of this garbage, he’s at least getting something good to eat out of the deal.
The whole process is tedium itself, but somehow Jigsaw is fascinated by everything from the conveyor belt moving in fits and starts as the loose fruits and vegetables come up to the front, to the way the scanner beeps when the checker weighs each thing and types in the code, to the way the bags all that stuff goes into crinkle as things get added.
The checker is in a mood way closer to Clint’s than Jigsaw’s, and mumbles a good morning to them before ignoring them for the most part.
They’re probably one of the more annoying sets of morning shoppers, anyway, buying so much random shit that requires codes and isn’t even put in bags. Least they can do is ignore the cashier right back.
Clint swipes his card and taps in the PIN. It’s not his old card. S.H.I.E.L.D. probably doesn’t still have his card activated or anything. But Stark is good for it, and this purple Avengers card doesn’t give him any problems paying for produce.
That’s nice.
Also nice is the little bounce in Jigsaw’s step as they make their way out of the store and back into the parking lot. He’s so excited about his health food that he doesn’t even spook looking at the scarecrows out front.
Clint doesn’t want to think about why scarecrows would be so distressing to his roommate. He’s seen the sketchy little doodles of meat hooks and dangling assets with stars on their arms. He’s read through the red star book with its discussion of viable punishments. He’s pretty sure literal crucifixion is not beyond the sadism levels of fucking Brock Rumlow and his crew of assholes.
Yeah, no. Clint would rather watch his roommate practically skip to the car with an arm full of disgusting vegetables in their paper bags, smelling the bag’s contents with a smile, his glasses slipping down his nose a bit as he tips his head forward over the bag in his arms.
A happy Jigsaw isn’t a totally rare sight or anything. Not recently. But it still stands out in Clint’s mind, brings a smile to his face, and kind of makes him want to do whatever it takes to ensure that his roommate stays happy.
Watching him get overwhelmed by the contents of the grocery store was kind of like watching Natasha when he’d taken her shopping at first. Granted, that trip had been during the winter, February, in fact. Everything had been pink and red, chocolate everywhere, and flowers all over the place, too. Bright colors and stuff on the inside, dreary gray ice on the outside. No wonder the store had been so overwhelming.
Here in the fall, it’s more orange and brown, lots of harvest and Halloween stuff—and they hadn’t even gone through the candy aisle!—and not quite close enough to winter to deal with the snow and stuff.
But that wide-eyed staring, the hesitant reaching for things like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch any of the bounty he was surrounded by. Finding out about weird fruits that weren’t in his fruit book yet. All kinds of disappointment about the pomegranate. It had almost made Clint go back and get one of the actual shopping carts, just to encourage his roommate to fill that thing up with whatever vegetable nonsense caught his fancy.
Banner opens up the trunk of the car, and Clint is betting that Jigsaw doesn’t go back there to put the bags of groceries away, but to crawl in there if they’ll let him. Another thing he wants to take up with fucking Brock Rumlow. Stuffing him in the trunk when you traveled? Clint would like to think no one would put a dog back in the trunk, let alone a person.
“The groceries go in the back,” Clint says as he joins Jigsaw back there. “Not you. Just, in case you had any ideas about crawling in.”
Jigsaw frowns and looks between the bagged groceries and Clint. He looks reluctant to put anything down.
“You want to grab a few things to eat in the car?” Clint asks. “You can grab some stuff.”
And that is how he ends up sitting in the back seat holding the tablet and eating a snickers bar while his roommate eats salad mix right out of the bag with his metal hand. Clint shakes his head slightly at the whole situation.
At least Caroline had vetoed eating an unwashed cucumber in the back of the car. Clint’s not great about washing produce or anything, but even he would say a big no thanks to an unpeeled, unwashed, unsliced cucumber.
Between himself and Caroline, they got lots of good pics of Jigsaw and the wonder in his eyes over the magnificence of the produce section. He hasn’t seen all of the scrapbooking pages Jigsaw’s worked on with Yasmin, but he’s seen a couple of them. The photos they took will make for some fun pages, he thinks.
And it’s a good thing they didn’t rely on Jigsaw to remember to take the photos, because he’d been under the spell of peaches and eggplants and stuff the whole time. To the point of skipping over the baked goods. Sheesh.
He’s not sure what the plan was with the tablet, but for a morning spent shopping, it wasn’t a bad time. Plans always fall apart when meeting the enemy, after all, and this one didn’t, except for the tablet part. They got their pictures, they got their basket of “goodies,” they got in and out without a confrontation of any sort, and no one seemed to pay them too much attention.
It’s New York, after all, and the morning. People going about doing their own thing and minding their own business. And no hammer incidents.
There’s something to be said for no hammer incidents.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 7 September 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
The little fingerling carrots are delicious!
It offers one to the other asset, who rejects the offer, and then offers one instead to the feeder. The feeder accepts the offer with thanks and seems to enjoy the little fingerling carrot.
It should not offer food to feeders—that is the opposite of the way things should be—but it has so much food. How can it not offer some to others who do not have food? The feeder has offered it so much, gave it a basket to fill up and helped to make pictures of all of the food that can go in the scrapbook, told it what all of the foods were that it did not recognize.
It offers her another little fingerling carrot.
“Those are your carrots, Jigsaw,” the feeder says. “Thank you for the offer, but I want you to be able to eat all of your food.”
It nods and eats the carrot itself. So sweet and crispy, breaking apart under the teeth and crunch-crunching as it chews. So much different from the bigger carrot pieces that are cut up small and cooked. And cool and refreshing, like when they made the salad the first time it met with this feeder.
It eats another and another.
It wonders what the rest of the day will hold. There will be an afternoon “session” with the— with Yasmin. And they will discuss all of the good things that happened, and all of the foods, the mountains and piles of fruits and vegetables, the walls of vegetables in bags and stacks, the foods it knows and the new foods that it found, like the furry potatoes.
“All of what you bought today will need to be washed and put away carefully,” the feeder says. “If you’re comfortable with it, I can come show you how to do that for each item.”
The other asset shrugs and it nods. It is comfortable with the feeder entering the room for assets if the other asset is comfortable with it.
“And perhaps we can find out how to cook some of the things you bought. The sweet potatoes and acorn squash should definitely be cooked, and the eggplant as well.”
It nods again. It will learn how to prepare foods! This is the best day.
When they go up to the room, the feeder shows it which fruits and vegetables to put into the refrigerator, which ones do not go into the refrigerator, which can be eaten right after washing, and which ones need to be cooked as well as washed, which need to be peeled, everything. Some vegetables can be cooked but do not need to be cooked, like the bell peppers and the rest of the little fingerling carrots. And many of the foods are not for the dog.
It is all so complicated.
The other asset stays on the sofa while the feeder teaches it at the kitchen table. The feeder shows it how to use the tablet to look up cooking instructions, and how to look up what the insides of the furry potato will look like—bright green!—and how to access all of its food books on the “apps” part of the tablet.
They went over this this before, the apps part of the tablet, but it had forgotten how to get there. Now it will remember. And the feeder shows it a “kiwi” card and a “daikon radish” card and a “pomegranate” card for it to put inside of its fruit and vegetable books later. It can also add those cards on the “food app” that is a picture of a cauliflower in the top right corner.
“For your homework, Jigsaw, I’d like for you to try all of the foods you bought and tell me about them when we meet on Tuesday.” The feeder smiles. “Okay?”
It tries to make the O and the K for her, but the fingers do not want to make the shapes right now and just close into a loose fist. It nods instead.
“Okay,” the feeder says. “Thank you for a good session. I enjoyed our time this morning.”
The feeder says goodbye to the other asset as well before leaving and then there are just two assets in the room for assets, and all of the delicious foods in the refrigerator and on the counter, safely out of the dog’s reach.
It takes out the strawberries, so red and plump, and washes them carefully under the faucet, putting the washed strawberries in a bowl and making sure to wash under the leafy tops as well as along the sloping sides of the fruit.
The other asset has eaten strawberries, so it knows that the other asset enjoys eating them. It will share the strawberries, yes. The other asset does not like carrots, so would not enjoy the last of the little fingerling carrots, even though they are adorable and small. But the strawberries will be accepted, and not rejected.
It brings the bowl over to the sofa and sits next to the other asset. It holds out the bowl with a smile.
“You sure, Jigs?” the other asset asks after a moment.
It nods and waits for the other asset to pull a strawberry from the top of the bowl and bite into the bottom of the strawberry before it takes one for itself. The other asset can have a strawberry for every strawberry that it eats. That is how it will thank the other asset for such an exciting trip out into the field.
There are only a few strawberries left in the bowl when there is a sound in the hallway—the jingling of metal tags and the footsteps. The flying man and the clown man are bringing the dog back!
Clint
—New York City | Friday 7 September 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—
He hasn’t eaten this many pieces of fruit in one sitting in his entire life, and he’s starting to think his stomach is going to revolt if he puts another strawberry in his mouth, but there’s something petulant and needy in the way his roommate keeps offering that bowl of strawberries, and Clint figures by now he’s already eaten enough to upset his stomach so there’s no avoiding it. Might as well eat more.
But there’s only one berry left in the bowl when it’s offered to him again, and he waves it off. He’s not taking the man’s last strawberry.
“You take the last one, Jiggy.”
There’s a knock at the door, and Clint calls out that it’s open. Probably Wilson and Cap bringing Lucky back. If it was anything else, Jigsaw would probably be on edge about it.
Instead, he’s just eating the last of the strawberries, green bit on top and all, just like he’d eaten the rest of his. Apparently observing Clint eat around the leafy bit didn’t do a thing to convince him there was a less gross way to eat a strawberry.
“We brought Lucky back,” Cap says, completely unnecessarily, while Lucky bounds into the room and is greeted with profusive ear scritches while he licks every inch of Jigsaw’s face and dislodges the glasses Jigsaw’s still wearing.
“Guess he missed you,” Wilson adds with a strangely forced smile.
What’s Wilson’s beef with Jigsaw today, then? Or is that even what’s happening? Clint’s pretty perceptive, but noticing Wilson’s a bit off doesn’t necessarily lead to his knowing what’s off or what that’s about.
Eh, he’s probably missed something that happened while he was out grocery shopping. He should probably check his phone and see if anyone’s sent a heads up about anything. He’s comfortable on the sofa, through, and his phone is in his back pocket. Too much effort to wiggle around and get it out. It can wait.
“How did your field trip go?” Cap asks, placing Lucky’s leash in the bowl by the door. “Anything… happen?”
Clint shrugs. “Only thing that happened is that I now have something like a gigantic white carrot in my fridge making friends with the cheese sticks in there. Daikon radish? Whatever that is.”
“I take it you’re not eating any,” Wilson says.
“Hell no. That thing is Jigsaw’s purchase, and he’s going to have to eat it himself. I’m not helping. That thing sounds and looks gross. Radishes. Nope.”
Their two visitors share a small laugh about that, and Clint wonders if he’s being teased at all. He might be getting teased. It’s possible.
Jigsaw takes the bowl of strawberry tops to the kitchen and comes back with his precious daikon radish out of the fridge.
Cap stares at it. “That really is like a giant white carrot.”
“Food lady said it was kind of spicy but not really spicy, and that it was crunchy. I’ll pass.”
Jigsaw mimes washing the radish and then slicing it up. He mimes handing them pieces of the sliced up radish with a smile.
“Maybe some other time,” Wilson says. “We’re about to have pizza for lunch. Something tells me I don’t want radish as an appetizer.”
Cap looks like he might take Jigsaw up on the offer, but he ultimately shrugs. “Later, yeah. I’d be really interested in tasting that. What else did you buy?”
Jigsaw goes to put his prized radish back in the fridge and then brings out the receipt. He hands it over like it’s a precious relic. And maybe it is, if it’s going in his scrapbook.
Cap handles it with the same reverence, clearly picking up whatever signal about the receipt that Jigsaw is putting out.
“Wow,” Cap says, studying the list. “That’s a lot of food. What is a kiwi?”
Jigsaw grins and signs “hair potato” at them.
“A…” Cap squints at him. “…hairy potato?” he asks.
Jigsaw nods and then mimes ripping something in half and indicates that the inside is green.
“A hairy green potato?”
Jigsaw gestures for him to come to the kitchen, and Cap follows.
From the sounds, Jigsaw is getting the kiwi out of the fridge and washing it off. Oh, goodie, the giant carrot-radish thing got vetoed, but they’re too interested in the kiwi to wait until later.
Wilson watches from in front of the sofa for a moment and then sits. “You ever had a kiwi?” he asks.
Clint grimaces. “I have a feeling I’m about to,” he says. “Those things look gross, though. Like Chewbacca laid an egg or something.”
Wilson shakes his head. “Try it. You might like it.”
Clint doubts it. But if he’s offered a piece of the kiwi, he’ll try it. He doesn’t even know why.
“Anything happen while we were out?” he asks. “I caught that pause before you smiled at him.”
Wilson shakes his head. “Happened years ago, and it’s not his fault. I just found out last night, is all.”
What? Not just Stark’s parents, but Wilson’s… Wilson’s what?
“Who was it?” Clint asks, keeping his voice low out of respect even though they all know Jigsaw can hear him perfectly well.
“My wingman. Back in Afghanistan.” Wilson shrugs as Lucky comes over and plops his head in the man’s lap. “It’s over and done with. I’ll deal with it.”
Except that Lucky has gravitated to him in classic emotional-comfort mode, head in lap and everything. So whatever he’s dealing with, it’s not dealt with yet.
“You get a video, or…?”
“Email with pictures. From his address.”
Clint grimaces. Blast from the past, that, and not in the good way. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
Wilson just nods and pets Lucky’s head in his lap. “It is what it is. We’re hoping that JARVIS can trace it back to them, same as with the tape Stark got.”
That’d be ideal. Something good to come out of a shitty situation. And no one here would mind having a source to go after.
He’s about to say something stupid about hoping that they don’t get led into a trap by following the leads to some kind of missile landing pad like Bakersfield, but before he can, Jigsaw and Cap come back from the kitchen area with some bright green discs with white centers and a starburst of black seeds going around the middle.
Oh boy.
“You’ve got to try some, Sam,” Cap says, holding out a piece to Wilson, who doesn’t let on that it’s not new to him. “This is amazing.”
Clint dutifully picks up the sliver Jigsaw offers him and eats it, grimacing the whole while. It’s… well, for all that it’s green, it’s not terrible. Kind of like pineapple in a sweetly sour way, with weird crunchy bits. He can do without eating any more of it, though.
“Thanks, Jiggy,” he says, trying to get the taste out of his mouth. “You like it?”
His roommate nods and offers another piece.
“No, uh, you eat that. You like it more than I do.”
He can’t wait for the pizza to arrive and make this kiwi thing a memory.
Chapter 23: Tower | Don’t know if you get it ‘cause I can’t express how thankful I am
Notes:
Chapter title from “Control” by Zoe Wees.
Comment replies will be slow again/still, but know that I love you all and love your comments, and that I will absolutely reply. ^_^
Chapter Text
Monesha
—New York City | Monday 10 September 2012 | 10:15 a.m.—
One of the perks of the early train is that everyone on it has their head in a newspaper or laptop screen, trying to get some work done on the train before they get to their office jobs. Getting a head start on the day. And Monday, especially, everyone is that tiny bit grumpier than usual to be up and about at 7 AM, so everyone does a great job of ignoring each other.
Monesha spends the time on her phone, arranging a cab from the train station to take her to Avengers Tower, and then playing Angry Birds until the train finally pulls into the station. She yawns as the businessmen and businesswomen stream off the train, and then gathers up her oversized IKEA bag with its parcels and her purse stuffed inside.
Only once she’s on the platform does it really land for her that she’s going to see her rescuer again for the first time in months. Maybe. She hadn’t had any luck getting in contact with anyone in Stark Industries to pass along a message to anyone, and it apparently took ages for her letter to arrive, so she doubted sending a second one would have been worth it.
So there’s a chance she’ll get to Avengers Tower and no further.
But if they don’t let her in, or if he’s not there, then she can leave the gifts for him and his dog, leave a written message for them, and spend a day in the City. It’s not a total loss either way, though she’s really looking forward to seeing her rescuer safe and sound with her own eyes. It isn’t that she doesn’t believe Agent Barton’s letter, but she’ll feel better when she lays eyes on her nameless rescuer.
Monesha gets into the cab she’d arranged, sets her IKEA bag beside herself, and prepares to look at her phone to avoid conversation with the driver.
“Haven’t heard of any special events at the Tower,” the driver says as he pulls out into traffic. “You meeting someone nearby? A celebration?”
Monesha bites back a sigh. She didn’t look at her phone fast enough, clearly, and he got a look at the wrapping paper on the presents.
“I’m meeting someone, yeah,” she says. “A friend I haven’t seen in ages. It’s her birthday.”
It’s a lie, but it’s really none of this cabbie’s business who she’s meeting and for what purpose. She understands he’s just making small talk to get a bigger tip, but something about the letter she’d gotten tells her that it’s for the best no one know what she’s really up to.
“You’re on vacation, then? Spending a few days in the City. It’s a great time of year up here. You’re in for a treat.”
She smiles. “So I hear. My friend is trying to get me to stay until the leaves start changing in October.”
“You won’t regret it.”
Monesha shrugs. “I only have so many days off.”
From there, she doesn’t have to be so careful with the information she gives. She tells him about the clothing store in the mall, how she picked up several extra shifts recently in order to get the time off to come up, about how her coworkers are covering for her. There’s nothing at all top secret about herself, after all, and it will fill the time and keep him from asking questions that do require lies.
And before she knows it, she’s walking up to the main information desk, explaining that she’s here to see Agent Barton, that no, he’s not expecting her, but if they’ll tell him Monesha Fowler is here to see him, he’ll probably send her right up.
Her heart is practically thumping out of her chest as one of the security guards scans her IKEA bag, and she can’t even be sure why. What does she have to be nervous about? She knows that the agents who interviewed her aren’t threats to her. She knows that her rescuer isn’t a threat to her. She knows his dog is an absolute sweetheart and not a threat to anyone.
Maybe it’s that scanning her bag indicates that she’s going to be let up to the Avengers level of the Tower. That it’s really happening.
Another indicator that it’s really happening is Agent Romanoff striding across the floor toward her with the hint of a smile on her lips.
“Miss Fowler,” she says as she closes the distance. “This is a lovely surprise. I hope your trip was pleasant.”
Monesha says that it was and takes her IKEA bag when the guard seems satisfied with its contents.
“I hope I’m not intruding at all. The letter said if I was ever in the area…” She shrugs. “I took the day off and thought I’d put myself in the area.”
Agent Romanoff does smile at that, an actual smile, as they walk toward the farthest elevator. “With a party worth of presents, hm?”
“He saved my life,” Monesha says softly as the elevator doors close behind them. Surely the elevator is a safe place to mention some details. “I just gave him a sandwich. It doesn’t feel like nearly enough.”
“You’ve done much more than give him a sandwich. You helped us help him, and you had a positive impact on him when most of the impacts in his life have been less than positive.”
She hadn’t really thought of her impact other than a meal and a tennis ball, but coming from Agent Romanoff, it must be true.
“It was the very least I could do. It wasn’t even a hot meal.”
The elevator lets them out into an attractive waiting area with some sofas, some tables with chairs, and a shelf of board games and puzzles, and Monesha follows Agent Romanoff through one of the attached hallways.
“Clint’s with him now,” Agent Romanoff says. “I’m sure you know that nothing you do or learn during this visit leaves the Tower.”
Monesha nods. “I said I was meeting a friend for her birthday. No one knows why I’m really here. I haven’t told anyone, and I won’t.”
Agent Romanoff nods, looking satisfied. “He goes by Jigsaw, by the way. The man you gave that sandwich to.”
“Jigsaw,” Monesha repeats to herself. It’s not a traditional name, but she has the sense that nothing about her rescuer is traditional.
Agent Romanoff stops by a door in the hallway after passing a few others without pause and knocks before opening it.
The first thing through the door is a dog’s nose, and then the rest of the dog, and Monesha can’t believe how much better her rescuer’s dog looks. Well fed, with a thick, glossy coat, and a bright red star on his collar that jingles as he excitedly sniffs at her legs and wags his tail. He walks circles around her almost too fast for her to be able to turn around and pet him, and he licks at her hand as she tries.
“Lucky,” calls Agent Barton from inside the room. “Come here, Lucky. Let her get in the door, you goof!”
Agent Romanoff guides the dog—Lucky, what a wonderful name for a dog, so hopeful—into the room by the collar and then gestures for her to enter as well.
And she doesn’t know what she expected to see, certainly not the black leather with the straps and all the weapons, but there he is, sitting on a pillow in front of a coffee table—looking so different in a soft maroon henley and jeans, with his hair clean and smooth, tucked behind his ears. He looks fuller in the face, like he’s been eating well instead of scrounging for scraps. There are glasses now—did he need them, earlier?—but she’d know his eyes anywhere in any lighting, glasses or no.
This is her rescuer. There’s no blood in an alley this time, no aluminum baseball bat, no fear. No hard or shiny leather, just soft fabric pushed partway up his arms. What shows of his left arm under the henley is just as she remembered it.
Monesha smiles. “Hello, Jigsaw.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 10 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
It really is the feeder with the braids!
The other asset had said that she was here, that she was coming up to see them. And part of it had not believed, because the feeder with the braids was back in the original hunting grounds, but here she is. She has a large blue and yellow bag with her instead of the metal club, and her braids are loose around her like a waterfall over her shoulders and down her back instead of partly up in a knot on top of her head, and the dog is so excited to see her again.
It is excited, too.
It gets to the feet with a little smile and then waves at the feeder with the braids. It signs “thank you” to her, and then picks up the word search it is currently working on to show her—types of fruit. It is halfway done with the fruit puzzle, and has only been working on it for an hour. It is getting so fast at finding the words, even with the letters all in a jumble.
The feeder with the braids looks at the other asset, confused, and the other asset says, “that means ‘thank you,’” before gesturing toward the chair that’s currently occupied by only a pillow and a small soft blanket, and that could be occupied by a feeder with braids.
“I should be thanking you,” says the feeder with the braids as she accepts the fruit puzzle from it. “I feel lucky every morning when I wake up, and it’s because of you.”
She goes to the chair, and then sits and looks at the word search. “This looks fun.”
It holds back a grimace. The feeder with the braids is not like the other feeders, the ones who had the fun. This feeder is like the feeder who comes to see it twice a week. There is no fun. She is just saying the word. It means something else to her, and she does not know what the word means to it.
It is still not sure it believes this other meaning for the word, believes that it means that even assets are enjoying what is happening. The two definitions are not mutually exclusive the way everyone who defines it talks about people enjoying things, after all.
It signs that it is enjoying searching for fruit in the letters, so that the feeder with the braids will not feel bad for using the word “fun” like that. It does not want the feeder with the braids to ever feel bad.
“He enjoys looking for the fruit, yeah,” the other asset says. It is good that the other asset is here, so that it does not have to take the time to write so much, but can pull the words from the mind and make the hand shapes instead.
It holds up a finger, apparently a sign for holding on one moment, for waiting for something, and then goes to the room that is only for it, goes to the closet that hides its treasures. It pulls out the food books, one by one, the green vegetable book, the orange fruit book, the grains book in yellow and the proteins book in purple. It leaves the red meat book in the closet.
Holding the books tightly against the chest, it makes its way back to the main room, where the feeder with the braids is petting the dog and scratching behind the dog’s ears. Maybe the feeder with the braids would like to feed the dog a treat.
It puts the books down on the coffee table and then presents the first one to the feeder with the braids. It signs “look, look” and shows her the cover with the green outlines of the vegetables pressed into the cover. It shows her the pages, one by one, signing that the baby corn is its favorite. So cute.
“He’d like you to look at the books, and that’s his favorite vegetable, baby corn.”
“Wow,” the feeder with the braids says, running a finger along the pockets and admiring the vegetables inside them. “There’s so much in here.”
It nods proudly and smiles. Then picks up the fruit book to hand her. There are so many books to show her, so many foods that it knows now, that it has eaten. Foods that it can ask for.
She takes the fruit book gently and flips through it, nodding at the pictures. “Oh, kiwis. I love kiwis,” she says.
It nods excitedly. Kiwi is very good. Tart and sweet and crunchy and juicy all at once. It signs that peaches are its favorite fruit, and smiles back at the other asset as its signs get translated into spoken words for the feeder with the braids to understand.
“Have you had peach pie?” she asks. “If not, you should try it. With vanilla ice cream on top.”
The eyes widen and it turns to look at the other asset and at the ballerina woman, both sitting on the sofa. Did they hear that? A feeder has spoken. It gets to eat a peach pie with something called vanilla ice cream on top. The cherry pie was almost worth not eating all of the cherries out of the refrigerator. A peach pie… It can only start to imagine.
“Got it,” says the other asset. “We’ll see if we can get some of that in here.”
The ballerina woman smiles. “I’m sure Rogers would be more than amenable to that. He and Wilson did a good job with the cherry.”
It will get to eat peach pie soon!
Maybe the feeder with the braids would like to see some of its other treasures. She came all the way from the original hunting grounds to check on it, to see how it was doing. It should show her more than just how it is able to eat now.
It holds up another finger and then goes to get the fish-looking soft thing, showing it to her and demonstrating how to squeeze it before handing it to her so that she can squeeze it, too. It is so soft.
And then it brings her the yellow-fuzz-ball, the same one she gave to it before. It is not yellow anymore, is a brown-fuzz-ball now, but it will always be a yellow-fuzz-ball to it. This turns out to be a mistake, though, because the feeder with the braids smiles wide but her eyes begin to moisten, like she will cry soon.
It brings her the multi-colored cube that twists and turns, trying to cheer her back up. And then the comb and brush that the clown man had given it. The little plant that is not so little anymore and will be repotted soon. But as the collection of treasures grows, the feeder’s eyes get wetter and wetter, even though she is smiling.
It does not understand. What feeling is this, that has the feeder smiling as though she is happy even while her eyes water in what could be pain or sadness? It does not want the feeder with the braids to be sad or in pain.
It signs its confusion, signs “why why why” and “no sad.” She should not be sad. She should not be hurting. She came all this way to check on it, and it is not making her feel happy. It wants her to be impressed with its progress, to be proud of how far it has come, to be happy, so happy.
The other asset says, “he wants to know what’s wrong,” which is part of it, yes. Maybe enough of it.
“Oh,” says the feeder with the braids. “No, no. There’s nothing wrong. I’m just… I’m just so happy for you, Jigsaw.” She dabs a finger at the corner of her eye, and smiles up at it, so wide. “You used to have nothing but Lucky, and now you have so much. You’re surrounded by all these people who care about you, and I’m just so happy.”
It still does not understand, exactly. If she is so happy, why is she nearly crying? But it does not think she would lie to it, so she must be happy like she says.
“It’s exactly what I wanted for you, to get the help you need and not to be thrown in prison or disappeared or anything.” The feeder with the braids blinks the rest of her tears away. “I don’t have words for how relieved I am.”
It brings her the feelings wheel, full of words to describe how she is feeling. When it does not have words for what it is feeling, the chart helps it. It demonstrates, points to itself and then at “joyful,” at “proud,” at “excited.”
“Uh, I don’t know what he’s pointing to, but that’s how he feels,” the other asset says.
“I’m feeling hopeful, thankful, and inspired,” the feeder with the braids says after a moment to study the chart. “Seeing how much progress you’ve made… It’s more than I could have imagined.”
It feels better now, hearing that the feeder with the braids is actually feeling words from the happy section of the chart, is actually happy despite the tears. It still does not understand the tears, but it does not have to understand the feeder with the braids. Not in this.
Monesha
—New York City | Monday 10 September 2012 | 12:45 p.m.—
She’s honestly surprised her visit has managed to last this long. She’d half thought they would shuffle her out as soon as she’d seen evidence that Jigsaw was alive and well, but instead Agent Romanoff had ordered pizzas that they’d made short work of.
It’s gratifying to see that her rescuer still has a good appetite, even though she worries that he might still be thinking of food as a rare thing that could go away any moment. He definitely ate very quickly, though he offered her more pizza every time she finished a piece. Of course he likes to share.
After the first barrage of show and tell, Agent Romanoff had started asking about her job, how things were going in general, how she was handling the stress of everything that had happened. And Agent Barton had translated all of Jigsaw’s additional concerns that no suspicious people have been hanging around, and that she always turned the deadbolt in her apartment, and that she always had her bat ready by the door.
It’s nice to see that they all still care, in their own ways. She feels included, like part of a little family almost, an exclusive club. And she finally gets contact numbers for both of the agents programmed into her phone by Agent Barton—Agent Romanoff is Ren, and Agent Barton is Stimpy.
She is to contact them if something suspicious does happen, and to use the numbers to arrange future trips to the City, but to remember that her own phone isn’t a secured line, so no names or details unless they ask for them.
Monesha goes to put her phone in her purse after getting the numbers added in, and her hand rustles a bit of ribbon on one of the packages.
“Oh, I can’t forget,” she says. “I brought some things for you and Lucky, Jigsaw. I wasn’t sure what you might want or need here, but I hope you like them.”
She pulls out the stack of gifts—two for Jigsaw and two for Lucky—and sets them on the table, on top of an empty pizza box.
Jigsaw’s eyes follow the packages as they go from IKEA bag to tabletop, their bright blue-gray even more on display than usual because his eyes are so wide and interested.
They aren’t particularly special-looking packages. Just a bit of leftover birthday paper her roommate had lying around, some red ribbons, and a label she cut in the shape of a star—two “him” labels and two “dog” labels. But he seems entirely fascinated by them, and she feels the warm internal glow of a gift well-given, even before he opens them.
Jigsaw slowly reaches for the one on top and turns it over in his hands a few times, studying the party hats and streamers on the paper and running the curls of ribbon through his fingers. When he’s satisfied with his inspection, he reaches for the second, which he inspects again before reaching for the third, and then eventually the fourth.
He makes that sign he’d greeted her with, his hand flat and fingertips touching his chin and then coming down in front of him, palm-up. Thank you, Agent Barton had translated.
“You’re welcome,” she says. After a moment watching him pet the ribbons with no indication that he’ll open the presents, she continues. “Are you going to open them?” she asks. “The gifts are inside the paper.”
Monesha feels a pang of sadness at the thought that he might not have any concept of opening presents. What in the world has he been through that he’s never opened a present?
Jigsaw blinks up at her from where he sits on his floor pillow and then suddenly, he is holding a knife that she had no idea he had on his person. The motions he made were too smooth for her to follow, and she’s still not sure where he got the knife from when he very carefully slides the inky black blade under the ribbon and slices it apart.
“Did you give that to him, ‘Tasha?” Agent Barton asks.
“He needs more than a paring knife from the kitchen,” she says, as though it’s obvious that Jigsaw should be armed now. “And it’s obviously his favorite one.”
“Huh. Okay.” Agent Barton seems to be fine with it, just curious.
Monesha assumes that if it was a problem, they’d take care of it. She doesn’t feel any danger, though. She’s never felt danger from Jigsaw, not even when she was terrified and drugged in that alley behind the bar. All of her fear had been directed at the man who had tried to rape her or worse.
Jigsaw peels the paper back just as carefully as he’d sliced the ribbon, easing the edge under the tape and avoiding even a tiny tear in the paper itself. His movements are almost reverent, and his eyes are so focused on the gift that Monesha half wonders if he’s even still in the room mentally, or if he’s been transported to some gift-opening paradise.
His expression go from curious and reverent to a sudden flash of delight as the paper parts and reveals the set of rainbow felt tip pens inside. He turns the package of pens over in his hands, inspecting the colors of the pens themselves, the color chart on the back of the package, the plastic sealing them inside.
“Awesome, Jigs. You can color-code stuff now.” Agent Barton grins.
“Or pick whatever pen you feel like using based on your mood, or the day of the week, or anything you like,” Agent Romanoff adds.
Monesha smiles. They should be perfect for writing with, but also for drawing or coloring, if he wanted to do that. She hopes he gets a lot of use out of them.
Before he moves on, Jigsaw makes a careful refolding of the paper, and sets the ribbon on top of the folded paper. Then he’s working on the next gift, and a touch of the reverence is replaced with eagerness, but he still works with as much care as before not to rip the paper.
She wonders if he’ll keep the paper and ribbon as another gift in and of itself. He might, especially if he’s truly never unwrapped presents before. Maybe someday he’ll be so used to it that he rips the paper open with his bare hands. But for now, Monesha can’t stop smiling at the way he’s balancing his caution with his excitement.
And he appears every bit as delighted by the stack of spiral-bound notebooks in a range of cover styles and sizes, even hugging them to his chest with a little smile.
Monesha hadn’t been sure what style of paper he preferred to write on, so she’d gone for variety. Everything from a plain secretary style notebook with a flimsy cover to a hardback diary with little stars on the tops of the pages.
She isn’t sure what he signs after looking through the notebooks and seeing the stars, but he seems genuinely thrilled to see that notebook.
Next he opens Lucky’s first package, and immediately pries open the box of treats to give one to his dog, curled up at his side. After giving Lucky a thorough ear rub and face rub, Jigsaw opens the last of the parcels and then takes all twelve of the colored tennis balls out of their mesh bag and holds one of each color up for the two agents on the sofa to see the DOG logo on their fuzzy surface.
“Cool. I didn’t know those came in all those colors,” Agent Barton says. “I figured a tennis ball was a tennis ball.”
These ones are in red, blue, green and yellow, and they should be tougher than a tennis ball to chew apart, according to the guy at the pet store she talked to.
Jigsaw signs “thank you” to her again, this time in a sweeping, exaggerated gesture that Agent Barton explains is a big thank you.
“I’m really glad you like them,” Monesha says. “And I really can’t thank you enough for saving me that night.”
There’s a series of gestures she doesn’t understand, and a very satisfied expression, and then Jigsaw is running his fingertips along the pages of the star notebook.
“He wants you to know that you are an innocent and that he would never let you or any other innocent come to harm.”
Monesha closes her eyes for a moment and sighs. “They have such a skewed impression of him on the news. I wish they could really see him. I wish they knew how good his intentions are.”
Agent Romanoff shrugs. “Who knows,” she says. “Maybe someday he’ll be ready for that publicity.”
It’s not a warning to keep her mouth shut, necessarily, but Monesha picks up on the unspoken injunction to keep her insights to herself for Jigsaw’s sake. And after he saved her, how could she put him in any danger? Of course she won’t tell. Not a word, not to anyone.
Chapter 24: Insomniacs | I got nothing left to be (do you have some plans for me)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Plans” by Dinosaur Jr.
I finally have a bit more time on my hands because the prep work is done and the house is on the market. Now I can relax a bit and get ready for random showings that make me leave the house at random times. Wish me luck!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Thursday 13 September 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
Ah, there’s Bartonio, complete with his insulated StarkTech thermos instead of his coffee carafe. Because 64 ounces of shitty coffee is about right for him being up and about at this hour. Now Tony can begin this team meeting.
Tony gestures victoriously at the holo screen and JARVIS flashes up an image of the Appalachians with a well-placed red dot on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
“I found the rat bastards,” he says with a grin.
“Which rat bastards are these?” his insomnia buddy asks blearily. “Sorry, there’s just so many rat bastards these days.”
Tony gives him the point. Jigglebells has studded the HYDRA map with more targets than they could feasibly go after in a year of steady missions, so it is actually hard to tell which rat bastards he’s talking about.
“The rat bastards who sent me that snuff tape,” he says. “Took a week, but we’ve got them. And here’s the kicker— There’s a base.”
Spangles leans forward. “A base? An actual base we could attack.”
“Raid,” Wilson says quickly. “We’re raiding bases. That sounds better to the public.”
“But it’s a real target, one we don’t have to just sit around and watch.” Rogers gestures toward the screen. “We can make an actual move on this. It’s not just one person in the back of a post office passing along a parcel.”
Nit-Nat smiles, leaning back in her chair like a red-headed panther. “It’s been a while since we had something we could all get involved with.”
Tony nods and zooms into the view. “So it’s this abandoned mine, and the LiDAR indicates it’s been turned into a HYDRA base. Or at least a base that a HYDRA tape came out of. Not the original, probably, but that’s enough evidence for me.”
“It might not be enough evidence for Nick,” Carter says. “Or are you thinking we’ll go after this target without involving S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
“The S.H.I.E.L.D. that’s just riddled with HYDRA worms?” Tony asks. “That S.H.I.E.L.D.? You’re thinking, what, that we lay out our plans for HYDRA to redline them?”
She shakes her head, refusing to rise to the bait. Bummer.
“I’m thinking we tell Nick what we have in mind, and maybe there’s a trusted group of agents we can go in with. Maybe Coulson and the Bus. A whole base can be tricky with just five people on the offensive.”
Five? Tony narrows his eyes. “I’m pretty sure there’s more than five of us going.”
Sharon shrugs and points at each of them as she names them. “Steve, Sam, you, Clint, me,” she says. “Natasha can fly the ‘jet, but she’s not cleared for field work yet with her knee…”
“Jigsaw’s going,” Barton says before taking a drink.
“No, he’s not,” Wilson says. “That man needs therapy and rest and healing. He’s nowhere near ready for field work.”
“I promised him we’d find a way to include him in any missions we ran,” Barton counters. “You can’t tell him we’re all heading off to take out a HYDRA base and leaving him alone with Banner for a babysitter.”
“Actually, I’m going, too,” Bruce says softly.
“Really?” Tony asks. “We’re getting a hulk? Awesome. More the merrier, Big Guy.”
Wilson holds up his hands. “Wait. Stop. We can’t leave Jigsaw alone in the Tower while we all go to North Carolina or wherever. We—”
“Won’t be leaving him at all,” Barton says. “Because we’re all going. Including Jigsaw.”
“You cannot possibly tell me that you think he’s going to do well in the field with us.” Wilson looks to his right. “Steve. Tell him.”
Rogers looks torn, probably because he and Icarus are getting it on behind the scenes. “He doesn’t have a good grasp on nonlethal,” Capsicle starts. “But…”
“But nothing,” Wilson says. “He’ll go in there and slaughter them all. That doesn’t look good on national television. It gets him in hot water with S.W.O.R.D. It ensures that we can’t question anyone in that base because they’ll be dead. It—”
“It’s not going to happen that way,” Barton insists. “I’ll talk with him. We’ll iron it out.”
“Hammer,” Wilson says, jabbing a fingertip at the table. “Construction worker. Or have you forgotten?”
Rogers shifts uneasily in his seat. “That was a fluke, maybe.”
“He thought it was a mission,” Wilson says. “This is a mission.”
Tony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, it’s my mission,” he says. “My tape, my parents, my revenge, my decision. Jigster comes with us. You can leave him out when we find the rat bastards who sent the email and it’s your mission.”
“Thank you,” Barton says, lifting his tumbler.
“Nick needs to have some say in this,” Carter says. “And S.W.O.R.D. If we’re bringing Jigsaw—”
“Which we are.”
Carter glares at him. “Then we need to clear it with S.W.O.R.D.,” she continues. “Or we need Nick to clear it with them.”
There’s some kind of silent standoff for half a minute before Itsy-Bitsy clears her throat.
“We tell Nick what we have planned on the condition that our mission isn’t derailed or delayed,” she says. “We bring Jigsaw on the condition that he operates under S.W.O.R.D.’s nonlethal requirement. Objections?”
“Lots,” Wilson says.
Spangles shakes his head. “Provided the conditions are met, that works.”
He turns toward Barton. “Clint, you have to keep Jigsaw under control. His entire future as a free man depends on it. If S.W.O.R.D. gets wind of him slaughtering a base full of enemy combatants while we’re supposedly rehabilitating him…”
“I’m on it, Cap.”
Rogers looks at Carter next. “And Fury can get us some backup, but we’re doing this, and we’re doing it our way. He might have assembled the Avengers, but he doesn’t hold us on a leash to do his bidding and only his bidding.”
Tony lets the rest of the chatter wash over him. They’re just ironing out details now. The important bits have been decided: they’re attacking a HYDRA base again, first time after Bakersfield, and they’re bringing along his stabby friend.
The question at the forefront of his mind right now? Can he get Jiggle-boo’s new tac gear ready in time, or will they have to let him go out in the Ronin gear again?
Because he’s been working on some tac gear for the guy ever since he got out a month and change ago. Patterning it after all the strappy bondage gear he’d seemed so attached to when they were first tracking him down. Lotta black, bits of red trim because red is an awesome color and also the Jigster’s favorite color.
Of course, red and black isn’t as cool as red and gold, but no one gets to wear his colors out in the field. Itsy-Bitsy’s colors, though, are up for grabs. Tony doubts she’d even mind if their murder puppy wore the same black and red colors.
Tony’s pretty sure he can skip a round of work on the sparring bots and spend that time wrapping up the construction of the new tac gear, and that will get everything ready in time. He just has to add a few more places for Jigglypuff’s favorite knives…
And design some guns for him to stash in there, too.
The original tac gear they peeled off of him in the Bus after they dragged him out of the Bakersfield rubble had had places for guns, and Jigsaw had used plenty of guns in his infiltration of the Bakersfield base. Headshots. So many headshots. So it figures that there’d be a desire for some true long-distance weapons to go along with his knife-happy normal.
Yeah. He can get it done in time.
Just judging by Spangles’s earnest face, so eager to iron out details and get this mission on the road, it won’t be more than a day or two before they set out, if that. But that’s plenty of time.
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 13 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
Clint pauses his video game and frowns at the tablet Jigsaw holds out to him. On it, there is a drawing of a face with a mask over its mouth and goggles over its eyes. His roommate has even gone through the effort of writing KILLING FACE over the drawing. It took Jigsaw nearly half an hour to put that message together.
“But why do you need a killing face if you’re not going to be killing them?” Clint asks. “We already agreed that you aren’t killing anyone unless it’s an accident. Just like the rest of us. Nonlethal mission parameters.”
Jigsaw scowls at him and points to the face on the tablet again.
“Yeah, I know. You want a mask. But why’s it gotta be… that mask?”
Clint kind of hates the Winter Soldier mask. Not only does it prevent anyone from seeing the faintest hint of a facial expression, but it’s basically just a muzzle. No one needs that unless they’re going totally incognito, and everyone involved in this mission already knows full well who Jigsaw is—and what he happens to look like.
And the Ronin mask is just asking for a different brand of trouble. Yeah, Clint has the Ronin gear back, but they aren’t going into the field with Ronin the masked vigilante assassin. They’re going as the Avengers, and one of the hallmarks of the team is that they aren’t hiding shit.
Stark has his mask because flying around in a suit of armor without a mask is asking for bugs in his teeth. Cap’s got a whole helmet thing going on because that’s what he wore back in the day. Wilson doesn’t mind bugs in his teeth, apparently, but does like to be able to see while flying. But those are all special cases, and none of them have anything to do with killing.
The mask Jigsaw is asking for is being specifically called a “killing face.” And he had referred to his glasses that way, too, after the hammer incident. That just doesn’t bode well for the non-lethality of his future actions in the field.
“What about a pair of goggles,” Clint suggests. “We could get you some really awesome goggles like Wilson’s. You liked those before, when you stole them, right?”
Jigsaw outlines the muzzle part of the sketch with a fingertip.
Ugh.
“Goggles would disguise you very well,” Clint says. “No one would think you were Bucky if you were wearing goggles with your tac gear.”
Jigsaw glares again. Points to the sketch again. Gestures at his entire face.
“It would be a lot easier to breathe if you had goggles but not that other part.” Clint sighs. “And the muzzle has to be uncomfortable. It looks like it digs in all over the place.”
Jigsaw nods, but he doesn’t seem to be backing down. Just acknowledging that his preference for tac gear is a pain in the face as well as a pain in the ass.
“You know, Stark probably has to scan your face in the lab to even get all the dimensions right for making you one of those face masks. And it will take time away from all of the other stuff he’s doing to finish up your tac gear.”
His roommate seems unconvinced.
“I mean, I’ll bring it up, but…”
It would be so much easier to just give him goggles. And then they could see his mouth. His eyes are expressive as hell, and it’ll suck to not be able to see them while he signs, but it at least makes sense for hiding his identity. But the lower half of his face is also plenty expressive, and his signing is going to be a lot harder to figure out without even his mouth to help provide a clue as to whether they’re getting close to identifying his meaning or not.
That, and it really will make it harder to breathe, wearing a mask like that over his face. Clint hadn’t gotten the best of looks at the Winter Soldier mask, but the ventilation on it didn’t look very impressive, and it was unyielding metal that seemed like it would lock his mouth shut as well. In a fight, sometimes you just gotta breathe through your mouth, and that’s hard to do if you can’t even open said mouth.
Clint finds himself staring at said mouth, which is not awkward at all, and drags his eyes away from his roommate’s lips.
Jigsaw brings the tablet back to face himself and works on it for a while. What eventually emerges is not very different from what was already on there, just the addition of OLD in front of KILLING FACE.
He points at the new word and signs “why,” which Clint takes to mean something along the lines of “what happened to the old mask and why can’t you just give that back to me already?”
And… And he doesn’t actually know what happened to the old one. Maybe it got left in the Bakersfield rubble. Maybe Cap has it in his rooms somewhere and beats himself up over it in his off time. Maybe it’s on the Bus somewhere.
“Uh, I was kind of trapped under a bunch of rubble when they were unmasking you and fishing you out of the concrete to patch you back together.” Clint shrugs. “I don’t know where your mask and stuff went.”
Jigsaw studies him for a moment and then spends a minute writing ASK on the tablet.
“Yeah,” Clint agrees. “I’ll ask.”
Tony
—New York City | Thursday 13 September 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
“So he’s wanting that awful muzzle as part of his tac gear,” Barton says. He prods at one of the suits, digging a finger into a seam between two pieces of the armor. “I said I’d ask, but I’m hoping I come back empty handed.”
Tony remembers the muzzle-mask. He remembers it full of bloody spittle and lung juice from where Jigsaw was stabbed through with all the rebar, and he remembers how much of a pain in the ass it was to clean the thing properly after he got it back to the Tower.
Because like hell was he leaving anything behind in the rubble for Ross to make use of. And also because he’d been curious, sure. If a guy wears something like that into battle, there has to be a reason, and if it was just covering his face, he’d find something more comfortable and just as effective. Like a bandana.
But no. There’s a lot going on in that mask, and while Tony hasn’t spent any time recreating it, he does happen to have the original with the filtration system cleaned out.
“Sorry to burst your bubble Robin Hood, but that’s an affirmative on the mask.”
Tony reaches into one of the many drawers in his workshop and brings out the mask in question. It’s clean, but the strap will need to be repaired before it can be used to fasten the mask on. From what he’s been able to tell, the mask doesn’t need to be strapped on to stay on, but if Jiggles is going to be moving around much, he’ll want it securely fastened.
“I’ve got some more material left over from the tac gear itself,” Tony says, “and it’s nothing at all to make a quick strap for this thing.”
Barton grimaces. “You can’t put it back in the drawer and pretend we lost it in Bakersfield and you don’t have time to make a new one?”
“What, and lie to our murder friend?”
“Well, he hasn’t been digging in your drawers to find it or anything, so maybe?” Barton picks at a bit of leftover wire. “Maybe hide it somewhere? Just until the mission is over. Then you can ‘find’ it.”
Tony shakes his head. “Unbelievable. The assassin whisperer wants me to lie to the knife-wielding murder hobo who routinely rips heads off of his enemies.”
He squints at Barton, who is looking increasingly uncomfortable with the whole idea and probably doesn’t really want to lie to his roommate anyway. Ugh. Too much discomfort. Time to deflect.
“You just want to watch his mouth when he pouts that he’s not allowed to kill anyone.”
“That’s not true.” Barton pulls at the wire and holds it up to his face when it comes loose. “It’s just easier to interpret his signing when I can see his face.”
“Uh-huh. I get it. I do. He’s a got a great set of lips.” Tony stops and blinks.
Jigsaw does have nice lips. He’s got Bucky’s lips, and Barnes was always a good-looking guy. Every history book has at least one sepia photo of him looking hot as fuck in either a dashing “just deployed in my fancy new uniform” way or a rugged “just got out of a prison camp” kind of way. Sometimes both. Tony’s always been partial to the second option.
But is this really a case of Bartonio wanting to make sure they can all interpret Jigsaw’s signs, or is his insomnia buddy protesting too much? Does Barton like Jigsaw? It’s obvious to anyone that Jigsaw likes Barton—those eyes linger every time they have an opportunity—but maybe it goes both ways.
That would be interesting. That would be very interesting. He kind of can’t wait to see how Barton manages to fuck that up, if that’s what’s going on.
“I’m just worried about a communication breakdown,” Barton insists. “If we can’t see his eyes because of his goggles or his mouth because of that thing, then we’re missing a solid two thirds of the meaning.”
“That much?”
Barton shrugs. “Maybe closer to half. But he’s really expressive with his eyes and mouth, and we’ll lose that in the field.”
Tony turns the mask over in his hands, exploring the curves of it with his fingers while his mind explores the various options.
If they give the man his full mask, will that make him more comfortable in the field? Maybe too comfortable? Comfortable enough to just start ripping heads off? Or will it just make him the right amount of comfortable to work with them without running off somewhere?
They don’t want to lose him in the Appalachians or anything.
But they might lose him if they don’t have the mask, too. Really, anything could happen. This is the first mission they’ve run with the guy, and there’s no telling what cognitive patterns will take over mid-mission.
“You really want me to hide the thing?”
Barton frowns. “No. Not really. Lying about something like this is stupid. I just don’t want him going back to that mask.”
Tony can see why. It really is like a muzzle. “So what, then? Tell him we’ve got it and hope he leaves it on the quinjet?”
Barton shrugs. “I guess. I know he’ll be happy to have it. Just wish he saw it the way we do.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of things like that. Take burgers, for instance.”
That gets a laugh, even if it’s a short one.
“You looking forward to the mission?” Barton asks. “Mask aside.”
Tony nods. “Can’t wait to send a repulsor beam right into some HYDRA mook’s face. Dismantle their mainframes, hack their servers, pull down their roof, but also? Just plain wreck their shit. Even the squishy organic parts of it.”
Because he’s not a sentient weapon on his best behavior lest S.W.O.R.D. come for him. He’s a free operative with a dream of bringing HYDRA down and avenging his parents, and if he sees a HYDRA agent in that base, he’s not holding back.
And maybe that makes him a bad example for their murder bunny companion. But that’s just the way he feels. If they didn’t want to be dismembered, then they should have canceled their membership to the fascist fan club. If they’re going to kill for HYDRA’s goals, Tony figures they should be willing enough to die for that cause, too.
“The face part of that might not go over well,” Barton says. “You’d probably take a head off if you shot one of those repulsors point blank.”
Tony grins. “Guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we? For science.”
Notes:
There’s a third part to the series now! Because y’all sometimes show a lot of interest in seeing things that aren’t going to make it onto the page (like the pie), I thought I would jot out those missing scenes that people are looking forward to seeing and stick them in a new story. If you’re interested, check out the Outtakes fic. ^_^ I’ll update it whenever there’s missing scenes y’all are pining for that I have a chance to spin up. Just leave a comment asking for that scene and we’ll see what the muse and I can come up with!
Chapter 25: Avengers | Stick to the plan
Notes:
Chapter title from “Stick to the Plan” by L7.
Posting the evening before my usual posting. Happy early chapter! ^_^
Chapter Text
Steve
—Airspace over West Virginia | Friday 14 September 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
Steve’s been in the passenger section of the quinjet several times since being thawed out, and even when talking with Coulson about Captain America trading cards, he’s never had as awkward a quinjet flight as he’s having now.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Jigsaw were sitting in a seat like the rest of them. And Clint had tried to persuade him to do that—there was room, even if it was a little crowded with both Sharon and Jigsaw along for the ride. There’d been a whole silent discussion about it, bordering on an argument, and Clint had lost.
So instead of sitting in a seat along one wall of the quinjet looking at the other wall, Jigsaw is curled up on the floor beneath the seats along one wall of the quinjet. Like a piece of cargo to be kicked aside for extra leg room.
In Steve’s worst case scenario for how Jigsaw would handle a quinjet, he’d imagined not being able to get Jigsaw to tolerate being close enough to anyone but Clint to sit in a seat. He’d imagined Jigsaw needing to sit in one of the cockpit seats, facing forward, with plenty of elbow room. He’d imagined Jigsaw needing to sit at the end of a row with Clint as a buffer between himself and the rest of them.
He had never imagined Jigsaw crawling under the seats and point blank refusing to be coaxed out from under them.
Clint is sitting on the ground by Jigsaw’s head instead of in a seat, simply so that he can see Jigsaw’s face and any signs the man makes. They’ve been trading a hardback, spiral-bound, diary-sized notebook back and forth, but Steve can’t make out anything on the open page but a row of stars at the top of the page and a grid of some sort with Xs and Os on it that they keep taking turns filling in.
Steve wishes Jigsaw had chosen to cram himself into a seat next to Clint instead.
He’s heard about the car trunk thing, both times it’s happened. Once when Natasha and Bruce picked the two of them up in an alley after Jigsaw had rescued Clint. Once when getting into the car to drive to the grocery store. Both times, Jigsaw had stood by the trunk waiting to be allowed to get inside. Apparently, under the seats is the quinjet equivalent of the trunk of a car, and Clint just didn’t act fast enough to prevent him from getting under there to start with.
Steve is putting his foot down on the way back. They aren’t going to let Jigsaw get under there and that’s that. He’s going to sit in a seat like a person. There’s room. If they absolutely need the space, Tony can hitch a ride on the top of the quinjet or else fly himself with the armor.
“How are you so good at this?” Clint mutters under his breath before passing the notebook back under Bruce’s legs to Jigsaw.
Steve can make out Jigsaw’s smile, but that doesn’t make his chosen location for travel any better.
At least he’s not wearing his goggles on his face yet. They’re around his neck. And the horrible Winter Soldier mask is likewise attached to his tac gear instead of his face. But that’ll change as soon as they reach their destination. Then, it’ll be time to crawl out from under the seats—did they drag him out for missions, when he was crammed under there by HYDRA teams instead of by his own habit?—and don the… the “kill face,” Steve supposes.
He really hates that thing, and not just because it prevented him from recognizing his friend much earlier in the chase for him. It’s just too much of a muzzle for his comfort, biting into Jigsaw’s skin and keeping his jaw shut. And it’s a direct link back to his days of captivity. The tac gear itself is, too, but the mask is what gets him. He doesn’t even like seeing it. Part of him wishes it had been left behind in Bakersfield where he’d tossed it after removing it from his friend’s face.
But for whatever reason, Jigsaw had insisted on it. Had been clearly thrilled to receive it from Tony along with the tac gear earlier that morning while the team was getting prepped for the mission.
It’s a good thing Jigsaw had chosen to disappear into his room with the tac gear and mask, too, instead of changing into them on the spot. The rest of the team might have been gearing up in the prep area, but the rest of the team didn’t have decades worth of scarring all over their bodies that would be guaranteed to get Steve angry.
The last time Steve had seen Jigsaw’s bare torso, he’d been furious at all the scars, the initials and tally marks, the burns and brands all over him. People’s names, though Jigsaw had been moving too quickly at the time for him to make out any details beyond the understanding that there were letters. It still makes Steve mad just thinking about it, and he needs to be calm, cool, and level-headed for this mission. Not furious.
There was room for his anger in the bank vault, for all that it had curled up and gone to sleep when they got there. This time, they have Jigsaw with them. They all need to be on their best nonlethal behavior. They have to lead by example.
Because it’s one thing for him to have killed in self defense when the Tower was infiltrated. And they can make a case for the Ronin stint if they need to. But if they take him on an actual mission and he kills with wild abandon, there isn’t any way they can hide that from S.W.O.R.D. This is a test to make sure they can bring him on missions, but failing the test would be very, very bad.
Steve can only hope S.W.O.R.D. appreciates a learning curve, or the fact that recovery isn’t usually a straightforward, linear process, or that people can make mistakes and Jigsaw is learning to be nonlethal after decades of knowing only murder and torture.
He just hopes this mission ends up being good news in tomorrow’s report to his S.W.O.R.D. contact, Arsenio.
They’re meeting up with Coulson and his Bus crew at the coordinates Tony had identified. That could prompt a reaction from Jigsaw even though they’ve explained what the Bus is and who is on it, along with a detailed round of “they are allies who hate HYDRA and they helped us before.”
Steve’s hoping that Jigsaw will accept them as allies and not spook. He’s also hoping that the two scientists on board aren’t still afraid of Jigsaw, and that the one agent, Ward, is less of a nosey pain in the ass this time around. He hadn’t liked the way the man had hung around Jigsaw or tried to angle to be alone with him, hadn’t liked what the man had had to say about the odds of survival, hadn’t liked the man, period.
But they’ll be allies in this mission, just as they were at Bakersfield, and Steve can’t forget that the Bus and its crew had helped save Jigsaw’s life after the missile attack. He won’t doubt them now.
Clint
—Airspace over North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 8:00 a.m.—
“Alright,” Cap says as they hover, cloaked, over the village surrounding the base they’re going to raid. “We’re doing this quick and clean. We’re getting in, we’re getting the job done, and we’re getting out.”
Clint looks up at him and nods, then looks down and to the side, where Jigsaw is still crammed under the seats. He really wishes he’d been able to get to the quinjet first. Maybe he could have prevented Jigsaw from climbing under there in the first place. He’d had pretty good luck with car trunks.
Jigsaw is studying Cap from between Banner’s calves, though, so he’s definitely paying attention. That’s important. And it isn’t that Clint doesn’t think Jigsaw will pay attention, it’s just that he’s never set off on a mission with Jigsaw like this before and isn’t one hundred percent sure what to expect. What were missions like before, with HYDRA? Did they just set him loose and watch him go? Did they lead him where he needed to go like a dog on a leash? Something in between?
“I’ve got drones in the air ready to look for anyone who runs,” Stark says, “so there’s no need to hunt anyone down. The drones’ll keep track of them.”
“And we have Coulson bringing up some backup as well,” Cap says. “So they’ll help us flush the place when they get here.”
They’d given Jigsaw a photograph of each of the Bus team to ensure he knows them as allies, but Clint can’t be sure how that’ll go when things are actually happening on the ground. Still, there’s little chance of overlap between their teams where Jigsaw would come across one of Coulson’s and get them confused with the enemy.
“The town is mostly civilian according to our records, but the enemy might hide anywhere, including sheltering with civilians. We’re focusing on the base itself, and we’ll canvas the town afterward.” Cap looks around at the team, then lets his eyes linger on Jigsaw. “Questions?”
Jigsaw shakes his head.
“Bruce and I are staying with the quinjet,” Natasha says. “We’ll try to sweep anyone who comes out, and we’ll coordinate Coulson’s team when they arrive. And we’ll target any missiles that happen to swing by for a visit.”
He knows she’d prefer to be on the ground with them. She’s been feeling antsier and antsier as her physical therapy has been progressing. At first, she’d confided, it had been easy to hold back, easy to take it easy, easy to let the healing happen at its own pace. But the more strength and flexibility she’s been regaining, the more she’s been wanting to push herself, to maybe dance a little, or try some stairs.
And he feels that. It sucks being injured and less able to kick ass when there’s some asses that need kicking. He’s been a bit squirmy about his ribs, and they were a lot less damaged than her knee had been. Still, though, for someone used to being active, forced inactivity is a real drag. It lasts forever.
But at least she’ll be keeping the air above the base missile-free. They could have used some of that last time they stormed a base.
“So, no killing, lots of ass-kicking, some data gathering, and then when we have everyone out of there, we blow the place. Yes?” Clint asks.
Cap nods.
And then they’re ready, Clint thinks. It’s just a matter of getting everyone else on the ground and breaking open the base’s entrance. A few blasts from the quinjet should do that, and then they’ll be on a roll.
“Nonlethal is the name of the game,” Cap says to reiterate, looking at everyone in turn to avoid singling Jigsaw out. “Use just enough force to take them down, not so much force that they’ll never get back up. We need this to be clean for the good press, and we need prisoners to question.”
“That said,” Stark adds, “sometimes mistakes happen. These bastards killed my parents, shot down Wilson’s partner, tortured our Jiggy-boo, and broke into our home. If they don’t make it, I won’t be crying any tears for them.”
“Tony,” Cap says with a warning in his voice. “We need to try to keep them alive. Aim to cripple before you aim to kill.”
Stark makes a “blah blah” talking motion with his hand, but he doesn’t contribute anything else to the pre-drop briefing refresh.
Clint has a feeling Stark is going to be the one with the highest body count, even though he’s supposed to be securing the mainframes and servers so that they can download anything juicy and then wipe them so no one can follow after.
Natasha opens the loading bay door and lets their first wave of fighters out—Stark and Wilson with their flight capabilities and Cap because what’s a landing like that to a super soldier. Banner moves up to join her in the cockpit and let Jigsaw wiggle out from under the seats.
“You gonna be okay with the nonlethal?” Clint asks as Jigsaw fastens that horrible muzzle over his face and pulls the strap tight enough that the metal edges cut into his cheeks and the bridge of his nose.
Jigsaw nods and flips up the goggles to cover the top of his face, and then it’s like Clint is just now seeing him for the first time again, on the rooftop at night, over Chapmans’ apartment in D.C. A mystery in black leather, face obscured, hair a mess, an oil slick bristling with knives and guns.
Clint hates it. It’s been less than a second, and he misses his roommate’s face.
“Aim for their knees if you want to do the most damage without risking a kill,” Clint finds himself saying, even though Jigsaw does not need the advice. “You know what to do. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to patronize.”
Jigsaw puts a gloved metal hand on his shoulder and gives him a brief, gentle squeeze. Then he signs OK, just like he’d been working on with Zoe, and as smoothly as if it never gave him any problems.
Clint grins. “Yeah. Okay. You got this.”
Natasha takes them down a bit lower to the ground, and Carter and Clint follow Jigsaw out of the quinjet, the two them rolling with the landing and Jigsaw just absorbing the shock in his knees in a way that makes Clint wince on his behalf.
They should probably work on training one on one, since he’s still resistant to the group of them at once. Someone needs to insist that he take care of his super soldier self so he doesn’t incur more pain and damage than he needs to. This isn’t HYDRA anymore. The goal is not to get hurt.
Mental note for another time, he reminds himself, pulling Jigsaw to the side behind a tree to provide a little cover from the blast Natasha’s about to level the entrance with. He just hopes his roommate keeps it nonlethal to whatever extent is possible.
Stark’s right—mistakes do happen. But there’s a huge difference between an honest mistake and a willful murder in the field, and a lot of what had happened to the tracksuit mafia treads the line between those two pretty carefully. In the field like this, against hardened HYDRA mooks in an actual base that might have brainwashing equipment, it’ll be harder to lean toward the nonlethal side of the line. Jigsaw will have to purposely leave people alive instead of letting it fall to chance at all.
Their cloaking seems to have worked perfectly, because there’s no resistance at the entrance, and the blasts from the quinjet’s guns level the doors and release a panic of agents rather than any sort of organized defense team. It’s like breaking open a termite mound, and Clint is so fucking glad he’s on the anteater team.
“Give ‘em hell!” calls Stark on the comms as he flies through the smoke toward the inside of the base.
And yeah, Clint thinks, picking off a fleeing agent with an arrow to the back of a kneecap. They’ll give ‘em hell. Just as soon as he gets in position to make the most of his chosen weapon. He’s lost track of Jigsaw already, but Carter is not too far from him as they eel their way inside and start inflicting damage.
High ground, Clint thinks, eying various internal elements of the base in question. This time, he needs high ground. A likely bit of stairs and upper level grating to his right catches his eye, and he’s off. From there, he can keep an eye on the team as they work their way further inside, and he can also keep escapees from darting for the doorway. It’s not a rooftop, but it’s a good bet all the same.
He ends another HYDRA mook’s career with a fist arrow to the lower back, right in the spine and hard enough to snap it. Sorry, buddy, but you’re never walking again. Is it deserved? Probably. Guy’s still working with HYDRA after everyone found out for sure just what kind of terrorist organization HYDRA happens to be. Might not have personally committed any atrocities, but Clint’s not playing a game of “what degree of evil are you” here. He’s just shooting to not-kill.
There’s another one, edging around a bank of terminals and aiming for Wilson. Clint looses an arrow and takes him down. One elbow gone. He fires another arrow to keep the guy from hobbling to another hiding place and trying a left-handed shot.
And then someone is releasing a smoke bomb, and damn, sometimes the high ground sucks. He can’t see anything and he’s coughing hard enough to hurt his recently healed ribs. Better find a new nest to snipe from.
“Headed deeper in,” he manages to say into his comm before jumping over the railing to the first floor.
“Copy,” Cap says to the sound of metal banging on metal. “We’re busting down a blast door. You got any explosives?”
Clint grimaces. “Nope. Lots of sharp and pointy things, though.”
He wonders where Stark is with his repulsor blasts. Surely those’d go through a door, right?
“Stark?” Clint asks.
“Hackers gonna hack,” Stark says over the comms. “I’ll look for a code to— Oh, never mind.”
Clint’s about to ask what happened as he slinks toward where he thinks the others might be, but Cap comes over the comms again.
“Jigsaw knew the code. We’re in.”
“Disable the doors so no one gets stuck in there?” Clint asks.
“Jigsaw’s nodding, so I think he’s already done it.”
“Cool.”
And that’s another layer of this base open to them. He catches sights of Carter’s white turning around a corner and decides to follow. Cap and Jigsaw are in one area together, maybe with Wilson. Carter might be on her own. Might need some backup. Clint’ll provide that.
“Coulson’s landed,” comes Natasha’s voice over the comms. “Prepare for a wave of support coming in behind you.”
“Roger that,” Stark says.
Clint and the others follow suit, except Jigsaw. They still don’t have a way he can communicate with the team out of sight. They’ll need to work on that for the next mission. Some kind of Morse code tapping on the comms maybe.
He packs it away for future consideration. Just another thing to bring up in debrief after this is over.
For now he’s got HYDRA operatives to discover, disable, and prepare for their jail time.
Chapter 26: Avengers | You shoot me down, but I won’t fall (I am titanium)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia.
Have a midweek chapter because I need stress relief! ^_^
Chapter Text
Tony
—HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 8:45 a.m.—
Oh shit.
Tony types in another string of code and pulls up more files. There’s not just stuff in here about Project Insight’s algorithm, now safely tucked away in JARVIS’s back pocket, figuratively speaking, but here’s a whole database of notes about which water supplies can be poisoned by which local HYDRA factions all across the country—coded, of course, so they can't just run down the list and attack each faction in turn.
What the hell is it with HYDRA and just killing scads of people? How does that help their so-called cause of world dominion? They’re just making sure they end up with dominion over the minimum amount of people. Surely they’d want to rule over more people and not fewer.
Who fucking salts the earth when they know they have to grow their own crops there next year?
He adds that database to his list of pulled files-of-interest and sets about looking for more juicy tidbits among the information JARVIS is hauling in.
A nice personnel file would be nice. Or a map of sister bases across the country. Or outside of the country. They know HYDRA is operational in other countries. The red book Jiggy came in with listed a few geographies as having a HYDRA Supreme, and there can’t very well be a “supreme” without at least a few regular operatives.
Tony looks up at the scuffle from the doorway, and then lowers his arm. Just one of the baby scientists from the Bus, nothing to shoot in the face with a repulsor blast.
“Hey Egon,” he greets the kid—Fitz, he thinks. “Nice drones,” he adds when three adorable little flying bots follow the kid inside the server room.
“Mr Stark,” the kid greets him in return.
“Please, it’s Iron Man when I’m wearing the armor. Tony when I’m not.”
“Mr Stark is your dad?” Fitz asks, obviously trying to make the dad joke in reverse order.
“Mr Stark is what the press call me. You’re not the press.”
Tony gestures to the swivel stool next to him. “Grab a seat, get your fingers all up in this sweet, sweet data, all that.”
He doesn't feel like sharing, but the kid is on team good-guy, and there's no sense in keeping data just for the Avengers to use.
The kid sits. “Find anything on Johnson, yet?”
Johnson. That’s the other “operator” along with Livingsworth, Tony thinks. Three whole operators for the North American HYDRA base. That’s right. Coulson’s crew was looking for the one and the other was thought to have fled the country.
He supposes if Jigsaw were after him—and if he weren’t Iron Man—he’d consider fleeing the country, too. Maybe go spend a few months in the Caribbean. Have some fun with it.
“Mostly we’re looking at poisoned wells, wells that are soon to be poisoned, and various nasties to poison those wells with,” Tony says. “If I find anything on your operator, you’ll be third to know, after myself and JARVIS.”
The kid hooks a homebrew bugging device into the first of the servers in the stack he’s sitting in front of. “Good to know. Anything you’re looking for? I can pass it along.”
“Anything and everything,” Tony says. “The more information the better.”
They hack in silence for a few minutes. Then: “How is Bucky doing?”
It takes Tony a hot second to place the name with the man, which he’s actually kind of proud of. It can take effort to so thoroughly rename someone in your head, after all.
“Goes by Jigsaw now,” Tony says. “He’s running around somewhere probably not killing HYDRA agents. Doing real good.”
“Probably?”
Tony see-saws a hand, the closest he can get to a real shrug in the armor.
“I mean, he’ll be trying to stay nonlethal, but honestly, setting him loose in here is like putting a starving grizzly bear in a stream of salmon. He’d like to rip off heads and spill the guts everywhere trying to skin them alive and rip out the nice, fatty bits.”
Aww, look at baby scientist’s little face. Clearly didn’t get the memo about the Winter Soldier. Or maybe he got the memo but got stuck in what he remembered about Barnes from the history books instead of conflating the two and coming up with a nice new person full of murder and revenge.
And full of dogs and cuddly stuffed sharks. Because that’s a big part of Jigglesworth, too. He’s not just Silent Rambo. He’s also a Disney princess or whatever. He’s got soft and hard in equal measure, and just pulls out whatever he needs at any given moment. At the moment, they’re in Rambo mode and while Tony hopes for everyone’s sake he’s going nonlethal with it, he can’t help but hope the agents Jigsaw comes up against are suffering for a long, long time.
“So, uh, about the wells?” Fitz asks. “What do we do about those?”
“Since S.H.I.E.L.D. is a piece of shit still riddled with HYDRA worms,” Tony says, “we send that info to the FBI. It’s a game of pass the problem, because we’re overstretched and it’s their job in the first place.”
“Hey, we’re trying,” the kid says. “We’re rebuilding. It’s just slow going.”
“Right, because of all the maggots crawling around in the mush.” Tony waves him off. “I get it. I had to get rid of people in Stark Industries. Stane’s followers. Cleaned house. But I didn’t slack off about it.”
He can tell the baby scientist is getting upset, and part of him doesn’t care. A lot of him doesn’t care. This was supposed to be his server room to hack, and now he has to share with S.H.I.E.L.D., albeit in the form of a budding agent with a thing for tech who he’d normally take under his wing.
“Oh, hey, looks like your guy’s in or around the northern Rockies. Montana, maybe,” Tony says, turning the screen to show Fitz. “Johnson. Has a whole thing set up somewhere out there. Definitely a sister base, maybe even a full helicarrier manufacturing site.”
“Shit,” Fitz hisses. “How did—” He glares at the screen as one of his drones hovers over his shoulder. “We had a lead about Montana and it turned out to be a false alert. Now it’s a real thing? We could have been there weeks ago.”
Sounds like someone’s tampering with their data pipeline, but Tony doesn’t bother saying it. The look on the kid’s face says he already knows there’s been some data destruction afoot, if not wholesale made up leads to distract from the real threads.
“How?” the kid asks himself.
“Might I suggest a mole in your midst?”
“We’ve only got six people in our team, and we’re all vetted by Fury himself, except Skye. And she’s not HYDRA.”
Tony shrugs, even though the armor hardly shows the movement. “Maybe she’s something else, then.”
The kid frowns at the screen for a minute. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Steve
—HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
So this is Melinda May, Steve thinks. She’s like Natasha, he decides. Highly skilled, focused, dedicated to the mission and not liable to make friends on the side if she can help it.
Except Natasha has made friends of them all, and happily so. She’s come a long way, trusts them all so much more than she did at first, and seems content with the group. There’s something edgy about Agent May, something of a desire to keep apart from others.
He doesn’t begrudge her the sentiment. She’s incredibly effective in the field, and has taken out nearly as many agents as he has, with a combination of firearms and martial arts.
Steve has lost track of Jigsaw in the frenzy of fighting, and he could swear Sam was overhead at one point but has since also disappeared. It’s just Steve and May, sometimes fighting back to back and sometimes coordinating with the shield. He would not mind having her on the Avengers. She’s something else.
He hopes Coulson’s team appreciates her.
An explosion down a side hallway is followed by Sam flying ahead of the blast into the main room Steve and Melinda are fighting in, and Steve welcomes him back with a salute before smacking an opponent on the head with his shield.
Sam heads down another hallway as Sharon appears from a third. They’re really playing mix and match for who is fighting where. It’s exhilarating, and Steve can’t help but think of the old times, of storming a base with his Howlies and the lot of them getting mixed up and turned around in the maze of those old HYDRA bunkers, but eventually clearing the hallways and meeting up to blow the place.
A gunshot followed by a thud directly behind him snap him out of the memory, and he looks down—HYDRA agent—and then toward the gunshot’s source. It’s Jigsaw with one of his guns, a blur of leather and metal still moving to a new position. Steve can’t fight the grin that crosses his face or the salute that follows.
Like old times, indeed, with Bucky having his back, only now it’s Jigsaw, still having his back.
Jigsaw disappears down the same hallway Sam flew down, and Steve wishes him luck. He nudges the guy on the ground at his feet, and gets a groan for his trouble. Good. It’s a gut wound, but survivable. Not a heart or lung. No major arteries.
They’re doing very well, all told.
He leaves the rest of this room’s mess to Sharon and May and follows Jigsaw down the other hallway. So far, they haven’t yet hit the heart of the base, where there may or may not be a prep room complete with a mind-wiping chair and cryo tube. Steve wants to get there, wants to destroy as much of it as he can with the shield, wants to prevent anyone from using it again.
And ideally, he’d find it and dismantle it before Jigsaw finds it, because he wants to spare Jigsaw the need to even be confronted with that equipment.
“Found the chair,” comes Sam’s voice over the comms.
So Sam’s found the prep room. That’s good. Steve checks the proximity monitor on his wrist and takes the first left in the hallway to put himself as close to Sam’s dot as he can get himself. He wants to take down that awful chair. Wants to smash in the glass tube. Wants to yank apart the wires and dump over the monitors on the chair’s control station. Wants to absolutely wreck the place the way he hadn’t wrecked the bank vault.
Jigsaw has beaten him there, he finds when he arrives, and is busily yanking pieces of the chair apart, starting with the arms above it and the electrode-studded paddles at the ends of the arms, what the manual calls the “halo” like there was something angelic about the horrible thing.
Steve makes his way instead to the cryo tube. He’ll leave the chair to Jigsaw, since the man’s already at it. There is plenty of destruction to go around. The glass resists the shield at first, and it takes several smashing blows to crack the glass and send pieces flying. Which makes a certain kind of sense, he thinks as he rips out electronics and tubing and sensors from inside of the glass tube.
Why make the tube out of something the man trapped inside of it can break if he gets the chance? They’d make the chamber itself unbreakable from the inside, even by a metal fist with a desperate super soldier’s strength behind it.
Well it’s not strong enough to withstand the shield, and Steve takes the tube apart, inside and out, leaves pieces of it scattered all over the floor. Some pieces of the equipment in the tube glitter an eerie Tesseract blue, and Steve takes an especially giddy pleasure in smashing those. He doesn’t know what the Tesseract has to do with any of this, but whatever it is, it can’t be good. And better that he break it until the blue light fades than let Clint get a glimpse of it still glowing.
Clint doesn’t need that sort of reminder. And frankly, neither does Jigsaw. No one who has seen the Tesseract needs a reminder of it. It’s better lost to the ocean like it was before Howard found it, or lost in space with Loki, assuming Loki stays hidden.
Anywhere but here on planet Earth.
Sam
—HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 9:15 a.m.—
A pair of enraged super soldiers destroying the place is actually an impressive sight. He can’t help but wonder what they’d look like boxing each other or fighting Stark’s eventual sparring bots. Neither one seems to have any limit on the amount of energy or anger available to destroy equipment with.
And it’s nice to see this place in particular demolished. The bank vault had been kind of a letdown, everything carefully taken apart and stored away in crates for later.
Because there shouldn’t be a later. There’s no place for a later where this equipment is concerned. No one should be subjected to this kind of monstrous treatment, whether they’d survive it or not.
The one thing this place doesn’t have, though, is HYDRA operatives to be fighting. They can blow the place up later and destroy all of this equipment, but they should clear it of operatives first.
Sam’s about to remind them both of that, whether Jigsaw will listen to the comms or not, when a trio of HYDRA operatives come running in with a new kind of weapon in hand, something with a blue glow about the muzzle. Looks like bad news.
He shoots at the newcomers and they scatter, and both Steve and Jigsaw abandon their current demolition projects and turn to face the new enemy combatants. And that takes care of any need to warn them. Excellent.
Less excellent is more HYDRA goons with those weapons racing in. Sam takes cover rather than let himself be out in the open to get blasted with whatever those things are. And a good thing, too, because the light fixture he was flying near gets vaporized when a bolt of blue hits it.
Shit. Are those leftover weapons from the bad old days? Something Tesseract related?
“Steve!” Sam calls into the comms. “You recognize these guns?”
“Don’t get hit,” is all Steve’s got to say before there’s a flurry of activity as Jigsaw comes out of hiding and leaps on top of one of the HYDRA operatives, putting the man in a chokehold with his metal arm and causing his blast to go wide and strike a valve near one of the chemical canisters near the cryo tank.
Shit. There’s a loud pop and a hiss, and whatever was inside that canister starts spraying out under pressure.
This is probably an area they should leave.
Jigsaw doesn’t seem to care about the chemicals as he steers his maybe-Tesseract-toting gunman toward the cryo tank—or maybe with his mask on he doesn’t notice the fumes. Could be anything. But he doesn’t have cover anymore and Sam doesn’t trust these HYDRA types not to shoot each other in the back if there’s a chance to take an enemy out with the shot.
“Jigsaw!” he calls into the comms. “Get back under cover, man. They are not fooling around!”
Jigsaw pays him no notice, and flings his gunman into the fumes, where the man shrieks and… shatters. Like glass. Something Sam definitely doesn’t want to get in the way of.
Jigsaw stalks around the wreckage of the chair and dodges another of the blue blasts on his way to pick out another target, maybe to throw into the super-chilled fumes and maybe to dispatch in some other way.
Steve apparently decides this is the right idea, and now there are two super soldiers out from under cover in a field where blue disintegrate-you beams are flying, and Sam does his best to offer them some cover with his own mundane firearms without getting hit by one of those souped-up ray guns.
It’s the least he can do, and it’s somewhat effective, he’s pleased to learn. The HYDRA goons might have fancy weapons but they’re just as afraid of getting shot as usual, and they take cover even if their enemies are out in the open.
That’s good, at least. Buys Sam some time to get some sense into Steve’s head, even if he senses Jigsaw is either not listening to the comms or else is ignoring his advice in favor of going straight for the enemy.
Sam lays out a little more fire to cover his team before inching to a better vantage point. He switches on his armband’s screen to see what Redwing is picking up, and they have a bit more backup coming their way; Ward, it looks like. Good. He can use some more backup. He’ll cover Steve’s ass and Ward can cover Jigsaw’s. Between them, he and Ward should be able to keep the super soldiers safe while the super soldiers go to town on the HYDRA gunmen, maybe disable those energy weapons.
It’s all going well enough for a few volleys, three of the gunmen are down, and Jigsaw has a fourth by the neck in a familiar Darth Vader chokehold, when something goes wrong. Jigsaw suddenly jerks forward as a gunshot sounds, and drops the man he’s holding in favor of grabbing at his own chest.
Sam has a fraction of a second to wonder what’s happened before Jigsaw has spun on his heel and shot Ward through the face.
“Jigsaw!” Steve shouts as the gun goes off and Ward crumbles. Steve runs for Jigsaw and tries to get at his chest, where Sam can see a bit of red but no tear in the tac gear to indicate an exit wound. Meaning that bullet could be bouncing all over Jigsaw's torso right now.
“Shit,” Steve says as he grabs at Jigsaw, “we need to—”
Jigsaw shoves him off, and Steve comes away bloody, but stays on his feet. And thinks fast enough to raise his shield and deflect the next blue beam into the shooter, who vanishes along with his gun.
“We’ve got a man down,” Sam breathes into the comms. “Ward is down. Think it’s fatal, going to check.”
“And Jigsaw’s been shot,” Steve adds in the comms. “Sam and I are fine. Need backup, though.”
Sam doesn’t expect to find much worth saving when he gets to Ward, and he’s right about that. There’s not much of a head left, even if the rest of him is spotless. He sends that through the comms as well, while Sharon appears to help Steve and Jigsaw mop up the rest of the gunmen. Clint isn’t far behind her, and by the time Agent May comes to take a look at Ward, her face grim and bloody, the last of the gunmen are down and Jigsaw is nowhere to be seen.
Figures.
He needs to get that wound looked at, should be pulling back to get it assessed at least, even if he slaps some gauze on it and resumes clearing the base. But nope, he’s a super soldier, and if working with Steve has taught Sam anything, it’s that super soldiers don’t consider a flesh wound any reason to press pause on a mission.
“What happened?” May asks him grimly.
Sam hesitates. What he thinks happened is that Ward shot Jigsaw in the back and got himself shot in the face in return. But that doesn’t make any sense. Ward is on their side, and he is too good a shot to miss their enemies that badly while laying down cover for Jigsaw or Steve.
But the other doesn’t make sense, either. There’s no one else in the area who was wielding a regular gun who could have made the shot that hit Jigsaw. The only available shooter was Ward or Sam himself. And he knows he didn’t shoot Jigsaw.
“I’m not sure,” Sam says, hedging. “Redwing caught it, though. We’ll watch it on playback after.”
That should help things keep moving in the meantime.
May frowns.
“We have the room cleared again,” Steve says, coming up to them and looking down at Ward’s body with a frown of his own. “We should be close to flushing out the last of the HYDRA agents in the base.”
May nods and gives Steve’s bloody arm and hands a significant look. “You’re injured?” she asks.
Steve shakes his head. “Jigsaw is. Wouldn’t let me help him. And he’s run off somewhere.”
“I’m on his tail,” Clint’s voice comes in over the comms. “He’s not running. Just stalking. Very, very slowly.”
“Don’t let him get in trouble,” Steve says.
“As if I could stop him,” Clint says with a laugh that sounds both worried and forced.
Chapter 27: Avengers | Let’s give ‘em something to talk about
Notes:
Chapter title from “Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt.
Thank you all for your pleasantly distracting comments in the last chapter! Every time I needed a break from all the stress of a hectic work week, I could open up my email and see lovely comments. It made the week so much better!
Chapter Text
Bruce
—Outside a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
The day has turned ugly while the team was inside the base. A cloudy day perfect for keeping the quinjet’s cloaking up had built up some rain that needed to come down, and now the area in front of the base is a pit of churned mud from everyone going in and out.
The clouds are still thick, despite the chilly breeze trying to blow them aside, and the rain that came down in sheets for a while has become a dreary drizzle. Plenty to make for a miserable time, but not enough to warrant taking cover in the quinjet.
And he’s not getting back on the Bus if he can help it.
Nothing overly horrible had happened on the Bus in Bakersfield where the Other Guy was concerned, but it had felt closer than the quinjet, despite having extra room to move around. He’d felt watched the entire time he was there, and not just because he’d been trying to repair Jigsaw’s body while the man had tried to fight him off the whole time.
That’s probably his main reason for not wanting to get back on the Bus, if he wants to be honest with himself. His memory of that aircraft is one of essentially torturing a man who was unaffected by the anesthetic they had on hand. It had been necessary to keep him from bleeding out, but it had been horrible. And if the way Jigsaw still looks at him is any indication, it has not been forgotten.
But there’s a limit to how many people really fit on a quinjet, even the larger model they brought with them.
So Bruce gives up on keeping his glasses dry and merely resolves to get good and dry on the flight back to the Tower, and maybe to do some extra yoga to help calm his nerves.
“So that’s all of us accounted for,” Steve is saying into the comms.
Jigsaw should be coming to the quinjet for some field dressing of that wound, even if it’s “just” a flesh wound and didn’t hit anything major—as though there’s anything minor to hit in a torso. And from Steve’s concern, Bruce has his doubts about just how much of a flesh wound it is. But Jigsaw and Clint are off apparently tracking HYDRA agents who slipped out a back passage instead of getting emergency medical attention for a serious injury. And Bruce isn't able to insist on better decisions unless he wants to get the Other Guy out to chase them down and bring them back.
Tony and Agent Fitz are still scraping the last of the intel from the HYDRA servers, and from what Bruce can tell from the comms, Tony is being territorial about it. That’s understandable, though. Especially in light of Ward. Who knows whether they can actually trust anyone on Coulson’s team except for Coulson himself. And Tony had seen it as his mission, too. That must be a contributing factor in not wanting any company—or competition for announcing critical intel.
Bruce watches as Agents May and Skye haul out a few hobbled HYDRA agents, pushing them forward ahead of themselves and directing them to the group of others sitting in the mud. The longer hobbles are replaced with tighter zip ties, and their hands are bound behind their backs as well, despite the injuries to their elbows and torsos that would make that especially painful.
This must be a batch of Jigsaw’s hits, judging from the bloody patches along their shirts and the particular way they wince when guided to sit with all their injuries. Jigsaw had made sure not to kill anyone from what Bruce has seen of the prisoners, but that doesn’t mean he went easy on anyone. Knives to the ribs, lung injuries, gut injuries, joint injuries of all sorts. It was like Jigsaw had been testing the waters to see how much damage he could inflict this side of fatal. Bruce hopes the ambulances they called to go along with the FBI come quickly.
Steve is the next out of the base, not with a prisoner but with a body bag. Ward, then. Steve has the man held respectfully enough over a shoulder, not dragged about or anything, but he looks grim and not even slightly sympathetic as Skye flinches from the sight of him. Steve continues on to the Bus to deposit the body.
They’re going to need to deal with that particular fatality before the Federal backup they’ve requested arrives to finish flushing the town and rounding up stragglers in the foothills. How did a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent end up with his face blown off in friendly fire? Was it friendly, or did Jigsaw know what he was doing? If he knew what he was doing, why not disable instead of kill? There's nothing nonlethal about a bullet through the head.
They’ll need to wrap up getting the base cleared and set up for demolition before they can gather around and go over Redwing’s footage.
In the meantime, he’s just glad they won’t need a Hulk for this mission.
“Wishing you’d stayed home?” Natasha asks at his side as she surveys the growing group of HYDRA prisoners. “Boring mission with a side of rain.”
Bruce shakes his head. “It’s important that we present a complete and united team for things like this. If there’s no need for the Other Guy, then at least I got out of the Tower for a bit.”
“I can’t even help go door to door sweeping the streets for HYDRA holdouts,” Natasha complains. “Sharon could have flown the quinjet. Or Clint.”
“Do you regret coming?” he asks.
“No. I just regret not being able to do more than stand around watching. I should be in the thick of it. Just, not yet.”
“Give it time.”
“Oh yes,” she says with a wry smile. “I’m giving it loads of time. I think Jigsaw meant to ground me for a good long while when he busted my knee. Some lesson to learn, though.”
Bruce smiles briefly. “He does have a way with teaching lessons. Ward,” he says quietly once all of the Bus crew is out of earshot, “certainly learned a harsh lesson.”
Natasha hesitates. Then: “Do you think it was too harsh?”
“I think…” he starts. “No. I think if someone shot me in the back during a battle, the Other Guy would have something fatal to say about it.”
And that’s what it sounded like on the comms. Sam wouldn’t have shot Jigsaw, even by mistake. He’s too careful to make a mistake like that. And there wasn’t anyone else in the area who could have made the shot, or they’d have found that shooter by now in sweeping the prep room. That leaves Ward.
And he remembers how keen Ward had been to get a close look at Jigsaw when the man had been in such critical condition after the Bakersfield missiles had struck. Steve never liked the man, and Steve has good taste. And the Other Guy had felt prickly around Ward.
No one thing signals that Ward was a double agent—certainly not the Other Guy’s grumblings, since the Other Guy tends not to like threats of any sort, whether they’re allies or otherwise. He vaguely remembers punching Thor during the Chitauri attack. But all together, and followed by this particular mission, there aren’t many questions in his mind.
Ward must have been gunning for Jigsaw. And he must have been from a branch of HYDRA that Jigsaw had no knowledge of, since the briefing before this mission hadn’t brought up any trust issues around Ward’s picture, name, status, or voice imprint.
Tony and Agent Fitz are followed out of the base by Fitz’s cloud of small drones, which zip and swoop like a flock of starlings for a moment before seeking cover from the drizzly rain. Tony has a slim server under one arm, and Fitz has a handful of hard drives he’s hurriedly tucking under his shirt.
They don’t look particularly victorious, but from what’s been said over the comms about HYDRA’s water-poisoning schemes, there’s not much reason to look victorious yet. There’s still a long road ahead of them to prevent all of these plans.
The two engineers part ways as they near the quinjet, Tony going inside to stash his server out of the rain and Fitz continuing on to the Bus with his own goodies.
“Anything else to grab?” Bruce asks as Tony comes back out empty-handed with his visor up.
“Assuming we have all the asshole removal complete, we’re ready to blow the place,” Tony says. “Preferably before the Feds show up. Don’t want them getting sight or wind of the equipment in there.”
There’s a commotion near the Bus, and Bruce and Tony turn around to look in unison.
“He shot Ward, though!” Skye is saying. “And no one is saying anything!”
Coulson puts a hand on her shoulder. “We have to look at the footage, Skye. There may be more to it. Our priority now is the living.”
“They’re just HYDRA,” she says. “Who cares about the prisoners, when we lost Ward.”
“There are priorities. We’ll debrief later. I’m sorry, Skye. Nothing can be done for Ward right now, but we still have a base to clear and demolish. On a timeline.”
Skye storms back onto the Bus, and Coulson comes over to join them.
“Any news on Barnes?” he asks.
Bruce shakes his head. “Clint’s looking after him, so he won’t run off.”
“That and he’s got a bullet in him,” Tony grouses. “Gotta be armor-piercing to get through my tac gear. That suit is brand spanking new, and now it has a hole in it.”
Coulson shakes his head. “I’m not concerned about him running off. I’m more concerned about his wellbeing. And I'm concerned about—” he cuts off as May and Sharon bring out another group of HYDRA agents and get them situated.
“And I’m concerned about possibly having a traitor in our midst,” Coulson continues when they’re alone again.
“Ward, you mean?” Natasha asks softly.
Coulson nods. “The footage will show us what happened, but… It’s going to be a huge blow to the team.”
“But it fits?” she asks.
Coulson is grim. “I’m afraid it does. We’ve spent a month chasing leads that fizzle out or shift at the last minute, and when I look back on it, Ward has been in a perfect position to cause that fizzle or shift. I trusted him too much. I trusted my whole team too much.”
“And now?”
He looks back at the Bus. “I think we’ll all have a hard time trusting for a while. But we have a job to do, all the same. And we’ll do it together.”
Clint
—Near a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
Jigsaw’s been moving even more slowly the last little bit, and not just because he’s apparently tracking some HYDRA agent through the mud. He’s been slowing down gradually, taking a few more breaks, moderating his breathing, probably to avoid choking under that mask of his that Clint hasn't been able to get him to take off.
Clint tells himself he isn’t quite worried yet—it’s Jigsaw; the man survived a point-blank missile strike—but he knows it’s a lie, and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to drag Jigsaw upright if his roommate keels over in the mud. The man is heavy as fuck, and it’s not even just the metal arm. It’s all that muscle, too. Because under all that leather is an incredibly muscular torso.
And whatever is left of a bullet, too, probably.
Ward got a good shot in, must have spent some time aiming it. Right between a pair of straps, just under the right scapula, and to the right of the magnetic plate that holds the skorpion lookalike on Jigsaw’s back. Yeah, it’s a shot that would take anyone else down hard, and it makes the best use of the armor itself to contain the bullet and maybe cause an internal ricochet.
But from the way Jigsaw’s moving, there isn’t a bunch of shrapnel bouncing around in his ribcage and sheering lung tissue with every breath, so they’re lucky.
Clint still doesn’t like the way the leather tac gear glistens red and wet in the light rain. He knows most of the wet is just water, but he can’t help but worry that too much of it is blood, and he hates that feeling of worry. Just how impervious is a super soldier?
He’s tried to steer Jigsaw back to the quintet and been met with stony silent stillness, not a hint of response, and definitely not acquiescence. The man is determined, and he won’t be stopped by a bullet through his tac gear. Is that normal for a super soldier or is it stubborn acceptance of pain and injury from someone who’s had decades of nothing but that?
Fucking Ward. Clint grits his teeth and relaxes the stranglehold he has on his bow’s grip. Clint had never liked that man. He’s glad the dude’s dead now. If he’d known this would happen, he’d have shot the man himself. Maybe even in the face.
“Think we’re getting close to a stopping point, Jigs?” Clint asks again. “Because there’s gonna be drones sweeping the town, and the Feds. Someone’ll get him. We could head back.”
It won’t work, he knows, but it’s worth a try. They shouldn’t even have started off this way. It’s like the quinjet all over again. He’d started out following Jigsaw thinking the search would resolve itself in a few minutes and they’d turn around, but he let it go too far and now there’s nothing he can do to turn Jigsaw around short of grabbing him and trying to force the issue.
And something tells him not to try to manhandle his roommate, even for a good cause.
Jigsaw doesn’t look at him—or maybe he does; with the goggles, it’s hard to tell—but just oozes behind a dilapidated barn’s door to continue following whatever signs he’s picking up with his goggles.
Clint sighs. He can’t see anything worth tracking in the mud, which is saying something. Mud is excellent for tracking, and Clint’s not a shabby tracker, so if he’s picking up a whole lot of nothing, maybe there isn’t a whole lot to be picked up.
He listens for the sound of Jigsaw’s breathing through the mask. It’s faint, but it’s there, loud enough for Clint’s hearing aids to pick it up. Just another reason they should be headed back the other way, toward the quinjet and Banner and a bucket of medical supplies. Jigsaw isn’t bleeding in the gushing-danger-SOS sense of the word, but he’s definitely not okay.
Clint nudges the barn door with a toe. It hardly moves. He’s going to have to squeeze through with his quiver. It’s a real pain in the ass, and he’s soaked through, and his bowstring is going to be worthless if the rain keeps up and all this damp gets to it.
“Anything in there?” he asks, hoping to get some kind of an answer along the lines of Jigsaw reappearing and shaking his head.
Something that means the trail has gone as cold as this miserably rainy day and they can head back to the quinjet already. Clint really doesn’t want Jigsaw to collapse or anything. And he really doesn’t want to have to call for help on the comms and get Cap out here to help haul his roommate off.
From what he’s hearing on the comms, they’re not quite ready to blow the base up yet, but they’re all kind of thinking Ward was HYDRA. And they’re waiting on the Feds to sweep the town because the drones don’t want to play in the rain.
Clint also doesn’t want to play in the rain.
“Make a noise if there’s nothing there?” Clint asks.
Because if there is something there, Jigsaw’s not going to make any noises. And he’s either stopped breathing audibly or else is way further into the barn than Clint’s hearing aids can make out. So silence might have a lot of meanings.
There’s no noise. Shit. Maybe there’s something in there. Clint gets ready to pry the door open and follow, slinging his bow across his chest and sliding his current arrow back into the quiver. This is such a pain in the ass. Why does his roommate have to be so damned thorough about this sort of thing? And have such little good sense when it comes to injuries?
Clint grips the edge of the door and pulls, wincing as the door’s rollers make a grating noise in response to being made to move. If there’s any need for sneaking, Clint has just ruined the game. Great.
He slides through the gap and looks around the gloomy interior.
No animals to be found. Lots of grody old hay lying around in piles. Flies seeking shelter from the rain. Mud from where the roof is leaking. Musty smell that makes him wish he had a mask like Jigsaw’s just for right now. He doesn’t know a whole lot about farms, but he’s betting no one has used this barn in ages.
And there’s no Jigsaw in the barn, either. There’s enough light coming in through the windows to see that much.
Shit. Does he have to report that he lost Jigsaw, now? That’s just going to rile everyone up, though. He’ll keep his comms set to listening mode and hope Jigsaw ducks back into the barn any second now.
“Jigsaw?” he asks the empty barn.
Clint looks under the crooked horse stall doors, pokes his way into every nook and cranny. There is no Jigsaw in this barn. Not even an assholishly silent Jigsaw watching him search.
Clint sighs. No one needs this. Especially not him.
He slips back outside of the barn, does a quick perimeter check as the rain starts to come down harder again. This is just the worst. He’d rather be back in the base itself getting shot at or something.
The only tracks in the mud are his own and Jigsaw’s, and they go to the barn and then around the barn—and those last tracks are just Clint’s own. What the hell? Did his roommate learn to fly or something? Did he scale the inside of the barn and find his way to the rooftop to get a better look for their target?
Clint gives the inside of the barn another look, finds nothing that would support Jigsaw’s weight as a climbing device, and heads back outside.
“If you’re on the roof, I’m going to yell at you,” he calls. “Throw a rock or something. Come on, man. You’re scaring me.”
Clint kicks a rock into the wall of the barn with a thump and glares. Jigsaw wouldn’t have just wandered off, and no one would have been able to take him, even with a wound like that. Not without a very big struggle that would make a whole lot of noise on the part of the idiot who tried to attack him.
He turns around to give the perimeter another check and almost smacks right into his roommate’s bloody—no, muddy —chest.
Jigsaw is standing there beside the barn, covered head to foot in mud and still bleeding—god, is it worse now? what has he gone slinking through the mud for?—silent as ever and now completely unfathomable in his mask and goggles. There’s not a trace of communication going on, not a speck of intention, not a thing. He might as well be a leather-wrapped statue dipped in mud and blood.
He appears to be holding a rat.
Clint heaves a sigh of relief. “You fucking scared me. I thought you were bleeding out in a ditch or carried off by some HYDRA STRIKE team we missed.” He barely refrains from calling his roommate an asshole—he might mean it affectionately but it probably wouldn’t be taken that way.
Jigsaw raises the hand that doesn’t have a rat in it and signs that he is sorry.
“It’s okay,” Clint lies. “I was just getting really worried.” Clint looks at the rat in Jigsaw’s hands. It’s about as muddy as his roommate is. So muddy it’s hard to pick out its exact shape.
“Um, are we bringing home a rat?” he asks. “Not that there’s a problem with rats. We can get it a nice little cage, and an exercise wheel for it to run on. Lots of… whatever rats eat. Leftovers, maybe.”
Jigsaw tilts his head a little to the right, but otherwise doesn’t make any move that could be interpreted as communication. Maybe he’s having fun with this, or maybe he’s somewhat out of it from blood loss. Either way…
Clint reaches out a gloved fingertip to poke at the rat.
The rat spits at him and makes a swipe of a wretchedly wet and muddy little paw.
“Oh.” Clint says, pulling his hand back and noticing the ears finally, and the shape of the thing’s head. “No. That’s a kitten.”
Jigsaw nods with what Clint chooses to interpret as a solemn silence and pulls the kitten closer to his bloody chest, which is probably good for neither kitten nor wound care.
“Sorry. Are we bringing home a kitten?”
When did Jigsaw get sidetracked from his HYDRA quest by a kitten? Why is there a kitten in the mud? Where is the kitten’s mom? Are they stealing a kitten instead of rescuing one? What about the HYDRA guy they were tracking? Were they ever even tracking a HYDRA guy, or was this Jigsaw's way of avoiding medical attention for as long as was plausible?
Well, if a kitten is a reason Jigsaw will accept to get out of the rain and go back to the quinjet to regroup with the others and possibly get some medical attention, then Clint will accept that with open arms.
“Right,” he says when Jigsaw nods. “I’ll let the team know we’re on our way back.”
Chapter 28: Jigsaw | What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
Notes:
Chapter title from “What About Us” by Pink.
Have a midweek medical-distraction chapter! ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—Outside a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
Pain pain pain. Sharp and stabbing with every breath, every footfall. Hot and searing and miserable. But unimportant. It pushes the pain away.
It follows the other asset through the mud and the rain, retracing their footsteps from the last hour of searching. It focuses on putting one foot in front of the other foot, on making the flesh hand a soft cup for the little creature it has found.
It does not focus on the burning in the chest and the throbbing of the head and the tightness in the jaw beneath the killing face and the sharp bubbly sensation that accompanies each breath. These things are incidental. They are not important. What is important is the other asset looking so concerned for it and the little creature it is so concerned for.
There had been signs of other little creatures in a pool of watery mud, and tracks that indicated a larger little creature had been making trips back and forth from the puddle to higher ground. A mother cat and her squirmy cat babies, just like the mother rat in the hive building in the original hunting ground, so long ago. But the little baby in the puddle of mud had been so sad, and it had been shivering so hard, and it had hardly made any noise at all while trying to hiss at it.
And it did not know that the mother cat would come back for this one in time with the rain and the rising level of mud. It is true that cats do not like it any more than dogs do. The cats in the animal prison in Cleveland had all hissed at it and tried to bite it when it came close, and some had swatted at it with their so-sharp claws. It had been covered in blood from the mission, but it is not so sure that cats would not always react to it in this way.
But this is a tiny cat, a baby cat, a cat that needs safety and protection and warmth. It will not hurt the little cat, even if the little cat hurts it.
The cats in the animal prison had not known it was setting them free, and this cat does not know that it is taking it to safety. So there is room for misunderstanding, and for scratches and bites. That is just the way of cats. They are scratchy and bitey little creatures the way dogs bark and bite and chase it when they have the chance, and when they are not broken like the dog Lucky in the hive building.
There is a tiny slip of the foot over a smooth rock in the mud, but it does not jostle the little cat in the flesh hand while it corrects the balance and continues. The slicing white-hot agony from the chest rushes over the rest of it in a giant wave that threatens to close in overhead, but it will not allow something like mere pain to stop it.
“You okay?” the other asset asks, voice full of concern, worry, even fear. “We’re almost there.”
It is okay, yes. It has had much, much worse. And often. It swallows a bit more blood and follows the other asset. Yes, it has had much worse. This is a minor injury compared to the meat hooks or the missiles, the chandelier of asset or anything else.
There is no order without pain, and order comes through pain. It brought order to the base and the operatives inside that base, and the base tried to bring order to it in return. Old weapons, from the time before everything, from the time with the first researcher, the man with the round head and the round glasses and the bow tie, with the blue light. So much to be afraid of.
If the evil of HYDRA has the weapons of the first researcher, with the blue light that makes people disappear… But the base is being emptied out. The operatives inside it, most of them still alive, are being dragged outside of the base, and the base will then be destroyed. That is the order of the mission according to the briefing. No one is to be left alive inside the building while the base comes down around their ears, even if that would be a fitting end. And no piece of equipment in the base is to be left standing.
So the weapons with the blue light will be destroyed with the base. There is less to be afraid of, then.
And the man who shot it is dead. Another good thing.
He had not looked familiar in the briefing materials, but if he shot it in that base, then he must have been HYDRA or related to HYDRA. HYDRA-adjacent is still evil, and still must become a target. It will not apologize. It will not back down. If the man who shot it had not been killed, then he could have gone on to shoot others in the team that is not a cell, and that would be unacceptable.
The others on the team that is not a cell had trusted that man. And if they trusted him, then they would have come to his aid if he had survived, and would have been in a vulnerable position, waiting to be shot in the back the way it was.
On a mission, it is imperative that a team defends its own.
And the team that is not a cell is its team. Its own team, with the other asset and the ballerina woman and the clown man and the hamburger technician and the flying man. Even the researcher with the curly hair and the woman in white. All on its team in this mission. They must be protected.
It is too bad that the man was able to shoot it while it was grappling with the HYDRA operative. That was foolishness and failure on its part, to trust another to watch the back. It is not the flying man’s fault that the other man offering cover had shot it. The flying man was not to know.
But it should have been on guard, should have known that a threat could come from anywhere. And it has learned that lesson, the old way, through pain. Order comes through pain. It sucks in a breath and swallows more blood. It is in better order now, with the lesson. Has been put back into order. Watch the back no matter what.
“The hell is that thing?” asks the robot with the hamburger technician’s face—no, the robot that is really the hamburger technician, it reminds itself.
They are all standing around in a circle near the quinjet, all of its own team that is not a cell and the team that joined them for this mission, who supplied the man who shot it. The second part of the gathering looks grim, and the first part… The team that is not a cell does not look grim, but does not look happy, either.
Despite the good mission success—look at all of the still-alive targets with their plastic bonds, sitting wet and afraid in the mud. Look at the base all empty and ready for explosions. Look at all of the team members alive and well and mostly unharmed. It is a great mission success according to the terms of the briefing. Why are they not looking happy.
There is one of the hovering glowing panels that is not even a panel that they were looking at—coming from the flying man’s little metal bird. So cute. The flying man let it pet the little metal bird before the mission. It is glad the little metal bird is in good condition still.
It does not look at the glowing picture coming from the little metal bird. Those are not for assets to look at. And the operatives looking at it are all more critical observational targets.
“I’m talking to you , Jigster. Whatcha got there?”
It looks at the little cat in the flesh hand, cradled tight to the chest both to ease some of the pain of the bullet fragments in the lung and to keep the little cat safe and as warm as possible—the little cat is no longer shivering, and that is a good thing, it thinks; a success. It looks back up at the hamburger technician.
It knows the sign for cat. It does. But the metal hand does not want to make the sign, and the flesh hand is full of little cat. So it turns the head to look at the other asset. The other asset will answer the question for it.
“It’s a kitten, Stark,” the other asset says. “What’s it look like?”
“A ball of mud. Maybe a rat.” The hamburger technician’s robot suit wiggles a little about the shoulders, something like a shrug. “Who can say with St Cyborg of Assisi?”
The curly-haired researcher shakes his head and leaves the huddle, comes toward it and the other asset instead.
“Regardless of what you have, let’s get you cleaned up. I want to see to that wound.”
It takes a cautious step back, but then looks at the other asset for a clue as to how to proceed. The other asset does not seem worried at all to have a researcher approaching, herding them toward the quinjet, and so it allows itself to be herded, following the other asset to the quinjet.
“Mask off,” the researcher says when he gets inside the quinjet with the two assets. “Both parts, if you’d please. The mission is over. Even Tony has his visor up in the rain.”
The mission is not fully over until the base is blown up. The mission is not over yet. There are still things to be done. It cannot yet be time for what happens after a mission. They are not yet back in the hive building. It is not time yet!
“Come on, Jigs,” the other asset says softly. “No one can patch you up if you’re a muddy statue. At least take the bottom part off so you can breathe better.”
It looks from the other asset to the researcher and back, seeking a sign that there is a crack in their united front, but there is no crack. They both stand there in the quinjet looking expectantly at it, and then the other asset reaches out with both hands cupped, eyes on the little cat it is cradling.
“I’ll take the mudball, okay,” says the other asset. “I’ll keep it safe.”
The little cat tries to squirm when it slowly hands the little cat over to the other asset, depositing the little cat gently into the other asset’s cupped hands. It is so small, so delicate, shivering so badly again now that it has been jostled. Will the other asset’s hands be warm enough? It knows that it generates heat, but the other asset… does not.
It knows what it is like to be covered in mud, and shivering, and tired, and so weak and vulnerable. It wants to make sure the little cat is cared for, does not have to go through this.
“Thanks,” says the other asset, holding the little cat awkwardly. “Once we get you taken care of, you can have it back.”
It reluctantly reaches up with the metal hand and jerks the strap on the killing face to pull it tightly enough to release the buckle. Lets the leather stretch slightly and then give, the slack loosening and loosening until the lower part of the killing face can come loose as well, blood-slicked though it is on the inside. There has not been an opportunity for the killing face to dry onto the skin face. It comes off easily.
The goggles come off next, pulled down around the neck.
And then it is just a naked skin face, slicked with blood from the lungs and from where the metal cut into the skin when one of the enemies got a good hit in, and it is so, so vulnerable now. Will there be a choking face? Will there be—
The researcher reaches for it, hands in blue gloves now, reaches for the buckles of the tac gear, reaches and reaches and no, no!
It takes a step back so fast that it stumbles on a bit of cargo netting and nearly goes down.
“Whoa, Jiggy, are you—”
No one will take the tac gear off of it after a mission ever again! No one, no, never. Only it will take the tac gear off. No one will ever undress it again. No one has that power over it. Never. It will not go back and the researcher cannot take it back!
“Jigsaw,” the researcher is saying, blue-gloved hands now held up placatingly—but it will not be placated, will not be soothed into compliance.
“We need to get your armor off if I’m going to be able to clean your wound.” The researcher frowns at the other asset and then looks back at it again. “I’m not going to hurt you. I promise.”
“It’s like after we got back to the Tower after the tracksuit mafia, Jiggy,” the other asset says. “Banner had to stitch me up, remember? I had my shirt off and everything. He gave me some stitches, set my nose, patched me up. It’s all good.”
It breathes as heavily as it can with the shards of metal lodged in the lung, looking between the two of them on the quinjet, the researcher with the blue gloves and the other asset with the little cat in the cupped hands.
It is not time! Not yet! No one has the power to undress it. It will fight back. It will. It will never go back, will never be dragged back, never undressed, never returned to being a plaything to be pushed around and pushed into and cut up for the science of things. No dicks out boys, no stun batons, no—
“Jiggy, come on. I won’t let him hurt you. He doesn’t want to hurt you. But you’re already hurt. Someone’s gotta clean that up. Please.”
The other asset holds up the little cat, and the little cat makes a hissing sound at the motion and tries to swat at the air.
“You can hold your kitten while he works,” the other asset promises. “But we have to take the tac gear off. Just the armor part. You can keep the undershirt on.”
The researcher shakes his head. “I need to get to his skin, Clint.”
“You can make do,” the other asset says. “I don’t think you’re getting anything better than a compromise here.”
The other asset hands it the little cat and it gratefully takes the little creature back into the flesh hand. It is a comfort to hold onto the little cat, to offer comfort where none is offered to it.
“How about you hold your kitten and I get the armor off,” the other asset suggests softly. “Just the armor. Just that. And you hold onto Muddy McGee. Please.”
The other asset is asking so nicely, and looks so concerned. It wants to reassure the other asset, wants to comply with the other asset’s request, wants to comfort the other asset and relieve the other asset’s concern. But…
“You trust me, right?”
It nods.
“Okay, then I’m going do this slowly, and you can hold onto your kitten the whole time. And we’ll all be okay. I won’t let anyone hurt you. Whatever used to happen after missions with those STRIKE bastards is not going to happen here.”
It nods again, just a slight movement, and clutches the little cat.
And the other asset moves so slowly, so carefully, to remove just the harness with the magnetic plate off of the back. And then unfastens the straps one by one along the torso, fingers slipping in the mud but otherwise sure and steady.
It holds the little cat, the poor muddy thing, so tired and scared, so small and vulnerable. It holds the little cat and pretends it is not here, that it is not being undressed, that this is not happening. Not again. Never again. Please, please, please not ever again.
…please no.
The other asset is saying things to it, is talking softly, words and words and words, but it cannot understand them. It can understand the tone, though, can understand that much. The other asset is trying to comfort it, even while undressing it. Even while it is being rendered more and more vulnerable with every passing moment. More and more ready for what comes next.
There is a horrible, horrible moment, a moment where there is a movement at the entrance of the quinjet, an operative coming to see if it is prepped yet for the post-mission celebration, the dicks out boys, the worst part, the—
And the other asset is snapping, fierce, is saying something short and sharp. And the movement goes away.
The other asset will not let any boys get their dicks out. The other asset will protect it. The other asset will not let it be hurt. The other asset promised, promised, promised.
Finally, it is the researcher’s turn to approach. The researcher moves so slowly, is also saying words softly, words it cannot understand.
And the researcher cuts away pieces of the undershirt, pieces at the front and at the back, widens the holes in the fabric left by the parts of the bullet that went through and then begins to come at it with medical cotton and swabs. Clears away blood. Moves so slowly. Speaks so softly.
It looks at the little cat, looks at the other asset so protective. Here is a little cat that it can protect, and another asset that can protect it. A line of protection going from the other asset, through it, and to the little cat. There must be safety in that line, somewhere, somehow.
The other asset and the researcher talk to each other, trading words. And then there is gauze and medical tape, situated beneath the blood-sodden fabric of the undershirt. There is pressure—the other asset, pressing hands to the front and the back of it, over the bandage.
The researcher is pulling off the blue gloves, is once more a researcher with curly hair and not an active blue-gloved threat, is pouring a bottle of water into a small basin. Why?
“—ggy?” the other asset says to it. “Jiggy? Hey,” the other asset says, and the other asset’s hands are so nice pressed against the torso.
“We’re going to wrap some bandages around your torso over your shirt, okay? To help with pressure and keep your other bandages in place better. Nod to let me know you’re understanding me.”
…It nods.
“Welcome back, Jigs. You went away there for a while, or something like that.”
The researcher comes at it with the bandaging, but is not wearing the blue gloves, is trustable once more. It allows the researcher to wind bandaging around the torso, raises the arm with the little cat and the metal arm, and then lowers both.
“I’ve got some water here to bathe your kitten, Jigsaw,” the researcher says. “To get the mud off, at least, and then you can keep your kitten close to your body for warmth.”
That… That is a good idea. That is what the basin of water is for. It is not for drowning assets that were careless enough to get hurt in the field.
“Can I bathe your kitten for you?” the researcher asks. “I won’t let anything happen to it. I’d like it if you ate something and drank some electrolytes while I worked on getting your kitten clean and dry.”
There is a trade of protein bar for little cat, and then a bottle of red liquid that tastes like fruit, and it eats and eats, and drinks, and watches the researcher without ever taking the eyes away. The little cat protests weakly in the water, but the researcher carefully massages the mud out of the little cat’s fur—and the little cat is white, not brown.
It has eaten three protein bars and is on the second of the electrolyte drinks when the little cat is handed back to it, swaddled in a clean towel. It tucks the little cat close to the torso, into the neck of the undershirt, against the skin, where it will get the most warmth from proximity.
“You want to come out and watch the base explode, or stay in here with your kitten?” the other asset asks it.
It wants to see the base explode. But it is warmer in the quinjet, and the little cat is still so cold and shivering even in its little towel.
It will go outside of the quinjet to see the explosion, but then come back inside, it decides. Yes.
And maybe then it will drink another of the fruit-tasting red liquids. Or a purple one. The other asset is drinking a purple one. They have done so well, these two assets. They deserve the electrolyte drinks after doing so well, even though this asset allowed the man to shoot it.
It did well afterward, allowed the researcher to help it, trusted the other asset. Yes. It deserves a purple electrolyte drink.
After the explosion.
Notes:
You shouldn’t be bathing kittens this small without a really good reason; they need to be warm and dry. But this one is already drenched in mud, and that’s probably a pretty good reason. And Bruce has many PhDs, but veterinary science is not one of them, haha! He should probably have waited until there was lots of warm water and heated towels and things before dunking the kitten.
Content warning: Jigsaw is remembering some HTP occurrences during this chapter, including the infamous “dicks out, boys” phrase.
Chapter 29: The Bus Crew | People are talking (talking ‘bout people)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9_gs0BKCqI
I will answer your comments tonight at home, I promise! Thank you all for such wonderful distractions. And I’m loving all the Alpine love! Can’t wait to respond to y’all! 🥰
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jemma (Simmons)
—Outside a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 1:00 p.m.—
She only recognizes one of the two figures making their way, slowly, out of the drizzly rain-soaked town and to the area near the base where the rest of them are hunkered down replaying footage from Redwing’s surveillance.
Agent Barton, with the bow slung across his chest and the purple chevron on his uniform. One of the old STRIKE Delta team, before he and Natasha Romanoff got transferred to the Avengers. She used to really admire him and Romanoff, back when she could afford to really admire anyone. Now she still acknowledges their heroic elements, but is perhaps a touch jaded for hero worship.
The man beside Barton, she doesn’t recognize as such. She knows it’s Bucky Barnes because of the mud-slicked metal arm with the red star still somewhat visible where the mud has been washed away in the rain. But beyond that… there’s not much to be recognized. The man is like a mud monster come to life. His whole frontside is muddy, even the full face mask, where it isn’t glistening red with blood he must be breathing out. And his hair.
He doesn’t look anything like Bucky Barnes from the history books or museum, and he doesn’t look anything like the relief carving of him in the wall of the fallen. It’s not just the long hair or the metal arm or the way he walks like something fluid and jointless.
The face mask and tac gear is just… so… dark and forbidding. The Bucky Barnes of history had had a swagger, had been highly skilled, but had been approachable. Had been human. This man is the farthest thing from approachable.
Even the HYDRA agents they have captured from the base flinch away from him as he passes by, and they’ve looked glumly around at everyone else, even Captain America. But Barnes? Barnes warrants a flinch.
Jemma remembers the scars all over his torso, the letter combinations and tally marks. The wounds he had survived from the missile strike. The way he had been conscious and struggling against Dr Banner’s repair job in the Bus’s medical bay.
Maybe the people who had done those things to Barnes were right to flinch away from him and look aside. Maybe they were right to fear. The most heavily injured of them were reportedly so injured by his hand. And she can’t blame him, won’t blame him.
She wishes she could see his face, his eyes, the set of his mouth. Maybe if she saw some evidence of pain in his features from the wound he’d sustained in the base—the wound Ward had inflicted, her brain reminds her—he would appear more human to her.
She wonders what it is he has cradled in his right arm. Something muddy, just like the rest of him.
“The hell is that thing?” Stark asks as the pair get within easy hearing range.
Barton looks over at Stark, but Barnes doesn’t show any sign of having heard him. Just keeps walking like he’s on flexible terms with the human figure.
“I’m talking to you, Jigster. Whatcha got there?”
Barnes looks down briefly and then back up. He turns his head to face Barton.
And that’s right. The scars on his throat. The silence of his struggles in the Bus those months ago. Because HYDRA had rendered him mute.
“It’s a kitten, Stark,” says Barton. “What’s it look like?”
“A ball of mud. Maybe a rat. Who can say with St Cyborg of Assisi?”
Dr Banner shakes his head and goes to greet the newcomers more personally. “Regardless of what you have,” he says, “let’s get you cleaned up. I want to see to that wound.”
Jemma watches as Barnes flinches away from Dr Banner, the movement so smooth she’s not sure it counts as a flinch—maybe it’s just a minute retreat—and then heads toward the quinjet with obvious reluctance.
It was horrible that Barnes had been aware and struggling during that surgery on the Bus. But somehow it’s more horrible that he apparently remembers it well enough to retain some fear of Dr Banner. She imagines Dr Banner doesn’t like it that his teammate is afraid of him—and for something not related to the Hulk, too.
“Mask off,” she hears before Dr Banner enters the quinjet fully and their conversation becomes muffled.
Jemma returns her focus to the replay of Redwing’s footage. It really is unmistakable. Ward… shot Bucky Barnes. Intentionally. In the back. During a mission in a HYDRA base. She remembers he’d been borderline cranky when they were ousted from the Tower after dropping most of the Avengers off after the Bakersfield incident.
Is this why?
Had he been upset that Barnes had pulled through? Upset he hadn’t been able to finish him off? Had he really been a snake in their midst this whole time? It hurts to think so, but sometimes the truth hurts. And it does ring true, in light of this footage.
“So that’s that,” she murmurs. “Ward betrayed us, has been betraying us all this time, and now it’s over.”
“It would appear so,” Phil says, his tone gentler than she’d expect, considering that he had hand-picked Ward for their crew.
Fitz stirs at her side. “So what now? We have him on the Bus. What do we do with him?”
Part of her, a small and cruel part of her, thinks they should put him back in the base before blowing the base up. Put him where he belongs, with his own kind. With HYDRA. But they’ve been pulling out even the few HYDRA agents who died in the base, lining them up for the FBI to deal with, same as the surviving captives.
They even brought out the goopy thawing pieces of a HYDRA operative that Redwing’s footage showed getting shattered after passing through cryo freezing chemicals.
At the least, she knows from some background checking through S.H.I.E.L.D. records that should have been sealed—alright, that were sealed, but she and Fitz had gotten into them anyhow—that Ward didn’t have a good relationship with his family.
Maybe it’s fitting in more than one way to leave him here with his HYDRA family, since he apparently did get along with them well enough to betray their crew.
“We bring him back out and add him to the list of the mission casualties,” May says, her voice hard. “In the end, he wasn’t one of us. He’s not our teammate anymore, and therefore he’s not our problem.”
Skye shakes her head and walks back to the Bus.
Jemma thinks she’ll take some time to get over the betrayal. Maybe more time than the rest of them. Ward had been getting closer with Skye of late, had been training her, even. Calling himself her commanding officer, getting her ready for truly joining S.H.I.E.L.D. And now not only was S.H.I.E.L.D. itself compromised, but the Bus crew had been as well.
“I’ll go talk with her,” Jemma says.
She’s not sure what she’ll say, but maybe she doesn’t need to say anything. Maybe it’s enough to just listen.
Leo (Fitz)
—Outside a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
So this is what it’s like working with the Avengers for a real mission, and not just cleanup of a mission gone south by way of missile strike.
He watches Simmons head back to the Bus and then turns his attention back to the gathering of them, of both teams.
He has the demolitions set throughout the base, so technically all that’s left is to blow the place up and maybe wait around to make sure the Feds take the prisoners to the right place. But there is the question of Ward’s body.
Skye might not like it, but they don’t have time to cart what’s left of Ward to his family or set up some kind of S.H.I.E.L.D. funeral situation, and they probably shouldn’t do that anyway, given how Ward and his family didn’t get along, and how his last action was to betray them all. They have Project Insight to go up against, old leads to revisit after finding out that Ward had probably corrupted the leads somehow, HYDRA to take down.
And they can’t just stuff Ward in the freezer until there’s time to deal with his remains.
It’s better they say they’re goodbyes now, whether those are mournful or angry, and let the Feds deal with the rest.
“The Feds aren’t going to take forever to get here,” Stark says after a moment. “I say we blow the joint.”
Captain America nods. “I’ll go see if Jigsaw wants anything before we do that.”
“What, like a souvenir?” Stark frowns. “He’s got a whole damn tourist shop worth of souvenirs carved in him, Capsicle. I doubt he cares about a scrap of metal from this chair or whatever.”
Right, the brainwashing chair. Leo shudders. He hasn’t seen more than the ruined remains of it after Barnes had torn it up, but the concept of electrocuting someone to the point of completely rewriting their brain is just creepy and terrible and wrong. Right through the face, no less. Leave it to HYDRA to take a bad thing and make it so much worse.
“I’ll at least make sure they know we’re doing it,” Captain America says, somehow not responding to the bit about the scarring.
Leo has seen the scarring firsthand. It’s bad. It’s everywhere, all the way down to the knees. It’s letters and tally marks like some kind of cattle brand plus notches carved in a knife handle. Leo would have had something to say about that if Stark had goaded him. But he keeps his mouth shut.
Stark is different this time. Last time, he’d been sort of aloof, a little crass, and ultimately a lot of fun. This time he’s defensive and almost mean, though still crass—the salmon image is still stuck in his brain. But from what he’s heard, this mission is personal for Stark. The last one was a rescue mission to pick up someone they’d been chasing for a while and this one is a revenge mission. That’ll probably account for the differences.
There’s a shout from the quinjet—Barton telling Captain America to get out—and Captain America returns to the group as though nothing had happened.
Leo wonders what the hell is going on on the Avengers team these days. No one tells Captain America to get out. Isn’t he the commanding officer? Leader of the team, at least. It would be like yelling at Coulson to leave the Bus.
“We’ll wait to blow the place up,” Captain America says. “I don’t want to surprise anyone with the demolition.”
Phil nods as though that’s perfectly understandable, and maybe it is—the last person he’d want to scare is Barnes. There’s no telling what the man would do if something suddenly exploded near him. His reaction to getting shot in the back was to immediately shoot Ward in the face, after all.
And then to keep going like nothing had happened, right up until he found a kitten?
Leo doesn’t even know what to do with that, so he stashes it somewhere else in his mind to ponder later, along with the hollow feel of betrayal from watching the footage from Redwing. Bucky Barnes plus kitten. It’s apparently a thing.
“So we’re in agreement about Ward,” Phil says, nodding toward May. “We’ll leave him here with the others, comb through the data he might have tampered with, and see if we can get our trail toward the HYDRA operators back on track.”
“And we’re letting the FBI handle the water poisoning plot,” Agent Carter adds. “They’ll have their hands full, but they have the jurisdiction across all of the geography they’ll need, and they have the people it’ll take to prevent disaster in that many places.”
“Right,” says Agent Romanoff. She looks at Stark. “Sure you don’t want to grab some of those Tesseract weapons before the base blows?”
“We’re not even playing with the idea of it,” Captain America says before Stark has a chance to answer. “Those things are going to be buried, and they’re going to stay buried.”
“You heard the man,” Stark says. He doesn’t seem too upset at the prospect, surprisingly. Maybe he already has lots of data on the Tesseract.
Leo had tried to bring one of the Tesseract weapons out to study it, while everyone else was hauling prisoners out. Captain America had taken it from his hands, snapped it in half, ejected the glowing blue charge, and then snapped that in half as well. So much for progress.
If the enemy has Tesseract weapons, even if just in specific bases, they should have a few of them, too, to study the effects and find ways to counter them. Maybe use some of the Tesseract energy packs to do other things with.
But Captain America had been a figure of righteous rage when confronted with the idea, and had just stalked back into the base to take apart the whole stockpile of weapons. Not a single energy pack survived. And now the remains are going to be covered over in rubble three layers deep in a backwater part of the Appalachian mountains for potentially all of time.
All of that power, all the stored up energy, and it’s been destroyed. Just like all of the Chitauri weapons they’d lost the chance to study. If these kinds of threats are going to come for them, they need to be armed to fight back, and no one seems to see the point. It’s like arguing with a boulder. Kick it all you want, and you’ll just stub your toe.
Eventually, Dr Banner and the other two come back out of the quinjet, and Barnes… Barnes looks like a whole different person without the mask on. Not just because Leo can see his face now, but because there is a face to be seen in the first place. The mask was as bad as Stark’s Iron Man helmet for making a person look like something inhuman and his weird liquid motions hadn’t helped, before.
His movements are even more fluid than before, too, which kind of hurts Leo’s eyes to look at. But he’s holding a white bundle against his chest—partly in his shirt, it looks like—a little kitten burrito. And he’s got a Gatorade in his left hand. Barton’s got a bottle of Gatorade, too. Barton doesn’t look too different from before, though he’s stashed his weapons, but without the strappy bondage gear on, Barnes looks almost soft beside him.
The two of them settle on the edge of the ramp, legs dangling over the side. Mud-slicked from the waist down and bloody from the waist up, Barnes looks strangely calm. Barton, though, while he’s way more uniformly soaking wet and mud-speckled, looks protective. He’s taller, and he’s using the height difference to sort of hover over Barnes.
Weird. Leo’s not great at reading people, but there’s something going on there.
And judging by the size of its head poking out of Barnes’s shirt, that kitten looks too small to be off on its own, wrapped in a towel or not. It’ll probably die, being that little and wet and cold, and starving most likely. Leo wonders how that’ll go over with Barnes. Probably not well. He can’t see anyone taking it well when a rescued stray kitten dies on them, but Barnes seems like he’ll take it worse than a lot of other people might.
“Ready for the demolition, Jigglesworth?” Stark asks.
Leo will never understand the nicknames Stark uses.
Barnes nods and sets the Gatorade down. He hovers a hand over the kitten’s head, half petting it and half protecting its ears.
“All the Tesseract weapons are in there,” Captain America says, and Barton’s shoulders relax a bit. “No one is going to be studying them.”
Leo sighs.
Phil
—Outside a HYDRA base in North Carolina | Friday 14 September 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
He watches as the quinjet lifts off, taking most of the Avengers team with it back to the Tower in New York.
It’s been a long day already, and he’s got a lot longer to go before he can start to even think about relaxing for the night.
The FBI is still arriving, and there will be several more conversations with them about the smoldering rubble that is the HYDRA base and its contents. They aren’t happy with the Avengers for a variety of reasons, and now they aren’t happy with S.H.I.E.L.D., either. But it is what it is.
Rogers was right. They can’t be letting anyone get wind of the kind of equipment this base held, even in its twisted and ruined state. It’s bad enough Thaddeus Ross has been stirring the debris in Bakersfield and getting ideas about what that base held. They don’t need the FBI digging around and finding things as well. Now, if they do dig, there will be a minimum of artifacts to find.
So the Avengers are off, with Carter, Romanoff, and Rogers remaining behind to help provide a united front with his own crew. Anything to ensure that the prisoners are handled as prisoners of the FBI and not as damaged bosom buddies of a few HYDRA moles within the FBI.
May is accompanying the FBI prisoner transports to the holding cells, ensuring that the hospital wing many of the prisoners are going to end up in is equipped to hold them prisoner. They do not want another Triskelion escape, this time from a hospital.
And most of the prisoners are going to the hospital. It’s easy to tell who has encountered which of the Avengers in the base. Rogers’s prisoners invariably have concussions and blunt force trauma to the torso. Wilson and Carter left gunshot wounds and a few milder concussions in their wake. Stark burned his few opponents with repulsor blasts. Barton and his signature arrows. And Barnes…
There’s an unhinged quality to his work, a kind of overkill. Choke marks on throats from a metal hand. Knees that are not so much broken as destroyed. Elbows crushed. Slash marks and gunshot wounds that just barely miss being immediately fatal. Often multiple sufficient injuries piled on top of each other as though he couldn’t stop inflicting damage until he neared the line across which the damage would prove fatal.
It’s hard to reconcile his work with the man who was clearly afraid to receive medical treatment from a teammate and who caressed his newfound kitten with a gentleness that should have been impossible from a prosthetic as clearly designed for battle as his.
But Phil knows his history. He knows who Barnes was. Not just a soldier, not just Rogers’s right-hand man and best friend, not just a war hero. Barnes was the caretaker of the Howling Commandos, a caretaker of Rogers before the serum, a caretaker of those who needed self-defense training. He’d been kind, and he’d been stubborn about it, refusing to allow circumstances to get in his way when it came to caring for others.
The kitten honestly makes more sense than the destruction he’d wrought on these HYDRA operatives.
What makes a little less sense is the closeness between Barnes and Barton and the rift he sensed between Barnes and Rogers.
Barton had never seemed to have any particular affinity for Barnes that Phil had known about. But maybe that has changed with Loki’s mind control and the Chitauri attack. Maybe Barton has found a comrade and fellow victim in Barnes. Maybe he’s found some understanding that, frankly, not a lot of other people can have first hand.
And Rogers… That, Phil has fewer guesses about. It’s probably related to Barnes being called Jigsaw instead of by his name. Maybe there’s a disconnect there, maybe a refusal to accept his past. Some kind of chasm across which Barnes is afraid to travel lest he fall in and get lost, or worse, have to fully confront what’s been done to him.
A horn honks behind him, and he turns to face what turns out to be another FBI convoy, an SUV to lead, an SUV to pull up the rear, and a handful of prisoner transports to take up the middle portion of the convoy.
That’s enough time for thinking. There’s work to do.
Notes:
Fitz is not very optimistic about this kitten’s chances, but you can be: the kitten is guaranteed to end up being okay. You have this writer’s word for it.
Chapter 30: Avengers | I’m so scared about the future (and I wanna talk to you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Talk” by Coldplay.
Author’s Note: Please excuse the technobabble in this chapter. I’m sure there are more technologically accurate ways to get the situation across, but I only have so much time for researching the terminology. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Friday 14 September 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—
Ah, home sweet home. And he got to miss most of the FBI showdown with Agent Agent. It’s nice having people play buffer between himself and the Feds.
The Feds are still pretty unhappy with him after all the shit he’s pulled these past few months—between being five kinds of belligerent about the tracksuit stings he wrecked chasing down Barton and the stink he made in the bank vault by wiping all of the HYDRA files while he secretly collected his own personal copies of them.
He should probably stop making it a habit to upset the government, but it’s just so fun. And plenty of the people in that government are probably HYDRA flunkies, anyway, and why not upset them when he has a chance?
“Sir, I have taken the liberty of ordering Italian food for yourself and the team,” JARVIS says into his comm as they all file off of the quinjet and onto the roof.
His suit begins its automatic disassembly routine under the exhausted but incredibly observant stare of Jigsaw, though no one else pays it any mind. Jigsaw’s fascination isn’t new, but it’s still a toss up whether Tony finds it more amusing or more sad. To think their murder maniac hadn’t put together that the suits were all hollow, and for so long.
Tony breathes deeply and gives his arms a stretch once he’s completely unencumbered. The armor might be designed not to weigh down limbs or feel ungainly to wear, but there’s still something lighter about life once he takes it off.
“Also,” JARVIS continues from the rooftop speakers, “there is kitten formula available for the newest addition.”
Yeah, the little mudball that turned into a kitten like magic. It’s a weak little thing, and he doesn’t know much of anything about cats other than that they like to claw up furniture and are generally assholes to their owners. But this one looks… sickly. Small. Kind of pathetic. It’s ears don’t even point upward or anything. What kind of cat doesn’t have pointy ears? Maybe it’ll grow into it or something, if it makes it.
“Awesome,” he says, leading the pack of them to the elevator. They don’t have the whole crew with them so they all fit. Tony and Brucie-boy, Bartonio and Jigglesworth, Icarus. And the rat, of course, in its little towel burrito.
“It’s not shawarma,” Tony says, “but Italian’ll do. Did you go with that new place on the corner? I’ve been meaning to try that place. It looks nice.”
“Indeed, Sir.” JARVIS is the best. “Chicken parmesan, eggplant parmesan, a baked ziti casserole with fresh vegetables, and a meat lasagna.”
They’re going to eat so well they make themselves sick off it and don’t want to see a tomato for a month.
“Tell me there’s garlic bread,” Barton mumbles. “It’s not Italian night without garlic bread.”
“Yes, Agent Barton. There is a basket of garlic bread, with dipping oil.”
“Mmm,” Barton moans. “Carbs.”
Tony wonders whether there’ll be a shift thing going on for this, or whether the assassin whisperer can convince the Jigster to eat with the team this once. It’s not like it’s the whole team, after all. And there’s a tradition to keep up.
He’s still impressed that Barton managed to keep Jigsaw from cramming himself under the seats again on their way back to the Tower. There’d been a conversation about not wanting to undo Bruce’s work, about the kitten being smushed by accident if there was a crash, about how he couldn’t have a grape Gatorade if he was lying down, but could have one if he was sitting up.
Tony hadn’t meant to listen in—or, who is he kidding, he was paying very close attention to every word so he could try his own hand at assassin whispering later on. The rest of the team had politely pretended not to observe the argument, and had just made room for Jigglypuff and Bartonio on one side of the quinjet all to themselves.
And still sitting side-by-side, close enough to be practically on top of each other. Part of that is Jigsaw’s doing, though. Jigsaw doesn’t understand other people’s personal space issues. Only his own. And where he’s concerned, there is no personal space when it comes to Barton.
Tony thinks part of that might be that whole “the same as” achievement that Barton was the first of them to unlock. If they’re the same as each other for whatever brainwashing, mind-controlled reasons, then they share a personal space bubble.
On the one hand, that bodes well for squeezing him into a seat next time they’re all on the quinjet together—he’s the same as Nit-Nat, Capsicle, Cupid and Tony himself. So many options to squish himself between on the seating. On the other hand, Tony likes his personal space bubble and doesn’t want his bubble popped, even by Jigsaw.
They pause in the little locker room setup Tony had installed near the roof for mission prep, and drop off their gear before they go on. But just the gear. None of them bother to actually change. This is no time to be changing into civvies or whatever before a meal. This is time to be stuffing their faces with glorious pasta.
Jigsaw’s been bringing up the back of their little pack with obvious reluctance, but he hangs back even more as it becomes clear they’re headed for the dining room. Tony considers cajoling him into joining them, but figures it’s best left to Barton. The man has a way with Jiggles, and none of the rest of them can come close to it. Let Barton do the sweet talking.
Tony grabs a chair and pulls it out, surveys the piles of foil-tented carbs on the table, and plops down on the chair. Good sturdy furniture that can take his weight with the armor on if he ever decides to wear it to dinner—he knows because he tested one of the chairs in his lab and it survived. He might not give enough shits to pick out good stuff, but Pepper? Pepper prepares for every case scenario.
Time to dig in.
Clint
—New York City | Friday 14 September 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
The others head into the dining room, and Clint sighs. He wants to go in there, too, and scoop up pasta sauce with garlic bread and gobble up melty cheesy pasta. There’s a lasagna in there with his name on it. Everything smells delicious and garlicky and cheesy…
But what Jigsaw is clearly expecting—or maybe more is hoping for than expecting—is that they’ll go somewhere else, the two of them, and wait their turn. And… And that’s just… No. The pasta. It is calling.
Clint huddles close to Jigsaw and the little white purrito that he’s holding so closely to his bandaged chest.
“Look, there’s this thing that we do after a battle, Jigs,” he says, and cringes inside when his roommate flinches. “It’s Avengers tradition, not HYDRA tradition. You remember that photo book I had to sign for forever? The one with all of us fighting Chitauri aliens and stuff?”
Jigsaw nods, and man, he still looks tired even after the protein bars and Gatorades. Blood loss and stress’ll do that to anyone, though, and he’d spent most of the flight back home getting tenser and tenser for reasons Clint has tried not to consider. Like whatever he was afraid of Banner doing to him was now something he was afraid was waiting for him in the Tower instead.
Clint doesn’t want to know what “post-mission protocol” was in the bad old days. He doesn’t. But he does want to have a little arrow-to-thyroid chat with each and every monster who created or enforced that protocol.
It’s a problem for another time. The problem for right now is all that pasta starting to get cold while the others eat and he and Jigsaw have another “no one’s gonna hurt you” talk.
“Well no one caught a picture of what we did afterward. Like, right afterward. And what we did was, we all piled into this restaurant that was still standing, and we ate way more food than we should have eaten.” Clint mimes eating a big bite of shawarma. “Just gobbled it up, even though we were all so tired we could hardly stand.”
He gestures toward the dining room.
“That’s what we do after a battle, Jigs. We eat an exhausted meal together and bond as a team. There’s no—” Clint blinks. “There’s no hurting anyone, there’s no punishment or anything. There’s not even a debriefing. There’s just food and lots of it.”
Jigsaw’s eyes widen and he looks past Clint’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Clint says. “There’s so much food. And we just go face down in it. You should join us. You’re part of the team.”
Clint pauses and then decides to mash the easy button, since his roommate seems so close to the finish line anyway. Just to nudge him over that line to the right idea.
“You did really, really well,” Clint says, knowing that Caroline at least is going to want to smack him for saying this. “You were great. You deserve to eat all of this food without having to wait around for the others to finish.”
Jigsaw swallows and hesitantly nods. He holds his kitten up a little.
“Uh, yeah, I don’t see why you can’t bring your kitten.” Clint shrugs. “Kitten did well, too. Really quiet, not squirming too much.”
Clint leads Jigsaw into the dining room, where the others have left a pair of seats open at one end of the table. Great. They can sit together, and it’ll be just like eating at the kitchen island after a meal is over, just the two of them, but in a room with the others. Perfect.
And hey, there’s a little bottle of white liquid by one of the seats, and a little instruction set with diagrams, plus a pad of paper and a pen. Clint looks it over while Jigsaw hovers near one of the chairs and steels himself up for taking a seat in it.
“You can feed your kitten from that bottle while you feed yourself,” Clint says. “Win-win, right?”
Wilson passes over the garlic bread. “Have a seat,” he says. “You want the eggplant or the ziti, Jigsaw?”
Jigsaw nods—because everyone in the room must know the answer is both—and slowly sits by the bottle of kitten formula, setting his star notebook down beside him. He looks at the instructions, and then proceeds to completely ignore the foil trays of food set in front of him in favor of unwrapping his kitten and giving it as much of the formula as it will drink. Turns out that’s almost the entire bottle sucked down while the kitten mewls and squirms and digs tiny claws into his hand in its frenzy to locate the bottle every time it gets dislodged by its own squirming. Kitten must be hungry.
Figures Jigsaw would see to the kitten before he sees to himself.
Clint digs out a massive scoop of lasagna and then one of the breaded chicken breasts as well. Gotta have a little of everything, right? Everything good, anyway. He’s not touching fried up eggplant with a mile-long pole. Slimy, seed-riddled nonsense hiding in a deep fried shell. Betrayal in every bite, that.
When the kitten is a milk-stained sloppy little thing with its head lolling in blissed out exhaustion, Jigsaw bounces the kitten a bit—burping it, Clint realizes, just like the instructions say—wipes its scrunched little face with a paper towel, and finally rewraps the towel and tucks the purrito into the crook of his right arm.
Then he pulls the whole foil tray of veggie ziti glop over toward himself, and digs right into the tray with a fork.
Guess no one else is getting seconds of that. Clint looks down the table to make sure everyone’s okay with the move, and sees only approval and amusement on the faces that look back at him. Good, good. No one needs to ruin the progress by insisting that Jigsaw plate up a portion and then take more later.
And so they spend the next half hour slowly polishing off way more pasta than they needed to eat, and maybe Caroline will have something to say about that, too, but it’s tradition. It’s team building. They’ll all have upset stomachs together, except for Jigsaw, whose stomach is never upset.
“So there were some helicarrier schematics in the server files,” Stark says after finally pushing his plate away. “Thinking that’s Project Insight stuff. I took the whole server so I can crack it without risking a data wipe while I’m working.”
Clint looks up from the chicken breast he’s currently trying to convince himself he has room for. “What kind of schematics?” he asks. “Like, for building more, or improvements on the ones they have, or what?”
Wilson nods. “And can we use the schematics for taking something down once it’s in the sky?”
“Hard to say,” Stark says. “They’re encrypted to hell and back. Looked like there’s layers of data in there, though. Can’t wait to crack it open.”
Jigsaw stops eating long enough to write ZOLA on the pad of paper—not in his notebook—and adds a “why” sign to the word on the page.
“He wants to know if it’s Zola,” Clint says. The others can’t see the paper, after all.
“Something called Z.E.L.U.S.,” Stark says. “Green letters on black background, though, so it’s gotta be related to the Nazi shithead AI who tried to sidetrack me in Bakersfield.”
Jigsaw nods, but goes back to eating instead of adding anything.
“You know anything about Z.E.L.U.S., Jigglebells?”
Jigsaw stuffs a massive forkful of zucchini and pasta in his mouth and then draws a phone with a big Z in the middle of the screen.
“Uh, it’s an app?” Clint guesses. “Something on a phone?”
“Oh my god,” Stark groans, apparently understanding way more than Clint does. “He hasn’t just backed himself up to the cloud, he’s made himself fully mobile. He’s made himself into a cloud-native app, or something.”
Wilson raises an eyebrow. “And this is a bad thing.”
“It means he could be in anyone’s pocket at any time, making him a lot harder to get rid of,” Stark mutters. “Still doable. And I’m going to do it. But…” He sighs. “What a hassle. I love a good challenge, but not when the fate of the world is at stake or anything.”
Jigsaw nods and then signs “peach” and “why” at Clint.
“I don’t follow.” Clint squints at him. “What does Zola or Zelus or whatever have to do with peaches?”
His roommate mimes eating a peach and then repeats the signs.
“Oh, you want peaches. To eat.”
Jigsaw nods.
“There are, regrettably, no fresh peaches in the Tower,” JARVIS says. “There are, however canned peaches in the pantry.”
Clint waits to see if Jigsaw will respond to the sound of JARVIS speaking, and when there’s predictably no evidence that he’s even heard the AI, let alone listened, Clint sighs. There might be some serious progress with him asking for specific foods to eat, but there’s not an ounce of progress when it comes to JARVIS. He hopes the AI’s feelings aren’t getting hurt by all this cold shoulder business.
“JARVIS says there’s some canned peaches in the pantry,” Clint says. “Are you done with the pasta?”
Jigsaw stuffs another bite of slimy eggplant in his mouth as an answer.
“Right. Well, let’s polish off what’s out here and then we’ll open up a can of peaches.”
“Where are you even putting it all?” Wilson asks.
Jigsaw ignores him and instead drags the plate with the remaining garlic bread over to be devoured.
Sam
—New York City | Friday 14 September 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
He’s only now able to think about eating without feeling vaguely sick from everything he ate when they first got in.
Which is good, because Happy just got back with Steve and Natasha a few minutes ago, and Sam wants to help fill them in while they have their own “shawarma” moment over burgers.
He takes a plateful of fries to nibble on while they eat.
“Jigsaw ate with the team?” Natasha asks, her eyes bright. “All of you, at the table?”
Sam nods. “Clint had to do some convincing first, but once he got Jigsaw in the dining room and sitting down, it was…” Well, it was a little sickening to watch Jigsaw put away the food that quickly after feeding his new friend. But in a touching way, he guesses.
Steve sighs. “I wish I’d been there to see it.”
“If we’d all been here,” Sam says, “then I’m pretty sure nothing Clint could have said would have gotten Jigsaw to eat with us. Sorry.”
“Next time, we’ll switch it up a bit,” Natasha suggests. “Or just add one person at a time.”
Sam nods. “Something like that would work, maybe. Natasha, you eat breakfast with them. Maybe we should be adding one person to breakfast every couple of weeks.”
“I could start eating other meals with them, too,” she says, dipping a trio of fries into her ketchup and then eating them. “I’m just happy he’s branching out a bit. Expanding his circle.”
Sam can see that, yeah.
“Speaking of expanding the circle,” he says, “what was it like wrapping up with Coulson and the rest?”
“Tedious,” Steve says. “Not so much paperwork or anything. Coulson handled the paperwork. But making sure those prisoners were set up as prisoners first and patients second was a challenge. I don’t want them to die in treatment, but they can’t be allowed to escape or get mixed in with the regular patients.”
“Melinda and Sharon are still stationed at the hospital to make sure no one gets released,” Natasha adds. “They’ll both rejoin Coulson afterward. I don’t envy them. Hospitals aren’t fun, even when you’re posing as a nurse. Maybe especially when you’re posing as a nurse.”
Sam can see that being a difficult infiltration assignment, yes. Which is probably what Natasha’s referring to. And it seems Sharon is joining the Bus crew after all. It had been a potential option, to help fill Coulson’s roster back out, but hadn’t been decided on when he’d left with the others.
“But we’re sure there won’t be another Triskelion escape? Just the North Carolina edition instead of the D.C. edition?” Sam asks.
Natasha nods. “They’re earmarked for FBI holding facilities once they’re treated and stable. Some of them probably won’t make it. But I think S.W.O.R.D. would be satisfied that Jigsaw tried for nonlethal. Some of the fatalities so far have actually been from concussions. So, Rogers, your work.”
Oh, good. That’s where he was taking his line of questioning next. S.W.O.R.D. oversight.
Because Steve is going to have to make another report to Arsenio about this mission and how successful it was, and that might be difficult to do if there was too much damage inflicted on the enemy by Jigsaw.
He shakes his head. Imagine. Too much damage inflicted on the enemy. And this is the enemy that’s building helicarriers to shoot the general population with. The enemy that shot Riley down and tortured people for the giggles. Can there be too much damage inflicted on them? He knows that the answer is yes, but still.
Steve shrugs. “I did what needed to be done. It’s unfortunate they didn’t make it, but…” He shrugs again. “Sometimes these things happen. I tried to go in with a light touch.”
And that’s a very different prospect than Jigsaw going in hard and fast with a goal of maximum damage. What they need is to get Jigsaw to adopt Steve’s approach, to do the minimum necessary to take someone down instead of the maximum possible before death is inevitable.
It’ll take time. But it’ll also take practice. And they might need to revisit sparring and team training. Jigsaw had been triggered the last time he encountered the group of them in the gym, but now he’s been in the field with them, and maybe he’ll be better able to work with some of them at a time.
The sparring bots Stark is working on will have sensors to help them all gauge whether a human would survive any given blow, and Sam can see them going over training footage and suggesting less damaging combat options. Even Steve could use some of that, as evidenced by today’s mission’s casualties.
“How’s the kitten?” Steve asks as he’s winding down on his fourth burger.
“Probably going to be just fine,” Sam says. “JARVIS got some formula brought in for it. We’ve got a vet coming to make a house call on Monday just to check it over, make sure it’s in good condition, considering.”
“Considering?”
Sam sighs. “It’s really young. Too young to be without its mom and littermates. And it got really cold and wet for a while in the rain. And didn’t eat for hours.”
Sometimes really young rescues just fail to thrive. It’s sad, but it’s part of life. Even with the best of care, that kitten isn’t guaranteed to live.
“Huh.” Steve picks up a fry, then puts it back on his plate in favor of sucking down the better part of his drink. “Has Jigsaw thought of a name?”
Sam laughs. “I don’t think Jigsaw thinks the kitten needs a name. But he’d better act quick, or Stark will name it Mudball or something.”
“Tony might call it Mudball even after it has a real name,” Natasha says. “And worse, it might stick, the way Jigsaw did.”
Sam cracks a smile. Jigsaw might have a hard time naming his kitten, and he might have an even harder time if the kitten doesn’t make it. But either way, Sam’s pretty sure a pure white kitten won’t be saddled with Mudball for a name. Not forever.
Notes:
End note: The kitten’s survival is actually guaranteed. Animals have plot armor in this story, I promise. ^_^
Chapter 31: Assets | When you touch me (I get vulnerable)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Miracle” by Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding.
Have an extra chapter because I am swamped at work and need the distraction~
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Friday 14 September 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
Muddy McGee is a cute little thing, once it’s been cleaned up. Scrawny, but in a stubby-tailed cute way that’s some weird combo of appealing and fragile. And it’s a good thing, too, because it’s also incredibly loud, especially when the formula bottle comes out and the smell of kitten milk is in the air.
Currently, the kitten is busily—and comparatively quietly—exploring the sofa while Jigsaw cleans himself up for the night. Clint is on kitten watch because it’s the only way he could convince Jigsaw to take the time and effort to get a shower in after the kitten’s latest feeding. Zoe might have canceled the evening’s session earlier because of Jigsaw’s injury, but his roommate still needs to get clean for real before crawling into his pillow fort for the night.
Or crashing on the sofa, since that might be easier to manage with a gunshot wound. He doubts Jigsaw needs to be crawling around in a pile of pillows and getting twisted up in blankets.
Clint had thought about offering some help, because he knows what it’s like to try to raise his arms and try to wash his hair with a chest wound. But given Jigsaw’s response to getting helped out of his tac gear earlier, Clint had kept his mouth shut about offering any help beyond kitten duty.
He kind of itches to see how Jigsaw’s doing in the bathroom, though. There’s been a lot of silence from his bathroom—to be expected, given that it’s Jigsaw in there—but not a lot of splashing. Sounds more like he’s just standing under the spray.
Lucky has curled up in the bathroom doorway, though, and Clint isn’t about to go check on his roommate, no matter how much he wants to help. Jigsaw has only shut a door between himself and Clint one time—after the hammer incident when he was sulking. And the door is open now, just like always. If Lucky has picked up on the need for a protective barrier, Clint is picking up on it, too.
An open door doesn’t mean that Jigsaw is comfortable with someone in his space, particularly when he’s undressed.
The kitten gets closer to the edge of the sofa, and Clint scoops it up and puts it back in the safe zone, getting a high-pitched squeak of protest for his trouble.
Jigsaw had either lost some time on the quinjet while Clint was taking his body armor off, or had at least been hearing static instead of words. And Clint hated that, hated being the cause of it, the trigger for the dissociation. He won’t do it again. It’s not as critical a need right now, anyway.
Jigsaw probably managed to get the bandaging off by himself, and the shirt as well. He’s in the shower, after all. Getting the mud and blood off his body and out of his hair. Out of his arm.
Clint grimaces. That’s gotta suck, getting mud and worse in the gears or whatever is inside the segmented metal casing of the arm. Maybe that’s what he’s got under the jets, letting the water get under the plates and sweep away the grit and stuff. That’d be better than letting the water pound away at his wound.
Clint has the first aid kit out already, for helping Jigsaw bind things up again as needed. There’s a kit in Jigsaw’s bathroom as well, but just in case. He doesn’t see how Jigsaw’s going to bandage up his back without twisting enough to undo Banner’s stitch work.
The kitten gets a paw stuck in the crack between two sofa cushions and chirps unhappily about it until Clint rescues the silly little thing. At least it’s given up on hissing and spitting. Apparently Clint is now like Jigsaw—a trusted cat adult or something. He runs a fingertip along the kitten’s knobby little noggin. It’s pretty soft. Kind of ridiculously soft. The kitten tries to swat his hand away but otherwise accepts the treatment.
Clint gently wiggles a fingertip along the kitten’s somewhat folded ears. Eventually, it’ll probably have regular cat ears that stand up straight. It must just be too young for that right now. The vet will tell them Monday, if the kitten makes it that long.
It’s several more minutes before the water shuts off in the hallway bathroom. Lucky’s collar jingles as the dog raises its head from its paws.
Okay, so now Jigsaw’s going to come out sometime soon. Might need help bandaging his back. May forego bandaging his back entirely instead of accepting help. Clint tries to remember the details of the last time Jigsaw was injured in the Tower, when they first brought him in. Had he rebandaged anything after his escape from Banner’s bedroom? Had he even needed bandages at that point?
Probably hadn’t needed them anymore. He healed up pretty quickly. Insanely, unfairly quickly. Super soldiers, man.
Clint looks up from the kitten several minutes later at the movement in the bathroom doorway.
Lucky has gotten up and is being petted, his tail swishing happily on the floor. And Jigsaw is…
Jigsaw is barefoot in yoga pants, with a t-shirt in his hands and not on his body. His hair is wet, dripping, not toweled dry. And not combed. He’s bleeding again, but it’s a slow trickle, and the stitches look like they’ve held alright.
He walks around Lucky with a hint of trepidation, and then looks between Clint and the first aid kit Clint has open on the end of the sofa. He signs “why,” which Clint takes as a request for assistance. But just to be sure…
“You want some help getting rebandaged?” Clint asks, because the name of the game with Jigsaw sometimes is to ask for clarification.
Jigsaw hesitates and then nods.
“Sure,” Clint says, picking up the kitten and nodding for Jigsaw to come closer. “You’ll have to hold the kitten, though. It keeps trying to walk off the sofa.”
Jigsaw swallows and closes the distance between them, Lucky plastered against his thigh. He accepts the kitten and raises it to his face to breathe in its kitten smell or something—Clint has no idea—and then rubs the kitten against his cheek like he does with that stuffed shark sometimes.
And the kitten accepts this treatment as well, without more than a bit of squirming. At least Jigsaw doesn’t get his face all cut up from teeny tiny kitten claws.
“Thanks for taking the kitten.”
Clint surveys the kit and opts against using gloves. Sure, he should go wash his hands after handling the kitten, or at least put the kit’s disposable gloves on. But Jigsaw is enhanced and if he hasn’t gotten infected by anything yet, it’ll be fine. No one ever accused Clint of being careful when binding wounds.
Anyway, gloves had been part of the earlier freakout in the quinjet.
Clint sits on the sofa with his knees spread and Jigsaw standing in front of him, and starts on his frontside. Ointment or cream? He settles for the antibiotic spray in the kit, just a quick spritz, and then dabs around the wound with a bit of clean gauze to keep the spray from dripping down. It probably hurts like a bitch, but there’s not so much as a hint of hitched breath, let alone a flinch.
“Sorry,” he says. “I know that hurts.” He presses a bandage to the wound, sticking it on with medical tape.
As he works, Clint tries—tries so fucking hard and fails so miserably—to ignore the raised letters around the wound. A-PIE. Alexander fucking Pierce. So big and so deeply carved that the letters are like a mountain range across his ribs. And there’s an A-LUK, and a D-TOL, and some Cyrillic letters, too, partly written over but still visible. Layers of letters. Clint regulates his breathing to hide his anger.
“Okay,” Clint says. “Turn around?”
He grits his teeth while Jigsaw complies, bracing himself to see the C-BAR across Jigsaw’s lower back. Fucking Cody Barkholt. But also… also Clint Barton. He hates that so much.
The entry wound on Jigsaw’s back is smaller than the exit wound on his frontside, but Clint treats it the same way. Verify it’s clean, spritz of antibiotic, dry the drips, apply the bandage. Gentle pressure. He reaches up and dabs at the water dripping down Jigsaw’s back from his wet hair—gotta keep the bandage dry. Not like he’s petting his roommate with a hand towel or anything.
“I’m going to wrap you up, now,” he says, unwinding some more bandaging. “Keep these in place and all. You mind turning around?”
Jigsaw complies, turning in place while Clint reaches around him to loop the strip of bandaging around his torso a few times. Clint fastens it at the front, on his left side, away from the exit wound but still central enough to avoid irritating the seam where flesh and metal run up against each other in yet another angry mountain range of scarring.
“I can hold the kitten if you want to get your shirt on,” Clint says softly, looking up at his roommate.
And then he’s got the kitten in his hands and Jigsaw has his shirt on again, and Clint is so conflicted. Why is he conflicted? The wounds are bound again and the scars are covered, especially that wretched C-BAR on the small of his back, and the t-shirt is nice and long, pulled down over the rising curve of Jigsaw’s hips and butt so there’s not a chance of it riding up and showing Clint the dreaded letters of his own name etched into his roommate’s flesh.
All of that is good. And Jigsaw’s looking down at him with those goddamned expressive blue-gray eyes so full of gratitude and the bow of his lips pulled into a little smile as he reaches down to take the kitten back, and his hands are so warm as they brush Clint’s, even the metal hand, which should be weird but all Clint can really focus on is the tenderness and gentleness as Jigsaw raises that scrawny little kitten up in his cupped hands to nuzzle against it.
And Clint kind of wonders what it would be like to be nuzzled like that, and— And— Oh. Oh.
Oh no.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t allowed to happen. This is all wrong. He can’t wonder things like this, not about Jigsaw—his roommate—his deeply scarred and traumatized roommate who’s been hurt so badly by so many people and literally scarred by people with Clint’s own initials, and…
This is the worst. He is the worst, even thinking of his roommate like this, whether he acts on it or not.
Shit. Shit fuck. He can’t have feelings for his roommate. His roommate doesn’t deserve to go through the kind of dumpster fire that comes from Clint having feelings for anyone.
Natasha will hit him for this, probably. And good. Maybe she can knock this out of him like she’d knocked fucking Loki out of him.
And preferably before Jigsaw catches wind of it.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 15 September 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
“Your kitten is adorable, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says in greeting. She looks at the kitten and then up at it. “Have you considered what to name the kitten?”
A name. It looks at the little cat in the hands, at the tiny folded triangle ears and the big blue eyes like miniature pools reflecting a cloudless sky. The white fur and the pink nose. The teeny-tiny claws tipping each paw.
Does the little cat need a name?
It looks at the dog. Lucky. The dog has a name. If the dog has a name, then the little cat should have a name.
It shakes the head as the little cat gums at a flesh index finger. It has only had the little cat for half of a day, and it has already failed the little cat.
But it has also rescued the little cat from the mud and the rain, and has fed the little cat from the bottle of formula every three hours, just like the instruction sheet said to do. It has kept the little cat warm, and has brought the little cat everywhere but the shower. The little cat should not get wet unless the little cat becomes dirty.
And it is becoming better at cleaning the little cat with the cotton balls before and after setting the little cat into the tiny tray of clay chunks to eliminate after a feeding. The little cat will not need to be dunked in a basin of water again.
The little cat squirms in the hands and its stubby tail moves back and forth as it scrabbles for purchase to rearrange itself. The little cat wants to explore the sofa cushion, and it does not see any reason why the little cat should be denied.
It sets the little cat down on a thigh and monitors it closely as it teeters along the thigh toward the sofa cushion and then changes its mind and curls up instead, seeking the heat of the body. It settles the flesh hand against the little cat’s back to support it against the body. Maximum heat for the little cat, and no danger of the little cat tumbling off of the thigh. Ideal.
“That’s okay,” the expert without the words says. “There is still plenty of time to think of a name for your kitten.”
She hesitates, and then crosses her legs a different way than before. She is nervous? No, just unsure how to proceed. The expert would never be nervous, not now. If she was going to be nervous, she would have been nervous much earlier, when she first arrived and did not know much about it.
“I’m glad to see that you’ve returned from your mission, Jigsaw,” she finally says. “I’m sorry you got hurt, though.”
It blinks at her. Of course it returned from the mission. What else would it do? And the injury it sustained is minimal, a flesh wound, not even any damage to the bones beyond a bit of chipping as the bullet passed through.
“I’d like to discuss your mission, if you’re allowed to do that.”
It blinks again. She is one of the support team. Of course she is permitted to know the details of the mission and its outcomes. It tilts the head to the side, then nods. No one has said that it could not discuss the mission with the expert, or with anyone else.
“Thank you. I understand there was a mind wiping machine and a cryo tube in the base you and the others raided.” She pauses long enough for it to nod. “How did it feel to encounter these things?”
Bad. It felt bad.
It opens up the binder with the trapped feelings chart inside it. None of the bad feelings really fit. It was not bored—very much not bored, with so much to be done as part of the mission parameters! It had been busy, but not pressured or rushed. It had not been stressed or tired.
Maybe bad is not the right feeling word. It looks at the words on the chart carefully. Successful. Yes, it had felt successful after demolishing the chair with the white electric fire, ripping apart the halo above the chair and pulling cords and wires out. Smashing the electrodes. And aggressive. Hostile.
It points to the words it felt, even though they come from different parts of the chart. Maybe it is okay to feel different parts of the chart at once.
“When you encountered this equipment earlier, in Las Vegas and in Bakersfield, did you feel these things?” Yasmin asks. “Or did you feel other things, maybe in addition to these things or instead of them?”
It had felt threatened before. Nervous and exposed. It does not remember Bakersfield. The missiles wiped the memories away. But in the bank vault in Las Vegas, there had been a fear that it would be ambushed.
It tries to explain. It knows the sign for surprise, and uses that. It is close to ambush. There had been no surprise in the vault, though. Nothing to stop it from blowing the vault up, from placing the C4 and the grenades, from launching the grenade from the gun and triggering the explosion.
It had been ambushed after, though, by the flying man and the robot—the hamburger technician inside the robot suit, it now knows.
There are not signs for all of these things, not that it can use while supporting the little cat on the thigh. It moves the binder to the side and brings the pad of paper to the lap instead. Draws and draws. There is the flying man, see the wings. There is the hamburger technician inside of the robot suit, see the fire coming from the feet and hands.
It is going to be hard to make meaning out of drawings this time, but it tries. Yasmin wants to know how it felt, and to know that, she must know what had happened. So it draws this asset leaping onto the flying man’s back, and then the streetlight with the flying man and this asset, and then the hamburger technician inside of the robot suit chasing it. The tunnels where it lost him.
It had been afraid, then, yes. Also frustrated and angry.
It walks the expert through the encounter, adding the feeling words at each stage, and then at her request draws the base from the last mission, draws the clown man with the star-shield smashing the tube where it is so, so cold. Beating it with the star-shield and knocking over the canisters with the gasses inside that make it so cold.
And the flying man, too, and then the enemy with the blue-light weapons, so much fear. Do not get hit with them, do not look at the blue light, do not think of the other times there has been the blue light—the factory with all the blue light, the cube made out of blue light, the original researcher, the first one, with the round glasses and the round head and the bow tie. Do not—
“Jigsaw,” Yasmin interrupts. “I’d like for you to take a break from this and pet Lucky for a moment.”
It swallows and comes back to the room. The dog’s head is in the lap next to the little cat, and the torso hurts so much where it has been breathing harder than the lung with the holes in it should be made to breathe.
It sets the pen down and rests the metal hand on the dog’s head, rubs behind the dog’s ears. Gives the sleeping little cat a stroke on the head as well. It mrrps once, a little trill from high pitch to higher pitch, and snuggles further into the hinge of its hip and torso.
“Let’s do a gentle breathing exercise,” the expert without the words says softly. “I want to make sure you don’t aggravate your injury, and we should be nice and loose when we’re reflecting, if we can manage it.”
The expert pulls out her phone and this time it is soft tinkly music, each tone distinct instead of blurring together into a single solid sound. There are lots of tones, some high and some low, and a little story of tones starts to unfold.
“This is piano music, Jigsaw.” Yasmin sets the phone on the arm of her chair. “I would like for you to concentrate on each note that’s played and to try to keep the notes separate from each other in your mind as you listen. We’ll breathe in slowly, softly, for a four count, and then hold for a four count, and then exhale for a four count.”
It nods and listens to the music. Breathes the way she has suggested it breathe, noting as it does, the sting of its wound. Rests the hand on the dog’s head and gets the fingers licked for its trouble.
“If it helps, you can close your eyes,” the expert says. “Or, you can keep them open.”
It keeps the eyes open. There is not a threat in the room, but that could change at any moment, and it will feel better if it sees the threat coming in time to stop it from hurting the dog or the little cat or the expert without the words.
After the music, it is time to feed the kitten again, and so it gets the little bottle of formula out of a pocket where it has been kept warm, and fits the nipple onto the top of it. The little cat is eager, rooting around for the nipple almost so passionately that it misses putting the tip of the nipple in the little cat’s mouth. But they manage.
Yasmin looks at it oddly while it feeds the little cat. Her eyes are weird, somehow. Soft. Softer than usual. It does not understand.
“I think naming your kitten would be wonderful practice for you to get used to thinking about people and pets in terms of their names, Jigsaw,” she says.
“And you have a vet appointment coming up Monday, according to the calendar. The vet might appreciate it if your kitten had a name for the appointment.”
It swallows and focuses on holding the bottle so that the formula flows out with ease as the little cat suckles.
It does not know what a vet is, only that a researcher for animals is coming to see the animals, and that the other asset will be there the entire time to make sure that neither the dog nor the little cat is harmed.
“Have you been thinking of me as Yasmin?” she asks.
It nods. It has done so well, thinking of her by her name more and more. It still slips up and thinks of her as the expert without the words, but it is doing better and better with the name. She asked it to. It was homework, even though she had not called it homework.
It always does the homework. The homework is like a daily mission it can accomplish without any support from the team that is not a cell.
The little cat is so fat and round in the belly from the formula. It puts the solid lid back onto the nearly empty formula bottle and bounces the little cat until it hiccups. Then it wipes the little cat’s face with the edge of the t-shirt it is wearing. All clean now. And sleepy. It will need to put the little cat into the tray of clay chunks soon, so that it can eliminate.
She smiles at it. “Thank you, Jigsaw. That makes me feel really happy and accepted. I feel valued as a person when you use my name.”
It nods. It does not understand, but that is something Yasmin is trying to teach it, in her own way. How to understand itself and others. Someday, maybe it will understand what it means to feel “valued as a person.” That is not on the feelings chart. It is a new feeling it is only learning exists today. To feel valued as a person.
“Do you have any concerns about your appointment with the vet on Monday?” Yasmin asks. “I might be able help with them.”
It shakes the head. The other asset will be there to help it protect the dog and the little cat. That is all that matters.
“Alright. Then for your homework this afternoon, I would like for you to bring your tablet instead of your binder to our session at three o’clock. That’s all.”
Notes:
I guess content warning for comic book-style wound care? Don't do this at home wound care? Yeah. le shrug.
Chapter 32: Avengers | Well life will pass me by if I don’t open up my eyes
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 15 September 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
Clint crumples the little lump of foam pellets in his hand and feels the pellets squish between his fingers. Natasha has such cool fidget toys on her coffee table these days. He can’t help but pick up a new one every time he comes over. This one is like kinetic sand, but it’s made out of some kind of weird balls that stick together without being sticky. He has no idea how it works, but it’s fun to play with.
And it’s distracting.
Right now, it’s distracting him from her disapproval.
“But think about what he’s been through, ‘Tasha,” Clint says. Squish squish go the foam pellets. “The only touch he’s ever known is torture and rape. He’s been carved into like a Thanksgiving turkey some newb hacked up with a fancy new electric carver knife until all the meat’s in gross clumps.”
“Clint,” she says, raising up on her toes in one of her physical therapy exercises.
“He doesn’t want to be touched,” Clint continues. Squish. Squish. “He flinches when you think about touching him. He can tell, he can read it in the air and he flinches. Flinches. Like he’s afraid of it and afraid of you for thinking about it.”
“Clint.” Up she goes. Then down. Up and down.
Squish.
“And this is a guy who’s afraid of nothing else,” Clint says. “Marches into enemy territory, knowing what kind of shit they have waiting for him, knowing they have the keys to his brain memorized via google translate, knowing what they can do to him if he slips up for a second.”
“Clint, you’re—”
“‘Tasha, I’m a wreck. I’m a flaming human dumpster fire. I’m the worst shithead boyfriend I know short of being abusive. I can’t put him through a relationship, especially not a relationship with a loser like me.”
She scowls at him. “Clint—”
“I mean, have you met me? I’m the worst.”
“Yes, you are. Shut up.”
He shuts up. And squeezes the foam pellets into a ball before mashing them flat again with his thumb.
Natasha raises up on her toes again and holds the pose.
“I hear you,” she says. “And I agree. Jigsaw has been put through a lot of abuse in his life.”
Clint sighs and slouches down further in the chair with a groan. “I shouldn’t even be looking at him, let alone rooming with him. Let alone sleeping with him. Let alone—”
“Zip it.”
He zips it.
“What I want to know,” Natasha says as she stands on her right foot and swings her left leg in arches forward and back, “is what gives you the right to decide that he’s not interested in a relationship.”
Clint raises his eyebrows.
How could he possibly be interested in a relationship? How could he ever want another person to get that close to him when the only people getting close like that have hurt him, raped him, tortured him? How could he want anyone in his space like that? He’s got the marks of everyone who’s been in his space like that before all over his torso and Natasha thinks he’d line up for just one more?
“Oh, and now you’re quiet,” she murmurs with a smirk. “What makes you qualified to deny him the ability to be interested in you?”
“I’m crap, ‘Tasha. How about ‘I’ve ruined every relationship I’ve ever been in’ for starters?” he asks. “How about ‘I accidentally got divorced on fucking Valentine’s Day?’” he continues. “Remember Bobbi? How about—”
“Do you like him?”
Clint shuts his mouth so hard and fast he bites his tongue. Aw, tongue.
The thing is, he does like Jigsaw. A lot. He just hadn’t noticed how much he liked him, or the way he liked him. Not until Jigsaw was standing between his knees without a shirt on, hair dripping and eyes soft, trusting and vulnerable, depending on him to bandage him up.
He’s liked Jigsaw since back when he was the Winter Soldier. He’s liked the man back when all he knew about him was that he’d been mind controlled and forced to do HYDRA’s bidding using a bunch of Russian trigger words.
And Clint had liked him even more when he was Bucky Barnes. When it was clear he hadn’t just been controlled by a piece of shit fascist organization, but by his actual, literal worst enemies. By the opposite of everything he’d stood for.
And Clint had admired the hell out of him for retaining the core of his personality through over six decades of this kind of mind control trauma, for rebuilding himself endlessly and tirelessly into a razor sharp diamond of vengeance, unable to be broken again. Something the enemy could only ever break itself on in a fight.
Clint had seen a man who loved his dog and cared for the animals he found no matter how gross the animal or how inconvenient the care. Clint had seen a man who protected everyone he ever encountered in the most decisive way imaginable, and who was unapologetically opposed to abusers of all stripes.
Clint had seen a guy who moved like nothing else in this world, who dodged arrows in mid-flight, who persevered through trigger words despite getting literally dropped to the floor by them, who fought off Natasha and Cap at the same time, who jumped off buildings and got up running, who marched into the enemy’s fucking apartment and tore the enemy up when that enemy had its name hacked into his hide.
Clint saw someone fearless in the face of unspeakable horrors, who wouldn’t back down, who survived despite everything and just kept coming back harder and harder to do his self-appointed job of clearing the streets of evil.
And then? Fuck, and then Clint had met his dog. And had seen his wounds. And had gotten to know him. And had seen him when he was afraid, had seen him when his eyes were full or terror while he apologized for running and leaving Clint behind in the gym. And had seen him scoop up yet another helpless creature to save while bleeding from a through-and-through inflicted by someone who should have been an ally, and…
“Well?” Natasha asks. “Do you?”
Clint nods miserably, squishy foam pellets gripped so tightly in one hand that he’s half sure he’ll see their impressions in his palm if he looks down.
“I fucking fell for him, ‘Tasha. I’m the worst.” Clint shakes his head. “He trusts me, and I feel like some kind of predator ogling him while binding his wounds. Like a wolf licking his chops, waiting for the right time to pounce. He deserves way better than a roommate like me. I shouldn't even be allowed near him.”
Natasha rolls her eyes. “So you like him.”
“A lot.” Clint hunches his shoulders. “And it’s not that I shouldn’t, or anything. He’s very likable. It’s that he doesn’t need to put up with my shit. He should be able to exist without someone thinking those kinds of things about him. And—”
“Maybe he wants to put up with your shit.”
Clint laughs, hard and sharp. No one wants to put up with his shit. He’s only bothering Natasha with this because she’s the least likely to let him get away with his bullshit. He’s had relationships as brief as one-night stands and as long as a two-year marriage, and every single one of those has ended up with him getting dumped or divorced for going back on his bullshit.
The one thing they all have in common, all his failed relationships, is him.
“I’m serious, Clint. What if he likes you?”
“He’s not ready for that kind of thing. And he doesn’t know any better, ‘Tasha.” Clint runs his free hand through his hair. “He thinks we’re the same as each other, a pair of assets. He admires my archery. He trusted me to take his tac gear off in the quinjet. And if he knew—”
Natasha scoffs. “What?” she asks. “If he knew what?”
“If he knew I thought he was hot, that I liked the way his body looks, if I thought these things, he’d never trust me again. The only reason the shark thing isn’t awkward, or the sleeping in the same bed and stuff, is because he doesn’t think of me like that. Right? Doesn’t have the social cues, you said. Doesn't know what that kind of activity means to most people. The only reason he trusted me to take his tac gear off is because he thought I didn’t think of him that way. Didn’t look at him and see…”
“See what?” she prompts.
“See a super hot super soldier that I want to get my hands all over,” he mutters. “Alright? He’s hot. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. Before, I liked him for him, and now I think he’s hot. It’s going downhill real fast in the respectability department. And after everything he’s been through. Now he can't even trust his roommate. I'm the worst.”
Natasha stops her physical therapy routine and sits on her sofa, leaning forward with an earnest expression. “I know you’re a big fan of self-loathing, Clint,” she says, “but I have news for you.”
Clint winces, waiting for the news.
“You don’t get to decide whether he wants a relationship with you or if he’s ready for a relationship.” She sits upright. “He gets to decide that. It’s one thing if you don’t want a relationship with him. No one can force you into a relationship. But this is something else. You can’t control his feelings just because you think he's too damaged to have them.”
“I’m trying to protect him, ‘Tasha.” Clint feels the ache between his shoulders and forces himself to relax a bit. “He deserves someone who will treat him right and not think about his ass when he’s walking up the stairs in front of them.”
She shrugs. “Tough. You don’t get to protect him.”
“But I want to,” Clint says. “I don’t want to hurt him the way I’ve hurt everyone else I’ve ever tried to be in a relationship with. Not after everything he’s been through when it comes to…” He looks at the floor between his feet and wills himself to sink into that patch of carpet. “When it comes to physical contact.”
“Intimacy,” Natasha corrects. “When it comes to physical intimacy.”
His cheeks are probably five kinds of red right now. He shouldn’t have come to Natasha’s room to talk about this. He should have just given himself a mental slap across the face and buried his stupid realization in the pit of denial he carries around within himself.
“It’s true that Jigsaw hasn’t had much physical contact that hasn’t been torture or a battle situation,” Natasha says softly. “But he also hasn’t had much physical intimacy at all.”
“And I’m supposed to be a role model?” Clint asks miserably. “Me?”
Natasha shakes her head. “No. But you can meet him where he is, just like you've been doing this whole time.”
He looks up at her. “What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “Well, you know he feels safe enough to sleep in your bed and sit right next to you on the sofa.”
“Right.” And isn't that what's so horrible about his current thought processes? That Jigsaw thinks he's safe and...
“And he felt safe enough to allow you to remove his tac gear in the quinjet. And to bandage his wounds last night.”
He nods. “And that’s why I feel like such a piece of shit wanting to get my hands on him. Because that’s never ended well for him. People haven’t wanted him for good things, ‘Tasha. They’ve always wanted to hurt him.”
“But you don’t. You don’t want to hurt him. You want to show him good things. Right?”
That horrible, wretched C-BAR mark on Jigsaw’s lower back flashes across his vision. His letters. His name. Right there in plain sight, as if he’d branded Jigsaw himself with his own hands.
“I don’t think I have the right to do that. I don’t think he’s interested in ‘good things,’ ‘Tasha. I think he’s too afraid of them. I think the good things will look and feel an awful lot like the bad things to him.”
“Then you offer him things he isn’t afraid of,” Natasha says. “Things that can’t easily be confused with the torture he’s been through.”
Clint sighs. Anything can be torture if the perpetrator is cruel enough. How’s he supposed to be able to tell, aside from the obvious things? Those HYDRA assholes were creative bastards.
“Things he wants,” she adds after a moment.
Clint frowns at her. “What do you mean? What do you think he wants?”
Natasha’s smile is that special brand of playfully knowing that would drive him up the wall except that he senses she’s actually going to share what she knows this time around.
“I’ve seen him watching you in the range, Clint. I’ve seen what he’s looking at. I’ve seen him start to reach for you and pull his hand back like he’s not sure he’s allowed.” Natasha’s smile deepens. “And I’ve seen him look at your hands more than is mere coincidence.”
“My… hands?” Clint looks at his hands, sets the foam pellet clump down, and looks again. Other than the fingernails still growing back on his left thumb and index fingers from the warm welcome the tracksuit mafia gave him, his hands are pretty damn plain as far as hands go.
“I wonder,” she muses. “If I were a HYDRA operative, and I were given license to torture the Soldier under my control, would I hold his hand? Only to break a finger, perhaps. Would I run my hands through his hair? Only to pull it as hard as I could. Would I rest my hand on his shoulder? Only to shove him into a position it was easier to rape him in.”
Clint scowls.
“He’s fascinated by your hands, Clint. And he trusts you not to break his fingers, pull his hair or shove him down. Maybe try holding his hand in yours sometime. Show him the good things. Caress his fingers. Run your fingertips along his metal hand and feel the grooves in it, or along the knuckles of his right hand. Tuck some of that hair behind his ear. Or offer to brush his hair or to tie it back for him.”
Clint licks his lower lip. These are nice things, good things. And it’s pretty unlikely that any of his torturers would have done any of them to him. Not without a vicious follow-through, like she’s laid out.
“Touch him,” Natasha says, “and show him what it is to be touched gently.”
Clint sighs. As if it was that easy.
Natasha
—New York City | Saturday 15 September 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
Clint sighs, and she knew it wouldn't be that easy to convince him. Sure enough, his next words confirm that there's still a barrier to be crossed.
“And if I’m a dumpster fire?” Clint asks, obviously still fixated on his failings. “What then?”
Natasha fights the urge to roll her eyes at him again.
“If you work your way into this slowly enough, it’ll be years before you have to worry about that,” she says.
And they can go at a slow pace for ages, just based on how novel every step of the way will be for Jigsaw. Clint won't speedrun the relationship; he's afraid to even start one. But she can't just tell him that she thinks everything will go well. He's expecting her to agree with him about how dreadful he is as a boyfriend. So...
“And the worst case scenario," she says, "knowing you, is that he’ll have had all that time to enjoy before you fuck it up somehow.”
Because Clint is almost certainly thinking that she agrees that he’ll fuck it up somehow, that that isn’t in dispute here. If she was telling him he’d manage to be a good boyfriend and not fuck anything up, he wouldn’t be able to believe anything else she was telling him. And so she will go along with him to some degree, even though she thinks he can manage this. She won't tell him he has it in him to be a good boyfriend because she needs him to believe her.
Not just because she’s telling him the truth, but because it’s almost painful to watch Jigsaw moon after Clint and Clint not see a damn thing. She’s sure the whole rest of the team is in the know about Jigsaw’s fondness for Clint by now, and it’s not just her. Jigsaw might be a master of many things, but he is not subtle.
Clint managed to make it to the top five things that make Jigsaw happy homework assignment? Right alongside Lucky? Clint manages to keep his attention for hours of archery in the range? Clint manages to get fed tasty morsels of any dish that’s shareable? Clint gets tucked in at night for almost a solid month after being rescued? Clint gets his socks and shoes put on when he could absolutely do it himself with just a little pain? Clint gets to dictate when a target dies and when a target doesn’t die?
Most importantly, Clint gets to touch him in the field, take his tac gear off in the face of the terrifying prospect of medical attention and anticipated medical torture? Clint gets to see him without a shirt on? To touch him without a shirt on? To treat his wounds?
Rogers got his hand broken when he tried to offer comfort, although it’s true enough that was before they really knew Jigsaw or Jigsaw knew them. Everyone else has been given a wide berth countless times, and Clint? Clint gets to stand right next to him in the elevator, gets to sit right next to him on the sofa, gets to share the coveted stuffed shark with him.
Clint’s self-denial and low self-esteem are the only reasons he’s managed to remain in the dark about this for so long. And Natasha isn’t surprised that tending to Jigsaw’s wounds is what opened Clint’s eyes. There’s a kind of intimacy involved in binding another’s wounds, especially given the necessary vulnerability that goes into it.
The proximity would have helped, as well. The act of touching Jigsaw would have sealed the deal. Once you have your hands on something precious to you, it’s hard to deny how precious it is. And Clint is a master at grabbing the precious thing so hard once he does notice it that it slips away. He’s either too aloof and forgetful because he doesn't realize his partner is precious, or he's too clingy and intense. That will be the trick he has to learn, holding the precious thing loosely enough that it feels comfortable staying put on its own.
That's been his pattern, anyway, in the relationships she's been witness to over the years. Clint is a pendulum swinging both ways, and his relationships tend to suffer for it. And she's betting that he knows it, on some level. That he realizes that this is his pattern of caring too much or not enough.
Right now, he’s afraid to hold his hand out for the precious bird to land on his fingers lest he squish that bird by caring too much and trying to hold on too tightly, but the bird has been circling for ages and must be getting tired by now. There's no way Jigsaw will peck his hand and fly away. This time is different. All he has to do is let the bird land, and—Natasha knows, she knows—this bird will do almost all of the work of staying put, no squeezing or grabbing needed.
Could it be a disaster? Oh, yes. With Clint and his penchant for self-sabotage, anything can be a disaster. But something tells her that Jigsaw wouldn’t notice a disaster if it engulfed him, not the Clint kind of “glomp on too hard and squeeze the bird” disaster—Jigsaw wants to be loved more than he realizes and will be hard to chase away.
And not the “forget major holidays and anniversaries and dates” type of disaster where Clint doesn't care enough—Jigsaw doesn’t have any concept of holidays, anniversaries, or dating in general or specific. Or even the “mission took priority again” type of disaster—if anything Jigsaw will ditch Clint for a mission before Clint ditches Jigsaw, and they’re even more likely to accompany each other than to ditch each other.
Clint’s relationship disasters are predictable, and Natasha has seen most of them in action. She’s feeling confident about Clint’s chances when paired with Jigsaw where she saw failure looming in the past relationships. If Clint is a messy disaster zone of a boyfriend, who better to put him with than someone who has no expectations to disappoint?
“Still thinking you get to make his decisions for him?” she asks.
Clint shakes his head. “No, I— No. That’s not how I was thinking about it, anyway. I just didn’t want to hurt him. Don’t want to hurt him.”
“You won’t. You didn’t hurt me.”
“I also didn’t want to get all up in your personal space and make out with you, no offense. I wasn’t dying to know what your lips tasted like.”
She laughs. “None taken. But don’t sell yourself short. You could have fucked up bringing me in countless different ways, and you didn’t. You’re good with broken people, Clint. Unmade people. You’re good.”
"If you say so."
"I do."
If only he’d believe it.
Notes:
Note: Yeah, here we get to see the tip of Clint’s relationship-failure iceberg, starting with his theory of how to protect people by making their decisions for them—something he’d never do except he’s got his stupidity goggles on because it’s about relationships now and when it’s about a relationship, Clint is stupid.
Chapter 33: Jigsaw | I have a name, and so do you (my name is special, and yours is too)
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Names Song” by Sesame Street.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Saturday 15 September 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
It wonders where the other asset is.
The room for assets is empty, just the fish-looking soft thing waiting for it on the sofa. There is no other asset. Usually the other asset is waiting for it, is sitting on the sofa and playing the games in the glowing panel. Is ready to ask it about the time it spent with the expert.
It steadies the little cat on the right shoulder, where the little cat has decided it wants to be right now, and sets the tablet on the table by the door. The dog goes to drink some water from the bowl, and it—
It is thirsty.
That is the feeling it is having. The feeder is working with it on how to feel hunger and thirst, and it is learning that there is real hunger and thirst and remembered hunger and thirst, that the body and the mind do not always agree with each other, that it should try to hear the body more often and not just trust the mind. She will be happy to learn that it felt thirst in the body. In the mouth and throat.
It follows the dog into the little kitchen and pulls down a mug from the cabinet. Fills it with water from the sink. Drinks it down. Gulp gulp.
And then refills it and gulps it down again.
Maybe watching the dog drink just now and helping the little cat drink from the bottle earlier have made it thirsty.
It sets the mug down on the counter. The mug is still clean, has had only water inside of it. But the ballerina woman had explained, once a mug is used, it does not go back into the cabinet, even if all it had in it was water. Once a mug is used, it goes on the counter if it is still clean, or in the sink if it is sticky.
The ballerina woman had said something about mouths making things dirty, but that part hadn’t made sense. How can a mouth make things dirty unless the mouth itself is dirty, slicked with blood, perhaps? Or dribbling saliva or worse through the choking face.
And there is no blood on the mug.
It does not shrug. A shrug would impede the healing and dislodge the little cat.
Maybe the other asset is returning soon. It needs the other asset’s help to find a name for the little cat. The little cat must have a name before the animal researcher comes to see it, and Yasmin wanted it to try to name the little cat for tonight’s homework. It is allowed to have help, though.
Otherwise the name would be little cat. Very simple and straightforward, and accurate. The cat is so little.
It tries to think of where the other asset would be. It is not a time for eating, though it is possibly a time for snacking if it has earned something from the refrigerator. It should name the little cat first, though. That would earn it a snack.
The other asset would not be in the training room without it, or the range. The other asset knows that it likes to be in the training room and the range when the other asset is there, would not deny it. Not until a Sunday when the other asset goes to the range with the auction woman and it is not allowed to go.
The ballerina woman’s rooms are the next likeliest location. It… It is allowed to go anywhere in the hive building, but it must ask before going into personal rooms like the ballerina woman’s. That is easy enough.
It does not know how long it will be there, so it makes sure that the formula bottle is filled up in case the little cat needs to eat, and then picks up the tablet again. The other part of the homework is to use the tablet more. A glowing panel that can travel with it, but one it is encouraged to look into. And the head does not hurt from it yet, today.
The dog follows it out of the room for assets and down the hall a few doors, to the ballerina woman’s rooms. It needs to ask permission to enter, and to do that, it needs to make a noise so that she knows it is outside asking for permission.
So bothersome.
It does not like making noises to ask for permission to come inside. It does not like making noises at all. Not making noise of any kind is the only thing it has been consistently praised for in the before times. It is the one thing every handler-operator-trainer-technician has known that it was skilled at and had not questioned. But this team that is not a cell, and the support team of experts as well, all want it to make noises.
The dog finally whines and paws at the door. It is such a good dog. Knows what this asset needs—to alert the ballerina woman without making a noise—and helps it by making the noise instead.
“Come in, Jigsaw,” says the ballerina woman through the door.
It pushes on the door, opens it, lets the dog in first and then follows with the little cat secure on the right shoulder.
And it was right—there is the other asset, sitting in one of the chairs with messier hair than usual. Maybe the other asset would like to use its comb or its brush. Or maybe the other asset likes to have hair that is mussed with fingers. It is good hair all the same.
“Hey Jigs. Hey Lucky,” the other asset greets them. “Have a good session today?”
It nods. It had to stop thinking and pet the dog three times while trying to find answers to the expert’s questions, but it only needed to do a breathing exercise one time. That is very good. Yasmin was pleased. She said so.
She had wanted to know more about the mission, this time about the quinjet and the travel there and back. About the seats and why it had climbed under them. It does not even know how she knew about that, but she had known—she is an expert, that is how she had known of course—and she had been so full of questions.
Why did it need to be safely stowed under the seats? It is a tool, a weapon, an asset. How else should it be transported than under the seats? It is safer for it to be under the seats, too. There is much less surface area for others to hurt when it is under the seats. It is out of sight and not tempting under the seats. It should not tempt operatives.
How did it feel under the seats? Safe, snug, cozy. There is only a little jostling and none of the operatives had kicked it or tried to step on any part of it. Most of the operatives had ignored it after the first half hour of looks it had gotten. And the other asset had played the game with the Os and the Xs that is not fun at all and has no reward.
What would have happened if it had sat in the seats like one of the operatives instead of under the seats like an asset? It would have been in the way, would have taken up operative space, would have been exposed and vulnerable to any operative who got bored on the flight and needed a distraction.
It has been in the middle of a quinjet on a flight like that. The operatives then had taken away the killing face and put on the choking face, had pushed into the mouth, deep, taking turns until they arrived and its tac gear had been— had been wet with— there had been spit and blood and— and— Even though it was still dressed, even though it should have been safe in the tac gear.
Never again.
Did you think that might happen to you with this team? And that had been a hard question to answer. It had needed to breathe after the previous question, had needed to pet the dog’s ears for a long time and even feed the little cat before moving on, and then there had been this question. And it did not think that this team would push into it—the other asset was right there and would have stopped them from doing it.
The other asset has more power over the others than any asset it has ever heard of.
But it had still been afraid. Even though it did not think that they would hurt it, it had been so afraid that they might. That this was when the operatives on the team that is not a cell would turn out to be operatives like any other team of agents. That this was when the pushing into would begin.
The expert had tried to talk, then, had tried to explain to it that this was normal. How can it be normal to fear something that is not going to happen? How can it know that something will not happen and then still be so afraid that it will happen?
They had not even been able to finish all of Yasmin’s questions. She had had more, it could tell. It would have had to draw things for her about the time after the mission, the flight back with the little cat and the lack of tac gear. The blue gloves, and the basin of water for drowning a careless asset.
It shies away from the thoughts. There are things it needs to do, and it cannot risk getting dragged down into thinking about the bad things. There is a little cat to name.
It watches as the ballerina woman stretches and moves her left leg. Every day, she is more mobile. Maybe someday soon she will be an operative on a mission and not a pilot. Maybe someday soon she will be able to leap and jump again, to strangle with her thighs, to put the bugs on something.
It gives her a thumbs up. She is healing so slowly. It has already pushed out or coughed up the last of the fragments from the bullet that had been shed in the right lung, and it has only been a day. But the ballerina woman has been healing for months. She must need some encouragement.
“Thanks,” says the ballerina woman with a smile that is not entirely happy. “This time next year, I’ll show you how much I appreciate the opportunity to do all this physical therapy.”
It frowns at her and tilts the head into the little cat on the shoulder—mmm, so soft against the cheek. Makes the question sign. It does not understand what she means. Surely she cannot be meaning that she will jump on it again in a year. It taught her not to do that. It thought it had taught her very, very well. Order through pain, as all lessons are learned unless it is trying to teach the dog.
“What, you don’t think I’ll be able to spar with you in a year?” she asks, her voice light instead of challenging. “I’ll show you some moves.”
Oh. She is talking about the weak, pretend fighting that is so fake and pointless. It can safely ignore that.
It goes over to the chair where the other asset is sitting and sinks down to the floor beside the other asset, careful to avoid dislodging the little cat or pulling too hard at the stitches in the front of the torso. Readies the tablet. Draws the dog with the red metal star tag at its throat, and then writes LUCKY above the dog on the tablet. So much easier to point at the letters it needs, already lined up for it, than to create the letters itself.
It draws the little cat next, and a line over the little cat where maybe a name can go. The little cat needs a name to fill in the blank. If the dog has a name, then the little cat should have a name, and not just because this is homework. It is okay to get help with homework.
Up the tablet goes so that the other asset can see it. And down the little cat goes, tiny talons pricking it through the t-shirt it wears as the little cat claws a path down to the lap, but not getting through the skin, especially where the other asset’s bandages form an additional layer of fabric.
The little cat is feeling adventurous, with its stubby tail twitching as it tries to balance itself. The little cat is a fuzzy white contrast against the black of the stretchy soft pants it wears, and leaves little hairs behind on the black fabric.
“You want to name the kitten?” the other asset asks. “We can help you name your kitten.”
Yes, that is exactly what needs to happen. And the ballerina woman can help, too, because they are in her rooms. It is only fair.
“There’s the obvious name,” the ballerina woman says as she sits on the sofa. “Snowball, maybe.”
“That’s too close to Mudball, which is what Stark’s going to try to name it.” The other asset shakes the head. “I kind of think of the little guy as Muddy McGee,” the other asset admits. “Not a great name, though.”
The ballerina woman watches as the little cat explores the lap and then tries to escape to the floor. It is comfortable sitting here, and does not want to have to follow the little cat all over the floor to keep the little cat safe and not lost. It does not let the little cat leave the lap.
“It would help if we knew if it was a he or a she,” the ballerina woman says. “I’d suggest Fluffy or Muffin for a girl cat, but maybe that’s a boy.”
Those are stupid-sounding names, though, and it does not like them.
The other asset agrees, and says so, calls them stupid names and scoffs. They are the same, the same, the same, this asset and the other one.
“Well I don’t hear you suggesting anything, Clint. Except for mud-based names.”
“Snow or something, maybe,” the other asset says. The other asset sounds uncertain. “Frosty? I’ve never named a cat before. So sue me.”
The ballerina woman narrows her eyes, but not in anger. She is just studying the little cat.
“You found the kitten in the Appalachians,” she says finally. “Maybe something like that. Appalachian.”
“I don’t even know how to spell that,” the other asset complains. “And that’s going to be hell trying to type or whatever.”
The other asset is looking out for it, even now, even when naming the little cat. The other asset does not want it to have to type anything too long or too complicated. It also does not know what letters make up that word.
“Anyway, it’s tiny. A big name for a tiny kitten is just mean.”
The other asset shifts in the chair to reach forward for one of the toys on the ballerina woman’s coffee table. The other asset likes those toys as much as it does—something to do with the hands during the silences.
“Something to do with mountains, though,” the ballerina woman insists. “Maybe App, for short. It looks like it could be a little app.”
“App sounds like something on my phone.”
“Alps?”
“Wrong mountains,” the other asset says while squishing a glob of colorful dots together. “Not even the same side of the world.”
The ballerina woman sighs.
It lifts up the little cat and brings it up to the cheek to be rubbed against the skin face. The little cat mrrps at it and licks the cheek with a tiny sandpaper tongue, so different from the dog’s tongue. Then the little cat is struggling to be put down again and it complies.
“I’m still thinking white, snow, mountains. But not Alps,” the other asset adds. “Alps is stupid. And anyway, didn’t that whole train thing happen in the Alps? With Bucky? Probably better not to go there.”
It scowls. It is not the bucky. They will not name the little cat after the bucky.
The ballerina woman shrugs. “What about Alp ine , then?” she asks. “That has to do with snowy mountains but not the actual Alps. It’s short and cute. Unisex. The kitten can grow into it.”
The other asset looks down at it with a question written in the eyes, and then there is a clearing of the other asset’s throat and the other asset looks away.
“How, uh, how do you like that for a name, Jigs?” the other asset asks. “Alpine? Lucky and Alpine?”
It holds the tablet out to the other asset, with the setting to the rows of letters for the other asset to choose from. It knows the shape of the first letter, but not the rest of them. How will it know how to write or type the little cat’s name if it does not know the letters that are needed to make the sounds of “alpine?”
The other asset takes the tablet and taps a fingertip against the surface, and then hands it back.
Oh, ALPINE. Right above the drawing of the little cat, on the line it drew. It studies the letters, the shape of them. It will be able to write this, or type it, with some effort. It knows the letters now. It will not forget the little cat’s letters.
“And maybe this for a name sign,” the other asset says, making an A-shape and moving it in a jagged upward slope. “It’s kind of like the sign for ‘mountain,’ but with an A for Alpine.”
It nods. The other asset is so good with names. And name signs. And all of the signs, even the ones that are for communicating and not for naming. It is very fortunate that the other asset has helped it with the naming of the little cat.
It nods again, happy. Homework accomplished. And the little cat is now ready for the animal researcher to come and look at it.
“Aww,” the ballerina woman says. “Little Alpine. What a cute name.”
It thinks so, too. In this, they are the same.
Chapter 34: Clint | I want to hold your hand
Notes:
Chapter title from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles.
On the one hand, work is hellishly busy and life is hectic and this is a bad thing. On the other hand... extra chapters as stress relief. I'm torn, haha! I can't keep this up indefinitely without any writing time, but anyway, have another chapter!
Chapter Text
—New York City | Saturday 15 September 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“What a cutie!” Zoe coos, her face scrunched up in a smile. She holds a hand out, but doesn’t actually move into Jigsaw’s space. “May I pet your kitten, Jigsaw?”
Jigsaw nods and extends the sleeping kitten cupped in his hands. His movements are fully back to the smooth swanlike grace of before the mission and his gunshot wound, at least for that limited range.
Clint knows it still hurts, though. Jigsaw hasn’t asked him to change the bandaging, but he’s also avoided anything that would give him a reason to need to be rebandaged. And there’s a tension in his expression, in his eyes, at the furthest extension of his arms. And Jigsaw trusts Zoe, maybe even more than he trusts Yasmin, so it’s not that he thinks she’ll hurt Alpine.
“Oh,” Zoe says softly, stroking a fingertip along the kitten’s head and face. “What’s the name?” she asks.
Clint catches himself before answering. Zoe isn’t talking to him. He might be here for some of these speech language therapy sessions, but the sessions themselves are all about and focused on Jigsaw. It’s important that Jigsaw be responding to questions and practicing his communication. That’s the whole reason they flew Zoe in from wherever and set her up with a room in the Tower.
Jigsaw pulls the kitten back and sets it in Clint’s lap instead of his own, leaving him free to pick up the tablet and swipe back to his drawings of Lucky and the freshly named Alpine. He shows her the picture and then frowns. A few seconds later, he makes Alpine’s name sign, the A-shape moved in an upward stepped sequence just like a mountain.
Zoe smiles and nods. “An excellent name. I’m sure your kitten will grow into that name.” She sits back in her chair across from them.
“How did you do with communication during your mission, Jigsaw?” she asks. “Did you encounter any difficulties?”
Jigsaw nods. He swipes back to a drawing of his face mask, with KILLING FACE still written over the top of it—and hopefully Zoe won’t object to that.
“I can see how that would prove difficult to communicate with,” she says. “Did anyone assign that mask to you, or did you choose it?”
He holds up two fingers, letting her know it’s the second option, that he chose it, and Clint smiles. Chose it, ha. He’d insisted on it, had been downright belligerent about it.
Zoe nods. “Why did you choose to wear something that would hide your face, Jigsaw?” she asks, her tone neutral and curious rather than accusatory. “We’ve talked about how important our faces are for communication.”
Jigsaw lifts his left shoulder minimally, but doesn’t seem to have more of an answer to offer.
“Is there a reason you might have wanted to hide your expression during a mission?”
Jigsaw blinks.
“Hm. I’ll make a note in your file so that Yasmin can go over this with you, alright?” Zoe does so, just jotting down a few words. “Are you thinking that you’ll wear this on your next mission?”
Jigsaw hesitates, but ultimately nods. He taps the KILLING FACE words above the mask, even though he’s supposed to be avoiding lethal blows on missions.
“Then let’s discuss some ways to get around the mask for communication with your teammates while in the field.”
Just like that, Clint muses, they’re right into problem-solving mode, and just accepting that the stupid killing face has to be there. Zoe isn’t challenging its existence or its use or even its name. She’s just helping get around the self-imposed obstacle.
Why not remove the obstacle? Clint will never get it, but it’s not about him. He’d tried removing the obstacle, had tried arguing for just goggles. He’d gotten nowhere and they hadn’t communicated even a little bit in the base itself. Total lose-lose situation. Maybe Zoe has the right of it. Who is he to complain about her methods if the result is that they can communicate better in the field?
Because there’ll be more missions, and if Jigsaw feels safest in his full-face mask, then maybe it’s fine.
He ends up helping iron out a kind of semaphore system of hand and arm positions that can be read from a distance and understood to mean various messages in the field. It’s not perfect, but it won’t be perfect until it’s been tested and polished a lot. Maybe they can do some testing and polishing in the gym as a team.
He wonders how HYDRA used to communicate in the field. They must have. Right? Or maybe they were just very specific in their pre-mission briefing and made use of any misunderstandings to heap on punishment afterward.
He knows how STRIKE operated. Comms in ears, frequent communication within the team, everything. But Jigsaw wouldn’t have been able to talk into the comms, hadn’t known any sign language to use, wouldn’t have been able to draw attention to himself in the field. He was supposed to be a secret.
There probably had been signals he knew to look out for, silent black ops stuff, like STRIKE excelled at across all teams. But it’s probably for the best that they’re coming up with fresh signals. Means there isn’t much chance of Jigsaw getting confused about which kinds of missions he’s running, what sorts of things he can expect from the rest of them, all of that.
Because he’d expected some kind of abuse in that quinjet after they cleared the base and came back. Hell, maybe he’d only been after a fled HYDRA operative as a means of delaying the inevitable outcome of his injury and the subsequent trauma of whatever the STRIKE field medic might have had in mind.
Clint doesn’t know what they’d have done to him, though. Maybe they’d have dug the bullet fragments out instead of trusting his enhanced physique to push them out like Banner had said would happen. Maybe they’d have… Clint doesn’t want to go there. Doesn’t want to think that even HYDRA STRIKE assholes would have beaten him for daring to get injured. Or that they’d have been turned on enough by a fucking bullet wound to even be able to get it up.
But they were sadist psychos, weren't they? They’d had what it took to hack letters into him while raping him, or between sessions. Why wouldn’t they get turned on by an injury like that?
Clint grits his teeth and drops his eyes to the kitten sprawled out on his lap. He strokes its round belly and its little paws. Anything to chase the thoughts of his own attraction out of his head.
Because hadn’t he been turned on while bandaging Jigsaw up? Hadn’t he seen the scars, felt the scars, pressed bandages on the wounds, seen the fucking C-BAR there… and then immediately thought Jigsaw’s eyes were pretty and his lips were kissable and his torso was shaped perfectly under that snug t-shirt?
Does he have any right at all to so much as look at the man? To think he’s so different from the others who have looked at him and deemed him fuckable?
Clint wishes he could go back in time and undo his stupid fucking brain’s bullshit discovery of his roommate’s actual physical form. He feels like he’s noticed Jigsaw's lips before last night, and it hadn’t been a bad thing. He’s not blind; he’s Hawkeye!
He should have made Jigsaw sit at the kitchen table while he sprayed some antibiotics and plastered some bandages on him. It was a mistake to have Jigsaw stand between his knees. It was a mistake to look up into those eyes. He… hell, it had been awkward when Jigsaw put his socks and shoes on a couple of weeks ago, but Clint had somehow managed not to know why it was awkward to have his feet in Jigsaw’s lap like that and his roommate looking at him through his lashes.
Now… if he ever needed that again, he’d be in big trouble. Just the thought of those warm hands on his feet, cradling his heels in the palm of his hand. And Clint doesn’t even like people messing with his feet. And that doesn't even include the way Jigsaw was looking at him.
“Clint?” Zoe is asking. “How does that sound?”
Oh for fuck’s sake, he swears at himself. Get it together, Barton.
“Must have spaced,” he says apologetically. “Come again?”
“Would your team be willing to make themselves available to go over these communication options before your next mission?” she asks again, not seeming to mind repeating herself.
“Uh, yeah. Probably. Don’t know when the next mission is, but…” He shrugs.
Zoe smiles. “If your calendars are all up to date, I’ll be able to coordinate a meeting for us.”
“Right.”
Clint doesn’t even have a calendar. Does he? Is there a calendar somewhere with his appointments on it? Because if there is, he doesn’t know about it.
It’s probably JARVIS, keeping track of his shit. Maybe keeping track of everyone’s shit. That’s convenient. Creepy. But convenient.
Clint has seen people eat bell peppers. They cut the things up into strips and dip them in ranch. Or they cut them up and cook them. Or they cut them up and dump them on salads.
Apparently they can also just eat the things like they were hollow green apples. Crunch crunch.
Strangely, it’s not off putting when Jigsaw takes another huge bite out of the outer wall of the current bell pepper and licks his lips before chewing.
Clint would have thought watching someone devour veggies like this would be kind of gross, but it’s kind of hot instead. Damn his brain. Everything’s different now that he’s actually seen his roommate’s lips and jawline and all that. Those lips are moistened with vegetable juice, and Clint still finds himself looking at them like maybe they’d taste pretty good.
He’s such a creep. Can’t even let his roommate eat in peace.
Clint sprays a bit more cheese goop from the can onto a cracker and shoves it into his mouth. Post-session evening snack time has apparently become fraught.
Clint focuses on the crunching of kibble as Lucky snarfs his dinner down. Alpine has already gotten a full bottle of formula, been burped, and been to the tiny litter box, plus a thorough cotton ball cleaning session. Every little nook and cranny of that kitten got the cotton ball treatment, soft and gentle, and persistent even when the kitten wanted to play instead of getting a cotton ball bath.
Yeah, remembering Jigsaw with the kitten is definitely something safer to focus on than Jigsaw’s jaw working on alternating bites of bell pepper and that creepy arm-long white carrot of his.
Jigsaw hadn’t even scowled at his slim jim tonight. He’d been too excited to cut up a fist sized knob off of the end of his weird daikon radish.
Hands. Jigsaw likes Clint’s hands. Natasha had said it, and when it comes to observations like that, Clint trusts her entirely. Clint can use that. Hands are way more approachable for opening volleys. Way better to try to hold hands than to stare at Jigsaw’s lips and jaw.
Kissing… oh, man, that would be so invasive. Jigsaw probably doesn’t remember kissing anyone back when he was Barnes. And Clint doesn’t think even the most twisted of the HYDRA assholes would have kissed him. Why would they have? Surely they all knew they were hurting him; why would they have done something as gentle as kiss him? So Clint going in for a kiss is going to end badly, and asking first will just confuse Jigsaw. Better just put that thought back on the shelf for later. Way later.
Holding hands, though. How the hell does someone even go about doing that? Jigsaw is using his hands. He’s holding strips of white radish thing and hunks of cheese, now that the pepper is gone, seeds, stem and all. And he needs his hands to talk, or to write stuff down. Or even just to gesture.
And to hang onto Alpine sometimes now, too. The kitten is fast asleep in a little shoebox lined with towels and a warmed bottle of water. But when it wakes up again, Jigsaw’s going to be all hands on deck again.
Lucky alerts them to company at the door before there’s a knock, though probably Jigsaw had heard their company approaching, too. Clint isn’t sure just how good Jigsaw’s hearing is, just that it’s a hell of a lot better than his.
It’s Wilson and Cap at the door, coming over to walk Lucky a little later than normal. And maybe it’s just that Clint had been thinking about hand holding, but somehow the universe has decided he needs an example because for just a moment, before Wilson reaches for the leash, Clint sees that the two of them are holding hands.
Wilson and Captain America. Holding hands. When did that happen? How did Clint miss that? It can’t be a new thing. Not a new-new thing. Cap isn’t blushing even a little, or acting awkward or aw shucks about it, or anything like that. He’s actually looking casual.
When did that become a thing?
Oh, and they’ve brought something with them, too. Cap is wiggling a long, thin stick with some kind of red and purple feathery blob on the end. With a bell. Jingle, jangle, with each swish of the stick. It’s kind of like a gaudy feather duster.
“We brought Alpine a toy,” Cap says while Wilson clips the leash to Lucky’s collar. “Maybe they’ll grow into it?”
Clint accepts the toy, gives it a wiggle. Looks kind of… well, he’s never had a cat. It looks like Lucky would chew the feathers off in two minutes flat and proceed to choke, but maybe cats are different.
“Thanks.”
Jigsaw comes up to join him at the door and adds his own thanks via sign before presenting a pair of white radish sticks like particularly thick steak fries made of out of raw vegetable.
“Is this that daikon radish?” Cap asks as he accepts a radish stick. “Thanks. I’d meant to ask how that had turned out.”
Wilson accepts the second piece with a tight smile that says he’s not really in the mood to put a radish in his mouth but is going to do it anyway.
“Nice,” Cap says around his bite. “That’s really nice. Refreshing.”
Wilson just nods, chewing with more reservation.
Jigsaw looks pleased with himself, his lips curled in a little smile and his eyes bright.
Maybe there should be some kind of vegetable appreciation club for super soldiers. Maybe Banner would like to join it. Maybe Clint can chill out elsewhere during club meetings, hang out with Wilson and Lucky, maybe trade stories about what it’s like to hold hands with a super soldier.
If Clint ever figures out how to get that ball rolling.
“Thanks for sharing your radish with us, Jigsaw,” Cap says. “We’ll be back soon with Lucky. Enjoy the wand toy!”
Then they’re off, Wilson holding the leash in one hand and Cap’s hand in the other, like it’s totally natural and not at all a challenge to overcome.
“Want to wake Alpine up and wave some feathers in their face?” Clint asks. Because what else would you do with this long-distance feather duster thing?
Jigsaw takes the toy—another missed opportunity for brushing fingers together—and inspects the feathers carefully. He wiggles the wand.
There’s a little chirping mew from the shoebox on the floor by the kitchen table, and Clint guesses they don’t actually have to wake the milk-drunk little muppet. That kitten heard the bell and is all about that. Maybe it’s a cat thing.
Alpine makes it over the edge of the shoebox with a bit of a tumble, and shakes it off before tottering toward them with that little triangle tail wagging in the air.
Clint is thinking they’ll scoop the kitten up and put it on the sofa again, maybe with the two of them guarding either end of the sofa and the kitten in the middle. But Jigsaw meets the kitten before it can get that far and sinks down to the floor in front of the kitten to be climbed on instead.
It’s… adorable.
What is with him? It’s “adorable?” Clint never used to find things adorable anywhere near this often. Now he’s finding things adorable what feels like left and right.
But he stands there for a solid two minutes watching that kitten climb his roommate and try to get the feathers, watching his roommate’s shoulders shift under that t-shirt—and maybe Natasha should have gotten Jigsaw thicker or looser t-shirts that didn’t show off his shoulders as much—and just generally being a creepy ogler.
After a few minutes, Jigsaw looks over his shoulder at Clint and holds out the wand toy, which Alpine promptly tries to smack, falling over in the process.
Clint comes over to join them, getting down on the floor much, much less gracefully than Jigsaw despite not having a though-and-through chest wound. His ribs aren’t even hurting him anymore, so there’s no excuse for feeling like a rusty tin man getting down on the ground.
He accepts the toy and gives the kitten’s nose a dusting with the tips of the feathers. So this is what you do with cats, instead of throwing balls or sticks, or playing tug-of-war with handy ropes. He can see it getting boring really quickly, but somehow it doesn’t.
The kitten is an absolute klutz. Makes Clint look like beauty and grace incarnate by comparison. Every so often, the kitten will just fall over for no reason Clint can see. Will just trip over nothing and roll over onto its side with its paws in the air like it doesn’t know how this has happened to it.
And Jigsaw will reach forward with his metal hand and wiggle his fingers in the kitten’s belly fur, and the kitten will glomp on like it's trying to hide a football from the opposition, tucking all four legs around Jigsaw’s fingers and trying to gum at the metal. Then the kitten will try to go for the feathers again, like it hasn’t had a tumble or spent half a minute getting very familiar with a couple of metal fingers that could crush concrete without effort.
But Jigsaw would never hurt the kitten, Clint knows. He’s gentle with every movement he makes, like that arm of his wasn’t made for the express purpose of being, as his red instruction manual calls it, the “fist of HYDRA.” So much for a fist. So much for HYDRA.
“Hey,” Clint says after a while. “You want to come with me tomorrow and meet Katie-Kate?”
He probably shouldn’t be inviting Jigsaw to his meeting with Kate, but Kate probably wouldn’t mind the company, and Jigsaw had looked pretty out of sorts last Sunday when he had to stay away from Clint and the range for over an hour to make sure he wasn’t seen by anyone and didn’t interrupt the session Kate had paid for.
Clint doesn’t want his roommate to feel out of sorts.
Jigsaw makes the sign for archery and asks his question sign.
“Yeah. We’re just going to be shooting some arrows in the range. I’m teaching her.” Clint accepts the wand toy back for his turn with the kitten and lures the kitten off to one side with it.
“You’d have to wear the glasses so she doesn’t think you’re someone you’re not,” Clint says, “and you’d have to keep to the back of the range, out of the way. She’s not a great shot at this point, and safety is important.”
Jigsaw nods, looking enthusiastic. Clint gets the feeling he’d enthusiastically agree to any number of conditions if it put him in the range to finally meet Kate.
“Lucky stays here,” Clint says. “And Alpine, somehow. Might have to get Natasha to watch Alpine.”
Jigsaw signs OK and looks very proud of his fingers for cooperating with him to form the two letter shapes in a row like that.
“Awesome job,” Clint says. “You’re getting really good at that.”
He hopes Kate doesn’t feel self-conscious with a silent watcher in the range. She probably won’t. It should be okay. And if it isn’t, he’s not opposed to calling it a freebie meeting and giving her nine hours total instead of the eight she bought at the auction.
He wonders what it would be like to teach Jigsaw archery. Imagines standing beside him in close proximity, getting all up in his space and moving his feet and hands into proper placement and grip, maybe rearranging his fingers on the bow.
It would be totally and completely different from what he’s doing with Kate, for one thing. He’s teaching Kate by example, showing her with his own bow and arrows, correcting her form verbally. Very hands off.
And really, if he were going to teach Jigsaw, he’d have to use the same technique. He can’t just slide into Jigsaw’s personal space the way Jigsaw sometimes slides into h— Oh, shit. Clint swallows, clears his throat, and swallows again.
Jigsaw is constantly invading his personal space.
How did he not notice that? Or how did he notice it and completely misinterpret it?
Maybe Jigsaw really does want to hold his hand.
Chapter 35: Tower | Try to solve the puzzles in your own sweet time
Notes:
Chapter title from “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree.
Whaaaaat? A fourth chapter this week? >_>
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
“Sure,” she says slowly as she lifts another slice of toast from the stack in the middle of the kitchen island. “I can take Alpine for the morning.”
She looks between Clint and Jigsaw. Clint’s dressed up nicely for his meeting with Kate Bishop again, and Jigsaw…
Natasha narrows her eyes. Jigsaw is wearing a purple turtleneck that hides his throat scarring and most of his metal arm, and perhaps more tellingly, he’s wearing his glasses.
“You aren’t supposed to go with Clint to meet with Kate, Jigsaw,” Natasha finally says. “I know it’s tempting, and I know you want to spend time together, but she paid for a one-on-one session with Clint.”
“I said he could come,” Clint says around a bite of sausage. “I invited him.”
She shakes her head. “That doesn’t mean it’s alright for him to go. She paid for your time, Clint, not your time with Jigsaw. The Hawkeye show, not Hawkeye and friends.”
And it’s too early for any of the public to see Jigsaw up close or for extended periods of time and possibly make any connections, either to Bucky Barnes or to one of the various killers Jigsaw has been in the past. Bishop is both smart and educated. It’s a combination that means she might put things together and have the resources and skills needed to do the research to back herself up.
“If Katie-Kate minds, we’ll go back to one-on-one and I’ll give her a ninth hour to make it up to her,” Clint says. “Come on ‘Tasha. It’ll be fine.”
Jigsaw points to his glasses and nods. His plate is currently full of peaches and cottage cheese, the latter of which he’d been unsure of at first but had quickly taken to, but he adds a piece of toast smeared with a thick layer of jam.
She should try to put a foot down about this, even though it’s not really her place to say whether this is allowable. That would be up to Pepper, and Pepper has made herself scarce in the wider residential areas of the Tower since the hammer incident, even keeping away from the main kitchen if she thinks Jigsaw might be in the area.
Natasha isn’t sure Pepper would make a ruling at all in this case, instead preferring to avoid Jigsaw.
It hasn’t been a problem so far, mostly because there’s very little reason for Pepper and Jigsaw to interact in the first place, but it would be nice if she could spend some more time with Pepper in the Tower at large. They could have a girls’ happy hour, she and Pepper and maybe the therapy team. Some wine, maybe a trashy movie, tapas, talking.
“I’ll take Alpine,” Natasha says. “And I won’t make a fuss if Kate doesn’t. But.”
Natasha raises a finger for emphasis, and is mildly amused when Jigsaw, at least, focuses on her fingertip as though it will be making the point for her.
“If this goes bad, I will have told you so.”
She serves herself one more spoonful of eggs and then pushes the serving bowl toward Clint. “If she recognizes him, it’s going to be your fault.”
Clint moves the eggs over in front of Jigsaw, who obligingly eats the rest of them without bothering to put them on his plate.
“It’ll be okay,” Clint says. “You’ll see.”
“Hm. When was the kitten fed last?” Hopefully she won’t have to figure out the bottle method of feeding a pre-weaning kitten. She’s sure she could do it, but it looks so messy when Jigsaw does it, and Natasha would like to avoid getting sticky kitten formula everywhere.
“Right before we came for breakfast,” Clint assures her. “Alpine’s fast asleep, all milk drunk and happy. All you have to do is keep the kitten from getting into the gaming stuff and biting cords or whatever. Or getting lost under the sofa, I guess.”
Jigsaw mimes waving a stick.
“And there’s a wand toy Wilson and Cap bought. You can play with it.”
“Alright,” she agrees. “I’ll stay in your front room with Alpine and Lucky. And I hope nothing goes wrong, but…” Natasha sighs. “I just think it’s a bad idea.”
“Noted,” Clint says. “I’m the king of bad ideas. They all seem to work out in the end, though.”
Jigsaw finishes his plate of peaches and cottage cheese and moves it out of the way. He offers Clint the last slice of toast, and then offers it to her. When she declines, he happily sticks the triangle of toast into his mouth with a crunch.
“The turtleneck looks nice,” Natasha offers after a few minutes. “And the glasses. Very distinguished.”
He blinks at her like he doesn’t know what to do with the compliment, and maybe he doesn’t.
She hasn’t seen him wear anything that covers his neck like that before now, other than his tac gear for the mission they ran a couple of days ago, though she made sure he had plenty of high-necked options when she bought him his first ever closet’s worth of clothes. He’s since acquired more of Clint’s shirts, but it’s nice to see him in one of the ones she bought him.
The question in her mind is whether he’s wearing it because it’s a chilly gray day outside and he wanted to feel cozy, or because he’s instinctively covering the LI scar on his throat to make himself that much less recognizable. Similarly, are the long sleeves because he was feeling the dreary weather, or because he doesn’t want the red star on his arm to identify him to Bishop?
She doubts he’ll opt for gloves on top of the turtleneck, so Bishop will at least know that he has a metal hand. But this way, he might manage to look relatively unlike his Red Star Killer and D.C. Slasher aliases. And unlike the Winter Soldier, though she hardly expects him to think Kate Bishop would know of that figure out of the ghost stories of the intelligence community.
“Good luck with your meeting,” she adds.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 9:45 a.m.—
The auction woman is young and eager, with her long hair tied back in a high tail behind her head and her glasses big and bug-like, with a tint in the lenses. Her heels seem to bounce when they hit the ground, springing her upward with every step as though she cannot wait to move forward.
Everything about her says that she is a perfectly intent student, a willing learner who looks forward to every lesson, impatient to stockpile all of the knowledge made available to her. She will be in good hands with the other asset.
And the other asset deserves the respect she will show.
But she is also trouble. She will step further than she should, will test boundaries, will strain to move forward before she is ready to do so. The other asset will have such full hands trying to wrangle her.
“Clint!” calls the auction woman when she is only barely within normal human hearing range, despite the other asset’s sub-optimal hearing. She waves an arm over her head as she half-walks and half-skips down the hallway toward the range doors. So excited.
The other asset waves back with considerably less energy. The other asset also does not waste energy yelling down the hallway. The other asset is practical like this. There is an entire hour of time in which the other asset and the auction woman can talk. There is no need to start as early as possible, before it is mutually comfortable to talk.
“Who’s this?” the auction woman asks halfway down the hall. “Is this another Avenger I just don’t know about yet? One of the new ones, like the Falcon?”
The other asset waits until the auction woman is right up next to them to do more than smile in long distance greeting. The other asset has a wonderful smile, very warm and full.
“This is Jigsaw, my roommate. He doesn’t talk, so don’t expect much conversation,” the other asset says. It looks as though the other asset is having a thought that this whole meeting was poorly planned. “Jigsaw, this is Kate Bishop.”
“Jigsaw?” she asks. “Well that’s a name.” She thrusts a hand out toward it. “Kate,” she says while it looks at her hand.
What… does she expect now? People might shake hands like this, but it is an asset . It has nothing to put into her hand, even if she was holding the hand out palm-upward, which she is not. Anything it put into her hand would just slide out of her sideways palm and fall onto the floor.
The other asset makes a throat-clearing sound. “Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to shake your hand, Katie-Kate. Sorry. He’s kind of a hands-off sort of guy like that.”
“Oh.” The auction woman withdraws her hand and instead clasps her palm and fingers around the bow slung across her chest. “Well, hi, anyway. You know you look so much like Bucky Barnes? It’s kind of uncanny.”
The other asset winces behind her back.
“You’re like if the ghost of Bucky Barnes put on glasses and grew hobo hair.”
It does not know whether it likes this auction woman. It is beginning to lean toward not liking her.
“Why don’t we get started, and you can show me what you’ve been practicing?” the other asset says, and gestures toward the range door. “Jigsaw won’t get in your way, Kate. He just wanted to come watch today.”
Yes, it wanted to come and watch. The other asset is a creature of beauty and power in the range, and it will take every chance offered to it to observe the other asset’s form and figure during the archery.
It nods and slinks past the other asset and the auction woman so that it can go inside the range and climb to a suitable perch from which to observe.
The auction woman will also be good to observe. Not because it expects that she has any skill at this point, but to assess how the other asset’s training is beginning to settle onto her. It will be another aspect of the other asset to observe, a secondhand version of the other asset’s form to admire, perhaps.
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
Hawkeye has a roommate.
She looses another arrow into the target, and takes a moment to appreciate how much closer it is to the center with her mentor’s latest tip. Hawkeye is her mentor! Eee!
And in a Tower this big, with this many rooms, Hawkeye has a roommate. It isn’t like they have to share. There’s plenty of space for them to each have a whole set of rooms all to himself. So if they’re sharing a room—or a set of rooms, probably—then it’s because they want to.
She has had plenty of roommates because of university policies and convenience, and she would never voluntarily have a roommate after graduation. Roommates are loud and gross, they steal your ice cream, and they borrow your favorite top only to give it back with holes in it or a big old stain down the front.
She doesn’t need to live with someone to have a social life; she gets out plenty, even if most places in the City are still kind of on edge from the Chitauri attack. She doesn’t need to live with someone to afford her living space; she has a stipend in addition to her trust funds, and it more than covers the cost of living. She doesn’t need to live with someone for the security of it; she’s well-versed in self-defense and can take care of herself.
There’s no way Hawkeye needs a roommate for any of those things, either. He’s by far the most approachable Avenger, lives all expenses paid in Avengers Tower, and can take care of himself, even if she could swear he’d seen better days when she first met him.
This Bucky lookalike is wearing purple, but the turtleneck fits well enough that she’s pretty sure it’s actually his shirt and not a borrowed shirt from Hawkeye. And Jigsaw might be gross or he might not be gross—she has no way to tell—but he’s definitely not loud. The ice cream theft is also up in the air.
Maybe Hawkeye is doing Jigsaw a favor? Maybe Jigsaw can’t live on his own for some reason. Maybe it’s the whole “doesn’t talk” thing. Maybe it’s the hobo hair—maybe he actually is coming in off the streets and just cleans up well. Maybe it’s got something to do with the metal hand.
Because that is definitely a metal hand, and really finely jointed, too. Almost definitely a StarkTech prototype. Maybe Jigsaw has a weird fake name like Jigsaw, and hobo hair, and glasses he’s not used to wearing, and a super high-tech prosthetic hand because he’s an actual charity case Stark is working on and Hawkeye took him in as a roommate to keep him off the streets while they work on the prosthesis?
Hawkeye is deaf, and if Jigsaw doesn’t talk, maybe that works out okay. Maybe Jigsaw signs and Hawkeye understands him, and so Hawkeye was the best bet for someone to kind of take care of Jigsaw.
It really is uncanny how much this guy looks like Bucky Barnes, though. She’s got an eye for faces. She can still easily recognize someone when they’re wearing contouring makeup or stage paint or whatever else they use to look like someone else. For theater or a movie—and probably for nefarious purposes, too, like the CIA or something.
And if you take off his glasses and cut his hair, this guy doesn’t just look like Bucky straight out of the history books. He is Bucky straight out of the history books. Right down to the dimple in his chin and the pout on his lips. Maybe he’s a relative. Maybe the Barnes genes are just really strong and he’s inherited every last one of them.
She’s not stupid. It’s gotta be something. He’s obviously not Bucky Barnes back from the dead or anything. Even if Captain America crawled out of the history books and looks exactly the same as when he last had his picture taken during WWII, that doesn’t mean Bucky Barnes is coming back, too. That’s too much of a stretch. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
Anyway, Barnes died falling off a train in the Alps. Everyone knows that. Sure, no one found a body, but it’s not like he was a super soldier the way Captain America is. No one would survive that. And Captain America only survived the plane crash because of the serum. There was only ever the one serum that worked. She knows her history. A failed serum produced Red Skull. A successful serum produced Captain America. And then the scientist responsible got shot. End of story, except for Banner and the Hulk and the giant pink monster. The Abomination, she thinks.
But Captain America would have wanted to get in touch with the Barneses when he was finally done with all the Chitauri stuff. And he must have found one of them, living on the streets, missing a hand, maybe a vet. Probably a vet. Look at how stacked this Jigsaw guy is under the shirt. And they bundled him up to the Tower, put a new hand on his arm, gave him some glasses and no haircut, and nicknamed him… Jigsaw?
That part, admittedly, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Jigsaw isn’t a name, it’s a power tool. Or a puzzle type. Or a guy from a trashy slasher series. Not something you’d want as a nickname, anyway. Unless it’s a military thing.
Oh well. Ultimately, it isn’t any of her business. Except in one way. And that is: Hawkeye has a roommate.
She imagines how cool it would be to be able to spend all that time with Hawkeye, to just come watch him shoot arrows any time you felt like it, to maybe go out and get food together. Hang out together. Drink beers together. Watch movies together.
Jigsaw is so fucking lucky.
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 11:15 a.m.—
That was not a complete disaster.
He’s not sure why that's surprising to him, other than the fact that if Natasha thinks something’s a bad idea it usually is. But while Kate had definitely recognized Jigsaw as looking just like Barnes, she hadn’t insisted that he was Barnes. Just that he looked like him.
And she’d stayed focused on the archery once they’d gotten started instead of getting distracted. Jigsaw’s presence hadn’t seemed to bother her at all. Kate is a roll-with-the-punches sort of person.
And Jigsaw’s presence hadn’t bothered Clint either, once he got immersed in the lesson. At first, sure, he’d felt Jigsaw’s eyes on him at every turn and it had been a little… He’s not sure what. Not nerve-wracking, exactly. It hadn’t made him feel nervous or anything, but it had made him want to show off a little.
But how do you show off when teaching someone, anyway? Teaching is supposed to be about the student and making sure they’re comfortable and understanding what you’re trying to get them to do, not about being a bigshot expert yourself. He remembers learning to shoot arrows from an absolute tool of a man who had been all about himself. It was kind of accidental that Clint had picked it up as well as he had.
Clint might be a real shit show in life, but he’s determined to be a better teacher than Trick Shot Chisholm. It’ll help that he’s not running extortion rackets on the side. Man, the circus life had been interesting in all the bad ways. Kate won’t be learning all the bad habits Clint learned, though. She’ll just be learning archery, and for what he’s gathered are pretty good reasons. So it’s all good.
All Jigsaw had really contributed to the meeting was a series of thumbs up signs whenever they took a break from shooting to assess Kate’s progress. And Kate hadn’t been insulted by Jigsaw’s thumbs up of encouragement throughout the lesson. She must have been able to read the sincerity in his praise, and it was nice that he’d felt the urge to encourage her. He knows what it can be like to be on the receiving end of some of Jigsaw’s stonier brands of silence.
Clint thinks maybe they’d get along. Kate had suggested brunch for next week’s meeting, after all, and had indicated she meant for all three of them. Who suggests brunch if they don’t want to spend time with people? Brunch is one part breakfast, one part lunch and three parts socializing over mimosas. Plus, sleeping in because breakfast is so fucking early.
Jigsaw hadn’t had a reaction to the brunch idea—clearly doesn’t know the term or he would have—but Clint thinks he’d have been amenable to bringing muffins and juice to the range, if food and drinks were allowed in.
He imagines the three of them parked in the hallway noshing on muffins and maybe some other brunch goodies. Probably better to do that at a table. But then there’s the question of whether to take Kate somewhere else inside the Tower, which is not within the auction terms, really… or taking Jigsaw to some kind of restaurant, which is way, way worse of an idea than the other.
Clint’s supposed to text her back later this week and let her know. He has a feeling it’ll be muffins in a common room and then some archery in the range. Because actually meeting her at a restaurant for brunch… That’s a big ordeal. Jigsaw had done pretty well at the grocery store when surrounded by his food therapist and two Avengers. At way too early in the day, when the grocery store was practically empty.
A restaurant, though… Clint can see that going bad at every angle.
Lots of people there at brunch time, so lots more people to recognize him, potentially. And he’d be signing or drawing on napkins or using a tablet at the table—or all three. That’s just going to draw more eyes. Can’t just slap a hat on his head and call it extra disguise, either, because people might look at him wearing a hat at a table in a restaurant.
And menus. He knows Jigsaw knows what a menu is, and has a somewhat grasp of how to use one. He got those burgers in Cleveland off a menu, and he’s read all of the menus in the living room. But ordering food at a restaurant can be kind of tricky, and what if he wants three different meals at once? That’ll draw more attention, again.
And Kate doesn’t need to observe all of this, anyway. She’s bought some of his time for archery, but that doesn’t mean she needs to be privy to Jigsaw’s issues with food or experience of a restaurant for the first time. Getting burgers to eat outside is not the same as going to a New York brunch spot and sitting at a table with a guest.
So yeah. Muffins in a common room. JARVIS can make sure he has some nice choco chip muffins, instead of anything gross and health-foody.
He guesses that’s a date, then. Just has to clear it with people first and then text Kate to come to the Tower and they’ll do brunch in instead of out. And since it’ll be brunch, Jigsaw will have already eaten a big breakfast, so maybe he’ll eat a normal amount of the brunch and not get Kate suspecting that they starve the guy or anything.
Chapter 36: Assassins | Sing of good things not bad (sing of happy not sad)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Sing” by The Carpenters.
Hoping to get back to my "Sunday and sometimes Wednesday" posting pattern this week, instead of my "Sunday and eh, I'm having a crap day also" posting pattern, haha! Here's hoping the days this week agree to be normal days and not crazy ones. ^_^
Oh, and a minor content warning in end notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
Playing with a kitten is a lot more fun than she had worried it would be. Kittens are tiny little things that get into trouble, she’d thought. They chew on cords and electrocute themselves. They fall off of things and maybe don’t land on their feet as well as they later learn to. They run into things and make messes everywhere.
And this kitten is special. If anything happened to it in her care, Jigsaw would never forgive her, she’s sure.
But Alpine is a fuzzy, clumsy delight of a kitten. Still working on stability when it walks, trying to pounce when it can barely manage to keep its balance, and just generally being a wiggly tailed moron of a cat, but in an undeniably cute way.
And it likes the feathers and bell on the end of the wand toy. Pounce, pounce, flop. Little baby jumps that land it no further forward than it started out. Swipes that send it off balance and teetering to the side.
And lots of sleeping, too.
Like right now. She’s got the TV set to a nice opera—volume down low—and Alpine is fast asleep in her lap, belly up and limbs limp.
Natasha rubs a fingertip along the kitten’s belly and touches each of its paws in turn. JARVIS had relayed some kitten advice while she was pet-sitting. It’s apparently a good idea to get them used to being handled, so that when something does go wrong with them, you can give them medicine, or inspect them for damage, or even just trim their claws.
It makes sense. She wonders whether Jigsaw will ever trim this kitten’s claws, though. He might see it as a bad thing, some form of disarming it. And she can’t see Clint doing it. Too much of a hassle. Natasha might end up being the resident claw trimmer. And given how cute this thing is, she might not even mind it.
Way better than a pet fish.
Lucky lifts his head from his paws and looks at the door a moment or two before it opens. He gets to his feet and goes to greet his returning people, looking like they’ve been gone for days and he’s only now been reassured that they’re alive.
Jigsaw sets his glasses down on the table by the door and then lets the dog lick all over his face in greeting. Clint’s a little more reserved, going in for a head pat and a rub behind the ears. But the two of them are definitely dog owners, paying more attention to their furry companion than to the woman who’s been watching over said furry companion for over an hour.
“Welcome back, boys,” she eventually greets them. “I take it disaster didn’t strike after all?”
Jigsaw looks up from where he’s crouched in front of Lucky and gestures at his face before frowning.
“The glasses didn’t do the trick?” she asks. “She thought you were Bucky?”
Jigsaw nods and then comes over to see to his kitten.
Natasha hadn’t expected a pair of glasses to serve as a perfect disguise, even with the longer hair. But it’s still too bad that the first instance of extended contact with the public had led to recognition. She’ll have to ponder the options for disguises again. She still doubts he’d accept the limited visibility offered by a hat’s brim. And a photostatic veil, while forming a perfect disguise, is not comfortable to wear.
Natasha scoops her hand under the kitten and lifts the little fuzzball up to hand it off to Jigsaw.
“Ugh,” Clint says as he glances at the screen. “Opera? ‘Tasha, why?”
She smirks at him. “I’m trying to teach your pets about classy viewing material. It can’t be cake and video games fulltime.”
“So put on a real show.” Clint flops down on the sofa next to her. “‘Hospital of Passion’ is probably on. JARVIS?”
JARVIS confirms the show’s schedule but does not change the channel on the TV.
Natasha smiles triumphantly. “Someone appreciates taste in this Tower,” she says. “So really, how did it go with Bishop?”
Clint shrugs. “She’s picking up archery about as fast as we thought she would, given her fencing and martial arts. She’s a quick study. And really good with faces, unfortunately.” He pauses. “She wants to do brunch next week.”
Natasha blinks. “And you told her no, right?”
Clint hesitates. “I told her I’d text her?”
“Clint,” Natasha says. “Do you really want to eat brunch with her?”
“I mean, no. Not just with her. Jiggy’d be there, too. She included him in the suggestion. And no,” he adds. “I’m not thinking we’re all three going to go off to some restaurant and try some mimosas. Jigsaw’s not up for that. We’d have to clear it with Caroline first.”
“And Rogers,” she says. “And S.W.O.R.D., probably. A mission with all of us there to ensure that things go well is a very different beast from a restaurant with civilians everywhere you look and a civilian you’re mentoring sitting across the table from you.”
“He did okay with the grocery store. Except for the scarecrows. Stupid Halloween decorations.”
Natasha frowns. “He’d been there with Caroline, who he trusts, and Bruce, who he sometimes fears, and you, who he agrees not to kill for.”
And he had been distressed by the Halloween decorations. Not to the point of harm, but there’s no telling what kind of stimulus might be present in a restaurant that could trigger a response in him that draws unwanted attention at best and might end in someone getting hurt.
Pepper and the Stark Industries public relations manager might be able to hide a murder in the Tower construction areas, but there’s no hiding a thing if Jigsaw happens to spot a HYDRA agent at a brunch bar. Not that she thinks there will ever be a repetition of the hammer incident, not after Clint’s talked with him about that specifically. But there’s no sense in taking chances.
“Yeah,” Clint admits after a bit. “Okay. I mean, I see it. I was thinking we’d end up eating muffins in the Tower or something, anyway.”
Natasha supposes that’s the better option, though the best option would be to keep their meetings strictly to archery training. The best option includes not bringing Jigsaw along for the meetings, too.
Natasha would be happy to spend time with Jigsaw and the animals every Sunday morning for a while, instead. They could put another puzzle together, maybe, or she could get in some more succulents and they could make a little garden of them. She still has to populate that new set of backless shelves she bought for her front room.
Jigsaw could help her. Alpine could sleep in a box while they worked and avoid getting into trouble.
She looks over at the chair where Jigsaw has settled with his kitten and half expects to see him nuzzling his cheek into the kitten’s fur. He’s actually watching the TV instead, with an expression on his face that’s downright mournful, the kitten in his lap asleep and forgotten.
Natasha frowns. It’s true the opera is a tragic one—most of them are, at least to some degree—but he can’t possibly understand what they’re singing about. Not with his language processing issues, and not after only a handful of minutes. So it’s not the soprano’s tragic singing about her own in-progress death by poison. It’s something else.
She wonders what’s wrong.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
The little cat did so well while it was gone with the other asset meeting with the auction woman. Sleeping so peacefully, not even waking up when transferred from the ballerina woman’s lap to her hands to its own hands. Not getting into trouble or the ballerina woman would have said, would have explained.
The little cat is so warm and soft, so pliable in the hands, flopping this way and that like a piece of soft fabric. The little cat sleeps so deeply. It is struck by the desire to squeeze the little cat oh so gently, to bring the little cat up to the skin face and just rub the cheek against the little cat until the little cat starts to wake up enough to make the rumbling noise in its throat.
That is called purring, according to the other asset, and is a good sign. The little cat will purr when it is happy, when it is content, when it likes what is happening to it. Right now, the little cat is too sleepy to purr, but soon it will be time to feed the little cat from the bottle again, more formula, and then the little cat will purr and purr, so rumbly and happy.
And the little cat’s paws will move in tiny squeezing-grabbing motions—kneading, like bread, the other asset had said, though it has never squeezed bread like that or seen any squeezing of bread. It likes when the little cat does that, when the little cat kneads like that. It is another sign that the little cat is happy.
The dog has the licking and the swishing of the tail and the perking of the ears to show that it is happy, and the little cat has the purring and the kneading. Different innocent creatures with different happy signs to watch out for, to try to make happen as much as possible so that the dog and the little cat get to be as happy as possible.
And the other asset has a red-cheeked smile that seems to be a sign of happiness as well. And throat clearing. There has been more throat clearing of late. It thought perhaps the other asset was becoming ill, and it had had sleeping images of a tiny little man with blond hair being very ill and coughing and clearing his throat, but it had not been the other asset at all. The hair was a different color of blond in the sleeping images.
It runs a fingertip along the little cat’s belly, still so plump and round compared to the rest of the little cat. The little cat is a study in opposites. Scrawny and thin and angular in the legs, like it is made of sticks and will fall apart in a breeze. Round and soft and plump in the middle, like it is full of warm stuffing. And so sharp in the talons, the claws, all those tiny daggers that stick out and catch on things.
It is glad that it found the little cat. Glad that it was able to rescue the little cat and bring it to the hive building to live here. It can comfort the little cat and make the little cat happy, can feed the little cat and clean the little cat, and now play with the little cat.
So soft. So warm.
And there are the tiny trembling vibrations as the little cat wakes up enough to realize how happy it is, and to start to purr. Just a little. The little cat is not yet awake enough to put much effort into the purring.
It can still hear the purring, though. It is much softer than the noise coming out of the glowing panel.
It wonders what is in the glowing panel now, that the ballerina woman was looking at and listening to before they returned from meeting with the auction woman.
There is a woman in the glowing panel, and a group of other women standing in the background. Their mouths are open, so open, and the noises that come out of the panel, the sounds that are softly entering the room for assets…
It is beautiful.
The other asset’s games in the glowing panel have music sometimes, music that goes with a level or that follows what the little man in the glowing panel is doing. Chimes for coins collected. That sort of thing.
And Yasmin’s phone makes music, too, when they are in their sessions and it is time to force the body to relax after a stressful barrage of thoughts has battered at it relentlessly. Sometimes blurry music, sometimes “piano” music that has distinct “notes” it can follow.
But this is different. This is… This is not a chime for a box with a coin in it or a little string of notes coming out of a phone. There are… words. It cannot understand them, but they are clearly words.
This is the opposite of the voice without a mouth that haunts the hive building and speaks without lips or a tongue or a throat. That must not be listened to.
Because there are mouths in the glowing panel. The women have lips and their mouths move, and their chests heave with the effort of making this music with words, the sounds that are so beautiful.
They did that, in the glowing panel. Are doing it still, taking turns and overlapping and sending out a stream of words it cannot understand but that are somehow not just words but also music.
The woman in the front of the glowing panel collapses onto a sofa and the other women on the glowing panel gather around her, making the music with their mouths, and then the glowing panel is full of fabric, billowing and covering over the women and the sofa and everything, and the sounds are over.
They made that sound. The women in the glowing panel. They made it deep inside their ribs, beautiful and perfect, and then sent it up out of their throats and out of their mouths. These are the beautiful voices that have mouths. The throat hurts when it hears them, the throat remembers—
—something.
The throat remembers something.
But what?
It cannot make those sounds. The lungs can gather in air, hold it inside the ribs and send it up through the throat, but there will not be noise-sound-voice. There will be no beautiful music, not coming out of the throat, this throat, its throat. This throat does not make those sounds. Cannot.
This throat is not for that, is not for making beautiful sounds. It is for other things, for choking and burning and pushing into. It is for swallowing down the reward before anyone can take it away again. It is for bringing the reward back up when it has not earned the reward after all, has not done well enough, has failed.
But the throat remembers something.
And the throat hurts.
The throat hurts, closes up, clamps down on nothing at all, because it remembers something it cannot do and has never done and wants desperately to do again.
“Jigsaw?” the ballerina woman asks, her voice as soft as the voices coming out of the women’s mouths in the glowing panel, before the fabric came down and the panel stopped glowing.
“Are you alright?”
It… it…
The dog has joined it, it notices now. Has put its head on the thigh, is huffing softly, sending warm air onto the sleepy little cat.
It shakes the head. It is not alright. The throat hurts and the eyes hurt, and the whole chest hurts, deep and sharp but not the way its wound had felt when it was fresh. It hurts, though. Like there is something lodged inside it that cannot get out and that is too big for the available space. Something that is not physical like a bullet or a blade, something that is harmless but that hurts so bad.
The room for assets is blurry because of the liquid gathering in the eyes, and it can blink all it wants but the liquid keeps gathering. It cannot look away from the panel that is now dark, that no longer sends out beautiful voices from beautiful mouths.
The throat remembers something and the chest is full of something, and it does not know what.
“I turned it off,” the ballerina woman says. “You don’t have to do any screen time right now. It’s okay.”
But it wants the music back. The beautiful voices. The throat had hurt to hear them, and the chest had felt tight and full like it would burst, but the voices had been so beautiful and…
It does not know what the throat had remembered but it feels like if it could just hear the voices with the mouths again, if it could listen for longer, maybe it would be able to remember what the throat remembers.
It pulls one hand out from under the little cat, gets a mrrp in response, and puts the free hand on the dog’s head. It feels the gathering liquid in one of the eyes spilling over. The tear down the skin face. The other eye is still so full, but not to overflowing.
“I feel you, Jiggy,” the other asset says. “Opera really does suck that bad.”
The ballerina woman gives the other asset a look that is full of disapproval, and then looks back at it with concern. “Is it what they were singing about?” she asks.
It does not know what they were… singing… about. That is what they were doing, that is what the beautiful music made out of voices is called. Singing. It… does it remember that? Did it already know that without knowing it? It has never heard anything like that before.
But the throat remembers. The ears do not remember, but the throat does.
It swallows and feels the softness of the fabric at the neck rub against the skin of the throat. The throat remembers.
It knows that it does not talk now. Cannot. Cannot make sounds with the throat, even when it screams. It knows that it is silent, always. But the throat remembers.
It feels a loss thick and hot and all-encompassing. It has heard what was stolen from it. It had not known, but now it does. It does not remember what belongs inside the hole, only knows the outline of the hole and can only guess at what was once there inside that outline.
The second eye spills its tears down the cheek, and the hand grips the thick fur at the dog’s neck with the fingers, feels the softness there and the warmth. The acceptance of what is without the demand for what could be.
The throat remembers, and it knows loss.
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw has a sad here and there is some reference to prior HTP events.
Chapter 37: Therapists | We were looking for an echo (an answer to our sound)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Looking for an Echo” by Ol’ 55.
Happy mid-week y'all! ^_^
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
She’s glad to see that Jigsaw has another element of emotional support added to his collection. The kitten—now successfully named Alpine, she’s pleased to learn—is a good place for him to pour his protective and nurturing energy. She has no objections to that. She does wish, however, that her toughest patient would pour a little of that love into himself.
“And how is your wound healing?” Yasmin asks. “You don’t seem to be moving as stiffly as you were yesterday.”
Not that “stiff movement” has any connection to Jigsaw except by comparison to his usual liquid movements. She’s surprised she’d been able to see the change, really. Even injured, he’d moved more smoothly than she does on a good day.
Jigsaw nods and gives her a thumbs up. He raises his right arm to show her his range of comfortable motion and then resumes his original position, right hand resting on the sleeping kitten in a towel-lined shoebox by his side.
“That’s good.”
It’s better than good. It’s a miracle, or rather a super soldier serum result. Still borderline miraculous, in her book. She’s glad he doesn’t have to suffer for weeks with limited mobility. It would be a vulnerability her patient would find unbearable, and the fewer stressors, the better.
Of course, his rapid healing means that his mind and emotions might not be able to keep up with the healing. Sometimes it’s best to take even good things like healing slowly enough that they can be processed.
“How was your meeting with Kate Bishop?” she asks.
Jigsaw see-saws his hand. Then draws on his tablet for a moment before showing her. There’s a picture of a face with glasses and long hair, labeled with a J, and a picture of a face with short hair and no glasses, labeled THE BUCKY. He has added an equals symbol between them.
“I see. She thought you looked like Bucky?” Yasmin isn’t surprised. A pair of glasses and a different haircut is not that much of a disguise. “How did that feel?”
He scowls, and she’s so glad they’re working on unlocking the intensity of his expressions in his communication sessions with Zoe. He’s getting so good at being in touch with his emotions and then allowing those emotions to be observed by others.
Contrasting today's quick and open responses to her questions and the stony expressionless silence of her earliest sessions with him makes her feel like they should have a celebration soon to mark his progress.
She keeps her smile to herself, though. He wouldn’t appreciate it if she smiled in response, and might even take it as teasing. Instead, she makes a note in her journal to discuss with the rest of the team. They should be able to find a way to celebrate that is not stressful for Jigsaw.
He’s hit so many milestones. Using his tablet more and more often. A trip to the grocery store. Identifying his feelings accurately and without protest or rejection of those feelings. A mission with his team. Thinking of her by her name. Naming his kitten. Accepting medical treatment while conscious enough to have the option of rejecting it. Sharing his snacks. Eating with part of the team in the dining room.
He’s doing so well.
And now he’s using his dry erase marker to circle all sorts of anger feelings on his laminated feelings wheel. His stony expression while doing so doesn’t mean that he’s feeling anger now, though. He’s merely remembering his feelings. Lucky usually responds when Jigsaw is actually feeling intense emotions.
The dog might not be trained as an official service dog, but he might as well be one. He picks up on Jigsaw’s emotions when they are strong but not yet overwhelming, and his response of nudging his nose and head onto Jigsaw’s lap has proven invaluable to her when those emotions do get tangled up inside.
Usually, she can follow Lucky’s cues and prevent Jigsaw from getting swept away in negative memories. And when she doesn’t catch it in time to prevent it, Lucky is a powerful force toward calmness and feelings of safety, and can help bring her patient back to the present before does much more than dig his fingers into the tops of his thighs.
“That was really upsetting,” Yasmin says when Jigsaw shows her his marked up feelings wheel. “You didn’t like that she thought you looked like Bucky. How did you respond?”
Jigsaw gives her a thumbs up. Then he draws a figure with a ponytail shooting arrows into a target, and gives the drawing a thumbs up as well.
“You praised her for doing well with her archery lesson?” Yasmin confirms. When he nods, she smiles. “That’s a really good way to respond,” she says. “Not letting her comment dictate how you responded was good. You were able to feel what you felt and then move on to other things.”
He smiles at her.
“I’m proud of you, Jigsaw.” Yasmin makes a note in her journal. “Many people would have found that really hard to do. Good job.”
She allows Jigsaw to enjoy a moment or two of praise, enough time for it to sink in but not enough time for the silence to concern him, and then turns their session back toward what they’d left off with the last time.
“I’d like to discuss the seating on the quinjet again, if that’s alright with you.” Yasmin pauses. “As well as what you had expected before getting your wound seen to during your mission. But before we go there, is there anything you would like to bring up?”
Jigsaw frowns at her and then swipes to a fresh screen on his tablet. He stares at it for a moment before beginning to draw.
Jigsaw very rarely has ideas or topics to bring up in their sessions, but when he does, Yasmin finds the topics to be well worth the discussion. She watches as he draws out what’s on his mind.
There’s a border around his drawing that looks a bit like a television, and inside of it are a figure on a sofa and a group of figures behind the sofa. They all have open mouths. Then he writes LI and points to his throat, tapping his metal fingers against the rich purple of his turtleneck. He shakes his head and then points to her phone by her side.
Yasmin nods, taking in the details of his drawing and actions. The marks on his throat, LI, she’s familiar with. She’s seen them every day for a while now. And shaking his head while indicating his throat might mean his inability to speak. The figures inside the box she assumes is a television screen have their mouths open. Speaking, perhaps, in contrast to his not speaking.
Her phone, though… Speaking and not speaking. Phones. Speaking on a telephone, perhaps. Except that he is pointing at her phone specifically and hasn’t drawn a phone instead. She’s never spoken on her phone in front of him. Has only ever used it to show him pictures or to play music or a meditation sequence for them to follow.
So, open mouths, speaking and not speaking, music. Singing, then.
“I’m understanding that you want to discuss singing,” Yasmin finally says. “Did you listen to someone singing today?”
He nods and looks at her phone again. Then at her. He types out MUSIC on his tablet, and then VOICE. He points at his throat and shakes his head.
“I can find some music with singing for us to listen to some time, if you would like. Not today, though.” She pauses. “Is that what you wanted to request or is there more to your topic?”
She doesn’t want to move him along before he’s ready, but they can listen to music later.
Jigsaw points to his wrist and indicates movement backward. So, before. In the past.
“Did you sing, before they hurt your throat?” she asks, keeping her tone light and avoiding pity.
He hesitates, and then nods before adding a “why” that makes her think maybe he’s unsure. He signs “remember” and then shakes his head.
So he can’t remember if he used to sing or not, but he’s recently heard people singing on television and is thinking about it. She imagines that he used to sing. A lot of people sing, even if only to themselves in the car while stuck in traffic. And given when the surgeries were likely done on his throat, “before” would have been during WWII or before he shipped out.
Yasmin can see him singing, yes, or at least humming while worked. The biographies of Steve Rogers don’t mention singing, but they do mention dancing, and that Steve had not needed much help learning his USO choreography. He’d danced plenty before the serum, courtesy of going on double dates with his roommate and close friend. Bucky. Jigsaw. Who must have loved music and dancing if he managed to drag little Stevie Rogers out for dancing on the regular.
And now he’s seen and heard people raising their voices in song and been harshly reminded of his inability to do the same.
Yasmin holds in a sigh. The world has been so cruel to this man.
“How did you feel listening to the singing?” she asks.
He lets out a soft breath, and holds his throat with his right hand. With his left, he signs “hurt” and “pain,” and then traces his fingertips down his face from his eyes to the bottom of his chin.
“You cried,” Yasmin says. “It hurt and you felt sad. Is there something you can think of that would help you enjoy listening to music like that?”
He shakes his head and looks at her with a hopeful little expression that twists her heart.
“Did you enjoy the music even though you felt sad listening to it?”
Jigsaw nods and points to the drawing of the singing figures in the television. He signs “beautiful” and looks wistful.
“Hm. I think for homework tonight, I would like you to listen to some more singing, alright? We’ll look for ways to enjoy the beauty without feeling the pain of what you are missing.”
Yasmin leans back in her chair after Jigsaw has finished collecting his tablet and his shoebox full of kitten and has taken off for his room.
This time the kitten hadn’t woken up to demand either playtime or formula, and so Jigsaw hadn’t needed to take the time to feed the greedy little creature.
Not that Yasmin would have minded. Jigsaw has demonstrated that he’s invested in his own treatment to a great enough extent that a few minutes of distraction here and there are absolutely inconsequential, and Alpine is an adorable ball of fluff easily worth being distracted by.
She’s not surprised that Jigsaw is still afraid of Bruce, particularly considering that he has recurring nightmares about various “researchers” over the years who have tortured him in the name of science or “fun.” From what she’s gathered in discussion with the rest of Jigsaw’s support team, Bruce has all the hallmarks of one of these researchers as far as Jigsaw is able to see him.
He’s soft spoken, a scientist, has medical expertise, and serves an auxiliary role to the team. His voice might be remembered from an earlier, unanesthetized surgery while Jigsaw still saw the team as an enemy. Bruce is a researcher in fact, though, not a sadist wearing the guise of research to cover up his depravity.
Jigsaw knows that on a logical level. He’s admitted that to her. He knows that Bruce won’t hurt him, that Bruce wants what is best for him, that Bruce even likes him.
But while she remains unsurprised by Jigsaw’s remaining fear of Bruce, Jigsaw himself is baffled by the fear. And frustrated by it. He doesn’t understand why he is afraid of something that he knows won’t happen. And he doesn’t like being afraid.
It will take so much time to get beyond the fear of a dreaded researcher, though, when Bruce remains a researcher. Divorcing Bruce from the role of researcher is the first step to removing the fear. As with Yasmin herself, moving beyond the assigned role being played and seeing the person instead will be necessary.
So now they will see how well Jigsaw does at thinking of Bruce as Bruce. And specifically not as “the researcher with the curly hair.”
She smiles.
She’s certain, just from her interviewing with Bruce, that Bruce would vastly prefer being thought of as a researcher who happens to have curly hair than to be thought of as a researcher with a giant green Hulk trapped inside of him, or worse, just as the Hulk.
But they’ll still have to move Jigsaw away from these descriptors and toward names. Seeing people as people instead of roles will also help him start to see himself as a person and not the role of “asset” that he’s been assigned for so long and clings to out of a false sense of security—for if he is not an asset, then what is he? What role does he play? The unknown can be so terrifying.
So his homework for this evening is to listen to singing. She hopes he will enjoy it this second time, and perhaps experience less emotional pain from the sounds of others engaging in an activity he can no longer join them in.
His longer term homework is an expansion on his earlier “think of me as Yasmin” assignment, which is still going well. Think of Bruce as Bruce. And by extension, try to think of others by their names. Lucky, Alpine, Clint.
She’s certain he will have difficulty with the assignment. He might not even be able to accurately explain his assignment to his roommate. But she has every faith that he’ll diligently work on it.
She doesn’t think a day has gone by in Jigsaw’s life where he hasn’t put his whole self into whatever challenges have been presented to him.
Yasmin finishes writing her notes and looks at her watch. Plenty of time before her next telemedicine appointment. She replies to a few emails, sends a meeting invitation to the rest of Jigsaw’s support team, and eats a small snack.
Then it’s time to pull out her laptop, put the “in session” sign on the door, and get back to work. Her other patients don’t have nearly as much to work through as Jigsaw, but they deserve her full attention just as much as he does.
Zoe
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
Half an hour before her last client of the day arrives. Plenty of time. She eats the last of her carrot sticks and tidies up her eating space.
Eventually, Caroline plans for them to eat with Jigsaw during sessions, an effort to reinforce the notion that a snack can be eaten whenever needed by whoever needs to eat it, and that eating in front of others is a natural part of socializing. Also, that a snack can be a small thing, just a few bites to tide you over until a meal.
She hasn’t made the official request yet, so Zoe has taken care to remove evidence of snacking before Jigsaw arrives. She only has a limited amount of time with him, and doesn’t want to spend it trying to regain his attention after he’s been distracted by her food. Especially if it isn’t yet within Caroline’s plans.
Tonight, they’ll go over his homework from Yasmin, the music. Talking about his feelings around the music, talking about different kinds of music. There’s a new level in Jigsaw’s matching app courtesy of Tony’s expedient work on the tablet’s programming. Just a few short hours, and he’s already delivered a whole new level.
She anticipates an emotional session, listening to clips of music and putting them into different categories based on various criteria.
Jigsaw knows the process well, and had enjoyed the turtles and tortoises level of this app. He liked putting things into categories even if he struggled to recognize the categories into which the items needed to be sorted. Identifying the unique features had been easy with his eye for detail, but actually communicating those tiny details had been quite a challenge. Naming the categories in order to place things into them was as much of a challenge.
But they are making progress. Better, they are making progress in this area without him consciously applying the progress to other areas. It’s coming instinctively to him in those other areas, so he doesn’t seem to realize they are working on those areas at all. This helps ensure he doesn’t get overwhelmed.
Signs that are similar to each other are gaining more distinction in his mind. He’s having an easier time distinguishing K and P, G and Q, hand shapes that are the same but rotated. And it’s helping him with the mirrored D and B in their lowercase typed forms, and P and Q and G in lowercase as well. Soon, she will be able to give him lowercase word searches with—she hopes—minimal frustration on his part.
This client responds well to gamification, but only when those games are not presented as being fun or enjoyable. At first, she had thought it was purely a vocabulary issue, focused on the word “fun,” in particular. But she’s come to understand that Jigsaw is wary of all things that are enjoyable without purpose. He seems to fear that if there is no stated purpose then there is a secret, hidden purpose that he will find painful.
So she has Tony working on the games, the puzzles, the word searches. And she makes sure that all of the activities she does with Jigsaw and assigns him to do on his own are enjoyable for him. But she also explains what the desired outcome is. There is a purpose. Her methods have clinical support and have been documented by those who developed them. Even with damage as significant as Jigsaw’s, there will be—eventually—progress.
And if he needs to see the path in order to trust that there is not a hole along the way for him to tumble into, how is that different from anyone driving at night? People need to see the map in order to trust the directions sometimes, and she doesn’t begrudge him that. Especially since he doggedly does the work once he trusts that there isn’t a trap ready to spring shut around him.
Zoe hopes that their musical adventure won’t present a trap for him. She has a variety of music for them to listen to, both instrumental and vocal. She has carefully listened to all of it, checked the lyrics to ensure there’s nothing triggering in the words used or the tone. She’s as sure as she can reasonably be that nothing will go wrong.
But she cannot review Jigsaw’s past experiences the way she can review the musical selections in the app. If a past abuser has used a turn of phrase that might be otherwise innocuous, she won’t be able to anticipate it. If a tune has played in the background while he was being abused, she will have no way of knowing until he responds to the stimulus.
And music is a thing that moves people, even when they do not realize it. Music is a thing he has found moving just this morning, and he had not been prepared for it, had not known how to respond to it. There’s just no telling how tonight will go until it has gone, but she’s hopeful. She’s done every bit of due diligence available to her.
And Jigsaw trusts her. If there are any hiccups tonight, that trust will get them through to the other side, and Yasmin will be there in the morning to help him process it.
Chapter 38: Assets | Never gonna give you up
Notes:
Chapter title from “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Ig3X59_qA
I guess have another midweek chapter, guys. >_> Yes, I’m keeping an eye on the chapter buffer. I shouldn’t run out. ^_^
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 9:15 p.m.—
Sitting there on the other end of the sofa from Jigsaw on kitten duty, Clint feels like such an idiot.
They’re listening to pop music right now, coming from a video on Jigsaw’s tablet. Clint doesn’t remember the name of the song or the artist, but it’s bouncy and happy-sounding, and Jigsaw has listened to the song five times in a row, watching the video of the singer belting it out on stage.
Clint has no idea how this is supposed to help Jigsaw, or even what it’s meant to accomplish. Isn’t this supposed to be about learning how to communicate better? It isn’t like Jigsaw can learn how to sing. HYDRA cut his throat up to the point where he can’t even whimper through a nightmare. So how is this going to help him with his communication?
Supposedly—and maybe on the sixth time through this song—Jigsaw will be categorizing the song. Is it happy or sad, is it soft or loud, is it sung by one person or many, is it a song he likes or doesn’t like… Lots of different ways to categorize the song. Listen to the song, then move it into the different baskets depending on the answers to those questions. That’s the whole point of the game. Listen to a song, then drag and drop into a basket.
What it’s actually turned into is listen to a song, then listen to the song, then listen to the song, then listen to the song, then… Sure, he’s moved some songs into baskets already, but some of these songs he can’t seem to decide on without coming back to them after listening to other songs.
And Clint doesn’t get it.
He hadn’t understood the game about matching turtles, either. Same game, different level. Look at the turtle, and then put it in a basket. Is it green or brown? In a pond or in the sea? What color are its eyes? How many spots does it have on its shell? Whatever. Clint hadn’t kept track of all the basket options.
When it comes to whatever the therapists are after with these matching games, he’s totally clueless.
All he knows is that Jigsaw cried over an opera lady dying on a sofa earlier, and his primary therapist’s idea of a good time after finding out about that was to have him watch more opera in the afternoon after their session. And now his speech therapist is having them listen to music, too.
Crying is, as far as Clint can tell, not the goal. But it’s happened, in Jigsaw’s utterly silent way of doing it. Not the agitated silent sobbing like after that incident in the gym where he got triggered by everyone being there at once. Not shoulders-shaking crying. Not rocking in place or grabbing at anything. Lucky hasn’t been on alert about it.
But Jigsaw has still had tears in his eyes, and sometimes those tears have streaked down his cheeks, and sometimes he’s sniffled a bit or wiped at his nose and face.
And Clint hates it.
This is a stupid game, and it’s a cruel thing to make Jigsaw do, listening to all this music when it makes him cry.
Clint wants to turn the tablet off and grab a tissue for his roommate, wants to excuse them both from the room and go distract Jigsaw from all of this emotional garbage with a big pile of cheesy nachos or something. Hell, even a juicy apple or some more of that weird white carrot-looking radish of his that seems to be lasting forever on account of how fuck-off huge it is for a vegetable.
Clint has a feeling, though, that doing any of that is probably going to amount to sabotage, and while he doesn’t understand what the point of putting Jigsaw through this is, he’s pretty sure there is a point, just one he can’t see.
This is why he hates therapy and steers clear of therapists. That and they have some kind of universal desire to bench him for being a bad sleeper or whatever. So what if he’s a depressed insomniac with high stress levels? He can still go on missions. Missions are the only place he’s actually good at what he does.
Clint scowls as they go back to listen to one of the earlier songs again. This one is a short song, a sad song, a quiet song, and sung by one person. Jigsaw has listened to this one only three times, and not in a row.
He finally moves it into the “do not like this” bucket, and the song drops off the screen, hopefully not to pop up again in the list of uncategorized songs.
Clint feels a wave of relief at the thought. It’s also on his “do not like this” list, and he’s really hoping that it won’t come back up tonight. Or maybe ever, if Jigsaw plays this game again in their rooms.
And then it happens. A new song pops up to replace the song Jigsaw’s dumped in the reject basket. Jigsaw taps a finger on the video, and fucking Rick Astley comes streaming out, crooning about never running around or deserting them.
Clint can’t help but groan.
Zoe fucking Rickrolled them.
And worse, Jigsaw doesn’t seem to mind. He seems to really like the song, moves it to the “like” bucket before it even finishes playing.
Clint can see a future in which he has to listen to that song on repeat for hours.
How the hell is this therapeutic? How does this help Jigsaw sign better? Or type faster? Or draw more clearly?
But it does help him smile. Because even though Jigsaw’s still wet-eyed from all of the music, he’s definitely smiling through this song. That’s a relief, at least. If Rick Astley made Jigsaw cry, Clint wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
Jigsaw puts the song into the “sung by a person” basket, and then into the “happy” basket. He can’t seem to decide if it’s quiet or loud, and he hesitates with his finger hovering over Rick Astley’s face, trying to make up his mind.
“Remember that not every song has to be categorized, Jigsaw,” Zoe says. “Sometimes a thing defies the categories when we try to place it in a basket. Some songs can be both happy and sad, for instance.”
Jigsaw nods and taps to listen to the song again. And then a third time.
Clint thinks this might be hell.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 16 September 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
It feels strange to leave the tablet behind instead of tucking it under the right arm, safely against the chest. But the expert with the signs had asked to keep it until their next session, and to bring all of its old pads of paper, all of its words, to the morning session with Yasmin.
And so it leaves the tablet on the coffee table and scoops up the sleepy little cat—Alpine.
It is supposed to try to use the names for the little cat and for the dog, and also for the researcher with the curly hair. For Alpine and for Lucky and… and for the researcher.
The eyes hurt from so many tears, and the nose itches. The chest does not feel as full and tight as before, though, even though it has spent almost an entire hour listening to beautiful voices making music with their mouths and throats.
The other asset does not seem to like the music level of the basket game on the tablet. The other asset did not like the turtle level, either. Does not seem to like the basket game at all. But the tablet with the basket game is not for the other asset. It is for this asset. The basket game is going to help it identify for others the distinctions it understands between different things.
That is important. It remembers how hard it was to try to explain to the other asset that killing a target was not murder, even though a living person was turned into a dead person in both cases. If it had had a basket game to help it identify distinctions to others, maybe the other asset would have accepted what it had tried to communicate all those weeks ago, and they could both kill targets again instead of having to leave targets alive.
“You want to drop Alpine off and then head for the gym for a while?” the other asset asks. “Light movement to keep you limber and then maybe get some nachos? I saw the good cheese in the kitchen earlier. Nice and gooey, perfect for nachos.”
It does not know what nachos are, but if they come from the kitchen and involve gooey cheese, then it very much wants to get some of them. And it did such good work today. Both of the experts had said so.
It holds up the little cat—Alpine—and then nods. It will need to feed the little cat before they can leave the little cat alone in the bathroom in its soft towel-lined shoebox with its warm bottle of water to sleep while they are away. That is what the voice without a mouth told the other asset they should be doing with the little cat when they have things to do after the feeding and the cotton ball bath and the putting into the small tray with clay chunks.
It is not sure it believes the voice without a mouth about leaving the little cat alone in the bathroom instead of making sure another is available to care for the little cat in its absence. It is a voice without a mouth. What does it know about little cats?
But the voice without a mouth had provided the formula and the bottle and the clay chunks and the tray and the shoebox. The voice without a mouth had suggested the bottle filled with warm water and the towel to keep the little cat warm when this asset’s body cannot provide the necessary heat.
So maybe the voice without a mouth does know about little cats.
“Right, Alpine needs dinner first,” the other asset says. “Then gym and nachos?”
It nods again. It got to see the other asset in the range earlier, not only being beautiful and powerful in form but also being competent and gentle in instruction. It is fitting that the other asset now gets to see this asset in the training room. This time, it thinks, there will be the leaping around and running and swinging that can be done in the parkour area. Not the bars or the wall, but the course with all of the obstacles to be overcome at high speeds.
“And you’ll take it easy, right?” the other asset asks. “I know you’re healing crazy fast, but you’ll still avoid ripping any stitches out. Right?”
It blinks at the other asset as they go up in the elevator carriage toward the rooms that are for assets. The parkour is much easier than the climbing and swinging on the bars when it is injured in the chest like this. It will be able to use the legs and the muscles in the core of the torso more than the arms and the muscles in the upper back.
It will not rip out stitches. If it ripped out stitches, the researcher with the curly hair would have to put the stitches back, and it… It does not want that.
“Aw, man,” the other asset groans. “You don’t know the meaning of ‘take it easy,’ do you? How about I take a rain check on the gym and we go straight to the kitchen for nachos?”
It shrugs the metal shoulder to avoid dislodging the little cat.
“Yeah, we’ll feed your kitten and then go to the kitchen. ‘Rain check’ means we’ll do the gym some other time, when you’re fully healed.”
But then how will it show off its skill and grace and speed to the other asset? How will it thank the other asset for allowing it to observe in the range this morning?
It does not need to be fully healed in order to run and leap through a parkour course. Or any other kind of obstacle course. It has trained through worse—many times, and often. It would not deny the other asset an opportunity to observe it. It wants the other asset to observe it. To observe it closely.
It follows the other asset down the hallway when the elevator arrives, and then readies the formula and fills the bottle.
The little cat is so hungry now that it has woken up from its sleep. So much warm formula, and so much of the purring and the kneading. The little cat is full of affection, so happy, so warm and snuggly and needy. And then the little cat is finally so full of formula that it cannot hold any more.
It sets the bottle aside and wipes the little cat’s mouth and face with a corner of soft fluffy towel. Strokes the little cat’s whiskers back along its cheeks and makes sure that all of the little cat’s fur is going in the right direction. It wipes the cotton ball along the little cat’s backside, so careful and gentle, and then deposits the little cat in the clay chunks for it to eliminate.
The little cat is so good at the routine already. The little cat spends a few minutes industriously digging around in the clay pieces as though it will dig all the way through the bottom of the little tray, and then does its business before dancing away from the mess and flopping on its side to lick itself clean.
So tidy, this little cat.
It picks the little cat up when the little cat has finished licking and holds the little cat up to the skin face to examine it closely. The little cat is all clean—no need for another round with the cotton ball—and so furry and warm. It is time to put the little cat in the bathroom with the warm bottle and the towel and hope that the little cat sleeps in there while the two assets go to the kitchen.
Nachos are waiting for the assets.
Nachos are crunchy tortilla chips covered with bright orange cheese that is a kind of gravy over the top. And there are little crumbles of meat on top of the other asset’s nachos as well, but it does not have little crumbles of meat on its own nachos. Instead of that, it has diced up onions and bell peppers. And there is thick green paste and creamy white sauce as well.
And a soupy tomato and onion salad that is called salsa that it loves so much. It has had chips and salsa before, but never with the bright orange cheese gravy poured over the top, and the chunky green paste. Guacamole, the other asset calls it. The other asset scoops up some of the green paste with every bite.
Nachos are messy, and the fingers get covered with the bright orange cheese gravy and juice from everything else, even if the chips themselves stay crunchy for a while. Eventually the last of the chips are soft from all of the liquids, but they still taste very good. And it has some of the gravy and sauce and paste left over, so there are more chips added, to scoop everything up with.
So good. A perfect thing to eat after a session with the expert with the signs. It can see why the other asset wanted to show it all about nachos.
It is not the only asset with messy fingers. But it is the only asset with bright orange cheese gravy inside of metal fingers. There is bright orange cheese gravy on the other asset’s chin and cheek, and on the other asset’s t-shirt.
It briefly imagines running a cotton ball all over the other asset’s face and dabbing at the other asset’s clothing, gently cleaning the other asset the way it gently cleaned the little cat after a meal. It cares greatly for the little cat, and that is why it cleaned the little cat. It also cares greatly for the other asset.
But the other asset is not a little cat, and the other asset looks down and sees the bright orange cheese gravy on the t-shirt and frowns.
“Aw, nachos,” the other asset moans, grabbing a paper towel from the countertop.
It has missed the opportunity to clean the other asset up, and now the other asset is doing the task instead.
The other asset rips off a sheet of toweling and holds it out. “Napkin?”
It nods and takes the paper towel. It will need to run the metal hand under water and flex the delicate finger plates to get the bright orange cheese gravy out, but the paper towel will help with the flesh hand and will keep the surface of the metal hand from getting bright orange cheese gravy anywhere else. It can do the rest later.
“So, how are nachos?” the other asset asks, wiping another paper towel across the top of the kitchen island where they have been eating. “Good stuff, yeah?”
It gives the other asset a thumbs up. Nachos are good stuff. Yeah.
“You worried about the vet at all?” the other asset asks as they make their way back to the rooms that are just for assets. “Not that you should be. Just wondering.”
Yasmin had asked it if it had any worry thoughts about the animal researcher, also. Should it be concerned? That is a lot of asking about worries for there to be no reason to worry.
“They’re just going to weigh Alpine and Lucky, take their temperature, make sure they’re both healthy, that kind of stuff. It’s not a big deal.”
If it is not a big deal, then why is it being asked if it is worried?
It was not worried before, but now it is starting be worried. Why does there have to be an animal researcher at all? To take all of the measurements and do the studies, but why do they need the measurements or the studies?
It will not let the animal researcher do what researchers do, take the samples, cut up the subjects to obtain the data. It will protect the little cat, the dog. Will protect them from anything that would harm them.
It will be okay.
Chapter 39: Reddit | I don’t know where they’re getting their news
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rumors” by Jake Miller.
Posting a bit early because I don't know what my Sunday morning looks like. Enjoy~
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
u/BigDongJohn
—/r/RedStar | Monday 17 September 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
The footage is shaky, taken from someone’s screened-in window. It’s raining lightly, and there’s mud everywhere. But it’s obvious to a true fan what he’s looking at. So obvious. And he is a true fan.
So is user ghosted-machine. The poster. The provider of this godsend of a piece of footage. ghosted-machine had found the file on the dark web, maybe an FBI leak, and posted it to the subreddit at midnight. It’s already been upvoted through the roof. And for good reason.
He watches it again, for the fourth time since logging in after his phone alert woke him up.
In the footage, beyond the window screen, through the rain, and under the mud… that is a metal arm. There’s a red shape on it that could be a star, up on the bicep. There’s a full face mask in black, the details unclear but unnecessary. There’s mud all over the black-dressed figure, but also some reddish blurs that might be blood, around the torso. Knowing Mr Red Star, it’s bound to be blood. He’s holding his right arm close to his chest. Is he injured?
And the man with him, without all the mud, without any of the blood, is obviously in black tac gear. Blond hair. A bow slung across his back. A quiver. Arrows. It has to be Hawkeye. The Avenger, Hawkeye. And not manhandling Mr Red Star. Just walking with him, leading him. It’s not a captive situation.
Mr Red Star is working with the Avengers. Mr Red Star is alive, seemingly somewhat well, and working with the people who were hunting him down for a month. Bakersfield wasn’t the end. Avengers Tower was the end.
And he? He was right. Gloriously right. Mr Red Star has to have been Ronin. The explosion at Avengers Tower was him breaking out, and then the three days and nights of bloody terror in New York, those had been him, maybe trying out a new M.O. And Ronin had never been found, had he? He’d just disappeared into the night the way Mr Red Star himself had in Bakersfield.
And after all, those murders in New York had been linked to HYDRA, Mr Red Star’s most hated enemy. The ones he went after almost exclusively before Bakersfield ended his career.
Except it hadn’t ended him, had it?
He grins. This the best news he’s gotten in ages. Mr Red Star is back! He’s working with a team now.
He gives the post its well-deserved upvote and gets to work on his comment. This is going to be epic. The subreddit has been dead for so long, as far as he’s been concerned. Jewelry posts. Random fan art. Hardly any real theories, and the ones that did show up got shot down instead of properly getting discussed.
Like his Ronin theory had been.
Well not anymore, baby! BigDongJohn is back!
This totally confirms my theory. Mr Red Star IS Ronin. Look at the facts, sheeple.
Mr Red Star hates nazis and hates HYDRA. Goes after the bad guys. Spares the good guys. He kills all the way to Bakersfield, where he wipes out that HYDRA safehouse. AGain, he’s after HYDRA. The Avengers are looking for him and they show up in Bakersfield. Mr Red Star goes missing. The Avengers leave.
Why do they leave? Come on, its obvious. They leave because they got him.
And then there’s a month of nothing. No new news, no sightings, no killings. Why? The Avengers. They have him locked up in Avengers Tower.
When does Ronin show up in New York?
Riht after an explosion. A “lab accident.” Right. A lab accident, my ass. That’s fucking Mr Red Star breaking out!
Nevermind how he does it. He blew up a bank, he blew up a warehouse, he can blow up a roof. That building is made of glass, people. It’d be easy.
And who does Ronin go after? HYDRA! Mr Red Star’s enemies are Ronin’s enemies. Because they’re the same man. And he busts up a whole bunch of mob dudes? Hello?! Mr Red Star goes after gangs, too. Remember D.C., when he got those drug dealers and carved them up?
And THEN we have the Avengers sighted all over New York. Right after the explosion, right as Ronin is running around. Then Ronin disappears again. And the Avengers all go home.
LOOK AT THE PATTERN! It’s right there!!
Mr Red Star and the Avengers are on the move. Red Star disappears, Avengers go home. Ronin and the Avengers are on the move. Ronin disappears, Avengers go home.
Mr Red Star is after HYDRA and other bad guys. Ronin is after HYDRA and other bad guys.
Its the SAME.
Mr Red Star is Ronin. Mr Red Star is Ronin. Mr Red Star is Ronin.
How many times do I have to say it until it sinks in?
u/redstar-cutiemark
—/r/RedStar | Monday 17 September 2012 | 2:00 a.m.—
Ugh. Make your own post for your Ronin conspiracy theory. No one believes you, and no one cares.
She sends her reply and downvotes his comment.
She just can’t with these dudebros who are all about the killing and explosions. That’s not the important part. The important part is that Mr Red Star went after the worst parts of society and protected the innocent. He chose to blow up that bank when no one was there, just so that no one would get hurt. Because even if there were some bad people in that bank, not all of the people inside it during working hours were going to be bad people, and he didn’t want to hurt the innocent.
Mr Red Star isn’t just some rambo serial killer. He’s a hero. He does things the hard way so that only the terrorists and criminals are hurt.
And the important thing about ghosted-machine’s footage is that Mr Red Star is alive!
She’d been really sad when he disappeared in Bakersfield and that military guy had taken over the base and made it sound like he had solved the “problem” of Mr Red Star. Ross, she thinks. Or Russ. General Russ? But now Mr Red Star is on her screen. Not just an artist’s representation based on eye-witness accounts. It’s actually him.
And he’s not with some military group. He’s with the Avengers. They’re heroes, too. Just like him. Killing the aliens who attacked Earth and saving the people in New York just trying to go about their days.
The Avengers must have finally caught up with him in Bakersfield and talked him into joining them. They’ve been training together for two months now, and that’s why no one has seen or heard of him since Bakersfield.
Until tonight.
She doesn’t know what made her stay up so late and take a glance at Reddit before finally turning the light off and going to sleep. But she’s glad she did. This is the best news.
She bets Mr Red Star looks really handsome under his face mask, with his bright blue eyes and long dark hair. He probably has a smile that would melt her heart. And she really hopes that the red hints she’s seeing in the footage are from someone else’s blood.
She doesn’t know what’s going on that the Avengers and Mr Red Star are dealing with in the rain, but it must be getting rid of bad guys, maybe HYDRA. BigDongJohn is right about that part, at least. Mr Red Star absolutely hates HYDRA.
u/mrs-red-star
—/r/RedStar | Monday 17 September 2012 | 2:15 a.m.—
He’s alive!
She watches the footage again, trying to catch every detail of her future husband’s features. Is he holding his arm up to his chest because he’s injured? Or does he have something he’s holding? Is that red smudge from his blood or someone else’s? Is his hair really that dark, or is it the rain? That is a star on his shoulder, though. The edges might be unclear because of the mud and the quality of the footage, but she knows it’s a star.
Just like the matching star she got tattooed on her left shoulder after the devastation that was his disappearance after Bakersfield. Something to remember him by, but here he is, alive!
And not just someone cosplaying him at a convention. The gear looks too complete, too polished. And the Avenger with him, the arrow guy, whatever his name is, he’s got a really fancy bow, and he moves like a real superhero, not a cosplayer striking poses. Mr Red Star moves so smoothly behind him. He’s so graceful. He’s perfect. Like a swan.
She sighs and holds her phone to her chest. The timestamp on the footage says it happened Friday. Just this last Friday. So it’s not that long ago. He really is alive now.
She just knows her dreams will be filled with Mr Red Star tonight. Mr Red Star with his knives, slowly slicing her clothes off to check her over for any sign of HYDRA alliances. Mr Red Star, seeing the red star on her left bicep and stopping for a moment to realize what it means. Mr Red Star, caressing her cheek as she looks up at him and slowly reaches out to remove his mask.
His blue eyes widen as his face comes into view, and his lips are parted in surprise still, in wonderment that she is like him, that she wears his mark, not HYDRA’s. That she’s his.
The way his lips are warm and soft, so soft against her own, when she pulls his face down for a kiss. How different his lips are from the leather uniform he wears. How he lets her take control, follows her lead all the way to her bed. His rough-gloved hand against her side, the metal hand, so smooth and chill as he cups her breast under the tatters of her blouse.
Someday, maybe.
She wishes she’d been one of those women he rescued from rapists or muggers. She wishes she’d had the chance to see him in person. To truly meet him.
Oh well. There’s always her dreams.
u/ghosted-machine
—/r/RedStar | Monday 17 September 2012 | 3:00 a.m.—
Any day now, the media will pick up on all the action his post has generated on this subreddit and the dozen other fan forums he’s posted that footage to. Even though news of the asset has died down in the mainstream media, there will still be feelers spread out to catch any updates. And once it’s known that the so-called Red Star Killer is still alive, still active, and in the Avengers’ custody, it will be a media storm all over again.
Public opinion was divided last time, some in favor of anything that removed HYDRA from the world, once their presence had been made known in Fury’s data dump of S.H.I.E.L.D. files. But there was a vocal segment of the population arguing that the asset was a dangerous maniac that needed to be found and put down lest the murder spree turn on the innocent, a planned burn that got out of control.
It should put increasing pressure on the Avengers, and on Fury and what’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D., to put out that fire. Especially with the theory that Ronin is just another alias, that the Avengers aren’t actually capable of keeping the asset contained after all. That they shouldn’t be entrusted with its keeping. That a true government agency would be better suited to it.
Not that he thinks Rogers would easily give the asset up to the government. But pitting the Avengers against the government should have its own positive ramifications for their cause. Split the enemy’s attention, get them fighting on multiple fronts, see what cracks are revealed in the process.
And should the government obtain the asset, then the asset is practically theirs once more. Just a few strings pulled, a few words spoken, a transport arranged to a facility with a chair.
And soon, there won’t even be a need for the entire chair with its bulk and drain on the generators. Zola has produced the schematics, and the engineers are busily machining the prototypes. With the remaining Tesseract energy packs, it should be possible to outfit several newly arranged STRIKE teams with portable halos. Maybe as many as a dozen. Compact, powerful, and easily weaponized against the asset, once it’s been subdued sufficiently with tranqs.
Just jam one over the asset’s eyes so the ends of the arch rest on its temples, and the job will be done in minutes. That should please Rumlow, who will no doubt insist on getting the first working prototype in his own team’s arsenal. Maybe the first handful, even.
Because if the asset will not be killed, then it must at least be brought back under their control. It cannot be left to do the enemy’s bidding as in North Carolina.
If that means they hand it over to Rumlow for reprogramming and conditioning, so be it. That will distract Rumlow from his efforts to establish himself as Crossbones, new HYDRA Supreme of the Eastern Seaboard. Let him spend a year raping the asset. That will give Johnson enough time to get the helicarriers built in Montana, and that in turn will usher in Project Insight, rendering the asset pointless. Let it become a plaything instead of a weapon. Who cares, as long as HYDRA wins the day?
He checks the comments on his post again, sees that BigDongJohn’s comment is the site of an outright flame war, as they call it. The mods are asleep, though, so no one freezes the comment thread. It will rise to greater popularity as other subreddits link to this post and its flame war, and soon, his post with its footage should be on the front page.
From there, the front page of the news.
Excellent. Let the asset’s own fans be its undoing.
Notes:
Content warning: Bit of emotional whiplash here, and someone fantasizing about Jigsaw, but nothing very graphic.
Chapter 40: Clint | I feel a little rush (I think I’ve got a little crush on you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Crush” by Yuna, ft. Usher.
Yes, I'm back already, haha! This one's for distraction, but expect another chapter Wednesday or Thursday (but not both) due to vacation and travel. ^_^
Content warning for this chapter is in end notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 3:15 a.m.—
It feels like he only just fell asleep, and maybe not even that deeply, maybe not even all the way asleep, when he wakes up again to a pitch dark room and a dip in the bed off to one side.
At least he knows why he’s waking up, though.
“Hey, Jigs,” he mumbles into the darkness. “Everything alright?”
It’s too dark to see the motion of a nod or anything, so it’s not like Clint expects to get an answer, unless maybe Jigsaw taps on his shoulder once for yes or twice for no, but it still feels better asking than just rolling over and trying to go back to sleep.
Jigsaw hasn’t been crawling onto the bed with him since their mission and his injury from Ward, hasn’t even been helping Lucky up into the bed. He’s needed Lucky more than Clint did, so that makes sense. Clint doesn’t want to take the man’s dog away or anything. Especially not after a mission where Jigsaw had gotten injured by a supposed ally and needed to face the daunting prospect of medical attention.
Clint works himself up to a sitting position and reaches over to pull the string on his bedside lamp. When talking with his roommate, light to see by isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a flat out necessity.
Jigsaw is wearing the turtleneck still, probably hasn’t changed that bandaging on his wound, might be okay letting his enhanced healing fix things without treating them well. HYDRA wouldn’t have taken much care to bind his wounds back in the day, and he hadn’t had much to bind his wounds with while out on his own. And they hadn’t been able to get close enough to him to change his bandages when they first brought him in after Bakersfield.
And he’d healed fine each time. It’s probably okay that he hasn’t changed his bandage or cleaned things up for a day or so. Clint hopes so, anyway. If getting Banner to patch him up in the field was a struggle when he was obviously in need of help, getting him to accept treatment for an infection or something will be impossible.
Jigsaw is holding the kitten close to his chest, and Lucky is curled up at Clint’s feet already—he must have slept through that part of the “join Clint in bed” process—and…
Clint blinks as the situation finally spells itself out to his half-asleep brain. Oh shit. Jigsaw is crawling into bed like old times. Like the times before, when Clint had his own banged up self to watch out for and had been having those nightmares about being back in tracksuit territory and or under Loki’s control, and Jigsaw had curled up by his side on top of the blankets, careful not to jostle him.
Only it’s different now, isn’t it, because now Clint knows that his roommate is fucking hot where before his roommate was just his roommate who lacked an understanding of social conventions and didn't realize how his actions could be interpreted. Damn. This is going to make things so weird.
“Uh,” Clint says, getting a head start on making it weird.
Jigsaw scoots closer to him, still on top of the covers, and places the sleepy kitten on the pillow next to Clint’s thigh. He signs that Clint should be sleeping.
“Yeah,” Clint says. “So should you. You couldn’t sleep?”
Jigsaw shakes his head. He signs “nightmare” and then points at the kitten.
“You’re worried about the vet appointment, after all, and had a nightmare about it?”
Jigsaw nods again. And he’s got his favorite notebook from Monesha, somehow. Clint hadn’t seen that. It’s like Jigsaw’s moving his whole bedroom worth of things in here. Between the dog, kitten and notebook—oh, and there’s the shark, too, by Lucky—he must have made two trips.
There’s a drawing of a kitten getting cut apart like a chicken cut up for frying, and a syringe with a big needle, and a little woodcutting saw—or probably for cutting bones, in this case—off to one side in the drawing.
“Wow,” Clint says. He reaches down to pet the kitten.
“I know for a fact that that’s not going to happen,” he says. “They’re going to put the kitten on a scale to find out how much it weighs. They’re going to look at the kitten’s butt to find out if it’s a boy or a girl kitten. Um. They’re going to check for teeth and stuff, look in its ears and nose. Check its eyes. Just a checkup.”
He doesn't know what all goes on during a vet checkup, not really, since the only pet he's ever had before this was a stray dog they never took to the vet before his dad got too drunk one night, too violent, and they no longer had a pet after that. Just a mound of dirt in the backyard, a testimony to the dog that had tried to protect him and his brother.
So yeah, maybe he hasn't ever been in a vet's office. But it can't be more involved than looking at the animals and declaring them to be just fine.
Clint shrugs. “Some of the same stuff for Lucky, I guess. It’s just a safety precaution, Jigs. No one’s going to hurt Alpine or Lucky. And definitely no one's going to cut them apart.”
Jigsaw frowns at him for a long moment, and then reluctantly puts the notebook behind himself on the other nightstand.
It looks like he’s planning on staying the rest of the night, then. And why not, if he’s already got the animals and his notebook in here. Clint can’t find fault with that. He only hopes it isn’t too awkward.
This isn’t the first time he’s known Jigsaw was in bed with him. It’ll be fine. He avoided making it weird the earlier times, even though every ounce of his dumpster fire self had tried to make it awkward. Why would it be awkward now?
He swallows. Why would it be awkward now? Because now he’s looking at Jigsaw’s jawline and his lips. And wanting to touch. Because now he’s going to have to scrunch back down into a sleeping position and wonder how Jigsaw’s going to position himself—around Clint? Beside Clint? On top of Clint?
And he’s still injured. He should be careful with that even if he’s healing at the speed of light. And he’s got a kitten in the bed with them now. What if Clint rolls over and smushes the kitten in the middle of the night?
“You, uh, want to stay here for the night?” he asks.
Jigsaw nods and scoops Alpine up in his hands. He sits there, pointedly looking at Clint like he expects something, and then finally adjusts the kitten to one hand and motions for Clint to lie back down already.
Clint clears his throat and does that, pulling the lamp string again as he does so.
“Tap my shoulder once for yes and twice for no, okay? Because I won’t be able to see you.”
Jigsaw taps his shoulder once.
“I mean later on,” Clint says into the darkness. “If I ask you a question or something and it’s still dark.”
There’s no response for a long minute, and then there’s a faint wobble in the mattress as Jigsaw gets himself situated with the kitten. The sheets pull at Clint a bit, tucking him in and pinning him, and he works to keep his breathing normal instead of getting worked up trying to anticipate how Jigsaw will end up positioning himself.
It’s a kind of loose one-sided spoon, finally, Clint thinks as he lies there staring up at the darkness that is his ceiling.
It’s hard to tell exactly without turning the light back on, but he can feel Jigsaw’s breath on his neck, and the faint tickle of kitten fur at his right shoulder. And Jigsaw’s got his left arm tucked beneath himself, probably, but his right hand is folded up between himself and Clint, is cradling the kitten and keeping it safe from being crushed.
And his legs are right up against Clint’s with only the blankets between them, his knees pressing into the side of Clint’s knees, his feet up against Clint’s feet, with Lucky curled up down there, too.
Clint closes his eyes. Tries to keep himself relaxed. His roommate is cuddled up against him, with a kitten and a dog and a stuffed shark in the mix. His roommate is on top of the covers, fully clothed, and clearly not thinking the kinds of inappropriate thoughts that Clint is trying to fight.
His roommate came to him for comfort from a nightmare. Clint is actually the protector in this scenario, instead of the protected. It’s a heady feeling, protecting Jigsaw’s sleep like this.
He wonders if he’ll fall asleep like this and wake up to find that Jigsaw is ready with breakfast in the kitchen. If he’ll sleep through Jigsaw getting up and all the jostling and rearranging of limbs that would require.
He wonders if Jigsaw is comfortable sleeping on his metal arm like that. Clint doesn’t think he’d be comfortable sleeping with a big chunk of metal underneath him. But at least he’s got his right arm on top and his chest wound doesn’t have any pressure on it.
For several minutes, Clint lies there in his bed, focusing on the soft heat of his roommate’s breath on his neck. How close is Jigsaw’s face to his neck if he can feel the man’s breathing so well? Is Jigsaw practically nuzzling into the crook of Clint’s neck? Maybe. And maybe he’s awake doing it, or maybe he’s already fallen asleep.
How long does it take Jigsaw to fall asleep?
Clint’s never really given it any thought. He knows it takes himself a damn long time to fall asleep most nights, but Jigsaw might not have that problem. He’s able to take little cat naps throughout the day, the little twenty-minute things that always leave Clint feeling like he’s wasted his time. Maybe he’s already fast asleep, and that’s why his breathing is so even.
The kitten pushes a claw-tipped paw into his shoulder, just a light press of velcro claws to skin through the thin sheet, and then wiggles into a comfier ball, huddled between Clint and Jigsaw. Clint resists the urge to reach over with his left hand and pet the kitten. Because who knows exactly where the kitten is in the dark, as opposed to where Jigsaw is in the dark?
He doesn’t want to end up petting Jigsaw, after all.
Or he does, but he knows he shouldn’t.
Jigsaw is trusting him to be on his best non-creep behavior here. To share space without making it awkward. And Clint is going to manage it, somehow. Even if his brain is suggesting things like reaching over to run his fingers along Jigsaw’s upper arm. Or trying to stroke his hair to make sure it hasn’t fallen in his face. Or rolling over a little so that he’s facing Jigsaw.
Yeah, his brain can kindly shut the fuck up and go back to sleep, any time.
He doesn’t wake up to Jigsaw getting out of the bed later on. Or to the smells of breakfast in the kitchen. Or even to more kitten claws in his shoulder.
He must have needed his sleep, because what he wakes up to eventually is Natasha bringing him a plate of waffles and turning the light on.
“Rise and shine,” he thinks she says while he checks his eyes and puts his hearing aids in. “The vet’s getting here in about an hour. I thought you’d want to be up and ready for that.
Ugh. Clint puts the mirror back in his dresser drawer and sits up fully.
“Why’d you let me sleep so long?” he asks as he accepts the waffles—already buttered, cut up, and doused with syrup, because Natasha is awesome like that. “I, uh, I should have been up earlier.”
His cheeks feel hot and he curses the traitorous little bastard that is his face for giving Natasha all the signs she needs to know that something happened last night. He can feel her curiosity stabbing into him from where she sits on the side of his bed. It’s just a matter of time. She’ll come out with it any minute now.
“What happened?” she asks after he gets about half a waffle down his throat.
There it is.
Might as well be honest about it, too. She’ll pry until she has the truth, and after using her as a sounding board about this “it turns out my roommate is hot and I like-like him” thing, he kind of owes her whatever updates come up.
“Jigsaw had a nightmare about the vet cutting Alpine into little pieces, so he brought the whole menagerie in here to sleep the rest of the night,” Clint says around a bite of waffle. “Everything but his plant.”
Natasha nods. “How’d that go?”
Clint shrugs. “Pretty well. I didn’t screw anything up, I think.”
“You think.”
“Well, I was asleep for most of it, ‘Tasha. I don’t think I grope people in my sleep.”
She laughs. “Jigsaw seemed fine at breakfast today, and I didn’t get any urgent alert from Yasmin that there’d been a problem in his morning session. Not that I’m on her list of people to report to,” Natasha adds.
“I think they have some sort of therapist-only club, and they only talk to each other,” Clint says. He spears another waffle chunk and smears it in the syrup for extra coverage. “Where’s Jigsaw?”
“Playing with the kitten in the living room.” Natasha smiles. “He wanted to bring you your waffles, but I told him the kitten would get syrupy and need another bath if he brought the kitten in here with him, and, well, I’m afraid Alpine is more important than you are, Clint.”
“Clearly,” he says. “I’m feeling very neglected.”
Clint wonders if Jigsaw has changed his bandages, if he even still needs to do that. Wonders if he’s showered. Wonders if he’s changed clothes.
But he can’t just ask Natasha what Jigsaw’s wearing. Or he could, if he wanted to see her eyes twinkle before she teases him mercilessly while pretending to misunderstand what he’s really asking about.
“But he seems okay?” Clint asks instead. “Not too worried about the vet or anything?”
“Not too worried, no. But he did ask me to stay.”
“That’s sweet. You can protect his plant while I protect Lucky and he protects Alpine.”
Natasha laughs again. “I do think he’s looking for help defending his menagerie, as you put it. Yes.”
Clint finishes up his waffles in a few big bites, manages not to choke, and washes them down with a mug of coffee Natasha hands him. It’s time to get ready for this vet visit, then. He can’t just come out of his bedroom when the vet arrives, wearing nothing but his boxers. And he should probably take a shower.
“Thanks for breakfast, ‘Tasha,” he says as he hands her the plate. “You’re the best.”
“I sure am,” she agrees with a smile. “Meet you in the living room, Clint. Take your time.”
Clint does not take his time. He rushes through a quick shower, rubs a towel through his hair, and throws on the first set of clothes that catch his eye—Jigsaw’s been in his closet again, clearly.
This is a good pair of jeans without a single hole in the knees, and one of his tighter t-shirts, with the super short sleeves. Clint looks at himself in the mirror, combs his hair with his fingers, and puts his hearing aids back in.
Now that he knows a little more about what Jigsaw might be getting out of the laundry system he’s established, Clint can see just how long Jigsaw’s been into him, assuming Natasha is right, which she usually is.
His roommate puts the good clothes—defined as the clothes Clint looks good in according to Jigsaw—on the top of the lingering piles in the living room, and at the front of the closet in his bedroom. He stuffs the bad clothes—defined as the clothes that don’t show off Clint’s figure—at the bottom of the farthest piles, or in the back of the closet.
It’s obvious, now that he knows why it’s happening. And he feels kind of like an ungrateful little shit for the month he spent stubbornly searching for his grodiest sweatpants when Jigsaw was trying to make sure he looked nice.
Since his ribs have healed up enough to easily get t-shirts on over his head again, the button-up shirts Natasha had bought him have been moving steadily further back in the closet, too. So Jigsaw’s definition of “Clint looks nice” isn’t “Clint is dressed up.” That’s a relief. Clint hates dressing up.
Clint gives himself one last look in the mirror and then heads for the living room.
It actually looks pretty clean in the living room, which is kind of a surprise to him. The kitchen area has clear counters and an empty sink. The table where Natasha is sitting with a magazine is cleared off except for Jigsaw’s plant in its garish pot. The video games and consoles are neatly put away in the entertainment unit. The throws on the back of the sofa look arranged instead of dumped there.
There aren’t any laundry piles. That’s the biggest change. Did Clint sleep through Jigsaw doing the laundry to the point of hanging all of the shirts and pants and stuffing all the socks and underwear in the dresser?
Clint greets Lucky with a pat on the head and gets his hand licked in return.
Maybe he slept that deeply once Jigsaw and the menagerie had joined him. Maybe he’s been sleeping more and more like crap since Jigsaw stopped sleeping over with him and just hadn’t noticed until he finally got another really good night’s sleep.
It’s not too much to believe. He hadn’t been sleeping great at any point in his life that he can recall, and it had only gotten worse after the thing with Loki and that scepter. Then better a little, then worse again. Better, worse. Better, worse. Like a yo-yo diet, only with sleep. Never healthy.
“Having a good time with Alpine?” Clint asks as he comes around to the front of the sofa, where Jigsaw is teasing the kitten with the end of the wand toy.
Jigsaw looks up at him and smiles, and Clint smiles back, feeling like his waffles have a mind of their own in his stomach, but in a weirdly good way.
In addition to his not-quite-a-disguise glasses, Jigsaw is wearing a different shirt today, and jeans instead of yoga pants. Still no shoes, and he only rarely wears socks, so the barefoot thing isn’t a sign of something gone wrong. Just Jigsaw’s preference this morning.
At some point, the wand toy has been broken. Or changed, anyway. The feathers are still fluffy as ever, and the stick is still in good shape. But the bell has seen better days. Somehow it’s gotten smushed into a flat disc, and the little knob of metal inside it is trapped and can’t jingle. Clint’s betting that was intentional. He knows how much Jigsaw hates making noise. He probably clamped the bell between a pair of metal fingers and squeezed the bell shut forever.
The kitten doesn’t seem to mind the silence of the toy, though. It’s still as excited as ever to grab at the feathers and try to disembowel the fake bird that the wand toy probably represents to Alpine’s feline brain.
“How’s the wound doing?” Clint asks, sitting on the end of the sofa and reaching for Alpine to tumble the kitten over onto its side and tickle its belly. He gets his fingers clawed and pulls his hand back with a soft hiss. Serves him right. Even as a kitten, those paws are tipped with daggers.
Jigsaw gives him a thumbs up and holds out the wand toy for Clint to play with Alpine at a safer distance instead of getting his hand cut up.
“Need any help with bandages?”
Clint can feel Natasha’s eyes on him as he asks, and he wills himself not to turn red. He’s just asking a very reasonable and responsible, helpful, question. If Jigsaw needs or wants help, Clint wants to offer it. If he doesn’t, then Clint will at least know.
Jigsaw lifts up the hem of his shirt in response, showing Clint how the wound is doing because there is no bandage at all there to keep it covered up. It looks…
Damn. It should be impossible for it to be healed to that extent, even with super soldier magic juice running through his veins. The stitches are gone, but they aren’t needed anymore. There’s considerable scabbing, but it looks healthy enough, not puckered or infected in any way.
Clint swallows and looks away from the expanse of cluttered scarring and letters that make up his roommate’s torso. And from the muscles that are too well-defined. Is Jigsaw getting enough to eat? Enough to drink? Is he dehydrated at all? Does he need more fat on his body or is this normal for a super soldier?
Clint’s only accidentally ogled Cap while half asleep that one time, and Cap was wearing a too-tight t-shirt at the time. He doesn’t know how much body fat a super soldier typically has.
“Looks like it’s healing up really well,” Clint manages to say. He can imagine the laughter Natasha is thinking in his direction, even though she doesn’t actually laugh at him right now. She’s probably saving it for later.
Jigsaw nods and lets his t-shirt drop again. He seems oblivious to the discomfort Clint is feeling, and Clint hopes he remains oblivious. The last thing he wants is for Jigsaw to think he’s done or is doing anything wrong. Or anything embarrassing.
So far, it’s seemed like maybe Jigsaw doesn’t understand the concept of embarrassment or humiliation, and Clint kind of hopes that keeps up, for everyone’s sake, but mostly for Jigsaw’s. So much of what he’s been through would be humiliating in someone else’s experience. He really doesn’t want that for his roommate.
Clint already has a more than passing relationship with embarrassment and humiliation. He'll gladly take on any of that for Jigsaw to keep his roommate from learning those elements of being a person.
Notes:
Content Warning: There is very brief and vague mention of child abuse and animal abuse that happened a very long time ago in Clint's childhood. All pets actually appearing in the story in the present are perfectly safe.
(update: to see Jigsaw's morning therapy session partway through this chapter, go the second chapter of the Outtakes fic, here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48958402/chapters/126378805)
Chapter 41: Assassins | You better leave my kitten all alone
Notes:
Chapter title from “Leave My Kitten Alone” by The Beatles.
Happy midweek "Flamingo is traveling" chapter! Replies may be slower, but comments are still very much appreciated and have a 100% chance of making me break into a wide grin that my family will ask about, haha! (And no worries about that--they know I share my writing, just not what that writing is all about. ^_^)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
“So he’s very nervous about this visit,” Natasha tells the vet and her vet tech as they make their way down the hallway toward Clint and Jigsaw’s rooms. “He hasn’t had good experiences with doctors himself, and he worries that you’ll hurt his kitten or his dog the way some doctors have hurt him.”
Dr Sandoval nods. “Would he be alright leaving the room so that his fears don’t set Lucky and Alpine off?” she asks. “Sometimes our pets can sense our apprehension, and they can get apprehensive themselves in response.”
Natasha grimaces. “That wouldn’t be a good idea. Clint is there, though, and I’ll be there. We can help keep him calm and reassure him that everything is necessary and not harmful.”
The vet tech looks up from the tablet he’s been updating with pre-appointment information. “We’ll be extra careful to move slowly but work quickly,” he says. “And you say Alpine is a rescue?”
“Found in a mud puddle on Friday,” Natasha confirms. “We’ve been feeding kitten formula every few hours, keeping the kitten warm and clean. Non-clumping clay litter. Everything the internet suggested, really.”
“It’s good you’re getting a check-up in,” Dr Sandoval says. “We’ll take a stool sample to check for parasites.” She gestures for her vet tech to note that in the file. “Kittens usually have tummy bugs, and it’s important to clear that up if they’re there, so little Alpine can grow up nice and healthy.”
Natasha likes this vet. Soft-spoken but confident, willing to work with a difficult client to ensure the best care for a new patient, accepting of the limitations but insisting on the necessities of the visit.
“Is it too soon for shots?” Natasha asks. “I know the kitten will need shots.”
“Far too soon,” Dr Sandoval says. “We won’t want to get vaccinations going for a few more weeks. Alpine needs to be strong enough to do well with them. We usually won’t vaccinate until six to eight weeks.”
Natasha nods. That’s good, probably. She doesn’t think Jigsaw would like the sight of a needle coming anywhere near his kitten, at least not without an explanation of why the vaccine was important and what it was meant to do.
She stops at their door and knocks before opening it, just in case Clint needs the additional warning for whatever reason. Between Jigsaw being on high alert and Lucky being able to hear them coming as well, Clint should know they’ve arrived.
“This is Dr Sandoval,” Natasha says by way of introduction, gesturing at the vet as they enter.
Jigsaw is curled up on one end of the sofa, legs pulled up and kitten tucked snugly—and perhaps a touch defensively—against his chest. Clint waves at the newcomers from his spot on the sofa next to Jigsaw while Lucky comes right up to meet them with a happy wag of his tail.
“Call me Jennifer,” Dr Sandoval says with a smile for Clint and Jigsaw while her vet tech brings the rest of the canvas-bagged equipment in. She shrugs off the large duffel bag and kneels to greet Lucky in the middle of the room with an even bigger smile.
“And you must be Lucky,” she says as she gets her face licked. “What a good boy you are, Lucky.”
“I’m Thomas,” says the vet tech. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Lucky moves on to smell Thomas’s canvas bag and the pet scale that he has under an arm, nosing around for treats, perhaps, after giving everything a cursory inspection.
Natasha watches the introductory process with mild amusement. Lucky, at least, does not share Jigsaw’s apprehension about the strangers or their equipment. And that is helping Jigsaw a bit, she sees. Jigsaw is still folded up in his defensive huddle, but he’s got a calmness about his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Clearly, he trusts Lucky’s opinion about strangers.
“Hey,” Clint says while the two vets get set up in the living room. “I'm Clint,” he adds as Natasha claims a seat in the accent chair. “This over here is Jigsaw, with Alpine. How, uh, how do you want to do this? We've never done the vet thing before.”
Jennifer opens a laptop on the coffee table and logs in. “I think we’ll start with Lucky here, since he’s so eager,” she says with a laugh. “We have Lucky’s records from his prior vet visits. Have you had any remaining troubles with fleas?”
Clint shakes his head. “No, the flea collar worked great, and they haven’t come back.”
“And the worms?”
Clint shrugs. “His poops look pretty normal, I think. Wilson didn’t mention anything about them. He’s the guy who usually walks Lucky in the mornings and evenings.”
Jennifer enters the data accordingly. “That’s great,” she says. “It doesn’t look like he’s due for any vaccines. Let’s get you on the scale, Lucky.”
Thomas guides Lucky to stand on the scale and calls out Lucky’s weight when the readings settle. “Good boy, Lucky,” he says with a friendly thump at the dog’s side.
After a bit more poking and prodding—all of which Natasha notes that Jigsaw is paying considerable attention to—Lucky is declared to be in very good health.
“Do you have any questions about Lucky’s health?” Jennifer asks. “Any concerns?”
Clint shakes his head, and they seem about to move on, but then Jigsaw signs “eat” and a question.
“I’m afraid I don’t know sign language,” Jennifer says apologetically. She looks at Clint.
“Uh, he wants to know about food, eating. Maybe how much should he be eating? Or what he should be eating?”
They both look at Jigsaw, who nods.
“Ah. What do you feed currently?”
Natasha gets up and goes to the kitchen to get the scoop out of the food bin, along with the food label Wilson has carefully cut out of the bag and left for reference. She hands the label over and indicates the scoop.
“It’s this, and twice a day, right, Jigsaw?”
Jigsaw nods, and moves his hand in a straight horizontal line. He scowls briefly, not upset, but referencing a general dissatisfaction, maybe. She still finds him hard to read sometimes.
“Oh, yeah,” Clint says. “Even scoops, not mounded, and sometimes a treat. But we used to feed him a whole lot of people food before Wilson put his foot down.”
Jennifer frowns. “Table scraps, you mean?”
“More like whole table meals,” Natasha says. “That stopped well over a month ago, though.”
“Oh, good. That’s incredibly unhealthy to be giving a dog. Or any pet, really. There's far too much sodium, too much fat, not the right nutrients.” Jennifer hands the label back to her. “This is fine, and that should be enough food for him, yes.”
The vet looks at Jigsaw. “Are you unhappy with what he’s eating?”
Jigsaw looks between Natasha and Clint like he’s not sure he’s allowed to answer, and then finally nods. He signs “more” and “reward,” his expression challenging.
“He wants to feed Lucky more. Or better, I guess. Not kibble?” Clint looks over for confirmation. “Yeah,” he says when Jigsaw nods. “Not kibble. Better than kibble. I guess that'll be wet food?”
Jennifer nods thoughtfully. “There are many wet foods on the market that would be perfectly suitable for your dog,” she says to Jigsaw. “I’ll leave you with a list of them, and you can experiment and find out what Lucky prefers.”
Jigsaw accepts the statement with an air of satisfaction that has Natasha practically hearing an “I told you so” coming Wilson’s way the next time they meet.
“I would offer a combination, to start out,” Jennifer adds. “Changing foods suddenly can cause upset tummy or gut issues, and we don’t want Lucky to feel sick.”
Thomas offers Lucky a treat and then takes a subset of the larger animal scale out to put on the coffee table beside Jennifer’s laptop.
“Are we ready for Alpine now?” Jennifer asks with a warm smile. “Little Alpine’s first checkup,” she says soothingly. “Nothing to be worried about. This will be mostly the same as it was for Lucky.”
Jigsaw looks torn, but he does allow Clint to take the kitten from him and pass it over to Jennifer. He also unfolds from his defensive huddle and moves into what Natasha can only think of as a ready-to-pounce position of sitting forward on the sofa.
She imagines that if Jennifer and Thomas knew who exactly they were working with, there might be more trepidation, but they are fearless and that confidence seems to help calm Jigsaw down as much as Lucky’s excitement about the new friends does.
They also seem to be doing a good job of including Jigsaw in the conversation instead of talking only to Clint and Natasha, which she’s glad to see. Bruce’s choice of veterinarian had been a good one, the same as his picks for therapists. Natasha’s glad he put together this home visit, and that it’s going so well.
She can see all of the ways it could have become a disaster from the first moment, even with Clint and herself there. Between the lab equipment and the office equipment, anything could have set Jigsaw off. And if he’d sensed any insincerity in their tone or demeanor, that might have been bad. And, of course, if he’d recognized them as HYDRA. There’s always that to worry about.
But while Jigsaw is clearly unsettled and on edge, he’s trusting the process to some degree, and is letting things happen. That’s important. Natasha wonders whether Yasmin discussed this with him in their morning session. That might be another contributing factor to this going so well.
After playing with Alpine for several minutes, Jennifer finally tips the kitten on its back and inspects it, palpitates it all over, and listens to its chest and back with the stethoscope. Then comes the part Natasha is dreading, the part of this visit that will go very differently for Alpine than it did for Lucky. Because Alpine needs to give some stool samples, and Lucky didn't.
While Jennifer holds the kitten steady and soothingly strokes its head and ears, Thomas lifts up Alpine’s tail, and the kitten squeaks in displeasure as its temperature is taken.
Jigsaw visibly tenses up on the sofa, but by some miracle remains in place instead of moving to snatch the kitten away from this treatment. Natasha suspects part of the miracle is that Clint and Lucky are by his side, Clint cringing and Lucky completely unconcerned and with his tail still wagging.
“Oh, I know, honey,” Jennifer coos at the kitten soothingly while stroking its head and face. “I know. It’s okay, you’re okay. There,” she says after a couple of minutes as she sets the kitten on the scale. “All over now.”
Thomas gets Alpine’s weight while Jennifer records the temperature and bags a bit of stool from the thermometer, and then Alpine is back with Jigsaw like none of that happened, happy as can be and squirming to climb up his chest.
“You have a precious little girl there, Jigsaw,” Jennifer says. “She’s not quite three weeks old, and she got a rough start in life. So I won’t want to see her back again for vaccines until she’s about seven weeks old, maybe even eight.”
Thomas takes over at the laptop and begins typing.
“In the meantime,” Jennifer says, “it looks like you’re doing a very good job with her. Her weight looks good for her age, and her baby teeth are starting to come in well. I’ll get this stool sample sent off for labs to see whether she has any intestinal parasites, and we’ll let you know the results. Do you have any questions?”
Jigsaw holds the kitten up to his cheek briefly, and then resumes cuddling her close to his chest while she tries to scale to his shoulder. After a solid minute, he shakes his head, either because he doesn't have questions or because he thinks that is what's expected of him.
Jennifer smiles. “Alright. If you come up with any questions, you can have Clint or Natasha call me and we’ll get you some answers. In another week or two, you should be able to start weaning Alpine off of the formula and onto solids. But make sure she stays warm for another week, and don’t change her over to a wet food too quickly.”
Jigsaw nods, looking just a little overwhelmed by the information.
“I’ll leave you with some suggestions for wet foods that I happen to like,” Jennifer says. “And a schedule of kitten development, so you can chart her milestones. Eventually, I’d like to see you feeding her a combination of wet and dry food. Don’t be worried about feeding her too much at first. She’ll eat what she needs and leave the rest. Make sure Lucky doesn’t get into her food, though.”
Jigsaw nods again.
“Alpine is too little for treats,” Jennifer says, “but we have some toys for our brave little girl’s first appointment.”
Thomas pulls a red and white striped fabric mouse from a pouch in the canvas bag nearest him, and holds it up with a smile.
“Make sure you watch her while she plays,” he says, adding a bright blue plastic spring about two inches long and a fuzzy round puff ball. “If the toys get damaged, take them away and replace them with new toys.”
The toys go on the coffee table beside the laptop, and then Thomas is reassembling the pet scale and canvas bags while Natasha accepts the printed resources and bill for the session from Jennifer and manages payment terms and scheduling for the next appointment.
Almost before she knows it, she’s back out in the hallway walking Jennifer and Thomas back to the elevator.
“Thank you for being so patient and calm with us,” she says. “This went really well.”
Jennifer gives her a wide smile and exchanges a look with Thomas. “Kitten check-ups are my favorite appointments,” she admits. “They’re just so stinking cute!”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
The animal researchers have been gone for several minutes and it still cannot let the abdominal muscles unclench. So much information to keep in the head, so much has happened, so much has not happened that it feared would happen.
“Sorry about the temperature check,” the other asset says. “That’s just how they take temperatures for animals, I guess. I know it was uncomfortable. For Alpine and for you watching it. I swear it was okay, though. It didn’t hurt her.”
It nods, but not because it agrees.
The dog did not seem distressed by anything that happened, and the little cat is no longer distressed by being pushed into. And it was only for a short while, and— And the little cat does not seem angry at it for letting the animal researcher do that. But it is still angry at itself for allowing it, though.
It should have been able to protect the little cat from that. It had just sat there and watched. It failed the little cat. Watched and did not stop the animal researcher. Is only one step away from having hurt the little cat itself.
And everything else about the animal researcher had been fine. Friendly, even. It has known researchers that pretended to be friendly before they brought out the scalpel, who talked and joked while cutting into it, who even sometimes would pet it while working on it, like they were trying to comfort it.
Not many of them. Researchers were near-universally horrible members of the support teams it has known. But some of them had had two sides, a friendly side that was a lie and the real side that was cruel. That was crueler still because of the false friendly side that came before or after the cruel side.
But this animal researcher had been so genuine about it all. And had been so gentle to both the dog and the little cat. Had fed treats and offered toys. Had been full of information and also praise that it has been doing so well with the little cat.
Had agreed with it that there was a better way than the two scoops of kibble for the dog.
But had still pushed into the little cat with the temperature-taking stick, while it had done nothing to save the little cat. Failed. Failed to save, to protect, to save the little cat.
The ballerina woman returns and sits in the chair again, looking pleased with herself.
“I think that all went exceptionally well,” she says. “And little Alpine is a girl! This suite of rooms needed a girl in it,” she says with a laugh.
The other asset tosses the little-fuzz-ball into the air and catches it. Again.
“I’m just glad it’s over,” says the other asset before adding the blue spring and the ball with a tail on it into a juggle with the little-fuzz-ball. All of the little cat’s little toys, so much smaller than the toys for the dog.
It watches the three toys go around in a neat circle in the other asset’s nimble hands while the little cat presses its paws to the skin face and licks its sandpaper tongue along the tip of the nose. The little cat does love to lick things. Even assets. Even assets that have failed to protect the little cat, assets that do not deserve to be licked by the little cat.
It is also glad that it is over. And it will not have to happen again for another four to five weeks. That is a long time before the animal researcher will return. Maybe it is enough time that it will be strong enough to prevent the animal researcher from pushing into the little cat with the temperature-taking stick.
There has to be a better way.
“So that’s that,” the ballerina woman says. Her stomach makes a grumbling noise and she puts a hand over her belly. “Oof. What do you think the team lunch will be?” she asks.
It perks up a little, feels the abdominal muscles start to release a little. Lunch is a good thing to talk about that does not have anything to do with how it failed the little cat. It still gets to eat the meal—the feeder would want it to eat all of its meals and all of its snacks. Every day, all of them. Even if it does not feel like it deserves them.
The other asset groans after a moment. “Aw, man,” the other asset says. “Casserole? It’s so hard to pick shit out of a casserole. Can’t we get a few pizzas instead? Pizza is always better than casserole. Especially a fish casserole.”
The voice without a mouth must be talking into the room again. It does that sometimes, answers questions no one asked it, like it is a thing that should exist. The other asset keeps saying that it is allowed to listen to the voice without a mouth, that they all want it to listen to the voice without a mouth. But it does not want to. The voice without a mouth is wrong, is everywhere and should not be everywhere.
Voices should have mouths, even if mouths sometimes have no voices.
“You know,” the ballerina woman says, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a tuna noodle casserole. It sounds interesting.”
A tuna is a kind of fish that is found inside of a can. So a tuna noodle casserole is a casserole with can-fish and noodles in it. It does not know what a casserole is, though. Is it like a pie or like an acorn squash bowl or like a sandwich? Is it just a pile of noodles and can-fish?
The other asset is right, though. Triangle bread piled high with crunchy vegetables sounds much tastier than a mysteriously combined can-fish and noodle meal. Especially because it can have triangle bread without any of the fish on top of it.
It moves the little cat away from the skin face. The sandpaper tongue is starting to hurt against the skin. It puts the little cat into the lap, on its back, and plays the no-fun, no-reward game of tickling the little cat’s belly until the little cat tries to grab for the fingers and then holding the hand up so that the little cat is surprised and lifts its paws in all directions.
Tickle, tickle, surprise! Tickle, tickle, surprise!
The little cat seems to enjoy the game a lot, and that is what is important.
“Sounds like you’ll have some pasta primavera with pesto, Jigsaw,” says the ballerina woman. “JARVIS says they’re putting a lot of vegetables in it just for you.”
It makes the question sign. Who is putting the vegetables into the pasta primavera? And what is pesto? Or primavera?
The ballerina woman smiles. “Rogers and Banner have been cooking together again,” she answers. “I think Rogers is trying to learn some non-Depression era kitchen skills, maybe to show off to Wilson.”
It tilts the head to the side. Why would the clown man need to show off to the flying man?
But it remembers, then. The clown man and the flying man, holding hands. Fingers interlaced. Of course the clown man would want to show off for the flying man, if they are holding each other’s hands like that. And the flying man must want to show off for the clown man, too. It is only right that it goes both ways.
It nods. Yes. That makes sense.
“Yeah, when did that happen?” the other asset asks. “I know you know.”
“Wilson and Rogers?” she asks. “Oh, it’s been building almost since before they met. Rogers had a thing for Wilson back when we were just barely recruiting him to the cause.”
“Really?” the other asset asks. “How’d I miss that?”
She shrugs. “By not paying attention, I guess. It’s been right there for anyone to see.”
“Yeah, rub it in,” the other asset mutters. “I had other things on my mind.”
It looks back and forth between them. They are having one of their conversations where they say arguing words to each other and even roll their eyes up to the ceiling or frown or scowl, but where they actually are not arguing at all, and are not even a little upset with each other. There is laughter in their eyes when they have these conversations. Mostly in the ballerina woman’s eyes.
It wishes it could understand why they do it. Maybe it will understand some day. Yasmin is trying to help it understand the team that is not a cell, after all. Maybe Yasmin knows why the ballerina woman and the other asset do this, and whether it is something that this asset should try to do as well.
Notes:
Content Warning: There's a tense moment during the vet visit, and Jigsaw beats himself up about not preventing that tense moment, but nothing too graphic takes place and all animals are well cared for.
Chapter 42: Tower | (Whoa) Just let ‘em talk about it
Notes:
Chapter title from “Let ‘Em Talk” by Kesha ft. Angels of Death Metal. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG3C-lLnZas
It’s rainy indoors time on this vacation, so have a chapter!
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
Pepper’s presence at the team meeting catches her by surprise, though only for a moment.
According to JARVIS’s updated agenda, there’s been significant movement on a few forums and subreddits following leaked footage from their raid on the North Carolina HYDRA base. That will necessarily require some attention from Stark’s public relations team, and Pepper is the best stand-in for that, rather than having several practical civilians in the room.
She’s seen the footage; it was in the agenda notes. It’s possible to make a case that the video doesn’t depict Jigsaw and Clint, that it’s just a trick of the imagination that makes that red shape on the left bicep a star. Wishful thinking. Seeing what you want to see. Clint could be just another archer. It could be staged.
But you’d have to make a solid case. You’d have to poke holes in the video in classic conspiracy style, ignoring some of the obvious information in favor of speculated information. And eventually, news will come out that they were in that area around that time, that it was raining that day, that there was an FBI effort as well. Those records will be sealed, but there are always hackers, leaks.
She’d hoped that they could have another few months before the public got any ideas about Jigsaw being here, of his serial killer aliases being attached to him. She’s not sure the PR team has things ironed out yet. They’ll have to get ahead of this, though. And with some kind of comment or blanket explanation that can actually hold water when poked at.
Beside her, Clint grimaces as he watches the footage on his phone, just now catching up on things. “Damn. I thought those houses were all empty. They were dilapidated enough for it.”
Rogers and Wilson come in together, neither looking particularly pleased by the situation. And that brings the team together fully, ready to commence the damage control.
“So I guess the question is, ‘who is that?’” Stark says. “As in, who are we going to say that is.”
Rogers starts a response: “There’s—”
“Eugh!” Clint exclaims, still looking at his phone. “There’s a fucking roleplay forum. These people are nuts. Pretending to be ‘ravished by the Red Star’ or being saved by him and then thanking him with sex.”
Natasha winces in sympathy. “There’s always a fan club for serial killers. Murderers in general have a lot of fans.”
“But this is gross! Jiggy isn’t anything like this. He’s the opposite of this.”
Natasha pats his arm. “Just move on, Clint. Don’t read it.”
She takes his phone and sets it on the table, face down. She knows exactly what’s on those forums, though she had only been checking them once or twice a week and missed this current development.
Some of his fans have romanticized him to the point of fetish, and she can understand how Clint would be bothered by that. Other fans are more interested in the social justice elements of his kills. There’s art, stories, jewelry. There was a podcast earlier, but it stopped updating around the time the Ronin news stopped dominating the media.
“The first option to discuss is the truth,” Banner says. “A heavily redacted accounting of the truth, of course, but the essentials. Bucky Barnes, HYDRA, decades as a weaponized prisoner of war, escape, rampage. Ongoing deprogramming and rehabilitation.”
“But he doesn’t want to be Bucky,” Clint says.
“Being Bucky gives him war hero status to fall back on,” Pepper says. “Charleen thinks that is the safest course of action. It guarantees a certain amount of leeway in the public opinion. The optics for prosecuting him become terrible. Maybe terrible enough that no one will try. He could be pardoned, even, officially, and not just through S.W.O.R.D.”
“No,” Rogers says. “It doesn’t matter who wants him to be Bucky. I won’t agree to shoving him into a role he’s rejected.” He lets out an audible breath. “It isn’t fair to make him lead a double life and accept being someone in public that he doesn’t feel like he really is.”
Pepper folds her hands on the table. “Even if that’s the safest way to introduce him to society?”
“There are other ways.” Rogers sounds adamant. “We’ll just have to find them.”
Natasha feels a warm pulse of pride as Rogers holds his ground. She knows how desperately he wanted Bucky back. How hard and how long he fought to make the Soldier into Bucky before Jigsaw had named himself. He’s come a long way.
And he must know something of what that would entail, too. Steve Rogers in private, Captain America to the public. Unable to truly be himself in the spotlight. It must have been terrible when he was first enhanced. Maybe it’s still terrible to some degree.
She wouldn’t know. She’s never been herself before now, in public or in private, at least that she remembers. She must have had a self before the Red Room’s teachings and aliases had been layered over her and smothered that original self. But her situation is different from this.
“Alright,” Pepper finally says. “Then who is he, if not Barnes? We’re running out of time to introduce him on our terms. The press release won’t use details, but we can’t be caught in an outright lie. So we need to know the details even if we don’t share them now.”
“He does look like himself,” Stark says. He pulls up the Barnes genealogy on the holo screen. “Maybe he’s a great grandnephew or something. From the Barnes line, but not back from the dead.”
Natasha slides her eyes toward Rogers, gauging his reaction to the idea. His lips are pressed in a tight line, but he doesn’t vocally object to the direction this is pointed. She wonders how far removed from Bucky Jigsaw wants to be. Whether he’d even accept a role as a family member.
“Looks like that would make him a Proctor and not a Barnes,” Banner says. “That’s the line with the fewest known records. It would be easiest to slot him in there somewhere.”
“JARVIS can edit him into all kinds of public records.” Stark grins. “Easy-peasy.”
Pepper nods thoughtfully. “So we forge a new identity for him, place him in the public records, let him choose a likely name from a pool of options. How does he get the prosthetic?”
“Car accident?” Wilson suggests. “Diving accident? Or something military. A parachute accident. Cord snapped, part of it wrapped around his left arm, and the limb got torn off. Honorable discharge, explains PTSD…”
“I know the schematics of that cyborg arm well enough from that instruction manual he came with,” Stark says. “I could take the credit for it if we needed that. Just so long as no one else learns how it works, because I wouldn’t build in the anchor points like that and make it hurt like a bitch all the time.”
Clint sits upright beside her. “It hurts all the time?”
Stark looks at him like he’s missed something obvious. “All the time. Yeah. Couldn’t not. He’s probably just used to it. Good at hiding it. Like a cat.”
Clint hunches back down, a deep frown on his face. Beyond him, Natasha can see that Rogers is also frowning. But it couldn’t be entirely new information to him. Not the way he’d examined those pages with a fine-toothed comb to glean every detail he could from them. Clint had just skimmed it the once, so it probably is news to him.
“If he was Black Ops, that might explain why some records don’t include him,” Banner says softly into the silence. “Because we won’t be able to insert him everywhere.”
“So the military erased what records they could,” Wilson says, “and left only a few behind.”
Except the records they wouldn’t be able to touch tend to be the same records the military can’t touch. People’s old yearbooks, paper records, that sort of thing. So if they add him everywhere they can and can’t add him to someone’s yearbook, that’s the opposite of the trail military tampering would leave. Anything the military left would include him, not exclude him.
“Why were we called to hunt him down, then?” Rogers asks, his voice rough and challenging. “And how did he go from getting a StarkTech prosthesis to killing people?”
Pepper shrugs. “You were called in because the military knew it was him and that he was having a psychotic break and needed to be brought back home from the war, as it were.”
Rogers doesn’t look pleased.
“We have to give him some kind of history that covers the details we need covered, Steve,” Wilson says with a hand on Rogers’s arm. “We don’t have to like it. We just have to make it believable. The military hiding details will help make up for the holes in the story.”
“Does he have to be related to Bucky?” Rogers asks.
“No,” Pepper says. “The resemblance can be an uncanny coincidence if that makes you more comfortable with the identity.”
Rogers shakes his head. “I still don’t like it. I don’t like deciding for him.”
“Maybe something closer to the truth, then,” Banner says. “But not the connection to the Barnes family. He enlisted at eighteen, Black Ops, records erased for safety. He’s captured by the enemy and spends years as a prisoner. Even a decade or two, if he gets captured soon enough.”
“Oh, oh, and Iron Man saves him from the Ten Rings,” Stark adds. “I paid a lot of uninvited visits to those bastards after I got the suit ironed out—no pun intended. No one would question it.”
Stark snaps his fingers. “And that explains the arm and the connection we have to him,” he continues. “Mental break makes sense. He can even call himself Jigsaw. Say he forgot his actual name.”
“If we wanted simple,” Wilson says, “we could say he was a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative and went off the rails during a mission and Fury needed the Avengers to collect him so more operatives didn’t get hurt in the attempt.”
Pepper looks up from where she’s writing. “Do we think he could pass for being in his forties? Late thirties?”
Natasha glances across the table at her paper—she’s got a timeline drafted out by the looks of it, with different dates filled in along one side of the page. Planning the details, then. Even before the story is definite.
They’ll need to run whatever they come up with by Nick. And she’s not so sure they’re close to the answer as far as Rogers is concerned.
Because Rogers is right. If they’re going to do this right, Jigsaw needs to be sitting at the table. He needs to have a say in whatever story he’s going to need to live with for the rest of his life.
“Maybe mid-thirties at the oldest,” Wilson says. “We don’t know how enhanced people age when they aren’t frozen. We should give him a wide window.”
“Natasha, Clint,” Banner starts, “you’ve been quiet.”
Clint meets her eyes, and she can tell he’s feeling the same way she is. Jigsaw needs to have a say. Needs to have the majority of the say, in fact. And final veto power.
“I’m with Cap,” Clint says. “I don’t like deciding for him.”
Natasha nods. “At the very least, we need several options to present to him, and then we work together from there to find something he likes.”
“So we spin up a few more juicy backstories and then have a show and tell with the Jigster,” Stark says. “Cool. Let’s say he’s a student and he was backpacking in the Andes and lost his arm to a climbing accident.”
Pepper frowns, but jots it down.
“Oh, or he could be a clone of Bucky Barnes, created from…”
Natasha lets the words roll over her. All of these are terrible. Too many paper trails needed, too many details to keep straight. And Jigsaw won’t care about any of these details enough to bother referencing them. But it’s entertaining, in a way.
Still, she’d rather he could just be himself.
Yasmin
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 4:30 p.m.—
For some reason she can’t identify, Jigsaw gets more and more agitated as their session nears an end. It couldn’t be their discussion of “the auction woman,” which is how he thinks of the young woman who apparently bought Clint’s time at the auction last month and who has now been to the Tower three times—twice without Jigsaw being allowed to come watch.
It’s true he was feeling lonely and excluded, having had to spend that time with Natasha instead of at the range with Clint the Sunday before last. And it’s true that he is deeply curious to know everything about this mystery woman, beyond what information of Natasha’s he’s related to her and what he saw yesterday.
Yasmin can’t think of anything suspicious or unpleasant about the young woman from the information she has, but she well understands Jigsaw’s feelings of being left out of something that will be part of Clint’s life for two months.
Of course, it’s better that he remains on the outside of that arrangement going forward. He needs to have something that he does on his own that isn’t therapy, that doesn’t involve his roommate. And it’s important that Clint have things to do that don’t involve Jigsaw. That Clint has people in his life who aren’t necessarily part of the team.
And it’s important for Jigsaw to understand that Clint and he do not have to spend as much time together as they do. She worries that they are using each other as crutches to avoid confronting certain things. Jigsaw needs to be able to accept that not everything in Clint’s life will be revolving around—or including—him. And Clint… Well, he is not her patient. But she does worry about him.
Lucky plops his head on Jigsaw’s knee, and Yasmin takes it as a signal to wrap up the brief meditation she’s been leading Jigsaw through as a means of taking his agitation down a notch before the end of their session.
“Jigsaw,” she says after giving him thirty seconds to come back into the room, “I can sense that something is upsetting you, perhaps beyond the time Sunday before last that you weren’t allowed to spend with Clint. Can you tell me what’s on your mind?”
Jigsaw frowns as he idly pets Lucky’s head. Then, he signs “animal researcher” and pauses again, collecting his thoughts or maybe preparing to write something down.
In the end, he opts to write. Or rather, to draw. What emerges is a picture of a cat—Alpine, then, meaning that the “animal researcher” is the vet. There is another picture of a long, thin tube, and an arrow pointing from the tube to underneath Alpine’s tail.
He points to his feelings chart and signs “helpless” and “awful.”
Yasmin nods, taking a moment to parse out his meaning. A long thin tube could stand for a good number of things, but given the arrow, perhaps he is referring to taking Alpine’s temperature, or gathering a stool sample. And he felt or feels helpless and awful about it, because he is connecting those words to his feelings chart.
“Did the vet take Alpine’s temperature?” she asks.
He nods, and then signs “do nothing.”
Do nothing? She goes out on a limb. “Are you upset because you didn’t do anything about the vet taking her temperature?”
He nods again. Signs “helpless” and “awful” once more.
“I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t do anything about that. Did you want to stop it?”
He signs “could not” and “helpless,” and mimes being stuck or frozen.
“I see.”
This goes back to his captivity, then. The vet triggered a memory for him and he fell into the freeze response despite wanting to prevent his kitten from being hurt the way he was hurt. She can’t do anything about the underlying issue with only a few minutes left in their session; she won’t leave her patient in emotional distress at the end of the session if she can help it.
But she can try to reassure him that his kitten was not, in fact, being hurt.
“It’s actually really common for people who have experienced a trauma to freeze up when they’re confronted with a reminder of their trauma,” she says. “Some know it as a fight or flight response, but it’s actually a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response.”
She can bring some literature for him to their next session, or else devote tomorrow morning’s session to discussing this response and how natural it is.
“It helps protect us when we face danger. It’s a form of self-defense, and it’s completely natural and normal, and not something to feel guilty about.”
He frowns, but doesn’t seem ready to challenge it.
“We can discuss it tomorrow in greater detail,” she says. “For right now, I want to reassure you that you did nothing wrong. Not now, not this morning with the vet, and not before during your captivity.”
That, she can see, is getting some internal disagreement. His fingers go from stroking Lucky’s head to burying themselves in the ruff of fur at his neck, something she’s come to recognize as a sign that he’s having some cognitive dissonance.
“Alpine wasn’t hurt by the thermometer, Jigsaw. She was a little uncomfortable for a brief moment because something strange and new was happening, but she was not hurt. She wasn’t in pain at any moment.”
He swallows, and then removes one hand from Lucky’s fur to write a word on his notebook.
When he shows it to her, she reads the PROMISE written there and wishes she could give him a hug, or give his hand a reassuring squeeze.
“I promise,” she says. “The vet is really good at making sure animals don’t hurt, and at taking care of animals that are sick or injured, helping them feel better and heal. They would never hurt Alpine. Or Lucky.”
Just as any true medical professional should never have hurt him.
Chapter 43: Tower | There’s something else that I wanted to say, say
Notes:
Chapter title from “Talk Good” by Grace VanderWaal.
I had a lovely vacation, guys, all things told. And your comments were so wonderful and fun to look through and read and grin about. Thank you so much for helping make my vacation a great one!
(end note is /not/ a content warning, so if you want to avoid spoilers, don't click it!)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
Steve looks down at his current sketch, Jigsaw with Alpine and Lucky, the kitten held protectively in Jigsaw's arms while Lucky sits loyally by his side. It had taken a bit of time to compose the scenario he's sketching, but that is not the problem he's currently having.
The problem is that the face isn’t right, yet, and he’s erased it three times already. There’s just something very Bucky about the face as it’s coming out tonight, and he’s not trying to draw Bucky alive and well in the present surrounded by pets and good things. He’d love it if Bucky were here now, but he isn’t, and Steve is trying to draw Jigsaw.
He can’t put the differences into words, exactly, but the expressions have changed just as much as the way he holds himself. Even though they look the same. Bucky had had a sort of boyish swagger that was a bit cocky but not arrogant, even after Zola had gotten to him in that Kreischberg factory and performed all those experiments on him. Jigsaw has a confidence about him, but nothing boyish. He has a distinctive walk, but it’s more a stalk than a swagger. And while the features of his face make the same patterns, there’s a different energy there.
And Steve just can’t seem to capture it tonight.
Steve puts his charcoal down with a sigh. Maybe he should be doing something else tonight, anyway.
Maybe he’s just still upset at the idea that Jigsaw could end up outed as having been Bucky in his past. Maybe he’s channeling that worry into his sketch, putting Bucky in the future, in Jigsaw’s place, where he doesn’t belong.
He closes his eyes and tips his head back as his eyes prickle. Bucky doesn’t belong in the future he loved the sound of so much, that he had so looked forward to. Bucky never did get to see it. HYDRA stole that from him, stole him from himself, closed his chapter of the book prematurely and tried to burn the whole book.
And after Jigsaw’s session with Yasmin had concluded, they’d run a handful of proposed new lives by the man who emerged from the ashes of HYDRA’s tortures, a mishmash of suggestions that Jigsaw pretend to be someone he’s not. Even if it’s not Bucky in those aliases, there’s still the problem of them not being who Jigsaw is now. And it's worse, even, because they aren't who Jigsaw was. And not just because Tony’s suggestions included shark attacks and other outlandish things.
All of those aliases avoid the very things that have made Jigsaw who he is, and denying him his history for the sake of good optics rubs him wrong. Rubs him as wrong as shoving him back into his history before he's ready for it, if he'll ever be. It’s like when Steve Rogers seemed to cease to exist once they had Captain America to trot around by the nose.
And Jigsaw hadn’t even seemed to understand some of the options they had for him. Student backpacker? Scuba diver? How is he supposed to pretend any of that applies to him when he has no experience as a student or a diver, or at least doesn’t remember any such experience? At least some of the options were soldiers who ran into trouble or were captured and held by the enemy.
But if Steve had to choose one for Jigsaw, he’d agree with Jigsaw’s choice: the truth. Starting with being a HYDRA prisoner and guinea pig, maybe skipping or glossing over the killings Jigsaw sees no issues with, and ending with the time he’s spent in the Tower getting the help he needs.
Jigsaw doesn’t accept who he had been before all of that, so they leave that out. He wants to be Jigsaw, wants to be who he is right now, so they accept him as Jigsaw.
Definitely not Barney Proctor.
But even if Jigsaw is happiest taking full credit for all of his missions to eliminate HYDRA and other evils, they do need to try to distance him from the Red Star Killer, and especially make sure he doesn’t get outed as Ronin. S.W.O.R.D. can’t know about those killings. So even if they go with the truth, they have to remove things about the truth that Jigsaw, rightly or wrongly, is proud of. Parts of his past and present that he wants to cling to as signs of success and purpose.
Steve sighs.
Why couldn’t the public just leave well enough alone? If those people on Reddit hadn't been so engaged, hadn't stuck their noses where they didn't belong, this could have waited until Jigsaw was truly ready to be known to the public at all, and preferably with a story he agreed with and was genuinely happy about.
It’s just all a huge mess. So much secrecy and so many lies. And every lie they tell requires more lies behind it, lie after lie. He hates it.
And, probably, his own experiences with fame are contributing to that. But Jigsaw won’t be kissing babies and shaking hands the way Steve was when he first became famous. No one is going to cheer for Jigsaw in a crowd. Jigsaw’s not going to be getting the bright side of the press, the warm glow of the limelight. In the very best case, there will be many vocal detractors scattered among those who more quietly support what he has done.
There’d even been detractors back in the ‘40s, people who saw Steve for the propaganda he’d started out as, and who loathed him and what he stood for. Jigsaw? A man who murdered hundreds of people within a few months instead of socking fake-Hitler on the jaw on stage… He’s not going to have an easy time of it. Fame will be even less gentle with Jigsaw than it ever was with Steve.
And the best case scenario, despite all its flaws, might be that the public has as much trouble with Jigsaw's face as Steve is having tonight. That the public comes to its own conclusions based on what it ends up being told, fills in the gaps, makes its own story up. That the public sees Bucky behind Jigsaw's eyes. Even if Steve wants Jigsaw to be able to stand on his own without being under the shadow of his past, he can't deny that Jigsaw's past offers some protection.
Steve looks at his sketch again, at Bucky's face there on the page despite his attempts to draw Jigsaw. He gets up and flips his sketchbook closed. He’s not going to finish this tonight, not in the mood he’s in now. He’s got too much on his mind to really get into the sketch. He should be thinking about what he’s going to bring up in therapy with Dr Linda tomorrow. Or maybe go seek out Sam.
Yeah. What he needs now is companionship, not a reminder of a lost companion. He needs some Sam time.
Zoe
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
Zoe feels a zing of excitement and pride when Jigsaw arrives with his binder and notebook for their session, though without Clint or his kitten. It's time to share with him what she's been up to. She’d had a late night the night before, and a busy day today, setting up his tablet to give him back his voice. It’s time for that, after all.
He’s making progress with the signs themselves, but not with the fingerspelling or ASL grammar. He has a much better grasp of written grammar, though a hard time writing the words. An AAC program on his tablet will help him visualize the words and put them in the order of his choosing without necessitating manually typing the words out.
Last night, she explored the program Tony had pushed down to the tablet, checking the features to see that it had everything she’d asked for, and he had delivered, as usual, though this delivery had taken weeks to put together instead of an afternoon: the best aspects of several mainstream AAC programs, without many of the limitations that tend to ruin the experience for users.
She’d been able to customize a few general boards for Jigsaw last night, mostly based on his food books and the names of those in the Tower he interacts with. A couple of common phrases and words that many people use in daily life, and a couple of trauma-based boards that are hidden for now. She doesn’t want him to explore those on his own and trigger himself without Yasmin there to help him through it. At least not until Yasmin decides to touch on those subjects in her sessions. This way, the subject matter will be there when it's time.
And his pads of paper and notebooks have been a great help in discovering the concepts he, specifically, most often tries to discuss in his daily life. A board for all of his discussion of his pets was a necessity. And there’s a mission board, with such words as “target” and “to kill” and “murder.” He’d apparently spent a while in his early time here trying to explain his thoughts about these things to the team. She wants to be sure he has easy access to those concepts.
“Is Clint not joining us tonight?” she asks as Jigsaw settles on the sofa, pulling his legs up underneath him as usual. Lucky climbs up beside him.
Jigsaw shakes his head and mimes sleeping.
“Well, it’s good that he’s getting some rest, at least.” Zoe pulls his notebooks and papers out of her bag and sets them on the coffee table. “Thank you for leaving these with Yasmin this morning. They were very helpful.”
Jigsaw signs “why” and looks at them with interest. He points to his tablet, sitting on the small table beside her chair and asks again.
“Tonight, you are going to start to get your voice back.” She pauses to let him process that.
He’s still for nearly a minute, and then questions her again. He puts his hand across his throat and shakes his head. Signs “can’t” and then “never.”
“I’m excited to show you how,” she says with a wide smile. “It won’t be a voice coming from your throat, and it won’t sound the same way your voice used to sound, before you were injured. But you will be able to enter words into your tablet, and your tablet will speak those words.”
He holds up his most recent notebook, the one with the stars all over it, and she makes an educated guess about his meaning.
“Right now, you can have people read your words or look at your drawings, yes. But with the AAC program, you’ll be able to have people listen to your words as well. It will be another option for you to communicate with them.”
Jigsaw looks at the tablet with a bit of trepidation, not at all the eagerness she’d hoped for. But then, his current system is working for him to some extent, as long as whoever he’s talking to is used to his patterns and knows ASL. That won’t always work for him in every situation, though, so it’s important that he at least have the option to make himself heard, even if he never uses it.
“You won’t have to use it when you don’t want to,” she reassures him. “No one will make you. But I want us to spend this session learning how the program works, and what it can sound like. We can spend a little time every evening practicing with it, until you feel comfortable.”
He nods, but still looks a bit wary of the concept.
“You’ve been silent for a very long time,” Zoe says softly. “Decades. Are you worried about speaking again?”
He nods again, this time emphatically.
“Are you worried that you’ll be punished for making sounds again after HYDRA made you so quiet?” When he nods again, she continues. “No one here will punish you for speaking. Everyone will be very happy for you that you have the opportunity to speak again when and if you want to.”
Jigsaw takes a minute to write out ONLY IF IT WANTS on his notebook and shows it to her.
“Yes, only if you want to. This will be one tool in your toolbox, and you can choose whatever tools you want whenever you want them.”
That gets an “OK” sign, and she smiles again.
“Alright,” she says, holding out his tablet. “Here is your tablet. I have a tablet of my own that has the program on it as well, and I’ll project my screen onto the white board there, so you can see what I do and follow along.”
The first thing she shows him is the home board, with its command buttons to backspace over words, choose different boards that have different words on them, create his own image tiles for words, erase or save a sentence he’s compiled, and, of course, to speak the sentence aloud.
“Many of the words have pictures that correspond with them. I know you have an easier time with images sometimes, so this should be helpful for you.”
She shows him how to navigate to different boards and how to search for a board that he knows a word is on, and how to access the settings to choose a voice or adjust the volume or speaking speed, among other features.
The first specific board she shows him is the people board, full of pictures of all of the Avengers and his therapy team, his pets, Pepper, and Happy. It also has a symbol for HYDRA, since that is an entity he references often. There is a tile for Jigsaw and for I/Me, and because of what he has put in his notebooks so often, a tile for It and The Bucky. She is here to help him communicate, not to police his communication.
“This just has their first names right now, but if you want to use their last names or a nickname, this is how you can copy the tile and rename the copy. You can also remove any tile that you don’t want on the board, and that tile will go away. You can always search for it to bring it back or to use it just once without adding it to a board.”
She demonstrates with “Clint and Lucky,” and presses Speak. Her tablet’s voice is set to mimic her own, and the volume is low. Jigsaw nods.
The next board she takes the time to explore with him is for common verbs he either uses or might use. She shows him how to long press the tiles to bring up options for conjugations and tenses, to go from “to eat” on the main tile to, for instance, “have eaten” and “will eat.” Also, the negative pairs to those tiles. “To do” matched with “Do not” and “Is” matched with “Is not.”
She hardly expects him to use these options for tailoring a word every time, or even often, but the options are there, and she wants him to know about them, to know how to use them if he wants to use them, and to see just how many options he has at his fingertips now. He doesn't appear all that interested in the long press options, or perhaps more accurately, he seems to think all these options are overly complicated. But if he wants to spend the time fine-tuning the words he uses at some point to get a message across with the highest levels of accuracy possible, she wants him to have the ability to do so.
He might surprise her with a desire to convey his thoughts in more complex and grammatically varied structures with the tablet than he does with his signs, after all.
Zoe is particularly proud of the mission-based board, and is gratified when Jigsaw becomes much more engaged on seeing that board.
“You would be able to say this, for instance,” Zoe says, before compiling a pair of sentences. Then she taps Speak, and the words come out into the room.
“Jigsaw is not the Bucky. Jigsaw wants to defeat HYDRA targets.”
“Or,” she says, swapping out some words, “It is not the Bucky. It wants to defeat HYDRA targets.”
Her tablet repeats the sentences.
“There are many ways to say the same thing, whichever you feel works best in any given instance.” She studies him for a moment. He looks a bit overwhelmed. “Are you ready to speak? Or do you want to look at more boards first?”
Jigsaw holds up two fingers.
Zoe nods. “That’s alright. Let’s look at your colors board.”
She walks him through all the colors she’s added to the board, beyond the basic set he can sign. Maroon and mauve, lime and chartreuse, lavender and aubergine, a whole spectrum of shades that he can indicate with more precision than adding light or dark in front of a color word. Each tile has a rectangular color swatch above the color’s name. Not only will he need that to identify these new colors, but she's seen the swatches he colored in his notebook with all his new pens. She knows he will enjoy the colors.
She moves on to his collection of food boards, one for each of the books Caroline has worked on with him, and using the same images as in those books for consistency and ease of use. The board names are outlined in the corresponding book’s cover color.
Eventually, and after several more explorations of the boards, she asks Jigsaw to compile a sentence and to press Speak.
And it does take him longer to do than to write or draw his sentence, but that, she is confident, is due to the novelty of the program. And perhaps a bit to his reluctance to make any noise at all if he can help it. That issue, she’ll leave to Yasmin.
What comes from his tablet, after nearly five minutes of work, is, “It wanted protect little Alpine.”
Jigsaw stares at his tablet with wide, disbelieving eyes and presses Speak again.
“It wanted protect little Alpine. It wanted protect little Alpine. It wanted protect little Alpine.”
Zoe smiles. Her whole torso feels warm and light with the joy of watching—and listening—as Jigsaw experiences his new voice for the first time.
“It wanted protect little Alpine.”
She hopes she doesn’t cry. He might not interpret her tears as happiness or pride, after all. And his choice of first words is so telling, so indicative of who he is at his core. Looking out for his kitten, protecting anyone and anything that will let him.
Not killing, not targets, not HYDRA. Not even food or comfortable soft fabrics or bright colors. Protecting his kitten.
“It wanted protect little Alpine.”
He looks up at her finally, and his smile is a bit tenuous, but it’s there.
“Do you like that voice, or would you like to try some others?” she asks. “There are many, many voices to choose from.”
Including one just called Hunt for Red October, which she assumes is a joke on Tony’s part, but probably a harmless one. If Jigsaw wants an accent, she sees no reason to object.
Zoe guides him again through the settings to the voice options, and they listen to several different voices saying his sentence, one by one, down the list. He stops at the H section, and after listening to the light Russian accent Tony provided, he presses Save.
Maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe Tony understands something about Jigsaw that she doesn’t. She wouldn’t put it past him.
“It wanted protect little Alpine,” comes from the tablet again, now accented.
Zoe smiles.
Notes:
I know some readers have really wanted to see a "fix" where Jigsaw regains his ability to speak and his original voice, etc., possibly via surgery to repair the damage to his throat. This is not that. This is, as Zoe says, just one more tool in his communication toolbox. It's not inferior or superior to any of the other tools, and we aren't suddenly going to have him conversing with ease. A lot of his disability is due to damage to the language centers in his brain, after all, beyond the damage to his throat. So don't worry: we're not mashing the easy button here and there isn't going to be a fairy tale magic healing ending to the saga of helping Jigsaw communicate. ^_^
Chapter 44: Assets | How you like me now?
Notes:
Chapter title from “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy.
Sometimes we need to step back and see a thing from someone else’s perspective, so we’re doing that here. Time to see how Jigsaw experienced that session with Zoe. ^_^
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 9:30 p.m.—
“Tonight,” says the expert with the signs, “you are going to start to get your voice back.”
It makes the body extra still and quiet. It will get the voice back? It will no longer be an asset that is silent all of the time—the one thing it has been consistently praised for and given good rewards for, from the before time when it was always cold and there were the others in the wolf pen, all the way to the time with the American handlers-operators-trainers-technicians?
Why would it give up such an advantage? It does not like to make noise.
Eventually, with the expert with the words looking at it, it makes the question sign and mimes the lack of a voice. This asset does not speak. Cannot speak. Not ever.
“I’m excited to show you how,” she says, her smile bigger than usual, but not cruel. “It won’t be a voice coming from your throat, and it won’t sound the same way your voice used to sound, before you were injured. But you will be able to enter words into your tablet, and your tablet will speak those words.”
It already enters words into the tablet. It can write them with a fingertip, or can make the letters with the keyboard, pecking at them like the chickens on the range that the hamburger technician talked about that one time in the lab.
And it can make words on the paper with the pens, too. It shows her the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages, in case she needs reminding. But how could she have forgotten? She must want to change how it makes the words.
“Right now, you can have people read your words or look at your drawings, yes.” She nods. “But with the AAC program, you’ll be able to have people listen to your words. It will be another option for you to communicate with them.”
AAC? For others to listen to the words, the words have to be made into sounds, noises, and it does not make noise. It is silent, silent, silent. Forever and always silent. It is so good at being silent.
It eyes the tablet warily. It already uses the tablet sometimes instead of the paper and pens. Is the tablet now going to make noises all the time? It likes that the tablet does not make noises except when playing the beautiful music with the words. The songs. Singing.
“You won’t have to use it when you don’t want to,” she says. “No one will make you. But I want us to spend this session learning how the program works, and what it can sound like.”
It wishes the other asset were here. Maybe the other asset could explain to her how silent it is and how that is the way it is meant to be. But the other asset is trying to get some sleep early tonight. Had a headache and was going to “sleep it off.”
“We can spend a little time every evening practicing with it, until you feel comfortable.”
It nods. There is nothing to do but nod when an expert wants something from it. This expert does not have any words to control it, but she does not need them. She has built up some trust. It must continue to trust her if she is to help it communicate better with the others in the hive building.
“You’ve been silent for a very long time,” says the expert. She looks gentle, her face and expression soft. It is the look all of the support team wear when they are trying to understand something that makes them sad. “Decades. Are you worried about speaking again?”
Yes. She does understand. It nods, making the motion bigger than usual. That is how to sign something loudly. The size of the motion is the size of the emphasis. The expert has said so, and the other asset agreed.
“Are you worried that you’ll be punished for making sounds again after HYDRA made you so quiet?”
Not exactly. The team that is not a cell will not punish it, even if it sometimes has a fear thought about being punished by them. And the support team with its feeder and its experts, they will not punish it. They always say so when it becomes worried about that.
It wants to hear the reassurance, though, so it nods. She will tell it again that no one will punish it, and it likes to hear those words.
“No one here will punish you for speaking. Everyone will be very happy for you that you have the opportunity to speak again when and if you want to.”
When and if it wants to? It will not have to start using the tablet to make noises and stop using the silent communication options, the signs, the paper and pens, the miming and the typing?
It should verify this. Everything will change if it is wrong. It does not want everything to change. Everything is so good right now, with the team that is not a cell and the other asset and the rooms for assets and the missions it will be able to go on.
It writes out ONLY IF IT WANTS on the paper and holds it up for her to read.
“Yes,” the expert says. “Only if you want to. This will be one tool in your toolbox, and you can choose whatever tools you want whenever you want them.”
It makes the fingers into the O and the K, and it thinks that it got the K right. That one still does not always come to the hand when it calls it up out of the mind.
“Alright,” she says. “Here is your tablet. I have a tablet of my own that has the program on it as well, and I’ll project my screen onto the white board there, so you can see what I do and follow along.”
It will be a projection. That is when a piece of a wall becomes a glowing panel that reflects whatever is on a different glowing panel. Twice the glowing panels. But it is allowed to look. It knows that now. “Glowing panels are not for assets” was a lie. HYDRA enforced a lot of lies.
What appears on the wall and on its own tablet is a rectangle with many little tiles on it in many different pale colors with little pictures and words under them. It is like the food books that the feeder gives it! Little tiles with pictures and words underneath, in a grid. Only they are already in their little electronic pockets, and there are no physical tiles to pull out and rearrange.
A little house in the upper left corner is what the expert calls a Home button. It will be on all of the “boards” so that it can always get back to this “board,” which is the Home board. That is nice. It will always be able to start over when it messes up or gets lost. It is like the button on the side of the tablet that always pulls up a “desktop” with little “icons.”
She explains what several other buttons on the Home board do and how to use them. It can go to different boards from here, or even make its own pictures to go with the words instead of the pictures that are already there. It can see all the words it has selected to make a sentence and rearrange them by dragging them around with a finger, just like in the matching games.
There is also a Speak button. That will make the tablet make sounds. There are many different sounds that the tablet can make, men’s voices and women’s voices of all kinds, even faster or slower—whatever it likes.
There is a board with all of the team that is not a cell on it! There is the other asset, labeled “Clint,” and all the rest of them. And the dog and the little cat. And there is a tile just for it, a picture of the skin face with “It” written under it. Also one with “I/Me” and one with “Jigsaw.” Another tile is labeled “The Bucky” and looks like it with shorter hair and in a yellowish tint, like it is an old picture instead of the new ones.
And a HYDRA sigil. That is good. It will need to talk about them.
It is still studying all of the tiles with all of the pictures—the clown man is smiling in his picture, and he does not smile very often in person—when the expert’s tablet says “Clint and Lucky.”
It looks up at the projection and sees that she has added those words to the space at the top. It nods. This makes sense, yes. It will touch a tile and that puts the word in the space, and then another tile, and another, and the tablet will say the words in that order, or in some other order if it drags and drops the words differently.
It ponders the board with words that are called “verbs”—different words are called different things, and it is not sure why or what the things they are called mean. Words are words. It is still mulling that over when there is a new board that comes onto the projection.
The board is called Missions! There is “to kill” and “killing face” and “target” and so many more! It can stay almost entirely on this board and maybe finally explain why it is important to kill HYDRA instead of capture HYDRA. Take no prisoners. Look at all the words for it to choose from!
“You would be able to say this, for instance,” the expert says.
Her tablet says: “Jigsaw is not the Bucky. Jigsaw wants to defeat HYDRA targets.”
“Or,” she says, and it watches her take the Jigsaw tile away and replace it with the It tile.
Her tablet says: “It is not the Bucky. It wants to defeat HYDRA targets.”
It blinks.
“There are many ways to say the same thing, whichever you feel works best in any given instance.”
It imagines being able to finally convince the clown man and the flying man and the researcher with th—Bruce, it corrects itself—that killing is acceptable, and even valuable in the field when the target is evil. They are the three of the team that is not a cell that object the most strenuously to the idea.
“Are you ready to speak? Or do you want to look at more boards first?”
It holds up two fingers, the quickest way to request more boards. It wants to know all of the words on the tablet.
“That’s alright. Let’s look at your colors board.”
It thinks for a second that a colors board would be a very small board, because there are so few colors, but the board she shows it has so many colors on it that it has to scroll down to see them all. There are light colors and dark colors. There are colors that are in between two other colors, like they were blended. Colors it has always been able to see but never name.
And before it can study all of the colors fully, there are the food boards! All of its food books, each on a different board, and arranged just like in the books. Little electronic tiles instead of cardstock ones, and all the same pictures on them. It wonders if the feeder knows about this, if she will stop giving it new tiles and books because it has the tablet with the AAC and the food boards now.
It hopes not. It likes flipping through the food books and running the fingers along all the clear plastic pockets.
There are many more boards, all of them accessed through the Home board, and after looking at them all, the expert says it is time for it to finally speak.
It swallows. What should it say? Which tiles should it choose from all of the boards that are available? There is so much to choose from. It finally thinks that it will tell the expert with the signs about the day it had. The animal researchers, how it wanted to protect the little cat but was frozen in place while they pushed into her with the temperature-taking stick.
But it does not want to say all of that. And Yasmin said that the little cat was not hurt. That what happened was not at all the same as what has happened to it before. Only the first part is still important, then.
The finger hovers over the “It” tile for a moment. Should it use the name for this? She had shown it both ways, the Jigsaw and the It. Both are acceptable. It presses “It.” The “To want” tile, when pressed and held, shows it a grid of options to choose from. And it can select “wanted” from the grid.
And what did it want to do? Protect. And it will use the little cat’s name instead of the “Cat” tile. The little cat is worth being named here. The little cat is important, and matters. Alpine matters.
When it presses the Speak button, the tablet in the hands says: “It wanted protect little Alpine.”
The tablet said that. Made that noise that it put together and told it to make. It made the tablet make the noise. It did a thing that caused noise. It made noise. Noise that it wanted to make, exactly the noise it wanted to make.
The words.
Exactly the words it wanted to say, or close enough. Much closer than it has ever gotten with the pen and the paper in that amount of time, and without a struggle to find all those letter shapes to make the words on the page, or to decide what pictures would best convey the thought.
It… It spoke.
It has a mouth, but the mouth did not make the sounds of the speaking. The tablet made the sounds. But the tablet did not speak. It is the one that spoke—the expert said so. That it was going to speak again. And it did. It spoke.
It presses Speak again. Again. Again.
“It wanted protect little Alpine. It wanted protect little Alpine. It wanted protect little Alpine.”
It is speaking. The throat cannot make a sound, but the tablet can. It cannot tell the throat to say a word, but it can tell the tablet to say words. Whatever words it wants. However many words it wants. And the pictures that are on top of the words are easier to remember and pull out of the mind than all the letter shapes it would need.
“It wanted protect little Alpine. It wanted protect little Alpine.”
The expert sniffs in her chair, and it looks up at her. She is looking like her eyes want to cry but she does not want them to. Why is she upset? Or is it like with the feeder with the braids, before, she is so happy that she is near to crying?
It smiles at her. Just a little one, in case she is actually upset. It does not want to further upset her. She has given it words, and she could take them away again. Could tell it that has not earned the words, after all.
“Do you like that voice, or would you like to try some others?” she asks. “There are many, many voices to choose from.”
The voice is okay, but if there are more to listen to, they should listen to them. All the noises the tablet can make. It does not know what it should sound like.
One of the voices is Hunt for Red October! The hamburger technician has called it that before. This voice must be made especially for it, with it in mind. And it sounds… like home. Like the handlers from the before times, the long ago before times where it was always cold and there were other assets around—it thinks there were, it has the picture of them together—where the rewards were always good and punishments always earned.
It presses Save. It wants this voice. This voice from when everything made sense, always.
The words it spoke earlier are still in the space at the top of the Home board. It presses Speak.
“It wanted protect little Alpine.”
The voice sounds right. Feels right. And the expert with the signs smiles.
Clint
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
He’s got his hearing aids out because he was trying—and failing—to sleep, so when Jigsaw and Lucky come back, the first he knows of it is when Lucky comes to verify he’s in the room.
A moment later, Jigsaw tentatively peeks around the doorway, as if he could ever make enough noise to wake him up, even with the hearing aids in.
“Hey, Jigs.” He sits up and pulls the cord on his lamp, letting the sheets fall around his hips, even though it’s fucking cold in the room to prepare for Jigsaw’s eventual visit and the resulting heat wave. “Have a good session?”
Jigsaw nods, and holds up his tablet. There’s some kind of new game on the screen, lots of squares with different colors and pictures. Clint wonders if he’s in for round two of Rickrolling fun times.
But Jigsaw sits down against the wall by the door and starts tapping and swiping on the screen, and no songs come tumbling out of the tablet’s speakers.
That’s a relief. He’s still got that headache. Couldn’t find the first aid kit, despite there not being a bunch of junk in his bathroom, so no ibuprofen for him, more’s the pity.
Whatever Jigsaw is doing, it takes him quite a while to be satisfied enough to show him, so Clint reaches for his phone.
Wow, it’s later than he thought. Their session must have run long. Or else maybe he ran into Cap. Cap still lingers in Jigsaw’s path from time to time hoping to talk.
Clint is just about getting ready to level up in Candy Crush, when suddenly, some Russian man is speaking to him in an accented but mellow tenor, just a mumble almost without his hearing aids in.
“Good therapy night. It learns speak in words. Has voice now sometimes. When it wants.”
Clint’s phone drops to the gathered up sheets and tumbles to the side. He stares at Jigsaw for just a moment, processing—did his roommate just talk to him using the tablet?
“Oh my god,” Clint breathes. His face hurts from the size of his grin. “Jiggy, that’s awesome!”
What a night to skip out on the session with Zoe. He could have heard Jigsaw’s first words if he’d been there. How long has this thing been in the works? Why didn’t anyone tell him? Or was he just not paying attention? That bites him in the ass sometimes, not paying attention.
“Congratulations. How does it feel?” Clint gets out of bed and grabs for the shirt he wore earlier, pulling it over his head before getting his hearing aids situated. “Can you say it again? I couldn’t hear it well that first time.”
Jigsaw nods and taps something on the screen.
“Good therapy night. It learns speak in words. Has voice now sometimes. When it wants.”
Clint shakes his head in amazement. “That’s amazing. I didn’t know you could use that tablet like that.”
Jigsaw starts tapping the screen again, and Clint waits to hear what he has to say. To hear it. What a concept, and after all this time. He can’t imagine how that must feel.
“Only when it wants. Noisy tablet and this asset likes silent.”
“Sure,” Clint agrees. “Just when you want to. No one’s going to make you talk.” And if anyone does try to make him talk when he doesn't want to, Clint will smack them.
If it was him, though, he's pretty sure no one would be able to stop him from talking once he had that ability back. He'd be too relieved to shut up. But there's a lot of things he and Jigsaw just aren't the same about, and this is probably one of them. His roommate does like to be silent.
“Can we tell Natasha, though? Cap? Someone? This is amazing.”
Jigsaw points to his head and then at Clint, signs “hurt” and “why.”
Clint blinks. “Yeah, my head still hurts, but this is just too good not to get up for. It’s worth it, and so are you.”
Jigsaw nods. He taps the screen just three times, and the Russian voice is back again, saying “Natasha.”
Chapter 45: Assassins | I see bad times today
Notes:
Chapter title from “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Posting early again. Not sure what my Sunday schedule holds, and I'd rather be early than late. ^_^
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
It’s not exactly entertaining reading material, the collection of roleplay forums, Reddit posts, and “fanfiction” dedicated to Mr Red Star. But it’s what she’s chosen tonight, in an effort to get a better feel for this section of public opinion before something gets out of the fan clubs and into the general media.
The impression she’s getting is that the opinion is largely positive, but also based on misconceptions and wishful thinking. There are the trolls who roleplay Mr Red Star as a monster and who are quickly banned from the forums. There are contentious comment strings that devolve into flame wars on Reddit and Twitter, and there are some downright alarming fantasies of how Mr Red Star would devote himself to the writer—or the reader, in some cases—once he gets to know them after rescuing them.
Mrs Red Star is a particularly prolific writer on the site, and she’s clearly a lover of romance novels because so many of her stories follow common bodice ripper plotlines. Mr Red Star is almost always a bad boy type who changes his ways for her, or a dark vigilante who saves her and falls for her because she’s different from the others.
Natasha is in the middle of a particularly saucy piece wherein Mr Red Star is as proficient with his tongue as he is with his knives, when there’s a knock on the front door.
She’s not expecting visitors, let alone at this time at night. And Clint, the only person who might pay her a visit at night now that Jigsaw has agreed to stay out of the air ducts, is surprisingly good at texting that he’s coming over before he does come over.
Natasha gets out of bed and pulls on her night robe before walking out to the front room and looking at the viewer screen to see who it is.
Hm. Clint is still in boxers, though he’s put a shirt and slippers on. And Jigsaw is with him, but not Lucky or Alpine. Very curious. Except for very short stints closed in the bathroom for her own safety or being left in the care of either Clint or Natasha, that kitten has been carted around everywhere. It’s late enough, though, that maybe both Alpine and Lucky are sleeping.
She lets them in, gesturing toward the sofa. Before Clint had discovered that Jigsaw returned his affections, she’d have put Jigsaw in one of her chairs and would have shared the sofa with Clint. Now, though, she anticipates they will scrunch up together on the sofa, instead of sitting at opposite ends.
“Make yourselves at home.” Natasha goes to her refrigerator and withdraws two bottles of water before filling a glass for herself from the sink. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
She hopes it isn’t relationship advice. Surely Clint can’t have messed up badly enough already that they’d both be on her sofa. That she knows of, they aren’t even holding hands yet.
Clint reaches for the bottle she holds out and ends up taking Jigsaw’s as well, since the man is too engrossed in his tablet to accept his.
She raises an eyebrow at Clint’s silence, and then decides to wait it out instead of repeating the question. He does have his hearing aids in, so he heard her just fine. There will be a reason for him not answering the question. She’ll just take a seat in her comfier chair and see where this leads.
“Tonight, it learns speak in words. Only when it wants.”
Natasha chokes on a sip of water and coughs until her throat is clear.
“Jigsaw?” she asks. “Is that… I’m happy for you. That’s great!”
She is happy. She’s very happy for him. But she’s also wondering why he chose to have a Russian accent. And she’s surprised that Zoe didn’t let the team know that this was in the works. Maybe they could have helped somehow. Probably Stark did help, actually. And that he didn't mention it indicates that he would actually be pretty decent at keeping a secret, despite the way he likes to talk.
Jigsaw smiles and signs “thank you.”
Clint grins. “Isn’t that cool? Bet it was worth getting out of bed for.”
She nods. “That’s a nice accent you chose,” she says. “Any reason for it?”
Keep her interest casual, calm. It might have nothing to do with the Winter Soldier program or his roots in the Soviet Union. It might also be that there’s some lingering fondness for his time there, what he remembers of it. She’s not sure how to take that, if that’s the case.
Natasha’s prepared for a long wait while he figures out his words, just like with anything he wants to write, type or draw on the tablet. That’s one of the things about socializing with Jigsaw. There are pauses to let him express his thoughts. It’s true that the conversation could easily leave him behind, but she wants to know what he’s thinking. So does Clint. It’s always worth the wait.
“Before time handler support team sound like,” the tablet reads out after nearly ten minutes. “Always cold. But angry dog cage with assets inside. Same sound like a home. Good rewards in before time.”
Angry dog cage? Before time is clearly his handlers and captivity before being handed over to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s HYDRA contingent, somewhere he felt was a home with good rewards. So yes, the Winter Soldier project.
She really isn’t sure how she feels about that, the thought that his time there was pleasant for him. Her own time in the Red Room wasn’t something she’d call pleasant, but it had felt like a home before she knew any better. At least, she’d felt she belonged there.
But she supposes anything would be pleasant when it’s compared to how HYDRA treated him under Pierce. So it does make a certain amount of sense that he’d value what he remembers of his time as the highly prized Winter Soldier, as opposed to the commonly tortured “Fist of HYDRA.”
“Angry dog?” Clint asks. “A cage of angry dogs?”
Jigsaw frowns and pushes a button on the side of the tablet, then taps several times over the course of a minute. The screen, when he turns it to face her and then Clint, reads WOLF PEN in typed capitals.
Oh. The Winter Soldier project is the source of the photograph with Karpov, Jigsaw, and the five others dressed like him. Her stomach clenches at the thought of additional winter soldiers. But they can’t have been enhanced like Jigsaw. They can’t have lasted as long. They must just have been his field support team, trained operatives who would have gone on missions with him. Their version of a STRIKE team.
Anything else is terrifying.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 11:45 p.m.—
They do not spend very much time in the ballerina woman’s rooms because it is late, the little cat will need feeding soon, and the other asset still has a pain in the head. The ballerina woman gave the other asset two small oval pills to swallow with lots of water, and that will make the other asset feel better.
It must be very nice to be able to swallow two little oval pills and then feel better. Most of the pills it has swallowed have not made it feel better. Have always made it feel much, much worse. But it is better to swallow what the handlers would give it, to avoid punishment and having the pills forced down the throat while it wears the choking face.
“That’s really something,” the other asset is saying after watching it go through the routine of feeding and cleaning the little cat, and tucking the little cat into the designated shoebox with the towel-wrapped warm water bottle. “How does it work, anyway? Are there just hundreds of words to scroll through, or what?”
The other asset should be getting back into bed, after taking out the purple crescents behind the other asset’s ears and taking the t-shirt off and adding it back to the pile it came from.
But the other asset wants to know more about the tablet, and it can give that information to the other asset so that the other asset can sleep well without having the questions chasing sleep away.
It walks to the sofa, confident that the other asset will follow, and sits down in the middle. The other asset can pick which side to sit on. Does the other asset want to be closer to the flesh side or the metal side?
The other asset yawns and plops down to its right as if without needing to think about the action.
It balances the tablet on the tops of the legs and taps the AAC icon with a faint click of metal against glass, but the other asset does not seem to mind, or even notice, the sound.
There are many boards to show the other asset, and it picks the best ones, the ones the other asset would really want to see. Then it works on locating the words it wants, which are scattered across different boards.
The other asset watches quietly, nodding occasionally while it queues up the words. It taps Speak, even though the other asset can see the words in their line.
“Loud words changes things? The same as? More or less the same as?”
The other asset’s head shakes no. “We’re the same as, period. No change, no degrees of being the same as. We’re the same as each other, and that’s just how it is.”
The other asset looks as though there are a lot of thoughts going on, and some of the thoughts make the other asset’s cheeks flush faintly.
“I like you just the same, no matter how you communicate. I’m just glad you’re communicating with me.”
It is also glad that it can communicate with the other asset.
It thinks about the stories that the clown man and the flying man had told it before the dinner meal. The stories about people it could pretend to be, and what had happened to those pretend people. How those pretend people had gotten the metal arm with the red star. How those pretend people had gotten the LI on their throats. How those pretend people had ended up in this hive building.
None of the pretend people were assets. None of the pretend people had killed and killed, had worn the tac gear on the rooftops of the hunting grounds. None of the pretend people had been controlled by evil. None of the pretend people were the same as the other asset.
If it has to pretend to be one of these made-up people, then will it lose the things that make it the same as the other asset? Will they still be the same as each other?
“You’re thinking thoughts, Jigs. Care to share?”
It uses the tablet’s keyboard program to hunt and peck the necessary letters. It does not know where the right words are on the boards in the AAC program. But it can conjure up the letters it needs.
The other asset waits while it finds the letters, does not interrupt or guess. Just reaches for the stick that controls the glowing panel and turns it over and over in nimble fingers. It is nice to look at out of the corner of an eye. Almost distracting, but it manages to type what it wants all the same.
PRETEND PEOPLE NOT SAME AS. NOT ASSETS. IT DOES NOT WANT.
The other asset reads the tablet’s letters when it moves the tablet toward the other asset.
“Even if your alias isn’t an asset like we are, you’d still be an asset.” The other asset puts the control stick on the coffee table. “Choosing a cover story is just that. It’s like a mask you wear in public. In private, you’re still you. And under the mask, you’re still you, even in public.”
It frowns.
“And how often are you in public, anyway? You’d hardly have to pretend.”
But what if that changes? What if it goes to the store that sells all of the food, and explores all of the aisles and aisles of delicious fruits and vegetables? What if it goes to the green park with the dog? What if it goes somewhere else?
And all of the pretend people were so different from it. And the ones that were similar in some ways were different in other ways. What if it does not remember the right details when it needs them? What if it changes the mind later and wants to pretend to be a different made-up person?
“You really don’t like the idea, do you?”
It shakes the head. It does not, does not, does not.
“It’s not just the aliases we ran by you, but the idea of pretending, right?”
It nods.
The other asset shrugs. “Well, no one can make you pretend to be someone you aren’t. Just refuse to do it. I’ll back you up.”
The other asset will be backup. That is good. It will just choose none of the pretend people with their confusing and complicated lives. It does not want to pretend to be a person. It is an asset, now and always.
Natasha
—New York City | Monday 17 September 2012 | 12:15 a.m.—
Natasha stares at her ceiling, at the darkness that seems to throb in the corners of the room and the utterly silent grate over her air vent. She doesn’t know what time it is, but she does know sleep is not on the way.
She wishes Jigsaw were in the air ducts above her so that she could call him down to talk with her.
But he’s not there. He might have stopped skulking around in the air ducts when he was allowed all over the Tower, or he might still indulge in a good duct crawl from time to time. But right now, he’ll be in their rooms making sure Clint is settled for the night and his kitten has a full meal in her belly.
Natasha sighs and gives up on sleep. She sits up and reaches for her tablet. “JARVIS, lights, please. The lamp in the corner.”
“Certainly,” comes the polite mechanical voice of the AI. JARVIS obligingly turns on the far lamp for some soft, warm lighting that won’t jar her eyes after being in the dark for so long.
“Thank you, JARVIS.”
“You are welcome, Agent Romanoff.”
Natasha smiles. It will never cease to amaze her that Tony Stark, of all people, built an AI as courteous and gentlemanly as JARVIS. The man he based the programmed behaviors on must have made a big impact on him.
She brings up the image of the photograph that currently has her sleepless. The Wolf Pen. Karpov stands off to one side, looking proud and proprietary, but also a touch grim. Then there’s Jigsaw, wearing what she thinks the red manual refers to as a cryo suit. The others are wearing that, too, except Karpov.
She studies each face in turn. A blond woman, tall, standing in the middle of the group. To her side, a man with a large beard, his face bruised and his expression partly a wince. To the woman’s other side, a Black man, uninjured and looking a touch smug. To his side, an Asian man with a bald head, distracted, but looking at the camera. His eyes are unfocused. And another injured man on the opposite side of the grouping, his arm in a sling.
They’re varied. Varied enough that there isn’t a likely culture or country someone in that group couldn’t glide through without inspiring so much as a double-take. Dress them differently, train them properly, the “wolves” in that photograph could infiltrate the governments of the world with ease.
That’s worrying enough on its own, if they’re HYDRA agents, but they are all dressed the same way Jigsaw is dressed. In the field, Jigsaw’s tac gear had been tight, strappy leather adorned with weaponry. The STRIKE teams that would have been with him weren’t dressed that way. They had regular tac gear. Standard issue, except for Rumlow’s custom gun and habit of wearing straps crossed over his chest.
So if a STRIKE team would ordinarily dress one way and their Soldier a different way, what does it mean for all six of the “wolves” to be dressed identically?
And while she isn’t one hundred percent certain that the sleeveless bodysuit they are all wearing is the cryo suit described in the red Winter Soldier manual, she can’t think of anything else it could be. The manual had described the purpose and effect of a cryo suit—they were meant to protect the core of a body, not the extremities. Heating elements woven throughout the fabric to assist with returning the body to standard temperature.
The thought that increasingly plagues her is that the photograph does not depict one enhanced super soldier with five field agents and a handler, but six enhanced super soldiers and their handler.
She knows from watching the monitors that Jigsaw had spent considerable time looking at the photograph after Clint returned the manual to him. She doesn’t know if he still does. But she would like to know how much he knows about the photograph. What he could tell them about the others in the wolf pen. Particularly, where this photograph was taken and when.
And most importantly, what became of the others.
Chapter 46: Assets | I found love where it wasn’t supposed to be (right in front of me)
Notes:
Chapter title from “I Found” by Amber Run.
Happy mid-week!
Note: Please see endnotes for content warnings this time around.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
It is wrong. Everything is familiar, but wrong.
It cannot tell what is wrong about it, though.
There is the chair with the white electric fire, the halo dormant and restful as it reaches for the sky. There is the table with the straps and railing, metal and cold, waiting to receive an asset. There is the set of lights overhead, surgical lights that burn hot against the skin and blind the eyes. The machinery hums in the corners of the room, the concrete smells of petrichor, the yellow lights flicker along the ceiling.
It is wrong, but why? It is… normal. Necessary. Familiar all the way to the bones.
There is the first researcher, the original researcher, before the transformation to green letters on a sea of black. There are the round glasses on the round face, the bow tie under the chin, the smile, so wide, so eager.
And there is the smaller table on wheels, the tray with all the instruments of destruction upon it, the tools used to collect data, to cut an asset apart, to drain an asset’s veins, to push new blood into the asset, blood that is cold or hot, blood that is not red, blood that is poison.
On the main table, there is a small white shape. It shivers and makes a squeak of protest as the researcher stretches it, pulling tiny legs up and down, two near the head, two near the tail. The little white shape’s belly is round, plump and pinkish under the white fur.
And the researcher sticks pins into the little white shape’s paws, trapping the little white shape in place amid mews and squeaks that now bear an edge of pain. Order comes through pain. The tiny white shape will be put into order. Is being put into order.
A tool is selected. It is the bone saw, the little round blade spinning at the end of the tool, approaching the tiny white shape, drawing nearer and nearer, and the tiny white shape writhes against the pins holding it in place, squirms and squeaks while there is still time to make these noises.
The saw comes closer, touches down against the tiny white shape’s middle, where it is widest, and slowly presses downward, sending a spray of ruby mist upward against the researcher’s gloved hand.
The tiny white shape is a cat. It is a little cat. It is the little cat. It is Alpine. It is— She is—
All of the little cat’s insides come spilling outside, tumbling out wetly against the sides of the table, until the plump, rounded belly is hollow and gaping open, wide, so empty, and her tiny mews and mrrps turn to high-pitched shrieks as the saw buzzes through her.
It screams for the researcher to stop, for the researcher to cut it apart instead, to cut apart this asset to get the data, please, this asset and not the little cat, but it has no voice. Has never had a voice. It screams and screams, as silent as if it never opened the mouth, and the researcher laughs and laughs, and tells it to wait its turn, and laughs.
There is a gag, then, a handler is trying to stuff a wet rag into its open, screaming mouth, and the rag is hot and warm, and the weight is pressing down on it, and the rag is whining, the handler is whining, is pressing down and licking and licking and it is the dog.
It opens the eyes and watches in the darkness as the dog rises up and comes down, moving with this asset’s heaving chest, trying to comfort it, to save it from the horrible sleeping images, the nightmare.
The dog gives the skin face another lick, breathes wet, warm air against the skin face—huff huff—whines softly.
It reaches up to rub behind the dog’s ears, to reassure the dog that it is fine, everything is fine, it is awake now. Then it looks at the little shoebox the little cat had fallen asleep in last night. The little cat is there, sleeping in a tiny circle up against the water bottle it had filled with warm water before crawling into the nest. The little cat is fine. Alive, whole. Warm and plump and happy.
It is not relieved by the sight.
It watches the little cat’s chest rise and fall for several minutes, proving to itself that the little cat is unharmed.
There is no reason for the horrible night images to plague it now. The animal researcher did not cut into the little cat or the dog, did not even have a blade or saw in reach when she was here earlier.
She did push into the little cat, but that is how they take a temperature, the other asset had said. It is a necessary thing, and not at all like when it has been pushed into. It needs to believe the other asset about this. And Yasmin, too. If it does not, then it has to believe that it allowed the little cat to be pushed into the way it has been pushed into, and then it has failed the little cat terribly.
Failed, failed, failed.
So it believes the other asset. Believes Yasmin. It has to. It has to. The little cat was not harmed by the animal researcher and the temperature taking stick. It did not fail the little cat.
It gently urges the dog to get off of it, and sits up to hug the dog close and run the hands through the dog’s fur. Signs that the dog is a good dog, even though it does not know if the dog can see it clearly enough in the dark.
It could try to go back to sleep, but…
It gets up, instead. Pushes back the pillows and the fluffy soft duvet and the fish-looking soft thing. This is not something the fish-looking soft thing can help with. But the other asset… The other asset can help.
The little cat mrrps sleepily when it scoops her up out of the shoebox with the towel and the bottle of still-warm water. The animal researcher said to keep the little cat warm, and it will be much warmer in the other asset’s nest than alone in this shoebox.
And it will need the tablet, too. Or… The head does not want to look at the glowing panel now. It chooses the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages, instead. It will take some comfort from the feeder with the braids as well as the other asset. It will use the purple pen. The other asset loves purple.
The dog follows it to the other asset’s nesting room, and it is prepared to slide on top of the other asset’s nest and settle in, but there is blue light coming from the other asset’s nest room. When it stops in the doorway to the other asset’s nest room, it sees that the other asset is awake, illuminated in blue from the glowing panel of the phone screen in the other asset’s hand.
Awake, then. Should be sleeping. Did the other asset have a nightmare and it did not realize? Was it too busy having its own nightmare?
The other asset looks up when the dog comes over to put its snout on the side of the bed, and reaches over to turn the lamp on.
“What’s wrong?”
It comes over to the dog’s side by the other asset’s bed and shows a drawing of the little cat in many pieces. It signs “stupid” with a scowl, because it is stupid. The night images are stupid and it is stupid for having them when the little cat is perfectly fine.
“It’s not stupid to have nightmares,” the other asset says. “Even if the reason for them is over. Or isn’t going to happen.”
It softens the scowl to a frown. Points at the paper and then signs “stupid” again. Even if it is not stupid for having the horrible night images, the images themselves are stupid.
The other asset sets the phone aside and pets the dog’s head. “I mean, I still have nightmares about Loki taking over my mind,” the other asset says. “About the tracksuit mafia grabbing me again.”
The other asset laughs softly, but it is a harsh laugh without a hint of joy. “Weird combinations of the two, even,” the other asset adds. “Nightmares are just nightmares. They suck. I’m sorry you had one.”
It points at the other side of the other asset’s bed and uses the “why” sign to ask if it can crawl on top of the other asset’s bed for the rest of the night.
The other asset looks at the other side of the bed, too, and seems to be thinking about something.
Will… Will the other asset tell it no? Will it not be able to sleep here after all? Does the other asset not want it around?
Then the other asset pulls back the layered soft things that cover the bed to reveal the soft sheet underneath.
“If you’re gonna crash here for the night, you might as well get comfortable.” The other asset looks at it, and the other asset’s cheeks are flushed faintly in the lamplight. “I mean, it can’t be comfy just sprawling out on top of the covers. Help Lucky up, and then get in?”
It blinks and then places the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages and the little cat in the other asset’s lap so that it can help the dog up onto the other asset’s feet. Then it does as the other asset has asked it to do, crawling not just onto the other asset’s bed but between the layers of the other asset’s soft things.
The other asset hands it the star notebook to put on the side table behind it, and then the little cat to hold, and then turns off the lamp before scootching down into the blankets and soft things.
“If you need anything, just poke me, okay? And one poke for yes and two for no?”
It pokes the other asset, flesh fingertip against the other asset’s bare shoulder, and then arranges the little cat safe in the dip between the two pillows on the other asset’s bed. It curls up against the other asset’s side, its feet pressing against the weight of the dog at the foot of the bed, and shuts the eyes.
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 5:00 a.m.—
He’s just about to fly off the edge of the roof, is readying his grappling hook arrow, when the dream shatters and Clint finds himself awake for no good reason he can see. It’s a rare thing, waking up when it’s dark out and not because of a nightmare.
Weird.
He wonders what woke him up, if anything. It might just be his fucked up brain deciding he’s had enough of a good thing and putting a stop to that. That makes a certain kind of sense. Can’t have too much of a good sleep session, after all. What would happen if he did? The world might end.
He takes in a deep breath, and finds his chest slightly constricted by what feels like a bar against his stomach.
Weirder.
Clint opens his eyes and takes a moment to place his surroundings. There’s usually a heat to one side of him where Jigsaw has curled up against him, or else a heavy weight all across him radiating heat downward.
This time, he’s actually on his side, facing the nightstand, instead of stretched out on his back like he usually sleeps. And Jigsaw’s about where he usually is, on those nights when he sleeps over, but he’s… oh. Huh. The heat source is just right up against him tonight. That’s an arm around his waist. A metal arm. Jigsaw’s metal arm.
And those feet are Jigsaw’s feet, pressed up against his own feet. The legs are Jigsaw’s legs, tucked in behind his own legs. Jigsaw’s breath against the back of his neck, even and soft.
Clint blinks. He’s never been the little spoon before. He’s been taller than all his partners in the past. And he’s taller than Jigsaw, too, but it doesn’t seem to matter in this case. Before, he’s had a mouthful of a woman’s hair, when spooning, or a handful of a man’s abs. Before, he’s always had one arm totally dead to the world, trapped under his bed partner and fast asleep while the rest of him calculated ways to free himself.
This other… it’s nice. He doesn’t have any numb limbs, he doesn’t have any hair in his face, and he’s not sure Jigsaw would appreciate someone hugging him close, anyway, so that’s good, too. He’s just as trapped, though. There’s nothing to indicate Jigsaw’s awake, and he doesn’t want to risk waking his roommate up if the man’s still sleeping. But there’s no way he’s going to move this metal arm with a gentle nudge and slip out of bed to get a drink or something.
Clint licks his lips as the image of that metal arm flashes across his mind. He’s seen it, obviously. But he hasn’t really ever touched it. And Natasha had said… She’d said to just touch Jigsaw, to touch him softly, to show him that people touching him didn’t have to mean people hurting him. Show him the good stuff.
He can do that. He can do that right now. Hell, he’s technically already doing it, just with his bare torso instead of his hands. He’d thought long and hard about how to hold hands with Jigsaw, and here’s an opportunity to caress his arm. That’s practically the same thing, right? It’s romantic, it’s gentle, it’s soft, it’s a good thing. And Natasha is probably right. Definitely ninety-ninth percentile of being right.
Clint moves his left hand downward, resting it gently along the top of Jigsaw’s forearm, probably near his wrist, though it’s hard to tell without looking under the covers. The arm is warm, just like the rest of him. And the metal feels smooth, despite the ridges. He tentatively runs his fingers upward toward Jigsaw’s elbow, and—
And the plates move under his fingers, shifting upward with his fingers like Clint’s moving them himself.
“Oh shit!” he says while sitting up in a blind panic, images of gaping holes in the metal arm dancing behind his eyes. “I didn’t— I didn’t—” He fumbles for the pull string on his bedside lamp. “I—”
Talk about fucking it up. He can’t believe he did that!
Jigsaw is propped up on his right elbow when Clint turns to face him in the lamplight, looking somewhere between startled and confused. But not in pain at all, and not upset or anything.
Lucky is leaning more toward startled at the foot of the bed, but he doesn’t move.
Jigsaw signs “why” at him with the left hand, which is attached to a perfectly fine metal arm, nothing looking particularly out of place, despite how he’d felt the plates shifting about.
Clint swallows. “I should have asked first. I didn’t mean to damage anything, or hurt anything, or—”
He cuts off as Jigsaw’s confusion gains an amused edge to it.
Jigsaw studies him for a solid minute while Clint tries to convince himself that he hasn’t hurt anything, and then lifts his left arm out so that Clint can see it more closely. The plates ripple upward along his arm toward his shoulder, just a little, and when they get to the top, they ripple back downward toward his wrist. As they move, instead of gaps in the arm’s metal plating, there is an underlayer of metal that’s usually only visible as a hairline groove.
Clint stares.
In his peripheral vision, Clint sees Lucky lower his head to cover Alpine again, sleeping between his paws and not on the pillow where she’d started out.
“…I’ve never seen it do that,” Clint says, feeling stupid. He’s been practically at this man’s side for like two months now. Has this happened before and he just wasn’t paying attention? Is this new? Something that doesn’t happen often? Is it part of a maintenance protocol or something?
“Is everything okay?”
Jigsaw nods and turns over to get his notebook and pen. He sits up fully and writes for a while, and Clint takes the time to make the rest of his nerves calm the fuck down already. Jigsaw says it’s fine. He did it himself, all the way up and then all the way down, to show Clint that it was fine. Jigsaw isn’t upset. Clint hasn’t ruined anything—not the arm itself and not anything between himself and Jigsaw.
Well, maybe he’s ruined any sense of cool factor he might have had where Jigsaw is concerned, but he doubts there was much of a cool factor to start with, anyway. Not after listening to him whine about his ribs and nose for a month, or after putting on his socks and shoes.
Finally, Clint is handed the notebook with CALIBRATION LOOP written on it in purple felt tip pen. There’s a picture of an arm with a star on it, and arrows go up one side of the arm and down the other side, representing the plates shifting, maybe. Obviously.
Jigsaw smiles at him and then the whole arm worth of plates shimmies up and down, shifting like everything is on tracks designed to move like that instead of like it’s one solid robot arm. He signs “new feeling” and mimes stroking Clint’s arm, but without actually touching Clint.
So that was a new feeling for him. Having someone gently stroke his metal arm. New doesn’t necessarily mean good, though. In fact, hadn’t Stark said that he was always in pain? What if he made it worse?
“Um,” Clint says. “Was it a… good new feeling?”
Jigsaw nods with a soft smile that lives mostly in his eyes.
Well that’s a relief. Clint licks his lips—he must be really thirsty—and then asks his follow-up question: “Can I do it again?”
Jigsaw’s smile turns into a grin, his eyes bright and eager. He holds his arm out toward Clint, palm down.
Clint makes sure to telegraph his movements, even though he has definitely gotten permission and the motion won’t be a surprise to Jigsaw. He reaches out to run the pads of a few fingers along Jigsaw’s forearm, feeling each smooth plate and the thin crevices between them, keeping his pressure light but not light enough to tickle—he hopes.
Clint remembers the snakes at the circus, the big ones, the boas and the pythons. He got to feel them sometimes, when helping clean their habitats. They always looked like they’d feel slick, and never actually felt that way. They were smooth and soft, and their scales weren’t bumpy but just one smooth slide under the fingers. And they were always warmer whenever they’d been under a heat lamp.
Jigsaw’s metal arm is similar in that it’s warmer than it looks, smoother than it looks. His fingers glide along its surface almost without noticing the individual plates. His fingertips might pick up more detail, and someone without his calluses might pick up the tiny gaps between the plates better than he can. But Clint can’t quite get over how smooth Jigsaw’s arm is.
Clint moves down to Jigsaw’s wrist, and then to the back of his hand, where the plates are both smaller and closer together, where they seem like they’d glide and slide around without doing the same shimmy as the bigger plates do.
“Is this nice?” he asks.
He doesn’t want to be obnoxious or to overdo anything. And he especially doesn’t want to overwhelm his roommate if this is truly the first really gentle touch he remembers.
Jigsaw responds by turning his hand over to run his metal fingertips across the palm of Clint’s hand, focusing on the calluses at the base of his fingers and trailing his fingers along the creases that cross his palm.
Clint looks up at him and finds that Jigsaw is looking at Clint’s hand, his lashes blocking sight of his eyes and his lips curved in a gentle smile. He looks totally at peace, focused but in a relaxed way. The lack of any sort of intensity takes Clint by surprise, and Clint honestly isn’t sure what to do with it.
The seconds seem to stretch into minutes, and Clint isn’t sure how long they’ve been just kind of holding hands, caressing each other’s fingers and generally basking in the novel sensations before his garbage brain decides that it’s time to talk again and ruin a good moment.
“I’ve never been the little spoon before,” he says.
Jigsaw looks up at that, his head tilted and his brows knitted in a confused frown.
“Uh, spoon, like the way we were sleeping before… Like how two spoons kind of nest together?” Clint shrugs. “Your front to my back? That’s called spooning. You were the big spoon and I was the little one.”
The way Jigsaw nods, Clint can practically see him turning the idea over in his mind like that Rubik’s cube he still hasn’t figured out.
“It was nice,” he says, because he can’t stop talking. “I enjoyed it. It was like being cradled. But in a good way, not a baby way.” Clint wills the ground to swallow him.
Jigsaw just smiles, though, and Clint can’t help but look at his lips. And damn. If this were someone else… Anyone else… And he was sitting up in bed with them after spooning and holding hands and talking about cuddling, he could just lean in and kiss those lips.
He wants to. It feels right, like a natural progression. And with someone else, it would be. With someone else, he’d have already kissed Jigsaw before spooning with him. But Jigsaw isn’t someone else. He’s Jigsaw, and Clint isn’t even sure he knows what kissing is.
The last thing Clint’s going to do is shove his face into Jigsaw’s and steal a kiss. He needs to just cool his heels a bit. Take things slow. And if it’s painfully slow to him in a moment like this one? So what. He can be patient and make sure that his roommate has the best possible experience of the good things in life.
Clint takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
“This is nice, too,” he says. “Holding your hand.”
Jigsaw nods. With his right hand, he starts writing in his notebook. What he eventually shows Clint is the message: IT WANTED
Clint grins. “Yeah?”
Jigsaw nods again and draws a pretty good rendition of a pomegranate. Clint thinks that was what the sort of spiky round thing had been.
“Back when we were at the grocery store? You wanted to hold hands?”
Jigsaw smiles, his expression taking on a shy quality.
Clint feels like kicking himself. Hard. Right in the ass. Natasha was so, so right and he has been so, so blind.
That was over a week ago. Almost two weeks.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Clint says. He gives Jigsaw’s hand a light squeeze. “Now I know.”
Notes:
Content warning: There is a nightmare involving harm done to an animal. The animal in question is not actually harmed in any way. But it still might be upsetting to read the nightmare. If you want to skim over that, it’s a big chunk of the opening section. Look for the phrase “It opens the eyes and watches in the darkness” to start reading again.
Chapter 47: Civilians | Don’t worry (about a thing)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley.
Author’s Note: Thanks goes to my IRL friend, SCB, for polishing up a dreadful fifth draft of the press release in this chapter.
Happy midweek chapter the second? I don't know, I just felt like posting again. ^_^
Chapter Text
Monesha
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 7:15 a.m.—
Her piece of toast falls back onto the plate as the news anchor announces the return of the Red Star Killer. The ticker tape at the bottom of the screen reads “Red Star Killer returns? North Carolina town terrified as Red Star Killer stalks the streets.”
Monesha hurriedly sets her plate down on the coffee table before her trembling fingers can drop it.
That isn’t possible. Jigsaw wouldn’t be in North Carolina. He’s with the Avengers. In New York. Doing well. Happy. It has to be a copycat.
But there’s footage—not great footage, through a window screen and the rain, but it’s still footage—of two men slowly walking past, and she knows without a shadow of a doubt that yes, that is Jigsaw holding something to his chest and Agent Barton walking in front of him with his bow across his chest.
It can’t be anyone else. It couldn’t be faked. Because that is exactly how Jigsaw moves in comparison to everyone around him. Smoother, somehow, like he’s on gliders while everyone else is walking. The only people who would know that would be others who encountered him, and none of those people would do this… right?
Monesha glances down at the phone by her side. She should call. She should ask them—no, she should demand to know—why Jigsaw is out on some mission instead of working on his recovery. Safely in Avengers Tower. Away from all the violence and killing.
She looks back up at the tv as the footage is looped again and again in the upper right corner. Is he bleeding? Is that a smudge of red on his back as they walk past?
She moans softly. He might be injured. They let him get injured on some stupid mission instead of…
Her phone is in her hand before she realizes she reached for it. But she doesn’t trust her voice. Can’t trust herself to keep the details out of her mouth. Her roommates could overhear the conversation. It isn’t secure. The government could hear the conversation, which would be worse.
The news anchor is uttering complete nonsense about some mining town being attacked by the Red Star Killer, as if he would ever do that. She turns the tv off. There’s no new information that’s actually true and she won’t listen to the lies. Jigsaw has possibly been injured on a mission with the Avengers. Apparently in North Carolina. That’s the part that matters.
Monesha brings up Stimpy on her phone and types her message. It takes her several tries to get it right, to find the right words that are vague enough to not give anything away to anyone intercepting a text.
[what happened in north carolina?]
She hits Send. And waits.
Several minutes later, there’s a response: [everything’s fine. Don’t worry we’re working on it]
Monesha breathes out her frustration. [what about helping him? what happened to that?]
She’s probably said too much. That’s probably too much detail. She’s probably given everything away to whoever may or may not be eavesdropping on her texts. But she couldn’t help herself. It’s as if her fingers typed that of their own volition.
[...]
The three dots flash and dance back and forth at the bottom of the text screen for a long, long time. Finally, there’s a response.
[it is way too early in the morning for this.]
[he’s fine. he wanted to come.]
Then there’s a picture of a tiny white kitten curled up in a shoebox with a lavender hand towel.
[it turned out well]
[actually, h]
[ow do you know?]
Monesha reminds herself that Agent Barton is an actual agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and an actual Avenger. And that he doesn’t actually owe her anything. Not any information, and certainly not a cat pic.
[Watch the news.] she replies.
[aw, news, why]
She frowns at the screen. Did they somehow not expect an Avengers mission to go viral?
There’s another response before she can compose her thoughts: [well get it sorted. Don’t worry. Bout a thing.]
He sends her a Bob Marley video from YouTube.
Cindy
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 7:30 a.m.—
She frowns at the hotel lobby tv screen. She can’t hear the news from the reception desk, but she can read the ticker tape if she squints.
It reads: “Red Star Killer returns? North Carolina town terrified as Red Star Killer stalks the streets. Avengers remain silent.”
The footage they play every few minutes does look like how she’s imagined him to look. But his M.O. is to sneak his way into somewhere, kill whoever he came to kill, paint the area red with blood, add a star somewhere, and then disappear.
Not to walk through a town in broad—or rainy—daylight on the heels of someone with a pole or a… Oh. A bow. The arrow Avenger. Hawk-something. She knows him as Clint, though. That’s what he told her to call him when the Black Widow was asking her questions about the man seen scaling the building by that one drunk guest in the early morning.
So if he’s returning, it’s not as the Red Star Killer. If the Avengers are with him… it’s not likely he’s terrorizing the town. This is just sensationalized garbage. Probably whoever was taking this video was terrified, sure. But that’s not a whole town being terrorized. Not by a long shot.
It sort of sickens her that something that was an actual, legitimately terrifying serial killing ghost man is being trotted out again for the ratings when he’s actually not being a terrifying serial killing ghost man.
She’s not sure what she thinks about him not being dead, after all. After a month and a half of no new news about him, she’d sort of figured that he’d been killed in Bakersfield, either in the explosion, or before the explosion, with the explosion used to cover up the execution. This is after more than two months of silence, and it turns out he’s alive.
Somehow, even though she’d been sure he was dead, it doesn’t surprise her that he’s actually alive after all. He seems like the type of guy who would survive anything.
Her phone chimes under the counter and she risks a glance down at the screen. It’s Paul.
[You okay?]
Cindy looks over to the coffee bar, where he’s looking at her. She gives him a smile and a little wave. Then she surreptitiously texts him back.
[Could use a coffee, hot stuff. <3]
He probably won’t have the time to bring her a coffee before someone else comes up wanting something, but it’s still a cute reminder of how they officially met after the Slasher attack. He brought her a coffee—and got her order right from memory—and had offered her some comforting words on top of the liquid comfort.
So sweet of him.
Her phone chimes with a reply and she sees a picture of a coffee cup topped with foam before sliding the phone away and looking up with a smile to greet the guest approaching the reception desk.
She has time to think about the Slasher, or the Red Star Killer, or whatever he’s going to be called now that he’s working with the Avengers… well, she has time later.
Jenna
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 8:30 a.m.—
It’s the car wash fairy! She’d know him anywhere, would know the bondage gear he wore, the mask over his face, the silver left hand… Though he has a whole metal arm in the footage, and she only got to see what had looked like a glove back in May. Still, it’s definitely him. There’s no mistaking the figure in the video for anyone else.
She’s glad he’s alive and well. Because he has to be doing well if he’s been seen with the Avengers. He’s not a captive being pulled along in cuffs. That Avenger with the bow is walking along with his back to the car wash fairy, and trusting him to follow. They’re clearly on good terms.
And if they’re in North Carolina, it has to be for a reason. A good reason.
She can’t see the car wash fairy terrorizing a whole town and being collected calmly by the Avenger with the bow afterward. Neither part of that makes sense. Towns don’t come in flavors of “everyone’s an evil bastard,” so there’s no way he’s gone after the whole town. And if he had, he wouldn’t be following the archer Avenger around after like nothing was wrong.
And so he isn’t resting on his laurels the way she’d thought—hoped—he was after Bakersfield. He was training with the Avengers. Two months of working with them, and there he is, already back out in the field, and not terrifying the populace the way the news anchor is making it out to be.
The bell on her door clatters more than jingles, and she turns away from the tv to address her incoming customer.
He’s not new, but he’s also not a regular. Tall, slender, navy blue suit with baby pink tie. It looks good on him.
“What can I get for you?” she asks.
“Half a dozen mixed donuts, three blueberry muffins, three cranberry scones.”
He idly glances over at the tv, but doesn’t seem surprised by the news being quietly broadcast as background noise. Must have already seen it at home or heard it in the car.
“All in the same box if that’s doable,” he adds.
“Sure,” she says, picking out an attractive range of sprinkle donuts for him. With a suit like his, he’s bringing these to an office. No one needs to risk getting jam filling all over their work outfit.
While she gathers up his order, he resumes watching the news, even though it’s mostly just commentary at this point. The ten o’clock news will start over with the actual news again.
“You know, it’s weird,” her customer says. “I don’t know about you, but I feel some kind of pride having him back on the news. He’s like our home grown local serial killing mascot. Good or ill, take your pick, but he’s ours.”
She nods. “I know what you mean. It was kind of special watching him head out west. I was sad when he disappeared.”
“Bet you that terrorist group wasn’t sad. HYDRO or something. HYDRA. I don’t remember.” He swipes a card through the machine and signs the screen. “The ones he was hacking up.”
“HYDRA,” Jenna says. “You got it right. And yeah, they got a two month breather, it sounds like.”
He picks up the box of donuts and muffins. “Think that’s what was going on in North Carolina? More HYDRA?”
She shrugs. “I can’t see the Avengers liking HYDRA much. So maybe.”
“Maybe he recruited them, and not the other way around.” He laughs.
“That’d be something,” she says.
“Well, have a great day.”
She returns the sentiment with a cheerful wave as he leaves, and then takes a moment to rearrange the pastries in their cases. It’s important for everything to look as appealing as possible, after all. She usually sells out around 2 or 3, but there’s no harm in doing what she can to sell out sooner.
Maybe she should make some star-shaped pastries in honor of the car wash fairy’s return. She could design something this morning, tinker with it tonight, give it a trial run as early as Friday.
Raspberry or strawberry? It’ll have to be red, of course. Maybe some tart red plum jam for the center. That would be unique.
Valorie
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 9:15 a.m.—
Well, it was only a matter of time before that got on the news. She wishes it had taken longer, though. Her stock is barely replenished from the last spike in demand, and she has a feeling this is just going to result in an even bigger spike. She’ll be dealing with waiting lists and pre orders this time, for sure.
It’s a shame the news is focusing on recounting all the murders and showing blurred out crime scenes, and not on the terrorists he executed and the people he saved from harm’s way.
The brokerage office has had to expand her voicemail storage to accommodate all the reporters wanting to talk to her. It makes her glad she uses an office phone instead of her personal number.
Last time, everything had still been new to her, and she had hardly said much when interviewed. But now, she has a lot to say. She just needs to pick the right reporter. Someone who won’t try to lead her or put words in her mouth. Someone who will let her set the story straight.
He’s not a serial killer at all, but an avenging angel on Earth, defending the helpless and destroying every evil thing he encounters. He’s made the whole country a better place for his presence, and he should be lauded, not reviled.
The Avengers realized this, obviously. Or why would they be with him in North Carolina, clearing out a town that must have been a HYDRA stronghold?
She wishes BigDongJohn wasn’t getting the publicity he’s getting from this. Not only is it going straight to his head on Reddit, but it’s contributing to the serial killer narrative, painting Mr Red Star as someone who will kill at the drop of a hat, and not someone who carefully plans every strike against the darkness with clinical precision.
Brandon
—Boise | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
He can get behind the ninja not being evil. Sort of. He’s still coming to terms with that in his nightmares, but when he’s awake—most of the time, anyway—he can recognize that the ninja was after HYDRA, and that HYDRA was the evil party.
That doesn’t change that the ninja is the source of his trauma, the reason he’s probably always going to be in therapy for the rest of his life. But also the reason he has his freedom from a terrorist organization’s machinations.
He can do without seeing the ninja on the news, though, in actual footage. It was bad enough when they were all just talking about him, putting up artists’ renditions of how he might look that never came close to depicting the terror of his leather straps spackled with blood and all those knives, and the boots, and the mask with its dead, soulless eyes. The way the metal arm moved. The way it sounded.
But now he’s on the screen, and the artists have been busy redoing their designs. It’s getting scary to turn on the tv at all today.
He’s just glad the ninja is still out East. If he ever comes west again, Brandon might move to Europe to put a whole ocean between them.
Johny (aka BigDongJohn)
—New York City | Tuesday 18 19 September 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
He’s not sure what to do with fame other than hide from it, really. He definitely doesn’t want the world to know that he is BigDongJohn. His mother. His grandmother. They can’t know. They’d skin him alive if they did.
But it’s gratifying to have news agencies and reporters DMing him to ask all sorts of questions. He’s got his pick of the litter with these DMs. And his quotes are actually going on national television.
Some news stations are actually having their talk shows feature his theory about Ronin and the Red Star Killer being one and the same. All the details from his various posts about it are getting aired live on the tv. He’s being upvoted like a god. Given gold left and right. He is riding high on this wave, and he doesn’t want it to end.
Unless it turns out that he’s recognized from someone scrolling through his profile and reading through all his posts and comments ever. He doesn’t want to be doxxed. That would be the end of him.
Monesha
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—
She heads outside for her lunch break, phone in hand. She has to check the news, has to see what has been done about the situation. According to Agent Barton, “every little thing gonna be alright,” but she has her doubts.
Pressing her back against the building in a patch of shade, Monesha opens the news app on her phone. There’s a press release now. The first paragraph is posted, and the rest is available on download.
It’s from S.H.I.E.L.D. Not from the Avengers, but claiming to be on behalf of the Avengers Initiative. She’s not sure how much of that to believe, given that S.H.I.E.L.D. is where most of his killing took place, and that he was going after HYDRA within S.H.I.E.L.D., specifically.
Does this S.H.I.E.L.D. really speak for the team?
There’s no reason to think they don’t, she supposes. Agents Barton and Romanoff were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents as well as Avengers. And they didn’t have to disclose any details about the arrangement Jigsaw had with the team. So it could be that S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers are very connected.
She just… Isn’t sure about that.
She downloads the press release to read the rest of it.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Announces Newest Avenger
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 18, 2012 — The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) is pleased to confirm Jigsaw as the eighth official member of the Avengers Initiative. This is the second such announcement in recent months, following the appointment of Sam Wilson (Falcon) in early June.
Says Tony Stark, famously known as Iron Man, “Avengers Tower was feeling kind of empty. Now we have a full house.”
Jigsaw unofficially joined the team in early July, working alongside fellow super soldier Steve Rogers (Captain America) in the ongoing efforts to eradicate HYDRA. The newest Avenger brings decades of field experience to the group, having worked deep within the intelligence community for most of his career.
“We’re really glad to have Jigsaw on the team,” says Natasha Romanoff, alias Black Widow. “With Thor offworld, we needed to regroup, and expanding the team is the best way to do that.”
Jigsaw recently completed an Avengers mission in North Carolina in the company of Clint Barton (Hawkeye). He will continue to work side by side with his fellow Avengers to protect the people of this world from threats such as the Chitauri, whose attempt to take over the planet was thwarted by the Avengers in New York City in early May of this year.
S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson remarks, “Working with Jigsaw is a real experience. His competence level is off the chart.”
Due to the sensitive nature of his prior work experience, no personal information about Jigsaw will be made available at this time.
For additional information, reach out to Maria Hill, Assistant to the Director, S.H.I.E.L.D.
Monesha shakes her head.
They’re supposed to be helping Jigsaw heal, working on communication and living his life without all the killing. Not putting him to work for them, whether he’s now officially part of the team or not. He’s in their care, and sending him out on missions is not caring for him.
Is that what they think is going to fix everything? Giving him missions to complete? Why, why, why did they have to bring him with them?
Monesha sighs. She doesn’t have any new messages from Ren or Stimpy. And she is not at all in a secure location to try texting one of them.
She cannot wait for this shift to be over so she can go home and try to ignore the slander on the news and the sense of betrayal she feels.
Chapter 48: Steve | If I can’t relate to you anymore (then who am I related to?)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Coney Island” by Taylor Swift and The National.
Time to deal with another element of the mission. You didn’t think I’d forgotten Steve, did you? We just had to wait until his therapy appointment. That’s all.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
“No, no,” says Dr Linda with a wave of her hand. “Saving the world takes priority over your therapy sessions… sometimes.” There’s a sparkle in her eye as she smiles.
Steve can’t argue with that.
“I wouldn’t say it was the whole world, this time,” he says. “But we did uncover some big problems that need solving.”
That’s probably the extent of what he should tell her about what they found in the North Carolina base. She doesn’t have clearance to know about the intended poisoning of water sources, which the FBI should be taking care of now. And she doesn’t have the clearance to know anything about Project Insight, the algorithm Tony is currently working on a bypass for.
“And we found a kitten for Jigsaw,” he says. “And Jigsaw was shot. He’s okay,” Steve adds hurriedly. “Clint says he’s almost completely healed up already. Everything scabbed over alright, and…”
Dr Linda raises her eyebrows at him.
“And that’s not why I’m here,” Steve finishes sheepishly. “I’m here to talk about myself, not Jigsaw.”
“Sometimes the subjects will overlap, Steve,” she reminds him. “Do they overlap right now?”
He gives it some thought. On the one hand, they seem to always overlap. He’s here because he needs to talk through and process all of what has happened with Bucky, and then also all of what has happened with Jigsaw. Among other things. But right now… Do they overlap right now?
“Sort of,” Steve says. “Not the part about the kitten. But I think I need to talk about the base we raided. And what was inside of it. And how and why Jigsaw got shot.”
She nods. “Alright. Where would you like to start?”
“There was a prep room in the base,” he says. “One of the mind wiping chairs with the arms and the so-called ‘halo’ over the top. I was going to destroy it, but Jigsaw got there first. He was pulling it apart and scattering the pieces, and part of me wanted to join him, and part of me was afraid I wasn’t welcome to join in.”
Dr Linda blinks. “Weren’t welcome in his space, weren’t welcome in his personal mission to destroy the chair, or weren’t welcome to vent your outrage in a destructive manner?”
“Maybe all three?”
Steve shakes his head and corrects himself.
“No. Not all three,” he says. “The middle one. I think he wanted to destroy the chair by himself, without help. Without my help. Kind of like he’s going through therapy without it involving me any. And he’s relying on Clint and Natasha, and even Tony, and not relying on me at all.”
Steve sighs. “I thought I’d be able to help him recover. Either some memories, or even just physically.” He holds up his left hand. “I tried holding his hand to comfort him when we were first bringing him in after Bakersfield. He broke my hand.”
There’s a pause, and Dr Linda doesn’t fill it.
“I guess that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell, isn’t it? I want to help, I try to help, and he doesn’t want it. He keeps pushing me away, I feel like.”
“But he does want help from others?” Dr Linda asks. “From Clint and Natasha? From Tony?”
“From Clint, yeah. All the time. I wish it were me instead. I wish I could be there for him like Clint is. But I have to do my own thing on the side, and just hope it helps.”
“How do you mean?”
Steve shrugs. “Well, in the base, I got the sense he didn’t want me working on the chair with him, so I went for the cryo tube instead. That’s the big glass tube where they would keep him frozen between cutting him up or using him in the field like an attack dog.”
She nods.
“So I was off doing my own thing, getting the glass broken down, pulling hoses out and smashing things.”
Oh, and there were the Tesseract-blue elements inside the tube, he remembers. Those had made him so angry. That HYDRA would still have and still use components that owed their origins to the Tesseract, that the wretched blue cube was something Jigsaw knew and feared.
He tells her about the Tesseract next, not enough to put her in danger of knowing too much. But enough for her to put together the pieces of the Tesseract’s influence on the team.
The way Bucky had been forced to work on Tesseract weapons while he was a prisoner in the War, the way Zola might have used the Tesseract when he was experimenting on Bucky. The way Clint had worked with it, and still worried about that. The way it apparently played a role in cryo-freezing procedures. Jigsaw’s obvious hatred and fear of the Tesseract weapons that had made their appearance in the base.
It should be okay to disclose that there were weapons in the base with Tesseract-related energy packs. The way people disintegrated when hit by a beam from those weapons. That’s not top secret information, he thinks. Anyway, he’d broken every single one of those weapons he’d been able to find, along with the power packs, before they blew the base up. They should be old news, as far as that base is concerned.
“This Tesseract has played quite a role in your lives, it sounds like.”
He nods. “It’s a horrible thing. I wish it would just go away and not keep coming back at various points.”
“Is it possible that Jigsaw is thankful to you for destroying the cryo tube with its Tesseract monitoring devices?”
“I hope so, on some level.” Steve frowns. “But I don’t know. We didn’t finish smashing the place up before the other energy weapons showed up. Maybe he’d have just moved on after the chair was destroyed. Maybe he didn’t need the help at all.”
Dr Linda nods. “Or maybe he can appreciate your help without needing it?” she asks. “Is it possible that he doesn’t need your help, but might want it on some level, in some instances?”
Steve looks at his hands briefly.
“He doesn’t act like he wants it,” he finally says.
“Does he know about your help?”
He blinks. Of course Jigsaw knows about his help. How could he not have noticed Steve right there breaking glass with the shield and ripping equipment apart with his bare hands?
Sure, Jigsaw had been focused on the chair and then on the incoming threats. But he wouldn’t have been so focused on the one thing that he neglected to notice the other things happening around him.
“I think he must have.”
“I would like for you to ask him, if you’re comfortable doing that,” Dr Linda says. “Specifically, I would like for you to ask him about the cryo tube during your recent mission, but also about other things you’ve done that have been designed to help. Ask him if he knows that they are meant to help.”
Steve thinks of the other things. The cooking, maybe. Cooking with Banner to help provide quality vegetarian fare in sufficient quantities. Jigsaw might not know about that. Or the reading to him and Clint that once, War of the Worlds. A complete failure, but designed to help. Jigsaw might not know about the purpose behind the reading.
Or guarding him from Ward, back when they first brought him in and everything was so touch and go with his injuries. Jigsaw couldn’t have known about that, actually. He couldn’t have known much of anything beyond incredible pain and fear.
Ward is a point that’s sticking in his throat, too. Ward the traitor, gliding under the radar and sabotaging Phil’s crew, their mission to go after the two remaining HYDRA operators in North America. And then slinking into that base under the guise of an ally and trying just one more time to get at Jigsaw.
Steve had known he didn’t like Ward. Had known on some level that he was bad news, not just an asshole. His instincts had told him that Ward was trouble. And he hadn’t done enough to stop Ward. Hadn’t done anything, except to mention to Clint that he didn’t want Ward in the room with Jigsaw.
And the next time Ward was in a room with Jigsaw, he’d shot Jigsaw.
Steve mentally adds it to the list of times and ways that he’s failed his friend, but he also knows that Dr Linda would not approve of that. She’d question that, and she’d keep questioning until he landed on the “you’re right, it wasn’t my fault” space and had to start being nicer to himself.
Steve decides to just nod and accept the homework assignment instead of presenting the details to Dr Linda and getting into the mess of who is to blame for Ward still being part of Phil’s crew long enough to get a shot in at Jigsaw.
“I’ll ask him,” he says. “About the cryo tube, and about the reading, and about Ward.”
Dr Linda nods. “Excellent. I’ll be interested to hear what you learn about your efforts over the last few months, and how they’ve been received.”
He’s sure she will be. She’s always interested in what he has to say, even when what he’s saying is stupid or wrong.
Dr Linda consults her notebook for a second, and then looks back up. “You mentioned a need to discuss how and why Jigsaw was shot?”
Steve nods. “And how bad it felt when I realized he’d been shot and tried to help stop the bleeding, only to be pushed away. He didn’t want help—anyone’s help, that time.” Steve sighs. “What he wanted was to get out of sight as quickly as possible and out of everyone’s way. Like a sick dog trying to hide its illness.”
Even Clint had had to practically track Jigsaw through the mud. And then cajole him to get his mask off and at least some of his tac gear off so that Bruce could patch him up. Steve’s given that some thought over the last few days. He can see why in a HYDRA mission, with HYDRA handlers and support staff, Jigsaw would have wanted to get away and avoid punishment for the injury.
But they aren’t HYDRA. They’d been fighting HYDRA. And Jigsaw needed to be able to trust them, even when things went wrong like they had when Ward shot him. Especially when things went wrong like that. Steve doesn’t know how to build that trust. At one point, he’d thought team building exercises and group training in the gym would help, but that had only triggered his friend and sent him into a spiral of fear.
“What did you do when Jigsaw rejected your offer of help and instead fled the area?”
Steve runs a hand through his hair. “I just— I carried on. He’d shot Ward in the face in retaliation for getting shot in the back, and I had to make sure that our allies didn’t treat him like an enemy after that. Had to get what had happened sorted out. There was too much to do to process.”
He looks up at her with a half smile. “Same old story, right? Too much to do to take the time to process.”
She smiles at him. “Time is often against us,” she says. “Was there an opportunity to process that rejection on the trip home, perhaps?”
“I didn’t go home with the rest of them. I stayed to make sure all the prisoners were processed correctly. We didn’t want anyone escaping or getting sent to the wrong place.”
Steve reminds himself to check up with Phil or Fury to see how that’s going, now that any urgent care has been completed and the prisoners are ready to be treated solely as prisoners and not as patient-prisoners. He knows they left May there to confirm everything, but there were a lot of prisoners to keep track of, and May is a single agent.
“When we did go home, we were with some of our allies, on their plane,” Steve says. “Some of them were pretty upset about Ward.”
“He was their ally, they thought,” Dr Linda says, feeling out the information. “More so than he’d been yours. They’d been betrayed even more intimately than you had been.”
“Right,” Steve says. “One of them was learning from him how to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. He’d been her commanding officer.”
“I see.” Dr Linda makes a note in her notebook. “And you found it difficult to process in their presence?”
Steve nods. “Natasha and I sat apart from them and talked a bit. Nothing that would have been a problem if it got overheard. Sharon spent the time talking with Phil.”
“And you haven’t had any time to process over the weekend?”
Steve hesitates long enough that she follows up.
“Were you afraid to process it?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I just… didn’t do it. I was avoiding it,” he admits after a moment.
“I didn’t want to think about getting pushed away when I was so worried for him. And Clint had told me to get out when I went to check on him afterward, when he was being bandaged up.”
She nods again. “That’s understandable. Why do you think Clint told you to get out?”
Steve frowns, remembering the look on Jigsaw’s face while he stood there in the middle of the quinjet clutching the muddy kitten and staring into the middle distance.
“Jigsaw was terrified,” he says. “He was terrified just in general, and he was afraid of Bruce and what was happening, more specifically. And I think I made it worse.”
He grits his teeth. “I think they hurt him, HYDRA. Back when they had him. I think they used to hurt him after missions. Use him.”
“Use him.”
“Rape him,” Steve makes himself say. “I think he was waiting for the whole team to come onto the quinjet and take turns…” He grits his teeth, but forces the words out. “…raping him.”
He relaxes his fingers with effort and runs his hands along the tops of his thighs. It’s over now. None of those HYDRA bastards will ever so much as touch his hair, let alone hurt him like that again. And the ordeal of getting patched up is over, as well. Even the wound itself is nearly healed.
It’s all almost over and it’s only been a few days, not even a whole week, and Steve is still putting off processing it. Except maybe he’s processing it now, prompted to think about these things, and to talk about these things, by his therapist.
“That makes you angry,” she notes.
“It does. Of course it does! It makes me so angry I can’t think straight sometimes. That he went through all of that while I was on the ice and couldn’t help him. That he’s afraid we would do that to him. Whether he thinks we would or not, he’s afraid of it, and that just…”
Steve shakes his head. “I’m not angry at him for being afraid of it. Or afraid of us. I’m not sure what I’m angry at when I think about it. I’m just angry.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?” he repeats, feeling like a little shit.
“Are you allowing yourself to feel all of your anger, or are you hiding some of it from yourself?” Dr Linda asks. “Could there be a part of you, however small, that is angry with Jigsaw for being afraid of you in that moment in the quinjet?”
“I hope not,” he says. “If there is, then I hate that part of myself.”
She gives him a very unimpressed raised eyebrow.
And he knows that’s not healthy. He’s been at this long enough to realize some of his less healthy thoughts and feelings. But damn it, it’s not Jigsaw’s fault he gets frightened sometimes. He can’t help it. If Steve had been through some of what Jigsaw has been through, he’d be terrified.
“It’s not his fault,” Steve insists. “I can’t be angry at him for something that’s not his fault.”
“Can’t you be?” she asks. “Is it not possible to hold sympathy and empathy for Jigsaw while also extending to yourself the right to feel everything that you feel?”
He frowns.
“Remember that feeling a thing and acting on a feeling are two different things that do not always go together.” Dr Linda pauses. “If there is a part of you that is angry at Jigsaw for his fear of you when you meant only to help him—and I am not saying there is or that there must be—then that part of you is as valid as the rest of you.”
She closes her notebook around her pen.
“All of your parts are valid, Steve,” she says. “Even the ones you don’t like. And when we reject the very existence of some of our parts, those parts can’t get any air. They can fester and swell up until we are forced to pay them the attention they need. And by the time we acknowledge them, there can be real damage to the rest of us.”
Steve doesn’t like that.
“I would like you to consider—just that, just consider—whether there are some parts of your anger that are directed in ways you don’t like,” Dr Linda says. “And I’d like you to ponder the overlap between feeling anger, and feeling hurt.”
“You mean, maybe instead of being angry at Jigsaw for being afraid of me in the quinjet, I’m just hurt that he was afraid of me?”
She smiles. “We often talk about your anger in our sessions, Steve. But we rarely address whether you feel hurt. I wonder why it is that you focus on your anger—the active emotion that you can express and sometimes accept—and not on how hurt you feel. You’re allowed to feel hurt, Steve.”
“…But it’s not his fault.”
“And that does not matter. You can still feel hurt, even if the person hurting you does not mean to hurt you or does not seem able to avoid hurting you.”
Steve sighs.
“Do you understand your homework assignment?”
He nods. “Thank you for the time today,” he says. “I’ll try to avoid having another mission when we’re supposed to meet.”
Chapter 49: Jigsaw | Let me in, oh, let me near
Notes:
Chapter title from “Shit Show” by Peter McPoland.
Happy midweek!
Chapter Text
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
“I understand you have a kitten now, Jigsaw,” the feeder says when it enters the room.
It nods. But it cannot show the feeder the little cat, because the other asset and the ballerina woman are watching over the little cat during this session. It was important not to spend any of the hour with the feeder worrying about the little cat instead of focusing on the feeder and what the feeder had to say. It does not want to waste the feeder’s time and risk the feeder getting upset. It only sees the feeder the two times in a week.
It performs the little cat’s name sign, the A shape in a stepped upward motion.
“That’s your kitten’s name?” she asks. “Very cute.”
It nods again. The little cat is very cute. It pulls up the Names board on the AAC app and taps the little cat’s name, presses Speak.
“Alpine.”
The feeder smiles wide and happy, and repeats the name. “Alpine. That’s a wonderful name for a kitten. And I like your voice, Jigsaw. How do you like the AAC program?”
It signs “good,” so much faster than trying to find that word on the boards. It still needs to memorize where everything is, and move things to where they make the most sense to it. But it is allowed to communicate however it wants, so it is okay to mix the words with the signs.
“That’s good to hear. I’m glad.”
The feeder reaches into her box on wheels and withdraws a pair of covered bowls from it. One for it and one for her. The bowls smell like stir fry, but sweet.
“We’re having teriyaki vegetables over brown rice today, Jigsaw,” says the feeder. “I added some cashews for more protein.”
It swallows and looks eagerly at the bowls. It does not know what teriyaki is, but it loves vegetables and chewy brown rice. And crunchy cashews. So much to enjoy.
The feeder lets it open the bowl in front of it and begin to eat—and teriyaki is sweet and savory and a little tangy. And there is so much sticky food sauce all over the glistening vegetables. Lots of mushrooms in different shapes and sizes, and big chunks of carrot, and slivers of yellow onion and green onion, and some napa cabbage, and some sprouts, and little baby corns, and some broccoli florets. So much inside the bowl on top of the brown rice.
“I wanted to discuss your pets today, Jigsaw,” the feeder says after swallowing a bite of her own teriyaki vegetables and brown rice. “Specifically, Lucky. You weren’t satisfied with the kibble he was eating?”
It shakes the head and pulls the tablet closer. It taps and taps and swipes the fingertips along the front of the tablet, closing the AAC and tapping the picture icon, then going through the pictures until finally there is a picture of the animal researcher’s suggested “wet food.” Several types of it.
Wet food comes in cans instead of bags. There are a lot of flavors to choose from instead of just kibble flavor, sour, yuck. Wet food has chunks of things in it, or is mush, but isn’t a lot of small rocks poured into a bowl. Wet food is more like a food reward than kibble. It does not yet know how wet food tastes, but it must be better.
“So you’re going to be trying out a few different brands of wet food to see which one Lucky likes best?” she asks, looking at the tablet from her side of the table. “Have you considered feeding Lucky scraps from the table again the way you did before the kibble?”
It nods, even though it had only considered that for a short while. It signs “bad” and “reward,” and then points to the wet food on the tablet and signs “good.”
It would be bad to feed the dog food that is not for dogs. Doing that too much would hurt the dog, and it will never hurt the dog. But there is a lot of food that is for dogs, and it will feed the dog that instead. But only the amount of it that the animal researcher suggests. Not orders or commands, but suggests.
“That’s good,” the feeder says. “Table scraps aren’t healthy for dogs. How are you feeling about the amount of food that Lucky gets?”
It brings up the rows of letters and taps the fingertip on the tablet, pecking out the letters like a chicken looking for bugs in the grass. The hamburger technician had shown it a video of a whole group of chickens doing that, a “flock,” slamming their beaks into the ground and picking up bugs or little seeds.
The hamburger technician had talked about the range, then, and about freedom. The chickens pecking in the grass were free to range, is what it had picked up from the video. That is where they are getting their eggs now. There is a whole expanse of grass called a field or a range with nothing but pecking chickens on it, all of them free to go where they please on the range.
Finally, it has typed out the message it wants to share with the feeder: NOT ENOUGH.
“You don’t feel that Lucky is getting enough food,” the feeder says. “Is Lucky getting the amount of food the vet thinks he should be getting?”
It nods, but the mouth twists in disagreement all the same. It wants to give the dog all of the food, to offer and offer and offer food to the dog until the dog is not hungry, until the dog even leaves some of the food behind.
But that would only hurt the dog. Too much of a reward is a bad thing.
“I think I understand where you’re coming from,” the feeder says. “We often want to overfeed our pets because we see food as a form of affection, and providing food as a form of love. We love our pets and want to feed them to show how much we love them.”
It… It thinks that is the same as wanting to give the dog as many rewards as possible because it cares for the dog so much. It nods.
“But real love is giving our pets the amount of the food they need to be healthy. Not too much, and not too little. That’s also a way to love ourselves.”
It is like the little plant in its so-pretty pot and saucer, and the dog and… and not the little cat. The animal researcher had said that it could and should feed the little cat as much as the little cat wanted to eat, at least while the little cat was still a baby.
“I can see you’ve had an idea about that, Jigsaw. Would you like to share that with me?”
It tries. What will be the best way to tell her what the idea is?
After a moment of debate, it pulls up the AAC program again and looks for the words it needs on the boards. It is supposed to be practicing the program so that it can become better and better at speaking with it.
It takes a while to find the right words, and only partly because it keeps taking breaks to put more of the delicious teriyaki vegetables and brown rice into the mouth. But the feeder is patient, and merely continues to eat her own food as it works at the tablet.
“Little Alpine eating all the food. Lucky only some food. The little plant only some water.”
The feeder frowns for a moment. “The vet said you could give your kitten as much formula as she could drink, yes?” When it nods, she continues. “Babies are growing so quickly that they need all the fuel they can get.”
The feeder smiles. “Your kitten is still a growing baby. She needs as much formula as she is hungry for. And later, she will need as much solid food as she is hungry for. Lucky is not a growing baby. Lucky is fully grown. That is the difference.”
So when the little cat is no longer little, but a full cat, then it will not be able to feed the little cat as much or as often. It does not like that. It wants to provide for the little cat. Wants to provide everything.
“This is important for you, as well, Jigsaw. Just like your pets need the right amount of food and water at the right times, you need the right amount of food and water at the right times. Not too little, and not too much.”
The feeder smiles. “And food is not a reward, remember? Just like we talked about last week, food is nutrition. Our bodies need the fuel to keep going, whether we’ve been ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or something in between. So because our bodies need the fuel, we eat and we drink.”
It nods. It remembers from a week ago, yes. And it even believes the feeder that bodies need fuel and that it has a body and must fuel it whether it earns the rewards or not. The other feeders it has known, except for the feeder with the braids who gave it the yellow-fuzz-ball and later all of the papers and pens, they have all been wrong, and this feeder is right.
It still tries to earn the rewards, though. It is hard not to try to earn them. It feels wrong to eat without earning it, even if it knows that it is right.
“And,” the feeder adds, “it is possible to not put enough fuel in the tank when we eat. To not eat enough, even though we are eating. Conversely, you can put too much fuel into the tank as well.”
There it is again, the “too much of a good thing” concept that should not be true but everyone insists it is true. Good things are good. More good things should be better.
“A tank only has room for so much fuel at a time,” she says. “Our bodies can only hold onto so much food at a time. The solution, especially in your case, as a super soldier, is that you need to eat more often.”
Yes. It needs to eat the snack in the morning before breakfast, and then breakfast, and then the lunch, and the snack before the second session with Yasmin, and then dinner, and then a snack after the evening session with the expert with the signs. And sometimes a snack in the night if it wakes up and is hungry or has not slept at all and is still active.
It knows about the snacks and the meals. Even if it does not earn each one, it must eat them. The feeder laid out a schedule and explained that it got to eat all those different meals and snacks at all those times, every single day.
“Now what I want to talk about, Jigsaw, is how big your fuel tank is.”
The feeder pushes away the rest of her teriyaki vegetables and brown rice. She has only eaten two thirds of the bowl. There is still some left. It stares at the bowl until she gestures for its eyes to meet hers.
“You have advanced energy needs, and so you need a lot of fuel. But you don’t have an unlimited tank into which to put the fuel.” She pauses. “That’s part of why we have spaced your meals and snacks out the way we have. So that we don’t overfill your tank with any one meal or snack.”
It looks at the feeder and waits for her to continue, but she does not. She is waiting for it to do something. It nods. That seems like a good thing to do.
“My concern is that each meal or snack is the right size to go into your fuel tank. Not too little, but also not too big.”
She pulls out a folder and opens it up to show it pictures of foods next to other things. There is a yellow-fuzz-ball, a pack of cards like for playing one of the non-fun games with the clown man, a fist, a thumb.
“We’ve briefly touched on hunger and fullness cues,” she says, “but we haven’t had a lot of luck with those, have we?”
It shakes the head. It is always hungry. Sometimes even after it has finished eating. Sometimes even when it feels like the stomach is swelling up bigger than ever before and will burst with another bite. It had thought at first that it was very good at knowing when it is hungry, since it always knew that it was hungry. But it does not know the other cue at all, the fullness cue, the feeling when it has had enough.
“I would like to introduce portions and servings to you now. A portion is simply what we call the amount we are serving ourselves.” She points to the empty bowl in front of it. “Your portion, the amount you wanted to eat, was one bowl of teriyaki vegetables over rice. My portion was smaller. I wanted to eat less because my fuel tank is smaller.”
She points to the thumb on the page, which is next to a wheel of cheese with a wedge cut out of it. “A serving is a very specific type of portion. It tells you how much nutrition is inside of a given portion. A serving of cheese is about the size of your thumb, but a portion of cheese can be any size, depending on how much cheese you are going to eat.”
It nods. It would never want only a thumb of cheese. Cheese is tangy and sharp and smooth and delicious. It would want a lot more than a “serving” of cheese.
“We won’t pay much attention to servings, since they are intended for un-enhanced individuals with much lower energy needs than your own.”
That is good. A thumb of cheese. It would roll the eyes around in the head if that was not a potential sign of disrespect toward the feeder. A mere thumb of cheese. No.
“But we are going to pay attention to portions. I would like to know not only when you are eating your snacks and your meals, but also what you are eating for those snacks and meals and how much you are eating.”
The feeder flips to the next page and there is an empty chart on the paper. A chart. It hates charts.
“So for our homework next time, I would like you to note down, here or on your tablet, all of that information. If you would like to take pictures of your snacks and meals instead of writing it down, that would be lovely. I know writing is hard for you. I want to make this as easy as it can be.”
She pushes the folder over to it and it looks at the lines making all of the empty boxes on the page. It will make the photographs of the snacks and the meals, instead. Yes. It still has the camera and can make photographs to shake and shake until the picture appears on them.
“Jigsaw, I want to be entirely clear here,” the feeder says, her voice so serious. “I do not want you to restrict your intake. I do not want you to skip your meals or your snacks. I do not want you to feel bad about what you are eating or how much you are eating.”
She raises her eyebrows at it. “Do you understand? You are not in trouble, and you are not doing anything wrong. I am only trying to better understand where you are right now with your eating so that we can work on your hunger and fullness cues more effectively while making sure you get all the nutrition you need.”
It nods. This is very important to the feeder, and is therefore very important to it as well.
It is nice to hear that it is not in trouble. It does not want to be in trouble with the feeder, ever. If it was in trouble with the feeder, what would happen? Would the feeder make it start to earn the food rewards again? Or make it so that there were fewer of them? Maybe go back to before? Would the feeder stop coming to meet with it twice a week?
“Alright,” the feeder says. She smiles, all the seriousness evaporating. “Do you have any questions for me, Jigsaw?”
The clown man is waiting for it on the way to the rooms for assets with a large bowl of cut up fresh peaches sprinkled with sugar until they have gotten soft and syrupy. It smells the clown man’s bowl of peaches before it sees the clown man waiting.
It swallows. It loves peaches. Peaches are the very favorite fruit. And these peaches have been dusted with sugar. They are soft-looking and sweet-smelling and will probably melt in the mouth. It wants the peaches. Badly.
Is the clown man offering to share the peaches?
It hesitantly approaches the clown man with the tablet held protectively in front of the chest. A buffer between it and the clown man, just in case it is needed. The clown man looks nervous, like he has been waiting a long time and is not sure that things will go well. There could be a reason for the nervousness.
What is it that could go wrong?
“Hey, Jigsaw,” the clown man says as it closes the distance. “I was wondering if you had some time to talk with me about something.”
It has to get to the rooms for assets, beyond the clown man. It has to feed the little cat its formula and then jostle the little cat gently and wipe the little cat all over to clean it before and after the tray with the clay chunks.
“I brought you some peaches, in any case.” The clown man moves the bowl of peaches slightly. “I know you like peaches.”
It can make time for the clown man. There are peaches.
It uses the little cat’s name sign and then signs “eat” and taps a finger against the wrist. It is time to feed the little cat.
It takes the clown man a moment to put the signs together, longer than it would take the other asset, but the clown finally frowns.
“Time to feed Alpine?” the clown man asks.
It nods, looking mournfully at the peaches. How to invite the clown man to come into the rooms for assets where it can feed the little cat and then gobble up the peaches?
“Do you mind if I come and watch?” the clown man asks, inviting himself.
It smiles and makes a relieved “come here” motion before walking past the clown man to the door to the room for assets.
The other asset and the ballerina woman will be there, playing with the little cat. “Socializing” the little cat, as the animal researcher had put it in the supplementary materials. The little cat can be extra socialized by meeting the clown man. The ballerina woman had read all of the supplementary materials to it. Socialization is very important so that the little cat is not afraid.
“Hey, Jigs,” the other asset says as it greets the dog in the doorway. “I was just— Oh, hi Cap.”
The clown man cradles the bowl of precious fruit fragments in one arm and waves with the other. “Clint,” the clown man says. “Don’t mind me. I’m hoping to talk to Jigsaw for a bit before lunch.”
The other asset looks at the ballerina woman and then back at the clown man. “You need us to clear out for a while?”
The clown man considers it. “You don’t have to leave,” he finally says. “It’s your room.”
“Actually,” the ballerina woman says from the sofa, “I need your help with something, Clint.”
It goes to the kitchen to prepare the formula for the little cat. The other three will decide between themselves who will stay in the rooms for assets, and who will leave. It suspects that the ballerina woman is lying and does not need help with anything. So let them make their decisions and tell each other lies and be awkward together.
By the time it has the formula warmed up and the bottle ready, the ballerina woman is steering the other asset out of the rooms for assets and into the hall.
“We’ll come get you for lunch, Jigsaw,” she says just as the door is closing behind her.
And then there is just the clown man holding a bowl of peaches and standing by the door, the dog standing beside the clown man waiting for head pats and scratches behind the ears, and the little cat meeping and mrrping as it totters toward the kitchen following its little pink nose toward the smell of the formula.
It gestures for the dog to come to the table, and the clown man follows with the peaches, sets the peaches down on the table and pulls out one of the chairs to sit in, careful to avoid the little cat.
Good. The clown man is getting settled down. That is a harder position to move from than a standing position, and the peaches are accessible and safe from getting spilled on the floor. It would still eat the peaches if they were spilled on the floor. Would slurp them up with the lips and enjoy their sugary sweetness on the tongue. But it would have a mess to clean up before the dog got to them.
It scoops the little cat up off of the floor and settles it onto the table in a towel to be fed. The little cat is so eager, mrrp mrrp, squeak squeak, making so much noise and hunting for the nipple so rambunctiously that it almost can’t get the nipple into the little cat’s mouth.
The clown man smiles as he watches it feed the little cat.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions,” the clown man says. “If you don’t want to answer, that’s fine. It’s for my therapy homework.”
The clown man has homework, too! It did not know that. It knew that the clown man had his own expert with the words, or maybe without the words, and that the clown man met with his expert before its own meetings with the feeder, and on the same days. But it did not know about the homework.
It wonders why it never occurred to it that the clown man’s expert would assign homework. All experts assign homework, it seems.
It nods. The clown man seems to expect that.
“During our mission on Friday, when you were tearing apart the memory wiping chair in the base, and before those operatives came in with the Tesseract weapons, did you happen to notice what else was going on in the prep room?”
The clown man looks at his hands and then studies the little cat’s paws kneading at the towel while the little cat slurps at the nipple and gets formula all over its face and whiskers.
“I’m wondering if you were keeping track of what I was doing, specifically,” the clown man says. “With the cryo tube.”
It nods at the clown man. It had known that the clown man was destroying the tube where it is so, so cold. Crash, crash had gone the star-shield against the curve of the glass, and there had been the crunch of metal and the pop of tubing coming loose. It is not a fool. Only a fool would enter a prep room and not keep track of every sound and movement around it.
It takes the bottle away and lets the little cat lick at its lips while it draws on the tablet with a fingertip. There is the tube, whole. There is the star-shield, so beautiful with its bright star. There is the tube, crushed apart. It points at the clown man.
“You were keeping track, then, right?”
It nods.
“Did you, uh.” The clown man pauses. “Did you appreciate what I was doing? The help. Were you happy that I was breaking the cryo tube while you broke the chair?”
It nods again. Why would it not have been happy? The tube where it is so, so cold is such a terrible thing to leave whole, and it could not have destroyed both the chair with the white electric fire and the tube where it is always cold, not at the same time.
The clown man nods as well, and they sit in silence while the little cat slurps up nearly half of the bottle of formula.
Then: “I’m sorry, Jigsaw.”
It makes the “why” sign, the question sign, asks what the clown man is sorry for.
“I should have known better than to try to get in the quinjet when you were getting patched up. Clint told me to get out, but I should have already known to stay out.” The clown man frowns. “I saw that you were afraid, and I thought—”
The clown man shakes his head. “I don’t know. I told the others I was going to let you guys know about the demolition, but I really just wanted to make sure you were okay. And I made it worse by showing up. I’m sorry.”
It blinks at the clown man and then shrugs. It does not know what to do with the words the clown man is saying.
“And I wanted to add,” the clown man says, “that I understand why you were afraid. In your position, I’d have been afraid, too. It…”
The clown man pauses again. “It hurt my feelings, that you were afraid of me. And that you pushed me away in the base after Ward shot you. I wanted to help you, and you didn’t want my help. It didn’t feel good.”
It considers the clown man’s words.
It remembers what the clown man is describing. It had not wanted to have its movements restricted in the base. It had not even known it was the clown man in the quinjet, not until now; it had only heard the other asset saying sounds toward the movement in the doorway.
It does not know what to do about hurt feelings. It does not know that feelings could be hurt, even though “hurt” is on the Sad part of the feelings chart. Hurt is something that is physical and feelings are not physical. The expert with the signs and the expert without the words had spent a lot of time explaining that feelings are emotions, are not tangible most of the time, are things that are felt inside and not always in the body itself.
How can they be hurt? How can they be injured?
It wipes away the images on the tablet and brings up the round chart with the feelings on it. It has stopped hating this chart, even though it still hates charts in general. This chart is so familiar to it now that it does not even need to read the words on it to know where to point when it feels a thing.
It moves the tablet over toward the clown man.
“What’s this?” the clown man asks before studying the chart. “Oh,” he says. “This is…”
The clown man frowns at the chart—does the clown man hate charts, too? are they the same as in this?—and then finally sits back up in his chair.
“I felt rejected,” the clown man says. “And I felt hurt. And I felt lonely.”
The clown man has learned how to use the chart very fast.
Its actions made the clown man feel rejected and hurt and lonely. It did not mean to do that. It does not know if it would act differently in the future, though.
It apologies, anyway, signs that it is sorry.
“It’s not your fault,” the clown man says. “You couldn’t help it.”
It repeats the apology. Even if it could not help it, and even if it would probably do the same again, it is sorry that the clown man felt those things and that it made those feelings happen.
It does not want the clown man to feel rejected or lonely or hurt.
The clown man frowns for a moment, and then thanks it.
This is a good conversation. And not just because there are peaches waiting for it.
“I only wanted to help,” the clown man says. “I only ever want to help. I guess it just… Makes me feel those bad things when I get turned away.”
It signs “thanks” and “help” and then “sorry” again. It does not know what else to do, really. It is thankful for help, but… Maybe it should try to find something to tell the clown man that it is thankful. A gift for the clown man. Maybe that would work. A gift like the clown man has given it gifts. Yes.
The little cat finally turns its head away from the nipple, smears formula all over its cheek in doing so. Its mrrp is a sleepy sound, sluggish. The other asset calls this “milk-drunk” and it does not know why. But it does know what to do now, and it takes the little cat through the post-formula routine with ease.
The clown man watches with interest the entire time, and then smiles when it wraps the little cat up in a clean towel and tucks it into the shoebox with a fresh warm water bottle.
“That’s quite a routine,” the clown man says. “You do that every time she’s hungry?”
It nods and pulls two forks out of the drawer in the kitchen that has silverware in it. It hands a fork to the clown man—who takes it with a confused look—and then stabs out a peach and slurps it into the mouth with glee.
It is time to eat the peaches! It has been so patient.
Oh, but wait. It holds up a hand and then goes to the table by the door, picks up the camera, brings it back. It points the camera at the bowl of peaches in their syrupy juices, looks through the little window, and presses the button.
Now it is time to eat the peaches.
Chapter 50: Natasha | And talk is cheaper when the story is good
Notes:
Chapter title from “Take It on the Run” by REO Speedwagon.
Thanks goes again to my IRL friend, SCB, for channeling the delightful Carlton Badger of the Honey Badger’s Den, a (completely made up) online tabloid.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 2:30 p.m.—
Natasha glances at the title of the tabloid article JARVIS has brought to her attention—from The Honey Badger, no less—and sighs. So it begins. Just as soon as that press release went out, the press got to work. Now, the question will be what side of things the press comes down on. Will they ultimately side with S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, Jigsaw? Or will there be more problems than before?
A Few Pieces Short of a Full Puzzle: What’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Hiding?
— By Carlton Badger
Is the newest Avenger all he seems—or are there more pieces to the Jigsaw puzzle than meets the eye? Let’s take a closer look at S.H.I.E.L.D.’s shiny new riddle, dear readers.
Less than three months ago, a data leak exposed S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fascist underbelly. Despite S.H.I.E.L.D.’s repeated reassurances that the myriad of nasty knots of impropriety and intrigue exposed to the sunlight by a very good cyber Samaritan are a one-time issue, it seems the paramilitary organization is back to its old tricks: keeping secrets with the best of them. However, it’s less of a mystery what information S.H.I.E.L.D. is now keeping close to its bulletproof vest.
Just who is Jigsaw, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s newest pet project? The pithy press release announcing his official appointment to the Avengers was light on facts, omitting even that most basic of personal details, Jigsaw’s legal name. Doesn’t it make you wonder, dear reader, why we—the tax paying public—aren’t entitled to even the basic courtesy of Jigsaw’s real name? Unless Jigsaw’s identity is just as unsavory as the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fascist forays.
If Jigsaw’s background is really above board, why was he “unofficial” for at least two months—that they’ll admit to? What else was he getting up to in an “unofficial” Avenger capacity and for how long, really ? Since the first quarter this year, since Thanksgiving last year, since Sam Wilson also started helping out in an “unofficial” capacity? Was the government aware of S.H.I.E.L.D. suddenly acquiring an “unofficial” weapon of mass destruction, or are we just supposed to accept that a secret superhero was running around for an unknown period of time, in the company or one or more “official” Avenger, doing who knows what, for the dubious “greater good.” We don’t know, and it’s doubtful S.H.I.E.L.D. will clarify the Jigsaw timeline of activities any further.
The lack of clarity, dear reader, may be the precise point worth pondering in the Jigsaw puzzle. Think back to early July. What other shadowy figure was making bloody waves around the same time? Why, yes, the Red Star Killer. A serial slasher that just so happened to disappear during the same month that S.H.I.E.L.D. has admitted to picking up a highly trained (and presumably lethal) operative. What a very, very convenient coinkydink.
Of course, no clear evidence has been established to link Jigsaw to the Red Star Killer beyond the overlapping timelines—and their allegedly matching metal arms. It’s entirely possible that metal appendages are the new superhero accessory du jour, following in the legendary footsteps of Spandex leggings and the like. Furthermore, Jigsaw’s metal arm has been confirmed, while the Red Star Killer’s metal arm has only been rumored. The existence of a metal arm could mean nothing, just as wearing a red cape from time to time doesn’t make Thor Little Red Riding Hood.
There could be any number of metal arms in the world. Not just two. Especially not just two with the same red star on their left bicep. Maybe there was a clearance on Soviet-themed cybernetic prosthetics that was too good to pass up?
While the Jigsaw puzzle has woefully few pieces, one does happen to stand out—his “sensitive” background. While it does seem rather farfetched to describe an infamously ruthless nationwide killing spree as a “sensitive” career history, the phrasing is obviously downplaying a bloody background of some sort.
What kind of organization was he involved with and for how long? Was he working for us or against us? What are the chances that Jigsaw’s past weaves as sordid a web as that of Natasha Romanoff? Perhaps it’s as murky as Capt. Steve Rogers’ deep freeze misadventure, or as accidentally enraging as the smashing science of Dr Bruce Banner.
Even if the Red Star Killer isn’t currently masquerading as an Avenger, there must be something unsavory beneath the perplexing persona of Jigsaw. Only time will tell—or until a helpful hacker spills the “top secret” beans on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D.
We’ve only just started assembling the pieces of the Jigsaw Avenger puzzle, dear reader. Watch this space for more details.
Do you have a piece of the Jigsaw Avenger puzzle? Contact Carlton!
Natasha sighs again. It’s not promising that the negative reactions are coming in first. First impressions do count for something. The press release was a good idea, and she applauds Maria for sending it out. But of course there’ll be some reactions to it that they don’t like.
She scrolls through a few more, a mixture of positive and negative, most of which are just sensationalized retellings of the press release, but a few of which try to unpack the secrets hidden between the lines.
No few of them make the connection between Jigsaw and the Red Star Killer—timeline, metal arms, red stars, the disappearance of the one around the same time as the appearance of the other, dubious—or missing—legal name.
And then… Natasha blinks. This one doesn’t limit itself to a press release but actually claims to have a source “close to S.H.I.E.L.D.” Do they? If so, who is that source? And is it a problem, or a solution?
Solving the Jigsaw Puzzle—Villain or Victim?
— By Lucy Castillo
Some might say the latest Avenger is violent and unhinged, an unrepentant killer being rewarded for his wetwork. But who is he, really, and can we trust him?
An anonymous source close to S.H.I.E.L.D. has some answers.
“Jigsaw is the product of an unsanctioned attempt to reinstate Project Rebirth,” our source says. “His original identity is unknown, even to himself, and no forensic records have been able to identify him. He’s a complete mystery.”
So there’s no before photo to be had in this super soldier makeover. But the after photo paints a bleak picture of a man without a past, without a name, whose missing memories point to an uncertain future. He’s missing all the pieces that would make up the foundation of his life.
Says our source: “His behavior has not typically been erratic, but an incident involving an unknown and unexpected trigger led to his disappearance and subsequent travels [across the country].”
Historically, the goal of Project Rebirth was to create a perfect soldier, a super soldier, to fight the Axis powers. Essentially, a living weapon. What was the goal of this new iteration, and who was running the program? If Captain America didn’t lose his memories in the enhancement process, why did Jigsaw? If Captain America didn’t go on a killing rampage, why did Jigsaw?
Could it be that the scientists and project leads were experimenting on an unwilling victim, and not a volunteer? Could it be that the Red Star killings that raged across the country and the Slasher killings before that were a revenge tour?
Might this be a case of revenger turned Avenger?
It certainly appears that way, as our S.H.I.E.L.D.-adjacent source refers to “ongoing massive deprogramming efforts” that have been underway since Jigsaw was retrieved, “well before” the attacks on HYDRA operatives began in the D.C. area.
While we’re far from putting together the whole puzzle, our information indicates that Jigsaw is a victim, rescued from a life being used as a weapon by the intelligence community—possibly a branch of HYDRA—and then given a chance to put his super strength to use protecting people.
Let’s give him that chance.
Have an opinion? Weigh in here!
It’s definitely a source close to S.H.I.E.L.D., or maybe a source within S.H.I.E.L.D. This article has information that shouldn’t be available, and she’s not sure that Maria didn’t put that information out there, too, alongside the press release, just to a different sort of press. Trying to get some of the more sympathetic background out there in an unofficial capacity.
It’s a good thing Jigsaw dragged Clint to the gym to run through the obstacle course and climb walls before lunch. Because they need to meet now, before anyone does anything rash in response to Maria’s press release or these tabloid articles. And calling a meeting that excludes Jigsaw while Jigsaw is available to attend the meeting just seems rude.
Besides, this is a special situation and it won’t wait until his therapy session with Yasmin at 3:30, when they can meet without him being aware that they’re leaving him out.
Ideally, he should be encouraged to attend their meetings. It might even be best to have him in this meeting she’s called for, since it’s about him. But there will be a lot of people there, and the conference screen, and that’s a lot for him at this point. She’ll give him the rundown afterward, him and Clint both.
The conference screen connects while she’s waiting for everyone to gather, showing Maria looking sour and arranging papers beside her laptop.
“So that was a surprise,” Natasha says mildly. “I didn’t expect you to move on it that fast.”
Maria blows an errant bang out of her face. “It had to be done,” she says. “You know that. The longer we waited, the harder damage control would have been. The more details we’d have needed to provide. Maybe even a congressional hearing to explain everything. The World Security Council…”
Natasha smiles to show Maria she’s not upset, though her smile does have a hint of teeth to it. “I don’t doubt it was necessary. I do question the decision to move forward with it without a heads up. Especially ‘quoting’ us.”
Maria is about to respond when Stark blows into the conference room.
“You scooped us!” He flings his hands up. “We had some really good options run by Jigglypuff, and now they’re worthless. Our PR department was this close to—”
Natasha holds up a hand. “Let’s wait for the others.”
Stark scowls and slouches into a seat, still muttering about rugs being pulled out from under people, wasted PR talent, and warning a guy.
Wilson and Rogers are followed closely by Banner, putting everyone in the room who’s likely to join them.
“Maria,” Rogers greets the screen as he sits.
“Steve.”
“I assume you’re the one we have to thank for the press conference?” Rogers asks. “Your name was on it.”
“It was a joint effort.”
“A joint effort to completely destroy everything my PR department’s been working on for ages now,” Stark grouses. “There are bank vaults and warehouses across this country with truckloads of records in them listing all the ‘field experience’ he brings to the team. What do you think will happen if someone finds them who isn’t in the loop?”
Maria lifts a shoulder, her expression cool and unflappable. “We’ll deal with that when and if it happens.”
Banner clears his throat. “It would have been nice if we had been informed,” he says. “Even asked for input.”
Natasha isn’t sure how much of the team’s irritation is based on the contents of the press release, which aren’t all that objectionable, and how much is based on the fact that the press release puts words in their mouths while bypassing them completely. Because they’d have ended up with something similar eventually. None of the stories they’d brainstormed yesterday would have worked once they added Jigsaw to the equation, and they’d have needed to stick entirely to the high level and vague.
“Consider your concern noted, Bruce,” Maria says. “But consider, also, that S.H.I.E.L.D. is officially responsible for the Avengers Initiative, and that we didn’t have time to workshop a press release with your team. We already had that one mostly complete and ready to send. It was the most expedient option.”
“But going forward…” Rogers says.
“Going forward, you’re in the loop before an announcement, with the opportunity to object and suggest changes,” Maria offers. “But I can’t guarantee veto power, Steve. The World Security Council can be difficult to please, and even Nick has to answer to someone.”
Rogers nods. “Alright. I can agree to that.”
“About the tabloids,” Natasha says, “any chance that ‘source close to S.H.I.E.L.D.’ was you?”
Maria scowls. “I don’t know who that was. We’re going through the list of people in the know right now. The intention might be good, but we can’t have anything unofficial out there.”
Natasha nods. That’s troubling, but at least they’re on it.
“In the interest of better communication, I propose more frequent meetings,” Maria says. “Once a week, plus our ad hoc meetings like this one.”
“Oh, come on,” Stark mutters. “No one has time for that. We’re already meeting all the time, just the six of us. Some of us have things to do.”
“They can join us for some of our regular meetings,” Banner suggests.
“Is he ready to join us yet?” Maria asks, obviously asking about Jigsaw. “By the reports I’ve read, he did well in North Carolina.”
“It was dicey at first,” Rogers says. “I don’t know how comfortable he’d be in a full meeting.”
He doesn’t mention the seating arrangements on the flight down, Natasha notes. Even though he’s agreed to more meetings and better communication with Nick and Maria, there are still secrets, pieces of the puzzle that are kept out of sight to protect his friend from a perceived threat.
Maria nods on the screen. “Work him up to it, if you can. He’ll need to confront the public eventually.”
Natasha checks her phone for the burner phone’s signal and frowns. The courier delivered the flip phone to Monesha’s doorstep two hours ago, and according to his surveillance, Monesha herself had arrived home from work not long afterward and taken the package inside. But she still hasn’t opened the phone. Once she does, Natasha can call the flip phone.
She doesn’t think for a moment that Monesha is the source close to S.H.I.E.L.D., but she does want her to be prepared for the press to descend upon her again. And she needs a secure phone.
Natasha puts her phone away. She’ll check back again later. In the meantime, it’s time to rejoin Clint and Jigsaw for dinner in the dining room. Typically they eat in the kitchen, just the three of them sitting at the kitchen island. But tonight, Stark and Bruce ate earlier with Pepper, and Rogers and Wilson will be joining the three of them for a slightly later dinner.
When she gets there, Rogers is still in the kitchen, along with Wilson. Putting the finishing touches on dinner together, it smells like. Burgers. Veggie burgers for her and Jigsaw, and beef for the rest of them.
Jigsaw is signing “no mission, table why” to Clint as she slides into a seat across from him.
She smiles. She’d missed the early post-mission team dinner last week, staying behind in North Carolina to help clean up the mess and direct the FBI. It’s nice to see Jigsaw sitting at the dining table, though, even without it being a post-mission meal.
“Because we can’t just eat in the kitchen all the time,” Clint says. He shrugs. “And because Cap and Wilson wanted to eat with us and there’s not room for all five of us around the kitchen island.”
Jigsaw looks like he’s about to insist that Rogers and Wilson eat at the table while he eats in the kitchen with Clint and Natasha, but in the end, he just nods with a bit of a begrudging frown.
Natasha looks at the tablet on the table beside him and wonders whether he’s planning to use it at all—or whether he’s demonstrated his new voice to the two in the kitchen yet. She’s certain Banner hasn’t heard it, because Jigsaw is still leery of Banner. But there’s a middling to decent chance he’d shown it to Rogers while they ate peaches before lunch.
Her unasked question is answered when Rogers brings a platter of partially assembled burgers to the table—several with green-tipped toothpicks to signify their vegetable nature—with Wilson following with a plate of fixings and a large bowl of fries.
“Mmm,” Clint says. “And fresh and hot, too. We should eat at the table more often.”
And he must have had it already lined up, because right after she has a chance to murmur her own thanks, the accented Russian of Jigsaw’s tablet issues his thanks in turn: “Thank you vegetable burger, Steve, Sam. Is good smell.”
Rogers sets the platter of burgers down with an audible thump, and it’s a lucky thing he was so close to the tabletop with it when Jigsaw tapped the Speak tile, or those burgers would have tumbled all over the place.
Clint grabs for a burger almost as soon as the platter is on the table.
“Wow, man,” Wilson says with a grin. “That’s great. You’re welcome.” He sets the other items down with considerably more grace. But he probably already knows about devices and programs like this. He was working as a counselor before he joined up, and it’s feasible that some of the veterans he worked with had been robbed of their voices by their trauma.
“It—” Rogers manages, passing Clint the fries to go with his burger. “It’s our pleasure, Jigsaw. Is that… your new voice? Or a recording? Or…” He sounds baffled, but pleased. “How does it work?”
Jigsaw turns the tablet around and shows them the board with all the tiles on it and the sentences he’s assembled in the box at the top. He taps a fingertip on the Speak tile again, and the words repeat.
“That’s amazing,” Rogers breathes. “We never had anything even close to that before. The future is…” He stops, seeming to think his words through and change course. “It’s really something. Someone I used to know would have said ‘holy cow,’” he finishes.
A few taps and swipes later, Jigsaw has some more words lined up: “What kind cow?”
“Oh, uh.” Rogers rubs at the back of his head. “It’s just a saying, not an actual kind of cow. It’s kind of old-timey now. But it means something like ‘wow, that’s awesome,’ I guess.”
Jigsaw nods and sets the tablet aside to reach instead for a burger with a toothpick in it. He must notice the way Rogers can’t look away from him, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the attention, focusing his own attention on devouring the burger.
“We heard it last night, late,” Natasha says as she reaches for a veggie burger of her own and begins assembling it with lots of tomato and pickles and a big smear of mayonnaise. “I like the accent.”
And she does, she’s decided. It’s not comforting, exactly, but there’s something nice about Jigsaw embracing part of his past the way she’s embraced part of her own, despite the nature of that past.
Chapter 51: Therapists | Some people call it crazy, well, I call it healing
Notes:
Chapter title from “Burn It Down” by AWOLNATION.
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
Jigsaw signs that he is happy this afternoon when she asks him how he’s feeling, the second time today he’s chosen that as his feeling word at the moment. This morning, his explanation for feeling happy was that Clint had held his hand the night before.
Yasmin is still not certain how she feels about that, and until she is certain, she will stick to congratulating him and letting the focus fall on the happiness of the moment instead of the potential for disaster.
Jigsaw is particularly and specifically vulnerable to being taken advantage of at this stage of his understanding of the world and the possible relationships within it. She doesn’t believe that Clint or any other of the Avengers would purposely pressure him into anything, but accidents and misunderstandings happen all the time in her experience.
It might be a good idea to present Clint with some literature about beginning a relationship with someone whose trauma runs as deep as Jigsaw’s. The man might be averse to therapy itself, but she can’t imagine he would reject the idea that he has some things to learn about how to be in a relationship with someone with Jigsaw’s degree of trauma.
But for now, Jigsaw is feeling happy this afternoon, and Yasmin is going to allow their session to dwell on this for a while. Apparently, his session with Caroline went well and he is specifically not in trouble. On top of that, Steve seems to have given him a bowl of sugared peach slices right before lunch.
Yasmin wonders what the reasoning is behind the gift of peaches. It seems like an odd thing to randomly bring by, and right before lunch instead of after it. From her understanding of Steve’s situation, he has ceased trying to pressure Jigsaw into accepting his history as Bucky, so that is probably not the reason.
Jigsaw pulls a picture of the peaches out of the front pocket of his therapy binder, which he presents to her with a smile. He signs that peaches are his very favorite fruit, and then that Steve—who is signed about with his name sign and not the unfortunate nickname that gets written out—ate them with him. They shared.
“That’s wonderful, Jigsaw. Why do you think Steve gave you peaches?” she asks.
He switches from signs to writing, exchanging his binder for his current notebook, the one with the star pattern on the top of the pages. Today, his pen is teal.
ASK is written on the page, followed on another line by a picture that she thinks represents the feelings wheel. Then FELT HURT REJECT LONELY on a third line.
“You felt those things, or Steve did?”
He signs that Steve is the one who felt those things, and then signs “mission” and indicates the past.
“Steve felt hurt, rejected and lonely on the mission you had last week?” When he nods, she continues. “Did he explain why?”
Jigsaw scrunches his nose up and considers his notebook, his usual reaction when asked to explain something he isn’t sure how to write down.
Yasmin gives him time.
If Steve came to have a heart-to-heart discussion with him, and Jigsaw was actually receptive enough to it to listen and share food, that’s a wonderful sign. Jigsaw has been somewhat aloof where Steve is concerned, possibly because of his early insistence that Jigsaw be Bucky, and possibly because there are residual memories of Steve from before that confuse him.
Jigsaw shows her a drawing of what appears to be a dentist’s chair with some sort of arms reaching up overhead and curved sections at the top of those arms. There’s a tube beside it. And a very detailed drawing of a gun.
With a combination of signs and pointing to the pictures, he explains what happened during the mission that Steve felt hurt about. She gathers that Jigsaw destroyed the chair and Steve the tube, and that Jigsaw was shot—which she already knew—by NOT-FRIEND, possibly meaning friendly fire or a betrayal.
Steve had tried to help him, and he’d rejected the help.
Yasmin nods to indicate that she understands what he has laid out for her. “I’m wondering why you didn’t accept Steve’s help,” she says. “You were injured. Usually when someone is injured, they accept their allies’ help.”
Jigsaw frowns and turns to a new page, but doesn’t write or draw anything for a long moment.
“Were you expecting help?”
He shakes his head.
“Did you not get any help when you were injured on a mission before?” she asks. “Is that why you didn’t expect it this time?”
She knows that he was terrified of the medical attention Bruce had given him. Perhaps Steve’s help had held a similar threat in his mind.
He sets the pen down on the notebook and signs “injury,” “failure,” and “punish,” then pauses before adding the custom sign for “HYDRA.”
“They used to punish you for getting hurt on a mission,” she says. "HYDRA did."
Yasmin wonders how adding injury on top of injury was supposed to help him learn anything but fear. But his captors had been more interested in their own entertainment than in his wellbeing, she knows. This is likely just another instance of their sadism.
Jigsaw signs “reward,” and then clarifies with “bad reward.”
“It isn’t a failure to be injured on a mission,” she says. “Those things happen. It’s one of the dangers of the job. They were wrong to punish you for it.”
He looks contemplative for a moment, and then takes the time to write out PAIN with an arrow pointing toward ORDER.
“Pain leads to order?”
Jigsaw nods.
“But it doesn’t,” she says. “Pain means something is wrong, not that something is becoming more ordered.”
He shakes his head now, and then writes WATCH THE BACK and LESSON underneath the rest of his words.
“This reminds me of their definition of ‘fun’ and how it was not the right definition, Jigsaw. How they lied to you about what ‘fun’ meant.” She pauses. “Remember that everyone is enjoying fun, and that no one is getting hurt.”
He writes out ASSET and points to it as though that contradicts what she’s saying.
“Not even assets should be hurting if something is truly fun,” she says. “That was a lie they told you. Just like pain leading to order. Just like punishment being a reward for getting hurt and getting hurt itself being a failure.”
Jigsaw sighs, silent but obviously frustrated.
And yes, it can be frustrating to have your beliefs challenged consistently. It’s a testament to HYDRA’s persistence that he absorbed so much of their poison as being truth even while they brutalized him and gave him no reason to trust anything they said or did. And she doesn’t expect a smooth road ahead in excising those deeply entrenched “truths.”
“They lied to you, Jigsaw.” For now, all she can do is repeat the actual truth to him and hope that he can accept it logically and then, eventually, emotionally as well. “Everything they told you, it’s all a lie.”
Zoe
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 9:15 p.m.—
Jigsaw comes to tonight’s session without Clint again, which is fine. There’s a lot going on in the media that the Avengers team might need to be discussing, and she can well understand why they might choose to do so while Jigsaw is otherwise engaged.
“How are you liking your AAC program with your voice, Jigsaw?” she asks. “Did you use it today?”
He nods as he gets himself settled with Lucky on the sofa. Once settled, he gives Lucky a few rubs behind the ears and then moves the tablet to rest on top of his notebook so that he can use it more easily.
“Caroline yes. Natasha yes. Yasmin no. Steve no.”
So yes, he used the voice with Caroline and Natasha, but not with Yasmin or Steve.
Jigsaw frowns, looking down at the Names board. Then: “Jigsaw and it. Steve and. Jigsaw and it. Natasha and.”
Zoe thinks she knows what he means, that he has a name and his preferred way of referencing himself, but only has names for the others and not his preferences. “Would you like help setting up additional tiles for alternate names for people?”
Jigsaw nods, and so she gets out her own tablet and sets it to be projected onto the whiteboard. It’s a simple matter to walk him through copying the current set of tiles so that he has two Steves, but it’s a little more challenging to rename the second Steve tile, because he’s not looking for Rogers or Captain America. He wants something else, and it takes several minutes for her to realize that the specific words he wants are “the clown man.”
“What do you think about adding a tile for ‘the’ to the name board, and only putting ‘clown man’ under Steve’s picture?” she asks. It’s not ideal—“clown man” itself is not ideal—but she knows Yasmin was working on names with him at one point, and it’s not her place to spend half an hour trying to convince Jigsaw to use Steve’s actual names.
She isn’t here to police his communication, after all. Only to help him express himself. If this is how he wants to express himself, she’ll facilitate it.
After a bit of thought, Jigsaw nods that they can add a tile for “the” to go before anyone’s alternate name. This way, he has the option of addressing these people by their alternate names instead of merely referring to them. And then it’s a guessing game with signs and charades to determine which alternates he is interested in using.
Zoe is not surprised that Clint’s second name tile is changed to “other asset” or that Bruce becomes “curly researcher” and Sam “flying man.” But “ballerina woman” is unexpected, as is what eventually emerges as Tony’s alternate name—“hamburger technician”—which makes no sense to her at all.
Her own alternate name ends up being “signs expert” and Caroline’s “feeder.” Yasmin is the last to be renamed, and her second tile is “no-words expert,” which is confusing to her, but which she accepts as making sense to him. Just as with Tony, the “hamburger technician,” what matters is not that his expressions be polite or logical, but that they are his intended expressions.
Yasmin can handle the diplomacy. But just in case, Zoe thinks she’ll pay her hallmate a visit after this session.
Yasmin
—New York City | Tuesday 18 September 2012 | 9:45 p.m.—
“We already agreed, Frankie,” Yasmin says over the phone. “I’ll be in New York until my newest patient is stable enough for me to leave him, and the timing of that was always in flux.”
“Is your newest patient the Jigsaw Killer that’s all over the news?” her husband shoots back, his voice filled with challenge. Then he sighs, the challenge deflating. “Damnit, Yaz, I thought this would take a month, maybe two. Now you’re talking about the end of the year. I miss you.”
Yasmin holds in a sigh of her own. “And I miss you. But you’re welcome to come to New York. They’ll put us up in a secure hotel and I can commute from there instead of living in the Tower.”
He can do his job from anywhere, after all. He writes for a bass fishing magazine. He travels all the time for his job, and he needs to understand that sometimes, sometimes, she will also travel for her own.
His silence tells her that he’s not considering it. He’s already spoken his mind about New York City. Nothing there for him, constant crowds, too much night life, too dangerous, can’t see the horizon. She’d recommended he take a trip of his own while she’s in New York, to keep his mind off the distance between them. But coming home to an empty house was apparently enough to cause irritation over the situation to set in.
“Through the end of the year, Yaz? To rehab a murderer?”
“You know I take my job seriously,” she says. “Including patient confidentiality. I will not tell you who I am seeing here. Only that I am living in Avengers Tower to be close to a patient.”
She wishes Jigsaw wasn’t all over the news. For his sake, and for her own. There’s very little way to convince her husband that she has not taken on Jigsaw as a patient without lying that her patient is actually… Steve. Or Tony. All she can do is insist that she won’t disclose the information and therefore let the uncertainty hang in the air.
And the suspicion.
If only he’d agreed to come out to New York with her.
“And yes,” she adds. “It is looking like I’ll be spending the rest of the year here. It’s only a few more months than planned, Frankie.”
“Alright. Can you at least come home for Christmas?” he asks. “Just a few days. Not even a whole week.”
“You know that the holidays are often a crisis time for my patients. Come to New York,” she says. “Please. Just for that week. Or we can celebrate together in January.”
“January isn’t Christmas,” he mutters. “It’s fine,” he lies. “I’ll think of something.”
The something had better be him flying to New York, if he wants to spend Christmas with her. She isn’t compromising on this. Not with a client like Jigsaw. There’s no way to tell what his reaction will be to holidays of any kind, or whether there will be memories surfacing around events that took place then—whether missions or abuses, or even times before all that. Or how the budding relationship he has with Clint will be developing with three months under its feet.
“I love you,” he says. “I know I’m being unreasonable, but I love you.”
Yasmin smiles. “I love you, too. Have a good night, okay?”
“I’ll work on it,” he says. “Night.”
She puts her phone down when the line drops, and turns her attention back to the tv and its softly murmuring nightly news.
It seems there’s been more footage from North Carolina, this time apparently officially released. Probably as a sort of damage control. She watches as dozens of suspected HYDRA operatives are taken into custody, helped up into the back of a transport vehicle by uniformed FBI agents. They look banged up, to say the least. Never let it be said that the Avengers are gentle when taking down their enemies.
She doesn’t recognize the man identified as Agent Phil Coulson, but she can easily pick out Sharon directing things while Phil talks to an FBI agent. And there’s Steve and Natasha in the distance, overseeing an ambulance crew handling another HYDRA operative.
When the actual news is over, the commentators come on screen, debating whether “Jigsaw, aka the Red Star Killer” is a force for good, or whether he needs to be held accountable for the murders he committed, regardless of who he was murdering and whether the government has pardoned him or not. And whether the Avengers need to be held accountable for their current roster.
This, she can do without. Yasmin shuts the tv off and prepares for bed. Tomorrow will no doubt be another busy day.
There’s a knock at her door while she’s getting a glass of water for her bedside table, and she looks out the peephole before letting her fellow therapist in.
“How did your session tonight go?” Yasmin asks, gesturing for Zoe to have a seat on the sofa while she sets the coffee maker to brewing enough decaf for two. It’s StarkTech, as is most of the equipment the suite is furnished with, and in under a minute, she’ll have two cups of coffee for them.
“It went well,” Zoe says, getting a tablet out of her bag, “though I did want to ask you how you were coming on with names for people.”
Names. Yasmin sighs. Yes, the names for people instead of the way he tends to think of them by role or occupation. She’d had very little luck with Bruce, but she knows Jigsaw thinks of her as Yasmin except when they’re talking about something that is upsetting for him.
“I’m almost certain he thinks of you as ‘the expert with the signs,’” Yasmin says as she pours their coffee. “I was ‘the expert without the words,’ at first. Creamer?”
“Yes, thanks.” Zoe sets the tablet on the coffee table, its screen set to one of the AAC boards. “And that makes sense. He has me down as ‘signs expert’ and you as ‘no-words expert.’ I guess there wasn’t enough space for the full description.”
Yasmin frowns and brings their coffees over, doctored as they like. She looks at the tablet more closely, and sees that yes, everyone—even Alpine—has a second tile now, to the left of the original one. Including Steve “clown man” Rogers.
Yasmin sighs. “I had something else planned for tomorrow morning, but I think I’d better address this, instead. Not to convince him to remove the tiles,” she reassures Zoe. “Just to remind him again that people like being called by their names, and thought of with their names as well.”
Zoe smiles into her coffee. “It’s interesting which roles and descriptors he’s assigned certain people. ‘Hamburger technician’ is particularly interesting,” she adds. “Tony is a technician. That’s easy to make out. But I’m not sure where the ‘hamburger’ part comes from.”
“At least Tony is more likely to be amused than upset,” Yasmin says. “I worry about Steve sometimes, if he learns that he’s not even Steve to Jigsaw, but is some kind of clown in his eyes.”
“Ah, that one got explained tonight.” Zoe points at Steve’s second picture, which isn’t actually identical to the first, but is instead his face with the cowl of his uniform on. “Jigsaw thought of him as wearing a uniform that looked like a flag, and associated that kind of uniform with brightly colored circuses.”
Well, that’s not so offensive as what Yasmin had feared. But it’s still not likely to make Steve feel very good about the direction their friendship-building attempts are going.
Her plans for tomorrow can easily push to Thursday. She would hate for the AAC program to drop a wrench in the works when it comes to Jigsaw integrating with the team.
Chapter 52: Interlude, New England edition | Look at everybody camping out with they binoculars
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rumors” by Jake Miller.
Thanks goes again to my IRL friend, SCB, for channeling the delightful Carlton Badger. She would like you to know that Thor is the only MCU movie she’s watched more than once, so naturally, her references lean that direction. ^_^
Chapter Text
Sam
—New York City | Wednesday 19 September 2012 | 6:45 a.m.—
There are guards outside of the Tower this morning, instead of standing just inside the door posing as doormen. That doesn’t bode well as an opener to the day. But he has to get Lucky out on the grass to do his business, at the very least. And preferably he’s going to let the dog play on the grass, as well.
“You sure you want to go out there?” one of the additional inside guards asks. He nods toward the cluster of people on the other side of the street, some holding cameras, some holding mics, and all of them chomping at the bit to get a statement from just about anyone in the know.
Sam groans. “The dog has to go out, so it’s not like I have a better option.”
“At least let one of us go out with you to keep them back.”
Sam shakes his head. An Avenger needing a guard to protect himself from the press? How would that look? Not good, he’s sure.
“Thanks, but no. I’ll be quick.”
The guard opens the door for him with a look of “better you than me” all over his face, and as Sam steps outside, the crowd across the street ripples with excitement.
This is going to suck so bad.
But it’s not the first time he’s turned down the press clamoring for a quote about Jigsaw. Only he was known as the D.C. Slasher, then, and Sam was just one of the many survivors dotting the city. Now he’s an Avenger. Technically, anything he says could be taken as an official team position.
He steels himself for the worst and crosses over when the light changes. Hopefully Lucky will be okay with lots of people jostling.
“Sam, Sam! What do you think about—”
The reporters start when he’s still halfway across the street, and Sam considers turning around and finding some other park. Maybe driving Lucky to a different dog park far, far away. But he finishes crossing the street, ignoring the reporters who are each trying so hard to speak over each other that he only hears pieces of their questions.
“—saw’s actual name? Is it true that—”
“Sam! What’s it like working with—”
“—Star Killer?”
“Is Jigsaw the Red Star Killer?”
“—first Black Avenge—”
“Sam, over here! People are saying that you—”
Sam pushes his way through them, holding up his free hand and guiding Lucky forward with his hand on his leash closer down to his collar to keep him close. That’s hardly needed, though, as Lucky seems determined to stick to Sam’s side and keep himself between Sam and whoever happens to be closest and loudest.
“No comment,” Sam shouts. “No comment! I’m just trying to walk my dog!”
“When did you get—”
“—only one eye—”
“Do you regret joining the—”
“—Honey Badger Den’s latest report?”
Sam pointedly keeps walking into the park, not turning around, and not even waving goodbye.
He read Carlton Badger’s first “report,” thanks, and it just made him mad. No, he doesn’t regret joining the team. He doesn’t know how Lucky lost his eye. He didn’t so much get a dog as sign himself up for dog walking duties.
Sam makes sure he and Lucky are far enough into the park and far enough down the street that the cameras won’t pick him up before he lets Lucky pause to sniff all the nearby objects. He can see the reporters all lined up with their backs to the Tower now, delivering their live reports about how the Falcon has a one-eyed dog and didn’t respond to questions.
He’s going to see if the garage entrance is less packed on his way back inside. It should be. No one’s going to mob a car to get an interview, he hopes.
Kate
—New York City | Wednesday 19 September 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
Kate looks at her phone with a frown. Hawkeye is postponing their session on the twenty-third. Skipping that whole Sunday and pushing everything else a week. She’ll still get her whole eight hours, but she was really looking forward to Sunday, more than even Friday and the end of her week of classes.
Apparently, he just wants to protect her from media exposure, and she guesses that makes sense, if there’s a flock of reporters around the Tower. She’s obviously coming for archery lessons, and that means she knows Hawkeye, and Hawkeye was close with Jigsaw—who is less charity case off the streets and more rescued lab experiment turned Avenger, if that one tabloid has the story straight from S.H.I.E.L.D.
It’ll probably mostly die down in a week or two, anyway, unless some other sensational thing happens or some new information is leaked. So at most, she’ll end up skipping two weeks of archery. But she really hopes it’ll only be this one weekend.
“Aren’t you getting lessons from Hawkeyes,” her roommate says, not looking up from her phone, where she’s been catching up on the latest “news” from the Honey Badger’s Den website while not watching the home improvement show that’s on the tv. “The archery. It’s with him, right?”
“It’s Hawkeye,” Kate corrects. “And yes, I am. What’s the honey badger saying now?”
She kind of hates that website. Carlton Badger has a snarky, negative take on everything. If you get all your news from him and his tabloid news, you’d think the world was ending any minute now due to the festering malevolence of everyone with a hint of power or prestige. Anyone he can go after. Honey badger don’t care.
Her phone pings with a text from her roommate—the website in question. Great.
Kate sighs, but she knows she’s going to read the thing. If he’s talking about Hawkeye, then she wants to know what he’s saying.
Avoidance Anonymous: Pay No Attention to the Jigsaw Behind the Curtain
— By Carlton Badger
The mystery surrounding the new Avenger known as Jigsaw continues to deepen, dear readers. New details have been shared with several publications of dubious repute by an anonymous source—who may or may not be Nick Fury after one too many Peppermelon Punch cocktails at the members-only lounge in Avengers Tower.
Answers, the anonymous source promised sotto voce from stage left, answers that make this whole farce even more laughable.
We’re supposed to believe that the assassination artist currently known as Jigsaw wandered off without so much as a “Return to Project Rebirth” sticker slapped on his metal arm. It’s de rigueur to microchip our house pets. Certainly the U.S. Army should do as much for their super soldiers.
It also defies belief that after years of extensive (and likely expensive) reprogramming, Project Rebirth couldn’t be bothered to update their super soldier records with so much as a codename. Jigsaw certainly doesn’t have the signature flair of the marketing geniuses that brought you Captain America.
Count Rushmore, on the other hand? That I would believe.
While Jigsaw’s supposed lack of identity and memories is indeed worthy of sympathy and patience, it does seem like the Avengers should have done a little bit of superhero character development before his official launch. Perhaps J.A.R.V.I.S. doesn’t possess software as cutting edge and sophisticated as a random renaming tool.
Jigsaw is fine as an Avenger codename. It’s short, stabby, and doesn’t have a superfluous adjective. Heaven forbid our suspected serial killer had opted for something like the Capricious Copper Jigsaw.
That being said, permission to be a mononymic entity really should be reserved for demigods like Thor or Liberace.
While Jigsaw’s attack triggers remain undocumented, it’s clear what sets most of us off—pathetic attempts at transparency from the ever shady S.H.I.E.L.D.
Until S.H.I.E.L.D. releases actual facts with supporting documentation, take any and all anonymous whispers with a large grain of salt. Unless said anonymous source is the Warriors Three stacked on top of each other under a trench coat. That’s totally legit.
We’re still on the case of the Unfathomable Umber Jigsaw, dear readers. Watch the space. Same Avenger gossip time, same Avenger gossip channel.
Do you have a hot tip from a loose-lipped Loki? Contact Carlton!
She scowls and closes the website. “That doesn’t even mention Hawkeye!”
“No, but that’s who the Jigsaw Avenger was seen with, and the article is about Jigsaw.” Her roommate shrugs. “Figured you’d want to know. Have you seen him? You go to Avengers Tower. You’ve been three times for your lessons. You have to have seen Jigsaw.”
Kate rolls her eyes. “I’m there to see Hawkeye, not Jigsaw.”
“But you’ve seen him, right?”
“No,” Kate lies. “I’ve seen Hawkeye, though, because that’s whose time I bid on.”
“Oh well.” With the statement that Kate hasn’t seen the mystery Avenger, her roommate loses interest and turns back to her phone. “It’d be something if you did see him. You’d be famous.”
Kate shakes her head. Famous, right. She’d be a target for stupid, mean-spirited Carlton Badger and his like. She can do without.
She hopes Hawkeye has a better time living with his roommate than she does living with hers. Jigsaw strikes her as being pretty considerate, all told. And definitely quiet. The jury’s still out on whether he steals ice cream or ruins clothes, though.
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 19 September 2012 | 2:45 p.m.—
“Man, it’s actually a pretty day out there,” Clint says as he looks out the windows lining the far wall of Pepper’s gardening room. “If it weren’t swarming with press, we could go to the park or something.”
Not that the other two would be interested, probably. They’re busy repotting the succulent, this time in a purple and teal pot with a bright orange saucer to go underneath. It’s just as garish and borderline hideous as the previous pot Jigsaw chose for that plant, but this one’s a smidge bigger.
And it’s not only the one plant that’s getting this treatment. There’s a whole pile of the things on a cleared out table in the center of the room, big ones and little ones, and Natasha is planting some sort of waterfall of succulents all the way down a cracked plastic pot. It’ll probably look pretty when she’s done, but right now, it looks like a lot of dirt everywhere.
Clint looks back down at the crowd on the other side of the street. It’s thinned out since the morning, but there’s still a solid five reporters out there with attending cameramen. And it occurs to him that this can’t be the first time Cap has been confronted with lots of press. And now the eyes are all on Jigsaw, or would be if he was out there to be seen.
Maybe he should get Cap in here, get him to talk about his run-ins with the press, give him and Jigsaw another thing to be “the same as” over. It couldn’t hurt anything. Worst case scenario is that Cap starts playing in the potting soil and Clint goes to play video games instead of watching the garden party.
Yeah, yeah, he’ll do that.
Clint gets his phone out of his pocket, types out his idea, hits Send.
A few seconds later, there’s a reply: [“On my way. Thank you!”]
Someone needs to tell Cap that there’s no need for quote marks or any other punctuation when texting.
Cap may be on his way creepy-fast, but it does take him about ten minutes to actually get there, which Clint takes as a good sign—he’s not desperate enough to have dropped everything and come running. Just desperate enough to think Clint’s plan is a good idea for getting closer to Jigsaw.
“Hey Cap,” Clint says when Cap appears in the doorway, looking vaguely like he was just in the area poking around. “Come take a look at these people.”
Cap greets them in one all-inclusive “hey guys” and bends to give Lucky a pat on the head when the dog proves too comfortable to get up. And Lucky has a sunbeam he’s parked himself in, so Clint doesn’t blame him.
“They’re still out there?” Cap asks as he works his way through the room. He looks down out the window with a little frown. “Like vultures,” he mutters.
“Sam was swarmed by them this morning while he went to walk Lucky. He’s good at ignoring the press, but he shouldn’t have to be. They should leave him alone.”
Clint nods, noticing that Jigsaw is spending some portion of his attention on Cap now that he’s mentioned Lucky. He’s still arranging rocks around one of the newly potted succulents of Natasha’s, but in a distracted sort of way. Excellent.
“Yeah,” Clint says, “especially when he had Lucky with him. The dog doesn’t need to get mobbed, too.”
Cap shakes his head. “Those ones out there now are the dedicated ones. The others will be back later tonight and they’ll show up in the mornings, but they won’t wait around all day. These ones, though…”
He puts a hand to the glass as he looks back down at the street across from them. “These ones will follow a newly minted super soldier as he chases down a HYDRA assassin. Or they would, given the opportunity.”
Clint blinks. This is a story he hasn’t heard. “Newly minted, meaning, you? Back in the ‘40s?”
“Yeah,” Cap says. “The man who made the serum and who chose me to be the test subject, he was shot just after the process had completed. I chased him down, the shooter, barefoot, all the way to the river, then dragged him out of his submersible.”
“Neat.” Clint doesn’t want to have to chase anyone barefoot, ever. He’ll keep his shoes on, thanks.
“Never did find out more about him, though. Cyanide tooth.” Cap shakes his head like he still regrets the way that ended. “That was the first time anyone in the press had ever looked at me twice. After that, though, I didn’t have a scrap of privacy. Everyone wanted to know my business.”
Clint thinks he knows this part of the story. “The USO tours, right? With the girls on motorcycles and the song and dance routine.”
“And don’t forget socking fake-Hitler in the jaw, shaking hands, holding babies…” Cap huffs out a mirthless laugh. “And the scientists were all over me for days before the USO tours. Needed samples to try to recreate the serum.”
That makes sense, Clint supposes. Doesn’t sound fun, but it makes sense. And hey that’s probably another thing he and Jigsaw have in common. They’ve both been experimented on and had samples taken and all that. Excellent. Not excellent that it happened, but it’s nice to find more non-Bucky things they have in common.
Linda
—New York City | Friday 21 September 2012 | 9:45 a.m.—
“And do you feel like a dancing monkey now?” Linda asks. “Is that why you’re upset by the press attention?”
Steve shakes his head. “No, but… I guess I never really processed what it was like to suddenly have this different body that didn’t seem to really belong to me. I had the last of the serum in me, and the serum was military property. I felt like a— Like a container for something that mattered more than I did.”
Linda nods. “And how did that make you feel at the time?”
Steve is silent for a moment before speaking. “Guilty, actually. Selfish. There I was, with this body people would and did kill for, all my ailments cured, and I was feeling bitter about giving blood sample after blood sample.”
“And do you still feel any of that guilt?” When Steve shakes his head again, she continues. “How does it make you feel now, looking back on it?”
“I guess I feel like there was a bait and switch. Unintentional, unplanned, but a bait and switch.”
Oh, now that’s very interesting. Linda gestures for him to continue.
“I signed up to help with the war efforts, and I was going to become this super soldier who could make a real difference fighting the bullies running amok in Europe.” He holds one hand in the other, looking down at them. “But then I was just a dancing monkey, hoisting up girls on motorcycles, selling war bonds and not so much as seeing a battlefield.”
He shifts in his chair.
“It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t what I was told would happen. But at the same time, I can’t feel angry about it, because it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just that Dr Erskine had been killed and the project was closed down.”
“Can’t you feel angry?” she challenges.
Steve sighs. “Yes, I can. But I don’t. I did, then. But looking back on it, it wasn’t fair, but it’s the thing that allowed me to save Bucky and the rest of the 107th. If I hadn’t been on tour there, right at that moment…”
She waits him out, lets him find his words. Steve has really opened up since the very beginning of their time together. He still struggles to find the right words for what’s going on inside himself, but he is getting better at letting his thoughts escape as words instead of silently thinking for minutes on end.
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’d never have seen Bucky again,” Steve says. “He’d have been turned into a HYDRA thrall right then and there. Probably the first of many. We might have lost the War.”
He pauses, and then: “No. We would have lost the War. Between Schmidt and his Tesseract-powered bombs and Zola making an army of brainwashed super soldiers, we would definitely have lost.”
Linda watches as he steadily gets pinker about the cheeks and neck. After a minute, she asks, “What are you thinking, Steve?”
“That it’s awfully self-centered and boastful to think I won the War, but also that without the Howling Commandos, there really wouldn’t have been a team that could go after HYDRA effectively.” His expression darkens. “Or as effectively as we did. Not effectively enough, if you ask me.”
“Do you feel guilty for not being able to put a permanent stop to HYDRA? That you are in some way responsible for the re-emergence of the group?”
Steve takes in a deep breath and lets it out in a rush, not quite a sigh, more refreshing the air in his lungs. Perhaps as a means to clear his thoughts.
“I know, logically, that it wasn’t my fault. I did what I could, what I had to do, and I had no choice but to leave the rest of it in their hands,” he says. “But deep down, there’s a part of me that keeps going over it and thinking there has to have been a way to do it all. Maybe if we hadn’t gone after Zola’s train. Maybe if I’d been more effective fighting Schmidt on the Valkyrie.”
He looks at her directly then, a rarity for him.
“Something,” he says. “There has to have been something.”
Linda moderates her voice to avoid any hint of unintended accusation. “And if there was nothing? If you’re beating yourself up over something you truly had no control over?”
He’s quiet, just nodding and pulling on a stoic mask to prevent himself from expressing his emotions.
“It must seem monstrously unfair to have been placed in a position to save your closest friend only for that very position to cost you that friend.”
A muscle in Steve’s jaw tenses, and Linda calculates how much time they have left in their session. She won’t intentionally prod him into experiencing his feelings without leaving time to recover from them.
“You’ve said before that you feel responsible for his death,” she says gently. There’s time to help him return to a baseline emotion before their session ends. “For everything he suffered. Are you able to hold onto the knowledge—the fact—that you did everything you could have done, and that there was nothing more you could have done?”
“But there was,” Steve insists. “I could have let him go home, but I asked him to join the Howling Commandos. I’m the one who put him on that train. I’m the one who didn’t put that HYDRA gunman down for good, so that he could get back up and start shooting again. I’m the one who wasn’t fast enough, who couldn’t reach far enough, who didn’t hold on, who—”
He shakes his head, not continuing.
“You’re the one who rescued him from torture and experimentation and gave him another year or two of life,” she says. “You’re the one who spent that remaining time by his side, instead of letting him be alone and traumatized at home, where people would surely have realized he was enhanced in due time.”
Steve closes his eyes. “I know. Logically, I know. But I just can’t accept it. I can’t get over this feeling that I doomed him to six decades of hell, that I’m responsible for what happened to him.”
“The only people responsible for what has been done to your friend are the people who did those things to him.”
“I know. I just wish I could believe it.”
Brock (Rumlow, aka Crossbones, B-RUM)
—Camp Lehigh | Saturday 22 September 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
Finally. Here it is. The treasure trove of paper files he knew was stashed away in the dusty recesses of this old military base-turned-HYDRA refuge. Zola hadn’t told him about them, but the blasted AI had to have known about them. And about their potential contents.
“You sure this stuff is going to be worth the allergies from all this dust?” Jakenhall asks, lifting a box lid with a solid half inch of dust off a box of records. “I’m not even asthmatic, and I’m going to have an asthma attack if I stay in here.”
Brock can’t believe this is who he has to work with now that Rollins is dead. Jakenhall is devoted to the cause, but not necessarily devoted to him. That’ll have to change, eventually. It’ll change, or Jakenhall will join Rollins in death and Brock will just pick a new second in command.
“Just dig,” Brock snaps. “We’re looking for Russian stuff. Old Soviet records that came over with the asset. They must have had more than just one pathetic fuck toy in their hands after all those years with it. I want whatever they held back.”
Jakenhall sighs and gets to work. Good.
Brock takes a look through the files in his own box, too. The faster they go through these records, the less likely anyone is to know that they’re down here, reading them and possibly finding some new tools that help him solidify his growing but still tentative hold on the position of Operator. He will succeed, whatever it takes. And he’ll get his asset back, too.
After nearly an hour of searching box after box, he sees it. A file in Cyrillic writing. He can’t read it—he’s memorized the sounds of the trigger phrases, but he’s not sure what those phrases mean—but he has a translation program on his burner phone.
And this, he soon finds, is one of the Winter Soldier records. From Russia. Specifically, Siberia. There’s a base in Siberia, and a list of HYDRA agents who enlisted to be the newest super soldiers in the Soviet branch’s army. People, with minds, with the ability to actually think, getting a serum from somewhere, and becoming far superior to the asset with its faulty brain and tendency to abandon the cause if it goes too long between wipes.
It looks like a list of ten, and five of them were A-list candidates, the ones who were first in line if they were healthy enough when the serum arrived.
Brock checks the date. December 5, 1991. That’s enough time to have shot them up with the serum, enough time for them to decide to keep the five successful Winter Soldiers and transfer out the glitchy one.
But they must still be on ice, or he’d have heard about them. Seen them in action. Seen the results of their actions. Something.
Well, if they’re still on ice, maybe they’d better be thawed out and told who it was who resurrected them instead of leaving them on the sidelines for two decades.
They’re sure to be thankful.
Chapter 53: Jigsaw | You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything
Notes:
Chapter title from “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads.
A few people in last week's comments were asking for Jigsaw’s perspective on the conversation between Clint and Steve, and it turns out I did have time to jot out the requested perspective! Yay! Anyway, instead of the second Interlude, have this practically unedited brand new chapter. The second Interlude will probably show up midweek sometime, depending on work drama. ^_^
(Thanks for those comments, folks. When I can, I love to fulfill reader requests for things that were otherwise going to be left off the page.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 19 September 2012 | 2:45 p.m.—
“Man, it’s actually a pretty day out there,” the other asset says. “If it weren’t swarming with press, we could go to the park or something.”
It looks up from the little plant on the table in front of it, a spoon full of the special dirt ready to be carefully poured into the new pot. The other asset is standing in front of the wall of windows, looking out at all of the people gathered at the edge of the street looking at the hive building with their binoculars and everything else.
It is not sure why the other asset came to spend time with it and the ballerina woman while they repot the little plants. The other asset does not like plants very much, even when the other asset is not being asked to eat those little plants. But it is still glad that the other asset has joined them all the same.
To show the other asset how much it was glad, it had let the other asset try to pick out another pot for the little plant, but the other asset had chosen an ugly dark orange pot that was so dark it was almost brown. So ugly. Ocher, the ballerina woman had called it. But the ugly pot was too big, and so it had not needed to agree to use the ugly pot after all.
The little plant has finally graduated to a bigger pot since it is becoming a bigger plant, but not big enough for the ugly ocher pot.
The reason the little plant is bigger now is that it has done such a good job giving the little plant the exact right amount of water—not too much, not too little—and the right amount of sunlight. The ballerina woman said so. Said that it had done so well.
She had come to see the little plant, and also the two assets, after the lunchtime meal to see if the little plant had grown enough to be repotted yet, because her own little plants were ready for new pots themselves. And so now all of the little plants are changing their pots around.
The hamburger technician had talked the other day in the lab about a kind of fish called a crab that has little hands with pincher claws on the tips—the hamburger technician knows that it likes animals, and every time it visits the lab, there is a new animal the hamburger technician wants to tell it about. Specifically, the other day there had been talk about a particular kind of crab-fish that wears shells like people wear clothes or like hamburger technicians wear hollowed out red and gold robots. Hermits. Hermit crab-fishes.
The hermit crab-fishes grow bigger and grow out of their clothing-shells, and so they have to go find new clothing-shells to change into. Just like the little plants grow bigger and need to find new pots to be planted into.
It does not think that the hamburger technician knew about the little plant getting big enough for a new pot when he told it about the hermit crab-fishes, but the similarities are still there even if the timing was not intentional. And maybe the hamburger technician had known. Because the voice without a mouth tells him everything, and the voice without a mouth would have known that the ballerina woman had acquired even more of the little succulent plants to pot up.
The other asset turns to look back out the window as it scoops up another spoonful of the special dirt for potting plants in. Not just plant dirt, but succulent dirt. It says so on the bag. “Succulent.” “Potting soil.” Very special dirt.
The ballerina woman has a cracked plastic pot that she is using to put all of the little succulent plants into, lining them up just so along the crack so that their roots—so delicate, so fragile—are inside of the pot and the stiff leaves are on the outside of the pot. Every time there is a succulent plant nestled into the crack, the ballerina woman gently pats more of the special dirt for succulent plants into the pot. That way the roots are protected and the little plants will stay put instead of falling out of the crack.
“Hey Cap,” says the other asset several minutes later.
It does not turn around to face the clown man who has arrived. It heard the clown man rushing down the hallway in the distance and then slowing down to walk up to the room as if there were no rush at all. It does not know what the clown man’s game is, but it is going to keep potting little plants with the ballerina woman instead of playing the rush-and-then-pretend game.
“Come take a look at these people,” the other asset adds.
“Hey guys,” says the clown man before petting the dog in a bit of sunbeam. “They’re still out there?” the clown man asks as he goes to join the other asset at the windows. “Like vultures.”
That is enough of the special dirt for the newly repotted little plant. Now it is time to add the pretty rocks on the top of the dirt, which the ballerina woman says will help retain moisture. There are some very specific arrangements that need to be made so that the little plant will continue to get the perfect amount of moisture and not too much or too little.
And it will continue to meet those requirements so that the little plant can someday be a big plant. Bigger even than the ballerina woman’s little plants. It wants the little plant to get to be big enough for the white pot with the teal circles on it—polka dots, the ballerina woman calls them—and maybe a bright fuchsia saucer. That pot is really big, as big around as one of the bigger plates the team that is not a cell insists on putting food on before eating it.
The little plant has a long, long way to grow before it will be ready for that pot, though.
The ballerina woman’s little plants—the original ones, not the new ones—are not even that big yet. But they are ready for some pretty rocks, and it will help her by putting some rocks on top of the special dirt around those plants.
“Sam was swarmed by them this morning while he went to walk Lucky,” the clown man says, talking about all of the people—the media, the press, the reporters—out on the street. “He’s good at ignoring the press, but he shouldn’t have to be. They should leave him alone.”
The flying man had been swarmed? There are lots of things that swarm, and apparently the media-press-reporters do that, too. Not just tiny creatures like bees and wasps and ants and things. That is too bad. And while the dog was out there—that means that the dog was swarmed as well. Unacceptable.
The dog did not appear to be distressed when it came back from the morning session with Yasmin to collect the breakfast meal and the ballerina woman. So the swarming must not have been too bad. But…
“Yeah,” the other asset says, “especially when he had Lucky with him. The dog doesn’t need to get mobbed, too.”
Mobbed. That is like swarmed, then. But mobs are made out of people all doing the same thing at the same time in the same place, usually without thinking about why they are doing it.
“Those ones out there now are the dedicated ones,” the clown man says. It sounds like the clown man knows all about mobs of media-press-reporters. Maybe he is an expert of a sort, just in a very narrow set of topics. “The others will be back later tonight and they’ll show up in the mornings, but they won’t wait around all day. These ones, though…”
These ones? It looks up from the rocks and the ballerina woman’s little plants. What about these ones? Are these ones more dangerous than the other ones?
The hamburger technician had told it once about how some swarms are more dangerous than other swarms. Bees swarm when they have run out of space—another similarity with the little plants and with the hermit crab-fishes—but there are some kinds of bees that swarm when they are angry. Usually because a person did something stupid or mean to them.
The clown man is looking through the windows, one hand on the glass. “These ones,” he says, “will follow a newly minted super soldier as he chases down a HYDRA assassin. Or they would, given the opportunity.”
The other asset blinks, and so does it. Both assets blink.
It does not know what mint has to do with super soldiers chasing down HYDRA assassins. Or why new mint is the kind of mint that is related to them. What is wrong with old mint? Or medium-aged mint? Is there such a thing as medium-aged mint? Or is mint just new or not new?
The other asset is just as confused about mint as it is.
“Newly minted, meaning, you?” the other asset asks. “Back in the ‘40s?”
“Yeah,” says the clown man, although this does not clear up the matter of what mint has to do with anything they are talking about. “The man who made the serum and who chose me to be the test subject, he was shot just after the process had completed. I chased him down, the shooter, barefoot, all the way to the river, then dragged him out of his submersible.”
“Neat.” The other asset nods.
And it is neat, it supposes, though it has yet to hear anything that involves mint, or any other kind of plant.
The clown man was a test subject. That is more important than asking what the clown man has to do with mint or mint with the clown man. Actual mint is probably not what they are talking about, ultimately. In this case, mint must be a kind of fish called a red herring, where something seems important but is not, although it does not yet understand fully about the fish, either.
The hamburger technician is trying to teach it all about “sayings” and “phrases” where the words that are spoken are not at all the words that are meant. It is… still confused most of the time. Like now, with the mint. Or about happy clams.
“Never did find out more about him, though,” the clown man is saying. “Cyanide tooth.”
It knows all about cyanide teeth, though. Now it is “reading the same page,” or something about the same pages, anyway—that is another saying—and knows what is going on once more. The clown man chased down a HYDRA assassin and the HYDRA assassin killed himself with a cyanide tooth.
That’s unfortunate, because surely the clown man could have hurt the HYDRA assassin in order to make the man tell the right kind of lies. HYDRA assassins, after all, are people. And people never say true things when they are tortured. They only ever say what they think the other people want to hear, and also lies that they think will make the pain stop.
This is one of the ways that order does not come through pain. Interrogation almost always yields corrupt intelligence.
But that is less important in this case. The important part is that the clown man could have employed some torture, hurting the HYDRA assassin, and was denied the opportunity by the cyanide tooth.
It wonders why a HYDRA assassin would have wanted to kill a researcher who was making super soldiers, though. HYDRA wants super soldiers. Why kill a researcher making them? That doesn’t make any sense at all. HYDRA would have wanted to protect a researcher making super soldiers.
“That was the first time anyone in the press had ever looked at me twice,” the clown man says. “After that, though, I didn’t have a scrap of privacy. Everyone wanted to know my business.”
It frowns. First HYDRA employs a researcher to make the clown man—definitely something very secret—and then HYDRA sends an assassin to kill the researcher when the clown man was made. Plus something about mint. And then…
But even if two cells within HYDRA were competing against each other for who got to control the clown man, neither cell would have allowed the media-press-reporters to know anything about it. The clown man would have been a secret that the media-press-reporters weren’t allowed to look at once, let alone twice.
Maybe the clown man had breached containment after the assassination, too soon for either cell to have gained full control over, similar to how it breached containment many months ago and began killing them all. All the ones who had hurt it, all the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians it could get the hands on, and the talons, the fangs, the glittering knives that it loves so much.
“The USO tours, right?” the other asset asks. “With the girls on motorcycles and the song and dance routine.”
…Now it is even more confused than before. Girls on motorcycles? Songs and dances? What is a USO and what kind of touring does it do that girls get onto motorcycles and—
“And don’t forget socking fake-Hitler in the jaw, shaking hands, holding babies…” There is a short huffed of laughter, the kind that is fake laughter, where the laugher is not amused.
Babies, it knows about. Those are teeny-tiny people, like puppies, meant to be held, yes. And it has seen handshakes. And perhaps there is something to do with socks… The feet are just the hands of the legs, though they are unrelated to jaws and it does not know what a hitler is, let alone a fake one.
The clown man is speaking gibberish.
Maybe the clown man is becoming feverish or is otherwise terribly confused about the story that he is telling. He is talking about the ‘40s. That is a set of years that was a very long time ago. That is the time there was a bucky in the world, it thinks. It might not be remembering the time of the bucky well, but it thinks that is when the bucky was around. The ‘40s.
“And the scientists were all over me for days before the USO tours. Needed samples to try to recreate the serum.”
It thought that the researcher was assassinated. That is what started the whole story. Mint and the assassination of researchers.
It looks back at the little plants in their pots on the table before it. These make sense, the little plants. These are logical. They get the exact amount of water at the exact right times, on a schedule, and they get to nestle into the exact right kind of special dirt for succulents, and they get the exact right amount of sunlight, and the result is a row of healthy little plants that grow into ever so slightly bigger little plants.
There is no inter-cell rivalry involving assassinated researchers, mint, and cyanide teeth, followed by unsanctioned media-press-reporters gaining access to equally unsanctioned revenge attempts that end with cyanide teeth and girls on motorcycles with babies and socks.
Perhaps it will stick to the plants, where everything makes so much more sense.
Notes:
(Can you spot the Taskmaster reference?)
Chapter 54: Interlude, Survivors edition | Yeah, we’ll be counting stars
Notes:
Chapter title from “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic.
Thanks goes once again to my IRL friend, SCB, for providing an edit on our Concerned Citizen’s letter to the editor.
Chapter Text
Monesha
—Washington, D.C. | Monday 24 September 2012 | 7:00 p.m.—
Monesha pulls the flip phone out of her nightstand drawer and looks at it for a minute. She remembers when the mystery package arrived, and remembers thinking she was being stupid for maybe bringing a bomb into the house. But all it had in it was the phone, a charger, and a slip of paper saying, “Love, Ren.”
So she’d known it was Agent Romanoff’s phone, not a bomb that looked like a phone, and she’d stashed it somewhere safe. Later that night, after her roommates had gone to bed, she’d opened it to see if there was anything on the phone, and no, there hadn’t been. The phone had been totally blank, nothing but a lit up screen to indicate it had turned on.
The next morning, it had rung, before she left for work. She’d stared at it long enough to miss the call, but Agent Romanoff had called back right away. Keep it on your person, she’d said. Keep it charged. Call me if anything happens. Keep yourself off the news.
The conversation had done more to frighten her than to reassure her. She’d felt like she had entered some sort of spy movie, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for everything that entailed. The secrets, the shoot-outs, the car chases.
But the phone has been silent since then. No missed calls, no texts, not even a wrong number call or a butt dial.
She hasn’t been keeping it on her person when she’s in the house, though. She doesn’t want it to ring and for her roommates to wonder why she has a second phone.
Monesha turns the phone over in her hands, opens it up, considers dialing, and then closes it again. Nothing’s happened, really. Nothing that warrants calling Agent Romanoff and beginning the journey toward all those secret agents and villain masterminds.
But it’s becoming harder to avoid being on the news when the press knows where she works. So far, no one has come into the store to harass her while she’s on the clock, but she’s had to take her breaks in the back room instead of leaving to get some fresh air, and she’s had to leave the mall using a different entrance to avoid them knowing her exact shift.
And the calls. She’s stopped answering her regular phone, just because any number she doesn’t know turns out to be someone asking for a statement on her rescuer becoming an Avenger. It’s worse than the last time, honestly. Last time, after S.H.I.E.L.D. had gotten their information, she’d been left alone, like S.H.I.E.L.D. had chased them all away. Except for when Agent Romanoff and Agent Barton had come to talk to her.
Whatever they’d done to tell the press to back off, maybe they could do it again. Especially if they want her to stay off the news.
Her roommates ask her why she doesn’t just give a statement and get it over with, but what should her statement be when she knows so much of the truth? What statement is the best one for keeping Jigsaw safe now that so much of his secret is out there?
Her regular phone rings and she glances at the screen. Unknown number. Probably a reporter. She taps the ignore option.
And it’s that call that makes her decision for her. She can’t keep on getting calls day and night. She’s missing calls from friends and family because her phone is becoming something she hates to be near.
Monesha opens the flip phone and navigates to Recent Calls. She presses the only call in the list and waits.
Agent Romanoff picks up almost immediately, only after one ring.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“I’m just getting a lot of calls from reporters. And they’re trying to ambush me outside of work, and at home. Just to get statements and things, but it’s getting out of hand.”
Monesha feels like she’s whining, and when others probably have it worse than she does. She wishes she hadn’t called, after all.
“If you can get me the names of the news agencies harassing you, I can get them to stop,” Agent Romanoff says. “I’ll make a blanket request that you be left alone, but there’ll be some who keep asking, even after that. Let me know who they are, and I’ll escalate.”
Monesha doesn’t know what Agent Romanoff means by “escalate,” but she hopes it isn’t something that will get her more notoriety for being an Avenger’s pet, or whatever she might get called by someone reporting on how they aren’t allowed to come near her, instead of reporting on what she might have to say.
“And that’ll keep me off the news?”
“It should,” Agent Romanoff says with a smile in her voice. “If you do have to give a statement, keep it short and simple. You don’t know about all of this Avengers stuff, but the man saved your life and you’re grateful to him. That’s all.”
She can do that. But only if she has to.
“Are you…” Monesha starts. “Are you doing all of this for the others, too? Or just me?”
“So far, you’re the only survivor who’s made any effort to become more involved. And the only one who’s made a visit to the Tower,” Agent Romanoff says. “Speaking of that, if you do want to visit again, we’ll send a car to the station to collect you. Or if you feel safer getting picked up at your home, we can do that, too. It’ll be a longer drive, though.”
“Would that be a good idea?”
Agent Romanoff laughs. “No. For your safety, you shouldn’t be seen here. But people don’t always go with the good ideas, so if you have a bad idea, better to do it as safely as possible.”
“If that’s meant to reassure me, it’s really not working.” Why is it that she always feels less secure when discussing safety with Agent Romanoff? “But thanks for trying.”
“Always,” she replies. “Call if anything happens. And keep the phone on your person, even in the house. We might need to send you a warning someday.”
Yes, always a comfort to talk to Agent Romanoff.
“Okay,” Monesha says. She wants to ask how likely it is that there’ll be a need for a warning, but just in case the answer is “very likely,” she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to know. The flip phone is small. She’ll keep it in a pocket.
Just in case.
Michael
—Cleveland | Tuesday 25 September 2012 | 1:00 a.m.—
It’s just him and Jen minding the front tonight, with Thomas in the back, as usual. Their little crew has had the same hours since the summer. And they get along better than any crew Michael has worked the Burger Hut counters with before, so he really hopes they keep syncing up like this.
It’s his break, just a quick ten minutes, but there’s not a single customer in the restaurant, so he can kick back and actually take his break without getting asked to mop up a spill or fetch napkins or something. Instead, he can be on his phone in peace.
Jen prefers to read during her breaks, and Thomas doesn’t even leave the kitchen for his, but Michael wants to keep up with his friends and maybe some news.
And it looks like his friend Devon has posted some Avengers nonsense on his Twitter. It’s probably supposed to be a joke, but Micheal doesn’t quite get what’s funny about the Falcon having a dog with only one eye.
It dawns on him a few tweets down. Right. Falcons with their great eyesight. One-eyed dog with crappy eyesight. They even each other out. It’s still not funny.
Michael remembers seeing a one-eyed dog once. Big yellow dog, soaking wet in the rain and happy to be drenched. Occasionally shaking the water everywhere, and the maybe-homeless guy who bought some Hut Burgers and fries didn’t seem to mind. He’d been just as wet.
Actually… here’s another tweet about the Avengers having pets. Wondering if Falcon’s dog is some kind of enhanced dog and wears a cape on missions. This one has a picture of the dog, and…
Michael opens up the picture and zooms in to get a closer look at the dog. One eye missing, yellow, pretty good sized dog. Looking really healthy with a glossy coat and fully fleshed out frame. But there’s a red star on the collar, and that’s the same eye missing as the rain-dog was missing.
Is this the same dog? He can’t go back and look at the pictures he tried to take of the guy and his dog from earlier that year, because his phone glitched and the pictures didn’t actually take for some reason. But if he imagines the rain-dog getting better food more regularly, and dry instead of soaking wet… It could be the same dog.
But he knows the Falcon doesn’t own that dog. The maybe-homeless guy with laryngitis owns that dog.
The thoughts in his head fall off their shelves into a jumble, and it’s a couple moments of staring before he really processes what that means. Maybe-homeless guy with laryngitis was a serial killer when he came to their store and bought food with probably some victim’s money. But he loved that dog. Cared for that dog better than a lot of people care for their pets.
And now he’s Jigsaw, the Avenger with the metal arm and the red star on the bicep. Which matches the red star on the dog’s collar.
He’s met a serial killer and an Avenger. That’s neat. Of course, he has no proof. That’s a bummer.
His phone alarm goes off and Michael gets up to go back to the front counter.
“You remember that homeless guy and his dog that came here in the rain that one night shift a few months ago?” he asks.
Jen thinks for a moment. “Yellow dog, one eye? Guy didn’t say anything?”
“Yeah. That was Jigsaw. I think Falcon’s dog is actually Jigsaw’s dog. It’s gotta be the same one.”
“Holy shit. You met an Avenger!” Jen grins. “You fed an Avenger four Cheesy Bacon Hut Burgers with fries.”
She laughs. “Shame no one will believe you.”
Jenna
—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 25 September 2012 | 5:00 a.m.—
Jenna turns the page in her paper and scans the contents of the Letters to the Editor section. There’s usually something good in there, something a little gossipy but not too catty to share with her customers who want to chat with her. It’s always nice to have some piece of news she can talk about that might be interesting enough to make them remember the encounter positively.
Repeat customers aren’t always because of the pastries, after all.
The first letter catches her eye immediately.
A Serial Killer In Spandex?
A vicious serial killer could be my kid’s next role model. Not that the idiots at S.H.I.E.L.D. will admit to it.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that he already idolized a terrifying green monster, a Russian assassin, a sniper from Medieval Times, a mecha-wearing arms dealer, and an alien with a god complex. Now there’s a new hack job being ordered around by that science fair project with the patriotic frisbee.
Just because these clowns saved us from the Chitauri, they don’t get carte blanche to do whatever they want. Especially not when they decide to get chummy with a serial killer.
Not allegedly, either. I’ve got eyes. I know a red star on a metal arm when I see one. And there is only one. It’s attached to the man who slaughtered his way from coast to coast, murdering parents with their children sleeping in the next room and gutting his victims before ripping them apart. The same man who is now taking not-at-all-shady “road trips” with Clint Barton.
He’s an Avenger now, and everyone knows that the Avengers are heroes. Never mind that his very name conjures up images of a horror media franchise and that he is a literal Jigsaw Killer, reducing several of his victims to piles of pieces for forensics teams to reassemble into human beings.
S.H.I.E.L.D. calls his previous work experience “sensitive” and refuses to divulge any details, but we can put the pieces of that puzzle together for ourselves. The newest Avenger is no role model and no hero, no matter how you dress him up. May he choke on his standard-issue hero spandex and spare us.
— Concerned Citizen, Phoenix, Arizona
Ugh. This same old thing. She remembers the days when the car wash fairy was actively moving around the country. There was a fairly even split in the opinions, at least that she’d heard. Some thought he was a vigilante doing good in the world, just messily. Others thought he was a maniac who needed to be in prison or else death row.
It’s sad to see the old arguments cropping back up, and after they’ve learned more about him, too.
Jigsaw. The car wash fairy’s name is Jigsaw. He was experimented on by some bad guys in the government or military or something. If he got triggered partway through being rehabilitated, that’s not his fault. And he was only killing bad people, criminals, terrorists. He never hurt anyone else, not even a little.
For a vigilante, a “no mistakes” track record is pretty impressive. Why can’t everyone else see that the way she can?
At least her star-shaped red plum tarts are a hit. She’s sold out of them only a few hours after opening every day since she added them to the menu. That’s a sign, she thinks, that at least in D.C., they appreciate their homegrown vigilante-turned-Avenger.
She’s got a puzzle piece cookie with pretty icing designs now, and that also sells out pretty quickly. It has to be a sign.
Brandon
—Boise | Wednesday 26 September 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
He’s supposed to meet his parents for lunch in ninety minutes, but that gives him plenty of time to read the paper. He’s getting a late start today, having just gotten out of bed an hour ago. The sleeping aid really laid him out last night, and he doesn’t remember feeling this refreshed in a long, long time. Months.
Even before his encounter with the ninja, he was stressed out with his internship and couldn’t really relax. Now that he’s looking back on it with Dr Miller’s help, he can see that he had noticed things that weren’t right about what was going on, that the side of politics he’d been dropped in had been rife with corruption that was just that little bit worse than his fellow interns had been dealing with.
It’s obvious now that the extra layer of corruption was HYDRA, coating everything like a film. And it’s a wonder it didn’t coat him, too. But if it had, he figures the ninja would have killed him instead of dropping him on his butt.
His phone goes off again, buzzing quietly on the kitchen table. Brandon glances at it, doesn’t know the number, and lets it go to voicemail.
His voicemail inbox is currently full, and it’s full of reporters who want an inside scoop, who want to delve into his trauma and make him some kind of internet-famous victim—or an example of how the ninja was picky about his targets. Either way, Dr Miller had suggested he not engage the press. Work it out for yourself, Dr Miller had said, and then let others in on it.
Because if he gets his words all twisted around by a reporter wanting to make it sound like he said something, that’ll get in the way of him eventually speaking for himself and knowing what his own position actually is.
It would be nice if he knew his own position right now. Already. It’s been months. But it took him a while to find someone he could mostly trust to talk to, and to change his major and try to catch up with classes and extracurriculars that would help him. And he has his current job to focus on.
There were things going on. And now that things have settled a bit, they’ve actually unsettled where the ninja is concerned. At first, the ninja had been danger, unspeakable horror that plagued him waking and sleeping. He’d been a wreck, and it was all the ninja’s fault. But as he’s stabilized, the ninja has been… not so much losing some of that terror factor—the ninja is still a nightmarish figure in black and bloody leather—but gaining a sort of savior factor to balance it out.
A hero he can be truly afraid of. Someone who plucked him out of the HYDRA web and just happened to traumatize him while doing so. Like a dragon rescuing a princess from a knight, maybe, or in any case, the monster being the hero of the movie.
Antihero, he thinks is the term for it. A hero who isn’t heroic in nature but in deed. He could be wrong. It’s been a while since he took any Lit classes. But the term seems to fit. The ninja did heroic things (saving people) un-heroically (by tearing other people apart).
He shrugs the thought away and reads the rest of the paper, stopping when he sees any headlines related to the ninja, the Avengers, or puzzles. That’s the latest thing—any article about puzzles is actually about the ninja. Same with Avengers articles. It all points to the ninja.
And he’s supposed to take note of how he feels while reading anything about the ninja. Or watching anything. But he’s stopped watching the news by now. He has to form his own opinions.
Put the Puzzle Down: Why We Don’t Need All the Pieces
What we do know about the newest Avenger—assuming that he really was the Red Star Killer—is that the only people he killed were criminals and terrorists. If you ask me, it’s anyone who objects to killing fascists like HYDRA that we should be suspicious of.
When it comes to regular people, the man has only ever protected us, and now he has a chance to do that even more often, and maybe a bit less messily.
It’s important to remember that this man isn’t whoever he was before he was enhanced, and no one even knows who that was. Even if it was HYDRA that made him enhanced, he’s clearly a good man who doesn’t hold with their way of thinking, even without his memories.
That’s what matters.
I say leave Jigsaw alone. Let the man get his life back without all the media spotlights shining in his eyes.
— Elliott Watkins, St. Louis, Missouri
That’s the thing about the ninja, isn’t it? Brandon believes he’s enhanced, definitely. No one else could have ripped the whole window right out of the wall like that. But then there’s the question of who enhanced him? Whether he was a willing guinea pig for the research or someone they grabbed off the streets and shoved in a cage like a lab rat.
He kind of thinks it has to be the latter case, and it has to be HYDRA who did the research on him. Because why else would the ninja be so… dedicated… to hacking them all apart? To chase leads across a country and blow up banks and shoot up warehouses.
Because the ninja was definitely dedicated to the cause.
Brandon sighs and turns the page. How did he feel reading that letter to the editor? He should probably write it down, but he thinks he’ll remember. Confused, a little sympathetic, a little worried, curious. Maybe even doubtful, because “the man has only ever protected us” is a bit of a stretch when it comes to some of the survivors out there. Like himself. There was definitely some traumatizing going on alongside the protection.
Trauma with a side of protection? Or protection with a side of trauma? That’s his real question. Which weighs more in the end?
Valorie
—Washington, D.C. | Friday 28 September 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
Valorie opens up her Etsy inbox on her phone while contemplating the open refrigerator. Breakfast, obviously, but what? Eggs? Toast? Maybe make some pancakes? Ugh. She closes the door. Cereal, probably.
Sales are still up, she sees, but not as high as they had been for a while there. Reddit and the other forums she’s part of have resumed their low hum of activity, even with the news still going on about the newest Avenger and how little is known about him. Because the forums already know enough about him.
About Mr Red Star, or Jigsaw, whichever way people are thinking about him. She’s been thinking of him as Mr Red Star since he saved her, but she’s trying to change over to Jigsaw now, since that’s apparently his name. Maybe he could be Jigsaw Red Star in her mind and combine the two.
Most of the new posts are updated Spotify playlists, and the theorists are nowhere to be seen. Even that horrible BigDongJohn is being quiet after his fifteen minute rise to fame.
And there haven’t been any sightings to speak of. The only Avenger to leave Avengers Tower at all has been the Falcon, Sam Wilson. And that’s just to walk his dog. It would be something special if the topic of the day would come out and be seen.
Oh well. She doesn’t mind him being a silent recluse. He saved her life, and that’s what matters to her. He doesn’t have to also be a smooth-talker giving interviews left and right.
She’s given a few statements herself, but the reporters seem to be a bit turned off by her comparison of Jigsaw to an angel. She’s tried explaining that actual angels aren’t fluffy and cute, but mighty warriors, but that’s probably not going to sell any articles. People aren’t really into religion these days.
Hm. Maybe she’ll go to that little bakery with the Red Star tarts. It’s a way she can show her support while also getting a decent breakfast in. And the lady behind the counter is a supporter, so the conversation is always nice.
Chapter 55: The Good Guys | Lock him in uniform, book burning, blood letting
Notes:
Chapter title from “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M.
We're starting off with a leap of logic and some possibly inaccurate linguistics. Suspended belief is appreciated, haha!
Chapter Text
Skye
—Empty field near Kalispell | Monday 01 October 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
It’s taken her a while to get over Ward’s death, and she’s not sure she’s actually over it yet, but her abandonment issues are at least in the backseat while she works to pry open the data the team has and run some programs to put the pieces together in a variety of ways. A pattern will emerge. Someone knows something they don’t know they know, and she’s going to find out what that is.
HYDRA took another mentor from her—even if he’d been a poison the whole time—and she’s going to prove to herself and this team that she has what it takes to be a hacker for good, not just a liability.
She runs the program again. It’s late. She should be sleeping. They should all be sleeping, but everyone is on edge still from the last close call they had, a lead that went almost all the way before drying up in a firefight two towns over. They’d been so close. But there are a lot of likely places in Montana for this “operator” guy, Johnson, to be hiding out in, and the whole state is big on minding their own business and very much not so big on cooperating with The Man.
And she’s got to admit… she’s The Man, right now. Working with and for the people she started out trying to expose and overthrow. But it’s to get rid of people much worse than S.H.I.E.L.D., and she finds she doesn’t mind it so much.
Hmm. She looks at the data in its current arrangement. This guy sure had a thing for the late Soviet Union. Twelve trips to Siberia between 1983 and 1991. That’s almost two trips a year. What was this guy doing over there?
Skye digs into the trip details, lining a few of the trips up with Alexander Pierce’s trips to the area. No overlap, but Pierce also had a thing for Siberia in the early ‘80s. That’s at least worth checking out. Anything two HYDRA operators were interested in is something they should go investigate.
Her mind drifts a bit, landing, eventually, on the bright red star—a holdover from time with the Soviet branch of HYDRA?—on Barnes’s left bicep. Or on Jigsaw’s, she guesses with a bit more bitterness than she likes to feel.
If she knew her birth name, she’d be going by that, not a made up name that sounds made up. But he knows his birth name, and all his history is written out in the books, and he’s rejecting it for “Jigsaw.” She wishes she had half of the knowledge of her origins that he has. She’d settle for a third of it, a fourth. Just a sliver.
But aside from feeling like he’s wasting a whole lot of lived life and family connections, Skye comes back to the red star. It’s important to him. His serial killer name had featured it prominently. There’s not enough to go on, and the link feels tenuous in a lot of ways, but she has this feeling that Jigsaw and Siberia are linked up, with HYDRA forming the chain. Maybe he was kept there when he wasn’t being trotted around to murder on command.
Whatever it is feels like more than that, though. She’s close to something, circling it. What else does she know about him from Phil and the briefing Fury gave them before working with the Avengers in North Carolina? What does she know that she doesn’t know she knows?
One of his old codenames was the Winter Soldier. Just how many names does this guy have, and he abandons them all for “Jigsaw.” She shakes her head. Not important right now. Wait. Maybe it is important. The Winter Soldier. She’s sure that’s what the briefing said. Exactly what it said.
But that chunk of data in the briefing had left out the notes that Fitz dug out of the mainframes in the base in North Carolina. They’d been translated from the Cyrillic, but how accurately? They hadn’t had access to Stark’s JARVIS, or any native speakers, or even the ability to trust any S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel who might have been able to help.
So… The Winter Soldier, yes. The fist of HYDRA. But also, part of the Winter Soldier program. Not all of it, just part of it. There are mentions of a super soldier, an enhanced operative, the Winter Soldier. But doesn’t Russian leave out articles? What if the translation software got the noun cases wrong, and it’s not the Winter Soldier, but a Winter Soldier?
If she was going to turn a person into a killing machine to help her rule the world, she wouldn’t put all her eggs in one basket. She’d want more than just the one. Surely HYDRA would also want more than just the one. What if it took them a while, but at some point, they succeeded? What if there’s more in Siberia than an old base that used to house the Winter Soldier?
What if there’s a base in Siberia that currently houses some Winter Soldiers, plural?
Clint
—New York City | Monday 01 October 2012 | 4:00 a.m.—
He groans when the bedside lamp flashes on and off, on and off, and squints his eyes to block out some of the light. Door. That means someone’s at the door. Wilson doesn’t knock when he comes to get Lucky for morning walkies. He just comes in. Why would he knock this time?
The lamp continues its flashing, and Clint finally concedes that he is awake enough to respond to it. He opens his eyes, and the lamp stays on. Lucky is still at the foot of the bed, Alpine is curled up next to Lucky, and Jigsaw is propped up on an elbow looking at the lamp with a little frown.
That means… It isn’t someone at his door. Lucky would have gotten up for that. Jigsaw would have taken off, too.
Clint hoists himself into a sitting position and then reaches for his hearing aides. Something must be going on that’s worth hearing about. He checks his phone next. There’s a text from JARVIS. Something something, winter soldiers, Clint’s half-asleep brain picks out, something, meeting, something something, conference room.
They can’t meet at a normal time, like after breakfast? Maybe 10 AM, noon?
“There’s a meeting,” Clint mumbles to Jigsaw. “Something about you, I think. More of you?”
“You are asked to bring Jigsaw with you to the meeting, Agent Barton,” comes JARVIS’s voice. “The thought is that he might be amenable to such a thing after having gone on a mission with the team.”
Right. Clint rubs at his eyes, trying to wake himself up the rest of the way. For whatever reason, he was really out of it before that lamp started flashing. Must have been the wrong part of his sleep cycle or something. He feels like a zombie.
“You wanna come to a meeting, Jigs?” he asks. “JARVIS says they really want you there this time. Maybe it’ll be like the time you met Fury.”
Jigsaw studies him for a moment, and then gets his tablet from the other nightstand and fiddles with it until it shows the words WOLF PEN from that night some two weeks ago when he first spoke to them.
Right. Right. The picture. The Wolf Pen. Those other guys with him and Karpov. Wait. Winter Soldiers? Plural? Clint looks back at his text. Yeah. Plural. Does that mean… Oh, shit.
He’s plenty awake now.
Clint extracts himself from beneath Lucky and Alpine, careful not to kick either one, and hunts around his room for yesterday’s clothes. Just a t-shirt and some jeans, but better to be wearing something more than boxers when he leaves the room. Especially since there isn’t anyone at the door to be taught a lesson about waking people up in the middle of the night.
Jigsaw only moves to get out of bed once Clint is working on his socks and shoes, and Clint hopes that means he is coming to the meeting, that he’s debated it in his mind and decided to join them.
“You going to put on socks?” Clint asks. “Shoes?”
Jigsaw looks down at his feet and then back up at Clint. He shakes his head.
“The floor’s cold, Jigs. At least socks?”
Jigsaw gives him an unimpressed look and then slips around him and out of the room to—hopefully—go get some socks on. Because the floor out there is going to be cold, and Clint’s feet will feel cold just knowing that his roommate’s got bare feet out there.
Clint decides he will actually wait for a pot of coffee to brew before heading out. No one needs to learn about possibly as many as five enemy super soldiers without at least the comfort of caffeine to make it all okay for the moment.
And anyway, it’s not like he’ll be going back to bed after discussing this. Jigsaw will be up for the day, heading off to meet Yasmin for his morning session. And Wilson will take the dog out for a walk. Clint doesn’t have a good shot at sleep without either of the living hot-water-bottle sleep aids he’s grown accustomed to, not with this kind of bad news on his mind.
Jigsaw joins him in the kitchen while his coffee is brewing, opens up a little can of kitten food, and spoons it out into a dish before setting it on the table for Alpine. The kitten is able to get up to the table on her own by now, with the help of the chair cushion and her claws, and this keeps Lucky from getting into her food. Clint figures it’s a good setup for now. When Alpine is an actual cat, they’ll want to keep her off the table. How they’ll manage that, he doesn’t know.
After Alpine’s breakfast, it’s time for Lucky’s, a big can of stinky wet food set in his bowl and a refilled water dish. Jigsaw adds the customary dog biscuit treat on top of the wet food, and Lucky gets down to business while Alpine trots out from the bedroom to find her own breakfast.
Jigsaw looks satisfied with the setup and gets a large tub of peach yogurt out of the refrigerator to eat for his own pre-breakfast snack, right around the time Clint’s coffee is ready. It’s a part of the morning routine that Clint never really sees, because he’s almost always asleep while this happens. He generally only gets up when breakfast for people appears on the scene, or when Jigsaw comes to get him for breakfast in the kitchen.
It’s nice to actually be a part of the early morning kitchen goings-on, Clint thinks. Not that he’ll be repeating this unless he’s really unable to sleep. But it’s still nice to be in the midst of the early morning hustle and bustle. To see the clockwork feeding of critters before the feeding of Clint.
“Are you going to sit here and eat, or bring it to the conference room?” Clint asks, grabbing a mug from beside the sink that looks pretty clean and pouring the first cup of coffee into it to start cooling down a little.
Jigsaw holds up two fingers and grins. He taps the tablet beside him, the WOLF PEN on the screen, and signs “friend” five times, and then “search.”
Oof.
“Yeah,” Clint says. “We’re probably going to look for everyone in that picture. I mean, not you or Karpov. We know where you two are. The other five.”
Jigsaw nods happily and starts eating his yogurt.
Clint isn’t sure how to explain that the others in that picture of his will probably be hostiles—confused enemies at best and loyal HYDRA super soldiers at worst—since he seems so happy to get a chance to see them again.
It could be really unpleasant for him to find out what that picture really represents.
Oh well. At least there’s therapists aplenty in the Tower to handle that.
Nick
—Washington, D.C. | Monday 01 October 2012 | 4:30 a.m.—
Nick opts against doctoring his coffee, choosing instead to log in and join the conference call on his laptop. He can drink it black this morning, for the first cup of the day. He’ll get some creamer in the second cup, after the call.
Hill is already there in the upper right corner, looking about as cranky as he’s feeling. Coulson’s got his crew gathered along one edge of a table so they’re all visible on the screen, taking up the top portion of his screen. Most of the Avengers are assembled in a line at the bottom of the screen.
As he watches, Barton enters the room with his carafe of coffee and a mug of the same, followed—and this, Nick counts as somewhat miraculous—by Jigsaw clutching a quart sized tub of peach yogurt like it will keep him safe from the unknown.
They are so lucky that man is timid in uncertain situations instead of violent. That his instincts lie toward the defensive and not the offensive. Except where HYDRA is concerned, clearly. Jigsaw would be utterly intractable if he was more aggressive.
And these other potential super soldiers, if they exist, are bound to be more aggressive. Even loyal to the organization that enhanced them, if their luck runs sour. But if they were disillusioned with HYDRA, willing to be led into S.H.I.E.L.D., maybe by means of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s connection with Jigsaw…
There’s an opportunity there in the middle of the potential catastrophe. Nick holds onto that thought, wills himself to be open to the potential for good instead of just the potential for bad.
Nick watches as Jigsaw hesitantly sits between Barton and Stark, looking extremely uncomfortable but not actively frightened. That’s good. They’re making some progress. The man’s an official Avenger now, and it’s about time he got used to attending some of these meetings.
“Apologies for the early morning, sir,” Coulson says when everyone is as settled as they’re going to be. “This seemed like something that shouldn’t wait.”
Nick waves his concern aside. “We’re here. What’s this about more Winter Soldiers?”
Coulson’s newest pet project, Skye, explains to them that two of the three North American HYDRA operators—Johnson, the operator they’re chasing down, and Pierce, the operator Jigsaw killed some three months ago, back when Nick had counted him among his closest friends—had been making trips to Siberia more frequently than was coincidence in the later years of the Soviet Union.
That doesn’t seem to point to anything super soldier-related that he can see, even when she brings up, and Simmons elaborates on, the quirks of the Russian language. It’s nothing more than a clue that there’s a large HYDRA presence—or was—in Siberia in the ‘80s. But then Stark takes over the screen and brings up an old photograph.
“This,” Stark announces, “is the ‘wolf pen.’ Their words, not mine.”
The image is of a group of seven people, among them Jigsaw and a Soviet military man. Jigsaw and five of the others are wearing the same thing, some sleeveless jumpsuit in gray with zigzags all over the torso and legs. The military man is in uniform.
“That’s Karpov in the green,” Romanoff adds. “The others, as far as we can tell, are field support for Jigsaw, during the Winter Soldier program.”
Some of the field support team look like they’ve been in a fight, but no one looks concerned about that. Was that nothing more than a training exercise? Sparring gone personal? A mission that ended badly? No. Not that last one. Karpov doesn’t look disappointed. He looks proud. Stern, but proud.
“Are those…” Skye says softly. “…are those all super soldiers? Winter Soldiers?”
“They might be,” Romanoff says, her tone grim and her face—once Stark stops sharing the photograph—even grimmer. “I hope not. But I know better than to put much stock in hope.”
Coulson nods. “This could be a disaster, sir. We don’t know where in Siberia this could have been taken, if they’re still there, if they are enhanced or merely expertly trained…” He holds his hands out, palm up. “If they are enhanced, this could take precedence over Montana.”
Nick looks at Jigsaw again. He’s apparently finished with his yogurt, and is looking at something off screen with obvious fondness and nostalgia. Probably the screen in the Avengers’ conference room, where the photograph might still be on display.
“Jigsaw,” Nick says. “What can you tell us about this photograph? About the people in it? Where it was taken?”
Jigsaw looks back at the camera again and then blinks. He signs something, and Nick holds back a frown. How much easier would everything be if the man could just talk to them?
It’s Romanoff who ends up translating for them, either before Barton gets a chance or just because she’s got a better view from where she’s sitting. It takes her a while, in part because of the pauses in Jigsaw’s signing and the apparent search for words on his part.
“He says it was always, always cold there, inside and outside. That’s the handler from before, yes. Karpov. He killed Karpov in—” She stops. “No, my mistake. Karpov killed himself in Cleveland. Went away too soon? Left him alone again. But gave him the red star book, with the photograph inside. And tac gear. A mission to kill HYDRA.”
“Always cold does seem to fit with certain areas of Siberia,” Simmons says. “And Karpov is dressed for winter, even inside.”
“Karpov was HYDRA,” Rogers says to Jigsaw. “Why would he give you a mission to kill other HYDRA members?”
Jigsaw makes some more motions and then mimes something tall falling over.
“Karpov taught you to knock down buildings?” Rogers asks. “But—” He stops as Jigsaw waves his hands some more.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to learn some ASL if they’re going to go through this translation exercise every time they need something from Jigsaw. At least a lot of the Avengers team seems to have picked up enough to follow along.
“HYDRA was sick on the inside like a rotting building,” Barton says. “Karpov said to tear down the whole thing, slice out the sickness. He said good job. Jigsaw felt really good hearing the praise.”
Nick wonders just how deep Jigsaw’s affection for this old handler goes, if getting praise from him was considered a good thing even as he had set out to kill the man. But there must have been some level of Stockholm Syndrome in the early days, the Soviet days. Or why would there be fondness when Jigsaw looks at that photograph? Why would there be appreciation for praise from the old handler?
If his luck turns up good, maybe the other five—if they’re still alive—will feel the same way and be easily coaxed to follow in Jigsaw’s anti-HYDRA steps. If his luck is supremely bad, they might manage to draw Jigsaw back to their side.
“Were the other five enhanced?” Nick asks. “Were they super soldiers, like you? Or were they regular human assets?”
There’s only one movement this time, a short answer that is quickly translated by both Barton and Romanoff in unison: “He doesn’t know.”
How can he not know?
“Care to take a guess?” Nick asks.
Jigsaw just stares at him. After a minute of silence, he blinks.
So that’s the end of his usefulness when it comes to information about this photograph and the potential for additional super soldiers in Siberia.
“We’ll assume the worst case, then,” Nick says.
“Should we wrap up our Montana search and prepare for a Siberian autumn?”
Nick shakes his head. “No. Keep your team focused on Montana. We need to find and stop Project Insight.”
“We’ve got two super soldiers and a hulk,” Rogers says, “on top of a crack team of superheroes and an AI supercomputer. We can find this place in Siberia, and we stand a decent enough chance once we do find it.”
“I’ll get JARVIS on the search,” Stark says. “Sweep old surveillance of the areas most likely to remain semi-frozen all year long, get some LiDAR going to pick out any promising hints of subterranean structures, narrow our options, go from there. That place’ll need enough of an energy grid to support the electric chair and popsicle stand.”
Nick nods. Exactly what he wanted, and because he didn’t need to ask, they’ll do it with all the enthusiasm they have at their disposal instead of grudgingly. Perfect.
Now, if only their luck holds.
Chapter 56: Pepperoni | Got our sights set straight ahead (but ain’t sure what we’re after)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Flirtin’ with Disaster” by Molly Hatchet.
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Tuesday 02 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
“So who’s up for some fantastic robots in the gym this afternoon?” he asks around a bite of calzone. “We’re firmly in beta production, just need some badass normals to play around with them now. Particularly if we’re going up against five super soldiers someday soon.”
He’s seen some great success with the sparring bots when Capsicle has been up against them in the gym during break testing over the last two weeks. He’s got the self-healing function fully in place, so a pair of bots can keep Cap busy for the duration of a workout, without anyone else needing to risk getting pulverized by that shield of his.
Rogers battles one of the sparring bots while the other performs emergency self-maintenance, requesting the necessary pieces from the stockpile and replacing those parts that get too damaged to function. By the time the bot is ready to go again, Mr America’s smashed some pieces off the other one, and the bots trade positions. Smooth as butter.
Jigglesworth is a little trickier when going against the bots, in part because he keeps targeting the pieces that can’t self-heal, like he doesn’t understand that shutting the bot down for good is not the goal. And he needs more of them, for another thing, because he’s not really getting a workout in unless he’s dogpiled by bots.
Jigsaw’s still got a long way to go when it comes to the understanding of what it even means to spar. Tony was brilliant—of course he was—to come up with the bots in the first place because asking Jigsaw to spar against a person was the equivalent of asking him to beat the ever-loving shit out of that person without holding back even a tiny bit.
Rogers can take it and be alright in a few days. Thor would be fine with it, if he was on the planet at the time. The rest of them would be mush on a gym mat.
And that doesn’t bode well for them if they end up needing to battle it out against five Jigsaws in Siberia. And they need to all see Jigsaw’s fighting strategies in a safer location than in the middle of a mission, so they can adapt to them. Vice versa applies just as strongly. The Jigster needs to get an eyeful of what they’re actually capable of when not holding back. Because they won’t be able to hold back against five Winter Soldiers.
But after the hammer incident, it had taken so long to even get Spangles in the gym with Red October without the latter going for the rafters like a treed panther. Part of that was the whole “oh no, there are too many people in this room” triggering thing that happened a few months ago for the first team training session meetup. And part of that is that Jiggles was still certain that Rogers was mad at him about the hammer.
But apparently all it takes is a bowl of peaches and they’re back to being on pretty good terms again. Talking about food, eating food, playing board games. Even a few card games. Jigsaw is a quick learner with card games. It seems to make Rogers happy that he is—probably something about Bucky and playing cards.
The hammer incident isn’t forgotten by any means, though it’s still deemed an unfortunate workplace incident involving a suicide as far as anyone outside of the team is aware. Inside the team… Well, really it’s only Pepper who’s still leery of Jigsaw after that. He supposes that’ll happen when you see a man smash someone else’s face in with a hammer.
But the rest of them have accepted it as part of the no-kill learning curve, same as with the HYDRA mooks who got killed in the North Carolina base raid or its aftermath. Sometimes nonlethal means getting super-frozen and shattered like an ice sculpture. These things happen. Tony doesn’t mind. He’s ecstatic that some of those assholes died in the North Carolina mission and afterward.
It serves them right for working with HYDRA. In this day and age, everyone knows what HYDRA is and what it stands for. If you’re still a card-carrying member reporting for active duty in a HYDRA base, maybe you deserve to be flash frozen and busted up into pieces.
“I’m open this afternoon to spar with your bots, Tony,” Spangles says.
“You’re also not a badass normal,” Tony says. “Badass, yes, but the souped-up kind. I need someone like Carter, if she wasn’t with Agent Agent’s team right now. Or Wilson, but without the armor.”
“I’m game,” Wilson says. “But I’m wearing the Falcon armor for this. Don’t want to bust a fist on a robot if I can help it.”
Oh, and yeah, that’s a good idea. Forget sparring for the sake of sparring and team building. And forget break-testing the bots against the team as a whole. Why not just use the bots as a way to simulate going up against whoever they might find in Siberia?
“Actually, yes, let’s stress test these guys on a flying moving target,” Tony says. “Everyone in battle mode, and we’ll practice for mission two: electric boogaloo. Anyone else? Any takers?”
“I’ll watch,” Nit-Nat says. “But I’m not cleared for sparring yet. I just want to see these fancy robots you’ve been working on.”
“I might have a thing for you,” Tony says.
It’s not tested yet, so he doesn’t want to get her hopes up, but he’s got the prototype of a brace for her leg that might let her participate in the field. They’ll need everyone they can get if they’re going to face down five more Jigsaws.
“Just a prototype, but I’ll bring it.” Tony beams. “Have you strangling men with your thighs in no time.”
Tony looks at Bruce. He doesn’t expect Bruce to be interested, even just in watching. He’s seen Jigsaw do break-testing on a bot in the lab monitors, and he’s seen Capsicle go up against them, too. He’s even seen some bot-on-bot fighting. But maybe…
Bruce eventually sighs. “I can rearrange my day,” he says. “But I want armor if I’m sparring with robots.”
“We’re not getting the big guy?”
“You want badass normal, not Hulk smash. I’ll be with Natasha on strategy duty, and she can make sure Clint comes.”
“Sure, sure.” Tony already has ideas for that—Bartonio might need armor, too, against robots. “Just some basic protection so no one gets banged up from all the metal. Still working on squishy bots as a concept.”
Bruce nods and then pushes his plate away. “I’ll go get my meditation session in early, then,” he says. “I’ll be back soon for the sparring test.”
Tony grins. “This is going to be great.” He looks at the empty space where Barton and Jigsaw might someday join them for a full-team meal. “I wonder if we can sweet talk our cyborg friend into joining us.”
Wilson shrugs. “We haven’t tried putting that many people in the gym with him since well before the quinjet to North Carolina. It might be time to suggest it, though, and see how he reacts.”
“I’ll ask him if he’s interested,” Cap says. “Maybe he’ll surprise us.”
It would be a bit of a surprise if Jigsaw was interested. He’d been… distressed, is a good word for it. He’d been “distressed” the last time they all piled into the gym and invited him along for the ride.
But maybe they’re there now. After all, he did alright in the quinjet to North Carolina if you define “alright” as “hid under the seats,” and he was fine in the meeting yesterday with all those people on screens, and he’s been therapized for ages now.
Though a lot of that therapy seems to be about food and playing word games. Other than the speaking program he has yet to hear in use, he’s put in some serious work on the gamification apps on Jigsaw’s tablet over the last month and change, and so much of that has been… Well, he won’t say it hasn’t been working. He just doesn’t know the theory behind how it’s meant to work.
He gets a request to add some new foods to the electronic version of the man’s food books, and he sets it up. He gets a request to make the program generate even bigger word searches or to set up increasingly complicated crossword puzzle arrangements, and he goes to work. Hell, he’s asked to make a new level on that stupid matching game, and he does it.
None of the gamification translates directly into Jigglesworth talking to them, though, that he’s seen. What’s getting him talking—occasionally, and not that Tony has heard yet—is that AAC programming. He does know that Jigsaw chose Hunt for Red October as his ride or die voice, though. And that he’s been slowly customizing the grids and boards and things. Just hasn’t seen or heard it in action yet.
It’s been fun enough polishing up his programming skills for that kind of thing. Very different muscles to flex than the ones needed for his regular work. It’s been nice. A stretch. And it’s ensured that his tablet gets a lot of use.
Jigsaw hardly even brings his paper anywhere these days, at least that Tony has seen. He hauls the tablet around everywhere, though. Talk about a win.
From barely trusting it and finding it difficult to even look at the tablet for more than a few minutes at a time, all the way to lugging the tablet around the way he hauls his little white rat around. Though the kitten is a lot cuter than the tablet, and also ambulatory. So Jiggsy Malone doesn’t have to actually hold the kitten full time the way he does the tablet.
Hmm. Maybe he can find a way to make the tablet hands-free. Beyond adding a strap or just giving Jigsaw a backpack to wear with the tablet inside of it. If he was better with JARVIS, Tony could program something like a mobile holographic panel to follow Jigsaw around parts of the Tower, maybe something like a popup that he could summon with a gesture and then use like a hovering tablet interface.
Something to look into. It would work in one of the labs or in a conference room. Somewhere already set up to work holographically. He’d have to rewire the rest of the Tower to even get started.
And it’s a moot point, because JARVIS is still the one hill Jigsaw’s willing to die on when it comes to refusing to step into the future. Hell, the man pretends not to even hear JARVIS, and he’s gotta be pretending because no one is that good at blocking something out.
Tony hasn’t given much thought to the reason for the cold shoulder toward JARVIS beyond thinking that it’s got something to do with Zola the man-turned-computer. Or maybe the punishment for paying attention to screens extends to listening to the radio. Zoe had specifically requested music videos with images of the singers doing the singing, so that’s something.
It’s not high up on his list of interests, though. He’s got bigger fish to fry, like his sparring bots. And finding out what a nice Siberian October is like. He’s betting brisk. Bracing. Bitterly cold.
Pepper
—New York City | Tuesday 02 October 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
Interior decorating is something she enjoys, usually. Selecting the right touches to inspire the desired feelings in any given room. Picking out the artwork for the walls, ergonomically appropriate furnishings, color palettes that relax or energize as needed.
This latest round of it has been nerve-wracking, though.
The stretch of offices on this hallway is no different from on any other hallway. There’s no logical reason for her to be struggling to choose the right accents for the space, the right auxiliary lighting, the right document storage systems.
There is an illogical reason, though, and that is why she rubs at her eyes and pushes the catalog away. What she needs is a break from this, and possibly a distraction from even thinking about it.
Or maybe what she needs is to confront it head-on.
Because this is the stretch of offices she’d taken Steve and Jigsaw on a tour of, so long ago it seems like last year, where it’s only been a couple of months. This is the specific office, in fact, that had needed to be re-remodeled after construction. Carpet ripped out, carpet padding replaced, even the drywall scrapped and new sheetrock brought in.
There’d been blood on the ceiling tiles. How does blood get on the ceiling tiles?
They’ve cleaned up all of the evidence of Jigsaw’s work with the hammer. All of the evidence that Harrell was ever even in the room. And they’ve hidden what happened from everyone outside of the team and PR personnel. It should be over and done with, except for a few construction workers with lingering trauma over their coworker “committing suicide,” as the report had stated.
But it’s not over and done with because she needs to fill that office with a nice L-shaped desk and some filing cabinets, a chair for the desk and two chairs for visitors, some artwork, a nice floor lamp…
And she can’t do it. Because instead of seeing the office as it could be, all she can see is the office as it had been, painted with blood and chunks of Harrell’s brain and skull.
Steve, she knows, sometimes eats with Jigsaw, along with Clint, Natasha and Sam. They’ve all of them seen what Jigsaw is capable of while he was originally running around the country hacking people up. And they’ve seen what he’s capable of with a blunt instrument stolen from a toolbelt.
And they can sit down with him and eat food.
She doesn’t know how they do it.
But her therapist has suggested she confront her avoidance of him. Her therapist doesn’t know that he smashed in a man’s head with a hammer or slaughtered hundreds of people in a months-long murder spree. Her therapist isn’t cleared for that. But he does know that she’s had a workplace violence incident to get past, and that there is a man in the Tower she’s finding it incredibly difficult to be around after said workplace violence incident.
She’s explained that the incident was unintentional, which is an outright lie, as Jigsaw had clearly intended to kill any HYDRA personnel he encountered and had been studying everyone on the floor to see if they were the lucky victim.
And she’s explained that the incident involved a triggered veteran who had been a POW, which is the absolute truth, as Jigsaw had clearly been on a hair trigger for violence against any HYDRA operative he spotted and has lived through and fought in—and caused, in some cases—more wars than anyone alive. And he’s been a prisoner since the 40s. Of course he would lash out at a representative of his captors if given the opportunity.
She doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t dislike him. She doesn’t hold him responsible for his actions in a murder sense of the phrase. He was acting on instincts that had kept him alive in very difficult times, and he had acted to protect himself and the rest of them from harm in the form of an enemy in their midst.
So she doesn't blame or dislike him. She does fear him, though.
Pepper wishes she didn’t. She hadn’t had any fear of him before the hammer incident, even knowing what he’d been through and what he’d done. She’d had sympathy for him, and still does. She’d had hopes for his future, and still does. She’d had admiration for him surviving what he’s survived, and still does.
But now she has a fear of him, as well, and she can’t shake it.
The man has a very friendly dog and an adorable kitten—she’s seen pictures—and he’s taken excellent care of them both. He loves animals to the point of refusing to eat them, despite needing all of the calories and protein he can get as a super soldier. He has been doing exceptionally well in his therapy from what she’s gathered through Tony’s secondhand reporting.
There are many reasons to appreciate him and not fear him. To take his work with the hammer as a one-off, incidental to his personality instead of fundamental to it.
She’s been struggling to do that, though, and has been avoiding the common areas of the Tower that he frequents in her efforts to avoid the man himself. It isn’t fair to him to judge him for the hammer incident, and it isn’t fair to herself to restrict her movements out of unnecessary fear.
So she needs to confront her avoidance, according to her therapist, and spend time with him or around him. Demonstrate to herself that the hammer incident is just that—an incident. That it won’t be repeated, and that if it is repeated, it will only be in her defense.
The only thing she’s been able to think of that might put them in proximity for a good purpose and not require her to eat with him—something she can’t stomach the thought of with her mind so full of blood-slicked images of him—is gardening. She has neglected her gardening in her efforts to avoid being close to him, since he might be in her gardening room and she doesn’t know how to react if she goes in there and discovers him waiting for her.
But she can rely on Natasha to help smooth things over in gardening. At the very least, she can have Natasha in the room with them while they garden.
But Jigsaw only has the one plant, and while he’s doing well with it, she doesn’t see him accumulating a whole garden of them the way Natasha seems bent on doing.
Pepper pulls out a fresh sheet of paper and adds a bullet point: Gardening.
It’s not the right season for starting a rooftop garden, though she can see the team appreciating the concept and possibly even enjoying the practice of it when the season is right. In the future, perhaps… Or if they built a greenhouse on the roof.
She adds another bullet to the page and ponders for a moment. Seasons. It is not the season for starting a garden, but what is it the season for? Mid-October, so fall, harvest, Halloween. Maybe there can be a Halloween-themed social event, just for the team.
They aren’t in the habit of decorating the personal areas of the Tower for changing seasons or holidays. Even the public areas of the Tower, the research areas, the office areas, don’t see much decoration. But it is never too late to start a tradition.
She writes “Halloween party” on the page as her second bullet.
A costume contest might be interesting, but she doubts the team has the time or inclination to put in the necessary planning to make that a success, and the point of a party is to relax and have fun, not to stress about preparing for the party. It is the host’s job to stress and prepare.
She writes the idea down and then carefully crosses it out.
Bobbing for apples—no. Unsanitary, for one thing, and she knows Tony was waterboarded in Afghanistan. Clint was possibly waterboarded while being held captive and tortured before Jigsaw rescued him. Jigsaw himself was almost certainly waterboarded periodically for years. Even Steve might have problems with getting water in his face like that after the plane crash in the arctic.
Carving pumpkins—no. No carving. She does not want Jigsaw working with knives during the party. She doesn’t believe he would hurt anyone with them, and she does appreciate that he might enjoy using them, but she can’t want to see him with weapons during a party that is supposed to put her at ease around him.
Candy and themed snacks—yes. Jigsaw’s dietician might have a lot to contribute here. Ideas for types of foods he might enjoy, ways to introduce sweets that won’t lead to an upset stomach. Pepper doesn’t know how many sweets Jigsaw eats, or which ones, aside from a delicious cherry pie Steve and Sam made a while back.
Decorations—yes and no. Fall decorations, she decides will be suitable. Scarecrows, squash, jack o’lanterns. Possibly some colorful corn and other harvest decorations. No ghosts or goblins or witches. No vampires or zombies. Keep the decorations to things Jigsaw would have some knowledge of, some familiarity with. Nothing that might veer into horror or require too much explanation.
Pepper taps the end of her pen against her lower lip. What else would go into a successful Halloween party?
Decorating snacks—yes. A combination of decorations and snacks, so a good thing. They can frost cupcakes, or pipe icing onto cookies. Oh, or…
Pepper smiles. They could make haunted gingerbread houses.
She adds a parent-level bullet specifically for that. It’s brilliant. She knows Tony never had much of a childhood, and Natasha wouldn’t have, either. She can’t see Steve having had the resources to waste on crafts like gingerbread houses in the Great Depression. Clint… Clint is a toss-up. She doesn’t know for certain and would never ask, but he strikes her as having had an unhappy childhood.
Sam and Bruce might have experience decorating gingerbread houses or cookies during the holidays, but the activity will still be novel to them as it’s haunted for the theme of the party. And it doesn’t have to be completely novel to be enjoyable, anyway.
It will require concentration and maybe even teamwork to build haunted gingerbread houses. And there can be an element of friendly competition, which is what is missing from a Halloween party with no costume contest. And there will be plenty of room for creativity, which is something that all great team-building exercises make use of.
Yes. That is what they will do during the party.
Pepper knows just what to do, now. There will be supplies to acquire—especially enough high-quality gingerbread panels to allow for construction in such a large group. They won’t want to risk baking those themselves, lest something go wrong in the baking process and they are left with nothing to construct houses from.
And candies for decorating. Icing of various colors. Bowls so that everyone has their own supplies to work with and no one is left wanting. They’ll set up in one of the common rooms, perhaps. That will be a location everyone finds familiar, and they can group tables together and use dropcloths to protect the floor from any fallen building materials.
Beverages. A variety of them, for those who want or need a little social lubrication and for those who might be used to drinking only water. And snacks to eat while constructing their haunted houses. There’s nothing to say they can’t also decorate some cupcakes and cookies. It might be a nice small beginning project for someone who doesn’t feel up to making a precarious gingerbread house.
Pepper jots down ideas for foods they will want beyond snacks and treats. It will take time to build houses out of gingerbread panels, and even more time to decorate. Hours. And that will require more than mere snacks. There should be some sandwiches, a vegetable tray with hummus, maybe an edible arrangement of fruit. Bowls of nuts and pretzels. Chips and dips.
She smiles down at her paper, filled with all of her ideas and a sketch of how a common room can be rearranged for the party so that people can sit and chat on sofas, work at a group of tables on the decoration activities, or even just mingle—though she doesn’t know how much mingling a team this small would be inclined to do.
Yes. This is how she will confront her avoidance. How she will allow Jigsaw to re-form in her mind, transitioning from the image of a killer in blood-smeared glasses with arms red to the elbow back into a gentle, quiet man who needs more positive experiences in his life.
“JARVIS,” she murmurs. “Please find a time on everyone’s calendar for a four-hour block near the thirty-first.” That should give her time to converse with Caroline and get ideas about the foods and beverages to have on hand.
“Certainly, ma’am,” says the AI. “Shall I place orders for the necessary elements of your party as well?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
That gives her roughly three weeks, close to four. This will not be open to the public, and it does not require as much preparation as the silent fundraising auction had required. It won’t take as long to put together, and it shouldn’t be accompanied by any explosions.
This will be good.
Chapter 57: Assets | A little of that human touch
Notes:
Chapter title from “Human Touch” by Bruce Springsteen.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 02 October 2012 | 6:30 p.m.—
The gym is littered with the discarded pieces of sparring bots, all the bits that got damaged and jettisoned in favor of replacement pieces from the caches stationed around the sparring area.
Clint kicks at a bit of carapace and surveys the wreckage.
They didn’t do too bad, all told. Destroyed all of the bots, though it had taken hours and they’d had to work as a team to do it. No one got hurt, not even Clint himself—which is kind of surprising, even to him. Teamwork is supposed to be the name of the game, anyway, so it’s not like “oh no, we had to work together” is a problem.
Even Natasha had been able to contribute, wearing some kind of webwork brace on her left leg to keep her knee from getting strained as it continues to heal. It had looked cool, and more importantly, it had allowed her to kick robot ass. Clint can’t quite get past the relief that he’d seen in her eyes as she joined them.
Maybe Natasha had been more worried about being useful and regaining her mobility—which might be the same thing in her mind—than he’d realized. It makes sense that’s something she’d hide, and probably just as much from herself as from the rest of them.
One thing she hadn’t hidden, though, was her joy at being able to roundhouse a robot in its technologically advanced face. Because for some reason, Stark’s bots had faces even while not otherwise being humanoid beyond the number of limbs and generally upright stature. It had been creepy. Stark’s bots had been creepy-efficient in general, really, and Clint is glad Stark is on their side making bots for them to practice against, instead of on the side of anyone else making bots to take over the world with.
Every time they’d damaged part of a robot, that bot would retreat behind the rest of them and a replacement piece would come sailing in from some other part of the designated sparring ring, just like Stark’s Iron Man suit could sometimes come zipping over to him in pieces. Clint doesn’t know how they did it—creepy science is enough of an explanation for him—but they all did it constantly.
It was hard keeping track of which bot was which in the first place, but with the rate at which they repaired themselves, Clint isn’t even sure which bots were still mostly in their original condition by the end. So many parts flying all over the place, and bots working on other bots before rejoining the mock battle.
He kind of wishes Jigsaw had been able to see it. Hell. Kind of? He really wishes Jigsaw had been able to see it.
Clint thinks they did some very impressive work, if he says so himself, and not just as a bunch of individuals taking turns. They were a real team, combining attacks with each other, using Cap’s shield as a trampoline or Wilson’s wings as an airlift. He even got to use a few of his trick arrows.
It’s just a shame Jigsaw hadn’t been sitting by Banner off to the side, giving them thumbs up and grinning at their successes, maybe even joining them.
He could have seen them as a group in ideal lighting without the need to protect himself, could have seen that they work well together in a simulated battle situation, could have been working on getting over his fear of this many people in one enclosed space. Could even have been working on his nervousness around Banner.
But Cap had laid out the invitation clearly, had answered Jigsaw’s questions about who would be there, and had gotten his invitation turned down. While it would have been excellent for him to join them in the gym, Clint’s still pretty pleased that Jigsaw felt comfortable being uncomfortable enough to say no thanks. Better he bow out now than freak out later.
There’s always next time. And there’s always smaller groups of them that can work together against the bots, too. It doesn’t have to be the big group of them. Any one of them could spar one-on-two against the bots, allowing one bot to repair itself while the other bot keeps the sparring match going.
And they can go all-out against the bots. Jigsaw hasn’t seen them going all-out very often. Even during the raid in North Carolina, he’d been pretty focused on his own stuff and hadn’t been able to pay close attention to every one of them going all-out against HYDRA.
And they hadn’t even gone all-out in the base, really. Not when battling the enemy agents themselves. They’d been trying to keep people alive. Against the bots—and maybe enemy super soldiers—they can really let loose. Clint has some ideas for a few new bot-unfriendly trick arrows, in fact, though he wouldn’t want to use those new arrows against a flesh-and-blood opponent, no matter how enhanced.
He’s kind of wondering if he might be able to bring Kate down to the gym this Sunday instead of the range. Get her shooting at some targets that really move, unlike the mild movements of the targets in the range.
Not that he thinks she needs to be shooting human-shaped things for the practice before eventually shooting human-shaped humans or anything. Ideally, archery is going to be a purely theoretical pursuit for her, and not something she needs to use in combat. But skill is skill, and training a skill can’t be a bad thing, Clint figures.
“Think you’ll have these guys up and running again by Sunday?” he asks Stark. “Even just a couple of them? Asking for a friend.”
Stark looks up at him from the panel he’s working on. “You have a date with the Jigmeister?”
Clint shakes his head. “I mean, I bet he’ll want to come, but I’m thinking of letting Katie-Kate get some target practice in. Mix it with some obstacle course work, nice moving target to go with her being a moving archer, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, I like it.” Stark taps the panel with a screwdriver. “Think it’s safe enough?”
Clint kind of can’t believe those words came out of Stark’s mouth. Stark is not exactly the king of thinking about negative consequences to his actions, after all, not that Clint has room to talk.
“I guess?” Clint asks. “She isn’t going to put an eye out or anything.”
Stark laughs. “I mean, is your little protege likely to take the idea to some arms manufacturer and spill my high-tech beans all over the face of modern warfare as we know it.”
“Oh.” Clint blinks. “No, she’s cool. She’s not going to sell your bots to the government or anything.”
“I’ll hold you to it, Bartonio. I got out of that racket, and I’m not getting back in.”
“Understood,” Clint says. “You only make super cool weapons for personal use.”
Stark holds out a fist, and Clint obligingly bumps it with his own.
“So I’m thinking maybe three bots for Sunday?” Stark asks. “Gives you a bot to demonstrate on, a bot for her to learn on, and a replacement bot for Cupid Jr to shoot at once she gets the hang of things and blows up her first one.”
Clint nods. “Sounds good to me. Can’t wait.”
“You want them in purple?”
“Oh, I can have some purple bots? Really?”
“Really, really.”
Clint grins. This is gonna be so good. He can’t wait until Sunday.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Tuesday 02 October 2012 | 7:00 p.m.—
The other asset returns form the team training exercise without a limp or any other indicator that horrible things have been done during the team training exercise. The other asset is full of smiles and is talking about bringing the auction woman to meet the hamburger technician’s sparring bots.
It still checks the other asset over for injuries, very carefully and all over. The other asset smells like exertion and skill, but not like blood or— Or anything else. The other asset does not seem to have been punished harshly or pushed into, or even beaten.
It had been asked if it wanted to come to the training room to observe the team training exercise, and it had asked the clown man all of the questions it had, had brought up all of the concerns it had.
And the clown man had assured it that it was okay for it to stay in the rooms for assets with the dog and the little cat. With Lucky and with Alpine. There was no danger to watch out for, no need to come and protect the other asset or stand up for the other asset or drive the other operatives away from the other asset.
It had believed the clown man about this—had believed there was no danger—and that belief has been proven now, has been rewarded by a happy other asset full of descriptions of what the team training exercise had been like.
“Maybe next time, it can just be a few of us,” the other asset is saying as it inspects the other asset’s arms where there are scratches but not self-defense marks. “Maybe just three of us or something. And you can watch without so many people in the gym.”
The other asset goes to the long table by the door, where the leash is curled up in the bowl and where there are now several “wand toys,” sticks on which there are strings and little bits attached to the end of the strings. The other asset picks up the little cat’s favorite wand toy, a stick and string combination that has a little blue and white bird shape on the end, with curly ribbon intestines coming out of the end of the bird.
The other asset gives the toy a swish an the little cat launches itself off of the sofa and runs after the bird shape.
It smiles. The little cat is so coordinated now, compared to before. The little cat even manages to catch the toys sometimes and pull and claw at them. Vicious.
“And I’m taking Katie-Kate down there this Sunday, if you want to come,” the other asset says again.
It had not responded the first time the other asset said this. It had been focused on the way the other asset walked, to be sure the other asset had not been pushed into.
Now, it nods. It will come to the training room with them instead of the range. It will watch the auction woman shoot arrows at the sparring bots instead of the targets. It has only been able to come to the auction meetings sometimes, and it wants to go all of the times.
“Stark’s going to make them purple,” the other asset says, voice excited and full of smiles. “The sparring bots.”
It likes the bots that are red. But the other asset will be very happy with purple sparring bots. It smiles and gives the other asset an encouraging nod as the other asset drags the little blue and white bird shape along the carpet for the little cat to chase.
“You do anything interesting up here while we were training?”
The smile on the face turns into a grin, pulls at the lips until the cheeks almost hurt. It made and ate a snack, all by itself. It did not wait for the other asset to return before it made the snack. It felt the hunger cue, and it acted on the hunger cue—no earning anything, just acting—and it even filled out the worksheet the feeder had given it during the session last week, the “mindfulness” worksheet.
It pulls the tablet over closer and taps it to wake it up. It taps the little picture of a piece of paper with an apple on it and looks at the worksheet it had filled out.
What meal or snack is it eating? What food is it eating? Is this what it wants to be eating? How much food is it eating? How hungry is it? What does the food taste like? What is the food’s texture? What is the food’s temperature? What does the food smell like? What is it thinking about while eating the food? What is it doing while eating the food? Is it leaving any of the food behind? How hungry is it now that it has eaten the food?
So many questions to answer. It took a long time to eat the snack—twelve little cubes of cheese, a small pile of crunchy crackers, a cluster of purple grapes, a palm full of tiny fingerling carrots, and a long fluffy-tipped rib of celery—while filling out the worksheet.
It had to think about so many things while eating, had to describe all of the foods, and focus on each one individually. And it had to fend off the little cat as it ate, because the little cat wanted to eat the cheese cubes and the grapes. The cheese cubes are on the treat list for the little cat and the dog. They are allowable, one cube only, and not often. But the grapes are not on the treat list. They are on the poison list for the little cat and the dog. No grapes, ever, or the little creatures under its care could get sick.
“Whoa,” says the other asset, sitting down on the sofa to the left of it, so close that there is contact between their knees.
“That’s a lot information. Did you type all of that in?”
It blinks. There is no one else who could have typed it in. All of the information was in this asset’s head and there was only one way to put it into the worksheet. It nods, though, feeling proud of the work it did.
“That’s awesome, Jigs.” The other asset jerks the wand toy away from the little cat at the last second, leaving the little cat pouncing on nothing and looking confused.
Yes. That is awesome. It closes the worksheet and pulls up the word search instead. The one it is working on now has small letters that are mostly curved shapes instead of large letters that are mostly straight lines. Lowercase, the—Zoe—had called them. Not uppercase, but lowercase.
It is supposed to be thinking of both of the experts by their names now, Yasmin and Zoe, and also the researcher with the curly hair. Bruce.
There are so many names in the list of words to be found in this word search puzzle. All of the names for the team that is not a cell. And for all of the experts and for the feeder. And this asset’s name, and the names of the little cat and the dog. Even the name of the fish-looking soft thing—Cuddles McFin.
It does not like all of these names, but it has found the other asset’s names. Hawkeye. Clint. Barton. It has found the ballerina woman’s names, too. Black Widow. Natasha. Romanoff. And Lucky and Bruce. It has not found Banner yet, or Hulk. Hulk is the name of the big green monster that it saw once before, when it had just escaped the researcher’s room and the giant green monster came to yell that it was like a little creature to be shared with.
Everyone says that the researcher is the green monster, but it knows better. The researcher is not green, is not that big, does not yell. The researcher does not get mad but the big green monster had only been mad, and not at it.
“That’s coming along,” the other asset says, reaching over to trace the highlighted letters of “Clint” in the grid of lowercase letters. “Lowercase is weird. Haven’t seen one of these with lowercase before.”
It lifts the left hand to loosely grasp the other asset’s right hand over the tablet. It prefers to hold the other asset’s hands with the flesh hand, but this will do. The metal hand can feel all of the same things as the flesh hand, and more, and the other asset does not mind the metal hand.
But the fingers on the flesh hand can fit more naturally between the fingers of the other asset’s flesh hands. It does not have to worry about the unyielding metal pressing into the other asset’s skin and leaving marks. It does not want to leave marks in the other asset’s skin. Not… not that way. Not any way.
The other asset lets the little cat catch the blue and white bird shape finally, but only because the other asset is paying too much attention to the metal hand and not enough attention to the little cat.
The little cat drags the wand toy away under the coffee table and begins trying to disembowel the blue and white bird shape with teeth and claws. That is alright. The little cat is a vicious predator, and not broken the way the dog is. The little cat knows violence and embraces it with all of the claws on its little paws.
“You want to watch something to the TV?” the other asset asks, running flesh fingertips along the grooves in this asset’s metal hand. The other asset’s voice is as soft as the fingertips, not urgent at all, just curious, with no purpose or goal in mind that it can tell.
It nods. It can watch the glowing panel, but it does not want to play a game or for the other asset to be playing a game. Playing a game means that there will have to be hands holding a controller, and it wants all of the hands to hold other hands instead. Like they are doing.
Hands holding other hands, fingertips tracing the details of other fingertips. This is nice. They do this sometimes, the two assets that are the same as each other, taking turns to see which asset’s fingers will do the tracing and which asset’s fingers will be traced.
Right now, it is the other asset’s turn to trace and its turn to be traced. It closes the word search on the tablet and pushes the button to send the tablet to bed. Sleeping. The tablet can sleep and wake up.
The other asset leans away from it to reach for the stick with the buttons on it that controls the glowing panel and begins pressing buttons with a thumb. The glowing panel comes to life, and the other asset moves through all of the little boxes in the glowing panel that show things that can take up the entire glowing panel once they are selected.
“Cake Off?” the other asset asks. “This week it looks like they’re making cars out of cake.”
It can watch them make cars out of cake. It will be focused more on the feeling of the other asset’s fingertips on the metal hand, though. The warmth and vibration of the movements, the occasional light scrape of a fingernail in a groove that sends a shiver up the spine even though it is not cold at all.
“Or whatever this thing is with a bunch of puppies,” the other asset says, when the selection square is over a picture of a basket of little dogs. “That looks cute. Cake or puppies, Jigsaw? Your call.”
It looks between the square with the cake and the square with the basket of little dogs. Cake or little dogs in a basket.
“We can watch one and then the other, too.”
It signs “cake” with the flesh hand. It does not know how they will make cake into a car, but it knows what little dogs look like already, even if it has not seen a little dog in life before. It has seen little dogs in the glowing panel, though. They can watch the little dogs in the basket later.
“Cake Off, it is,” says the other asset while pushing the button.
When the glowing panel changes to show the remaining people behind their tables, the other asset puts the stick with all of the buttons on it to the side and reaches over with a second hand to hold onto the metal hand with. Now there are two hands caressing the metal hand and it smiles.
The other asset’s leg is warm against its own leg, pressed against it from thigh to knee. The other asset’s shoulder is pressed against this asset’s shoulder, too, and all the way down to the elbow. It is so close to the other asset and the other asset is so close to it.
The smile gets even bigger on the skin face, and it tips the head over to the side to rest it against the other asset’s head. Now they are even closer. Now it is almost like in the other asset’s nesting room, when the other asset is snug inside of the nest and it curls up on top to keep the other asset’s sleep safe from horrible nighttime images of the alien that hurt and controlled the other asset, or of the tracksuit men who captured and hurt the other asset.
It breathes in deeply and lets the breath out as silent as ever, snuggles up closer, making itself shorter so that the skin face can rest on the other asset’s shoulder.
“You okay?”
It nods, the cheek rubbing against the other asset’s t-shirt. It is not as good as nuzzling the skin face against the other asset’s skin like it can sometimes do at night in the other asset’s nesting room. But it is very, very good.
Chapter 58: Clint | Hold my hand (want you to hold my hand)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Hold My Hands” by Hootie and the Blowfish.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate that. And also happy birthday to me! I'm posting a midweek chapter as a gift to myself, even though I'm swamped at work. ^_^ Enjoy!
Chapter Text
—New York City | Tuesday 02 October 2012 | 7:45 p.m.—
These absolute crazy bastard geniuses are not just making a sheet cake and then cutting it up to look like a car. They are making over a dozen cakes apiece, stacking them with buttercream and ganache and whatever else, and then carving them into a massive car. They’re making rice krispie wheels as big around as dinner plates. They’re painting stenciled license plates for their cakes.
One contestant has an occupant for his car, also made out of cake.
These people are crazy in the best way. These people are being asked to go big or go home and they’re straight up bringing their homes with themselves they’re going so big.
He risks a glance over at Jigsaw, who hasn’t shifted on the sofa once after Alpine crawled into his lap. Clint tries not to move too much as he cranes his neck. He doesn’t want to dislodge his roommate’s cheek or anything.
Jigsaw isn’t asleep, but he looks like he’s getting close. His eyes are half closed, his right hand is still where it rests along Alpine’s back, and his left hand is unmoving in both of Clint’s hands.
The clock on the video game console under the TV says that Jigsaw won’t have time to fall asleep before it’s time to go get dinner leftovers with Natasha. But it’s a close thing. He’s definitely relaxed enough to fall asleep.
Clint takes it as a kind of success.
Jigsaw’s normal setting is “highly alert” and even his more laid back settings tend to be easily flipped into high alert the moment something changes in his surroundings or someone says a word like “fun” that means something different to him than to the rest of them.
So instead of being miffed that they’re going to have to watch this episode of Cake Off again for Jigsaw to appreciate all the car cakes, Clint’s feeling pretty good about things. He’s managed to get his roommate from moderately anxious about his wellbeing when Clint first got back from team training, all the way to legitimately relaxed with his head on Clint’s shoulder.
Clint did that. It’s kind of stupid, but he feels very accomplished.
And he kind of wants to wait on dinner, too. Jigsaw apparently ate a huge snack already, so he can eat a bit later. They can reheat things. But if they don’t go eat soon, Jigsaw will be late for his 9 PM session with Zoe.
Clint wouldn’t mind that. It isn’t that he thinks their sessions together are boring or a pointless waste of time. They’re doing some good, he knows. But surely they can skip a few of them. Jigsaw has been going to these sessions like it’s the end of the world if he misses one. All of the sessions. Early in the morning, late in the evening, and in between.
Surely he can play hooky one time. Even after the Harrell thing with the hammer, he went to that session with Yasmin late instead of fucking off entirely. The one day he skipped his afternoon and evening sessions was when they had a mission to go on as a whole team. He didn’t even get a break after that.
Clint would riot if it were him in those sessions.
But it’s not his place to sabotage Jigsaw’s recovery, and for all he knows perfect attendance is part of the process. What if he encourages Jigsaw to skip a session and then he starts skipping sessions all the time? What if his therapists get mad at him, or quit?
Jigsaw takes a deeper breath than the rest of his breathing and moves his right hand along Alpine’s back once or twice.
“You about ready for dinner?” Clint asks, taking that shift as a sign that Jigsaw’s perking back up after his not-quite nap.
He kind of expects his roommate to snap to attention at that question—he does that most of the time when food’s mentioned—but Jigsaw just nods against his shoulder and carefully splays his metal fingers in Clint’s hands like he’s afraid of hurting Clint with the motion but still needs to stretch.
And maybe the metal fingers do need to stretch. He’s seen Jigsaw move the metal arm like he’s winding up for a pitch sometimes, rotating it around at high speed. Not often, but a few times. Clint doesn’t ask questions. At first that was because he suspected Jigsaw didn’t have the means to answer and he didn’t want to frustrate him. Now it’s just that some things are too normal to ask about.
Clint is a little disappointed when Jigsaw sits back upright from his sideways slouch against him. But he’s not at all disappointed about his roommate’s metal hand, which stays resting in his own hands after the stretched fingers.
He runs a fingernail lightly along the length of Jigsaw’s index finger, the grooves catching slightly as he does so. It doesn’t seem to bother his roommate when he does this, and it makes a very faint clicking sound like fiddling with a zipper might. And it’s just kind of fun to do.
“I think it’s lasagna tonight,” Clint says. “Two kinds. A real lasagna and one without any meat in it.”
Actually, he thinks, there’s probably three kinds of lasagna. A normal one with meat and noodles, a meatless one with noodles, and a meatless one with eggplant or zucchini instead of noodles. Two lasagnas that are lacking in meaty goodness, but only one of them is an actual abomination.
Jigsaw will probably eat the abomination first while Clint eats the real food, and then they’ll split the lasagna that’s just all cheese in all the layers. Natasha will… Clint narrows his eyes in thought. Probably, Natasha will diplomatically have some of all three.
And maybe Cap and Wilson will stick around to join them even after they finished eating the main team meal. They’ve been working on getting dinners with Jigsaw more populated over time.
Clint’s phone buzzes against his hip and he reluctantly withdraws his left hand to dig the phone out of his pocket. Natasha’s left him a text that’s just a pile of spaghetti on a plate. There’s probably not a lasagna emoji.
“That’s Natasha,” Clint says. “Food’s in the kitchen.”
Jigsaw gives his hand a light squeeze and then scoops Alpine up and stands. So smooth. Clint needs a few false starts before he makes it up off the sofa, and that’s his own fault for heading straight up here after sparring with the bots and not doing any cool down stretching. He feels like such an old man sometimes.
“So have you given any thought to which tree you like best for Alpine?” Natasha asks as she serves herself a second slice of lasagna—this time the cheesy noodle one.
Jigsaw nods enthusiastically and signs “all” with a smile.
Clint runs his fork along his plate to scrape up the last of his meat sauce. Does he want a piece of the extra cheesy lasagna next or another meat sauce lasagna slice? Decisions, decisions. But it’s an easier decision than the cat tree decision. He goes for the meat lasagna.
“I don’t know that Alpine needs all of the cat trees, Jigsaw.” Natasha smiles. “Maybe two, though. One for the front room and one for your bedroom.”
Jigsaw holds up three fingers and points to Clint, signs “nest,” and nods.
“Oh, I get one in my bedroom, too?” Clint asks around a bite of garlic bread. “Okay.”
There’s room for it, anyway. He can shove a cat tree in a corner. No harm done. Just as long as it isn’t one of the trees with obnoxious hanging things on it that jingle. He may be deaf enough to not hear the jingling during a normal night but he doesn’t need to have a shock in the night if he accidentally sleeps with his hearing aids in and does happen to hear it.
Jigsaw has seen pictures of fifteen different cat tree designs, forwarded to his tablet by Cap and Wilson, the pet fairy godfathers who are constantly bringing new toys to them and exposing Jigsaw to the wide world of spoiling your pets rotten.
Some of the cat trees have little cat condos, they’re called, boxes with holes in them for a cat to hide and play in. Some of them have ledges and platforms for a cat to lounge on. Some of them have little basketlike hammocks hanging to one side or tunnels at the bottom. Some are taller and others shorter. Some have ropes hanging down from the middle, or jingle bell balls, or mice. Some don’t have any dangly bits at all.
And they all have sisal cord wrapping some of the upright pillars and carpet wrapping others. Apparently sisal is good for clawing on. They’ve got a scratching post in every room of their suite, and Alpine uses them all the time, thankfully instead of the sofa or chairs or anything else.
Anyway, the pictures of cat trees had been a very exciting thing to find on the tablet earlier that morning after the first session with Yasmin. And Clint is glad that none of these carpeted, sisal-wrapped jungle gyms had shown up at the door unannounced. They look huge and awkward, and he likes that his roommate is getting to choose, to some extent, what goes into the space.
Jigsaw scoops out some lasagna with a layer of slimy vegetable noodle substitute and plops it onto his plate before sticking the spoon back in the dish and drawing his tablet closer. A few minutes and several bites of vegetable lasagna later, he has his favorite five cat trees pulled up on the screen, each marked with a little star in the corner to keep them apart from the losers in the contest.
Thankfully, none of them have any dangling bits.
They’re all really tall, though. Taller than he is, if Clint remembers correctly. And Clint’s pretty tall. He wonders how they’ll get the kitten down off the top of one of the taller ones if neither of them can reach the top of the cat tree.
Well, maybe that’s what treats are for. Maybe they can lure her down with a shaken bag of treats.
So far, Jigsaw has been keeping treats for really special occasions where Alpine is concerned. Clint doesn’t get the reasoning behind it, since he still seems eager to give Lucky treats, but the kitten only gets treats while learning to do things.
And boy has that kitten been learning to do things. She can sit using the same signal that Lucky uses. She’s good at shaking paws, though only for one shake before she withdraws her paw and demands her treat. She can high five without even needing a treat anymore to tempt her. She puts her nose up against an extended fingertip almost every time.
The latest reason for giving Alpine a treat has to do with the harness. Alpine doesn’t like her harness yet, but Jigsaw is persistent and will probably prevail with enough time and practice.
Clint isn’t sure the kitten needs to learn how to wear a harness, but it had been an idea floated by Wilson, and Jigsaw had lit up on hearing it. If Alpine can wear a harness, they can attach a leash to the harness, and then they can take the cat for walks in the park.
It’s ridiculous, but Jigsaw likes the idea of Alpine rolling around on the grass out in the park, so who is Clint to judge? It’s not like Alpine is his kitten. She’s Jigsaw’s. And as long as she’s on a harness and leash, she can’t get lost outside.
“That’s a good selection of cat trees,” Natasha says after a while. “You might need to narrow it down a bit, though.”
Jigsaw looks at her with a frown of concentration and then points to one of the sleeker cat trees—with wood paneling, even—and then at Natasha herself. He adds “plant” to the communication attempt and then moves the window with the cat trees to the side and sketches out the floorplan of her living room with its growing wall of plants against the window.
Natasha blinks. “You want to put a cat tree in my front room?”
Jigsaw smiles at her and signs that Alpine might visit her.
“I…” Natasha trails off. “That’s sweet of you, Jigsaw, but I think I’ll come visit Alpine and not the other way around.”
Clint nods. “She’d need to get a litter box and a scratching post and some toys, too,” he says, “and she doesn’t even have a cat.”
“Right,” Natasha says. “I can still come over and enjoy spending time with Alpine in your rooms.”
Jigsaw looks from Clint to Natasha and then shrugs, accepting the verdict without complaint.
He goes back to the window with the cat trees in it, and taps to remove the star from the cat tree with the wood paneling. So much for the fancy cat tree that looks more like modern art than a cat tree.
Clint can just see Pepper sighing that the one visually attractive option has been removed. All the rest of the cat trees are kind of ugly in a carpet-covered monstrosity sort of way. And they’re all kind of beige. Very boring.
“Did you hear about Pepper’s party idea?” Natasha asks after a while.
“We’re having a party?” Clint asks. “Whose birthday is it?”
Natasha shakes her head. “No, it’s a Halloween party. She just sent out the invites before dinner. No idea what it entails, but it’s for the whole team.”
“And not the public?” Clint asks. “We didn’t have a great time at the last event that was open to the public.” The auction had been a nightmare through and through. He can skip the next one of those.
“Not the public. The auction wasn’t a party, though, anyway. It was a work event. Those aren’t supposed to be…” She looks at Jigsaw and pauses. “…enjoyable.”
Natasha studies Jigsaw, who appears to be ignoring the party conversation in favor of looking at two of the cat trees close up side by side.
“It’s not for a few weeks, anyway,” Natasha adds. “And she specifically said in the invite that if we have to reschedule because of a mission, that’s alright.”
Jigsaw looks up at that and asks about the mission. When it is, where they are going, which of their many enemies they will be dispatching.
Clint is tempted to say Siberia, and to let the conversation roll around to the way those five others in the wolf pen are probably not friendlies in need of rescue, but hostiles in need of being put down. He’s got Natasha here to back him up, after all. But he keeps to the party topic instead. They’ll cover Siberia once Stark’s found the base.
“Not a mission, a party,” Clint says. “For all of us on the team. To, uh—” Not to have fun, he thinks. Can’t phrase it that way. “To spend time together and get to know each other better. There’ll probably be lots of food to eat, too. Maybe some games to play that aren’t fun.”
He really wishes Jigsaw would accept the actual definition of “fun” and stop balking at the word when everyone else used it. Months of therapy and he’s still afraid of fun.
Jigsaw asks if he’s coming to the party, if he’s part of the team for this.
“Yeah, you’re part of the team,” Clint says. “And not just on missions. All the time.”
Except maybe not all the time.
He doesn’t have to deal with the public the way the team sometimes does—if any of the rest of them were in the spotlight like he’d been after the footage leak, they’d have needed some kind of press conference. And he doesn’t get covered in the news or anything anymore, after the flurry of excitement was replaced by the next big thing. Or not much, anyway.
Jigsaw doesn’t have to go to all of the team meetings with Fury on the conference screen. Or not often, anyway. He’ll be in therapy for a lot of those and only really available for the ad hoc meetings like the one Monday morning. And he doesn’t have to go to any team training drills or the like. At all. They’re still working their way up to that.
He just gets to go on missions and hack up HYDRA goons, and sometimes go to parties. He gets to use the team’s equipment and spend time with the team in small groups. So he’s part of the team but not officially. That’s close enough. Or he’s officially on the team in a parttime capacity. Something.
Anyway, he gets the thought that maybe Pepper’s looking to get the team together as a whole team, specifically including Jigsaw. After avoiding him for as long as she has, maybe she’s taking a different direction. That would be nice.
Clint wonders if the therapy crew is included in the team for the purposes of this party. He kind of hopes not. It isn’t that he doesn’t like them—they’re okay—but therapists can’t turn it off sometimes, and he doesn’t want to get analyzed over a plate of cookies or whatever. Doesn’t want to have to watch what he does or says to avoid being benched.
Whenever they had S.H.I.E.L.D. events, the therapists would try to get the scoop on people outside the psych eval, see if people were really doing okay or if they were “struggling” with anything. Clint hated it. He can do without.
He hasn’t had a psych eval in ages, and it’s been very nice not having anyone try to get inside his brain. Especially since he’d probably fail a psych eval if he had to do one. Sure, he’s sleeping a bit better, now that Jigsaw spends most nights curled up in his bed. But the fact that he has a former assassin curled up beside him in bed as a kind of talisman against nightmares probably wouldn’t look good on an evaluation.
He’s still not sure he’d be allowed to date Jigsaw if things were still going by S.H.I.E.L.D. standards. It wasn’t ever a problem for agents to date each other; not in and of itself. But try as he might, he can’t entirely get past the thought that he’s somehow taking advantage of his roommate.
But the therapists don’t mind. He’s thinking Yasmin, at least, is kind of pleased by the development. At least, she has made a whole section of his scrapbooking therapy revolve around recounting how he and Jigsaw are spending time together, what they’re doing, when, how Jigsaw feels about it, all that good stuff.
Jigsaw’s shown him the pages. Lots of walks in the park, lots of playing with the kitten, lots of heading to the range. Lots and lots of pictures of Clint in that scrapbook, and lots of smiley face stamps and purple ribbons pasted to the pages, too.
There’s a bunch of other stuff in there, too, of course. It’s not always Clint o’clock in scrapbook land. But he has a lot of pages dedicated to him, and he’s been featured a lot in the “find things that make you happy today” homework assignments.
It’s really weird being the thing that makes someone else happy this consistently. Clint just really hopes he doesn’t fuck it up somehow.
Chapter 59: Assets | And drowns her at its ease (drowns her at its ease)
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Drowning Man” by The Cure.
We’ve had our fluff, two whole chapters of it, and now we have a content warning. Well, recovery isn’t linear. Content warning in end notes if you are interested in those. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 03 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
It is feeling content this morning when it arrives for the morning session with Yasmin. There is only a faint sense of irritation that the dog is still being walked by the flying man and cannot join it here in the therapy room, and the irritation does not get in the way of the content part.
This morning’s morning snack was a juicy fresh peach and a mug of cottage cheese from the little refrigerator in the room for assets. It still remembers the sweetness of the juice that dripped down the fingers, and the soft fuzz of the peach’s outsides. And the cottage cheese, so filling.
And quiet! It did not run even a small risk of waking the other asset while it ate the morning snack. The other asset slept on, with the little cat tucked in under the other asset’s chin and the fish-looking soft thing nearby to be squeezed if there is a horrible night image while it is away.
It does still miss the other asset’s nest, so soft and warm. And the other asset’s arm, wrapped around the middle of the torso. And the other asset’s soft breath warm against the neck. It did not want to slip out of the other asset’s arms when it was time to greet the flying man. It enjoyed being the little spoon. The other asset was right—it is very nice to be the little spoon.
“Good morning, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says as it closes the door behind it. “How are you feeling this morning?”
It smiles and signs that it is happy and content, and she smiles back at it, happy that it is feeling happy.
“That’s wonderful.”
Sometimes, she asks it to elaborate on how it is feeling at the beginning of their sessions together. Sometimes she does not. This morning, she does not.
“I’m feeling anticipatory,” Yasmin says. “We have a new project to work on today that I think you will enjoy.”
It looks at the stack of glossy-paged magazines on the coffee table. The project must involve them somehow. It wonders how.
It has turned the pages of magazines before. The ballerina woman had shared one of the red-haired woman’s gardening magazines, full of pictures of flowers and trees and grasses. Pretty pots and gardens. Seeds in little envelopes. Tools for digging around in the special dirt for plants.
And the other asset gets a magazine full of pictures of fish. It does not understand why the other asset receives this magazine, but it is in the mail the other asset brings in regularly, and the fish inside of it are pretty, except when they are impaled through the cheek with barbed hooks. It knows all about what that is like. That is not pretty.
What are these magazines filled with? There is a picture of a woman on the front of the topmost magazine. She is wearing something that is not practical, and she does not look real. There are no wrinkles anywhere, and her hair is too smooth. She is strangely misshapen, too, but in a way it cannot identify exactly.
It sits on the sofa in the usual spot, the legs pulled up and the body tucked into the corner. The binder and the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages go on the sofa next to it. Now everything is ready for it to learn about the magazines and the project that it will probably enjoy.
The expert puts a folder on top of the magazines but does not gesture for it to take the folder.
“Today we’re going to make two collages,” she says. “One will represent your time with HYDRA, in captivity, and the other your time free from HYDRA—your freedom.”
…that does not sound like a project it will enjoy. The second one, maybe. But it does not like to thinking about the before times. It does not know what a collage is, though. Maybe it will be enjoyable after all.
“Here is a collage I made about a trip to see a butterfly garden.”
Yasmin opens the folder and shows it a sheet of paper that is covered with pictures, all of them glossy like the insides of a magazine, but overlapping each other and crowding each other. It is like a scrap book page, but it is also not like a scrap book page.
“Each of the pictures stands for some element of my trip,” she continues. “These are some of the butterflies I saw. Here are the overripe fruits on pedestals for the butterflies to eat.”
Butterflies eat fruit? It does not know how they do that, because they do not have mouths that are very big, and most fruits are bigger than the entire butterfly. But the expert is still explaining the collage, so it puts aside butterflies and fruit for another time.
“Here are some of the plants that were around, all the flowers. Here’s a car we drove to the garden in. Here’s a smiling mouth, because we were happy and laughing.”
The smiling mouth is weird, not attached to a face at all, but just the lips curved up and some very white teeth showing in between them.
“Do you see how it would work?”
It mimes looking through the camera and making a photograph of something and cutting the photograph up, and then points to the collage. Did she make pictures of all of these things on the trip and turn them into glossy paper to chapstick onto the page?
Yasmin smiles and shakes her head. “These aren’t photographs I took, like in a scrapbook. I cut all of these pictures out of a magazine.”
So they are not the real butterflies, or the real fruit, or the real plants, or the real car, or the real lips. It is a fake scrap book page.
It signs “scrap book” and “lie.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a lying scrapbook, Jigsaw.” Yasmin smiles again. “It’s a representation of things that remind me of an event. If I wanted to capture the feeling of summer, I could choose some swimsuits, a pool, ice cream, maybe a beach. They all remind me of summer. They represent specific things I do during the summer.”
It… thinks it understands. A collage page about the feeder with the braids would have a notebook and a yellow-fuzz-ball. A sandwich and some fruit. An aluminum club. All things that remind it of her.
It draws these things in a jumble and then points to the magazines. It will do this, but with magazine pictures.
“Yes,” she says with a nod and a smile. “I have here a stack of magazines for you to look through, Jigsaw. These are where you’ll find the pictures to use of things that remind you of something, or that represent something.”
She places her hand on top of the magazines. “There are a lot of different kinds of magazines here, and all magazines have ads in them that have nothing to do with the rest of the magazine. Some of the images in these magazines might be upsetting to you, and some of them might make you feel very happy.”
It looks at the magazine stack under her hand. The magazines could be full of little traps, and it will not know which pages are traps until it sees them. This is going to be a difficult project.
“Most of them will be somewhat neutral,” Yasmin continues. “But we still don’t know all of your triggers. Even a picture we think is safe could remind you of something traumatic that makes you feel bad like you’re reliving the traumatic event.”
It nods. Those are the horrible night images that happen when it is still awake. Not often, but sometimes.
“So remember, you’re going to make two collages. For one of them, I want you to cut out pictures from the magazines that represent or remind you of some element or event during your time trapped by HYDRA. For the other one, you’ll be cutting out pictures that represent or remind you of some element of your time away from HYDRA.”
It nods again. It understands the mission.
“One of your collages will focus on your captivity,” the expert says. “The other one will focus on your freedom. Sometimes there will be overlap, and that’s okay. Just decide which collage to put the picture in, and we can talk about it later.”
She hands it the first magazine. It turns the pages slowly, looking at the pictures on them. This magazine is filled with pictures of people who are not real, just like the woman on the front of the magazine. And food. There are pictures of food, and hair, and makeup like it has seen in the ballerina woman’s bathroom and some of the other bathrooms it has been in during missions.
It is nearly at the end of the magazine when Yasmin speaks again.
“We won’t have time to go through these and select all of the images for your collages this morning during our session. Do you feel like you can do this for your homework, and bring your collages with you to our afternoon session?”
It nods. It can look at pictures in the room for assets.
“I would like for you to have someone you trust sit with you while you do this. Possibly Clint,” Yasmin says. “When we have our afternoon session, I’ll ask you about some of the pictures in your collages and what they represent.”
It can do that. The other asset can play video games or watch the show with all the researchers on it. Hospital of Passion. The other asset likes that show a lot just like it likes the cake show.
“Alright. I’ll see you at 3:00, and if you don’t finish, that’s alright. We’ll keep working on your collages until you do.”
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 03 October 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
So today it’s more arts and crafts in therapy land. Not that he minds that. Or has any say in it. He doesn’t have a say in anything where Jigsaw’s therapy is concerned, and that’s probably the way it ought to be. He doesn’t get what the therapeutic value of hacking apart magazines is, after all. Just that it’s better than listening to Rick Astley on repeat.
Jigsaw really does like that song, for some reason.
He doesn’t seem to be having as much fun with the magazines, though. He has three main piles spread out on the table in the common room, where there’s more space to work. One pile is for collage A, one is for collage B, and one pile seems to just be things he likes. Clint isn’t sure.
Then there are the tattered magazines off to one side and the whole ones off to the other.
At first, Clint was pretty sure that one collage was supposed to be bad stuff and the other one good stuff. But then what he thought was the bad stuff pile got a bright red smile and a pretty swimming pool, and the good stuff pile got a doctor. He knows Jigsaw doesn’t have any good associations with doctors.
He doesn’t know all of the things in the piles, though. There might be something else in one of them that is the defining clue that he just missed seeing Jigsaw cut out. Clint’s been trying to keep Natasha from cheating at The Game of Life, and he’s missed a lot of cutouts.
“I still don’t know why an artist with no college degree is getting that for a salary,” he grouses. He’s spun up a doctor, for crying out and he’s only making 30k. This game sucks.
Natasha laughs and adds a pink person to her car. She’s up to four people now. Herself, her wife, and two little girls. Clint’s alone still, which is for the best because he’s also broke. It’s just not fair.
Maybe that’s why it’s called The Game of Life. Because life’s not fair.
Jigsaw holds up a magazine to show them a perfume ad where a couple is kissing on the beach, the guy a chiseled masterpiece, the lady practically Venus in a skimpy two piece.
He asks what it is.
Clint shrugs. “It’s an ad, just like the food stuff and the lipstick one, trying to get people to buy stuff. This one’s for perfume. Which stinks.”
And doesn’t make sense for a beach, anyway. People don’t go to the beach to smell like flowers. They go to the beach to smell like sea salt and sun tan lotion. Any perfume would just wash off, anyway.
Jigsaw shakes his head and circles the couple’s faces with a finger, then asks again.
Oh. Great.
Natasha gives him a sly little look from across the table, her smile catlike and teasing. But she doesn’t help him out.
“They’re, uh, kissing. That’s all.” Clint shrugs. He hopes there won’t be a follow-up question about why they’re kissing. He doesn’t feel qualified to really explain that. Not well, anyway. Not without ruining what he and Jigsaw are building together.
Because he’d love to kiss Jigsaw. He daydreams about it, sometimes. He likes the different levels of smile his roommate has, from the barely there smiles that are mostly in his eyes to the wide grins that show off his teeth, and everything in between. Jigsaw has a great mouth, great lips, very kissable lips. They look soft. Clint wants to find out just how soft they are.
But he knows better. He does. And he can be patient. He can. He just has to keep reminding himself that Jigsaw doesn’t remember all the experiences he had as Bucky, that he’s brand new in the world of dating or relationships, that almost anything could trigger some horrible memory for him.
And to his immense relief, Jigsaw signs “doctor show” and points to Clint with raised eyebrows, asking, maybe, if this is like what they do on Hospital of Passion. Jigsaw hardly ever looks at the tv when Clint’s watching his soap opera, so Clint isn’t sure when he saw them kissing on the show. But he nods.
“Yeah, like the kissing on Hospital of Passion,” he says.
“You’re still watching that?” Natasha asks incredulously.
“It’s really interesting, ‘Tasha! Suspenseful. You never know what’s going to happen next.”
“That’s because they make up the plot on a weekly basis and don’t have any through lines.”
Clint scoffs. “Not true. Dr Santiago has been courting Senora Perez for years now.”
Natasha rolls her eyes at him. Then she looks over at Jigsaw and smiles. “That long? Is he even trying?”
Clint follows her look, glancing over and seeing that his roommate is not paying attention to the conversation the way he usually does by following the speaking role back and forth like a tennis match. He’s just looking at Clint.
Specifically, he’s looking at Clint’s mouth with a thoughtful expression.
He feels his cheeks get a bit warm, and can just hear Natasha’s mental cackling. Because she’s definitely cackling inside.
“Is, uh, is there a little flap on the magazine page where you can lift up the flap and smell the perfume?” he asks.
Jigsaw blinks and then nods, holding out the magazine for him to sniff.
Crisis averted. Clint accepts the magazine.
Huh. Maybe the ad isn’t totally stupid. It smells like coconut and shea butter. Glorified suntan lotion, just without the actual protection for your skin.
“Cool,” he says, handing it back. “Thanks.”
“Paging Dr Barton. It’s your turn, Dr Barton,” Natasha says with a bright laugh.
Great. Another turn. He’ll probably lose his house in a flood this turn, the rate his luck is going.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 03 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
It has not finished the project by the time it must hand the collages to Yasmin. It has cut out pictures—a lot of pictures, more than enough to cover up both of the papers that will become collages. And it has begun to chapstick some of the pictures onto the papers. But it has so many to choose from, and it could not decide beyond a few which to use for sure.
But Yasmin had said it was alright if it did not finish. That they would keep working until it did. So it has brought along the magazines and the envelopes of cut-out pictures and all the tools to put the pictures onto the paper. And to cut out even more pictures if it needs to fill in any spaces.
“It looks like you’ve done a lot of work on this, Jigsaw. Thank you for spending so much time on your homework.”
She looks at the partially filled up captivity collage, and it cannot tell what she might be thinking.
It has only managed to put what the ballerina woman called a swimming pool despite it not being deep enough to swim in at the bottom of the page and a set of wide stairs with people sitting on them at the top of the page, looking down. And a pair of lips that are the exact shade of red that the feeder with the red mouth had before it cut her into tiny pieces and fed her to the little creatures in her garden.
It did work on the homework for a long time in the room with all the tables and the sofas. While the other asset and the ballerina woman had played a board game that is not fun and talked about the show the other asset likes to watch.
There is still so much empty space in the captivity collage, though, despite all the work it did. And the other collage is even emptier. It could not find as many things that were different from each other to put into the collage. There were a lot of the same kind of image, and it is not sure that is what it should be doing, putting more than one green park or multiple yellow dogs or yellow-fuzz-balls.
“This is a really good beginning,” Yasmin says as she looks over the freedom collage, even though there is only one green park on the paper so far.
“I’d like to know more about the swimming pool this afternoon, Jigsaw. There are lots of types of experiences that can be had at or in swimming pools, and also a lot of things a swimming pool can represent or stand in for.”
She sets the captivity collage on the coffee table between them so that they can both see the three pictures it has chapsticked onto the page.
“Is this picture reminding you of an actual incident with a swimming pool,” she asks, “or is it more symbolic? Standing for another body of water, maybe a lake or the ocean. A bathtub.”
So many things.
Swimming pools that it has bathed in after it stole will from the operator were all smooth, slick, with tile. Like the corner in the prep room with all the tiles along the walls and the chains for holding it in place and for hitting it with. So that the water from the hose could scour the body to make it fresh and appealing for the agents, after a mission or between rounds of bad rewards or before putting it back into the tube where it is so, so cold.
But it put this picture of a swimming pool in the collage because it is a shallow swimming pool, like a very big bathtub, but rectangular. It remembered the rough planes of the sunken concrete box that it would be held down in to clean out the lungs. Water and chemicals in, a hose to empty the lungs, and then air pushed down the throat to open the lungs back up. Again and again, until the lungs were clean.
It does not know how the lungs had gotten dirty, just that they did get dirty sometimes.
It has chapsticked the swimming pool into the collage because the swimming pool reminded it of the concrete box, especially with the coiled hose hanging on the peg nearby in the picture. A bathtub would have been a better picture, but it has not found one yet in the magazines.
But how to draw the connection between the swimming pool and the concrete box for the expert to understand? She wants to understand it, and to help it understand itself and others.
It draws a line that goes horizontally across the page of the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages, and then a rectangle underneath it, up against the line. Like a little upside down hat. Inside the box, it draws a figure, and puts the star on the figure’s left arm. This is the asset inside of the box.
Then it switches to the light blue pen and adds little waves to the box. Filled with water and this asset deep inside.
Back to the black pen it started with. There is the asset again, this asset, on the hands and knees, with the hose to suck out the water. It adds water at the end of the hose, in blue, even though there should be a machine at the other end that sucks the water up and out of the lungs. It writes DRY THE LUNGS over the hose.
Then… what color should air be? Air is not a color at all. It frowns. Maybe red? There was always blood involved when the lungs were cleaned. The lungs were not as strong as the rest of the body, not after a few washes in the concrete box. It remembers the blood so metallic and slick on the lips.
It draws another figure, this one stretched out on the ground beside the concrete box. And the hose pushing air into the lungs, red. With an arrow. Into the lungs. It adds a blue arrow to the other hose. Out of the lungs. Water and chemicals out. Air in.
It shows the expert without the words.
She is quiet for a minute, looking at the pictures, one after the other on the page, and the colors and arrows. Then: “Did they drown you in a swimming pool, Jigsaw?”
It nods the head. That is almost right. It is close. It was not a swimming pool, but it was like a swimming pool. It writes WASH THE LUNGS over the series of drawings.
“Were there chemicals in the air that you had inhaled?” Yasmin asks, her voice so soft. “An injury that needed to be healed?”
It blinks and then shakes the head. No. It writes DIRTY on the page, the fingers shaking with the effort to make the letters it does not want to think about. Dirty, dirty, dirty.
“They told you your lungs were dirty, and needed to be washed and dried.”
Yes. It draws a circle with arrows. Over and over again. A loop. Wash, empty, dry, wash, empty, dry.
She takes a breath and lets it out. “Do you remember how HYDRA lied to you about what ‘fun’ meant?”
It is still not sure about the definition of fun, and whether the enjoyment is always supposed to include assets, or if people can have fun that does not include assets enjoying things that are happening. It believes that the team that is not a cell and the support team are telling the truth. It does. But fun still feels like a dangerous thing, a thing that will hurt and hurt and hurt.
It nods, though. It knows that fun is not what HYDRA said it was, even if it still feels like a dangerous thing.
The expert nods as well. “This was a lie, too. Remember that HYDRA told you so many lies, that they were always lying to you. About who was innocent and who was guilty, about your targets needing to die, about the things they did to you and whether you deserved them.”
But if there was no need to wash the lungs, then why waste the time and the materials to do that? It knows that the drownings were sometimes for punishment, and that the support personnel who cleaned it would sometimes drag it over to put the head down in the water to teach it a lesson—because order comes from pain, after all—but the support team had much better things to do with their time than measuring out the chemicals and setting up the machinery.
It signs “why,” and then points to the picture of the concrete box. Why do any of that?
“Did it hurt?” the expert asks. “When they drowned you, and vacuumed your lungs, and filled them with air again. Did that hurt?”
It nods. Everything about it hurt. And was frightening. The frigid sting of the alkaline water rushing through the nose and mouth, burning the eyes, no matter how long it tried to hold the breath, no matter how tightly it squeezed the eyelids closed. The darkness closing in around it. The feeling that maybe it will not come back this time, and then the agony of the inevitable return, the fire in the lungs and all over the skin, the thick hardness of the hose in the throat, just like—
Just—
The same as—
—as when—
It is petting the dog, sliding the fingers deep into the fur at the dog’s neck, feeling the warmth and the silky softness around the fingers of the hands. It looks down into the dog’s eye, the rich brown deep and flecked with bits of lighter brown around the edge of the iris.
“Jigsaw?” Yasmin asks.
It looks up at her. They are in the therapy room. Of course they are. She is the expert without the words, and this is where they meet.
“You were agreeing that the whole process had hurt.”
It nods. It does not remember doing that, or what the process is that she is telling it about, but that does sound right. Most of the processes it is familiar with from the time before are painful.
It looks down again, sees the notebook with the stars at the top of the pages next to it on the sofa cushion. Sees the pictures it has drawn, the words. Dirty. Yes. Washing the lungs was very painful.
“And you had asked, before that, why HYDRA would do that to you when it was not necessary.” She pauses, and leans forward, and speaks so gently, so sadly, but with such conviction. “They did it to hurt you, Jigsaw. They did it just to hurt you. That is all the reason they needed.”
To cause pain. Yes. Order comes through pain. That makes sense.
That. That makes sense.
Notes:
Content Warning: There is description and discussion of Jigsaw being drowned by HYDRA personnel in the last section of this chapter. If you don’t want to read that, you can skip Jigsaw’s second POV section.
Chapter 60: Tower | A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Notes:
Chapter title from “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M.
Guys, there are significant content warnings on this chapter. If you feel you might need those, check out the end notes. The last chapter had content warnings, but not this significant. Please be safe.
Also, there's a new outtakes story that happens after the prior chapter and before this one, featuring Tony and Jigsaw with a hint of Bruce. It's here.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 04 October 2012 | 7:15 a.m.—
“So, Jigsaw.” Yasmin smiles when it looks up at her from the collage project it is working on. “How did your evening go last night? Anything interesting or exciting?”
It chapsticks the current picture—a flower that does not look like the ones the woman in white had on her coffee table, but that does look bright and puffy and orange, and like it might smell very strongly—into place and then moves the freedom collage to the side so that none of the residual chapstick will get on the tablet.
It does not know many signs for things in the night sky. Just stars and moons and planets. And it only remembers the sign for stars. But the AAC program has pictures of things like balls of fire flying through the sky, and lots of different planets with names, and things about “outer space,” which is not the same as the kind of space that is in a room or the kind of space that is left on a page.
It takes a while, but it is getting better and better at navigating the boards, and can find words to use more quickly than before. The pictures help. And the keyboard tile can help it to make new words that it cannot find.
“Hold hands and watch cake show,” it says with the tap of a finger. “Make spaceships cake and tiny creatures for inside around spaceships cake.”
Yasmin probably already knows all about spaceships, since she is an expert. But it had learned so much about them from the other asset and from Zoe last night, and it wants to share what it has learned.
“Like quinjet,” it continues with more taps of the fingers, “to go past the moon into stars. Jupiter Saturn Mars Venus. Not Pluto.” It shakes the head to emphasize that Pluto does not count. It does not know the story behind Pluto, but it is a planet that is not a planet, a planet that the other asset says should still be a planet, but that the expert with the signs says got demoted for being too small.
It does not believe that something should get demoted for being too small. A small planet cannot help being small. But it is an unfair thing that happened, the demotion, and an expert has said so.
Some of the cake displays on the cake show had featured round cakes that were planets, and one had a “comet,” which is the fireball with the tail going through the space-sky.
“Also cake comet and not Loki not Thor alien. Big eyes green person.”
Yasmin looks appropriately impressed. That is good. The cakes were really, really impressive last night and it can tell from looking at Yasmin that it has conveyed the message accurately, described the cakes in all their glory, with all of the aliens and planets and spaceships, the stars and comets.
“Did Zoe help you make a board on your tablet for outer space?” Yasmin asks.
She did. It had made a board but had not had anything but stars and moon and alien to put on it. Now it has planets and so much more. It is very interested in all of the things in the night sky. There is so much there to see that it cannot see here—there is too much light from the city and the things are so far away that it needs a special machine to see them, a long tube on a three-legged chair-thing that they do not have here. Telescope, the word under the picture says.
But it can look at pictures of the outer space, the space-sky, and all of the things inside of it.
“It seems like you have a new interest,” Yasmin says. She smiles big and happy and warm. “Maybe we can make a scrapbook page about outer space sometime.”
It nods. That would be a very good addition to the collection it is making.
“In the meantime, let’s talk about holding hands.”
It smiles, feels the lips part it smiles so wide. Holding the other asset’s hand feels so good. Warm and soft, when the flesh hand can squish into the other asset’s hand, and rough where the other asset’s hand has the calluses, and smooth just above the palm where the other asset’s hand becomes a wrist and then an arm.
It loves to hold the other asset’s hand, and for the other asset to hold its own hand. Especially the metal one. The other asset’s touches are so light and gentle, and each of the plates in the hand seems to pick up a slightly different sensation that all blends together like the music that sometimes comes from Yasmin’s phone during meditation sessions. So much different from when a technician is holding the metal hand or applying tools.
“Do you feel like Clint expects anything from you?” she asks.
That turns the smile into a frown. The other asset does expect things from it. It signs that the other asset does not want it to kill targets. It is true that they are still “working on that,” but the expectation is there. It has to try not to kill targets, and has to do an even better job than it did in the North Carolina base.
“Alright.” Yasmin accepts the answer with the same lack of judgment she had for when it did kill the targets. She is a good expert, one who understands, just like she said she was trying to do in the beginning. Understand it, not change it.
“And do you expect anything from Clint?”
It pulls up the images of the trees for cats on the tablet and shows them to her. Then it signs that the other asset will build them. Three of them, of the trees for cats that go inside and not outside. The carpet trees, instead of wood. They will have an inside park made of carpet trees for cats in the rooms for assets.
Yasmin nods with a little smile. “That’s bound to be entertaining,” she says. “Are you happy holding hands with Clint? Do you ever feel afraid or unsafe when holding hands? Like you are trapped or can’t get away?”
It does not know how to answer that. It is very happy, so yes, but it is never unsafe feeling or trapped feeling, so no. Yes and no. If it answers yes, then she might misunderstand. But if it answers no, she might also misunderstand. How to answer…
It holds up a finger—the first thing, happy, and not the second things—and then signs how happy it is, how warm it is, how safe it is. It points to the spots on the flesh hand that match where the other asset’s hands have the calluses. Signs not-soft, since it cannot remember the sign for rough.
It would never feel unsafe to hold the other asset’s hand or to have the other asset hold its hand. The other asset is an asset, and they are the same. They would not hurt each other now that they are together on one team. Before, the tiny fang on a stick that the other asset had shot at it, that was when they were on different teams. Assets do not always get to decide what they will do when the team wants something done.
“That’s wonderful, Jigsaw. I’m very happy for you, that you get to hold hands with Clint. Will you tell me if anything changes?”
It nods. It tells her things all the time. Of course it would tell her if there was something even better than holding hands with the other asset, or snuggling close to the other asset at night in the other asset’s nest. Kissing, maybe. That might be a thing that only people do, though, and not assets. It will follow the other asset’s lead on that.
Yasmin
—New York City | Thursday 04 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
Jigsaw has completed his collages by the time they meet for their afternoon session. Both the captivity collage and the freedom collage are packed full of pictures, without any white space peeking out from between them.
She gives him the appropriate praise while inspecting the pair of collages. On one, he’s added to the swimming pool, stadium seating and red lips, choosing a doctor in a lab coat, dentistry tools, a chandelier, a boxer’s fist without the glove on, lightning in the sky, some climbing rope, an octopus, a picture of a S.W.A.T. team, a glacier from a bottled water ad, and several others.
Yasmin has a feeling this one will take several sessions to get through, and that he’s been creative with some of the representations. A chandelier, for instance, is much more figurative than a tray of dentistry tools.
The other collage is full of pictures of dogs, tennis balls, park scenes, a camera. There are lots of food images, some books, a great white shark, a robot, a circus acrobat, a choir, some individually cut out letters scattered around the page and spelling nothing in particular. There is a pile of soft-looking sweaters, a laundry machine, a bar of soap, a doctor, and several farm animals. Also a baseball bat.
Both of these will be able to supply them with material to unpack for easily a month. And once unpacked, those traumas will need to be explored, examined, worked through and picked apart. Each component will need attention, and they will need to find strategies for dealing with the emotions that come up.
The captivity collage, she will reserve for afternoon sessions. She has two hours to work with him then, and can make at least an effort toward returning him to a stable emotional baseline by the time their session ends. A single hour would not be sufficient with Jigsaw. Not at the pace of his communication or the depth of his traumas.
Given how the swimming pool conversation had gone yesterday, Yasmin feels a bit of trepidation asking him to wade back into the traumas of his time with HYDRA, and part of her wants to make use of the time to do something uplifting before they dive back in. But he seems in good spirits, and Lucky is already on the sofa with him instead of curled up on the floor. She should be able to read Lucky’s responses alongside Jigsaw’s and gauge the mood of the session.
Yasmin picks the stadium seating to ask about. It could be as simple as an assassination of someone in a theater or other location with stadium seating. It could be as complex as an indoctrination session that she will need to untangle and then provide truths for. But it was one of the first three images he added to the collage, so it’s something he has strong feelings about.
“Are you ready to talk about some of the images you’ve chosen for your collages?” she asks. When he nods, she places the collages on the coffee table, with the captivity collage on top, facing him. She points at the stadium seating. “Could you tell me about this one?”
Jigsaw starts to sign something, his hands up and hesitating, and then he pulls his tablet to his lap instead. He has to type whatever it is he’s going to say, so it takes a while, but eventually, when he shows her the screen instead of tapping Speak, it reads TRISKELION. TRAIN IT.
The Triskelion, she knows from her briefing, is the East Coast S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. One of the places he spent a lot of time in, down in the basement levels. He wouldn’t have been in the regular gym or a sports field, so this probably doesn’t represent bleachers, but maybe it does. Perhaps there was a separate HYDRA gym hidden away in the bowels of the building.
“Did they gather together in a group to train you?” she asks. “In a gym or a small arena?”
He nods and then holds up two fingers. Lucky is alert but hasn’t lifted his head from his paws or scooched closer to Jigsaw. But the one-finger, two-finger system does indicate a certain amount of verbal regression.
“A small arena,” Yasmin confirms. “Why did they do that? Why did they gather?”
After a pause, he looks down at his tablet, and taps out his answer. “To watch. To laugh and cheer.”
He clears the sentences and switches between boards for a while, but doesn’t seem to find whatever it is he’s looking for. He looks back up at her instead.
Yasmin doesn’t imagine for a minute that they were cheering for anything positive. It sounds more like some kind of cage match than training. But she keeps her questions little, just making tiny steps forward into the scene instead of coming to any conclusions he doesn’t offer her outright.
She doesn’t want to guess wrong and add the need to correct her to his current difficulties. Jigsaw frequently struggles with anything that could appear to be a challenge to her authority, and correcting her sometimes falls into this category for him.
“What were they watching?” she asks. He doesn’t answer for a minute and doesn’t look like he’s planning to answer, so she continues. “Were they watching your training, Jigsaw?”
He nods, his right hand settling into Lucky’s fur and petting behind the dog’s ears.
Yasmin frowns. For it to be this upsetting this soon, she may have misjudged his mood at the start of the session. Or it may be that training is a code for something else. What had he written out during their earliest sessions as something an expert would do? Training it, she thinks. Conditioning it. Yes. And there are many unpleasant ways to condition someone.
“Were they cheering you on?” Yasmin waits for several moments, and is about to continue when he does shake his head. No. Not cheering him on. “What were they cheering for, Jigsaw?”
Jigsaw looks down at his tablet, and uses his left hand to line up the words he wants instead of withdrawing his right hand from Lucky’s fur.
“Agents,” he says.
Yasmin nods. “They were cheering for other HYDRA agents.”
Jigsaw nods.
“What were the agents doing?” she asks.
It has to be something awful, but she’s beginning to think it was less a cage match and more… something worse. Something more likely than mere violence to cause this hesitancy and reluctance in her otherwise incredibly forthcoming patient.
Also, Lucky has begun to inch his way closer to Jigsaw, and Yasmin doubts it’s for better ear scratches. The dog’s proximity to Jigsaw during their sessions has been a remarkably accurate assessment of Jigsaw’s distress levels. Right now, the only thing keeping Lucky from putting his head in Jigsaw’s lap is the tablet already being there.
“Jigsaw,” Yasmin says softly. “I know this is hard. I know it’s upsetting. Will you trust me that I’m trying to help you?”
His nod is small, but it’s there.
“Nothing you tell me will change my opinion of you or make me like you any less. And nothing you tell me will leave the room unless you tell me you want it to.”
He signs the O and K with his left hand, the two letters split by a pause, and she nods her understanding of the sign.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she says. She waits a moment, leaving him room to add any input he feels she needs.
“…What were the agents doing, Jigsaw?” she asks again, when it’s clear he doesn’t have anything to add.
Jigsaw types out his response in slow, almost dazed fluidity, the movements slow but sure, but does not tap Speak when he has finished. He shows her the words on the tablet instead, and does not meet her eyes, instead looking past her shoulder as if into the past.
PUSHING INTO IT
“The agents were pushing into you,” she confirms.
He nods again.
In some cases, she might assume that the agents in question had formed a circle around him and were shoving him back and forth across the circle, disorienting him and causing him to stumble. It would be a traumatic experience to be made weak and helpless among captors who intend to hurt you.
But she has read the briefing many, many times since first receiving it. She knows that there was considerable sexual assault among the abuses Jigsaw has survived at HYDRA’s hands. She just never would have thought it was treated as a spectacle among the agents, that they would cheer on his rapists, maybe while waiting for their own turns.
And in some situations—many of them, at least with this client—she has let the euphemisms stand unclarified. Jigsaw has a detached way of seeing the world, and that’s partly a defense mechanism and partly that he’s been kept from seeing the world as it truly is. But here, she senses it’s pure defense mechanism. And that has to be challenged for there to be progress.
“Do you mean to say they were raping you?” she asks softly, as gently as she can.
Jigsaw’s hand slips limply from Lucky’s fur as the dog edges closer into a sitting position and puts his head on Jigsaw’s shoulder to lick his cheek.
Yasmin gives him time to think about what she’s said, time to process the directness of her question, while she holds space for him to do so uninterrupted.
After several minutes, there’s a nod and he signs “fun.” He may not be actively dissociating, but he’s clearly very focused on the past and not on his present.
“I’d like to check in with you, Jigsaw,” she says. She moves a hand off to one side, across his line of sight, to re-engage him in his surroundings.
He nods again, tracking her hand with his eyes.
“Can you count five soft things in the room for me?”
He looks down at his tablet, and spends some time alternating between looking down and looking around. Then: “Lucky fur. Sofa. Blanket. Carpet. Soft pants.”
She smiles. “Thank you. Are you comfortable on the sofa? Not too warm or too cold?”
Jigsaw nods, though he does take a moment to reach to his left and pet the throw blanket of nappy cream fleece. He signs “comfort” with his left hand, leaving his right arm behind Lucky.
“Maybe you’d like to hold onto the blanket while we continue?” she asks. “To remind you that you’re here, in a safe place with safe people and your dog, and all sorts of good and soft things.”
He blinks and then pulls the blanket down from the back of the sofa to bundle up against his left side.
Now he’s got Lucky on the right, a fleece blanket to his left, a soft sofa behind him… He’s as protected against his past as she can make him short of feeding him a peach.
“How are you feeling right now?” Yasmin asks. “When you remember that they raped you and cheered each other on and called it fun.”
The response is quicker than she anticipated, though finding the words on the tablet does take enough time that she can tell he’s struggling with language more than usual. His movements are minimal as he navigates the tablet, his arm still while his hand and wrist move to select the words. And he taps Speak instead of taking the movements needed to show her the board.
“Deserved earned reward. Bad reward. Lesson to learn.”
Yasmin closes her eyes for a moment, hurting for him. She opens them again. “Rape is wrong. No one deserves to be raped, Jigsaw. No,” she insists when he shifts on the sofa, “not even assets. There is no lesson involved in rape. That was not training or a lesson. All it was, was wrong.”
He’s still for a minute, accepting Lucky’s tongue across his cheek without reaction until he finally reaches up with his right hand to loop his arm around the dog in a side hug.
“What they did to you was wrong,” Yasmin says. “You couldn’t have deserved that, because no one deserves that. Not anyone at all, ever.”
She waits several minutes for a response, and doesn’t get one. But he’s still in the room with her, hasn’t actively dissociated the way he did when remembering the pain of the ritual drownings or the way he had started to earlier.
Sometimes, asking a question that is easier to answer will prompt him to respond, where a statement that he disagrees with on some level will cause him to close up a bit. And HYDRA, she knows, would have tried to engrain the lie that he deserved such a “lesson,” so he’s going to be dealing with significant cognitive dissonance.
Yasmin decides to focus on that, on the cognitive dissonance, rather than on the traumatic event itself.
“How does that make you feel, Jigsaw?” she asks. “Hearing that you didn’t deserve it, didn’t earn it? That it wasn’t a lesson and that it wasn’t … your … fault?”
And yes, that does get him to move again, to pick out some words on his AAC program and tap Speak. “Sad angry confused,” he says.
He looks up from the tablet and switches to signing, still with his left hand so he can hold Lucky close. “Same as trash.”
“You are not trash, Jigsaw.” Yasmin frowns, wondering where his statement is coming from.
Jigsaw has been through things that would make anyone question their worth, but she’s never seen him devalue himself in response to what has been done to him. And she can’t be sure that’s what is behind his current statement, either. But the statement itself needs to be addressed all the same. She’ll try to get a sense of the meaning behind it afterward.
Yasmin adds a touch of firmness to her voice, not enough to come across as stern or aggressive, but enough to be insistent. “You were wronged. You were hurt. But that doesn’t affect your worth or your value. And it does not make you trash.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and signs “but failed,” as though any failure on his part would naturally have warranted such “training.” And maybe that is where his statement is coming from. Not that he feels the rapes stripped him of value, but the other way around—that his failures made him trash and that led to the rest.
“Did your captors tell you that you were trash?”
He nods and taps at the tablet some more. “Deserved earned. Because trash. Because failed.”
“They said those things,” Yasmin confirms. “But let’s check the facts.”
It’s not often that a patient enjoys this exercise, checking the facts, but Jigsaw has never seemed to mind it. Disagree about the facts, yes, sometimes. But he never gets defensive about the challenge those facts represent to his world view.
“Does HYDRA tell the truth?”
He shakes his head and signs “lie.”
“That’s right. They lie,” she agrees. “Did they lie to you?”
He nods.
“How often would you say they lied to you?”
There, he hesitates, and then finally signs, “all” and “everything.”
“They lied to you all the time,” Yasmin guesses, “about everything?”
When he nods, Yasmin continues. “So when they told you that you earned it, that you deserved to be raped, that you were trash and a failure… were they lying to you?”
Jigsaw bites his lower lip and then nods.
“Yeah,” Yasmin says. “Yeah, they were lying to you, like always.”
She gives him some time to process that, to maybe come to accept on a logical basis the fact that they were lying to him and that he hadn’t deserved that treatment. It will take longer to emotionally accept the facts there, but today, maybe they have gotten a foot in the door of thinking that it wasn’t just a bad or unpleasant thing that happened, but a wrong thing that happened. That his captors weren’t merely cruel, but were wrong to do what they did.
“I’m really proud of you for sharing this with me, Jigsaw. I’m proud of you for confronting this, and for beginning to work through it.” She smiles at him. “This is incredibly hard stuff to process and you’re very strong inside, where it really counts.”
Yasmin pauses, letting that sink in a bit.
“And you are not a failure,” she says. “You are not trash, and you did nothing to deserve or earn what they did to you. It wasn’t something you asked for, wasn’t something you earned. It was nothing you did wrong or didn’t do right. It was only ever their decision to hurt you. It wasn’t your fault.”
Notes:
Content Warning: This chapter starts out mild enough, but it builds into a discussion of how Jigsaw was raped and how that makes him feel. If that’s an issue, you can stop reading this chapter when Yasmin’s section starts. Nothing related to the action-plot or romance-plot happens, only the recovery-plot.
Chapter 61: Assets | You’ll always have my shoulder when you cry
Notes:
Chapter title from “Count on Me” by Bruno Mars.
Significant content warnings on this chapter. If you feel you might need those, check out the end notes.
I'm traveling, so here's a travel chapter! Comment replies will be a bit slower, but your comments will give me many smiles and much inspiration while I'm out of town. ^_^ Sunday's chapter might be an evening chapter, also, depending on my drive home.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 04 October 2012 | 4:45 p.m.—
There is the music coming from the expert’s phone, the meditation music, the blurry notes that roll one into another until it’s hard to tell them apart or even to follow them. And there is the sound of rain coming from the expert’s phone, too. Pitter patter of droplets on leaves, on a metal roof, against the ground and into puddles.
It is breathing deep breaths, and counting, counting, counting. They have dug up a buried trauma, the expert says, and they need to let it dry out in the air and the light instead of heaping the leaves and dirt back over it and closing it up in darkness again to resume festering.
It is not supposed to avoid the trauma. It is not supposed to shy away from the trauma. It is not supposed to think distant thoughts when the trauma rears up in the mind and throws the words at it, the voices, the sounds of the flesh slapping flesh and the whistles and laughter of the operatives. The agents.
Dicks out, boys. Time for some fun. The zippers. So many zippers. The heart races, the blood rushes through the ears, throbbing and heavy and deafening in the skull.
So many zippers. So many men with their hands vanishing into their pants. So many grinning agents, looking down at it.
…does not deserve…
It breathes out, slow, soft, silent. It tries to hold the words and the images in the mind while counting to eight. It is not supposed to back away from the trauma. It is not supposed to run. It is supposed to be compliant, to let the trauma wash over it, to cover it over, to strike it from all directions.
Put your back into it, Jameson!
Shuddup!
You’re fucking pushing rope. Use the baton if you can’t keep it up.
It breathes in, slow, soft, silent. Tries not to hide. It wants to hide. Wants to run, to flee, to seek out a safe place, to close everything out and sink into oblivion.
Come on, man. Make it squirm.
The hum of a taser baton on safety settings, the idle electric fire raising the hairs along the right arm and at the neck, but not yet blooming into white hot agony and thousands of biting, stinging little creatures. But soon. So soon. Any moment now. Just as soon as the agent flicks the safety, presses the button, the quiet click that opens the floodgates of pain.
It breathes out, slow, soft, silent. It tries not to flinch away from the taser baton, tries to remember that it is an old thing, a thing it left behind when it stole will from the operator, a thing that can no longer hurt it. A memory. It tries to remember the trauma and not relive it, to acknowledge it and not succumb to it, but…
But the smooth cold metal. The pressure of the unyielding metal inside of it and the relief of the chill against the burning friction of before. The queasy gratitude for the smooth slide warring against the anticipated flash of brightness when the baton clicks on, when the entire body is lit up on fire and frozen in the moment of endless anguish.
You heard the man. Dicks out. Come and get your dick wet, newbie!
Isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t it bite?
Nah, it wants this. Was made for it. You don’t see it struggling, do you?
Because it knows what they want, the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians. Be still. Accept what it deserves, what it has earned with its failure. Learn the lesson well, comply, and maybe it will be over faster.
Except…
No one deserves to be raped, not even assets.
There is no lesson involved in rape. That was not training or a lesson.
But it failed. It does not remember how it failed, what it failed to accomplish. There are too many possibilities, too many instances, too many failures to narrow anything down to this failure leading to that lesson. There are just failures and lessons. Order through pain.
Order—
Order comes through pain.
What they did to you was wrong.
But order comes through pain. It was unordered. Disordered. Disorderly. Failed.
You couldn’t have deserved that, because no one deserves that. Not anyone at all, ever.
No one. No people. It is not people. Not a person. Is only an asset, this asset, is an asset with a name, Jigsaw. But underneath the Jigsaw, there is just an asset. Only an asset. A person might not deserve to be… to be… might not deserve to be pushed into, but an asset?
No, not even assets.
Didn’t deserve it, didn’t earn it. It wasn’t a lesson and it wasn’t… your… fault .
Brought this on yourself, you little shit-eating maggot. Fucking waste of space. Goddamn worthless piece of trash. Someone’s gotta put you back in order. Teach you better.
Same as trash.
You are not trash, Jigsaw.
Dicks out, boys.
Deserved. Earned. Because trash. Because failed.
Dicks out, boys.
It was nothing you did wrong or didn’t do right. It wasn’t your fault .
Dicks out, boys.
It wasn’t your fault.
Dicks out, boys.
…your fault.
Dicks out. Dicks out. Dicks out.
So many zippers.
It wants to crawl into the air ducts, to take the safest path to the safest place. It wants to hide from everyone in the hive building, from all of the agents and operatives, the researcher and technician, all of the people.
It wants the safety of the other asset.
It wants the safety of out-of-sight. The safety of inaccessible. The safety of out-of-reach.
But there is the dog. It cannot retreat to the ductwork without the dog and leave the dog vulnerable in the hallways. It must go down the hallway with the dog, to protect the dog, and then cross the common room with the dog. Where the clown man might be waiting for it.
Ambush.
It looks up at the vent near it. Just a few feet away and on the ceiling. An easy thing to access, but not with the dog. And not with the tablet.
But the clown man and the flying man have not been there in the common room after the afternoon sessions very often. Only after the evening sessions with the other expert, and only sometimes.
It stands there, to the side of the closed door to the therapy room, for long enough that the dog nudges it in the thigh, demands pets if they will stand still, or else for it to move.
The other asset is so far away.
It pets the dog, rubbing behind the dog’s ears, and then takes the steps needed to move down the hall, toward the common area and the stairwell beyond it. The elevator is too risky. The elevator could be a trap.
The elevator has never been a trap in this hive building, though. Why would the elevator be a trap now? Check the facts, the expert would say. Yasmin. Yasmin would say to check the facts.
So it checks the facts as it walks toward the common area, slowly, on guard for anyone who should happen to be there.
The elevator in this hive building has not been a trap, ever. If the elevator was a trap, it could pry the doors open and free itself and the dog. If the elevator was a trap, it could dismantle the ceiling of the carriage and climb to the top. From there it could perhaps haul the elevator carriage up to a safe floor of the hive building, secure the cables, and then set the dog loose onto the safe floor by prying open the doors.
So could the elevator hold it, even if it was a trap? No.
The common room at the end of the hallway is empty. It makes a thorough check, just to be sure.
Who would make the elevator a trap? Not the clown man, the flying man, the ballerina woman, the researcher with the curly hair, or the hamburger technician. Some of them can’t. Others would not bother. And the other asset does not even make the list of possibilities. Would never. The voice without a mouth has the ability to make an elevator not go where the buttons tell it to go, but not to make the doors sturdier than they already are.
Is the elevator a trap, then? No.
It takes the stairs.
Knowing something is not dangerous is no reason to not take the safer course of action. It is possible to know something is safe and still avoid it. And the dog’s safety could be compromised in an elevator, even one that was not a trap. Even one that worked as intended.
There are four floors worth of stairs to climb before it is on the safe floor, the floor that houses assets and the ballerina woman. It pauses halfway up so that it can assess the dog for signs of exhaustion or discomfort in the leg that had healed badly in the past. The dog is happy, though, starts up the next flight before realizing that they are stopping.
Good. It does not want the dog to be uncomfortable with the climb.
It gives the dog a thumbs-up when the dog looks back at it, and then begins the rest of the trip to the floor that is safe for it always. Where the other asset is waiting for it, either in the rooms for assets or in the ballerina woman’s rooms.
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 04 October 2012 | 5:45 p.m.—
Clint frowns down at his phone and then resumes the game. It’s just a fishing simulator, nothing that takes much concentration. And nothing that takes much movement, either, which is good because Alpine is asleep in his lap. But he can feel the time passing. It’s already been over half an hour since Jigsaw’s session with Yasmin was supposed to end.
Maybe he got snagged by Cap. That happens sometimes, usually after the evening session with Zoe. Cap and Wilson sometimes hang out in that common area at the end of the therapy hall. Maybe they’re there before dinner today. But Cap’s been helping increasingly with making the dinner, something he and Wilson have joined Banner in doing. So probably they didn’t grab Jigsaw for playing a board game.
Maybe Stark wanted him to come test something in the lab. That’s happened, too, though it has to be done in person—usually, Stark just tells JARVIS to fetch whoever he wants, but that doesn’t work with Jigsaw because JARVIS is like some entity on another dimensional wavelength where Jigsaw is concerned, and can’t make contact.
Maybe the session ran over. It’s done that a few times, when Yasmin’s next client had canceled or rescheduled. Usually when there’s something particularly dicey to talk about.
Clint’s frown deepens, and not just because the fish got away in his game.
It’s been about thirty minutes since when Jigsaw usually comes in, and Clint doesn’t have a great feeling about that, not after yesterday’s session talking about drowning and special vacuum cleaners for sucking water out of lungs and then tubes for re-inflating them. That had been a show and tell he regretted asking about. Sometimes it’s not a good idea to ask Jigsaw how therapy went.
The therapy game plan seems to be to talk about pleasant things in the morning, and then slam him with trauma in the afternoons and hope Zoe can patch him back up before bedtime. Clint is not a fan.
Especially since it seems increasingly likely that therapy ran over. It’s nearly six. Cap is definitely in the kitchen by now. Stark almost never comes to fetch Jigsaw in the evenings, preferring mid-morning when everything is fresh. And anyone else typically avoids Jigsaw after therapy sessions with Yasmin like they think he’s on a hair trigger or something.
Clint’s about to send a text to JARVIS—just a little inquiry into where Jigsaw is at the moment, whether he’s on the way or got caught up in something else—when the door opens and Lucky comes bounding in to greet him.
Or, no, to get his attention. Lucky comes around and blocks the screen, and then goes right back to Jigsaw, who is slipping through the door with a furtive air that Clint doesn’t like to see.
Clint shuts the game down—he wasn’t catching any fish, anyway—and pats the sofa cushion beside him.
“Hey, Jigs.” Part of him doesn’t want to know what’s set his roommate off. But most of him wants to offer comfort, and the only way to do that is to get him to relay what’s wrong. “How’d therapy go?”
Jigsaw sets some papers on the console table and then sinks down onto the sofa next to him—right up against him, in fact—and sets his tablet on the sofa beside him, leaning up against the back of the sofa so that Lucky can still climb up without hindering his access to the device.
Clint wraps an arm around Jigsaw’s shoulders, his hand resting on his roommate’s right shoulder. Jigsaw’s definitely tense about something. If Clint knew how he’d respond to a shoulder rub, he’d offer one. But for all he knows there was a sadist masseuse in HYDRA’s roster somewhere along the line.
“That bad, huh?”
Jigsaw puts his head on Clint’s shoulder and sighs, just a silent exhalation, but clearly a sigh. After a minute or two, he reaches behind Lucky for the tablet and pulls it into his lap.
Clint keeps his eyes to himself while Jigsaw works on the tablet. He doesn’t know if it’d be rude to watch Jigsaw pick out words or anything, but he kind of likes getting the finished product instead of seeing it in parts. When he sees it coming together, his brain always tries to anticipate the rest of it, and he’s wrong more often than he’s right.
“Safe here. Room for assets.”
“Yeah,” Clint agrees. “You’re always going to be safe in here. It’s our room. Suite. Thing.” He wants to ask what made Jigsaw feel unsafe somewhere else, but he can see from the corner of his eye that Jigsaw’s already composing another sentence. Clint doesn’t want to interrupt him.
It takes him a while, so either he’s really struggling to put the words together—a sign that he’s really upset—or he’s got a lot to say. Which might also be a sign that he’s really upset. It takes effort to communicate, even with the new tools he has, so whatever it is he does communicate tends to be really worth the effort, at least that Clint has seen.
“They hurt Jigsaw. Before. They pushed into it. Inside of Jigsaw. Did not deserve. Did not earn. Did not want. Did not.”
Clint sucks in a breath. It comes back out shakily. So they finally got there in the therapy schedule.
“No,” he says softly, proud of his voice for cooperating and not coming out in a growl. “You didn’t earn that. You didn’t deserve any of that. Or want it.”
God, how can Jigsaw think for a second that he had wanted it? Did they tell him he was asking for it, or… Clint grits his teeth, the only thing he can really clench that won’t set his roommate off further. He wants to clench his fists, wants to hit something, wants… Wait.
Is that the first time he’s referred to himself as Jigsaw when not introducing himself? No, Clint thinks. He did once before, while they were walking away from the tracksuit mafia headquarters. But other than that… He just called himself by name. Twice.
“It wasn’t anything you did, Jigs.” Clint gives his shoulder a squeeze and leans his head against Jigsaw’s. “You didn’t deserve any of the shit they did to you.”
And they did so much shit to him. That fucking red star book with the lists of ways to hurt him, ways to make a mark stay put, ways to keep him compliant no matter what they were doing. Taking him apart. Beating him. Drowning him. Raping him. So much shit.
It makes Clint want to scream. And then shoot every one of those bastards full of arrows until they look like so many porcupines all in a pile.
“Was not Jigsaw fault.”
“Nothing they did to you was ever your fault.” Clint risks a side hug, pulling Jigsaw closer as gently as he can, trying not to jostle his tablet or make him feel trapped or anything. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Jigsaw sniffs. “Was wrong.”
Clint nods, his cheek moving against the top of Jigsaw’s head. “It was wrong, what they did to you. From start to finish, everything they did was wrong. It’s their fault, all of it. They’re the ones to blame. They’re the ones to hate.”
They’re the ones to kill, Clint does not say. But damn, does he sometimes feel like saying that. Whenever he thinks too hard about the specifics, that murderous part of him bubbles up and demands action.
“Was not Jigsaw fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault. No.”
Jigsaw lifts his right hand from Lucky’s head and wipes at his face. Puts his hand back down, probably burying his fingers in Lucky’s fur judging by how he’s trembling.
“Was not Jigsaw fault. Was not Jigsaw fault. Was not Jigsaw fault.”
“No,” Clint says. “It wasn’t. Nothing they did has ever been your fault.”
He shifts on the sofa, turning to face Jigsaw and inevitably waking Alpine with the motion. Sorry, Alpine, he thinks as the kitten mewls her dissatisfaction with the situation and jumps down to decamp to the chair instead.
“Can I hug you?” he asks. “You look like you could use a good long hug. Like upright spooning, but facing each other, kind of.”
Jigsaw wipes at his face again and then nods. He lets Clint gather him closer and just about melts against Clint once he gets the idea behind hugging.
“That’s right,” Clint murmurs into Jigsaw’s hair. “I’ve got you.”
And that’s apparently all it takes to push his roommate over the edge from tearful trembling to outright sobbing, though no one would know from the sound. Clint breathes out, slow and steady despite his anger at the people who hurt Jigsaw for all those decades. He traces his hands along Jigsaw’s back, small circles while holding him close.
And if that metal arm is kind of digging into him a bit? If his shirt’s getting wet where Jigsaw is crying against his shoulder? If he ends up sitting like this until nightfall and they miss dinner and Zoe’s session?
So what.
“I’ve got you, Jigs,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
Notes:
Content Warning: This chapter starts out where the last one left off. In it, Jigsaw has misunderstood Yasmin’s instructions while meditating, and is having flashbacks to snippets of conversation and sensations that happened while he was raped. If that’s an issue, you can skip this chapter. Nothing related to the action-plot or romance-plot happens, only the recovery-plot.
(And yes, Yasmin does manage to pick up that there's been a misunderstanding, but there isn't time to put Jigsaw fully back onto even ground before their session is up. She does what she can, just off the page.)
Chapter 62: Avengers | All my flavors are guaranteed to satisfy
Notes:
Chapter title from “Ice Cream Man” by Van Halen.
Chapter Text
Sam
—New York City | Friday 05 October 2012 | 6:30 a.m.—
Jigsaw is sitting at the kitchen table with his tablet when Sam comes in to get Lucky for the morning’s walk. Unlike other mornings he’s been at the kitchen table, he isn’t eating a morning snack before his therapy session with Yasmin. He’s just poking the tips of his succulent’s leaves, and Lucky is sitting by his side instead of dancing around at the door waiting for his leash.
For most people, and on most mornings, Sam would chalk it up to sleeping wrong or just being in a funk. But from what he understands, Jigsaw doesn’t sleep most nights and any funk he happens to be in could spell disaster for the attempts of those around him to interact. Is it Sam’s job to try to tackle this? No. Is it Sam’s job to try to chip away at the funk before Yasmin gets started on the day’s therapy sessions? No.
Is he going to try anyway? Of course.
He doesn’t know Jigsaw nearly as well as Clint or the therapy team, but he knows he doesn’t like seeing him sad. And listlessly poking a plant’s leaves while a dog that’s got the instincts of a therapy dog sits loyally at his side spells sadness in Sam’s book, especially when the whole “not eating anything” part is added to the mix.
“Everything okay?” Sam asks, keeping his voice light.
Jigsaw looks over at him for a moment with a look that borders on blank, and then signs “confused” at him. But to Sam’s eyes, he looks more sad than confused. Dejected, maybe.
Sam closes the door behind himself and invites himself to have a seat at the table across from Jigsaw.
If Jigsaw minds the proximity, he doesn’t let on. Instead, he just watches Sam’s approach with that same dejected look and blinks once.
“Anything I can help clear up for you?”
Because the answer is probably no, but like hell is Sam not going to try. There’s something very kicked puppy about a sad Jigsaw, even if understanding and cheering up the former assassin super soldier is way, way beyond his pay grade.
Jigsaw hesitates, looking thoughtful, and then signs that HYDRA is wrong about everything, which Sam can definitely agree with but can’t find anything confusing about. Yes, HYDRA is wrong about everything. At least, the three signs “HYDRA everything wrong” seem like they would translate into that. And no one would argue that HYDRA was somehow right about anything…
But then Jigsaw adds “right some things” to the string of signs after a pause. And yeah, that would be confusing. It definitely confuses Sam, anyway. What could he possibly think HYDRA was right about?
Is this some kind of self-deprecating thought process whereby Jigsaw is believing that HYDRA was right about him? That he really is just a weapon? That’s all Sam can think of, because Jigsaw’s been pretty good about associating HYDRA with pure evil, and what could they possibly have been right about in a general sense?
“I generally assume that anything HYDRA says or does is bad and probably a lie to manipulate or control people,” Sam says. He pauses. Tries to keep the judgment out of his voice. He’s not judging Jigsaw here, after all. Just trying to understand.
“What do you think they’re right about?”
Jigsaw looks at the tablet for a moment, hovers his fingertip over it, but then chooses to sign instead. Maybe it’s too early in the morning to work on a tablet in his mind. He signs that “neat follows pain”—miming the one sign literally chasing the other—and then “no imprisonment.”
Sam understands what “no imprisonment” would mean to him. Jigsaw’s still upset about the Triskelion escape over a month ago, and he’s always been eager to kill his targets, making taking prisoners a moot point. Even with the tracksuit mafia, he didn’t so much take prisoners as let the bad guys live. Prisoners only escape, so why bother imprisoning anyone in the first place?
He’s not sure why neatness follows pain, or why pain is neat, or why being in pain leads to being neat, though. He’s not even sure he’s interpreting the signs accurately. Especially since HYDRA was anything but neat in the way they inflicted pain on Jigsaw, littering his body with scars, which is hardly neat in most senses of the word.
“HYDRA isn’t right about not taking prisoners, though,” Sam says, tackling the easy part of the response. “That’s one of the things they’re wrong about. It’s also not true. Not something they did.”
Jigsaw frowns and tilts his head before asking why.
Sam shrugs. “I mean, they held you prisoner for decades. You weren’t born there, you were captured.” And that’s about as close to the Bucky story as Sam feels they should get. Just gloss over that part. “If you weren’t a prisoner, they wouldn’t have needed to put you in that chair and freeze you. Right? They wouldn’t have needed to hurt you to get you to do what they wanted.”
Jigsaw signs that HYDRA lies.
“Yeah, I’ll say. They don’t even follow their own mottos.”
That gets him another frown and a shaken head, but whether he’s agreeing with him or disagreeing isn’t clear.
What is clear to him now is what Jigsaw probably meant by neatness following pain, or rather, pain leading to neatness. HYDRA would have told him that they needed to make him hurt in order to get him to cooperate. To fall in line. To be neat. And in that, they weren’t lying. Pain and lies were the only things that ultimately worked to get Jigsaw to comply with their orders and do as he was told.
“Maybe it’s something you should ask Yasmin about,” Sam says, deciding to give up while he’s ahead. This kind of conversation is definitely out of his league, especially if he’s misunderstanding things as much as he suspects he is. “She’s probably got some tips for working through it.”
Jigsaw nods. He gives Lucky a scratch behind the ears, and then silently sighs and gets up, scooping up his tablet as he does so.
“Heading off?” Sam asks, getting to his feet as well. “Guess I better get Lucky leashed and ready for his walk.”
Jigsaw nods again and gives Lucky a thumbs up before he slips out of the room and into the hallway.
Sam lets out a sigh that isn’t at all silent. Today is definitely presenting a challenge for Jigsaw. Maybe they went over something heavy yesterday. Or maybe it was a nightmare. Really, it could be almost anything that’s eating at him. And he hasn’t been outside in weeks with all the reporters out there. Honestly, that’s probably a good part of the problem.
Maybe they can all go to the park this afternoon after lunch. The watchers have thinned out steadily over the last two weeks, either giving up on a sighting or else returning to their normal New Yorker ways of leaving assorted famous people alone.
It should be relatively safe to head out there with Jigsaw, provided he wears long sleeves and some glasses. Maybe they could play some frisbee golf. Lucky would be an interesting course obstacle, trying to grab the frisbee while they play.
And the press thinks the dog is Sam’s, after all. If he’s out there with Jigsaw and Lucky, and maybe brings Steve along, Clint, even Natasha if she’s interested… There might be a bit of gossip about the Avengers spending an hour or so at the park, but they shouldn’t be swarmed and there shouldn’t be too much negativity from the tabloids.
Maybe even that horrible Carlton Badger will leave them alone.
He’ll run the idea past the team over lunch. Who knows? Maybe Stark and Banner will join them.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 05 October 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
The head is still spinning around the idea that Yasmin had for it in the morning, about how HYDRA always lying meant that HYDRA always, always lied, and not only when it thought differently from the way HYDRA thought. Yasmin had said that it would only confuse itself if it tried to pick and choose some things for HYDRA to have been right about when all of the HYDRA things were wrong, were evil.
But pain does put things into order—puts assets into order—and that has always been the case. Order through pain is unpleasant, but it is true. But Yasmin is right about the confusion.
And that is why it is almost surprised when the feeder greets it with a wide happy smile for their session.
“Thank you for journaling your meals, Jigsaw,” the feeder—Caroline—says. “I read through them, and you were very thorough. More so than most of my other clients, which I really appreciate. Especially with the mindfulness exercises. How did you like doing those?”
It looks at the insulated box on wheels. It is there, beside her, where it belongs. But there are no delicious smells coming from it today. Is it empty? Why is it empty? Did it do something wrong and one of the others reported it to her?
“Jigsaw?”
It prepares the tablet for talking. How did it like the mindfulness exercises? They were a challenge to fill out, all the tapping of fingers along the tablet, all the things to think about while it ate. But it was also more enjoyable to eat the meals when it was concentrating on how everything tasted, and what its texture was, and how much it enjoyed everything.
It even felt a fullness cue, once, it thinks.
But it does not know where those sorts of words are on the AAC boards. So many boards. Or it does know, but it does not remember. The mind is too focused on the empty box on wheels to bring up the words and their locations. Still, it tries.
“Hard difficult to complete. Delicious food more delicious with charts. It is surprise. Full feeling once.”
The feeder smiles even wider—a grin—and her eyes light up and crinkle at the edges. “I’m excited for you, Jigsaw! It’s been so hard to feel fullness cues, and we seem to be getting somewhere with that now. When did you feel the fullness cue? What was it like? Did you continue to eat?”
It nods. They are getting somewhere. That is exciting. The feeder, Caroline, is excited for it. Good, good things. But an empty box on wheels. That does not make sense. That is not how it should be. But it will answer the questions, and maybe there is something inside the box that does not smell. Maybe it will taste good even if it does not smell.
“Pasta bow-tie with green peppers, carrots, mushrooms, red peppers, onions, zucchini, yellow squash. Dinner. Basil pesto. Garlic cheese bread. It did and did not need finish. But it ate all.”
“So you felt the fullness cue,” the feeder says after a moment. “Did you think about whether you wanted to finish your portion?”
It nods. It had thought about whether the remaining garlic parmesan bread needed to eaten, or if it just wanted to eat it. But the other asset and the ballerina woman were not going to eat it, had pushed away their plates. So it was not still feeling hunger, but it needed to eat the bread or no one else would. It could not leave anything behind.
“Why did you eat the rest of the meal after thinking about it?” Caroline asks. “You aren’t in trouble for it. I’m not disappointed or upset. I’m just curious.”
It taps and swipes between the boards, tries to get the best words lined up. Taps the Speak tile finally. “Clint and Natasha did not eat. But garlic cheese bread left behind. Cannot leave behind. So ate the garlic cheese bread.”
“Did you think there would be less food available next time if you didn’t finish everything?”
It nods.
“Remember that there is always more food available. We went to the store and saw all that food, remember? If there is less on the table next time, and you are still hungry after finishing, can you ask for more food?”
It nods again. It can. But it knows that it will not. It asked for peaches after the team meal after the mission, but that was a special occasion. It does not ask for food normally. It is up to others what and how much it is offered. It is an asset.
“That’s right,” the feeder says. “You can always ask for more.”
Then she pulls a light pink book out of her bag and passes it over the table. “Today we’re going to focus on dessert. That’s usually a sweet dish that we eat after lunch or dinner. Most often dinner. But we can eat dessert whenever we want. There aren’t any restrictions or rules.”
A new book! It eagerly picks up the book and traces the shapes pressed into the cover. A ball on a triangle, and a muffin-looking thing with pieces of sand on top, and a big, wide cylinder. And some little circles and ovals around the bottom of the shapes.
“You’ve already had some desserts,” she says, “so this isn’t a new category, but I want you to have a special section for sweets and treats, which may overlap with your other books sometimes.”
And the box on wheels is opened, and then a little styrofoam container is brought out onto the table. It still doesn’t smell, though maybe that is because of the container sealing in the smell. But the box is not empty. It caught a glimpse inside of it, and it is full of containers!
“This is the most basic of ice cream flavors, Jigsaw.” The feeder opens the container and hands it a spoon. And yes, now it smells cream and milk, and something else it cannot place. “Vanilla is often used as a base and other flavors are mixed in on top of that.”
It digs the spoon into what looks like white yogurt, but is hard and not goopy at all. A chunk comes loose along the container’s wall, and it puts that in the mouth and—
Cold!
It is like ice, and tastes like cream and something else. That must be the vanilla. That is where it gets its name, vanilla and ice cream. Because it is icy cream that tastes like vanilla. And it melts in the mouth, becoming softer and more liquid with every passing second. The flavor grows stronger the longer the ice cream sits in the mouth.
Is this what the team that is not a cell was supposed to eat with the peach pie that the feeder with the braids said it could have? They had eaten fluffy white cream with the pie and not ice cream, but it can imagine how the so-warm pie and the so-cold ice cream would go together and mix up temperatures in the mouth. So confusing for the tongue.
Caroline does not get her own container of ice cream, but instead gestures for it to continue eating. It offers the container to her, but when she smiles and shakes her head, it digs out another spoonful of the ice cream. So good. And with little flecks of something dark inside of it. Maybe that is the vanilla. Vanilla is a tiny black speck. There is a lot of vanilla in this ice cream, spread out so that the ice cream is still white. So good.
It takes another spoonful out of the container, and another, and another—until suddenly the head hurts so bad, along with the top back of the mouth, but only for a moment.
Caroline smiles. “When you eat ice cream too fast, you might get a brief headache,” the feeder says. “We call that brain freeze, or an ice cream headache. It’s not harmful, but it does remind us to eat more slowly.”
Brain freeze. That does sound harmful, or at least like a part of the cryo freeze process, in the tube where it is so cold. But if the feeder did not warn it ahead of time, there must not be any danger. She is a good feeder, so different from HYDRA feeders, and it can trust her.
It eats the rest of the little container of vanilla ice cream more slowly, but quick enough that it is only just starting to melt in the container. So good. The spoon squeaks against the side of the container.
“Next up is the second most common base flavor of ice cream. Chocolate.” Caroline brings out another container, this one full of brown ice cream. “There are also ice creams that mix the two together. Vanilla with some chocolate chips, for instance.”
It takes the lid off and digs the spoon in. It smells sweet and creamy, but not like the vanilla. Oh, this one is even more delicious than the first one. Still cold, and still creamy, but the taste is darker and richer, the same way the color is darker and richer. It is not as sweet, or is a different kind of sweet.
“Which do you like better?”
It points to the chocolate ice cream. This one is… well, no. Maybe it is not better. Maybe it is just as delicious in a different way. It would happily eat a lot more of either flavor. Both, even, together. Like she described. Little flat chips of the dark ice cream inside of the light ice cream. Chocolate chips.
“Having second thoughts?” she asks with a knowing smile, like she has heard its thoughts.
It nods and points to both of the containers in turn. It likes both very much. It cannot wait to taste what other flavors there are inside of the box. There is room for so much in the box. And it saw so many containers. So many.
The next one is pink! Just like the dessert book it now has. And it does taste like strawberries, just like the name of the ice cream. And smells like strawberries and cream. There are icy chunks of strawberry inside of the ice cream, too. Little flecks of red strawberry and bigger slices, too. Even the crunchy little strawberry seeds have made it into the ice cream.
It points at the container and signs that this is the favorite ice cream. Sweet and fruity and creamy and smelling so good and tasting even better. Strawberry ice cream. What if there is a kind of ice cream that is peach-flavored with pieces of peach inside it? The favorite fruit made into an ice cream. Oh, it hopes, hopes, hopes that there is peach ice cream in the box.
Then there is something the feeder calls raspberry fudge, a vanilla ice cream with streaks and rivers of red—raspberry like a frozen jelly—and little squares of chocolate mixed all throughout that are hard and not made of ice cream. The sweet fruity parts are the best, but the vanilla is still good, and the crunchy pieces of frozen chocolate are such a good addition. A different kind of sweet. Three different kinds of sweet all mixed together in one ice cream.
And a chocolate ice cream with gooey white bits, and chunks of chocolate, and nuts! Rocky road is the name of this one, and it is so crunchy and soft at the same time. And then a butter pecan ice cream that has even more nuts, and a lemon tart ice cream that has little bits of graham cracker and lemony yellow bits. And a green ice cream with chunks of chocolate in it that tastes like toothpaste and chocolate. And then—
Yes—
It is a peach ice cream!
So pale and peachy, like a very light orange-pink color, and chunks of icy peaches all throughout the container. This. This is the favorite ice cream. This is the best that ice cream could ever get. There could not be a better ice cream than the favorite fruit and the icy-creamy goodness of ice cream. The mixture of two amazing things into an even more amazing thing.
It signs that this is the new favorite, the ultimate favorite, the best of the best.
“I thought you might like that one best,” Caroline says with a smile. “I saved it for last so you could wrap up on the best note possible.”
And it is the best note possible. It thanks her with very big movements, a very big thank you, and finishes up the container.
“For your food tiles, we’re going to reserve a couple of pages for ice cream, and the first will be ice cream in general.” She hands it a little square tile of a ball of what must be ice cream on top of a triangle of something else. “The rest of the pages will be flavors of ice cream.”
There is a long thin brown string called “vanilla,” and a flat rectangle of dark brown called “chocolate,” and then several fruits and even something that looks like a white disc with streaks of red radiating out—a “mint”—that has some pieces of chocolate with it and two small green leaves. That would be the green toothpaste ice cream. There are nuts and “caramel” squares and “toffee” and all sorts of things. Many more things than it has tried today. There are so many ice creams in the world!
“Now, there is also pie, which I believe you’ve had.”
She hands it some tiles to put into the next set of pages, a picture of a pie, and then lots of different slices of pie with different insides and different names. So many kinds. And it has only had cherry and peach. There is even a chocolate pie. How can there be a pie made out of chocolate? Is that not just a big disc of chocolate with a pastry crust?
“Next time, we’ll have lunch, and then have some cake. So you’ll want to bring your vegetable and dessert books with you.” She waits for it to nod in agreement—as if it would do anything but agree—and then continues. “In the meantime, since you’ve had dessert only, I need for you to have your actual lunch meal. Bruce is aware, and they’ve saved you some chunky vegetable chili with cornbread.”
Cornbread? It did not know bread could be made out of corn. It loves corn!
Chapter 63: Super Soldiers | Think what that money could bring (I’d buy everything)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rich Girl” by Gwen Stefani.
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Friday 05 October 2012 | 1:45 p.m.—
Steve thinks it’s likely Jigsaw has finished eating by now and is in his room, either napping or getting in some screen time with Clint. And that means he might be available—if he’s interested—to get some screen time in with someone else. Specifically, online shopping.
He and Sam had sent him over a dozen pictures of cat trees for him to look at on his tablet, and JARVIS assures him that he’s narrowed the options down to something reasonable. But even Jigsaw couldn’t make much use of five cat trees. Maybe three, but not five.
And Sam said Jigsaw was feeling down earlier. Steve has found that getting things for others, especially now that he can afford to do it, feels really good. He and Sam have been spoiling the Tower’s resident pets rotten, but maybe it’s time for Jigsaw to get in on the action. It might make him feel better to add to the toy and treat selection.
He wonders whether Jigsaw would feel safer in a common room for this or if it would be fine to bring him into his second room. It would only be three of them in there, Steve, Jigsaw, and Sam. That’s not too many people. They’ve played games with just the three of them pretty often.
By the time he arrives at Jigsaw and Clint’s rooms, he’s decided he’ll try the second room. He knows that Jigsaw is well aware of the layout and contents of most of the rooms in the Tower by now, and definitely knows Steve’s own rooms very well. They won’t be strange places. It’ll be okay.
He knocks on the door and hears Clint calling out that it’s open. Steve shrugs and lets himself in. Clint appears to be playing some kind of fishing game while Jigsaw holds Alpine belly-up in his arms like he’s rocking a baby.
“Hey guys,” he says.
Clint grunts softly and makes pulling motions with his controller, as if he’s actually trying to pull a struggling fish out of the water, but Jigsaw looks over with a little smile and nods.
Steve takes it as a greeting, at least from Jigsaw.
“I was wondering if you wanted to come over to my rooms and go shopping with Sam and me, Jigsaw.” Steve smiles. “We can get those cat trees you decided on, and maybe some more toys.”
Jigsaw nods and shifts Alpine to one arm before getting up and collecting his notebook with a pen tucked into the spiral off of the coffee table.
“Aw, fish, no.” Clint drops his arms to his sides again, looking disappointed. “Almost got that one, too.”
Jigsaw meets Steve’s eyes and shakes his head slightly.
“I would have caught it,” Clint insists. “The line snapped, is all.”
The screen makes bloop bloop noises like bubbles while a fish of some sort appears to laugh with its fins folded over its belly. The options on the screen are to quit or try again.
“Better luck next time?” Steve offers. “If you need a break, you can come shopping with us.”
Clint waves them off. “Nah, I’m going to catch something in this game, even if it’s a dinky little minnow in a pond.” He grins at them. “Enjoy your shopping spree, Jigs.”
Sam has two kitchen chairs in the second room, one on each side of the drafting chair, and the laptop is already set up with the Barky website on the screen when Steve and Jigsaw get there.
“Hey guys,” Sam says. “Hi Alpine,” he adds with a hint of a coo in his voice. “She’s getting so big.”
She’s still tiny in Steve’s book, even for a kitten, but he does agree that she’s bigger than she was. She was scarily small at first, and Sam hadn’t even been sure she’d make it.
Now she looks more fully baked, definitely a kitten without question, where at first, there had been a kind of not-done-yet quality to her. Now her belly is round and the rest of her is plumping up as well. And her fur is almost like a halo of fluff around her. He wonders if she’ll be a long-haired cat, maybe.
Jigsaw holds Alpine out toward Sam, and somehow she remains asleep throughout the motion.
“I don’t want to wake her up,” Sam says. “Can I hold her later, when she’s awake?”
Jigsaw nods and returns the kitten to her baby-cradled position tucked against himself.
“Thanks. She’s really turning out to be a cute little thing.” Sam gestures for Steve to take the middle seat, in front of the laptop, and then sits in the chair to Steve’s left, farthest from the door. “Ready to shop?”
Jigsaw nods again and waits for Steve to sit before claiming the third chair and looking attentively at the screen.
“So this is the Barky store,” Steve says. “Barky sells things for pets. Dogs, cats, birds, fish, all of the pets. It’s where we found those cat tree examples to send to your tablet.”
He navigates to the list of saved items, which include the handful of cat trees that had finally been singled out as possibilities, and also some treats and a toy that looked interesting—some sort of round carpet with a mechanism on the other side that spins around and imitates a mouse or something underneath.
“Let’s look at some of these trees up close and see what looks good to you. They come in different colors, some of them.” Steve opens up a new tab for each cat tree.
Jigsaw shows him a picture of a basket with a handle and asks “why,” which Steve knows could mean anything from actually “why” to simply making something a question.
“You want to make sure the tree has a hammock part, like a basket?”
Jigsaw shakes his head and sketches a horizontal line with one person on top of the line and a spread out group of people along the bottom, with a basket sitting directly on top of the line. He adds some larger baskets between the people in the group, and that’s when it clicks for Steve.
“Oh, we buy it on the laptop, online, and they’ll send it to us.” He points up in the right hand corner of the screen. “See the shopping cart icon? We put things in there and then go to a checkout page.”
Jigsaw nods and then signs OK at him.
It turns out Jigsaw has two favorite cat trees among the five, so those are easy to decide on. They go right into the cart, and Steve points out how the cart icon gets a one and then a two over it, to represent things being “in their cart.”
The third tree takes a lot of effort to pick from the three remaining starred trees. Steve wants to buy all of them and just keep the two least favorite in his room, for if maybe Jigsaw changes his mind, or if there should be a tree in a common room, or maybe Natasha wants a cat tree. Where will Alpine end up spending most of her time? Will she roam the hallways eventually, or stay in Clint and Jigsaw’s rooms?
He wants to buy them all, but he doesn’t suggest it. Instead he says he’ll keep them all starred in case Jigsaw changes his mind or wants more later. And that speeds things right along. The idea of starring something to claim it—instead of in recognition of having killed it—is a big hit, and they move on to toys and treats when the cat trees are sorted.
In the end, they check out with the three favorite cat trees, five different kinds of cat treats, a whole two dozen of the plastic springs like the vet gave them, a batch of stuffed cat toys shaped like pieces of sushi with a packet of wasabi and a big pink shrimp, and a few new bones for Lucky, plus dog treats, a new knotted rope and a ball launcher to make throwing a tennis ball for Lucky easier for people like Sam and Clint to do for longer without the serum-enhanced endurance Steve and Jigsaw have.
And that’s on top of the switch to pine pellet litter and the selection of wet kitten food for Alpine to continue her initial weaning process.
Steve does his best to ignore the price tag on all of that. He still gets what Sam calls “sticker shock” at the prices of things these days, and this is probably a lot of money even by today’s standards. But it’s just the usual for setting up a pet when you have the space and funds to “go crazy,” as Sam puts it. And it does feel crazy buying this munch stuff, and also choosing the overnight shipping for it, which essentially doubles the price.
Jigsaw has to head off to his afternoon therapy session after they finish, but by then, Alpine has woken up and been enjoying some cuddles with Sam while trying to get on top of the laptop. He collects his kitten and signs thank you before pointing to the laptop.
“You’re welcome,” Steve says. “I had a great time shopping with you.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “And you’re welcome to come by for more, any time. Anything you want to buy, we can probably find online somewhere.”
Jigsaw gives that a thoughtful look, and Steve hopes that he’ll take them up on the offer. Even if he doesn’t, though, it’s been a fun hour or so, and he’s glad they were able to spend it together.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 05 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
The other asset is not alone in the room for assets when it returns from the afternoon therapy session. And that is not a bad thing, this time.
Yasmin had asked it all about the ice cream from before, and while it had not brought the pink dessert book, the tablet had a Dessert board on it with all of the same tiles on it. The Dessert board had not been on the tablet before, but it was there when it looked at the food boards to find descriptions of foods to use when describing the ice creams.
And then it had showed her the pictures of the cat trees that they bought “on line,” which means not actually standing in the line to buy things like in the food store, but sitting down and buying things in a screen.
There had not been any talk at all about the collages, not the captivity one and not the freedom one, but only talking about what has happened during the day. It got to explain that bread can be made out of corn, and that it is not as chewy as bread made out of whatever regular bread is made out of. It is crumbly and soaks up butter like a yellow sponge. Also soaks up chili. So good.
Yasmin was very happy that it had spent the time with the clown man and the flying man, and that the other asset had not needed to come with them. Yasmin wants it to feel comfortable with the rest of the team that is not a cell, even the researcher with the curly hair.
It is not so sure about the researcher, but it is doing well with the others. It does not even feel very strange to use their names when it is referring to them with the AAC voice. Still strange, but not very strange.
So it has done very, very well with the afternoon therapy session, and it is not upset when it turns out there is the clown man and the flying man in the rooms for assets, and also the ballerina woman. So many others in the room for assets.
“We were thinking we might have a good time heading out to the park for a couple of hours,” the flying man says in greeting. “Maybe feed some ducks at that pond, throw some balls for Lucky, have a little picnic snack before dinner. How’s that sound?”
The whole group of them—operatives and assets alike—are going to go outside of the hive building!
It has been ages and ages since it was able to go outside of the hive building. So many ages that it has lost track of the time. Forever, it seems.
It grins, and then thinks about it again. Outside of the hive building there are the people with the binoculars across the street that are looking for it. That is why it has not been able to leave the hive building for so long. Are they gone for real, or only gone when it has looked outside the windows?
“The paps are mostly gone,” the flying man adds. “You’re not old news, but the main news cycle has moved on for now.”
“And anyway,” the other asset adds, “we can tell anyone with a camera to scram. If there’s only a couple of them, then five Avengers telling them to go away will actually get listened to.”
The clown man nods. “And I can give an impromptu interview if that’s what’s needed to get everyone else into the park without a problem. I don’t mind.”
The flying man laughs. “Yeah, you can finally talk about those twinkies, Steve.”
It does not know what twinkies are, but the clown man smiles and gives the flying man’s hand a squeeze. Maybe twinkies are something to do with holding hands for them? They are not assets, after all. Holding hands must be different for people than it is for assets.
They bring a lot of things to the green park with them.
The ballerina woman carries a rolled up blanket that is very thick and made up of so many different colorful fabric pieces—a “quilt” that they will sit on while they eat. The clown man brings a basket made out of dried up grass, with a top on it and a handle, that is filled with foods they will eat—cheese cubes, and boiled eggs, and cut up vegetables and fruits, and lots and lots of food sauces to dip things into.
And then the flying man has a bag of peas and a head of lettuce. These, he says, are for the ducks to eat. Ducks are a kind of long chicken that lives in the water. It knows this from the tiles in the red meat book. The other asset has all of the balls they will throw for the dog to catch, and also a small plastic disc called a frisbee that they will throw as well. It has played with the frisbee before in the green park, while walking with the flying man and the dog. It is excited to throw it some more.
It gets to hold the dog’s leash, and someday, if they ever do this again, it will be able to hold the little cat’s leash as well. But the little cat is still too small to wear the harness and go out into the green park. The little cat will need to stay behind. That is okay, though. There are plenty of things for the little cat to do, and it makes sure the little cat has a fresh plate of kitten mush to eat while they are gone.
It takes the elevator down to the ground floor with the ballerina woman, whose knee will not yet allow her to walk down that many stairs. The other three take longer on the stairs. But eventually, everyone is ready to go again, and the dog is so excited and wagging its tail back and forth so much that the whole back half of the dog is wiggling.
There is no one across the street with a camera or binoculars, only regular people—not “the press”—who want to cross the street or who are walking along the edge of the street to get to some other place.
It has been to this pond before, when it needed to clean the other asset’s tac gear and the glittering fang with the decorative holes along its spine. The pond looks very different in the light of the late afternoon sun. There are other people around and even a few other dogs, like in the rest of the off-leash area of the park. But the other dogs do not come closer, do not bother them or bark at it or attack it.
And the ducks come from the far side of the pond to their side, floating along the surface like little feathery boats, in a big cluster. Many of them are brown and black and white all over, but others have bright yellow noses and glossy green heads, and are brown and white in big blocks of color.
The ballerina woman laughs and throws them a handful of peas from the bag, which get gobbled up so fast that they hardly have any opportunity to sink into the water. The ducks dip and bob their whole front halves into the water after the peas, their necks moving snakelike and their heads darting forward to snatch peas.
While the flying man and the clown man throw the new fuzz-balls for the dog to bring back, it joins the ballerina woman with the head of lettuce. It should not just throw the lettuce into the water the way she is throwing the peas, though. It would be hard for the ducks to eat. So it peels off a leaf and rips it up, tossing the bits out to the ducks.
They like the lettuce as much as the peas, even arguing about which duck gets to eat each leaf. But there is plenty for everyone, so it tears up more leaves, tossing out pieces of leaves in between the ballerina woman’s handfuls of peas.
This is the best day. The other asset is laughing at the ducks’ antics, and it gets to hear the other asset’s easy laughter, so relaxed and joyful, so without care or tension. And the ballerina woman is still laughing, too. It would laugh, it thinks, if laughing was something that it could do. It would join them in this, would be like them, would laugh and laugh.
Chapter 64: Avengers | You can dance (you can jive)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Dancing Queen” by ABBA.
Merry Christmas Eve, if you happen to celebrate that. ^_^
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
There’s only a small stack of english muffins left on her kitchen table, and the apricot preserves from her refrigerator waiting to be spread on the “crunchy, chewy rounds,” as Jigsaw calls them.
Today is a first for her, playing hostess during a meal instead of joining Clint and Jigsaw in their rooms. She thinks it’s gone fairly well. She and Jigsaw had brought the food in together from the main kitchen and Jigsaw had gone to wake Clint up while Natasha finished putting out the plates and cutlery, folding segments of paper towel for napkins, and even turning on some soothing ballet music.
Prokofiev isn’t her favorite composer, but she does like his work, and she’d been interested to see if Jigsaw would recognize any of it while they ate.
He hadn’t seemed to, though he can be hard to read sometimes and might have remembered a catchy measure or two. Perhaps more importantly than recognizing it, though, he had appeared to enjoy it. It hadn’t been like the opera, where he got distressed to the point of tears despite claiming to enjoy it. He’d merely moved his head sometimes to the rhythm of the music, particularly between servings or while slathering preserves on his current english muffin.
She’s glad he’d enjoyed the music. And she’s glad she chose to play the music for herself, as well.
It has been too long since she’s listened to music for its own sake. But her physical therapist has indicated her healing is progressing to the point of some reintroduction to dance. She won’t be leaping back into ballet any time soon, and won’t be doing anything strenuous for quite a while still.
But after the light training with the sparring bots of Stark’s and the leg brace he’d made her without even being asked, she’s feeling more… whole. More complete. More like herself.
And that means a lot to her. She spent long years creating this version of herself, and she likes this version a lot. That this version can resurface after a blow to her ego in the form of a crippling knee injury is still somewhat remarkable to her. She’s grateful that her current self is resilient enough to survive the complete destruction of her knee and subsequent long-term benching. Plus the prospect of never actually recovering her full mobility.
And just think, she can move beyond merely taking her walks, stretching her reconstructed joint, and engaging in weight training to restrengthen her knee. She can reintroduce dance, something so integral to her sense of self that Clint had made it her name sign.
Her feet almost itch to get into a pair of pointe shoes, but she knows better than to give into the urge. She will heal better if she takes her time about it. And she must heal completely if she is to resume being the Black Widow in truth and not just in title. She won’t jeopardize her healing over a little bit of impatience.
Ballet itself is still beyond her, even with Stark’s brace. She’ll be working on other dance forms. Standard ballroom forms, to start with. Maybe some waltzing, or a nice slow foxtrot. Pepper had suggested that maybe Rogers knew some dance forms, either from his days in the USO or before that. He and Barnes had gone out dancing back in the day. And Rogers would surely be willing to help her build up her knee strength.
It’ll be just like sparring, but practically zero impact and set to music. She cannot wait to run the idea by him, probably while he’s in the gym getting ready to deal out damage to a heavy bag. He may ask for a rain check if he’s feeling the need to really pound something into submission, but she’s fairly sure he’ll agree on the spot instead.
JARVIS is sure to have some nice waltzes they can dance to, and if Rogers for whatever reason turns out not to be able to dance after all, she can always teach him.
Her current selection comes to a triumphant conclusion, and Natasha debates starting another ballet to keep the music going or maybe trying something else that might be equally interesting to Jigsaw—Clint, she knows, won’t care either way.
Jigsaw pushes the plate of english muffins over toward her, an offer that isn’t insistent but just courteous, and then takes the second to last muffin. He signs “music” and tilts his head to the side.
“Would you like to hear some more?” she asks. When he nods, she picks up her phone and looks up a nice waltz. Strauss will do. Voices of Spring is nice. “Here you go,” she says, putting on a playlist of Strauss’s waltzes.
Jigsaw smiles as the first few notes begin to play and begins spreading preserves to the rhythm of the waltz.
“Not saying I mind or anything,” Clint says after a while. “But is there a reason for the music? Just felt like it today? Something about being a hostess instead of a guest?”
Natasha grins at him. “I can start dancing again,” she says, continuing when his eyes light up. “Nothing strenuous yet. But I’m going to ask Rogers to dance with me in the gym today.”
“Whoa, really?” Clint grins back at her. “That’s awesome!”
He gives her a high five, which Jigsaw watches with a frown, and then scoops up the last of his scrambled egg with the last of his butter-drenched english muffin. “So you’re nearly out of physical therapy, I guess?”
“Not for a while yet, but I’m making great progress. I’d ask if you wanted to dance with me, but I don’t want to get my toes stepped on.”
Clint laughs. “I don’t know how to do that kind of dancing. Put me in a club and I can shake my ass, but beyond that, I’m hopeless.”
She knows it’s a lie as well as he does. Clint has gone dancing with her a few times over the years, and he’s fine on the dance floor. It’s only when he thinks of it as dancing that he starts to trip himself up. When he’s just having fun, he’s as coordinated as can be.
But if he wants to feign inability, she won’t blow his cover.
Natasha watches Jigsaw watching Clint for a moment, and wonders what it would be like to dance with him instead of Rogers.
She’d definitely need to show him how to do it, unlike with Rogers, who probably remembers all the steps he used to know and is only better at it with his serum-enhanced limbs. But it’s a physical activity requiring coordination and even some muscle isolations in a few forms. Jigsaw might just be a very quick learner.
And with his graceful, fluid movements, seeming to move without doing so, she imagines he’d be fascinating to watch on a dance floor. Very different from the figure Bucky Barnes would have cut on a dance floor. And he’d be a powerful dancer, just as Rogers is bound to be. Tireless in all likelihood, and able to lift her with ease.
It would be interesting, she decides. Unobtainable at the moment, but interesting.
Jigsaw has—according to Clint—resumed his near-nightly habit of slinking into Clint’s bed for a few hours, curling up around him and sometimes on top of him. But other than that, Natasha has yet to see any evidence that Jigsaw would be comfortable with the proximity and physical connection required by even the most formal and stately of dances.
Unless it was Clint he was dancing with, perhaps. But that’s a moot point because Clint himself is uninterested. Or is, at least, uninterested in dancing with her. Maybe he’d change his tune if Jigsaw wanted to dance with him.
Ideas swirl in her mind for a moment, too fast and too numerous to identify, and she smiles at the mental image that is left in their wake—Clint trying to teach Jigsaw how to dance and getting redder and redder as they spin along the gym floor because he keeps getting confused about whether he’s supposed to be leading or following when dancing with another man.
“What?” Clint asks, eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking devious thoughts.”
Natasha laughs. “I’m just wondering what it will be like to dance with Rogers,” she lies. “He’s a lot more sure-footed than you ever have been.”
Clint hmphs and drains his beverage. “See if I ever take you dancing again.”
Jigsaw signs “dance” and makes his blanket question sign of “why” afterward. He adds a tap of his finger to his wrist. So he’s probably asking when they danced, or maybe when she will dance with Rogers.
“Clint used to take me dancing sometimes,” Natasha says, guessing it’s the first question. “It was fun, and he enjoyed himself, whatever he has to say about it now.”
Clint shrugs. “It wasn’t bad. But if I’m going to spend a whole night thrashing around and sweating like that, I—” He cuts himself off, doubtless because his brain has caught up to the words he’s saying, and then starts again. “I mean, it’s better to be doing a gymnastics routine or something useful. That’s all.”
She smiles her most innocent smile. “Of course,” she says. “That’s all.”
Clint groans, his cheeks beginning to flush slightly.
So she was right. He’s now thinking about all manner of thrashing and sweating, possibly where Jigsaw is concerned. She wishes him all the luck in the world with those thoughts.
Jigsaw looks from Clint to her and back and then narrows his eyes slightly in confusion.
“Okay, it’s true,” Clint says, sitting up straighter like he’s determined to start over with his thoughts or something. “Dancing is alright. It’s just not something I want to do all the time.”
Jigsaw exchanges his plate for his tablet and draws a figure with hearing aids in a ballet pose.
“Oh, hell no. Definitely not that kind of dancing,” Clint says. “I’m not that stretchy. And I like my toes too much to put them through that. Also, have you seen how tight their— Er— I, um. Don’t wear tights anymore.”
Natasha dials her smile back from gleeful grin to mild innocence.
Yes, Clint, she thinks. Explain to him about the tights. She takes a careful sip of her water.
Jigsaw only wears yoga pants an easy five days out of every seven, after all, and the jeans he wears the other two days aren’t loose by any means. The man clearly prefers his clothes to be snug and stretchy. And he’s been curating Clint’s wardrobe as well, in ways that indicate he prefers Clint’s clothes to be snug and stretchy, too.
She thinks Jigsaw would very much like to see Clint wearing tights, especially the bright purple ones he used to wear as part of his circus uniform. She’s seen pictures. Jigsaw would eat that up. And the bare arms, too. Oh yes, Clint would cut quite the figure in Jigsaw’s eyes wearing that circus outfit.
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 2:15 p.m.—
Steve racks the pair of dumbbells he’s been using for the last half hour and contemplates the next step in his routine. He’s trying to branch out a bit from just boxing as a workout of choice while on his own in here, and so far the weights section of the gym is just not very inspiring.
It’s plenty inspiring lifting weights with Sam spotting him, or when he’s spotting Sam—he really looks forward to the eye contact while spotting each other, the way he can almost feel the heat of Sam’s body close to his, the way he can read Sam’s exertion in every inch of his figure as his muscles work, but alone…
Alone, weight lifting leaves something to be desired.
Steve figures he might as well get some wraps for his hands and spend the rest of his time with the heavy bags. Just as soon as he finishes his current round through the machines, maybe.
“Getting a little extra physical therapy in?” he asks when he spots Natasha making her way over to the weights section of the gym. “I can spot you if you need it.”
“How convenient that you’re ready to take me up on my offer,” Natasha says with a little smile. “I want to go dancing, Rogers.”
Dancing? He knows that she danced ballet before; she’s mentioned it a few times over the months he’s known her, and she does move like a dancer. That was part of the training in the Red Room, ballet.
He’s also seen some ballet now—he looked it up after hearing about it. It looks… hard on the knees.
“Are you ready for that?” he asks with what he hopes is concern without condescension. “There’s a lot of jumping and knee bending from what I’ve seen.”
She beams at him, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her more obviously happy, even when throwing peas at the ducks yesterday and throwing her head back laughing. “They cleared me for light dancing on Friday,” she says. “No ballet, but some ballroom should be fine. Do you waltz?”
Steve rests his hand against the back of his head. Does he waltz? He might be better at swing or the Lindy Hop. He hasn’t danced since before the War, which is only a few years ago as far as his body knows, but he was in a completely different body at that point, too.
“I can pick it back up,” he says. “You might get your toes stepped on for the first song or two. Congratulations,” he adds as his brain catches up to the enormity of her revelation. “That’s wonderful news!”
He’d been worried that she was pushing her recovery too far too fast when she’d joined them against the sparring bots of Tony’s, but if her physical therapist is clearing her for dancing so soon after the bots, it must have been just fine. Maybe because of the brace. Maybe without it, she wouldn’t have been okay doing that.
He wonders how soon she can truly join them on the ground for missions. And he can see a bit of calculation beneath her smile, so maybe she’s wondering, too. Maybe by the time Tony and JARVIS identify the mysterious Siberia base—and assuming it’s primed for them to raid—Natasha will be up to more than just flying the quinjet out there.
In the meantime, dancing.
He used to go out dancing with Bucky all the time. And sure, they’d had other partners most of the time. Bucky would find them a pair of girls to go out with, and they’d pretend to pay more attention to their dates than to each other. And he was all knees and elbows back then, too. But he knows the steps, and he’s bound to be better at it now than he was then.
More coordinated, for sure, and surefooted. Able to dance for longer before needing to take a breather. He might not need any breathers at all, actually. Sure, it had been strenuous when he was a scrawny asthmatic, but everything’s different now.
The waltz music Natasha puts on is not the music he danced to earlier. Truly everything is different now. He was expecting something with lyrics, someone singing as they danced. Or at least a lot more brass. A band, not a symphony.
But this is classical music, purely instrumental and a bit fluttery. It does have a definite beat and rhythm, though, and he can get a sense for how they’d dance to it. It should be fun. And it’s definitely more interesting than lifting the same weights in subtly different ways to work out slightly different muscles.
They move out to the open area in the middle of the gym, leaving the blue mats piled up along the edge rather than laying them out as they’d do for other things. They aren’t sparring each other, and neither of them should be tumbling to the ground as part of the proceedings.
Steve gets himself in position and cradles Natasha’s waist with one hand, his other seeking her hand out to lightly grip it. Unlike with a song, there isn’t really a starting cue to follow, so he just looks down at her and raises an eyebrow to see if she’s ready to start.
And she doesn’t lead, but she does pull him into the first step, starting them out in beat with the music with a few basic waltz steps. One two three, one two three, and they’re in the swing of things within a few measures of music.
It comes back to him even quicker than he’d thought it would, and Natasha is a delight to dance with. Despite her still-strengthening knee and stately grace, she’s somehow more energetic than the dancing partners he remembers. Not bouncy or with wide flailing movements. Still entirely controlled and even a little cautious in how she places her feet.
But like a live wire, all the same, practically vibrating in his arms with her clear delight at being so mobile again after so long spent hobbling around on crutches, going from one seat to another, and then gradually working her way up to walking unaided.
And now dancing.
Steve feels the warmth of pride swell inside of him. She’s come a long way since the injury Jigsaw dealt her in Bakersfield. She’s put in the work—even if usually out of sight—and the results are stunning. He can feel her happiness where his hands connect with her, and he’s happy for her as well.
This should be celebrated. This is a huge milestone marking tremendous progress.
“Well, you clearly remember your steps, Rogers,” Natasha says with a laugh after a particularly daring twirl. “Do you think Jigsaw would have any muscle memory of dancing?”
Steve honestly doesn’t know.
She’s right, though. He clearly has some muscle memory of it, transferred over from the pre-serum body to this one. But it also hasn’t been that long for him. Only a few years. For Jigsaw, it’s been decades. Decades since he’s danced in anything but a desperate self-defense against an ambush of STRIKE agents. Decades since he’s even been Bucky. And there have been mind wipes between those two times in his life.
A lot of them.
Steve carefully keeps his hands light and gentle as they continue to make their way in wide loops around the gym. He won’t let his anger about that show if he can avoid it. Natasha didn’t ask about it to rile him up. She’s just curious, maybe looking for ways to engage with Jigsaw that don’t involve potting and repotting the same dozen plants in her living room.
“I’m not sure,” he finally says. “There are too many factors to consider, and it’s been a really long time for him. Why do you ask?”
“I put on some music during breakfast,” she says. “Ballet at first, then this series of waltzes we’re dancing to. He seemed to really enjoy listening, even moved along to some of the rhythm a little.”
She shrugs lightly. “I wondered if he might enjoy learning to dance. Either all over again, if he remembers some of it in his bones, or for the very first time if it’s truly all gone.”
So he was right. She’s just looking for ways to engage him, make him feel included, give him some nonviolent pastimes to enjoy that are actually also social engagements. It’s a good idea. He knows he’d have never thought of it, but Natasha would be perfect for it.
“It probably wouldn’t hurt to ask him. I hear he’s been listening to more music as part of his therapy.”
Not that Jigsaw’s therapists talk to him in any but the vaguest of terms. But Clint is a talker, and Jigsaw shares everything with Clint. It’s the workaround Steve has found for keeping abreast of Jigsaw’s therapy progress without prying or resorting to asking JARVIS to relay a basic overview.
“No time like the present,” she murmurs, her eyes twinkling with mischief.
Steve glances up—if Jigsaw has entered the gym while multiple others are present, he’ll be in the rafters, and sure enough, there’s not only Jigsaw but also Clint up there for some reason, looking more like a pair than usual.
Steve doesn’t wonder how Jigsaw got up there. He’s seen the blur of movement as Jigsaw skitters up a wall and out onto the rafters like he was born doing it and gravity doesn’t apply to him. Clint, though… Steve really needs to get Clint participating more on team training activities. He feels like he hardly knows what the man’s capable of other than the archery and impeccable aim.
He hopes they haven’t been talking about Bucky long enough or specifically enough to jeopardize any progress he’s made with Jigsaw or to sabotage any interest in music or dancing.
Natasha gives his hand a squeeze and pulls away from him with an apologetic smile. “I’m going to take a break and stretch things out. Don’t want to overdo it.”
“Of course.” He releases her hand. “This was a lot of—” Steve swallows the word he knows Jigsaw will hear and balk at. “I’ve enjoyed this a lot.”
Natasha smiles knowingly and heads toward a pile of mats to take a seat.
Steve takes the opportunity to walk over to the part of the gym directly beneath the two rafter-climbers. He cranes his neck to look up at them.
“Interested in learning how to dance, Jigsaw?” Steve gestures toward Natasha. “She can teach you.”
Jigsaw stares at him.
“It’s fine if you just want to watch, or just listen to the music,” Steve adds. “But if you wanted to be part of the music, you could dance to it with us. Or on your own.”
Or with Clint, he doesn’t add. Because he knows Natasha likes to dance, and he knows he doesn’t mind it himself, but he doesn’t want to speak for Clint.
Jigsaw shifts his position in the rafters, smoothly and without fear of losing his balance, and signs that he will listen to the music and watch them dance.
Steve nods. “Alright. You can change your mind any time.”
Jigsaw nods, and Steve heads over to the table piled with water bottles and picks one off the top.
Not bad for a session in the gym. It’s a gentler workout to be sure, but it still got his heartrate up, and he’s had an opportunity to invite Jigsaw to do something that Steve suspects he will eventually take them up on and enjoy doing. He just needs to watch for a while, to make sure there isn’t any hidden razor blade in the otherwise fascinating treat.
Steve can be patient, sometimes. And he suspects Natasha can play a much longer game, still. He wonders how long it will take to get his friend dancing again.
Chapter 65: Assets | And the wonder of it all (is that you just don’t realize how much I love you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton.
Have a weekday chapter for the holidays!
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 6:30 p.m.—
“Now I need a piece with a G sticker on it,” Clint says, squinting at the instruction manual.
No piece of carpet-covered platform is handed to him, and Clint looks up at Jigsaw, who is supposed to be handing him the parts he needs and who is instead picking Alpine up out of the box of styrofoam and cat tree parts.
“Alpine,” Clint says. “Stop helping. We’ll never get your tree assembled at this rate.”
Jigsaw smiles and sets the kitten aside before digging into the box and holding up a large flat plank of wood with carpet stapled to it.
Clint confirms that the sticker on the bottom is G, and then awkwardly puts it on top of the four F pillars, with their weird headless double-sided screws sticking up through the holes in the G plank.
It should be Cap and Wilson putting this cat tree together. They’re the ones who bought it. Sure, they ran it by Jigsaw first to get his approval, and sure, Jigsaw had been present when they bought it, and sure, they’d had it delivered to their door instead of bringing it by in person. But they’re still responsible for this mess, and they should be the ones who have to turn the mess into a cat tree.
Clint asks for the next piece on the list and starts screwing the sisal-wrapped pillars onto the carpet-wrapped ones.
“You like how it’s shaping up?” Clint asks as he works. “Think it’ll be something Alpine enjoys?”
He sees Jigsaw nodding in his peripheral vision and smiles.
“You want to put the next one together while I help wrangle the kitten?”
Jigsaw shakes his head.
Figures.
Jigsaw just wants to watch him work and snuggle his kitten while Lucky keeps out of the way curled up on the living room dog bed, worrying at his new bacon bone.
It’s actually kind of homey, Clint has to admit. It feels good to be putting something together that actually goes together like the picture on the instruction set. And it’s nice having this much life around him, between Jigsaw and the two animals. It occurs to him that he hasn’t felt lonely in months.
Maybe this is good for him. Maybe Jigsaw is good for him, like Natasha thinks. Maybe he’s good for Jigsaw, too, and isn’t just making the most of what Jigsaw has to offer him.
Alpine half-jumps and half-scrambles down out of Jigsaw’s arms and puts her paws on the side of the box again. She’s too small to get inside of the box every time she tries, but she’s a persistent little thing. It takes her three attempts at climbing up the sofa and jumping toward the box before Clint hears the crinkle of plastic that signals her successful re-entry into the box.
“If she likes the box better than the cat tree itself, I’ll be really disappointed,” Clint says, though he’s pretty sure he’d just be amused.
Jigsaw grins at him and reaches for Alpine again.
“Alright,” Clint says with a sigh. “We’re almost done. There’s a weird hammock thing next, part H.”
Jigsaw hands him the hammock, which is like if a basketball hoop were made of beige fleece and also didn’t have an opening in the bottom. Clint can see Alpine getting stuck in it and not being able to get out again. Like being in a giant waterbed that keeps moving with you so you have to rock back and forth to generate a wave to push yourself out of the bed with.
But the cat tree is designed by people who know cats better than he does. It’s probably fine. And if she gets stuck, Jigsaw can get her out.
Clint attaches the hammock and gives it a gentle wiggle to make sure it’s sturdy enough for the job. It’ll do. Alpine hardly weighs anything at all, not even a whole pound yet, so she won’t pull it down or knock it off. Probably. And if she does, they’ll write a nasty little review on the website this thing came from.
“Now just the crow’s nest thing on top.”
Clint asks for the longest of the sisal-wrapped pillars and screws it onto the top of the cat condo. The last piece is like a platform, but it has a low ledge going almost all the way around it so that Alpine will be able to curl up and have something to lean up against instead of flopping off the platform entirely.
After a minute, he stands back and surveys his work.
“Not too bad,” he says. “I think this is supposed to go in a corner and we anchor it to the wall. What room do you want it in?”
Because there are three cat trees in this living room, two of them still in boxes, and three rooms in the suite that are destined to have a cat tree in them once Clint finishes assembly.
Clint can foresee a need to call in Natasha for assistance, too. Not with the cat tree assembly. That’s pretty simple, even if it’s a pain in the ass. And he kind of likes the feeling of Jigsaw watching him as he works. He doesn’t want to give that up.
But Natasha is the one who arranged the furniture in this living room so that Clint could see Jigsaw coming from anywhere he happened to be sitting and wouldn’t keep getting startled to the point of yelping. He kind of doesn’t want to wreck her work by slapping a cat tree against a wall, and he really doesn’t want to move the furniture to make room for a cat tree only to discover that Jigsaw is constantly and accidentally sneaking up on him.
Jigsaw points to the expanse of wall to the other side of the entertainment unit from the console table by the door.
It would be an interesting place for the cat tree, yeah. Clint can see them watching TV or playing video games while Alpine plays on the cat tree just to one side. They could watch her while they watched the TV screen.
He can also see Alpine using the cat tree as a jumping off point to get on top of the TV, maybe knock things over. She’s still too little to get much of anywhere high without an assist, but a cat tree would be that assist. And he doesn’t want her falling behind the TV and getting stuck in a nest of cords.
“Hm.” Clint considers other options in the room.
There’s the area by the door, but what if they open the door and she leaps out into the hallway? Or someone else lets her out? So far she doesn’t seem to care about the door, but what if that changes?
There’s the wall by the laundry closet. That’s kind of by the kitchen, though, and it’s behind everything. They wouldn’t be able to watch her playing on the cat tree very much, and Clint didn’t go through all this effort to assemble a cat tree just for no one to see the thing in use.
“Why don’t we put it where you suggested,” Clint finally says. “And just not anchor it to the wall yet. That way we can move it around if we need to later.”
Jigsaw nods and sets Alpine on the sofa before lifting—not scooting—the cat tree to the wall beside the entertainment unit. He makes it look so simple, not an effort at all, not a strain in the slightest, and Clint allows himself to admire his roommate’s strength. And so soon after being wounded, too.
Not a moment after the cat tree is pushed against the wall, Alpine goes to investigate it, her little tail up in the air and her gait that hesitant kind of curious that is full of pauses to sniff things.
She checks the bottom part of the cat tree out for several minutes, smelling and licking the sisal, rubbing her face all over the carpet, exploring the mini tunnel at the center of the base. That had been a real bitch to get in place, feeling around for a tiny hole that an anchoring screw had to go through, and not being able to get his face close enough to confirm with his eyes.
He hopes she gets a lot of use out of it.
Jigsaw sits down by the cat tree to watch his kitten up close, and Clint starts gathering up the pieces of plastic bag that all of the pieces had been pointlessly wrapped in. He balls them up in his hands and shoves them into the trash for later. They all say things about babies suffocating and keeping the plastic out of reach, and he figures if a baby is going to suffocate, then a kitten might, too. Better safe than sorry.
He puts the little L-shaped wrench and extra screws on the kitchen counter. No idea what to do with those. Or the hardware for attaching the cat tree to the wall. But if they’re on the counter, they’re in sight, and if they’re in sight, they can’t get lost, right? Right.
Clint looks over to see Alpine climbing Jigsaw instead of the cat tree, using his shoulder as a perch from which to further inspect the layer of the cat tree that’s a bit higher up off the ground. Clint is betting she’ll get to the top of the cat tree by the time they leave for dinner, though. She’s not afraid of much of anything, and he doesn’t see the cat tree inspiring much fear.
“You know, I kind of like it there,” Clint says. “I can see it from all over the room.”
Not that it’s pretty to look at or anything. But with a cat on it, it might be pretty entertaining.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 7:00 p.m.—
It runs the fingers through the dog’s fur as it sits against the wall with the dog’s head in the lap, and it listens to the sounds in the suite of rooms that are for assets. Thump thump goes the dog’s tail. Prrp prrp goes the little cat. And splish splash goes the other asset in the other asset’s bathroom.
The other asset is just standing in the water, now. Before, the other asset had been splashing around under the water—washing the hair, maybe, or rinsing off the soap—but now the other asset is just enjoying the water.
It imagines the other asset under the water, the rivulets running clean down the planes and contours of the other asset’s torso. The other asset has a very good torso.
Strong and well-defined and healthy. Just the right amount of hardness, and just the right amount of softness. A perfect torso, and with a few marks on it to show that the other asset has healed from injuries, has suffered and persevered and made it through.
The tracksuit men had made many marks on the other asset’s torso, thick bruises from chains and thin cuts from blades, and even a few small round burns—cigarettes, it knows. It knows all about these things. There are some other, earlier, marks as well, but only a few of them. Not at all like this asset’s body, with the marks all over on both sides.
The other asset has old wounds made in battles, taken on missions, with a few from the tracksuit men. This asset, though, has old wounds from punishments and from rewards. This asset has reminders of all of the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians that ever used it and pushed into it.
It is glad that the other asset has not been pushed into or hung from meat hooks as a chandelier, has not been burned and cut up so many times. It would not want the other asset to be treated like that, not ever. And it will never let the other asset be treated like that.
The water shuts off in the other asset’s bathroom. Now the other asset will be dripping water instead of having water running so fast in small streams along the skin. Next the other asset will be patting a towel everywhere and then wrapping a towel around the hips.
Before, the other asset would have come out into the living room with just the towel, would have searched through the piles of soft clothes to wear. It would have been able to look at the other asset’s body, to trace the eyes over the other asset’s skin and admire the other asset’s shoulders and arms, the way the muscles move all along the other asset’s back.
There would only have been a few moments, a narrow window of time in which to observe the other asset so closely, but they would have been very good moments.
Now, the other asset has a closet full of soft clothes to choose from right there in the room, and will not need to come out of the nesting room at all until fully dressed. It has made this happen by putting the other asset’s soft clothes up in the other asset’s closet. It has only itself to blame for the closing of the window, the hiding of the other asset’s body.
But now it gets to look at the other asset’s form through the soft clothes that the asset wears, and the window is all day long, because the other asset is not wearing the horrible baggy pants that it hates so much or the t-shirts that are so loose it cannot see any of the other asset’s muscles working under the fabric.
It is a sacrifice of one thing—the sight of the other asset in the towel—in order to get another thing—the sight of the other asset all day long in good-looking soft clothes. A sacrifice that was worth it, even if now it has to imagine the other asset in the towel and does not get to see the other asset in the towel.
It had been able to see the other asset in a snug t-shirt while the other asset lifted weights in the training room after the afternoon session with Yasmin, and then put the pieces of the tree for cats into order. And without any pain. Order that did not come through pain.
There had been effort, though; exertion, sweat. The other asset’s t-shirt had been damp enough to cling to the other asset’s entire torso while lifting the weights, and it had been almost as good as seeing the other asset in a towel. And the other asset’s hair had curled slightly around the edges of the other asset’s face.
Beautiful.
The other asset is so beautiful, so industrious, so full of energy to put the tree for cats into order like that after lifting all the weights. The sitting down and the crouching and the getting up. The way the other asset’s thighs had moved and shifted beneath the jeans. The way the other asset’s t-shirt had revealed just a thin strip of the other asset’s skin when the other asset squatted down.
It sighs. It wishes there had been time to put the other two trees for cats into order, as well. It would watch the other asset work for hours if it was able to.
But there is a team dinner. The feeder had asked it to try to join the team for dinner instead of waiting until after the team that is not a cell has all left the dining room and kitchen area.
It is not the entire team that is not a cell tonight. The clown man and the flying man are outside of the hive building tonight, eating at a place that sells dinners. And the hamburger technician is eating with them, as well as the woman with the long red hair that it has not seen since the not-really-a-mission morning when it had killed the HYDRA operative in the hive building using his own hammer-weapon.
They are eating together, all four of them, outside of the hive building, because they are doing a thing called a “date night.” It does not know what a date night is, or why they are doing it without any of the rest of the team that is not a cell. And it does not know why a date night happens outside of the hive building.
There is a lot it does not know, and that is fine. There has always been a lot it does not know. Assets do not need to know everything. They just need to comply.
But while it does not know about the date night, it does know that the rest of the team that is not a cell will be there at the team dinner. They are not doing a date night. There will be the other asset and this asset, the ballerina woman, and the researcher with the curly hair—Bruce. It is going to be safe, even if it is not a post-mission team meal.
And because it is a team dinner, there will be triangle bread and salad and a special kind of bread that is covered with butter and sugar and cinnamon instead of cheese or garlic. It is looking forward to the special sweet bread. It is another dessert it can add to the pink book for desserts and the Dessert board on the tablet.
The other asset comes back into the living room wearing new soft clothes from the closet—not a towel, so sad—and stands with hands on hips, looking into the room.
“Aw, she’s not even halfway up!” The other asset looks at the little cat, curled up in the lower of the two carpet boxes on the tree for cats.
That is where the little cat decided to stop climbing and to instead rest for a while. It had considered putting the little cat up higher, but it did not want the little cat to be afraid or to not know how to get back down again.
It shrugs and goes back to petting the dog. The dog needs some attention after the whole afternoon spent paying attention to the little cat.
It tries to make sure that both the dog and the little cat get play time and lots of petting and attention. It does not want the dog to think that the little cat is more important than the dog. They are both very important.
“I guess she’ll climb up there, eventually,” the other asset says, coming around the sofa and crouching down to give the dog some additional pets and scratches behind the ears.
The little cat looks out at the two assets from the little hole in the carpet box and mrrps at them.
“Yeah, I’m talking about you, you silly little thing,” the other asset says. “I built a whole-ass tree for you and you’re hanging out in the trunk instead of the branches. It’s ungrateful, is what it is.”
The other asset is smiling while talking, so it knows that the other asset is not angry at the little cat, or even really complaining. It is the teasing kind of talk that the ballerina woman and the other asset sometimes make at each other. The little cat is being included in the ritual.
It smiles. The other asset likes the little cat a lot. All is well.
Chapter 66: Couples | Dreaming about the things that we could be
Notes:
Chapter title from “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic.
Happy (slightly early) New Year's Eve!
Chapter Text
Pepper
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
“Honestly, I don’t know why it still bothers me so much,” she says. “I’ve seen things before. I’ve been in situations.”
Sam sets down his glass of wine. “It’s an upsetting thing, Pepper,” he says. “I did two tours in Afghanistan, pararescue. I definitely saw some things. Was in some situations. But I still sometimes have nightmares about how Holly got her face cut open in my passenger seat after Jigsaw stole my steering wheel.”
Pepper frowns but doesn’t interrupt. Holly… Oh, yes. Holly the HYDRA recruiter Sam had tried dating before he knew anything about what was going on.
“Sometimes, you see a thing and your brain won’t let it go. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t have to be. It’s just upsetting enough that you can’t set it down.”
She nods and twirls a bit of pasta on her fork before spearing a shrimp to complete the bite. “I understand. Logically, I do. It’s the emotional side of me that just wishes I’d get over it.” She eats her perfect forkful of shrimp alfredo.
“And that’s why the party?” Steve asks. “To try to get over it?”
Pepper nods. “Partly, yes. That was the first reason, anyway.” She smiles. “Then I found some other reasons. It will be great for helping the team relax.”
Tony scoffs. “We don’t need to relax. We need to get back out in the field. I’m getting close on that email you got, Wilson. And even closer on Siberia, I can feel it. I’ll find them.”
Pepper shakes her head. “You can relax between missions, you know. You should relax between them.”
“Can’t relax too much or the Jigster will get antsy. We’ve already waited long enough.”
“I think he’s content enough with the work he’s doing with Maria,” Steve says. “He’s still looking through the S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitment lists for her, picking out anyone he recognizes or has a bad feeling about.”
“How’s that going?” Pepper asks. “We did a thorough check of everyone in Stark Industries, both direct and indirect payroll, all the contractors and agency partners. We didn’t find anyone but Harrell.”
She suspects that doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone but Harrell, though. Part of her thinks that HYDRA operatives are like Shroedinger’s cat. They both are and are not HYDRA operatives until Jigsaw sees them—and swings a hammer.
Steve swallows his bite of lobster. “It’s going well, I think. Maria always has more personnel files for him to look through.”
Sam nods. “She’s sending along introduction videos, now that Jigsaw is getting better at listening to music. Just a few seconds of each potential re-hire stating their name and a little bit about themselves, and that way Jigsaw can check if he remembers their voice from anywhere.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Pepper considers whether she could get a similar style of vetting set up. Maybe there’s a company anniversary of some sort coming up and she can couch it as an effort to put together a nice team-building project. And the background check can search specifically for recordings. They can’t add anything like that as an additional part of the application process or they’ll run into legal trouble, but either way, it’s something to think about.
“Maria is determined to avoid another Headley situation,” Steve says. “She wants all the moles dug up and ousted before anyone else can get hurt or enable an escape or a leak. She’s very devoted to the cause.”
“More devoted than we are,” Tony mutters. “We’re just passing along information for Fury and that lot to act on. Or the Feds. Or the local police. Wish we had a nice juicy base to crack open.”
“You’ll find something,” Sam says. “In the meantime, we’re training more, coming together as a team, and keeping Jigsaw on the path to recovery. It’ll work out.”
“And his therapists are still willing to stay in the Tower?” Pepper asks.
She recalls that being part of the struggle of recruiting them. The eventual successful candidates needed to be willing to work some very intense hours, in person, with a severely traumatized client. And Bruce had needed to pull from sources outside of New York, who necessarily needed lodging for the duration of their work with Jigsaw.
Sam shrugs. “As far as I can tell, yes. Bruce has been handling the details there. Yasmin, I know, is looking to stay longer. She might even be willing to move her practice to the City and relocate, though no one’s brought that up yet.”
“Well the other one might not meet with him as long, but she sure has been keeping me busy,” Tony says. “Jiggly’s speech language therapist has some very interesting ideas about apps she wants. I feel like a software developer instead of an engineer sometimes.”
Pepper smiles. He’s not complaining, she knows. Tony is eating up the new challenges as fast as Zoe can serve them to him, and then asking for seconds. He’s told her all about these apps, or at least all that she can absorb about them.
And they honestly sound like fun little apps to use as a distraction when her brain needs a break. She actually downloaded a nice public-facing crossword app after hearing Tony tell her about his Jigsaw-only version.
Even the apps he hasn’t had to create from scratch, like the AAC app, he’s had to redesign for Jigsaw’s unique needs and experiences. And while she’s not so sure he’s done that in an entirely ethical manner, she at least knows he won’t be selling the new apps or any of the programming that went into them.
Stark Industries is focused in different areas, after all, and Tony himself has a limited attention span. Best not to clutter it up with too many diverse projects. She still needs him focusing a portion of his time and attention on clean energy.
But there could be considerable goodwill to be gained by further developing Jigsaw’s speech app and marketing it for the public. Yet another thing to think about.
Sam
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
Stark takes the check when it arrives—no hesitation on the server’s part about where to set it down, as everyone recognizes Tony Stark and assumes he’ll pay—and then he passes it over to Pepper, who is already pulling out a card for it.
Part of him feels like a freeloader going out to a super fancy seafood place and having his landlord pay for the meal. He already lives rent-free in the Tower, and now he’s getting board as well as room? But most of him is just grateful and accepting of the treat, and is looking forward to doing this more often.
Getting out of the Tower. Exploring some of what New York City has to offer. Spending time with Steve in a date capacity. Even if they’ve been largely hands-off during dinner. Stark and Pepper can hold hands over the table or share food because the world at large knows that they are a couple and there’s no need to keep those displays at home.
Sam and Steve, though. Sam Wilson and Captain America, as the world would see it. That’s a different situation. No one knows that Steve is seeing anyone, for one thing. And the public interest would be overwhelming if he were discovered to have a sweetheart. And if that sweetheart was not only a man, but a Black man, there are scads of people who would be in an uproar.
Sam doesn’t give a shit about those people or their opinions. If there are bigots out there who get upset that Captain America isn’t who and what they thought he was, so be it. But he doesn’t want Steve to get swamped with more publicity than he can handle, doesn’t want Steve to be any more under the microscope than he already is, doesn’t want their relationship analyzed on the evening news.
So they aren’t hiding their relationship. But they are being circumspect. It’s… It’s not new.
Sam and Riley had needed to keep the full nature of their relationship hidden as well, lest their entire military careers implode on discovery. It hadn’t been fun then, and it isn’t fun now. But it’s in their best interests for the moment. Sam can be patient. He can wait until they’re in the car back to the Tower before he holds Steve’s hand. Can wait until they’re inside the Tower to pull Steve in for a kiss.
“Anyone up for a movie?” Stark asks. “What’s even playing right now?”
Pepper consults her phone. “It doesn’t look promising, Tony.”
“Then back home for a movie? JARVIS can play anything we like.”
“I haven’t been to the pictures in ages,” Steve says. “What are movie theaters like in the future?”
Sam grins. “Cold, dark and crowded. Loud.”
“So they haven’t changed,” Steve says.
“So that’s a no on the movie? We’re doing dinner and not a movie? Dinner and going home early?” Stark finishes his glass of wine. “Dinner and going home to watch a movie?”
Pepper smiles at him. “Why don’t we do dinner and a nice evening in?” she asks. “I’m not feeling like a movie.”
Stark shrugs. “Dinner and a nice evening in, it is. Spoilsport. Capster’s first date in this century and no movie.”
Steve just shrugs. “I don’t mind. We’ll watch a movie some other time, Tony. How about that? We could make it a movie night for the whole team.”
“Movie night for the whole team is not the same as a date night, just for the record.” Stark doesn’t seem to mind the idea, though. “Picking the movie would take hours, too.”
Pepper makes a note on her phone, and Sam can envision the invitation that will be forthcoming, along with probably twenty movies to vote on.
“What,” Sam says, “we wouldn’t be watching Star Wars?”
“We could watch Star Wars,” Stark says.
“What’s Star Wars?” Steve asks.
Pepper gives Stark a warning look and puts her phone back in her purse. “Don’t you spoil those movies for him, Tony. Steve is one of the last few people on this planet who don’t know that line.”
Steve looks slightly bewildered but more amused. “I don’t mind… uh, being spoiled?”
Sam shakes his head. “You’d mind if you knew. Trust me,” he says.
Sam can remember his own first experience watching those movies. Not the details, since that was so long ago and he’d been so young, but the way the movies had captured his attention and dragged him through emotional highs and lows. He wants all of that magic to be present and intact when Steve watches them.
Also, though, if it’s supposed to be a movie night for the whole team, that should probably include Jigsaw. And Jigsaw has gotten much better about screens when it’s his tablet he carts around, but how long can he comfortably watch a movie? Especially while potentially surrounded by a team of people he can’t be in a gym with or sit among for a quinjet flight.
“Is Jigsaw up for a movie night?” Sam asks. “He can’t handle a full team dinner yet, and having a team movie night without him might reinforce the separation between him and the team.”
“Let’s see how he does at the party and then go from there?” Pepper suggests. “There will be lots of room at the party for different small groups to break out, and that might be easier for him than sitting through a movie.”
And they should probably pick the right kind of movie, too. Jigsaw might have a better time with a less violent movie than with a violent one. Animation might be easier to watch or harder. Musicals might be catchy or off-putting, maybe even upsetting given his inability to sing along.
They’d have to make sure nothing triggering was in the movie, as well, and there’s no telling what might be triggering for him. What if it’s a perfectly harmless movie with no upsetting qualities at all, but a handler had been watching the movie once while hurting him? There’s just no way to anticipate his reactions.
As far as he knows, Jigsaw’s preferred viewing material is cake-related or focused on adorable baby animals. Sam’s not sure there are many movies out there with a similar focus and lack of plot.
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 06 October 2012 | 9:30 p.m.—
Steve waves goodnight to Tony and Pepper as the elevator doors close, taking the other couple up to their penthouse apartment, and then pulls Sam in for a kiss right there in the hallway.
“I wanted to do this all night,” Steve murmurs between kisses, his hands gently framing Sam’s face.
Sam grins against his lips. “I wouldn’t have minded,” he says, “but I don’t want the public to start hounding you for a coming-out press conference or anything.”
Steve brushes a thumb over Sam’s lower lip and looks into his eyes, their soft brown a warm tone even in the bright lighting of the hallway.
He wonders what the public relations people would even call such a press conference. He’s familiar now with the term “coming out,” but surely they’d call it something else. There’d be some other overarching purpose for the press conference and that would just be one of the questions he was asked by dozens of reporters, each hoping to be the one he chose to answer.
“Your room or mine?” he asks.
“Yours,” Sam says, reaching up to take one of his hands and guide him in the right direction. “I’m working on a macrame project and there’s string all over the sofa.”
“Macrame?” Steve asks, letting himself be pulled along the hallway. “Isn’t that for hanging plants and things?”
Sam smiles at him. “Can be. I’m just starting out. Learning the knots before I make something out of it.”
Steve makes a point to find out more about macrame. If it’s something Sam is interested in, then he wants to know all about it. Maybe even try his hand at it, so that he can understand the appeal and maybe join him in a crafting session.
And if it really is about making knots, maybe they could have some fun with it sometime. He seems to remember a whole subculture in Brooklyn back in the day that was all about tying each other up in knots. Maybe that’s still a thing. Maybe it’s even more of a thing now in the future.
They take their time changing into more comfortable clothes for lounging around in, Sam borrowing a pair of sweatpants and one of Steve’s looser t-shirts and looking very good in the resulting outfit. Very approachable. Very appealing.
Steve finds it difficult to keep his hands to himself, and doesn’t even really try to, instead caressing Sam’s arms and back as he guides Sam to sit up against him at one end of the sofa with his legs stretched out between Steve’s.
“Thanks for the evening out,” Steve says, placing a soft kiss against the side of Sam’s neck. “It was nice to be out of the Tower, but it’s even nicer being back inside, where no one is watching us.”
“I understand the feeling,” Sam says. “Back a few years ago, when I was in the Air Force, Riley and I had a thing going. For years, actually. We met in boot camp, and hit it off. But there was a rule, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. So we had to hide our relationship or get dishonorably discharged.”
Steve hmms against Sam’s neck. He hasn’t heard of this rule, but he can put together a pretty clear picture of what Sam’s talking about. Had a thing going. Had to hide the relationship. Steve’s known that Riley was more than Sam’s wingman. They’ve talked about the man off and on over the last several weeks.
“I’m sorry I’m a repeat of Riley in that regard,” he says. Sam shouldn’t have to hide his feelings or his relationships. “That we needed to keep things hidden while we were out tonight.”
Sam shifts to press himself back closer against Steve’s chest.
“It’s fine, for now.” He pulls Steve’s arms over in front of his stomach and hugs them close. “When we’re ready to go public, we will. I’m not in any rush.”
Steve’s done some reading up about the modern take on sexuality, all the flavors and shades of it that are acknowledged in the future. But he’s got a lot more reading to do before he’s ready to announce a relationship of any kind.
What is he? How does he identify?
He knows it shouldn’t matter to anyone but himself, and probably to Sam as his special person. But Steve also knows that he’s a public figure. He’s been a public figure since Project Rebirth, since the USO, since the War. He hasn’t gotten out of that role by being miraculously discovered, defrosted and sent out to battle aliens.
And public figures are public whether they want to be or not. The facts of their lives are the property of whoever can get the scoop on them the fastest, and he knows that at least a few gossip columns will be talking about an Avengers meeting at a fancy seafood place in the near future.
Captain America and Iron Man, discussing something in public over lobster bisque and steaks. Pepper Potts, well known to be riding herd on Tony Stark, clearly there to take notes. And a relatively unknown man, new to the Avengers but present at the auction that went sideways—Sam Wilson. They’ll do a little digging on him, too.
Tony’s table was carefully buffered from anyone getting close enough to overhear their conversation, but that will just fuel speculation. What were they discussing? Business or pleasure? He’s reasonably certain they didn’t give any witnesses a clue as to their real purpose, but that just means there’ll be more outlandish suggestions brought up in the tabloids.
Lack of solid information often means wilder theories flying around. But strangely, that hasn’t been the case for himself in the biographies he’s read.
Steve had finally read some of those books he’d had to sign for the auction. Biographies of himself, chosen by Pepper for being relatively solid and good-faith attempts at capturing his legend. There’d been some speculation in the biographies about his relationship with Bucky. There’d been some acknowledgement that he and Bucky had lived together in a queer neighborhood. That they’d been unusually close.
But none of the biographies had come right out and suggested that he or Bucky might be bisexual. And definitely none of them had claimed that either of them was gay. Steve hasn’t read all of the material purporting to be about his life, but what he has read has been sort of cautious, careful not to draw too many conclusions.
If he’s going to come right out there on the public stage again for something more significant than the new bananas and the taste of snack cakes… If he’s going to set the record straight—or not so straight—then he has to know exactly what he’s going to say, and how he’s going to say it. The last thing he wants is to give anyone ammunition to use against the queer community of then or now.
Especially because the truth is that he doesn’t know how he identifies. He’s never had to define it before. He started out being just Steve Rogers, and even though he’s had to get used to the idea of being Captain America instead, and of living in this new body under the scrutiny of the public, he still likes to think of himself as just Steve Rogers.
It took a lot to get him interested in a person like that. Interested in them physically. And the person in question, well, their genitals had never had anything to do with it. He had to really like a person for who they were before he thought seriously about what they looked like at all.
Sam had been an exception to that general pattern, actually, in that it didn’t take long at all for him to find Sam interesting. Steve had heard him tell off a reporter and take care of his own needs on national television instead of catering to what others wanted from him, and Steve had kind of been hooked right then, before Sam had turned around and revealed what he really looked like in those jogging shorts.
Steve had only noticed Sam’s butt at all because he’d been intrigued by Sam’s gumption and take-no-shit attitude. By his claim that he would come kick the D.C. Slasher’s butt if Captain America would only invite him to do it.
So what did that make him? Bisexual, sure.
He’d really liked Peggy, had found her attractive and had wanted to be with her, but only after she’d socked the man who insulted her in the lineup. Gilmore Hodge, he remembers. He’ll never forget how she socked him for sassing her, for his disrespect. How Hodge had gone down.
And he’d really liked Bucky the same way—only more so, much more so—long before that, because Bucky had stood up for what he believed in and had protected the weak, which, yeah, had included Steve himself at that point.
And now Sam.
But he can’t think of a single other person he’s ever liked like this, anyone else he’s thought might make the right dancing partner. It takes a lot to get under his skin this way, to make his stomach turn over in his belly when they look at him a certain way, to make his hands itch to reach out and touch them.
So it’s complicated. Bisexual, but complicated.
It can wait, anyway. The public doesn’t need to be in Sam’s business, following him around and asking prying questions. He can spare Sam that ordeal a while longer.
“You want to stay the night?” Steve asks, partly to fill the companionable silence and partly because he’s thinking maybe he’d like to fall asleep with his arms around Sam instead of a lumpy pillow.
Sam laughs in his arms. “Thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter 67: Archers | In your world of two
Notes:
Chapter title from “World of Two” by Cake.
Have an early midweek chapter (and expect probably another one later this week) because I have gotten so much writing done, you guys, so much. ^_^ My buffer is glorious and long.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 5:30 a.m.—
It’s the heat that wakes him up this time. He’s dreaming about being trapped in a sauna with no way out other than to kill his friends with a twisted up wet towel, and the steam keeps getting hotter and thicker, and he can hardly breathe, the steam is so heavy in the sauna.
Clint sighs as he realizes that he’s having a stupid nightmare—not even a scary one—and goes to roll over and try the cooler side of the bed. Maybe give his pillow a flip and get the cooler side against his face.
But he really is trapped in a sauna, and while he doesn’t have to kill Jigsaw to escape, he can’t get out without at least killing Jigsaw’s sleep.
Because his roommate is sprawled on top of him this time instead of curled up beside him, and Clint can’t even lift the covers to get a little airflow because Jigsaw is on top of the covers for some reason instead of under them where he belongs.
He can move his legs, though, his feet. Lucky isn’t in the bed with them, and Alpine is likewise nowhere to be seen. Probably in the living room exploring her cat tree.
Clint pokes a foot out from the covers and revels in the chill air that blows softly over his toes. Maybe that’ll be enough relief that he can fall back asleep.
Part of him wants to move his free hand up to run his fingers through Jigsaw’s hair. Just to see what would happen. Would he wake up? Or is he already awake because Clint woke up and Jigsaw’s a light sleeper? Maybe he’s asleep and would sleep through having his hair touched.
There’s no way to tell without doing it, and the little shit part of Clint’s brain is envisioning the possible results of his actions and getting a kick out of it. The rest of Clint’s brain is telling him to keep his hands to himself because Jigsaw might sleep through concepts of personal space, but no one’s really played with his hair except to grab him, probably.
The last thing he wants is a triggered Jigsaw in his bed in a wild panic. They can both skip that possible response.
Clint does inch his free arm over to the nightstand, though, to grab his phone. If it’s late enough in the morning, he might just try to stay awake. He could surprise everyone by greeting the dawn voluntarily. But if it’s before six…
Aw, phone. It’s before six. That’s not fair. He’s really awake now and he’ll only just manage to fall asleep before Wilson comes to get the dog, which will kind of wake him up a bit, and he might as well just stay awake after all.
He can at least play a game on his phone while he waits for it to really be morning. No sense in trying to go back to sleep only to get woken up by Wilson and then again by Jigsaw coming back from his therapy session with breakfast in tow.
The game he chooses makes a stupid chime sound before he remembers to turn the sound effects off, and Clint grimaces when Jigsaw shifts around in response to that.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I’ll turn the sound off.”
Jigsaw raises his head from Clint’s chest and props his cheek on his left fist, looking down at him. He doesn’t look bleary-eyed or tired at all, Clint notes. If anything, his eyes are sharper and more alert than usual, and Clint hopes he hasn’t startled his roommate.
Ha. Roommate. Roommates do not spend more nights a week in bed with each other than in their separate beds. He’s not sure they’re boyfriends or partners or anything, but they’re definitely more than roommates at this point. Even if Jigsaw is only climbing into bed with him as a form of nightmare relief.
And roommates do not hold hands or sit that close to each other on the sofa. Roommates might offer a shoulder to cry on, but they don’t offer each other food as often as Jigsaw hands him things to eat. Roommates might rearrange each others’ closets, but Clint hasn’t ever had a roommate who did his laundry and made sure he wore nice things. He’s had a girlfriend once who did that for a while before getting pissed off at him. And Bobbi used to do that, before the divorce.
Clint holds in a sigh that Jigsaw will only want an explanation for that he does not want to explain. He’s totally taking advantage of this whole situation. Getting nightmare protection services. Food delivered practically in bed every morning. Laundry services all the way to folding and hanging. He’s getting a dog and even a cat out of this.
Roommates with benefits, maybe. The least he can do is not be an obnoxious perv and push for more than he’s already getting out of this. Things that Jigsaw can’t provide or would be upset by. Things others have done to Jigsaw that were absolutely not cool. Things that Jigsaw might conflate with those not-cool things.
If all he’s known is abuse, how will he be able to tell what the good stuff is?
Natasha was right about the hand holding. Jigsaw loves that. Seeks out his hands whenever they’re not actually needing to do something like sign or eat or play video games. And Jigsaw’s eyes light up whenever Clint reaches for his hands. He doesn’t even mind it when Clint clicks his fingernails in the grooves of that metal hand. Clint would have imagined that felt weird or was annoying, but Jigsaw just smiles.
Maybe Natasha is also right about playing around with Jigsaw’s hair. It’s definitely long enough to do stuff with. Past his shoulders now, and no sign that it’s irritating him enough to cut it off. But also no actual use of those hair ties. He’s seen Jigsaw stuff them into a pocket when he’s wearing jeans, and he’s seen Jigsaw play with them, stretching them and twisting them around in his fingers.
But not putting his hair up in a ponytail. Maybe the metal hand catches on his hair when he tries. Maybe he didn’t really understand Clint’s horrible explanation of how to do it. Maybe he just doesn’t like the way having his hair tied back pulls on his scalp. There’s lots of possible reasons for it.
“You, uh, want to see what I’ve got on my phone?” Clint asks after he realizes that Jigsaw is still staring at him. “It’s just a game. No fun, I promise.”
He turns the phone to face Jigsaw and then blinks when Jigsaw moves the phone away and resumes staring at Clint’s face.
It’s too dark to make out the true colors and contours of Jigsaw’s face just by the light of his phone, but Clint knows full well what color his eyes are, and he can see the lashes that frame them very well from this angle.
And he can see the cleft in Jigsaw’s chin under the faint blurring effect of the facial hair that will probably go away again the next time Jigsaw showers, because he doesn’t shave every day like Clint does now. Jigsaw lets a few days go past between each shave, and Clint has yet to see a length of beard that doesn’t look good on him.
And above that chin are the lips Clint consciously steers his eyes away from, because they are kissable lips, plump and inviting, and Clint is absolutely not going to kiss his roommate. Jigsaw would not go in for that, he knows it. It’s totally invasive, completely unprompted, and Jigsaw hasn’t had a lot of good things going on with his mouth that didn’t involve food.
The light of his phone flickers off and Clint is stuck staring up at a dark blur in his otherwise dark room. Which sucks, because he knows Jigsaw can still see him with that super soldier sight of his, can at least see him well enough to know which part of Clint’s face he’s looking at in any given moment, and Clint can’t see him back.
What if he’s looking at Clint’s lips? That’s a sign in most people. It’s a kind of unspoken invitation, if two people are staring at each other’s lips intensely enough. It gets you out of having to ask if you can kiss someone, as long as you pay attention while going in for the kiss and make sure you pull back if they don’t seem into the idea the closer you get.
Clint tries to keep his breathing steady, even if he knows he can’t do anything about the heartbeat that maybe—hopefully not, but maybe—Jigsaw can feel through his ribs.
He’s about to say something stupid—he doesn’t even know what, other than that it would be stupid—when Jigsaw moves away from him and slithers off the bed to go to the hallway.
Clint lets out a huge breath—so much for steady breathing—and slides his hearing aids in. There’s Wilson at the door, then, picking up Lucky to take for a romantic dawn walk in the park with Captain America.
Maybe that’s something Clint should have asked about instead of the game on his phone. He could have suggested they take Lucky for a walk, and too bad Wilson, the dog’s already been for walkies.
It could be romantic, maybe. He’s not sure how to make walking a dog romantic. Romance was never one of his strong suits in a relationship. That failure on his part was the end of a few relationships, where he just couldn’t seem to get it together no matter how many online articles he read about how to be romantic.
It’s probably a good thing that Jigsaw doesn’t know about romance, or he’d be upset at what he was missing out on.
Except they’re roommates, yeah. Not boyfriends. Roommates. With benefits.
Clint drags his pillow over the top of his head and groans into it. What the hell is he doing?
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
The elevator today takes her down instead of up to the range. She opens her mouth to ask about that—is the range off limits because someone else booked it, since she has an earlier appointment than her usual ten o’clock?
And JARVIS must be reading her mind.
“Agent Barton has decided that your meeting will be held in the gym level of the Tower today, Ms Bishop.”
Wow! The actual gym that Hawkeye uses to train more that just archery. Are they branching out in her training as well? Will she be learning cool new archery moves beyond different ways to hold the bow, nock the arrow, and draw? She’ll be training like an Avenger in a gym that Avengers train in.
How exciting!
The elevator drops her off at what must be the very bottom level of the Tower, and Hawkeye is waiting for her there—and in the same uniform he’d worn when he saved her life. Sleeveless and snug, with a maroon chevron over the front, archery gloves, even the boots.
Kate stares.
“Stark has some new toys,” Hawkeye says. “I thought it might be a bit of fun to go up against them, see how you do aiming at targets that really move.”
He leads her past a locker room and into the gym proper, and it is huge. She’s seen some high quality private gyms in her time, but this one has ceilings like a warehouse and enough sections to be a public gym even though it’s only for a handful of people to use.
And there in the middle of the gym are a trio of purple metal robots, looking a bit humanoid but not enough to be creepy. Their eyes are dark, so she assumes they haven’t been activated yet. Tony Stark made these, after all, and he has a thing for “glowing equals powered on” when it comes to the Iron Man suits, so it makes sense he’d have the same effect for his robots.
“Those are so cool!” she says. “Can I touch them?”
“Sure,” Hawkeye says. “You’ll be shooting at them, too, so go wild. They’re hard to break.”
“Wow,” Kate says, running a hand along a carapace. “The robotics team at university would go absolutely wild for a chance to even be in the same room as these guys.”
Hawkeye gins. “Well lucky you, huh, Katie-Kate.”
She turns around to look back at the rest of the gym, taking in the climbing wall to one side, the parallel bars, the uneven bars, the gymnastics mats. There’s a whole parkour course. A boxing ring. And—
There’s a movement in the ceiling and she blinks. “Is… Is he supposed to be up there?”
It isn’t that she objects to Jigsaw in any way, but the rafters are scary-high up there, and…
Hawkeye looks up where she points. “Jigsaw decided to join us again, yeah. He’s fine.”
What if he thinks she doesn’t feel safe around Jigsaw now that she knows about the whole serial killer thing. But she trusts Hawkeye, and Hawkeye trusts Jigsaw, so she’s not afraid. Anyway, he’s an Avenger now, and they wouldn’t put just anyone on the team.
“I mean,” she says quickly, “aren’t there bleachers to sit on or something? What if he falls?”
Hawkeye laughs. “If he falls, I pity the floor.”
Kate waves up at Hawkeye’s roommate charity case-turned-Avenger, and the man waves back at her, wiggling his fingers rather than waving with his whole hand. He looks at home up there somehow, despite it being a very long way to fall if he slips. She’s not even sure how he got there. The rock wall doesn’t connect to the ceiling and none of the rafters pass over it close enough to jump to.
Well, it’s none of her business. Everyone deserves some privacy, after all.
She turns her attention back to her hero and gets ready to learn the shit out of this weekend’s lesson. She only has a few left, and she doesn’t want to waste a single minute if she can avoid it.
Hawkeye asks JARVIS to set the robots up, and the three of them light up and then scamper into a triangle formation, hunched a little and waiting for something.
“Right, first off, we’re just going to go on hitting them with the arrows,” he says. “Don’t worry about breaking them. There’s more where these came from, and they repair themselves as we go.”
That is so, so cool.
And he’s not even exaggerating, she soon discovers. When she lands an arrow in a joint and hears a bit of sizzling, that robot hops back behind the other two and an actual piece of purple metal with some cords hanging out of it flies across the gym and latches onto the damaged robot.
If these things were weaponized, they’d be nearly impossible to defeat, she thinks. They just keep rebuilding themselves as they break down, and even work on each other’s damage when it’s too hard to reach or too complicated to fix on their own.
Eventually, she’s got the hang of anticipating their movements and can hit them most of the time. Her arrows do ricochet sometimes, but her bow doesn’t have the same draw weight as Hawkeye’s, so there’s less force behind her arrows. She makes a point to aim for the joints instead of anything smooth or curved.
And then they’re combining things. Striking new poses, taking up new positions, simulating a battle where they have to keep moving and can’t just stand in place firing into a single target. It’s exhilarating. She’s out of breath almost the whole time, but in a good way. And her arms and back are burning from the exertion of it, and her butt.
She can see why Jigsaw chose to be up in the rafters for this, too. Because as the robots move, and as she and Hawkeye move, there’s no telling where an arrow will actually be going once it’s loosed. They have to stop and collect their arrows from all over the gym. It’s not at all like on the range where there’s only one direction they’re shooting in and the arrows are all ending up in the same spot.
“Is this like in battle?” she asks. “Do you have to go collect your arrows?
Hawkeyes nods. “That’s the one thing that sucks about it. Limited ammunition, trying to find all your arrows, running out at the worst moment.”
She nods, imagining being on an actual battlefield and picking up her arrows, sometimes having to plant a foot in an enemy and yank the arrows free. It’s not as pretty as shooting the arrows, but if she’s going to be a hero someday, she might need to do this.
“Time for some inverted poses, I think. Mix it up a bit.”
Kate gawks. “Inverted poses? Like, upside down and using our feet?”
“Upside down yes, feet no. It’s possible, but we’re not doing that.” Hawkeye leads her to a smooth metal pole next to some other climbing equipment. “I like to keep my shoes on if I can manage it.”
He shoulders his bow and shimmies up the pole like it was made of velcro, and then flips upside down and readies his bow again, hanging there by his legs wrapped around the pole like he’s part bat or something.
And he makes every shot he takes, too. Even when the robots move around, even while he’s upside down, even as he uses his core muscles to raise himself partly up to take some shots.
It’s amazing. And he’s going to teach her how to do it!
And it is not anywhere near as easy as he makes it look, even when she uses his quiver that keeps the arrows in once she’s inverted.
She can’t manage to climb the pole, or to stay up when he helps her, but she can climb a ladder-like thing and tip herself over while he steadies it, and all the blood rushes to her head and makes her ears throb in time to her heartbeat. It’s hard to concentrate, hard to aim, hard to nock the arrow or draw the bow.
Everything is harder, and her first arrow goes so wildly off target that can’t see it and feels downright embarrassed to be wasting Hawkeye’s time like this.
But eventually, she starts to get the hang of it, and the bots start to play defensive strategies to avoid getting shot full of arrows.
She doesn’t even know how long they’ve been down here in the gym when they finally collect arrows for the last time.
“That was amazing!” She jiggles her quiver to situate her arrows more uniformly in it. She’s missing one still. “The robots, the climbing, the obstacle course. Can we do that again next week?”
“Sure thing, Katie-Kate.”
Hawkeye looks over her shoulder and she turns around to find that Jigsaw is holding out her remaining arrow. Had it gone up into the rafters? Had he caught it? Or had he just happened to see where it had gone?
Before, she’d have been sure it was the last thing, because even having a metal arm wouldn’t make anyone fast enough to grab an arrow mid-air. Not unless they were like Captain America or something, which he… wasn’t. But now she knows he is .
And she can’t quite see how he came down from the rafters without having jumped or flown or something. So he’s definitely like Captain America. Even without the insider information in that article, she has her own eyes to believe now.
“Thanks,” she says, reaching out to accept the arrow.
Jigsaw hardly has eyes for her, though. He’s staring at Hawkeye like he wants to take that uniform off and see what’s underneath, and…
Oh, they’re roommates.
Kate wonders how she didn’t put that together before. She’s had a couple of opportunities to observe Jigsaw, and he’s always looking at Hawkeye even when he’s praising her improvements.
Maybe it only started as a charity thing and now it’s something more.
She glances over at her hero, and yeah, he knows he’s being looked at like that, and doesn’t seem to mind. It’s definitely something more.
Huh. She’s just learning all kinds of things. Bidding on Hawkeye’s time was the best decision she’s ever made!
“Hey, uh,” Hawkeye says as they head back through the locker area toward the elevator. “We might be going on a mission sometime soon, may be gone a few days. How do you feel about cats and dogs?”
Is… Is Hawkeye asking her to pet sit? During a mission? A few days? Kate tries to tamp down her excitement. Her apartment is pet-free, so she’d have to come here. She’d have to—ha, “have to”—stay here in Avengers Tower to petsit for them. For a few days.
“I love cats and dogs,” she says, and it’s not even a lie. She does love dogs. And cats are… they’re not bad. Just maybe a little standoffish.
She watches as Hawkeye and Jigsaw have a conversation with their hands. It’s fascinating to watch. Hawkeye’s motions are sure but steady—another thing he’s an expert at, clearly. Jigsaw’s are bursts of fluid motion that’s almost hard to keep track of, but interspersed with pauses where he’s thinking or planning out his next motion.
Maybe sign language is new to Jigsaw. She wonders how he used to communicate if not by sign language, since he doesn’t talk. Writing, probably. That’s how she’d do it. Type on her phone and show her screen, maybe. Her handwriting isn’t always that legible.
Then Jigsaw is studying her very carefully. Uncomfortably so, even. She’s a bug under the glass and he’s looking at every single hair on her bug legs. Finally, after what feels like several minutes but can’t have actually been that long, he nods.
Kate lets out a sigh of relief. Whatever that was, she passed.
“I mean,” Hawkeye says, “if your classes and stuff wouldn’t suffer any, we could definitely use some help with pets while we’re out. We could put you up in a guest room, put everything you need in there, have a car drive you to your classes and stuff. Wherever you needed to go.”
“Sure!” Kate grins. This is actually a thing that’s happening! She might get to stay overnight in Avengers Tower, watching Hawkeye’s pets! “I’d love to.”
“Great.” Hawkeye claps a hand over her shoulder as they get in the elevator. “You have time to meet Lucky and Alpine today, or do you have somewhere to be? That’s the deal—Lucky has to okay you first.”
Kate’s whole stomach is one big flapping butterfly in her torso. Is she… is she going to see Hawkeye’s room? Meet his pets? She controls her breathing the best she can, and nods. “I’ve got time,” she says. “Lots and lots of time.”
“Awesome. ‘Cause I really don’t know when we’d be leaving, and it’ll be pretty sudden when we do get the green light.”
Hawkeye pushes the A button on the elevator, and they zoom up, up, up.
The Black Widow is in the hallway when they get out of the elevator, carrying a small cactus in a bright red pot.
“Hey ‘Tasha, guess what?” Hawkeye says.
She raises an eyebrow at the three of them. “You found someone to watch Lucky and Alpine?”
Wow, she’s good.
Hawkeye confirms her answer and then they’re moving further down the hall while the Black Widow slips through a door—maybe to her room. Do they all live together on various halls like in an apartment complex? That is so cool.
A few doors down, Hawkeye pauses and opens a door, and there’s a yellow dog coming through the door and turning excited circles in greeting, getting its ears scratched and then sniffing at her feet and the bottom of her quiver. The dog looks more like a Lucky than an Alpine, and it would make sense for the dog to be the one whose sniff test she has to pass.
“Hi there!” Kate says brightly, reaching out a hand to be smelled. “Oh, you’re a good dog, aren’t you?” She crouches down to get her face licked. The collar, she notes, has a red star tag that says LUCY on it, which is weird, but only confirms that the dog is Lucky.
“Well, I’d say she passes, Jigs. How about it?”
Kate looks up to see Jigsaw nodding, though still a little leery. He makes a few signs that Kate can’t read in the slightest, and then disappears into the room.
“Why don’t you come in, Katie-Kate. He wants to make sure you know how much to feed and when, and all that. And you can meet Alpine.”
“Are they Jigsaw’s pets?” Kate asks as she stands.
“Yep. I just get to live with them.” Hawkeye grins. “It’s a pretty good deal.”
There’s a cat tree over by the TV and gaming consoles—is Hawkeye a gamer?—and a tiny white scrap of fluff that must be Alpine scrambling down from the tree and trotting toward her. And there’s another two gigantic boxes in there, too, with pictures of cat trees on them. Maybe they’re still setting things up. The kitten looks really young.
“Can I pick the kitten up?”
“Sure. You’ll be playing with her eventually. Might as well get introduced. That’s Alpine.”
Kate scoops Alpine up and follows Hawkeye further into the room to the little kitchen by the wall of windows. This is going to be so good. She can’t believe she’s in Hawkeye’s living room! Hawkeye’s kitchen! It’s like a dream come true. Getting the inside scoop on her hero like nothing she could have imagined.
Chapter 68: Clint | I’m going under (but I’m not giving up, I’m just giving in)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Never Let Me Go” by Florence and the Machine.
I told myself I wouldn't post this until Thursday, but... it's Thursday somewhere?
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
The second cat tree is coming together much faster than the first one. Probably because he has a sense for how the pieces are going to fit together now that he’s put a whole tree together with pieces that are similar, if not the same. But in any case, he’s already halfway done with this thing and it’s been nowhere near as tedious as the other one was.
“Well,” Clint says as he twirls the little L wrench around in circles to tighten a screw. “How are you feeling about Katie-Kate? Confident? Worried? Somewhere in between?”
Jigsaw holds up one finger and signs that Lucky liked her, and Alpine, too.
That’s clearly the important part. Not whether Kate is likely to remember all the feeding instructions or how the new pine pellet litter situation works. That appears to be a given in Jigsaw’s book, which is good, because Clint doesn’t quite get the weird puppy pad plus double litterbox system Wilson had found online and helped set up when the boxes and stuff arrived yesterday.
Apparently, there’s practically no mess and no need to ever fully replace the pine pellets? And it’s really cheap, though that hardly seems to matter here in the Tower. And it does smell like pine in the room, which is an improvement over the weird perfume that the no-clump clay had.
Clint is betting they’ll end up with a fancy robot taking care of the litterbox, just as soon as Alpine is heavy enough to set off the sensors and not get scooped up with the poops. There’s no way Stark would let something like a litterbox go unmechanized for very long. Probably something like a roomba with a rake. Maybe in purple.
“Yeah, I think she’ll do great.” Clint digs around for the right set of sisal-wrapped pillars—two of the F pillars, and one of the B pillars again—and starts adding them to the places indicated on the instructions.
When he’s got those screwed in, he looks over his shoulder at Jigsaw, who is lounging in the middle of his pillow fort, leaning against the wall with Alpine on his shoulder and Lucky curled up across his legs, and smiling like he enjoys the view.
“You really decided not to even help with this one, huh?” Clint asks.
Jigsaw indicates the dog and the kitten, both of which are out of Clint’s way, and signs that he’s helping.
“Uh-huh. Sure. That counts.” Clint gives him a smile to reassure him that he’s teasing and not actually disgruntled, and then resumes building the tree.
This is the longest he’s spent in Jigsaw’s room without actively trying to talk him into not murdering anyone. Usually, this is Jigsaw’s own personal space and even Jigsaw himself hardly ever spends time in it other than to nap on occasion. He doesn’t really sleep the nights in his pillow pile anymore.
Probably, this cat tree won’t get much use, either. Alpine prefers to be wherever people are, so that’s the living room or Clint’s room. But who knows. Maybe she’ll decide this tree is the best tree.
“Where do you want this thing in here, anyway?” Clint asks as he fastens the L-shaped platform over the top of the pillars with another pair of pillars and a screw for the top of the third pillar. This thing is so fucking tall. Clint’s going to need a step stool for the top platform if he has to screw anything down on top of it.
Jigsaw points to the corner farthest from the door, along the wall that has his closet door.
“Nice. You’ll be able to see at a glance if she’s in here, and she can jump off into the pillows whenever she wants.”
Jigsaw nods with a smile while Alpine climbs down into his arms and props her front paws on his chin so that she can more easily lick his nose.
Yeah, definitely a cozy way to wrap up the morning. First some awesome training time with Kate, who is getting impressively better each time—must be spending loads of practice time between their sessions—and then some cool-down action with this cat tree. At this rate, Sundays are shaping up to be some of his favorite days. He’s never bothered to have a favorite day before, mostly because all days were largely the same to him.
This schedule thing might be working out.
He can feel Jigsaw’s eyes on him as he works on the upper portions of the cat tree, reaching up overhead and fastening a little rope under the top platform for Alpine to play with. Nothing that wobbles easily and nothing that jingle-jangles. Jigsaw has good taste in cat trees.
Clint tosses the extra bits back in the box with the plastic bags the parts were all wrapped in for some reason. If they need an L-wrench thing or any of the anchoring things, they’ve already got some in the kitchen. They probably won’t need to anchor all three trees. Maybe not even one. Alpine is tiny and no one else will be climbing up there.
Clint gets the box flaps closed so that neither of the animals get in there and suffocate in plastic, and then stands back to admire his work. It’s not a bad job, if he says so himself. Came together in record time, no false starts along the way like there had been with the first tree when he’d grabbed the wrong pillars thinking they were all the same, no stupid tunnel hoop to try to add to the bottom.
Yep. A very solid cat tree put together with precision. Clint mentally pats himself on the back. He is the builder of cat trees. No one in this whole Tower has put together this many cat trees, probably. No one else really strikes him as a cat person, anyway.
“What do you think?” he asks, turning to include Jigsaw in his field of vision.
Jigsaw gives him a thumbs up and then gestures to the pillows beside himself, a clear invitation to join him if there ever was.
And it does look comfortable. It always has. And he could use a nap, sure, if there’s time before lunch. They usually eat pretty late, anyway, after the others finish up. Alpine is scrambling out of the pillows to investigate the new construction in the room, and Lucky clearly already sensed an impending nap and got a head start.
If Jigsaw can come curl up in Clint’s bed, isn’t turnabout fair play? Jigsaw clearly doesn’t mind. He’s invited him, and not for the first time. The pillows piled up on that mattress have looked comfy since he first piled them on, the night they moved in. What’s the harm in it, really? There isn’t any. They’re spooning at night a solid eighty percent of the time, and cuddling on the sofa probably on a daily basis. And there was Thursday night, with Jigsaw melted against him on the sofa sobbing his heart out.
They’ve been moving at a snail’s pace with this relationship, not even kissing yet, but they’re here by now. Right? Right. It’ll be fine. He’s been invited. It’s not like he’s pressing for more than Jigsaw is ready to offer him.
Clint pulls his hearing aids out and thinks about maybe putting them on the serving platter on the floor that acts as Jigsaw’s nightstand. It’s not as secure from kittens as his actual nightstand, though, and there’s no telling what Alpine will consider to be a toy. She could get hurt if she swallowed one, if she’s even big enough to do that. If she swallowed part of one, then.
He opts to shove them into his pocket instead, and just hopes they don’t get crushed. Stark made him five new pairs, though, back when he stepped on the one a little over a month ago. It’s not like crushing another pair will hurt anything. It’ll be fine.
Clint comes around to the side of the pillow fort Lucky isn’t curled up on and gets down to his knees to crawl into the pile of pillows and tangled blankets—and one of his shirts, for some reason. It’s really more of a nest than a fort, if he’s going to be accurate. And it’s comfy. These are softer pillows than his, and the pillowcases are some kind of soft jersey instead of cotton.
He’s about to shift around to sit beside Jigsaw up against the wall, but Jigsaw instead shuffles down to join him in lying down in the pile, and it’s definitely nap time the way Jigsaw snuggles up close to him. Clint pushes the stuffed shark out of the way and dislodges the tennis ball that Lucky must have brought in at some point. It’s definitely nice and cozy, and the way Jigsaw is sighing into his shoulder says that Jigsaw feels just as cozy.
Clint wonders if he can actually take a nap, or if he’ll just be dozing a little, resting with his eyes closed and trying hard not to put too many moves on his roommate. Either is probably fine. It’s early enough in the day still that it shouldn’t keep him up even longer at night if he does fall asleep.
And to keep himself from putting any moves on Jigsaw… Clint shifts around to be on his side, turned away from Jigsaw but pushing back against him to let him be the big spoon. Jigsaw obligingly pulls him closer and smiles against the nape of his neck.
Excellent. Now Clint can run his fingers along Jigsaw’s arm and not think about going in for a kiss because there’s nothing but a pillow and a shark for him to kiss. Everything is perfect, especially the feeling of Jigsaw’s lips at his neck and the way his hand drifts up to run along the top of Clint’s left shoulder, the metal warm and smooth and lightly massaging along his trapezius.
Yes, this is exactly perfect, with the hint of a massage, the light petting over his t-shirt, the softness of the pillows and blankets cradling him from head to toe. He can understand now why Jigsaw went for the “more is more” strategy when it came to soft things piled up on his mattress. And he is definitely going to be falling asl— Oh.
Jigsaw’s thumb finds a knot, and suddenly this is not a light flutter of warm fingers gently pressing down along his back and shoulder to lull him to sleep. This is the good stuff. This is a legitimate massage now, with all the digging and pressure, and Clint knows he’s made a mistake. Not only is this the good stuff, the stuff you have to pay a specialist for, but he might not be able to get enough of it.
He can’t remember the last time he was booked in for a massage due to muscle tension and all the rest, but it had been through S.H.I.E.L.D., he knows. It wasn’t like he went out and pampered himself. But he’s being pampered now. Also, Jigsaw is really good at this, gently urging him onto his stomach and extending the area he’s paying attention to. It’s like he knows exactly what he’s doing.
And Clint can’t think of any reason for Jigsaw to be familiar with massage therapy—he’d sell his bow and all his arrows if HYDRA had ever given him a nice massage. But Jigsaw does know anatomy like very few non-surgeons do. He’d know where the muscles were bunching, and why and how to unbunch them. And maybe he gave himself massages sometimes to chase away pain.
Whatever it is, Clint can imagine those fingers all over his back, not just at his shoulders and along the sides of his neck and spine, kneading at his muscles and setting things loose. It’s just another thing he shouldn’t be thinking about and would never ask for. Because how the hell could he ever return the favor?
Jigsaw would never lie there and let someone push on his back. Giving him a back rub like this might even wreck whatever’s going on in his back underneath the skin, with all the metal arm attachment points. What if Clint hurt him somehow? What if Jigsaw felt trapped or he panicked? And what about all the scarring? Did that hurt still? Would trying to massage the pain away only make it hurt more?
And can Clint bear to put his hands on that C-BAR signature and confront his name in Jigsaw’s flesh like that? He might want to get his fingers on his roommate’s skin, but the thought of his name there sickens him. And how is that for an asshole thought? It’s not like Jigsaw went out and got himself tramp stamped for the giggles. He didn’t choose anything about that. And here’s Clint judging him for it?
Except it’s not judgment of Jigsaw, he knows. It’s that sickening thought of “what if it did stand for Clint Barton?” He’s had dreams, nightmares, where he carved Jigsaw up. Not many of them, thank fuck, but his brain has found ways to include Jigsaw in the list of people he hurts even if his nightmares do remember the way his arrow had missed the target when that target had been Jigsaw outside of Chapman’s window.
Does Clint deserve this neck and shoulder rub that’s turned into a massage? No. Not in any way. But despite that, despite his inability to return the favor, despite getting—as always—more than he’s giving in this relationship, here he is. And it’s good. Damn, it’s so good.
Clint isn’t sure what wakes him up, but he comes to facedown in some of the softest pillows he’s ever experienced, feeling blissed out and loose and floppy, with no idea what time it is. He’s pretty sure it’s still Sunday, but is it lunch? Did he miss lunch? And whose— Oh. Stuffed shark. This is Jigsaw’s pillow fort. Right. The massage.
Clint pulls his limbs underneath himself and pushes himself up to his hands and knees—and it takes effort to move his jelly muscles the way he needs to move them to accomplish this. But he’s alone in the room, and there’s a limit to how long he should stay in someone else’s room, probably. He’s probably already past the limit.
Mmm. Pizza. That might be what woke him up. The smell of pizza, so greasy and meaty. Glorious pizza. It must still be lunch, and Jigsaw must have gone to get it. That’s why he’s alone, marinating in softness and the residual heat of his roommate’s proximity.
Clint manages to get to his knees, and from there to his feet, feeling like every piece of his body is connected to a cloud by a thin, soft filament. Buoyant. He feels like he’s floating. That’s it. He’s not heavy at all, despite how his limbs are partly liquid. He’s sure he’d float in water, just bob along the surface like a humanoid life preserver.
He yawns and reaches into his pocket for his hearing aids, stumbling out of Jigsaw’s room and into the hallway while he puts the hearing aids back in.
Oh. Natasha is there, too. She’s the one with the pizza boxes. Did she bring them lunch, or… There’s a pot of something on the table as well, so Jigsaw must have gone with her to fetch lunch. Right.
And she’s giving him a look. A Look, actually, worthy of the capital letter. One of those long, measuring looks that digs deep down inside and pries up all the secrets. Clint wonders what secrets of his she’s pulling out of the water with her eyes. He doesn’t think he really has any secrets from her at this point.
But just in case, he straightens his t-shirt and pulls his hair into something kind of like a decent shape. Tries to act like he’s not gliding on the air and surrounded by fluff, like he’s not made out of clouds and only tenuously connected to the earth.
“Hey ‘Tasha,” he says. “Guess it’s lunchtime?”
“Past lunchtime. You didn’t come to the kitchen with Jigsaw, so we brought it here.”
She looks him up and down, still trying to piece together exactly what she’s looking for, clearly. Clint wishes her luck with that. She does look more contemplative than judgmental, though, so he probably hasn’t fucked anything up too badly. Yet. Give him time.
“So I get yummy pizza,” Clint says. “What gross slop are you two eating?”
That gets her to abandon the search. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and then sets his pizza down on the table beside the pot of mystery food.
“The rest of us are having vegetarian gumbo with a new batch of cornbread. Different recipe with actual pieces of corn in it, according to Rogers. And jalapenos. You’re welcome to have some.”
Clint makes a face. “You can keep the gumbo unless there’s shrimp and sausage in it. I might have some cornbread. Is there butter?”
“In your fridge, yes.”
It isn’t until after they’ve eaten that Natasha returns to the apparent hunt for information.
“So the Bishop girl agreed to watch Lucky and Alpine,” she says as she butters her last piece of cornbread.
“Yep. So we’re set for whenever we head out to Siberia.” Clint debates whether he wants another piece of pizza. He kind of doesn’t, but it tastes so good, he might just have another piece and be uncomfortably stuffed afterward.
“I figure it took about a week to find the North Carolina base,” he says as he grabs another piece. “It’s been about a week on this Siberia thing, too, so we’ll probably see some movement soon. Better to have her in pocket than need to scramble last minute, right?”
Natasha feigns shock. “What’s this? Is Clinton Francis Barton planning ahead? I think I hear the end of the world approaching.”
Clint mimes throwing a meatball at her, but eats the meatball instead. It’s definitely not something they want Lucky or Alpine eating off the floor if he manages to land a hit and it bounces to the floor.
“I’m glad you got it sorted,” Natasha says more seriously. “And you’re happy with the arrangement?” she asks Jigsaw.
He nods and ladles more gumbo on top of his heavily buttered piece of cornbread. He sets the ladle back in the pot and then makes the second half of the archery sign with a K-shape. Then indicates that that—Katie-Kate’s name sign—is a good person that Lucky approves of.
“Yep,” Clint says. “She likes cats and dogs, and was really good with both Lucky and Alpine.”
“You offered to pay her, I hope.”
Clint blinks. “Why? Do you think she needs it? I mean, she’ll get a room and all her meals and stuff, and rides wherever she needs. And I threw in an extra hour of lessons.” He frowns. “Should I text her and offer her a check, too? Or cash? I mean, I can do that. I just… It didn’t occur to me, is all. She’s rich, right?”
Natasha sighs. “If you offered her another hour of lessons, you’re good. But yes, you pay people to come over and watch your pets, Clint. Just like babysitting.”
Yeah, because he has so much experience with both things. How’s he supposed to know this stuff? It’s just a favor, he thought. Kate doing him and Jigsaw a favor, and then Clint doing her a favor in return with the ninth lesson.
He shrugs. “Well, as long as we’re all cool.”
Jigsaw signs something about a mission where it’s always cold and then a clock, which Clint takes to mean a question about when they’ll be going to Siberia.
“Not sure yet, Jigs. But Stark is on the trail, and it probably won’t take him very much longer.”
Jigsaw nods, looking satisfied with the answer, and then indicates the five other assets from the photograph with a happy smile. Like he’s excited to meet them again.
Clint exchanges a look with Natasha, who raises her eyebrows in invitation. Great. He’s on deck.
“You know, Jigsaw,” he starts. “The others in that photo might not be very happy to see us. They might still think that HYDRA is the team with the good guys on it. We might have a fight on our hands.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and signs “the same as,” and Clint feels the ground under his feet again after nearly an hour of feeling like he’s on top of the clouds. Jigsaw thinks they’ll be more assets just like himself, just like Clint. Or maybe even more like himself than Clint is like him. It’s going to be a rude wakeup call when those other assets attack them.
Clint kind of hopes they won’t even be there. That the base Stark ends up finding is completely empty, abandoned, stripped of all supplies and personnel. Not even a single squad of guys looking out for the Siberian dust bunnies.
But when is he that lucky?
Chapter 69: Avengers | Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
Notes:
Chapter title from “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” by R.E.M.
Chapter Text
Bruce
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
“Okay okay okay, how about this.” Tony taps the edge of his hands on the tabletop. “It’s gotta fit in the trunk of that car, right? Right. And it’s gotta be something Winter can haul away on a motorcycle.”
Bruce nods and avoids looking at the screen where the crashed car is on the still displayed, its trunk open and the Soldier staring down into it. It’s necessary, he knows. But it feels morbid, knowing that the people in that car are soon to be beaten and strangled to death by the man on the screen.
“Something he can zoom off with and avoid getting a lot of attention. So it’s small.” Tony scowls in thought. “Small. But worth killing them for. Worth stealing. Something important, but small. And we’re looking at December 1991.”
Tony flicks through the various “stacked” holoscreen tabs with his father’s research notes.
“It’s gotta be in here. It’s gotta be somewhere. Whatever prototype he was working on that they swiped before killing him. Something they sent their Soldier to go fetch.” Tony rubs at one eye and then runs that hand through his unkempt hair. “Some gadget. Some thing.”
“Maybe,” Bruce says. “We’ve been assuming it’s a prototype of a weapon, or at least a technology. But what if it’s something else entirely?” He shrugs. “What if the box is the problem and we need to think outside of it?”
“That’s all dear old dad did, though. Weapons. Devices. Gadgets. Tools.”
They share a moment of silence, and Bruce can feel the frustration radiating off of Tony. They’ve been at this for hours, since Tony got the idea that they needed to know what was stolen on December 16th, 1991, before they go to the Siberia base JARVIS is scanning for. It’s not anywhere near the first time they’ve spent several hours on the topic. It’s just becoming more urgent for Tony as they get closer and closer to another HYDRA base.
“Let’s think about what we might be finding in Siberia,” Bruce suggests. “Take a break from looking for the secret prototype and prepare instead for facing five hostile Jigsaws.”
Tony groans and pulls at the sides of his hair. “I’m better than him,” he mutters. “I’ve surpassed the old man. Why can’t I crack his code?”
Bruce lets Tony have a moment or three to lament his late father’s tricky coded notes and to reaffirm his own superiority to Howard. It’s important for his psyche, Bruce knows, which is in turn important for his physical health. Tony hasn’t had an ounce of sleep in three days. He’s close to falling over.
What have they not really considered since learning that the five operatives in that photograph might be super soldiers?
They’ve tried pairing off in simulated training, assuming Steve and Jigsaw each take one of the five, Tony takes another one in the Iron Man armor, the Other Guy keeps them all on edge, and Sam and Natasha get some backup from somewhere. They’ve tried to anticipate whether there’d be five super soldiers in the base or just one, or even none of them at all.
They’ve even considered the best possible case scenario, which is that they’re wrong about additional Winter Soldiers and these five people in the photograph are elderly or dead by now.
But they haven’t considered…
Bruce blinks. They haven’t considered how the five of them might have been enhanced. Other than “maybe Zola made some progress using Jigsaw as a never-ending experimental source of successful serum.” But Zola was in the States until he became a computer in the ‘70s. And Jigsaw himself was in Siberia until he and Karpov were transferred over… and they don’t know when that happened.
What if Zola wasn’t the source of the serum that was used to enhance the other five Winter Soldiers? What if… What if they were also working on Steve’s samples the whole time? What if it wasn’t Jigsaw’s blood samples that led to more super soldiers, but Steve’s. There’d been many. Bruce himself had worked with some trying to isolate the healing factor that went into it before he ended up green and full of rage.
And who would have had access to the early testing after Steve went into the ice, since he’d had access to the first set of testing? Who would have been trying to replicate something he’d actually seen? Something he’d worked with—because wouldn’t Howard have needed to work with the serum itself to put together the Vita-ray machine that accompanied it?
They’ve been thinking the prototype that was worth killing for was some weapon, but what if it wasn’t a weapon but the means of creating more human weapons?
“Tony…” Bruce says.
Something about his tone must be off, because Tony’s giving him his full attention for once.
“What if it’s not a weapon at all. Or a gadget. Or a tool. What if it’s a material. A serum.” Bruce swallows. “What if it’s a super soldier serum that they sent the Soldier to steal, and once he saw that the serum was there in the trunk, there was no more need to leave your father alive and working on replacing Erskine’s formula?”
“…Holy shit.” Tony goes back through the holographic tabs of his father’s research notes again, his eyes wide as he reads with a new idea at the forefront of his mind.
“That would put the wolf pen photo some time after 1991, which fits Karpov’s age, and that would explain how they got enhanced, and that would mean they sent Jigglypuff off to S.H.I.E.L.D. because they had five better Winter Soldiers and didn’t need him anymore.”
Tony shakes his head. “That explains why Pierce and all of them did what they did. He wasn’t their best weapon anymore. He was the old model. Who cared if he broke, because they had better. They had five whole better weapons.”
Natasha
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“So I take it things are going well?” Natasha asks over the brim of her cup of tea.
Clint, slumped bonelessly in the bigger of her front room chairs, takes a moment to answer, either because he’s not immediately following or because he’s feigning ignorance. She’s going to be kind and give him the benefit of the doubt; he probably has other things on his mind. He wouldn’t try to hide from her.
“With Jigsaw,” she prompts after another moment. Just what happened in Jigsaw’s room that has him like this hours later?
“Oh. Yeah. Um.” Clint fidgets with the bottom edge of his t-shirt briefly and then nods. “You know how Jigsaw’s a fucking genius at massage therapy?”
Natasha does him the honor of not masking her surprise. “Really.”
“Yeah, neither did I. But I do now.”
“Hm.” Natasha takes a sip of tea and sets the cup down. “That does make a certain amount of sense, given his skills at disassembling people. He definitely knows his way around the human anatomy, specifically how people fit together.”
“Right. That’s what I figured.” Clint scowls, but it’s only a flash across his face. “No one in HYDRA was giving him a nice relaxing back rub after a tricky mission, right? It’s gotta be the other, the anatomy know-how.”
Natasha nods. “Not unless it led somewhere awful, no,” she murmurs. “So you got a back rub in the pillow fort?”
It’s the obvious conclusion to draw from the presented information. If there’d been anything else going on in Jigsaw’s room that could lead to Clint looking unkempt and halfway to the moon, there would have been indications in Jigsaw that she hadn’t seen while getting lunch with him and bringing it back.
“Mhm,” Clint agrees. “Put me to sleep and everything. I still feel almost like my body’s made out of clouds, ‘Tasha.”
He holds his hand out horizontally and bobs it like a hovering flying saucer. “I’m just floating around and nothing hurts. I didn’t even know my back and shoulders hurt until they didn’t.”
“Have you thought about returning the favor?”
Clint grimaces. “I mean, would he even want that? Someone’s hands all over his back, pushing him down to dig their thumbs in?” He shakes his head, no doubt thinking of other situations where Jigsaw’s been pushed down. “And what about where his metal arm connects to the rest of him? What if I mess something up under there? Jar something loose, or press a button or flip a switch, like, literally?”
Natasha lifts her teacup before she indulges in a smile. She remembers Clint telling her about the way the plates in Jigsaw’s arm can move independently of each other, and how spooked he’d been the first time he encountered that. He’d been so sure he had broken what any number of explosions and vicious battle situations hadn’t broken.
“What if you don’t break anything?” she asks. “What if you ask him and he agrees, and it turns out he’s been hurting this whole time and didn’t notice, same as you?”
Only probably a lot worse, she thinks. She knows anatomy as well as Jigsaw, at least. And she’s seen the diagrams of how that metal prosthesis attaches. Even if the attachment points weren’t a constant bone-deep ache, the drag of that much metal on one side of his spine has to be chronic agony between the weight itself and the need for the rest of his back muscles to compensate for it while keeping him upright.
Clint sighs. “I think he’s been hurting this whole time and totally noticed, ‘Tasha. Stark said it, didn’t he? ‘Hurts like a bitch.’ ‘All the time.’ Jiggy’s gotta know about it. I’m betting he thinks it’s just part of being an asset,” Clint mutters.
Those were the words, yes. Very eloquent, just like usual. She’s not surprised Clint remembered them. And she has the same suspicion about Jigsaw’s relationship with pain. All she has to do is remember her own upbringing and then add an additional sadistic twist on top of the Red Room’s baseline level of internalized masochism.
“Are you thinking he might be upset if he wasn’t hurting and therefore was less of an asset?” Natasha asks. She finishes her tea and sets the cup down one last time.
She supposes it’s always an option that Jigsaw thinks assets should be in pain, but Jigsaw considers Clint to be an asset as well, and had no problems at all relieving Clint’s pain. Has never objected to Clint taking ibuprofen, or to taking it easy to reduce pain to his ribs after the tracksuit mafia got done with him.
“I don’t know. I just don’t want to risk making anything worse, you know?” Clint picks at his fingernails, and Natasha makes a mental note to put her fidget toys back out. “Maybe he needs a massage therapist to go with all his other therapists.”
Natasha bites back a laugh. She can’t think of any way that would go over well, bringing in yet another strange person specifically with the goal of touching Jigsaw all over.
“That’s an area where you are the only available option, Clint. Maybe get yourself a massage license. Wouldn’t take you more than a year to figure out what you were doing.”
Clint sighs, and Natasha wonders just what he’s thinking. He can’t be thinking it’ll take a year to figure out what he’s doing with Jigsaw—not when it’s been only a few months and they already sleep in the same bed more often than not, hold hands like a pair of lovestruck teenagers, disregard each other’s personal space, and ogle each other when they think no one is watching them.
Honestly, she’s surprised Jigsaw has been this comfortable with Clint’s presence and touch this soon. Maybe Clint is surprised, too. Maybe he’s wracking his brain trying to come up with additional milestones between where they are and where they could eventually be, all with the caveat of somehow not becoming a disaster.
“Excuse me,” JARVIS’s voice comes drifting out into the room. “Sir has discovered what might be the Siberian HYDRA base on the agenda. He requests your presence in the main conference room.”
“Guess I got Katie-Kate on board just in time,” Clint says.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes, JARVIS,” Natasha says. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Agent Romanoff.”
Natasha gets to her feet and collects her teacup and saucer to bring to her kitchen. “I’m impressed JARVIS picked something up already,” she says. “Siberia is a big, big place.”
“If anyone would know, it’d be you,” Clint says, dragging himself upright and pausing before getting up. “And maybe Jigsaw, but he doesn’t remember it.”
“I wonder if his memory will be jogged by paying the place a visit,” Natasha murmurs as she rinses out her teacup and sets it aside to clean properly after the meeting. “This might prove to be a very difficult mission, even without additional Winter Soldiers to worry about.”
Clint sighs and scratches at his hair. “I think he’s thinking they’re gonna be besties. Him and the other five.”
Natasha can see that, yes. Even though the photograph clearly shows that there had been either a fight among the ranks or else a sparring session turned brutal beatdown—something to injure two of the five and leave at least one of the others looking victorious over that. But given that Jigsaw doesn’t have the easiest time holding back, that might just be par for the course as far as he’s concerned and not a sign of discontent.
She wonders whether she would have considered any of her sisters in the Red Room to have been truly her sisters in any way if she hadn’t defected but had instead merely been transferred away from them for an extended time. A few of them, she decides. Only a few. But a few nonetheless.
And if a photograph of those sisters had been all she had to go by… She can only hope that Jigsaw’s affinity for their team will hold up under the stress of a reunion with some mirage of good times shared in the past. She thinks it will.
“They may not even be there,” Natasha says as she and Clint head toward the elevator. “If they had the resources available, it would have been wise to split them up and keep them in politically advantageous geos against future need.”
But how many resources had there been in the last years of the Soviet Union, even among HYDRA? They’d shipped the Soldier to the States along with Karpov, and they have yet to find a single record indicating that the Soldier was giving them problems just before that transfer.
All the records of “malfunction” they’ve found happened in the presence of weak handlers—which Karpov wasn’t—or on American soil. If anything, transferring him to S.H.I.E.L.D. would have been catastrophically short-sighted… unless there were genuinely no more resources to go around and therefore no other options.
So why would the other five still be in Siberia? Why not redistribute them across the world, each according to their specialty. Why not send them off to the geos that did still have the resources to manage a Winter Soldier?
Well, she supposes they’ll find out soon enough. Either the five of them will be there, or they won’t. Either the base will have records explaining things, or it won’t.
Steve
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
Steve looks at the hard copy of the aerial scan, preferring the tangibility of it for the time being. It gives an overview of the base, just enough of the surroundings to show that yes, there is something there, a structure built into the mountain where the tundra meets it.
He’s got to give it to HYDRA—they’re predictable when it comes to building bases into mountains. Choose a mountainous area, find a nice point of ingress and egress, build a base there. Go as far down as possible, disguise the entrance area, and you have yourself a nice stronghold.
If they were any less predictable, searching all of Siberia for one set of buildings that looked like a base and was definitely not a civilian structure would have taken weeks, not days. But what civilian is building into the mountainside?
He looks up at the holographic screen, which is zoomed in on what appears to be the entrance. There’ll be a back way in, he knows. Something more carefully disguised that serves as an escape route should the base be raided. Something maybe a whole mile away from the base itself. Tony still has to locate that.
But if Jigsaw were here and not in his session with Yasmin, maybe he could point it out to them. At the very least, they could gauge his reaction to the aerial photography to see if he was excited to see it, or wary, or something in between.
“So it actually looks abandoned, not just hiding really well,” Clint says with an audible frown. “Is there even going to be anything in there at all?”
Steve shrugs. “We’ll check it out either way. It may be that they only resupply every great once in a while, and use the back entrance to do so.” He taps the printout in front of himself. “And we don’t know how deep it goes. It may be almost entirely vertical.”
Some of the bases they’d raided in the War had been like that, built around a central well like a tall, narrow tower drilled into the bedrock. They’d used the Tesseract to power machinery used to excavate the earth needed to construct so many bases so quickly, all over Europe. But mostly in and around the Alps. Other areas had used more traditional designs for their bases.
“Have we considered the possibility that Sir Stabs-a-lot will think he’s going to see some old buddies instead of old enemies?” Tony asks. “Because we’ve all seen that picture of his and how comfortable he looks with them.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Steve decides to break it.
“They might be in cryo storage,” he says, “in which case they may not be hostiles when we free them. But I think Jigsaw can tell that anyone attacking us is the bad guy.”
“And we can always try talking them down.” Natasha shrugs lightly. “Assuming they’ve been treated anything like the Soldier was, we should have a foot in the door just by showing up with a happy Jigsaw.”
“That’s right,” Clint says. “If he was comfortable with them, even friendly, maybe it’s a two-way street.”
Bruce shakes his head. “It’s almost certain they were treated better. They were the new models, remember?”
Steve scowls. Yes. The new model of super soldier, patterned after himself. The original success. But if Erskine’s serum amplifies what lies inside someone’s heart, wouldn’t a replication of it do the same? And Erskine had chosen him despite—or rather, because—of all the physically, externally superior volunteers. Because if you take a bully and enhance them, you just get a bigger, stronger bully. What kind of people would HYDRA have lined up to be super soldiers? Anything from captives like Bucky had been, to criminals to be exonerated if things went right and executed if things went wrong, to eager HYDRA agents already chomping at the fascist bit.
The only hope he has that the new five would be salvageable is that Jigsaw had gotten along with them, maybe. Because Jigsaw doesn’t remember. He wasn’t injured in the picture and some of the others are. That might lend credence to a friendly relationship, or it might be that it merely wasn’t his turn getting beaten on for the sake of practice. There’s really no telling.
He wishes Howard hadn’t been working to recreate the serum. Maybe he’d still be alive if he hadn’t. Or maybe some other reason to kill him would have cropped up. Would he have eventually made that flying car, or would he have been unable to ultimately produce anything beyond weapons?
“So we’re all feeling good about checking this place out without backup?” Tony asks. “Because I am. We’ll have a hulk with us. That’s better odds than we’d get with mundane backup. And no worries about getting shot from behind by ‘allies’ looking to dispatch us.”
Steve nods, looking around the table and seeing agreement across the board. “Just as soon as we find the back door, we can be off. We have Fury’s blessing, even if we don’t need it.”
And there’s every indication that the base is abandoned, in any case. He looks at the zoomed in details on the holographic screen. There’s clear signs of disrepair. Nothing remains of the striking clean lines of the bases he and the Howlies had raided during the War. That might be Soviet design as opposed to German, but it might also be weathering and decay.
It might end up being an information gathering mission, hauling off records and destroying equipment, and not an enemy in sight. Steve isn’t sure what he’d prefer.
No, he is. He’s very sure.
He wants an enemy to go toe to toe against, all out, to vent some anger and frustration over everything in a way that’s productive for the greater good. And he wants at least some indication that there aren’t a number of super soldiers stashed throughout the countries of the world ready to topple governments at a whispered command in the dark.
But it would be best, he has to admit, if all they find are records that the serum failed, that the “wolves” in Jigsaw’s photograph were ultimately unenhanced and died of natural causes at some point.
“Think we should bring in Nick and Maria anyway?” Natasha asks. “Just so we’re all in the loop together.”
Steve concedes that it wouldn’t hurt. Looks like this impromptu meeting is becoming a little more official after all. If only Jigsaw had been able to join them.
Chapter 70: Jigsaw | Thanks for the memories (even though they weren’t so great)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Thnks fr th Mmrs” by Fall Out Boy.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
It slips into the therapy room after the dog—Lucky—and frowns when the coffee table is not empty but has both of the collages on it instead. They don’t always talk about the captivity collage in the afternoons, but they do often enough that it is not looking forward to the therapy session if the collages are already out.
“How are you feeling this afternoon, Jigsaw?” Yasmin asks with a smile.
How is it feeling? It is feeling… wary of the collages. And impatient to go to Siberia and see if the other assets in the wolf pen are there. But also happy because there is another plant in the rooms for assets that it is taking care of to make sure that it thrives before giving the clown man his very own plant.
It is a “pup,” a baby plant made by one of the ballerina woman’s plants when it got too big and tried to grow outside of the pot. They planted it earlier in a little blue pot that the ballerina woman had said was cobalt. A nice color for the clown man and not garish and bright like the clown man’s flag uniform.
The clown man had enjoyed the gardening, back when all the press people had their cameras and their mics and their binoculars and were waiting across the street in a pack. And the clown man had brought it the sugared peaches to talk about feelings and how his had been hurt. And the clown man has helped it so much to buy the things for the little cat. So many things.
It is time to give the clown man something to show how thankful it is. And in just a few days, it will be able to do that.
Maybe they can discuss the littlest plant instead of the collages. It is feeling hopeful. It signs that, hopeful, and then draws its own plant and a second “pup” plant in its own pot. Draws the star-shield. Adds an arrow. Yes.
“Did you get another plant?” Yasmin asks. “One you’re going to give to Steve?”
It nods.
“That’s nice of you. Why is Steve getting a plant?”
It adds a drawing of the tree for cats and a little “cart” like the big baskets on wheels from the grocery store and the upper right corner of the Barky screen in the clown man’s laptop. Then it signs about the peaches, and about how they talked.
“I see. And have you been thinking of ways to repay Steve for his help for a while now?”
It starts to nod and then makes the “see-saw” motion with the hand. It has been thinking, yes, but not for all of that time. Only since Friday, when they looked at the screen together and clicked some buttons to make all of the toys and the trees for cats arrive at the door the next day.
“Well, I’m glad you’re thinking of him and trying to do something nice for him. I know it’ll mean a lot to him,” Yasmin says. Then, instead of asking another question, she reaches forward and taps the collages.
It is going to have to tell her about one of the pictures after all.
“Today, I’m curious to explore a similar element in your two collages, that of the medical researcher, and how that element is different in your life now than it was in your life as HYDRA’s captive,” she says. “We’ve already discussed how the researchers in HYDRA would treat you, Jigsaw. With their unnecessary and unmedicated surgeries, the saws and needles, all of the drugs.”
She moves her finger from the researcher in the captivity collage to the man in the lab coat in the freedom collage. The researcher is wearing the special headphones that hang down and listen to whatever the end is held up to. The man in the lab coat has gloves—white, but still gloves. It is trying not to think of the man in the lab coat as a researcher because there are no tools around him. Only the lab coat and the gloves.
“Does this picture represent when you were injured in your mission earlier and Bruce treated your wound?”
It reluctantly nods.
It thought they were finished discussing that, thought that it would not have to think about the researchers again unless reminded of them. But here is a session that will be two hours of talking about the curly haired researcher and the time on the quinjet. It does not fully remember everything that happened there. It remembers pain and the little cat and the other asset protecting it.
There had been an agent—it does not remember who—that the other asset chased away to protect it. And then there had been the snug almost-hug of the other asset holding bandages against the torso, and then there was so much of the electrolyte liquid that tastes like fruit and protein bars and an explosion that it protected the little cat from by sheltering the little cat’s head and ears.
“Are these pictures representing similar things?” Yasmin asks. “The freedom collage has this picture representing Bruce helping you and treating your wound. Did anything like that happen when you were in captivity? Were there medics who treated your injuries, even if they did horrible things as well?”
It points to the smooth swimming pool in the captivity collage. The washing of dirty lungs. That was a lie to hurt it, though. It does not count, probably, as treated injuries. After a moment, it points to the tray of tools, metal tools on a metal tray, also on the captivity collage.
“Did Bruce use a tray of tools like that?”
It shakes the head, and then blinks. It nods. It— It does not know. It does not remember. It signs that the knowledge has fallen out of the head.
Yasmin nods. “Do you not remember very much from the way Bruce helped you on the quinjet? It was a while ago, and very stressful.”
The eyes look at the picture of the man in the lab coat with the white gloves and it cannot raise them to meet Yasmin’s eyes. It should know, it should remember, it is bad for it not to remember things. And there was no missile to take the memory away from it. No chair with the white electric fire. It just… lost the knowledge. Was careless, maybe, and didn’t keep the knowledge safe.
“That was a very stressful time for you, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says again, softly. “Did you know that stress can impede our ability to form memories?”
It shakes the head, still looking at the picture in the freedom collage. That is not right. It does not forget because of stress. It does not forget at all. But it has forgotten.
Yasmin leans forward, her head tilted and eyes searching, searching, searching for the opportunity to connect with it, with the eyes that cannot meet hers.
“Jigsaw?”
It looks up at her, just for a tiny moment before it looks back down.
“When we are under a lot of stress, our brains are too busy trying to help us survive to worry about capturing every detail for later,” Yasmin says. “It’s okay if you don’t remember all of the details from the time Bruce was helping you in the quinjet. It’s natural.”
It shakes the head, points to the captivity collage. To the tools, the tray, the downward headphones that the researcher wears. It points to the other tools, the ones that are electric and designed to cut bodies apart. Or wood. The picture it had cut those tools out of was filled with pieces of wood. But the tools, it knows, are good for cutting into bone and metal. It points to the red lips, to the stairs where the agents leered and cheered and pushed into it. It points to all sorts of things on the captivity collage.
“…I don’t understand, Jigsaw. Can you help me understand?”
It… It remembers. Everything.
It scrunches the eyes and grips the hair tight in one hand. How to help her understand that what she says is not right, that she cannot be right about stress and memories, that it must be a failure on its part to not remember the details from the quinjet.
Because it remembers. It remembers. It remembers.
It remembers all of these things. From the captivity collage. From the captivity itself. From the time before. It remembers. All of the details. It remembers them. It has been told that these things were stressful, too. And it remembers.
It knows the exact sounds of all of the things, hears those sounds when it sleeps. It knows the exact shapes of all of these things, the way these things feel. Sometimes even feels these things when it sleeps. Feels the heat and the vibration of the blades whirring, feels the jitter and scrape of blades caught in bone, the fire-spark-bright of metal against metal, feels the wet thwack of skin and leather against bloody gouges in the thighs and back.
Hears the zippers so quiet underneath the other sounds, hears the click of the taser and smells the burning of hair and skin, the meaty sizzle of a baton lit up against it or inside of it, pushed deep, deep inside of it. Hears the snap and click of old-time cameras, the metallic clink of lighters, and smells their fumes, the tobacco.
Tastes the metal of the choking face and the metal of the blood and flesh where the choking face has cut into the mouth and the salty bile and bitter slick after the stomach heaves—waste not, want not, lick it up—heaves all of the contents up from the dozens who pushed into it through the metal ring—
“—saw, please .”
The dog is whining. There is the dog’s tongue on the face, not the metal pressing against it but the tongue, soft and warm and wet and the dog’s paws on the thigh. And there is sound, words, the expert without the words is speaking to it.
“—op pulling your hair. You’re hurting yourself, Jigsaw.”
It opens the fist and releases the hair. It will comply with the expert. How long was it not in compliance?
“Thank you,” the expert says, her eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “I want you to spend a few minutes connecting with Lucky, okay?”
It nods. It can do that. Can wrap the arms around the dog and bury the face in the dog’s fur and let the shoulders shake and the breath come in short gasps as it tries to force the stomach to be still inside the torso. There is not anything inside of the stomach that should not be there. Only good things are inside of the stomach. There is no need to convulse and convulse and push out what others have pushed into it.
It does not know how much time passes while it breathes into the dog’s fur and shakes, and it does not need to know. The expert will give it instructions.
“I’m sorry, Jigsaw,” the expert finally says. “I misread the situation and your emotional responses. I didn’t mean to push you into thinking so hard about your captivity.”
The expert sets her phone on the table—where did the collages go?—and taps a button on it to make delicate piano music and birdsong come out of it. They listen to the music and the chirping and chittering until the dog finally shifts in the arms and settles its head on the shoulder, huffing hot breath into the ear.
But not a whine.
It is sorry it upset the dog, and sorry that it worried the ex— Yasmin. Sorry that it worried Yasmin.
It tries to sign that it is sorry, but the dog is in the way and the sign is off to the side instead of lined up with the center of the body.
“You have nothing to apologize about, Jigsaw. We can’t always control where our minds go, and your mind took you to a dark place. It wasn’t your fault.”
Yasmin pulls a magazine out of her bag and puts it on the coffee table by her phone. There is a picture of a bright yellow circle on the cover, surrounded by a halo of wispy flames and curls, and beyond that, a sea of blackness. “Astronomy” says the magazine at the top of the cover. There are other words on the cover as well, but those are hard to read and it prefers to look at the picture of the yellow circle.
“I understand the Avengers are planning more missions,” Yasmin says. “Missions farther away than North Carolina.”
She turns the pages of the magazine until there is a pull-out flap and then spreads out a picture of a lumpy gray rock in a black background, with a little white and gold machine on it and lots of small white words in short columns above it.
“This is a picture of a mission where NASA sent a robot to an asteroid to gather samples of rocks and ice to bring back to Earth.” Yasmin taps a finger on the robot. “It was so far away from its home planet, and if something went wrong, there was nothing that could help it.”
It stares at the little robot on the asteroid. Did the little robot come home? Did everything go well on its mission? Is it still out there on the asteroid looking for the best rocks and ice to bring home?
“When you go on far away missions with your team, if things go wrong, you have people you can depend on. People like Clint and Natasha, who you spend lots of time with. And people like Bruce, whose help can be scary.”
…But the robot? The little robot? Did it make it home?
Yasmin folds the pages back up and closes the magazine. It looks up at her.
“This last time, Jigsaw, something went wrong on your mission and you were hurt. And unlike for this robot and the asteroid, your team was there to take care of you, which is wonderful, even if it was scary and stressful.”
She holds the magazine out to it.
“You won’t necessarily have a kitten to help you through the scary times in your next missions. For your homework tonight, I want you to come up with five things that you can bring on your next mission that will help you accept help from your teammates if something does go wrong.”
It accepts the magazine and holds it tightly in the hand. It sounds like the little robot maybe encountered a problem in its mission and did not have anything to help it. Maybe there is more information in the magazine that will reassure it that the little robot made it home safely with all the best rocks and ice.
“Do you understand your homework, Jigsaw?”
It nods. The little robot did not have anything to help it, but it can bring things with it that can help it on missions, when things go wrong. It needs to find five things it can bring. Things that will not just help it, but that will help it the way the little cat had helped it when the researcher with the curly hair was treating the wound.
This is very different from the five things that make it happy assignments. Those five things would be easy. There are the other asset, and the dog, and the little cat, and that’s three without having to even think about it. But the other asset is already going to be on the mission with it, and the dog and the little cat cannot come on any missions.
So it does have to think about what the five things should be, and many of the things that help it are not things it should have on a mission. No dog. No little cat. No little plant. It could bring the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages and the colorful felt pens, but how would that help it if it needed help being calm when injured? That is something that it would just have anyway, to play the game with the Xs and Os that is not fun at all and that it always wins because the other asset is so bad at it.
There is still half an hour of session left when Yasmin tells it that she wants it to include all five senses in the homework assignment if possible—something it can look at and smell and listen to and touch and even taste.
And it takes that with it into the hallway, along with Lucky and the magazine about the little robot and the asteroid.
Something that feels comforting, that could be held and would help it to be calm. That would have to be the fish-looking soft thing, wouldn’t it? It can hold the fish-looking soft thing and squeeze it, can bring it up to the cheek and rub the fish-looking soft thing against the skin face to remind it that it is free now, and that it has not been taken back. Because if it were ever taken back, the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians would never let it have the fish-looking soft thing.
Something that smells comforting, though. That could be a soft t-shirt or hood shirt from the other asset’s closet, maybe. One that the other asset has already worn, so that it smells more like the other asset than it smells like the soap that goes into the laundry machines. If it was ever taken back, the other asset would not be there, and so if it can smell the other asset, it would know that it has not been taken back.
And looks? What looks comforting? Maybe it should bring a picture with it. A scrapbook page, maybe. A picture of the dog and the little cat, a whole page of pictures, maybe. It would not be able to look at the dog or the little cat if it was taken back.
It can listen to a song, too, on the mission if something goes wrong and it needs help being calm so that it can be helped by the researcher. There are now many songs on the tablet, even the one about never being abandoned or hurt, about never giving up on it or running away and leaving it alone to be hurt. It can listen to that song, and it can know that it has not been taken back.
And tasting… Something that tastes not even a little bit like blood or— or anything else that is from the before times. Something sweet, maybe peaches. It would never get to eat a peach if it was taken back. It would have slop to swallow or to lick up, but not peaches. Not a food reward that was good. And peaches are so soft and gentle on the throat. Yes. It would bring a peach, maybe.
It has reached the rooms for assets by the time it has completed the homework assignment, but the other asset is not there to congratulate it on the completed homework assignment. The other asset is not anywhere at all. Maybe the ballerina woman’s rooms.
It picks up the little cat and puts the little cat on the shoulder so that it can hold the notebook with the stars on the tops of the pages and the magazine and also the little cat. It will wait for the dog to make the scratching noises at the ballerina woman’s door, and then the ballerina woman will call out that it is open and that they can come in.
But there is no response at the ballerina woman’s door. Does that mean that it is not allowed to come inside? Or that the ballerina woman is not there to let it in? Should it open the door and see if she is inside? Or is that not allowed?
The other asset would not be in the training room or the kitchen or range or the common rooms right now. The other asset would be somewhere it could easily go and join in. So… where is the other asset?
It stands in the hallway for a long silent moment, wondering where it is supposed to go to find the other asset. There was not a piece of paper anywhere in the rooms for assets that said where to go. And the other asset would not just leave it. Would not, would not, would not.
There is a little blue light flashing on the wall beside the ballerina woman’s door.
It blinks at the light, and then looks around. The hallway is empty, and the blue light does not seem to have come from anywhere. There is not a source that it can see. Just a blue light.
It frowns at the blue light while the little cat mrrps on the shoulder in interest. Even the dog looks up at the blue light.
Then the blue light takes on a J shape. It flashes on and off, on and off: J. J. J.
This is very suspicious. Where is the light coming from? It looks around again, wary. But there is nothing and no one in the hallway other than this asset and the dog and the little cat. Nothing about the three of them in the hallway is generating the light or reflecting the light. It does not know where the light could be coming from or what it could mean or whether it is dangerous.
But it is just light, after all. How could it be dangerous?
After another moment, there is a different shape flashing on the wall: I. I. I.
Then: G. G. G.
It taps on the wall where the blue light is now flashing: S. S. S.
There is nothing actually on the wall. It wipes the fingers over the light to be sure, and the light seems to go away when it does so instead of shining on the fingers. Just a blue light coming from somewhere—A. A. A.—and shining on the wall, but not on the fingers or the hand the way a normal light would.
The light is coming from inside of the wall somehow. Is this… Is this the voice without a mouth, now making light come from out of the walls? That would make sense if the light was coming from the upper corners where the walls meet the ceiling. That is where the ever-so-faint light comes from when all the other lights are off. That is where the voice without a mouth lives, in the seams of the hive building, especially where three planes meet, in the high up corners of rooms.
W. W. W.
So many letter shapes in blue light.
The letter shapes start over again then, and appear in combination instead of just one at a time.
The little cat wants to jump off of the shoulder and catch the blue letter shapes on the wall, but it holds onto the little cat as the little cat’s chirps and clicks threaten to turn into action. It does not want the little cat to jump off of the shoulder and swipe at the wall only to fall to the floor.
JIGSAW, say the blue letter shapes on the wall. That is this asset’s name. Jigsaw. It chose the name for itself, chose it for all of the right reasons. Is the voice without a mouth trying to get this asset’s attention? Well, it has succeeded.
Even the dog is paying close attention to the light, front paws braced on the wall to put its head up higher to get a good look, tail wagging.
The question of danger is no longer an important one, since it knows that it is allowed to be here, and there is no indication of impending punishment for looking at the light. The question of whether the voice without a mouth is responsible for the light and trying to get its attention is already answered—there is no other place the light could be coming from, and the voice without a mouth often tries to sneak itself into this asset’s field of attention, speaking liplessly into rooms.
But the question of why… Why is there a set of letter shapes in blue light on the wall beside the ballerina woman’s door? Why does the voice without a mouth do this? Why does the voice without a mouth want its attention, anyway?
The letter shapes change from saying JIGSAW to saying FOLLOW, and then there are no more letters on the wall at all, but only an arrow in blue pointing down the hallway and toward the elevator and stairwell. There is another arrow of blue light there, it can see, and no flashing letters.
Oh. JIGSAW FOLLOW. Jigsaw is supposed to follow the arrow, then. That is what the voice without a mouth wants it to do, what it has gotten this asset’s attention for. It can do that, can follow. But should it?
It does not trust the voice without a mouth, always trying to intrude where it does not belong. But it is curious. Very curious. Where is the voice without a mouth trying to lead it? And why?
It takes a few steps in the direction the arrow points, and the arrow moves with it along the wall, still pointing toward the end of the hallway.
The little cat squeaks and mrrps and tries to climb down the arm to get at the moving light arrow, but it tucks the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages and the magazine under the arm and holds the little cat with both hands to keep the little cat from getting into danger.
When it gets to the end of the hallway, the arrow on the wall flashes out of existence and the arrow at the end of the hallways rotates beside of the elevator door, pointing down.
The voice without a mouth wants it to get into the elevator and go down. The kitchen is down on a lower level. And the clown man and flying man’s rooms. Maybe there is something good on a lower level that the voice without a mouth wants it to know about, wants to share with it.
A peace offering? An apology for all the times the voice without a mouth has tried to make itself known when voices without mouths are wrong and are not for this asset to listen to? Or a trap, maybe. But there are not any traps in the hive building. It is allowed to be anywhere in the hive building it wants to be, as long as it asks permission to enter a personal room.
It will get in the elevator and go down, then.
There is nothing fun happening, but the blue light gradually leading it along does seem almost like a game. It follows the arrow through another hallway and then it can hear the ballerina woman talking in one of the rooms that are filled up with a gigantic table and have all the chairs around the table.
“I still say we cross that bridge when we get there,” the ballerina woman is saying. “We have no idea how they’ll react to us, or even if they are there in the first place.”
Oh. The light on the wall has led it to the place where the ballerina woman is. This is what the voice without a mouth wanted, and it is also what it had wanted—to find the ballerina woman and through her to find the other asset.
And it is not anyone’s personal room, just a room for anyone to meet in, so it does not have to make any noise to ask for permission to enter. It opens the door and sees the whole team that is not a cell gathered around the big table in the middle of the room, with the enormous glowing panel on the wall showing it the one-eyed man it was supposed to kill before Project Insight launches and the woman with the bun who gives it all the folders of maybe-S.H.I.E.L.D.-but-maybe-HYDRA personnel to “vet.”
“Jigs?” the other asset asks, voice full of surprise. “Hey, come on in. Have a seat.” The other asset points to an empty chair, but that chair is across the room from the other asset and the ballerina woman.
It does not want to sit all the way over there. It wants to be near the other asset. It did not come all this way down the hallways and down the elevator just to sit across the room from the other asset and watch from afar. It wants to be right there, wants to press up against the other asset on a sofa and put the head on the other asset’s shoulder and explain about the homework it has accomplished and the difficult session.
It cannot do most of those things here, but it slinks along behind all the chairs and goes to stand between the other asset and the clown man, anyway, where it can see everything in the room and also be close to the other asset.
“Jigsaw,” says the one-eyed man in the glowing panel. “Good of you to join us. Let’s catch you up.”
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw remembers some HYDRA Trash Party things very clearly, to the dismay of everyone involved. Sadly, Yasmin is not perfect and cannot always anticipate where Jigsaw's mind will take him.
Chapter 71: Therapists | Live and learn and never forget it
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 7:15 p.m.—
What a day.
Yasmin shuts the door of her suite behind her and puts in a dinner order with JARVIS, something warm and filling to help counter her exhaustion and clear her mind, but light enough that she isn’t digesting all night.
Order placed, she kicks off her shoes and sinks down into the sofa. She needs to finally rearrange her client schedule so that Jigsaw is the last person she sees in a day. She’s close, but there are still a handful of clients from back home with special arrangements who are scheduled right after him, especially on weekends where she’s made exceptions for them.
She doesn’t want to jostle their schedules too much, but as her work with Jigsaw increasingly comes to darker, heavier topics, she needs to do something to give herself a sufficient breather afterward instead of merely an hour of preparation time beforehand.
Next week, she decides. She’ll give it one more week and at her next sessions with these clients, she’ll discuss alternative times or days for them to meet. Absolutely worst case, she can recommend a colleague to take over their sessions while she’s in New York. Between the time zone and the intensity of her work with Jigsaw, she can’t continue as she has been.
Especially not if she is making mistakes with Jigsaw like she did today.
Yasmin spends a minute or two massaging her temples and neck, and then goes to the kitchenette to retrieve an ice cube to run along her face.
All she’d meant to do today was establish a baseline of behavior for “researchers” in his captivity experiences versus a baseline of behavior for Bruce, something to help him iron out the differences in concrete terms so that he can perhaps divorce Bruce from the role of “researcher” and therefore become more comfortable around him.
But somehow, it had all gone sideways when she suggested that it was normal for him to not remember all the details of that encounter in the quinjet. And she feels that she could have prevented that if she’d read his responses more accurately—had seen and accepted what he was showing her rather than hoping that she could lead him somewhere to the side of that.
Had Lucky signaled to her that Jigsaw was on edge? She can’t remember. Maybe he had. Or maybe even the dog had been caught off guard.
This isn’t the first time she’s seen Jigsaw resort to behaviors of self-harm when stressed during a session, but usually it’s little pinches along the skin of his right arm, or holding his right wrist more tightly than is needed for mere comfort. And Lucky is always able to divert his attention from that. But today… She can still see Jigsaw’s metal fist clenched in his hair, the hopeless, helpless acceptance mingled with terror in his expression.
And all because she’d told him that it was natural to lose pieces of memory during stress.
Yasmin lets the sliver of ice that remains drop to the sink and pats her face dry with a paper towel.
She hopes that the course-correct with the Astronomy magazine was successful beyond merely distracting him from the question of what he does and does not remember. She hopes that there is enough meat to the homework assignment she gave him that he’ll be able to latch onto that and not return to the past again.
The homework itself should have helped as well, beyond the curiosity she knows he has for all things outer space. If he is able to spend the necessary time and effort on the homework, he’ll have the blueprint for a sensory kit that should help him ground himself on a mission.
It’s where she’d been planning to end their session today, after a discussion of Bruce and how different his treatment on the quinjet had been from what Jigsaw might have been—must have been—expecting. They just got there by a different path, a path that included an unintentional flashback.
Flashbacks are par for the course and she’s expected them before, but this one had seemed to come from left field, to have crept up while she wasn’t watching for it.
Yasmin makes herself a cup of tea, green with lemon, and returns to the sofa.
Hopefully, Jigsaw will have a good session with Zoe and start the day tomorrow with the necessary foundation for his sensory kit. Because the next mission could easily be as disastrous as the last one, with a wound that requires more medical attention.
Others may think little of a gunshot wound at the rate that Jigsaw heals, may even be thankful that he heals so quickly and can move on so fast. But to her eyes, he may physically heal too quickly. Quickly enough that his mind can’t keep up, that he doesn’t have the time to process his injuries and accept the limitations those wounds impose.
Order comes through pain, according to Jigsaw—or rather, according to HYDRA—and therefore any injuries are just steps along the path to better order. Accepted as something that he deserves for being less aware of an enemy or for trusting people he should have been able to trust.
But the order he’s finding in his pain is not the order she wants for him. It’s the order HYDRA imposed on him and that he persistently clutches close to his chest as though the familiarity of it makes the dagger acceptable when it slides between his ribs. She wants him to be gentle with himself, the way he’s gentle with his pets and with those around him. She wants him to accept that his limitations are not failures, but just part of being human.
She would love it if he would accept that he is human. But that is a long way in coming, she fears.
In her perfect world, he would understand that pain is a sign that something is wrong, that something needs to be done about the underlying cause of the pain. That pain isn’t a sign of his failure or a lesson that he is responsible for learning. It’s just the body’s way of saying “help, something is not right, please fix it.”
Maybe the next mission won’t include an injury. Maybe if it does, Jigsaw will go to Bruce without first fleeing the area and making things worse. Maybe if he has a sensory kit in place that he can retrieve when he needs it. It’s the only thing she can do for him where the missions are concerned, the only concrete thing.
She certainly can’t go on these missions with him—and doesn’t want to. And she can’t bench him from these missions or postpone the missions, as much as she does want to. There are wheels turning and cogs aligning, and the next mission seems to be looming on the horizon. Already.
JARVIS doesn’t give her any details she doesn’t need, keeps it to the very basics, but the next mission is not going to be a brief, hours-long day trip like the mission in North Carolina. She doesn’t know where it will be or even when it will be, only that it will take considerable travel time to get there, possibly enough travel time that the team will need to rest on the journey to be ready when they arrive.
And that… that much detail means the mission is on the horizon. Yasmin has barely been able to help her client unpack the trials of the last mission, and the next is so close, is looming over them.
And if Jigsaw healed at a rate more appropriate for the human body, this couldn’t be happening. There would have to be more time between this new mission and the last one, time for him to fully heal, both physically and emotionally.
She wonders if he will bring his killing face for the mission, if that will end up being included in his homework as one of the things that helps him through receiving help from his teammates. Jigsaw is free to select whatever things he’d like for his sensory kit, but Yasmin isn’t so sure she likes the idea of his killing face being part of it.
It would protect his face just as the body armor would protect his torso, and it might have some tactical advantages in high tech goggles or maybe something to do with his breathing. But the pictures she’s seen of it—drawings from Jigsaw and also a photograph he took of it for her during a mission scrapbook assignment—indicate that his killing face is nothing so much as a muzzle and blindfold pressed against his entire face.
But the mission can’t happen as early as tomorrow. She’ll have at least a few more sessions with him to go over his homework and help him acquire all the pieces of his kit. This time, she’s determined that he have what he actually needs on the mission, and unlike the official list of needs, she’s looking out for him psychologically as well as just physically.
And maybe there will be time to circle back around to the collages and finally determine what it is about Bruce, the team’s only medic from what she can tell, that is so similar to the “researchers” from Jigsaw’s past—and to help Jigsaw dismantle that similarity and focus instead on the differences.
It’s foolhardy at best to send Jigsaw into the field when he has this many alarms set up in his mind about Bruce and medical treatment. If she can’t help him disarm some of those alarms and come to fully trust all of his teammates in every capacity, then what happens when something else goes wrong?
Jigsaw can’t acquire a new stray animal every time there’s an injury in the field, even if there were enough stray animals in the area, which there won’t be. Not when he has as little thought toward self-preservation in the face of injury as he has. Injury and pain, after all, are tightly connected to self-improvement in his mind.
Another land mine she has no time to disable before this new mission.
And speaking of land mines… Yasmin picks up her phone and sends off a quick text to Zoe, giving her fellow therapist a heads up that their mutual client is tender today.
Because that’s what is going on. Jigsaw is not dangerous, is not so much on the edge of something, but is merely tender. She and Jigsaw have been exploring some very difficult subjects in the last several sessions, and it’s perhaps time to focus on things that are less difficult, to give him time to settle a bit before bringing those difficult things back up.
This afternoon, she’d led their session closer to topic he found to be a dangerous one, and she hadn’t realized it in time. She knows these things can be unavoidable, that it’s impossible to tell all of what will potentially trigger a client, but she also can’t help but feel she should have known somehow that he was still so tender from their earlier discussions about the collages.
She opens up her diary on the phone and types in her feelings about the afternoon, along with her logical, rational responses. Wise mind will balance these things, because there is room for both extremes. Her rational and emotional minds both have something valuable to contribute, and she wants to be sure to capture everything.
Her next appointment with her own therapist is not until this Friday, and so she will need to hold space for things for several days.
Perhaps she’ll share her feelings with Zoe later tonight, after her session with Jigsaw and perhaps Clint.
There is a knock at the door, and Yasmin gets to her feet to answer it. Her dinner has arrived, then. A large bowl of beef pho with lotus stem salad, comforting and hopefully just the thing to help settle her after a session gone wrong.
Zoe
—New York City | Sunday 07 October 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
She’s not expecting much of anything after her evening session with Jigsaw, but she’s certainly not expecting Yasmin to be waiting by her door with a divided bowl of fruit and cheese. She’d gotten Yasmin’s missive earlier about Jigsaw possibly being on edge for her session tonight, but she hadn’t seen any evidence of it.
Zoe taps in her room code and invites her fellow therapist inside for a chat. “Come on in. What’s on your mind?”
Yasmin smiles and precedes her into the room, setting the fruit and cheese bowl on the coffee table and taking a seat.
“I made a mistake today with Jigsaw,” Yasmin says. She sighs. “It has me shaken, to be honest. I did what damage control I could, but… Did he seem… off tonight?”
Zoe frowns, trying to recall if anything seemed particularly “off” about him. Tonight had been another where Clint was missing in action—something about mission prep—and Jigsaw had spent the time telling her all about a small robot collecting rocks and alien ice in outer space.
As it turned out on reading the less than accessible small white print on the magazine he’d supplied, the robot was hardly “little” in any sense of the word, except perhaps by comparison to a massive asteroid. The whole project had been massive, even daring, and from what she’d been able to glean from the article, had been a success.
An expensive success, but what does price mean in the face of scientific progress?
Zoe finally shakes her head. “We spent nearly the entire hour discussing that magazine you gave him, and the fate of the mission to ‘sanction and extract’ alien minerals and water from the Main Asteroid Belt. Tea?”
Yasmin nods. “Please.”
Zoe fills up the kettle and sets it to boil.
She still doesn’t know how the words “sanction and extract” play into anything where the NASA mission was concerned, but those are the words he’d come up with, and she tries not to question his word choices. She’s not there to police his communication, only to help him enhance it.
“Was that your mistake?” she asks. “Giving him the magazine?”
Yasmin huffs out a brief laugh. “That wasn’t it,” she says. “That was just the recovery. I may have fumbled, but I’m relatively sure I stuck the landing in the end.”
Zoe nods. “It’s nice that he’s found an interest in space. It definitely gives me more to put into those crossword puzzles and word searches, and I’m learning a lot myself.”
She gets out a pair of cups and plops a teabag in each one before pouring the boiling water over them. Maybe when her work with Jigsaw is able to transfer to long distance, she can ask for one of these StarkTech kettles to take with her. Boiling water has never been so fast.
Zoe puts the cups on a tray with a pair of plates and forks for the snack Yasmin brought and carries the tray over to the coffee table. She sits across from Yasmin and sets up their little evening snack, putting Yasmin’s tea and place setting in front of her and then her own in front of herself.
“So the magazine wasn’t the issue,” Zoe says as she helps herself to some strawberries and mango chunks. “What was the issue?”
Yasmin picks up her tea and lifts the teabag up to check the brew strength. “Well, he said he was feeling hopeful when we started, and while I don’t think it was wrong to take him at his word, I do think I misunderstood what he was hopeful about.”
Zoe nods. It can be tricky trying to gauge their patient’s emotions at the beginning of a session, even with the traditional inquiry into how he’s feeling. “And hopeful is such a complicated one, too,” she murmurs.
Yasmin sighs. “The more I think about it, the more I think he was specifically hopeful that we wouldn’t do exactly what I led us to do. I had the collages right there, and he didn’t seem happy to see them.”
Zoe doesn’t image he would have been happy to see them, no. She’s very glad she doesn’t need to focus her own sessions so heavily on his prior traumatic captivity. The collages seem ambitious to her, possibly too ambitious for the short time they’ve been working with Jigsaw. Collages of pleasant things, certainly, would be welcome. But even a freedom collage has room to include unpleasant things. It’s unavoidable.
And a collage, by its very nature, jumbles everything—the positive and the negative—together in such a way that everything intrudes on everything else.
“I’m going to have him work on an outer space scrapbook for our next session,” Yasmin says, “and we’ll put the collages away for a few sessions. After the last few discussions, we just need more of a break from them.”
Yasmin shakes her head and forks a few cheese cubes onto her plate before gathering up some mango and a few grapes. “I do need to unravel his traumas and help him confront what was done to him, but there isn’t any need to rush the process. There’s enough trauma to last several lifetimes, unfortunately.”
“Mm,” Zoe agrees. “And it all stacks up in layers that interfere with each other. What was the discussion today about?”
And more importantly, how did it go sideways?
Yasmin sighs. “I was trying to get an idea of how legitimate medical attention had differed from gratuitous torment of a healthy patient— So that I could emphasize how safe Bruce was in case there was another mission where Jigsaw needed medical attention, and…”
She shakes her head again, her brow furrowed. “Ultimately, what happened was that seemingly everything on the captivity collage reared up and caught both of us off-guard. I think,” she says slowly, “that he was trying to demonstrate for me that he remembered things well under stress, and the demonstration turned into a flashback.”
Zoe grimaces in sympathy. “He had Lucky with him, right?”
“Thankfully, yes. Lucky comes to all our afternoon sessions.” Yasmin sighs again. “I just wish I’d been able to see what was happening in time to, I don’t know, head it off at the pass. Before he was pulling his hair and just.” She looks up. “His eyes, Zoe. So much terror and acceptance should never be in the same expression.”
Zoe can only imagine. She had caught a glimpse of that when Jigsaw had been afraid of the “fun” feelings stones and certain that the “fun” nature of them had meant that she would be hurting him, but it had been short-lived. She never did reintroduce the stones, despite suspecting that he would get a lot of use out of them.
That short window into Jigsaw’s trauma had been enough for her, and she’s very glad that most of the time, her sessions with him have been able to focus on improving his daily life going forward and not on the horrors of his past.
She’s caught flashes of his past, has seen things that she can only assume are symptoms of his history. The mask he’d drawn and labeled a “killing face,” his almost fear of having a voice and his aversion to making any sort of noise. The entire debate around the definition of fun.
But she doesn’t think she’d be able to sleep nights if she were exposed to the enormity of what has been done to him. She doesn’t envy Yasmin, or even Caroline, their front row view of the outcome of these traumas.
“I suppose I just feel I failed him this afternoon,” Yasmin continues. “I wanted to reach out and offer physical comfort even knowing full well how bad an idea that was. I almost threw out all of my caution and training to try to… I don’t even know what. Put a hand on his knee, maybe, or try to untangle his fingers from his hair.”
Zoe understands, or thinks she might. “I sometimes wish I could just hug him,” she murmurs. “I doubt it would end well. We’re better off keeping our hands to ourselves, however much we want to reach out and offer that comfort.”
It isn’t that she’s afraid of him snapping or getting her confused with an attacker and hurting her. She’s been working with him long enough to know better—she’d known better in a matter of days. But she doesn’t want to break the fragile trust that they’ve been building and cause him to fear her. It’s better that he knows that she will never break into his personal space, that she will rely on Lucky to do that for her, or Clint if there’s a need for it.
“I know,” Yasmin says. “Today has just been really trying. You know, he went with Clint again to meet with the auction winner this morning.”
“I didn’t. It hadn’t come up.” Zoe frowns. “I thought it was generally supposed to be time for Jigsaw not to be with Clint.”
“It is. Was Clint with him tonight for your session?”
“No,” Zoe says. “He had a mission planning session with the others. He doesn’t come nearly as often now as he did at first.”
Yasmin nods, taking the information in. “That’s probably for the best in the sense of helping Jigsaw gain his independence and not feel he needs to have one of the others with him at every point in time. But I imagine it gets in the way not knowing whether he’ll be there,” she adds.
“At first, perhaps. By now, I think the whole team has learned whatever they’re going to learn when it comes to ASL and Jigsaw’s unique idiolect.” Zoe shrugs. “Anything more that Clint can share with the team is just a bonus.”
Notes:
So I felt the need to award the little robot a mission success, haha! Thank you all for your concern about the little robot last chapter. ^_^
Chapter 72: Clint | Even you can’t be caught unawares
Notes:
Chapter title from “Be Prepared” by Jeremy Irons.
It's a bit early for a midweek chapter, but I'm feeling the need to post. It's freaking cold out there, and posting makes me warm inside. ^_^
(Content warning in end notes.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Monday 08 October 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
“I still don’t understand why the shark needs to go in a duffel bag.”
There’s a black duffel bag on the sofa—not so much a gift as a thing that Jigsaw requested—and also an assortment of other things, ranging from a small pile of Clint’s “eh, not bad” dirty laundry to a trio of peaches, none of which really belong in a duffel bag.
The laundry, for one thing, belongs in the basket Clint has been getting better and better at putting his clothes into over the last couple of weeks. Why make a sofa pile of questionable laundry now, after spending months training Clint to use a basket like a non-trash person?
And peaches, um, definitely belong in the kitchen, if they have to be in the suite at all.
Jigsaw picks up the stuffed shark and rubs it along his cheek, letting his eyes close in obvious pleasure at the sensation. Then he holds the shark out to Clint.
“Right, it’s soft.” Clint brushes the shark against his face briefly. “But why’s it going in a bag? Doesn’t it belong in your pillow nest?”
Does Jigsaw not like the shark as much anymore? No, that’s not it. Couldn’t be. If anything, Cuddles McFin becomes more and more an emotional support shark with every passing evening. He still brings it to bed with him, squishes it while it’s Clint’s turn playing video games, and sometimes even brings it with him to a therapy session Lucky can’t join him for.
So why stuff it in a bag where it’ll be that much less accessible?
Jigsaw holds out his hand for the shark and then nuzzles the shark close before exchanging it for a t-shirt he buries his face in before inhaling deeply. And that isn’t weird at all. It’s totally normal for people to smell other people’s passable but still definitely worn laundry.
Jigsaw mimes eating one of the peaches and Clint’s mind starts to form a picture of what he could be meaning to convey. Feeling the shark. Smelling the clothes. Tasting the peaches. Senses and stuff. It kind of explains the scrapbook made of ribbons tying together glitter-festooned pages full of pictures of Lucky and Alpine. That would be seeing the pictures, if Clint’s guess is right.
He wonders what the hearing one will end up being.
Jigsaw has a tablet that plays music, but the tablet is still on the kitchen table. So it’s definitely not going in the bag, at least not yet. But if he’s putting other stuff into the duffel bag early—earlier than what, Clint has no idea—then why not the tablet? And if he’s only putting stuff in the bag that he won’t need until later, why the shark? He’ll need that tonight.
And he has his concerns about a trio of peaches added to a duffel bag without being in some sort of container. What if they get squished and everything in the bag gets all juicy? The shirts can be thrown in the wash, and the shark, too, if it comes to it. But the scrapbook is kind of important and not washable. And the tablet will be in that category, too.
“Is this some sort of kit you’re putting together?” Clint asks. “Like a go bag of stuff you like?”
Jigsaw nods and makes Yasmin’s name sign. Then he adds “mission” to the concept and taps his wrist.
So… Jigsaw is doing this because Yasmin asked him to, and it’s for the mission to Siberia that’s coming up. But that’s not for another day or two, at least. They’re still ironing out the details. And Yasmin shouldn’t know any of those details, should she?
Well, Clint thinks, maybe she should know that there’s a mission coming up. It makes sense that she’d be helping prepare Jigsaw for a mission, or at least be aware that she’s going to have a day or so off from her Jigsaw duties while the team is out of town. Maybe it’s fine, in that case.
And who knows? Maybe having a little go bag full of homework things will make a mission easier for him. Clint has a go bag of his own—mostly for heading out onto a mission if one comes up unexpectedly, and including mostly his secondary weapons, a set of tac gear, and some protein bars. A little first aid kit he’s never once opened despite having ample reason to open it. A bottle with some electrolyte powder in it, just add water and shake.
It seems like Clint’s go bag is more related to the actual process of going to the mission site, though, and Jigsaw’s is more about… Well, coming back, sort of. Coming back to himself, maybe when things get too intense during a mission.
Clint remembers how out of it he’d been in the quinjet during the North Carolina mission. Staring but sightless, not even hearing a word they’d spoken to him, just holding the kitten like his very life depended on the kitten’s safety. It had taken several minutes to bring Jigsaw’s mind back into the quinjet along with his body.
In one way, it had been for the better that he spaced on them. That had given Banner the time to probe the wound for obvious bullet fragments, to assess for internal ricochet, to gauge the amount of internal bleeding. It had allowed time for getting the stitches set up after they stopped the bleeding, too, and Clint doesn’t think the whole “needle and suture thread coming toward you” part would have gone over very well if Jigsaw had been aware of Banner moving in his space like that, going around to his back, any of it.
And he can’t see a world in which Jigsaw was okay with Banner dabbing blood off his face and neck, mud off of his arms, and all the rest of the field cleanup. Jigsaw had hardly been okay letting Banner clean Alpine.
So yeah, a sensory go bag to help them where there probably won’t be a convenient kitten. That’s a good idea. Clint has to hand it to the therapy team—they may be therapists and therefore horrible to spend time with, but they have some very good ideas in and among the bad ones.
Bad ideas, of course, are still there in abundance. Like all the games Zoe has on the tablet, and the songs it plays. Or like the obsessive arts and crafts homework assignments that somehow leave Jigsaw sobbing into Clint’s arms after a session with Yasmin. But there are also speaking tablet programs and duffel bags to take on missions.
“Think maybe the shark can get added to the bag later on?” Clint asks. “And the peaches? Maybe closer to go-time?”
Jigsaw nods, and goes to get the tablet off the kitchen table. The tablet goes into the bag along with the shark and the shirts and the scrapbook.
Clint frowns. “Uh, that I know of, go-time isn’t for a while, Jigs.”
Jigsaw nods again and nestles the peaches one by one into the folds of Clint’s worn shirts. He zips the bag up and looks down at it with a satisfied expression for a few moments before unzipping it and retrieving all of the items back out onto the sofa.
“Just checking to make sure it all fits?”
A third nod.
“Maybe the peaches should get cut up and put in, I don’t know, a container or something. To keep them from getting squished.” Clint shrugs. “Quinjet might be a bumpy ride, you never know.”
Jigsaw brings a peach up to his nose and inhales deeply, then lets his breath out with a satisfied drop of his shoulders. He offers one of the peaches to Clint and then takes the other two to the kitchen to set them on the counter by the sink.
Clint follows with the third peach and puts it in the pile with the rest. There’s been a peach shipment, obviously, because there’s at least seven peaches taking over that whole part of the kitchen counter. It must have happened while they were out eating breakfast with Natasha in her rooms. He’s pretty sure he’d have noticed someone coming in with a bag of peaches.
“So it fits,” he says. “Now what?”
They could watch something on the TV. Cake Off, maybe, or that new show about making sculptures out of chocolate. They could play video games. They could put something on the TV and pretend to watch it while they really just held hands and started falling back asleep before lunchtime.
They could play with the animals. Wand toys for Alpine, if she’s interested. Which she almost always is. Or they could do some tug of war with Lucky—or with Alpine. It’s fun gently taking toys away from Alpine and letting her drag the toys back into her own possession. They could even do fetch for either Alpine or Lucky. Lucky knows how to play, but Alpine sometimes brings them things to throw.
Or there’s the gym. Natasha will be dancing with Cap right now, since that’s what she said she wanted to do after breakfast. But they could climb the rock wall or play around on the parkour course and not get in their way. Or they could lift weights. Or they could do some gymnastics. It’s been a while since he’s seen Jigsaw twirling around on the parallel bars. He could show off a bit, himself, too.
Maybe he should put together the third cat tree and get it situated in a corner of his bedroom. Or their bedroom, it might as well be called. Jigsaw keeps a secondary notebook on his far nightstand, with a dark purple ballpoint stuck through the spiral binding. He has a white and purple target coffee mug over there for water, too, and it’s definitely Jigsaw’s mug because Alpine sometimes puts her face in it and unlike Jigsaw, Clint isn’t drinking after that.
Jigsaw goes to his bedroom—which is still Jigsaw’s bedroom and not theirs, because Clint might not need a place to call his own but Jigsaw definitely does—and comes back out with one of the fabric boxes he stores his treasures in.
This one is the purple fabric box with the white sequins glued to the sides in concentric target rings, and Clint’s seen it but hasn’t seen what’s inside of it. It’s his newest fabric box, and another of the good ideas the therapy team has had. If he puts his treasures in the boxes, Alpine and Lucky can’t get into them and accidentally ruin anything or get hurt eating ribbons or whatever.
Jigsaw pulls out a smaller cardboard box that has a picture of a black and white line drawing on the top of it that’s partly colored in with a picture of a marker and partly disassembled into pieces. A puzzle. Jigsaw wants to be put together a jigsaw puzzle.
Clint keeps his expression neutral. He can play a game while Jigsaw assembles a puzzle, no problem. The problem only shows up if Jigsaw wants his help putting together this particular puzzle, because… Clint accepts the box and gives it a shake.
Yep, fully disassembled in there. And the picture on the box is clearly an indication of what is to come. Not only does this thing require them to assemble a puzzle, but the damn puzzle isn’t even colored in yet. They have to make the puzzle whole and then color it in with marker. Why do they have to make these things even harder than they have to be?
“You want help coloring it in after you put it together?” Clint asks, hopeful.
Maybe that’s all Jigsaw is wanting from him is to play “what color goes where” with him afterward. Because Clint doesn’t have the attention span to put together a colorful puzzle, let alone this other thing with no color.
Jigsaw points at the picture on the top of the box, a plate of holiday cookies, it looks like. Black and white striped candy cane cookies. Black and white Christmas tree cookies. Black and white snowmen cookies with scarves and hats. Black and white stars and ornaments and presents with ribbons. All arranged overlapping on a plate on a table.
It’s still October. And he’s not really sure Jigsaw knows what cookies are, or what winter holidays are coming up. It’s really not the time to put this puzzle together.
“Got anything else in there?” Clint asks.
Jigsaw pulls out another puzzle box, this one with a black and white stained glass window that needs to be colored in. It’s lots and lots of birds, in flight and perched on bars in the stained glass piping.
Same issue there, only Jigsaw probably has more experience with this subject matter than the holiday cookie tray. Still, though…
“Third time’s a charm?”
Jigsaw looks at him and makes his question sign.
“Means, the first two things weren’t ideal but maybe the third one is a good idea?”
Clint hunches his shoulders a little, feeling bad about rejecting the puzzles. A thousand pieces of unfinished line drawing isn’t exactly right up his alley, though, in a big way. It’s something maybe Natasha would like doing with him. And he’ll color in birds or cookies or whatever if that’s the ask. But…
Jigsaw takes the puzzles back and puts them into the fabric box. He rearranges the contents of the box for a moment and Clint makes a point not to look inside the box while he does so. It’s Jigsaw’s box, and Jigsaw’s treasures, and Clint figures he’ll give Jigsaw some privacy even if he is rifling through it in the living room.
Finally, Jigsaw puts the lid back on the box, gets up, and returns the box to his room before stopping briefly to open a drawer in his bathroom. He comes back to the living room with the wooden hairbrush Cap had gotten him, and hands it to Clint. He mimes brushing his hair and then holds out one of the hair ties Clint has seen him stuff in his pockets but never, ever use.
This is… Not at all what he thought he’d end up doing today. But if it’s a choice between putting together needlessly difficult puzzles and combing Jigsaw’s hair, maybe even putting it up in a ponytail afterward, then Clint will say that yes, third time is a charm.
“You want me to put your hair up in a ponytail like Natasha wears?” Clint asks. “Because I can try, but it’ll probably look horrible.”
Jigsaw nods and holds his hand out for the brush.
Clint hands it back and then grimaces as Jigsaw immediately rips the brush though his hair from root to tip without any hesitation or care for possible tangles. The sounds. God. Clint can practically hear the hair screaming for mercy.
“Let me?”
Jigsaw hands the brush back with an eager smile.
Clint is not an expert at long hair. He hasn’t ever had it himself, and his various partners who have had it have all known better than to let him at it, even Bobbi.
He hasn’t even brushed a Barbie’s hair but the one time in elementary school during recess, and he’d ended up brushing her head right off her neck he’d been so rough with with the brush. Granted, the Barbie in question had been a tangled mess and he still maintains that the whole debacle was Suzie’s fault because of those tangles. But still.
He’d had to stay after school because Suzie had cried so hard about the doll’s head during recess, and then his dad had taken a belt to him after dinner.
He was never sure if the belt was because he had been playing with a doll or because he’d been held after school. With his dad, it had always been hard to tell why anything was happening except when he drank, and then it was easy to figure out—drunk dad meant hide because you could never do anything right and the opportunities to do things wrong were around every corner.
Clint shoves the memories out of his head and into the trash heap of his childhood where they belong. This is not a Barbie, and while things can definitely go wrong, he has the feeling Jigsaw will extend the benefit of the doubt where his old man never had.
Clint gestures for Jigsaw to sit on the sofa with his back to him, and waits for him to do so before inspecting the brush, just in case it’s as bad as he thinks it might be. He half expects to see a ton of broken off hair caught in the bristles, but the brush is pretty clean. Maybe Jigsaw has enhanced hair, Clint muses.
He readies the brush in his right hand and then decides to section off Jigsaw’s hair a bit so that he’s not just brushing huge hunks of hair all at once. He switches the brush to his left hand, then decides he’ll need two hands to section things, and sets the brush on his thigh for later.
“I’m going to touch your hair now,” he warns before swallowing and doing just as he said. Clint gathers about an inch-wide section of hair between his fingers and then lifts the brush again in his right hand and lightly pulls the brush along the surface of the hair a few times.
He feels like an idiot. He’s not brushing Jigsaw’s hair like this. Not really. He’s approaching Jigsaw’s hair with the brush like he’s afraid to actually put the brush anywhere near the hair, and he’s accomplishing nothing. Natasha would laugh at him.
Clint grips the small section of hair tightly in his fingers to make sure nothing pulls and actually lets the bristles sink into the last inch of Jigsaw’s gathered hair. Then he works the brush through to the end, just brushing the inch of length. There seem to be a few tangles in there that the bristles find, but nothing much, and the hint of tangle is gone by the third time through.
He moves the brush up a little and gets two inches of hair in the brush’s range. Repeats his actions. At this rate, Jigsaw’s hair will grow new length by the time Clint has finished brushing the length he already has. But he’s seen the way the women in his life have brushed their hair, and it’s maybe not this careful, but it sure isn’t ripping a brush through starting at the root.
Not at first, anyway. Not when they’re first getting out of the shower after washing it and not after they’ve had it loose for a while and it’s been blown about by the wind. No. First they start at the bottom and gradually work their way up. Then they start brushing from top to bottom.
He’s not ripping the head off of the Barbie this time. He’s trying to do what he can make sure there aren’t any knots that get snagged and torn out. And if it takes a while, then it takes a while. They aren’t scheduled to be anywhere. They have until lunch, really.
“Is… Is this okay?” Clint asks after he’s finished a third section.
He’s only got one more to go, and then he has to try to brush Jigsaw’s hair from top to bottom and just hope he caught all the tangles. And then… then he has to try to put it in a ponytail. He showed Jigsaw the basic premise of how to do that earlier, months ago it feels like, but that doesn’t mean he actually has a clue what he’s doing.
Jigsaw nods his head and resumes his statue stillness.
Clint finishes the last section and then tentatively brings the brush through Jigsaw’s hair as a whole, following the brush with his hand and feeling how smooth everything is. Damn. Did he… did he do a good job?
Clint gathers up Jigsaw’s hair and lets it fall back around his shoulders, brushes it a few more times for good measure. He’s gotten all the tangles out, and without all that awful ripping noise. Now to tie it up.
“Do you want it tight or loose?” Clint asks, as though he has any idea how to achieve either state without trial and error.
Jigsaw just nods again, which isn’t any help, and Clint decides that he’ll try for loose. A loose ponytail is going to be easier to take out later and probably won’t remind Jigsaw of anyone grabbing his hair and yanking. Or at least it’ll remind him of that less than a tight ponytail would.
Now if Clint can just make a ponytail that’s loose without it being so loose that it falls out immediately.
Clint sets the brush down and puts the hair tie between his teeth so it’ll be easier to grab when he has all of Jigsaw’s hair gathered up again. And then he just… Gathers up all that hair and keeps on gathering. It’s like Jigsaw’s hair keeps multiplying and spreading out, like there’s more and more of it every time he gathers it up.
Every time he thinks he has it all, he starts to reach for the hair tie and finds that a little bit has somehow slipped out of his hand. That, and it’s just so pleasing running his hands through Jigsaw’s hair to do the gathering. He almost doesn’t mind when it starts getting away from him in his gathering attempts.
Eventually, though, Clint spies Alpine tottering from her basket and making a bee-line in her clumsy kitten fashion over to the sofa. Better wrap this up. She might want attention, might want food, might want to snuggle. And Jigsaw will want to provide, and to do that, he won’t be sitting still for Clint’s hair-gathering attempts.
Clint finally manages to get all of the hair he needs in one hand and the hair tie in the other, and while it takes him a while to figure out how to get all of the hair through the tie without losing strands of it, he’s pretty satisfied with the eventual outcome—his very first ponytail.
“There you go.” Clint taps Jigsaw on the right shoulder lightly with the back of the hairbrush. “I think it doesn’t look horrible, but if you hate it I won’t be upset if you take it out.”
Jigsaw turns his head and flashes an absolutely blissed out beaming smile over his shoulder at Clint, and Clint feels his whole stomach flip flop in his gut while his brain just up and skips town entirely.
“Um.”
It is not fair. His roommate should not be able to look so soft and gentle and appealing, should not be able to look so sleepy and alert at the same time, almost smoky and with an expression that borders on invitation. Should not be able to do these things to Clint with just a smile.
This is the time when Clint would normally reach forward and pull his partner back against him, plant a kiss on the side of his partner’s mouth or maybe along his partner’s neck, maybe start something upright that ends up a bit more horizontal, maybe that even adds to the pile of laundry strewn about the room.
But while his brain has taken leave of his skull, it at least did him the favor of leaving instructions for how not burn this budding relationship to the ground in its absence.
Clint swallows and very pointedly—and with effort—keeps his hands and his face to himself. This is not the time to kiss Jigsaw. This is not the time to pull Jigsaw back against him and settle into a cuddle. Jigsaw’s eyes—his whole expression and posture—might be open and inviting, and Clint might want more—so much more—right now, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting a green light for more.
Jigsaw doesn’t understand traffic lights in this context, doesn’t mean to signal these things, and would need to have the proceedings explained to him anyway if they were going to continue down that path.
It’s just that Clint wants that path so much, wants to frolic and roll around in the flowers lining that path and just…
Jigsaw signs his thanks and gets up with the brush in his hand to return it to his bathroom drawer.
Clint smiles back up at him and tries to say something normal like “no problem” or “you’re welcome” or even “your hair looks nice,” but nothing comes out but a croak and he clears his throat with words left unspoken.
Jigsaw just thanks him again and scoops up Alpine on his way out of the living room.
Clint leans back against the sofa and stares at the ceiling for a moment. Yeah. That was definitely a good thing, and Jigsaw enjoyed it. They both enjoyed it. That’s what is important. They have all the time in the world to explore the path.
Notes:
Content Warning: There’s some remembered child abuse in this chapter, where Clint has unfond memories of the unfair and cruel consequences of his innocent childhood actions. It’s very brief. Just skip the bit about the Barbies (it’s like five paragraphs) and you’ll easily miss it.
Chapter 73: Jigsaw | What do you want me to say?
Notes:
Chapter title from “Wild Roses” by Of Monsters and Men.
Have another midweek chapter~ ^_^ I'm currently writing chapter 109, so my chapter buffer feels endless, haha! (Glad I didn't guess how long this story would be!)
Content Warning in endnotes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Monday 08 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
“How are you feeling this afternoon, Jigsaw?”
Yasmin starts with the traditional question instead of noticing the hair all gathered up at the back of the neck. Or maybe she does notice but asks the question first, anyway. The feeling question is important, after all. There is a reason they start like this.
It should answer.
It signs that it is happy and that it feels like it accomplished a mission objective that did not involve blood stars or killing targets.
And Yasmin is suitably impressed, her eyebrows rising in appreciative curiosity. “That’s wonderful. Tell me more?”
It turns the head so that she can see the hair all gathered up, and then it draws two assets sitting on a sofa, one with a star on the left arm, and the other with a plastic crescent behind one ear and holding a brush. Beside the drawing, there is room for it to draw the brush in more detail so that she can understand it better, and it adds a circle as well, to represent the hair tie.
It mimes brushing the hair, just a little bit at a time, and then all over.
“Is that Clint on the sofa behind you?”
It nods and tries to convey everything about the scene to her. The other asset so warm and solid behind it, the way the sofa cushion dipped under the weight of both assets, the other asset’s breath on the neck and gently blowing hairs astray even as the other asset tried to gather them all up.
So good. The way the brush moved through the hair when the knots were out, the way there was no pain when the other asset was getting those knots out, so unlike when it brushes the hair. The little stiff hairs on the brush scratching so gently, so soothingly against the scalp, sending shivers up the spine. The—
“Can I pause to observe something, Jigsaw?”
It stops signing and blinks. Nods.
“When you brushed your hair before Clint took over, you caused yourself pain because you tore through the tangles. Had you been thinking that was inevitable, that the orderly hair required the pain of brushing first?”
Had it been thinking… It considers the question. Order comes through pain, even though everyone says that is not true. But the pain from the brush was so little, not even worth thinking about. It had assumed…
Had it? Had it assumed anything at all? Or had it simply pulled the brush through the hair and felt the small pains and thought nothing of them?
It signs that it does not know. The only times it can remember the hair being brushed, except this latest time, it was the asset brushing the hair. It remembers fingers twisting and clenching in the hair to control the head—to keep it still for the choking face to go on, or to move it forward and backward so that the agent pushing into the mouth could push in deeper so that the neck bulged, or to grind the skin face against the concrete, or—
“Jigsaw?” Yasmin says. “It’s okay if you don’t know. I just wanted to point out that it sounds like Clint was able to put your hair into order without any pain at all.”
That is true.
“Pain can be used to force things into order, yes. But order doesn’t require pain all the time. Most of the time, there are many ways to put things into order. And we can choose the ways that don’t hurt.”
The way the other asset took little pieces of hair and so carefully brushed each little piece from the bottom of the hair to the top of the hair, all without any pain. The other asset could have brushed the hair the way this asset brushes the hair, but the other asset did not want to. Had winced when it did so at first.
It asks if there is a pain way and a no-pain way to do everything.
“That’s a good way to think about it, yes. Like brushing tangled hair, or like taking off a band-aid. You could rip it off and get it over and done with, or you could soak the bandage and ease it off.”
So sometimes the pain way gets the job done faster. But it knows as well that the pain way can be much, much slower. It is very skilled at making pain last for targets who deserve that. The no-pain way would be over so fast. So it is different in each situation, maybe. Sometimes the pain way is fast, and sometimes it is slow.
Sometimes it is days on the meat hooks, and sometimes it is just an afternoon of being pushed into and filled up until it cannot help but heave the stomach’s contents up onto the concrete. So the pain way can also be not fast and not slow, but medium.
It wonders, though, if something can be accomplished fast, and the only thing that matters is to get it done, then why do it the pain way if the pain way is slower? It feels like it would have learned lessons very quickly without the pain—just the threat, the promise of the pain was enough to help it comply.
It uncaps the teal pen and writes WHY PAIN on the next page of the notebook with the stars on the tops of the pages. It does not want this part of the conversation to be muddied up in the happiness of the hair brushing picture.
“Jigsaw, HYDRA chose to cause you pain whenever it could, for however long it could. That’s part of what makes it an evil organization. You didn’t deserve what HYDRA did to you. It was wrong.”
Is it wrong because it did not deserve the pain, or is it always wrong to cause pain, even if the one experiencing the pain does deserve it?
It begins to write again, taking its time and wishing it had brought the tablet along. But the tablet was still tethered to the wall, “charging.” It needed to sleep for a while longer before it could be used, and so it could not bring it to the session.
WRONG BECAUSE NOT DESERVED it writes on one line. Then, on the next line down: WRONG ALWAYS EVEN IF DESERVED
It shows Yasmin the notebook with the stars on the tops of the pages. Is it the first one or the second one?
“What do you think, Jigsaw?” Yasmin asks.
It is not a challenge, but it is challenging all the same. What does it think?
It thinks that it does not like receiving pain. And sometimes it thinks that it does not deserve to receive pain, that it didn’t. The others in the hive building all want it to think that it did not deserve what HYDRA did to it, even if it was a failure and even if it needed to be put into order.
And it can accept, sometimes, that it did not deserve or earn the pain it received. So if it is wrong to cause pain when it is not deserved, then HYDRA was wrong. It already knows HYDRA is evil. But this would make HYDRA wrong as well.
But it is not sure what it thinks about deserved pain. It… It caused a lot of pain once it freed itself. It was very generous with the lessons that needed to be taught to those who were evil, to those who hurt it and others. It cut and sliced and tore and ripped. It made every kill count.
And it enjoyed that so much.
But what if Yasmin thinks that causing pain is wrong even if the receiver of the pain does deserve it? What if it gives her the wrong answer and she is upset with it? What if she changes her mind and does not want to understand it after all?
“It’s a lot to think about,” Yasmin says, “whether someone can deserve to be hurt. Whether it’s always wrong to hurt people, or whether some people can be hurt without it being wrong, or whether there are circumstances that warrant pain, even.”
It nods. That is a lot to think about. What answer is she looking for? What is the right response?
“I won’t give you an answer, Jigsaw, other than to say that there are very few absolutes in this world.” Yasmin smiles knowingly. “I won’t dictate your morality. It’s up to you to decide where your conscience will take you.”
But if hurting others is part of what makes HYDRA evil, and it hurts others when it has the chance, does that make it evil, also? Or because it is only hurting the evil, does that make it okay? It does not want to be evil. But it does want to kill all of HYDRA, and it wants to do it the pain way if at all possible.
HYDRA has to be eradicated, all of its evil cleaned out like a boil that must be cut open and spilled out to let the good and the innocent flourish again. Every last one of them must be destroyed and it cannot rest, not truly, until the mission is accomplished.
And the best way to achieve mission objectives in this case is to kill and kill. It has agreed to consider not killing HYDRA. But how could it possibly eliminate HYDRA everywhere if it does not kill HYDRA operatives wherever it finds them?
So killing targets does not make it evil. That is a good thing, a necessary thing, a thing it can do and take pride in. Mission accomplished, success, good job. Reward? Yes, it decides, reward comes after success, after good job. But reward does not always mean food. Food is deserved, not earned. The feeder says so.
What makes HYDRA evil, one of the things, is choosing to cause pain and for as long as possible… which it has also done… but to an asset that did not deserve it. Its targets have always deserved the pain it causes.
That is the important part. Deserved or not deserved. That is the distinction between it and HYDRA in the area of pain-causing. Both choose to cause pain, but the pain is directed differently.
But what if HYDRA, all of the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians, thought it did deserve the pain? They all told it that it had earned everything that came to it. What if they believed that, and thought they were doing the right things? Necessary things.
Just like it believes that its own mission is a right and necessary thing.
Who gets to decide what is right and necessary?
The tablet has slept long enough when it gets back to the rooms for assets, and has the green light on instead of the red one. Red means it is tired and needs to be tethered to the wall, and green means it is ready to go.
It frees the tablet from the tether and wakes it up. It will need the tablet for this, to find all the right words. There are so many things in the head right now, and it needs the other asset to help it with some of those things.
“Going right for the tablet, huh?” the other asset asks, closing the fish magazine and turning sideways on the sofa to face it. “Something on your mind?”
It nods. Yes, yes there are many things on the mind.
But the important one, the one that all the other things build up into, the question it needs an answer to but cannot ask Yasmin because she will not answer… It opens the AAC app on the tablet and hunts for the words it needs. There are not many, and all of them are in places it remembers, so it is not much time at all before it can ask.
“Is Jigsaw evil?”
The other asset stares at it for a moment, eyebrows high up on the other asset’s face and lips parted slightly. Then there is the head shake—no—and a glare.
“No. First of all, no, you’re not evil. Second, who even suggested that you were? Because if Yasmin said you were evil, we have to get you a new therapist.”
It shakes the head. No. No, they cannot bring in a different expert. It likes this expert, likes Yasmin, and would miss her if she were gone. And how could it trust another expert as much as it trusts Yasmin? It couldn’t. Yasmin wants to understand it and help it understand itself and others. She is a good expert. There are so few good experts in the world.
“Not Yasmin,” it queues up, “Jigsaw homework. Jigsaw to think about pain and no pain and deserve and no deserve and right and wrong.”
The other asset’s glare softens to a frown, and the fish magazine goes onto the coffee table with a thwap. “Homework,” the other asset mutters. “It’s always the homework, isn’t it?”
“Yasmin will not tell it answers. Yasmin say to find Jigsaw moral compass.”
Those are new words on the tablet in the Homework board. Yasmin helped it enter them, and explained what a moral compass is.
Moral means morals, what an asset or a person thinks is right and what an asset or a person thinks is wrong. And right is like north on a compass. An asset or a person knows moral north-right and judges other actions in relation to the north-right. A wrong action would be like south, the opposite of north-right.
And there are also other directions, east and west, and those are different types of actions, like want to do and do not want to do. An asset or a person can want to do something wrong, which is like southeast, or want to do something right, which is like northeast. Or not want to do something wrong, or not want to do something right—southwest and northwest.
But the moral compass is how an asset or a person can tell what they want to do and what they should do, which is not always the same direction.
It switches to the drawing of a compass, neatly labeled, with all of the morals on it beside the directions.
In order to know whether it is evil, like HYDRA, it needs to understand its moral compass. Needs to know how certain actions fall on the moral compass, which directions those actions are. If it wants to kill HYDRA, that’s east, but it becomes northeast or southeast depending on whether the compass points north or south when it does the killing.
Killing HYDRA is northeast. It is the right thing to do, and it really wants to do it. That part is easy. And making HYDRA suffer is all the way in the east—it really wants to—but it cannot tell if that should be northeast or southeast.
It points to the north and then the east of the compass and signs “kill HYDRA targets” because that is where that action falls on its moral compass. Killing HYDRA is good, and it wants to do it. And then it signs “HYDRA” and puts the “pain” sign on top of that other sign, bringing pain to HYDRA, and asks the question sign.
Where on the compass does that go?
The other asset stares at it for a moment, and then stares at the compass drawing with its labels.
“That’s a lot to take in. Give me a minute.”
It nods. The other asset can take all the time needed. It has asked the other asset for help, after all. If the other asset has to think about it, then the other asset should be given the time to think about it.
“So what’s standing out to me is that you think—still—that killing is just fine, that it’s the right thing to do, if the enemy you’re killing is HYDRA. Right?”
It nods again. Yes! The other asset understands it so well. They are the same, after all, so of course the other asset understands it well. Even if they do not agree all of the time. The understanding is there.
“And you’re wondering whether torturing HYDRA is good or bad?”
It smiles. The other asset is so wonderful. Understanding the compass so fast, and understanding its question so fast. With only a little time to think about it all. It has been thinking about this for the last hour and is still confused.
The other asset hesitates, and then frowns again. “Well, I mean, torturing people isn’t cool or anything, but it’s better than killing them, and—”
The other asset gives it another head shake, no.
“I think your moral compass and mine don’t line up, Jigs. Sorry. I would put killing people at… uh…” The other asset squints at the compass. “Well, the south part, anyway, even if it’s kind of also east for me sometimes.”
So the other asset does believe that killing targets is wrong, but the other asset also sometimes wants to do that, wants to kill certain targets. Wants to do something that is south on the other asset’s moral compass. And it has agreed to leave targets alive, even though it is southwest on its own moral compass.
That is how they are the same in this, then—they are both wanting to kill some of their targets, and they are both agreeing not to do that. The difference is whether killing targets is right or wrong.
It signs to the other asset, signs “the same as” between them, and then the question sign. Just to make sure the other asset still feels that way.
“Yeah,” the other asset says. “We’re still the same as, even if we disagree sometimes. Don’t have to agree all the time.”
It puts the pain sign on top of the HYDRA sign again, and asks. Points to the compass. What does the other asset think about torturing HYDRA?
The other asset is frowning again, and not answering. Is maybe doing homework as well, trying to decide where that falls on the other asset’s moral compass. Finally, after several minutes, the other asset answers with a sigh.
“I honestly don’t know, Jigs. On the one hand, it would leave the person alive, and that’s good. But on the other…” A head shake. No. “I’m just not a torturer.”
The other asset looks to the side.
“Not, uh, not now. When I was Ronin, sometimes things got out of hand. But now I use just enough force to win, just enough pain to subdue and yeah, maybe cripple sometimes, but just to put them out of action. Get them off the playing field.”
The other asset looks back at it. And the hesitancy and chagrin is gone now.
“I’m not a torturer, Jigs. And I don’t think you are, either. I don’t. You’re angry, and you’re scared, and you’re hurt. And I get that. God, I get that. But that isn’t who you are. It’s not you. It’s them. It’s HYDRA.”
Now it is this asset’s turn to frown. It signs “but enjoys” and then taps itself in the chest. It enjoys hurting HYDRA operatives. Making it last. As long as possible. Cleaning out the evil entirely, all the way to its core.
“I know you did. I could tell. I was wading through chunks a few times tracking you down.” The other asset makes a disgust face and mimes vomiting. “But that’s not who you are inside. That’s your anger and your pain talking.”
It is angry, yes. Angry and maybe also hurt still. Yasmin says that what happened to it was wrong, that it did not deserve it, that none of that was its fault. That is something to be angry about. She also says that it will hurt for a long time, inside.
It nods.
“You’re still angry and you still hurt,” the other asset says, “but you’re you now, aren’t you? You get to be who you want to be, and you get to do what you want to do.”
The other asset stops for a moment and then frowns again. “Do you really want to hurt people?”
It will not let others be taken back. And it will not be taken back itself. It will kill and kill and kill to prevent these things. It signs that, the best it can, gets many of the words out into the air between them.
The other asset nods. “Right. You don’t want anyone to be hurt like you were. You hate all these monsters out in the world and want to clean it up. I’m with you, Jigs. But I don’t want to be a monster myself.”
The eyes widen in the face. Is it… Is it a monster, then? Does the other asset think—
“And I don’t think you’re a monster, either,” the other asset says quickly. “You just have to shift your focus a bit and learn to fight like a hero. Quick and clean. Because you’re better than them. Better than HYDRA.”
It is better than HYDRA, better than the monsters, the evil. But it does enjoy hurting the evil. Does that make it a monster? Just a different kind of monster? A better kind of monster?
“But Jigsaw enjoy,” it lines up on the tablet. “Enjoy enjoy enjoy.”
The other asset is still for a moment, and then: “But we don’t have to do everything we enjoy doing. Especially if we know it’s wrong to do it. We can do what we don’t want to do or not do what we want to do. The compass says so, right? East and west?”
It nods. This is a lot to think about. It knows something is what it wants to do, knows that it is right to do it—killing HYDRA—and it has to not do it in order for the team that is not a cell to be happy with it. In order not to disappoint the other asset.
And now there is another thing it wants to do—torturing HYDRA, making it last—and it does not know whether that is north-right or south-wrong, but doing it would make it a monster. It does not want to be a monster. Only an asset.
It is not any closer to completing the homework than it was before—it does not know whether it is right to hurt those who deserve it, or whether it is always wrong to hurt someone, or whether there are circumstances that make hurting someone okay.
And without knowing that, it does not know where torture goes on its moral compass. And so it does not know if torture is right or wrong, does not know whether torture is good or evil, and does not know whether it—this asset—is evil, or a monster.
“Look, this is all a lot to think about all at once,” the other asset says. “Maybe we set it aside for a while? You’re not planning to torture anyone in the near future, right? So you’ve got time to think about it later.”
There is the mission coming up. The base in Siberia the hamburger technician is searching for. There may be an opportunity there for dispatching HYDRA in the most painful and slow ways possible. For making things last, for making HYDRA operatives suffer horribly.
And it does want to. Very badly.
But the other asset is right. It is not being controlled by the team that is not a cell. Is not being forced to do what it does not want to do. It is making the choice to please the other asset and the others on the team that is not a cell by not killing, even though it wants to kill. It can also make the choice to dispatch HYDRA operatives quick and clean, like a hero.
That would make the other asset happy. Wouldn’t it?
It does want to make the other asset happy.
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw has some memories of HTP situations in this chapter, but they are brief.
Chapter 74: Archers | Do I deserve to be the one (who will feed you breakfast, lunch, and dinner)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Man of the Hour” by Norah Jones.
I'm probably going to sleep in tomorrow, but want to be sure y'all get the chapter update by Sunday morning all the same. Have it a little early! ^_^
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
“So we’re totally sure we’re heading out in the morning, right?”
Because if he asks Kate to pet-sit on short notice and then he bails on her because the mission doesn’t come together, that’ll be a great impression to make. It’s already bad enough he didn’t think to offer her a paycheck for her time or whatever.
“We’ll want to be there when there’s plenty of daylight to see by if the power grid no longer functions or gets cut when we trip a trap,” Cap says. “But not so late in the day that we run the risk of being stuck there overnight.”
“And that’s a yes?” Clint asks. “We’re doing this?”
Cap nods. “It’s a yes.”
Beside him, Jigsaw practically vibrates with excitement. He had a good session with his food lady and now they’re getting confirmation that they’ll be actively on a mission this time tomorrow. Couldn’t be a better day, Clint figures. At least not in Jigsaw land.
“Cool.” He digs his phone out of his back pocket and opens up his messages. Scrolls past Natasha and taps his conversation with Kate Bishop.
[You up for petsitting tomorrow? Were leaving early]
He’s kind of expecting a response right away, just based on her past patterns, but she must be in class or something, because there’s no response.
[Should only be a night and change. Maybe just a day thing. Keep you posted]
He puts his phone away and shifts his focus to the team meeting they’re having instead. He doesn’t generally let on that he’s paying attention, but there doesn’t seem to be any harm in it this time.
It’s their mission, and they don’t have Bus-based backup in their pocket, so it’s best to know what the plan is and make sure everyone knows that he knows what the plan is.
“Satellite still shows no activity,” Stark says. “Going to get a better look on-prem, though. Got a whole flock of Redwings. Think you can manage a flock in the wild, Wilson?”
“You know it. We did well enough in practice.”
Clint wonders when they practiced controlling a bunch of flying robot birds, and where. Probably the gym. But if you’re already used to controlling one robot, why do you need to practice controlling lots of that same robot?
“Great. You have your arrows all set?” Cap asks him.
Clint chalks up the robot thing to different skill sets for different people on the team and lays out the basics of his arsenal for the team in words and gestures. Does he have his arrows all set? Does he like coffee?
This is a mission where they may encounter super soldier opponents, so he has to be armed to take down as many as five enraged Jigsaws. That means serious stopping power is needed, but not fatal stopping power. They don’t want to kill these people if they can help it.
He’s got flashbangs to hurt enhanced eyesight in the possible gloom of a base’s dreary recesses. He’s got electric arrows that leave behind something like Natasha’s widow’s bites, clinging to whatever they brushed up against and hopefully making it think twice about being a threat. He’s got fist arrows to hopefully knock someone out with. He’s got net arrows, because even a super soldier can get tripped up in netting. He’s even got a grappling hook arrow in case he falls off somewhere high. Never climb buildings without a grappling hook arrow.
But he’s also got the kind of arrows that most people would recognize as such. They’re sharp as hell, barbed, designed to go in and get stuck. Some of them snap off inside a body, some of them deform like a bullet and scatter shrapnel in there, some of them are just stubborn like a porcupine quill and won’t budge.
He’s prepared. He can go in there and face what’s waiting for them, whether that’s a mound of dusty records or a pack of enemy Winter Soldiers.
They go around the table, each of them describing their preparations for tomorrow’s mission.
Natasha has been working with the brace Stark made her, fine-tuning the fit and making improvements on it. Does she run the risk of ruining her progress with her knee if something goes wrong, possibly landing her more permanently on the bench? Yes. But they’ll need all of them in full working order or as close to it if it does turn out there are enemies ahead.
Wilson and Stark cover the drone front, describing how they’ll be taking surveillance the whole time and how the team will get alerted to any movement of an ambush closing in, should it be a trap. Or a missile closing in, if it’s Bakersfield round two, electric boogaloo.
Stark has some new bugs to hook into the interfaces they may find there, and some handheld translation devices for them if they need to parse out the language from whatever paper files they find. Knowing HYDRA, there will be a lot of paperwork and files, and unlike in North Carolina, it won’t be in English.
Even Bruce has been working on his Hulk-summoning skills, apparently, alone in his Hulk-proof suite. He doesn’t go into detail, and he calls Hulk “the other guy” which is definitely not helping alleviate any of Jigsaw’s obvious skepticism. But it’s nice to know that they will definitely be able to count on having a lean green anger machine at their side in this.
Jigsaw does not get asked what he has been working on, Clint notes, but it’s somehow not feeling much like a slight in the atmosphere of the room. For one thing, Jigsaw is too excited about what everyone is working on to pick up on any slight. For another, Clint’s pretty sure everyone in the room knows full well that Jigsaw doesn’t need any special preparation to be ready to kick HYDRA ass.
The thing is, though, Clint kind of wishes the rest of the team wasn’t quite so dismissive of the idea that Jigsaw will obviously fall in with them and fight the others if it turns out the other five Winter Soldiers are there, awake, and feeling punchy. Clint knows that Jigsaw wouldn’t turn on them or betray their team. But he might not be very effective if he’s pulling punches or trying to make friends with the enemy.
But they gloss over that this time around. They’ve already talked about it, sort of it. Clint guesses it’ll have to be enough. And who knows—maybe it’s just a false lead and the base is a dusty old wreck without anything of value hidden inside?
Kate
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 2:00 p.m.—
She checks her phone after class is out and sees that she’s missed a pair of texts from Hawkeye. She can’t help but feel just the tiniest bit smug that she has a superhero texting her and the people around her don’t.
Hm. Pet-sitting already? They got that mission lined up fast if they only vaguely knew it would happen on Sunday. But then, they’re the Avengers. There must just be a lot less red tape to wade through to get things done when you’re a group of superheroes who saved the world.
Kate hangs back a bit as she and her friend group make their way to the library for a post-class notes exchange. She can text and walk. But she can’t text and walk and explain what she’s texting to the others all at once.
[Sure!] Kate stares at the word for a minute and then deletes it before trying to channel nonchalant into the phone instead.
[I’m free, yeah]
[Could come over tonight if it’s going to be really early]
She can’t believe she just sent that. Inviting herself over to Avengers Tower for an extra night. But it would help ensure that she doesn’t get stuck in traffic somehow and make them late for their mission if they need to wait to leave until after they’ve handed off Lucky and Alpine.
It's courteous, she tells herself. She’s just being courteous with the offer of coming over early. That’s all it is. Not entitled. Courteous.
[If that makes it easier for you], she adds. Because she’s being courteous.
The response she gets after a few minutes is a dog and a cat and a thumbs up. Then: [pizza night at 6?]
This time, she can’t help herself from texting him an over-excited Sure!, but it’s okay. He asked her to come over and spend more time with the group of them—Hawkeye, Jigsaw, Lucky, Alpine… maybe also the Black Widow or some of the others.
“Wow, what’s the good news?” Sandi asks as she holds the door open for Kate.
“Oh, nothing,” Kate lies. “My aunt has some chores for me to do back at her place, so I’m headed over there tonight. Just looking forward to seeing her, is all.”
Sandi shrugs and heads over to the table where the four of them always trade notes after class. “Must be nice. All my family’s out in Montana.”
Kate gives her a sympathetic look. There’s definitely parts of her family she wishes were that far away, but she doesn’t say it. “Getting close to Thanksgiving break, at least. Maybe you can visit.”
“Nah,” Sandi says. “I’ll save that for after finals week.”
It’s hard to concentrate on the Trig notes today, but Kate gives it her best go. She has the highest grade of all four of them, and she’s determined to keep it—and not just to keep her mom off her back. It’s a point of pride for her by now, being “good” at subjects she doesn’t really care much about. Talk about faking it ‘til you make it.
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
Jigsaw’s session must have been a better one than usual, because there’s definitely a happiness in his glide through the door and Lucky’s tail is wagging harder than usual, too.
“Good time today?” Clint asks as he pauses his video game.
His roommate nods and signs “mission” and “happy” and “kill HYDRA” with a bright smile, before choosing a spot on the sofa that puts him squarely in Clint’s personal space with their sides touching.
“Not the last one, though, right?” Clint asks. “You have the killing face for it, but you aren’t doing the actual killing.”
Jigsaw nods, though he looks a little put out about it. That damper doesn’t last long, though, because he launches into a flurry of signs that Clint has to work hard to put into any kind of order. Something about hair and dinner and peaches?
Clint wonders if that’s a good sign, that the motions are coming to him when he needs them and he’s expressing himself so quickly, or if it’s some kind of setback due to the lack of sense he’s making. Hard to tell. Probably Zoe would know, if they were going to go to their session tonight.
“I didn’t catch all of that,” Clint says, “but yeah, I’ll put your hair up before we eat pizza with Kate. That’s what’s for dinner. We’re having pizza, and Kate’s coming over to get a head start on watching the animals.”
Jigsaw draws a fingertip around where he’d have glasses frames if he was wearing them, and then asks if he has to wear them.
“Not around Kate, no. That’s a long time to be wearing glasses you don’t need.”
And anyway, it’s not like the glasses ever did a thing to disguise him where Kate was concerned. At this point, why bother?
“Are you okay with her eating with us?” Clint asks. “I figured it would be alright, but…”
Jigsaw nods and signs that Kate is friends with Lucky and Alpine. Then he asks if Natasha will be there, too, or if it is a team dinner before a mission instead of after one.
At least, that’s what Clint gathers. Jigsaw is more than a little excited about everything and his signs are blending into one another more than usual.
It occurs to him that this might be a small disaster without Natasha present, and that it might be a small disaster anyway. Jigsaw in a downright chatty mood paired with the fact that what he’s excited about is a mission that might involve meeting top secret “friends” or opportunities to torture HYDRA mooks in the name of subduing them…
At least Kate doesn’t know ASL.
Kate
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 6:15 p.m.—
“Hey, glad you could make it, Katie-Kate!” Hawkeye calls out from deeper in the living room when Jigsaw opens the door for her.
Jigsaw has his hair up. That’s the first thing she notices about him that’s different from usual. Instead of his hair hanging down a bit past his shoulders and looking unconditioned but clean, it’s now in a loose ponytail at the nape of his neck.
There’s also the missing glasses, but that somehow doesn’t surprise her as much as the hair. And she can’t tell whether the lack of glasses is responsible for the brightness of his eyes or if he’s just in a mood of some sort, but Jigsaw’s eyes are really blue tonight.
Lucky noses his way past Jigsaw to greet her, and then the whole group of them—because Alpine had to join in the commotion by the door—makes its way inside.
“Hi Clint,” she says, putting her overnight bag down and trying to get a moment’s breather from Lucky’s greeting licks and circling.
Looks like the pizza is still on the way, which is fine. She’s not famished or anything. She ate before coming over just in case, because she doesn’t want to come over and gobble up all the food like she doesn’t have a cafeteria pass at university or a dorm room fridge stacked with snacks. She figures she’ll have a slice or two, call it good. Maybe some salad and a wing if they got that kind of stuff to go with the pizza.
There’s a card table out in the living room, she notices as Lucky finally finishes his greeting and goes over to sit next to Hawkeye and get an ear-rub. But it’s not actually standing up on its legs. It’s just folded on the floor with its legs underneath it like a dead spider, like someone got it out, laid it down flat, and wandered off.
And it has the whitest puzzle she’s ever seen on top of it. It’s like there’s no color at all. Actually… She goes over for a closer look. There isn’t any color. Just white with a few black lines like someone made a puzzle out of a coloring book before it was colored in.
Surprisingly, it’s already almost a third of the way complete. She has no idea how anyone could want to put together a puzzle like that. Talk about miserable. A puzzle like that would be a punishment to put together, not a pastime.
Less surprisingly, Jigsaw sits on the ground at one side of the card table after handing her a purple mug of water. It does sort of figure somehow that he would either not quite understand the premise of a folding table being unfolded into a table that stands upright, or else would not care to sit at a table in a chair like a normal person.
It doesn’t quite figure that he’s handed her a mug of water, but she takes a sip out of courtesy. “Thanks,” she says. And then drinks the rest of the water because she must have been thirstier than she realized.
Jigsaw nods at her and removes Alpine from the box of puzzle pieces yet to be assembled, where she is clearly doing her best to help him sort pieces. The kitten complains bitterly about the relocation and then squirms around in Jigsaw’s hands until he sets her down on his thigh.
She immediately clambers back onto the folded folding table and swats a piece to the floor.
Kate goes around to sit on the other end of the sofa from Hawkeye and tries not to be weirded out that Jigsaw might have somehow known she was thirsty. It has to have been an attempt at hospitality.
“What are you playing?” Kate asks. It looks like he’s in a first-person fishing game, which… sounds even worse than fishing in real life.
“Here Fishy Fishy,” Hawkeye says with a grimace. “I’m going to win. Someday.”
There’s a snapping sound as the fishing line breaks in the game, and then the screen if filling up with bubbles while an anthropomorphic fish laughs at him. Bloop bloop bloop.
“Aw, fishing line,” Hawkeye mumbles. He turns to her. “You want to try? Jigsaw won’t play this game with me. Says it’s mean to the fish.”
If anything, it looks like the fish are being mean to Hawkeye in this game, but Kate accepts the second controller Hawkeye offers her and watches as he sets up a two-player round.
“So you just pretend you’re fishing?” she asks.
“Without all the slimy bits, yeah. You pick your bait, your pole, your line, all that. Even what kind of boat you’re going use.” Hawkeye shrugs. “Then you just go fishing.”
Yeah, it sounds every bit as boring as the real thing. She’d rather gather algae and leaves on the end of a stick than actually fish on a fishing trip. But somehow, even without knowing much about what choices would be the right ones, she ends up catching a marlin on her first turn.
“Go Katie-Kate!” Hawkeye cheers. “I guess I didn’t get the broken edition of the game, after all. It is possible to win.”
He goes on to catch—and lose—a minnow after much struggle.
“I think it might be you that’s broken,” she says before realizing what has come out of her mouth. Oh no! She just insulted Hawkeye!
“I— I mean, in the game,” she tries to say, but he’s laughing too hard to hear her.
“Good one,” he says. “Wanna go again?”
Kate’s about to say yes against her better judgment—who’s to say how long Hawkeye would be okay with her beginner’s luck—when the Black Widow arrives with an armload of pizza boxes and a plastic bag looped around one arm.
“Little help here?” she asks from the doorway.
Kate tries to get up and take something from her, but Jigsaw has somehow eeled his way over there and lifted all the boxes from her arms before Kate can get fully upright.
Sure, she’s only been around him for a few hours at this point, total, in all the time she’s known him, but Kate is certain she will never understand how Jigsaw moves. It just isn’t natural.
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 9:15 p.m.—
Now that Kate’s settled for the night in her guest room, it’s time to get himself settled for the night. Their evening session was canceled to help with an early morning, but Clint still has his doubts about how well he’ll sleep.
The night before a mission is always a bunch of tossing and turning because he’s ready to get a move on now and doesn’t want to wait however many hours for something stupid like a good night’s sleep. The night after a mission is usually a bunch of tossing and turning because he’s managed to ding or scrape something, maybe even break it outright, and he’s just plain uncomfortable.
But sleep while on a mission? Oh, that’s some of the best sleep around. He knows he’ll doze on the way to Siberia—that’s going to be at least a few hours of good sleep right there—and that’s generally enough, right? A few hours of good sleep beats a whole night tossing and turning.
But it’s not just himself in need of settling. Jigsaw is still all tightly wound up, and Clint doesn’t want to risk triggering him with a backrub to loosen him up for the night so he can sleep. Maybe they should watch something boring on the TV. Something with even less plot than the things they usually watch.
Clint gives Jigsaw’s hand a gentle squeeze and then lets it go to grab the remote and turn on the TV. Jigsaw has nearly fallen asleep slumped against him watching TV before, maybe it’ll work again now. Hell, maybe it’ll work so well that Clint falls asleep, too. There’s an alarm set. It’s not like he’ll manage to sleep through JARVIS flashing the lights and yelling at him.
Jigsaw doesn’t watch the selection process on the screen. Clint can feel his eyes watching him instead, and he can see a hint of a smile on his roommate’s lips as well. He thinks back to their first technical meeting, when Clint shot an arrow at him, failed to hit him with said arrow, and then got all those slasher movie vibes from having Jigsaw’s eyes on him.
It’s funny how the same basic thing—being stared at, and by the same person—can change over time.
It’s also funny that Bob Ross is still on the air. Or reruns, anyway.
Clint turns his head to meet Jigsaw’s gaze. “Wanna watch some happy little trees and clouds?”
Jigsaw nods and then reaches for his hand the moment Clint’s got Joy of Painting selected and the remote is back down. He shuffles closer somehow and puts his head on Clint’s shoulder, and Clint has a decision to make.
He can stay like this, with Jigsaw next to him and his arm trapped between them so that Jigsaw can hold his hand, or he can disengage just long enough to get his arm around Jigsaw’s shoulders and then offer his other hand as a replacement.
And why not do that? It’ll be another new thing—and hopefully a good thing—for Jigsaw’s slowly growing repertoire of good things.
Clint gives Jigsaw’s hand a squeeze before pulling away and rearranging their limbs a bit. And yeah, that’s way better. Now they fit together even better than before, and Jigsaw has a softer bit of Clint to rest his head against, too.
Maybe they’ll both fall asleep while Bob Ross paints a happy little cabin deep in the woods by some happy trees and a little pool of water.
Chapter 75: Avengers | I can’t run at this pace very long
Notes:
Chapter title from “Trying to Reason with the Hurricane Season” by Jimmy Buffett.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Sam
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
He should definitely be asleep by now, resting up for their early morning even if he can catch a few hours of sleep on the quinjet. But the combination of his feelings about the upcoming mission and the fact that Steve is still awake no matter what he pretends is keeping him up.
Sam debates running through the Redwing controls on his gauntlet again, just to get the muscle memory good and deeply embedded, but he left all his tac gear—including the Redwing controls—in Stark’s armory-slash-rooftop-mudroom. That sort of locker room where they keep active tac gear and similar when it’s not being worked on or used. And he doesn’t want to get out of Steve’s bed and pull on his clothes from earlier in order to go get the gauntlet to work on the controls some more.
He’s got it down; he just needs to believe that he does.
He and Tony tested the Redwing units out individually to make sure they all behaved the way they were designed to behave, and then they stress-tested Sam’s ability to keep track of them. One? Easy. Actually unnecessary to keep track of Redwing at all, as the little bot seems to have a decently intelligent mind of its own. Three? Trickier. Redwing’s “mind of its own” dumbs down in a crowd, kind of like humans. And fifteen? That had been Sam’s limit while still engaging in conversation.
Meaning his actual limit is closer to ten of the Redwing units, since he won’t just be talking with Stark and maintaining a flight path over the roof and nearby buildings. He’ll be in a base or above a base, preferably not buried under a base, and he’ll have to keep track of Redwing units outside keeping up surveillance and also his personal Redwing unit, the one he likes best and can still tell apart from the others.
It may be that Redwing can reach places in the base that they cannot and he has to guide Redwing through blindly using only Redwing’s own lights and sensors. It may be that he needs to recall all of the Redwing units to provide some cannon fodder for enemy agents, something to keep them busy and distracted while the team infiltrates the base.
He and Stark had run through some simulations of those situations as well, and determined that the outcome depended entirely on what else was going on around him. Just directing Redwing? Fine. Also fighting or trying to maintain a hiding position? Dicier.
“You can’t sleep, either?” Steve asks in the darkness.
Apparently, Sam is no better at pretending to sleep than Steve is. Good to know.
“Just rehearsing things in my mind,” Sam murmurs, turning toward Steve and resting a hand on his chest. “It’s not anxiety, though. Just thinking ahead.”
He hears Steve’s nod, the shifting of his hair on the pillow, and then Steve is holding his hand on top of his ribs.
“I’m anxious, but not in a scared sense,” Steve says. “I want to be there already. I want to be doing the things that need to be done. I don’t like to wait.”
“I know,” Sam says. “Anything I can do to help you sleep?”
“Don’t really want to sleep.”
Sam raises an eyebrow though even Steve’s enhanced sight couldn’t see it in the dark room. “Is that an invitation to stay up all night?”
Sam traces his fingertip along Steve’s chest, following the gentle curl of a bit of hair. “Because I have a few ideas about that,” he adds. “Suggestions of what we might do.”
Steve’s response is a chuckle that Sam can both feel and hear. “Seems a bit disrespectful to fool around right before a mission,” he says.
“Disrespectful, how?” Sam asks. “Of what? Who? This is our time. We can do whatever we want with it so long as we don’t pull a muscle and bench ourselves.”
Steve shifts to face him and cradles his cheek with his right hand for a moment before pulling him in for a soft kiss.
“You know, you’re right,” Steve says into the corner of his mouth. “Don’t know what I’m thinking. Where I was going with that.”
Sam smiles against Steve’s lips and leans forward slightly to recapture his mouth for another kiss, this one lingering and sweet, with a hint of heat to it.
“I don’t know, either,” Sam says. “But do you want to hear my ideas?”
Steve’s hand drifts down from Sam’s cheek to his shoulder and then under his arm to reach around his midriff. He pulls Sam closer again, and this time all of Sam slides forward beneath the sheets.
“Maybe I have an idea or two of my own,” Steve says.
Sam grins. “Well let’s hear ‘em,” he says.
Yeah, this will be a far better use of their time than silently running through mission details.
Hulk
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
Hulk look in mirror and grin, wide. So many teeth. Hulk make more faces, each one fiercer than the last. Hulk roar at full volume and then grin again as Hulk suite bathroom shake in response. Even Hulk suite is afraid of Hulk.
That is not always good, though, everyone and everything being afraid of Hulk. Hulk does not want everyone be afraid of Hulk. Hulk only ever trying to protect. It not Hulk fault that buildings fall over, cave in, shake to the ground sometimes. Puny humans made puny buildings, is all.
Time to switch back.
Hulk ignore the thought, but after a while of making faces and yelling, it is like ignoring a mosquito that returns after every flapped hand-wave to chase it off.
Time to switch back. Time to switch back.
Hulk sigh and let puny Banner slowly come up to the surface. So annoying. Also annoying that Hulk cannot leave Hulk suite except when puny humans are hurt or need help. Annoying, but not enraging.
Hulk not even sure what Hulk started out being mad about this time.
Nothing.
“There is nothing to be angry about,” puny Banner says, gripping the bathroom countertop and forcing his breathing to stabilize.
The mirror is unbroken, the sink and counter unbroken, the floor and walls unbroken. Toilet, shower, everything is whole and in its place. Once again, the transition was smooth going in and coming out, and nothing was damaged.
He can feel the Other Guy at the edges of his consciousness, still roused enough to be watchful but not enraged.
It would be easy to bring him back out, to go through the exercise a few more times. But the transition from himself into the Other Guy and back takes a lot out of him, even for short bursts that don’t involve any fighting or danger. What he needs to do is grab something heavy in carbohydrates and make his way to bed for real this time.
Bruce exchanges his stretched out yoga pants for a clean pair of pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, and then goes out to his kitchenette to see what he has available. There are oats, fruit and nut bars, crackers, and more in his cabinet, but what he really feels like is a sandwich. Something with good bread, not sliced.
He pauses by the door to his bedroom to slip his feet into some house shoes and makes his way down to the main kitchen.
Natasha
—New York City | Tuesday 09 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
She’s hardly expecting company in the kitchen the night before a mission like this one, and least of all Bruce. But it’s Bruce who comes in, wearing a pair of sky blue pajama pants with winged bananas on them and a plain navy blue t-shirt.
“Natasha,” he greets in response to her nod of welcome. “If anyone was going to be down here, I’d have thought Clint with Jigsaw.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” she says with a laugh. She was only ever planning to grab a jar of raspberry jam from the pantry and return to her rooms with it, but she decides to stay and see what Bruce is up to.
Natasha watches him rummage around in the refrigerator for what turn out to be sandwich fixings—turkey, mustard, lettuce, tomato, swiss. And on a good hoagie roll instead of slices from the bag of sandwich bread.
She wonders if he’s been training in his rooms, maybe adding Tai Chi to his yoga. Whatever it is he’s been up to, he clearly needs to replenish his energy levels, because he makes a second sandwich before starting to eat the first one. Clearly he’s hungry tonight, and a kind of hunger that does point to energy replenishing rather than midnight munchies.
“Up to anything interesting?” she asks. “Or just can’t sleep?”
Bruce swallows his bite of sandwich and sets the sandwich on a plate, dusting crumbs from his hands over the plate before reaching for a paper towel to wipe a bit of mustard off his lips.
“Just communing with the Other Guy,” Bruce says at last. “Making sure our channel of communication is open, that he understands the mission objectives, the parameters, what might be expected of us.”
Natasha wonders if that involves actually shifting into the Hulk or just deeper meditation than usual. It might, if he’s eating two large sandwiches at nearly midnight afterward. How does that go, anyway? What does it look like? She knows what it looks like when he becomes the Hulk; that isn’t in question. But does he talk to himself? Think to himself? Does the Hulk answer? Or does the Hulk need to be… “out,” she supposes, in order to pick up on the world outside Bruce’s body?
“And everything’s going well?” she asks, instead of the countless more invasive questions tumbling around in her mind. “You’re still mad all the time?”
Bruce chuckles. “There’s no shortage of things to be angry about. Everything with Jigsaw is just one more big opportunity to explore my anger issues.”
Natasha nods. “It’s easy to be angry about everything that’s been done to him,” she agrees. “And about the possibility that he was thrown away for five newer models after all of that.”
Not that being retired to the ice forever would have been a better option in the long run. He’d still be in cryo storage if he had been left in Siberia. Possibly like the others in his photograph. It’s better that he’s truly free now, that he has a chance to live his life, have some friends, even a relationship.
It’s just a shame he had to endure HYDRA’s treatment to get to this point.
Natasha raises up the jar of jam—her only reason for having left her rooms so late—and wishes him a good night before heading back to her rooms.
It’s too late at night to be drinking tea, but in the morning, she’ll want at least one cup. And she’s out of jam. That’s what comes of sharing a breakfast table with others. The jam just goes a lot quicker when there’s a Jigsaw spreading it all over toasted English muffins.
She surveys her morning items, spread out on the sofa in her front room, and finds them finally to be satisfactory. There’s the brace she’ll put on over her tac gear, which should allow her to join in the fighting, if there is any, without merely being a pilot and comms participant. Her actual tac gear, freshly oiled where it needed the attention. The myriad tools and tricks of her trade ready to be stowed in that tac gear.
Natasha brushes a fingertip fondly along the widow’s bite gauntlet. With any luck, the charges will help incapacitate a Winder Soldier if there’s a need for it. Without doing lasting damage. Most of her other tools are designed to kill and need to be used with considerable care to maintain a good example for others.
Tony
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
“Sir, I would advise you to seek at least a few hours of rest tonight.”
Ugh. Pepper must have said something about him not coming to bed yet. JARVIS never gets on his case about sleep unless Pepper complains. Because JARVIS knows that there’s only so much sleep can do to fix problems.
And it would be so nice if this photostatic veil would mesh onto this metal face mask the way he wants it to. But it just won’t go. It’ll mesh to the metal, but it won’t shift afterward. He might as well weld a piece of cling wrap to the thing. So much for his brilliant idea of making some sort of mask that Red October can wear that still lets people see his face.
They’re going with the same old mask design this time, though, it looks like. Probably for the best. He ran out of time to get a working prototype to Jigglypuff before the mission, and trying out a prototype on a mission has a significant chance of going sideways. Tony can skip something going sideways with the Jigmeister this time around. No one needs to be shot if it can be helped.
And no more stray animals, either. This place is becoming a zoo. Or worse, a pet shop. All the Barky orders coming in left and right, people might get to thinking he was some kind of animal lover.
And he’s not an animal-hater or anything, especially not when they aren’t his animals. But he has the zoological equivalent of a brown thumb, having accidentally killed every fish he’s ever tried to keep alive from before he can remember. Mostly by overfeeding or over-engineering their tank, when they were within his attention space, or by forgetting about them entirely when they weren’t.
But it’s not like Capsicle and Icarus are spending his money on this stuff. All the orders come care of someone who is not Tony, so the public won’t start hounding him for pictures of a new Tower mascot dog or something.
If the Tower has a mascot, it’s already been chosen, anyway—Lucky makes a great mascot, and the muddy rat will grow into the role as well. There you go. Done and done. No more critters.
Unless maybe Jiggles wants a ferret. Tony’s always been fascinated by the fur-coated slinkies of the animal world, and he would totally go visit a ferret.
“Sir,” comes JARVIS’s voice, slightly more insistent. “It is suggested that you wrap up your current project and retire for the night.”
He rolls his eyes. Yeah, yeah. Early morning. Busy day. Get some rest. Bah. Sleep is for the weak.
What he needs isn’t rest, it’s for this photostatic veil to finally provide him with a functionally transparent metal that will serve everyone’s purpose on a mission where Jigster’s “killing face” is concerned.
But the material is clearly meant to bond to human skin and not metal. It might be the warmth that’s the issue, but eventually a metal mask would warm up to skin temperature, so he should be able to get around that. It might be the texture, though. He could texturize the metal in the prototype mask to imitate skin…
But anything he adds to the metal will just make the mask thicker, and bulky is not the name of the game when it comes to this thing. It should be sleek and streamline, it shouldn’t weigh much at all, it should have room for the filtration system but also for the wearer to actually open his mouth. All of these things are at cross purposes to each other, and then meshing a photostatic veil over the top is just. It’s just not working out.
Maybe he should get a little rest. Just a break from this project. There’s plenty of other projects to work on. He’s got a backlog on the tablet apps, things that haven’t been asked for but that would definitely improve the experience. And there’s the stuff he’s working on for Pepper, and fine-tuning the sparring bots’ firmware.
Yes, lots to go around.
“Sir.”
Tony sighs. “Oh, alright.” He tosses the scraps of his current photostatic veil onto the table beside the would-be prototype mask. “I’ll at least lie down with my eyes closed, but I won’t promise you any sleep.”
JARVIS’s voice is vaguely amused when he agrees to the conditions of Tony’s rest, and Tony can’t help but yawn. It is kind of late. They do have an early morning and a busy day. He can at least rest his eyes.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 11:30 p.m.—
There are happy trees everywhere in the forest.
Every happy tree has a happy tree friend, and there are groups of happy trees together as well. Thwap thwap thwap and brsh brsh brsh of brushes on canvas and the thumpity-thumpity-thump of a brush hitting a metal pole as the happy trees multiply, each one appearing trunk first, growing from up high to down low. The branches and leaves start out small and high and with all of the sounds of bristles on canvas they grow and spread into wide, bushy lower branches.
There is a mountain range in the distance, too, choppy and ragged near the top, with rolls of palette knife paint, and gradually smoother and blurrier toward the bottom. Snow, but not white. Or, snow that is white but that is somehow also lavender and periwinkle in the distance. It is a winter forest, and there is a cabin—no, a base. Yes, a base.
A happy little base by the stream, and the rocks and grass at the edge of the stream are reflected downward toward it, like they were dragged into place with a brush.
But the stream is wrong. There is no stream by the happy little base, and the base itself is wrong, too. It is free-standing and not built into the mountain. It is brown and not the gray white of concrete that will blend in with the rock. It is made of wood, is a cabin and not a base, is wrong.
It turns around and looks at the happy trees in the forest, still appearing left and right in their haphazard manner of trunk and then branches, top and then down. When it turns around again, the base is right once more. Is how it ought to be, how a base should present in the wild.
Hidden among the rocky crags is the panel for putting a hand against or typing a code into, or both, one after the other. Etched into the plate above the hand-panel is the sign, the sigil, the tentacles and skull of HYDRA. Beside that is the star etching. This is the Winter Soldier project. This is HYDRA. They are one and the same.
And inside… It puts a hand on the panel, and gets no response. It presses buttons in a sequence the hand knows but the brain does not, and gets no response. It tries with the metal hand next, and gets no response.
There is no response.
Is the base empty? Is the base no longer functioning? Has the project closed down?
Then what is to become of it? Standing in the snow and surrounded by the happy trees, trying to get inside, trying to open the door, trying to get a signal or a sign, something to tell it that it has returned home finally, to the wolf pen. That it is ready to comply.
But there is no response.
The Winter Soldier is home, and there is no response.
Notes:
We're so close to the Siberia mission, y'all. Just one more chapter to go--I'm so excited!
Chapter 76: Kate | ‘Cause his world is built ‘round punctuality
Notes:
Chapter title from “A Well Respected Man” by The Kinks.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 3:00 a.m.—
She’s a superhero—Lady Hawkeye—and she wears purple spandex every day and shoots arrows and is famous for her totally cool lavender sunglasses and trick shots. And her habit of saving the world.
“Good morning, Miss Bishop.”
Most recently, the President awarded her a medal of honor for rescuing a whole orphanage worth of children from the Cheeto-Ree aliens with nothing more than a stick and some string.
Her mother is finally off her back about joining the private security sector. Her father has returned from wherever he disappeared to when she was a little girl, and he loves her very much—he’s proud of her. Her mother is, too, but they agree not to say anything about it after all the years of her mother not being proud of her no matter what she accomplished.
She doesn’t need a roommate in order to live in university housing, her shirts are never stretched out or stained from being borrowed and returned unlaundered, and her ice cream is always exactly where she left it.
Lady Hawkeye is known internationally for training others to follow in her footsteps, mentoring those who aspire to reach the heights she routinely climbs, and inspiring people with every rescue to do more and be more.
Hawkeye, her mentor and close friend, is happy to have her on the team. They train together daily, for hours at a time, and have inside jokes that grow more numerous with every passing week.
“…is leaving shortly, Miss Bishop. Your presence is requested…”
She has a one-eyed dog and a little white cat.
No, she doesn’t have pets. Roll that part of the dream back. She doesn’t need pets of her own, because Hawkeye’s boyfriend has pets, and they all share these pets. They are communal pets.
Yes. That’s right. Hawkeye has a boyfriend with pets. A boyfriend who has not spoken a single word to her in all the time she’s known him—years now—and who looks exactly like if Bucky Barnes went on a decades-long camping trip and came back with long hair and a metal arm and Complaints.
And Lady Hawkeye—that’s her—has a boyfriend, too. He’s—
“Miss Bishop.”
No, roll that back. Lady Hawkeye—that’s her—has a girlfriend. Yeah. She has a girlfriend. A girlfriend who is also a superhero, maybe who flies.
The four of them—the two Hawkeyes and their romantic partners—are often seen out on double dates. Movies, dinners, dinners and movies, laser tag. Fun things.
“Miss Bishop, I regret to inform you that you are running late this morning.”
Lady Hawkeye lives in a super high-tech Tower, with her superhero girlfriend, her superhero mentor, her superhero mentor’s superhero boyfriend, and the one-eyed dog and white cat that are communal pets.
The super high-tech Tower has an omnipresent butler that… that is telling her she’s running late?
Kate groggily opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings. So many things are wrong.
For one, she doesn’t have sheets this soft or a duvet this fluffy and warm or anywhere near this many pillows on her bed. For another, her bedroom in her apartment isn’t big enough for a bed that could fit three people in it with elbow room to spare. For yet another, she doesn’t sleep with a lamp on, but there’s a lamp on.
Kate knows her way around hotel rooms—especially the very nice hotel rooms that her mother insists on for every vacation her mother also insists on—and this is… Nicer than a hotel.
There isn’t the whole smarmy element that the best hotels sometimes have where they feel the need to impress you and impress upon you that you are staying at The Nicest Place™ and that you should be appreciative of this lap of luxury you find yourself in.
It’s homey. Feels like a home, even if not her own home.
But hey, her own home hasn’t felt like a home since her dad disappeared eleven years ago, so who’s keeping score on how much like a home anywhere feels, really?
There’s a pleasant chime coming from the next room, or at least from through the door, and Kate yawns big and stretches her arms wide up over her head.
“Good morning, Miss Bishop,” comes the voice she’s awake enough now to recognize as JARVIS. “The team is departing soon. Your presence is requested to take custody of the animals Lucky and Alpine.”
Kate blinks.
Oh shit! This isn’t just part of a nice dream. She’s supposed to be up well before the crack of dawn to go get her charges from Hawkeye and Jigsaw!
The chime from the next room sounds again, and Kate slides out of the too-soft sheets and onto a plush bedside rug. There’s a pair of slippers at the edge of the rug, and she nudges her toes inside them as she makes her way out of the bedroom and toward the chime.
There’s a huge sitting room outside of the bedroom, and the place is stocked with an entertainment unit and all the living room furniture she could ever hope to use—including a nice desk and chair for her homework—and more pet furniture and stuff than any cat or dog could ever hope to use.
There’s a cat tree taller than she is, a little hammock on two scratcher posts that’s about knee height by the desk, a dog bed that looks softer than the bed she just left… A water fountain making gentle burbling brook noises beside a pair of food dishes that are—as of now—empty. On the other side of the sitting room, there’s a litter setup and a bin of random toys.
The chime sounds again, and she can hear Hawkeye mumbling something about having sympathy for night owls beyond the door.
Oh, god, she’s disappointing Hawkeye. He thinks she can’t handle mornings, maybe, when it’s just the bed was so stupidly soft and warm she got caught up in a dream and—
Kate yanks the door open with a breathless wince and then freezes.
It’s not just Hawkeye there in a purple t-shirt that looks slept in and a pair of jeans that have last night’s pizza sauce on the right knee. If it was just Hawkeye there—as though Hawkeye could ever be “just” Hawkeye—she might have salvaged things.
But there’s also the silent specter of Jigsaw in an absolutely terrifying black leather getup that resembles a BDSM ensemble more than any tac gear or uniform she’s seen in her life, tighter than Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman suit, with more straps than she can count and shiny red trim along the seams that makes it look like the blood is already oozing down his body from the spleens he’s been frolicking in.
To make matters only one hundred percent freakier, he’s got some kind of black metal Hannibal Lecter face plate hanging from a hook over his right collarbone, and a pair of high-tech black goggles around his neck.
He looks like death, and he looks eager about it. Excited to be playing the part, thrilled to be disemboweling his enemies with any of the absolutely wicked knives sheathed about his person. That whole getup, from the shiny, strappy bondage leather to the cannibal muzzle to the probably metric ton of sharpened steel, makes it look like Hawkeye is accompanied by a whole spilled inkwell of destruction.
She had hoped to say something witty in greeting, and she would have settled for saying something banal like “good morning,” or “sorry I overslept,” but all that comes out is a high-pitched squeak that sounds more than a little like it’s spelled E-E-P.
“Oh, hey Katie-Kate,” Hawkeye mumbles, sounding as exhausted as he looks.
Clearly, not everyone is as enthusiastic to be getting on with the killing of enemies as Jigsaw is. Some people in the hallway might actually have sympathy for her, might even hate the early morning as much as she does.
Somehow, she never put together that the blurry bondage gear footage from North Carolina would have been closer to how Jigsaw looks on a mission than the soft turtlenecks and yoga pants he’s been wearing to their archery sessions. Jigsaw can look like a silent but soft teddy bear, with warm grayish eyes and gentle—if too-smooth—movements, or he can look like an actual grizzly bear complete with the claws and, she assumes, the kill-you behavioral defaults.
Hawkeye is undeniably taller and broader in the shoulders than Jigsaw. But Jigsaw dwarfs Hawkeye in every way when it comes to the presence of chill competence that radiates off him, even in a very tastefully decorated hallway at 3 AM on a weekday.
While handing off pets.
Because while she’s been trying to make sense of the apparition that stands to Hawkeye’s left, she’s been utterly failing to take into account that there’s a happy, golden dog sitting politely in the doorway, and a sleepy ball of fluff curled up in Hawkeye’s arms.
“Told you she was awake,” Hawkeye says with a nudge of his elbow into Jigsaw’s side that in no way causes the slightest movement in the immovable object that Jigsaw represents.
“G-Good morning,” Kate manages. “Sorry I overslept.”
She wrenches her eyes away from the obvious threat in the hallway, and tries to even out her adrenalin spike.
Jigsaw is not there to attack her. He’s there to drop of his beloved pets so that she can take care of them while he’s disemboweling HYDRA assholes, tearing them new assholes in the literal sense, probably, and maybe killing them if he is feeling merciful about it.
He doesn’t look very merciful right now.
“It happens,” Hawkeye says with a dismissive wave of one hand. “Hey, so Lucky’s been out on the grass to do his business already, but he still needs a real walk. They both need breakfast, too.”
“Right, right.” Kate nods and reaches out a hand so that Hawkeye can deposit Alpine. “I’ll walk Lucky at six-thirty, feed them both, then play time for a while.”
Kate rattles off the whole list of scheduled to-do items for the two of them, more to reassure herself that she isn’t forgetting anything, and less because she worries they might think she’d forget.
And then Alpine is making her little mews of “how dare you wake me” and Lucky—good boy that he is—is licking her hand while she takes the leash. Pet handoff success all around.
And Hawkeye and Jigsaw are making their way down the hall to the elevator like the world’s least matched set—one in wrinkled and stained casual clothes from last night and the other in sleek murderwear, one tall and broad the other other less tall and lean, one moving like he’s ready to fall back into bed and the other moving like… well, like some eldritch abomination who’s been dreaming sleeplessly beneath the waves, but she’s trying to be nice.
Not for the first time, Kate wonders how their relationship works. What they found appealing about one another at first, before they got to know each other. How they get along so well when they are so different.
Oh well. It’s not really any of her business.
What’s her business is getting Alpine settled somewhere inside, getting some non-pajama clothes on, walking Lucky, getting both animals fed, playing a bit, and getting something to eat for her own breakfast.
And then maybe a nap.
“Hey, so when are you coming back?” Kate’s roommate asks as Kate and Lucky are on their way home from morning walkies.
Kate frowns. She’s not even sure why she answered her phone, let alone when she’s coming back. She told Allison she’d be at her aunt’s place all day and maybe even was going back there after classes on Thursday. Why is she even being asked when she’s coming back?
“I don’t know,” Kate says. “Lots of chores still to do, and it’s not like I’m only doing chores. We’re hanging out, too.”
Ugh, so many lies. She did hang out with Hawkeye, Jigsaw and the Black Widow last night, it’s true, but they aren’t exactly her aunt. At least she’s being vague enough that the lies don’t need to spin more lies up to defend themselves. She hopes.
“Why?” Kate asks.
“There was a guy here last night who wanted to interview you about your thing with Hawkeyes. The archery thing.” Allison’s voice is an audible shrug.
She doesn’t care about the archery, doesn’t care about Hawkeye, doesn’t even really care that Kate is away from the apartment… except that it was inconvenient having to field a reporter.
Kate rolls her eyes.
“It’s just Hawkeye,” she says. “Not plural. Though he does have two eyes, obviously.”
“Whatever. I told this guy you were at your aunt’s and I’d have you call him back. You want his number?”
Kate looks down at Lucky. Does she want to talk to some reporter asking about Hawkeye and archery lessons? Is that really why the reporter wants to talk to her? Is he really a reporter at all?
What can she even say about her archery lessons and her time with her hero and her hero’s boyfriend that doesn’t trample all over non-disclosure agreements and reveal Avengers secrets? She can’t talk about the cool robots. She can’t talk about Jigsaw watching them and collecting arrows. She can’t talk about Hawkeye and Jigsaw together.
And she doesn’t want to, anyway, even if she didn’t sign things when she was awarded the bids.
“Kate?” Allison asks. “They’re doing a bit where they try to talk to everyone who bid on the Avengers’ time. You did that. You’re on the list. Come on. I don’t want to deal with him.”
What, and Kate does?
“If he comes back, tell him ‘archery is fun, other than that, no comment’ and then tell him not to come back.” Kate nods to herself. That ought to do it. “Those exact words, Al. ‘Archery is fun, other than that, no comment.’ And then scram, I guess.”
“You don’t want to be on some TV special? You don’t want your name in the papers? You were the only loser bidding on Hawkeyes. They don’t have anyone else to talk to for him.”
Kate pulls her phone away from her ear and glares at Allison through it, wills her disapproval to travel through the connection and land in Allison’s face.
“I’m already rich,” she mutters. “I can do without being famous.”
Fame was something to avoid if you could manage it. At least until there was something noteworthy to be famous about. Something like saving the world. She’s not saving the world, though; she’s walking a dog. And then probably doing some homework. And skipping classes this afternoon.
If there’s some reporter trying to get in touch with her, she wants to be where he can’t find her. Definitely.
“Yeah, rub it in,” Allison says. “Some of us would love to be famous.”
“Then you talk to the reporter,” Kate says. “Or do something that’ll get you famous, I guess.”
“So it’s really going to be ‘no comment’ from you? Hawkeyes is your hero, you spend every Sunday with him, you’re learning yet another martial art from him, you spent thousands of dollars to get this, and you don’t have a comment? Not a single comment?”
“All a comment is going to do is get your precious Honey Badger to report unflattering lies about me in his stupid lying tabloid,” Kate says. “No thanks. ‘Archery is fun, other than that, no comment. Scram.’”
Allison heaves a sigh on the other end of the line. “Alright, alright. How’s your aunt doing?”
“Fine,” Kate lies. Aunt Moira isn’t even in town. Kate has no idea how she’s doing. “Anything else?”
“Don’t ‘no comment’ me,” Allison says. “I’m just being friendly. Sheesh. On your way back, pick up some paper towels. We’re running low and it’s your turn to buy them.”
Kate agrees to buy some paper towels, and then hangs up.
Reporters wanting to talk to her. That’s not supposed to happen. She is supposed to be able to just do her thing at school, avoid working an internship with her mother’s security firm, spend her Sundays with her hero, and live her life.
Ugh, ugh, ugh. At least she was forewarned. And maybe her roommate will actually tell the reporter to scram when he contacts her next.
“Hey, isn’t that Falcon’s dog?” comes a voice up ahead as she’s crossing the street to get back to Avengers Tower.
“One eye, yellow, it’s the dog, alright,” some woman says. “Get the camera on, hurry, hurry.”
“Wonder what’s happening?” the first voice says. “Falcon got a dog walker?”
And then, before Kate can make up her mind about whether to turn around and go back to the park and call a car to come get her and Lucky, there’s a mic in her face and a woman with bright red curly hair is asking her questions.
What is her name, why is she walking the Falcon’s dog, is there a mission? How does she know the Avengers, how does one get a job walking the Falcon’s dog? Where are the Avengers, and how long as she been a pet-sitter for them?
Kate no-comments her way past the barrage of questions as they cross the street in a cluster, Kate trying to keep herself between the reporter and Lucky while Lucky tries to keep himself between the reporter and Kate. It’s a big tangled-up leash dance, and Kate eventually gives up and lets the dog “protect” her from the big scary man with the camera and the redhead with the mic.
There’s a part of her that itches to say she’s Hawkeye’s student, not the Avengers’ pet-sitter, but the truth is she’s kind of both right now, and that’s fine. And anyway, she doesn’t want to encourage this sort of thing. Why would she give one reporter a no-comment runaround and then spill her guts to some other reporter?
“What do you know about a plane taking off from the top of Avengers Tower?” calls the reporter as Kate and Lucky make it to the other side of the street.
Kate lobs another “no comment” over her shoulder and speed walks to the front door, where the door guy lets her in with a commiserating smile.
“That one’s persistent,” he says. “Been out there since just after you left, comes every morning.”
“Yikes,” Kate mutters. “Remind me to get a ride out to a different park for evening walkies.”
Chapter 77: Avengers | I had the best laid plans this side of America
Chapter Text
Bruce
—Airspace over Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
He’d felt calm about the base in North Carolina, despite knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of enemy operatives in the base and a possible need for the Other Guy. This base in Siberia, though…
The Other Guy doesn’t like it.
Even though the quinjet itself is cloaked from human eyes and any surveillance that might still be running around the base, it’s a perfectly clear day without a cloud in the sky to provide them a little cover from making a shadow as they circle the base waiting for Tony’s drones to conduct their verification scan.
If anyone is watching for shadows on the snow, they’re making one.
If.
They don’t know for sure that there’s anyone or anything in this base. They do know it used to house the Winter Soldier project, but they have the one guaranteed surviving member—or test subject, to be more honest—of that project in the quinjet with them, thankfully not crammed under the seats, but only because Clint got in his way and pleaded with him.
There might not be any other enhanced individuals in the base below. Any enhanced individuals that are there might be in cryo storage and therefore not an immediate threat. There might be no need for the Other Guy at all.
The preliminary scans showed the base to be in disuse, and the readings being sent to the quinjet dashboard indicates the same—the probable side and back exits appear undisturbed and the helicopter landing pad hasn’t seen a helicopter since the last snowfall, which was a week ago according to the weather stations nearby.
It’s hard to tell from the front entrance whether anyone’s been in that way because the whole area is bare rock. But they’ll know more when they move in closer and take a look in person. There’s only so much a drone can tell them.
“Looks pretty much the same,” Tony says. “There’s a newly fallen tree near the third exit, but also signs of rot and insect infestation. Probably just a tree falling over and nothing nefarious.”
They make use of a clearing in the forested area near the second exit and land the quinjet where a casual glance won’t see anything out of the ordinary. From there, they’ll work their way toward the main entrance and hope that the base is really as derelict as it appears to be.
If there’s enemy fire, well, they’ll have a Hulk to draw their attention, and Tony’s repulsors as well. Worst case, there’s JARVIS in the quinjet ready for unmanned takeoff and assistance. But it shouldn’t come to that. There don’t appear to be any likely hiding places for enemy snipers in the base itself, not that he’s an expert in these things.
Clint doesn’t seem concerned about the possibility of being fired on, though, which is comforting.
The Other Guy still doesn’t like it, though, and as they round their way out of the forest and into the open, the Other Guy especially doesn’t like it.
Bruce can’t place his finger on what his angrier counterpart is sensing, though. The base appears to be undisturbed, unused, possibly empty. And isn’t “empty with a few records” the best case scenario here?
He seems to be the only one feeling whatever it is, though. Everyone else is walking with stealthy confidence, not making any unnecessary motions that would draw attention but also not hesitant at all. Except for Jigsaw, who is obviously excited the way he walks ahead and then realizes he’s no longer next to Clint and slows down again.
At the main entrance, the only resistance they encounter is a locked door that looks like it hasn’t been opened in decades, which it might well haven’t been.
Bruce takes note of the code Jigsaw taps into the door control, just in case they need it again, and the keypad lights up as the last key is depressed, flashing from red to green.
“So the code works,” Tony says. “Everyone got that down?”
There’s a chorus of repeated numbers as the team confirms that they have the code, and then a silence that turns awkward as the door—despite its corresponding green light—fails to open.
“What, is there a single-sided deadbolt on the other side?” Tony asks. He takes a look at the mechanism for a few minutes, and then applies a laser cutter to the edges of the door that are stuck. “Alright, open sesame, sweetheart, let’s go. Chop chop.”
The door gives with a series of clicking protests, and bits of the framework crumble and fall in a rocky rain. But the door does finally open, and opens fully instead of by partial measure.
Through the door, Bruce can see an interior that’s dimly lit by the sunlight behind them, and possibly by some filtered sunlight from an opening further inside. It’s difficult to tell. There’s a long, thin light bar on either side of the short hallway at the entrance, both of which are behind metal cages. Neither are working, though Bruce thinks there might be a faint flicker in one of them.
While he and the rest of the team ready their flashlights—and in Tony’s case, lifts a hand with a glowing light in the palm—Jigsaw merely weaves between them to walk straight in without hesitation.
“Hold on, Jigs,” Clint says, quick-stepping after him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “We go in as a team. We stick together, remember?”
Jigsaw’s shoulders lift and drop in a silent but clearly disappointed sigh, but he does stop.
“Everyone ready?” Steve asks. “We go in, see if some lights will turn on for us, inspect everything we come to. This place may be abandoned, but it could have some traps still.”
Bruce nods along with the others, and the group makes its way inside with Jigsaw and Clint in the lead.
Something is very wrong about this base, which Jigsaw doesn’t seem to notice or care about, and it takes Bruce a full minute to place what it is that’s so wrong while they cast about for a light switch of some sort. As Natasha finally gets a few caged fluorescent lights to flick and buzz into life, Bruce has a sinking feeling in his stomach as it hits him.
There is no dust.
The air is a little musty, but not to the degree that he’d expect from a building abandoned for so long, even with venting to the outside. The lights might not work well, but they illuminate an interior that’s completely devoid of dust. There are no tracks, but that’s because there’s nothing to track footsteps into. There are no distinct signs of disturbance, but that’s because the whole place looks freshly cleaned.
“Are we sure this is abandoned?” he asks.
“No,” Steve says. “We just suspected it was.”
But he clearly sees what’s wrong because he’s talking about it like their expectations have been disappointed; past tense, after all.
“It’s pretty clean for an abandoned base,” Clint says, sliding his flashlight away and reaching back as if to confirm that he’s got his arrows all in order. “Looks cleaner than my room, even.”
“That’s not hard, Clint,” Natasha says with a smile. “You set a pretty low bar.”
Clint just shrugs. “Still looks spooky-clean.”
“And I don’t like that humming sound,” Sam adds. “Like machinery in the walls or something. And is there a breeze?”
“Definitely a breeze,” Clint says. “Real cold one.”
And of them all, he would know best, with his bare arms.
All in all, the base seems too well-kept to be abandoned, too functional to be derelict, but also… There’s no way anyone could have been through the front entrance and both of the other entrances showed no sign of disturbance. He has a hard time believing that someone is in the base being entirely self-sufficient for twenty-odd years, and it seems doubtful that all ingress and egress has been via helicopter pad and roof access.
And personnel aside, if there are sufficient resources to keep this base spotless and literally humming along, that sinks their theory that the dissolution of the USSR and concurrent resource issues were the reason for closing the project and sending the original Winter Soldier to the United States.
If they had enough resources to power the base and keep it clean, then do they have enough resources to also house five other Winter Soldiers?
Natasha
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
This is hardly her first time infiltrating an enemy stronghold, and it’s not the first time she’s explored an empty stronghold, either. It is the first time such a place has been this clean, though. Even when she’s toured currently-active research stations under the guise of a legitimate inspector, she’s been confronted with a few dust bunnies in rarely used rooms, test materials not in precisely the right place, papers left out in the open instead of neatly filed away.
But they’re nearly done with this ground level and ready to head down the stairs—since none of them want to risk getting stuck in the metal cage that is the elevator—and she has yet to see a single thing out of place or even a single mote of dust. And that should be impossible.
The place is clean. Too clean. Too well maintained for anything she’s seen before, but especially for something that is suspected to be abandoned since Soviet times. Even when it was a freshly built base and the occupants were proud of their project and had all the funding an unethical scientific super soldier development program might have expected to receive, this level of maintenance would have been too much for the facilities.
The strange thing is that it doesn’t make her feel like the place is a trap. It’s just… too clean. It isn’t the clean of a place that’s been recently scoured, or anything. This isn’t evidence of someone coming through and trying to tidy up. It’s as though the place has never been dusty in all its time standing.
The unsettling hum and breeze likely has a lot to do with that. There are clearly fans and filters keeping the air moving through the hallways and rooms, and the ventilation system is large and exposed with industrial air ducts snaking along all of the ceilings in every room and hallway. The walls even seem to vibrate with the unnatural mechanical hum.
Her main question so far is why they’d bother to keep that system running. And her main answer is that there must be something in this base worth keeping cold and clean and well regulated. Her main fear is that the answer leads to five super soldiers, five Winter Soldiers, to be specific.
Dust might get in the machinery and risk shutting down cryogenic storage facilities, which might result in the untimely thawing and death of a superior model of Winter Soldier. She can’t think of any other reason to invest in this kind of power use for an otherwise abandoned building.
And the building does seem to be abandoned. There are assorted offices and file rooms on this ground floor, all of which are filled with defunct computer equipment from the 90s, mostly beige plastic and boxy monitors, and not a personal touch to be found. Filing cabinets line the walls with the keys still in the locks for easy access. There are printers and fax machines, telephones, the occasional bust of Lenin on a desktop beside pencil holders or tape dispensers and staplers.
The lights are at least somewhat stable in their cages along the sides of the walls as they go down a concrete stairwell. She likes having both hands available to deal with any surprises that pop up instead of needing to devote a hand to a flashlight.
The next floor down is apparently all storage. The signs beside doors indicate such things as equipment overflow and nonperishables, storage closets dedicated to cleaning materials, office supplies and everything in between.
A peek into the various rooms reveals the door labels to be accurate and the rooms themselves to be every bit as tidy and spotless as the rest of the base so far. There’s no need to do a thorough search here, so they move on.
“Anything showing up outside?” Rogers asks as they make their way down another set of stairs.
Wilson shakes his head, looking at the control gauntlet on his wrist more than the stairs themselves. “Redwing isn’t seeing anything at any of the entrances. Looks like we’re still alone.”
Natasha almost wishes the answer had been different. That there was some activity at a side entrance that they needed to address, some enemy emerging from slumber and moving in to confront them. It would help distract from what is feeling more and more like an archeological dig into the recesses of HYDRA’s past, complete with ghosts potentially waiting around every corner.
Not that she thinks the base is actually haunted. The only ghost story in this base is impatiently gliding along with them, occasionally forgetting himself and moving ahead only to be coaxed back into the group by Clint.
She looks at Jigsaw as they enter another hallway, this one apparently lined with sleeping quarters. Jigsaw is clearly holding himself back to stay with them, and only at Clint’s insistence. She imagines he would blow through the base without even a third of the caution the rest of them are taking, without clearing passages or remaining on the lookout for signs of an impending ambush.
Is this because he knows the base is empty, because he remembers the layout of the base, because he’s confident he can handle any potential ambush that presents itself? She’d like to think it’s the first option, that the base is truly empty, that he can tell somehow. Because she keeps getting the feeling that they’re being watched, and that it’s not just leftover surveillance systems doing the watching.
“This is taking too long,” Stark mutters as they near the elevator again. “If this place is like the others we’ve got blueprints for, the main attraction is at the bottom of the well. I say let’s go there, see if we have Winter Soldiers to deal with, and then take our sweet time clearing the rest of the place on our way back up.”
He does have a point.
If there’s something waiting for them at the bottom of this downward spiral, they might as well handle it before investigating. Of course, there’s also something to be said for not being at the bottom of this place when a trap springs shut around them and they’re that much farther from the entrance and freedom.
“So let’s bury ourselves good and deep so there’s no way we can dig out if there’s missiles again?” Clint asks. “I don’t like our odds if this place collapses and we’re at the bottom when it does.”
“We’ve got surveillance of our own looking out for missiles,” Stark counters. “We’ll have enough time to send the quinjet after any missiles that come our way.”
Clint shifts uneasily. “I don’t want to be buried in rubble again. That’s all. And I kind of hate this place. It gives me the creeps.”
Jigsaw pats Clint’s shoulder twice and then gives his arm what is probably intended to be a soothing downward stroke.
“Thanks for the thought, Jigs,” Clint says. “I still don’t like the place. No offense.”
“It does feel like the Abomination is waiting around every corner,” Bruce adds. “And there are a lot of corners in this place. It feels like we’re circling the eye of a hurricane, and I don’t like whatever’s at the center.”
“All the more reason to get it over with,” Stark says. “Come on. Let’s bust the place up.”
They look at Rogers.
“Tony,” he finally says, “take the elevator down to be sure it works. You’ll have the easiest time getting out of the thing if it doesn’t. If it works, we go down to the deepest subfloor, look for the Winter Soldiers, and make our way back up as we clear each level.”
“Yes!” Stark pumps his fist. “Finally getting a move on.”
They don’t have long to wait before Stark is on the comms saying that he’s sending it back up for them. They have even less time to wait before the elevator makes its shaky way upward and halts just shy of the opening.
There’s not guarantee that the elevator will take all their weight, even if they’d all fit in the first place, and she’s glad to stay behind with Rogers and Bruce while the other three go ahead. She’ll get in the elevator when it comes back up, and she won’t complain about it, but the thing does not look stable.
And sure enough, the elevator fails to return after Wilson sends it back up. She imagines it finally ran out of juice partway up.
“Looks like it’s the stairs for us,” she says without bothering to hide the relief in her voice.
Rogers looks down the elevator shaft in consternation, but doesn’t insist they climb down it. Instead, he takes to the comms.
“Everyone okay down there?” he asks.
“Roger, Rogers,” Stark says. “It didn’t come back up?”
“Oh great, I’m gonna die in a pile of Soviet rubble,” Clint mutters. “No, not really, Jigs. I’m just complaining.”
“I sent it back up,” Wilson confirms. “It must have died partway up.”
“I’m just glad it didn’t die with us still in there,” Clint says. “I’d rather be trapped forever with some elbow room.”
Rogers sighs. “Alright, don’t wait up. Keep the lines open and get a sense of what’s down there. If you do encounter the other five, keep back. We’re on our way down the old fashioned way.”
Natasha gives her left knee a flex. She’s not sure how many stairs down that will end up being, but with the brace, it shouldn’t matter too much. At the very least, it shouldn’t do more damage. The brace will take some of her weight off the joint, and worst case, she can have Rogers carry her or something.
“Ready, boys?” Natasha asks with a smile she doesn’t quite feel. “Time to take the stairs.”
Notes:
Time zones confuse me when we start getting more than a handful of hours difference. Travel across many time zones at the (made-up) speed of quinjet is doubly or triply hard for me to calculate. I spent dozens of hours over the course of several months googling flight times (minus layovers) and calculating travel time and time zones. I changed the time stamps on the next several chapters each time I attempted to do the math because each time my numbers came back different.
Then I asked an AI chatbot to do the math for me, using conventional travel between New York and Siberia, subtracting layovers and taking off a given number of hours of flight time to account for the quinjet being… eh… roughly twice as fast as conventional travel. The math was different again, but it was consistently different.
So I redid all of the time stamps an actual fourth time, and I am not redoing these time stamps a fifth time. We’re just not going to think too hard about the time stamps while they’re in Russia, okay? Okay. They simply traveled there, and this is simply how long it took. Look away from the math. Suspend your disbelief. It’ll be okay.
Chapter 78: Jigsaw | Just when things went right (it doesn’t mean they were always wrong)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Home Sweet Home” by Mötley Crüe.
An extra midweek chapter? Yes, an extra midweek chapter! ^_^
Chapter Text
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 4:30 p.m.—
Finally they are moving faster and deeper into the base. It wants to find the other assets, the wolves from the wolf pen. If they are asleep in the tubes where it is so, so cold, then it wants to wake them up and show them the other asset and the rest of the team that is not a cell, wants to welcome them to the new team where they will never have to be put away in the cold again.
The longer they are in the base without a response, the more likely it is that the others are asleep in the cold. And the door they came in was so tightly shut for so long that it resisted opening when the code was tapped into the key pad, so the other assets have been in the cold, asleep, for so long.
It is time for them to wake up and join it. No asset should be asleep for that long.
What if the tubes where it is so, so cold also resist opening? What if something goes wrong and they cannot be woken up so easily?
It will not think of these things. Will not contemplate the possibility of reaching the others from the wolf pen only to lose them. They will be safely sleeping, and the tubes will open, and the cryo suits will warm up, and the wolves will be a pack again, reunited. That is the way it will go.
There is a researcher here with them, and a technician. They will be able to fix anything that is wrong and everything will go how it wants things to go. There is no ally here that will shoot an asset in the back, and the team that is not a cell—its very own team—will welcome the others into the team.
Just as soon as they can find the others.
It knows that it has been here before, now that the base looks familiar once more. Has spent long, long years here. The hum of the base settles into the bones and makes everything shake that tiniest bit, the reverberation of home. The earthy scent and the faint echoes from within the pipes and tubes along the ceilings and upper walls. The smoothness of the worn concrete where so many handlers’ boots have passed over the floor. The dryness, yes, and the breeze so chill.
This is home. The home from the before times, where it was always, always cold and everything always made so much sense. This is the home where it was never confused and the rewards were plentiful and the punishments were always well earned.
It is too bad that the team that is not a cell is no longer all together. It is too bad that the clown man is not here, but is stuck high up in the base. Because there is a chair with the white electric fire, and so many tubes where it is so, so cold, and it would have been pleased to destroy these things together with the clown man and his star-shield.
But the hamburger technician did not fix the elevator when it would not climb any more floors. Maybe there is a reason not to make the repairs. Maybe they are going to use one of the side exits, or the back exit. Maybe they are going to go through the upper levels so slowly by the stairs, climbing one level at a time and exploring all over.
It will take them a long, long time to do this. And it will take the other part of the team that is not a cell a long, long time to climb down.
That is a shame. This part of the team that is not a cell will have found and woken up the others from the wolf pen before the other part of the team that is not a cell can make it down here. They are very close to the room with the tubes where it is so, so cold.
It will stick together with this part of the team that is not a cell, though, instead of going forward on its own to wake the others up. The other asset wants it to remain with the group, and so it will remain with the group. Even when the group stops to look at a room to the side with many beds on top of each other—six potential sleeping places, with six sets of bedding on the end of the bare mattresses, waiting to be put on the beds so that assets can sleep for the night.
It knows this room very well. It does not know the code to open the door from the inside, though. That code requires a handler to open the door. This is a room for assets, after all, and assets are not free to come and go in this base the way assets are free to come and go in the hive building that is currently its home.
The blankets on the beds are not like the soft things it has piled on top of the mattress in the hive building. They are thin and scratchy. Five of the beds have multiple blankets, though, which would help make an asset very warm in the place where it is always cold. The sixth bed only has the one blanket, but it is a bigger blanket, made for wrapping all around an asset instead of just covering the top of an asset.
It reaches out to pick up the blanket and would rub it against the skin face except that it is on a mission and there is only the killing face. It cannot feel textures through the killing face. But the metal fingers tell it that it is thin and scratchy, that it is familiar, that this… this is its very own blanket. It slept here. On this bed with this mattress and this blanket. And the other five beds… for the others from the wolf pen.
This was home, was home, was home…
“Jigs? You okay?”
The other asset is worried. It can tell. The other asset is the only one in the room with it now, is by the door that only opens from the outside unless a handler has the code tapped into the key pad. Is frowning.
It holds out the blanket so that the other asset can feel it, and then wraps it around the shoulders as if preparing to sleep rolled up in the blanket.
The other asset does not look very happy to be seeing this place.
“Yeah, yikes. I’d get rugburn just looking at that thing. Aren’t you glad you have actual, soft blankets and things at home?” the other asset asks. “And pillows. And your shark.”
It nods and unwraps the blanket, sets it down on the end of the bed.
The other asset is becoming upset thinking about it in the before times, and so it will not remind the other asset of these before places and times and ways of being.
“Ready to move on?”
It nods and follows the other asset out of the room. Does not look behind it. There are better things in the hive building. And on the quinjet in the duffel bag. The fish-looking soft thing is much, much softer than the blankets in the sleeping room for assets here in the base.
The next several doors, it knows without looking, are supply closets stocked with all of the things an asset could need in the field.
There are rooms with nothing but grenades. It loves grenades. And there are rooms with ammunition, and rooms with guns of all sorts, including the ones that only assets are strong enough to use without the recoil shattering a clavicle. There are rooms with tac gear in all kinds of colors, the leathers solid and mottled depending on the location of the mission.
There are rooms with energy tablets, specially formulated discs that are so sour that the whole mouth will shrink in on itself until the jaw aches next to the ears, but that will power an asset through a mission when the asset’s strength is giving out. And protein powders that can be mixed into a slurry of variable thickness.
There are rooms with drugs in them, too. All of the drugs that a handler might need to control an asset in the field—tranquilizers and sedatives and drugs that will shut an asset down, and also stimulants that will keep an asset going beyond when the asset’s body would ordinarily shut down.
There are rooms with medical equipment, too. Gauze and bandages of all sizes and strengths, and sutures and needles and cotton for packing wounds, and braces so that an asset can walk on a broken bone so that medical technicians do not have to carry the asset to triage.
So many rooms, so many supplies. The others look inside, inside, inside each room, but only briefly. There are mutters and complaints, but it does not pay them any attention. There is no reason to complain about such a bounty of equipment, after all. The others in the team that is not a cell must just be upset that the hive building does not have all of this bounty.
Maybe some of the bounty can be hauled off in the quinjet and set up in the hive building. There will be five more assets to help carry all of the bounty.
Then there is a big, open room with lots of tables and benches, and a stretch of counter like in the store with the food, only instead of the line of moving material on top of the counter, there are glass dividers between the two sides of the line, so that someone can walk on each side along the line and not interact.
It… It remembers… It has watched while agents walked along the line with their large metal plates, and people on the other side of the line—feeders—put food onto the plates. Scoop by scoop, the food went onto the plates and the agents moved down the line to get more scoops of different kinds of food, all onto the metal plates.
It has watched while others have eaten the food. Sometimes, if it had done really well, it would get some of the food from a handler’s plate. A reward. Just for it. And never taken away again the way later handlers and feeders would do. This is the place where rewards were earned and kept, and where punishments always made sense.
A good place, if always cold. A home.
Then there are the rooms with the many tall and wide metal boxes that have drawers that pull out, and inside of the drawers, so many pieces of paper stacked on end, upright, with little stickers and writing that it recognizes but cannot read. Letters. But different letter shapes than the ones the expert with the signs is using with it. These are the letters from the base from before, just like the letters on the door signs and everywhere else in the base.
The others in the team that is not a cell cannot read them, either, and need to hold small rectangle lenses up to the letters so that the other letters show up on the rectangle, these ones readable. It has a small rectangle lens in a pocket of the tac gear, but does not bother to get it out or hold it up to anything. It does not need to know what the papers say, or what the metal box drawers say, or what anything says.
It already knows what is in the drawers. These are the records for the project, for the Winter Soldier project. All of the writing and pictures and diagrams are about it, and about how to make it and what to do with it. And also about the others from the wolf pen, surely. The other assets. All of the documents are about assets. And it already knows enough about this asset. It could learn more about the other assets from the wolf pen, true, but it would rather learn that from them.
And they are going to be further ahead, beyond the rooms where assets are conditioned and created and trained.
And yes, there are the conditioning rooms, the training rooms, the rooms with the beds to which assets can be strapped instead of the beds where assets can move around freely.
The hamburger technician is not impressed with the training rooms, even though there are so many things in common between these training rooms and the one in the hive building. The hamburger technician makes dismissive sounds in his throat, sounds that it can hear because it knows that the hamburger technician has a mouth inside of the robot.
“What is this for, cage fighting?” the hamburger technician asks. But it is not really a question. It is just disapproval. “Literal, actual, fighting in cages. What the fuck.”
The flying man and the other asset do not look happy, either, even though there many good things in the training rooms in addition to the barred areas for fighting other assets and pushing against limits.
Maybe they are expecting weak pretend fighting like they do in the training room in the hive building, with the blue mats on the floor to cushion a fall. There are no blue mats here to put on the floor. There is only the floor. And the bars. It has been thrown into the bars before. It has been twisted up so that the metal arm nearly ripped itself off of the body and the anchor points deep inside needed to be adjusted back into place.
It has also closed the barred doors before with others inside. It does not remember why. Maybe it was told to do that. If it had been told to do that, it would have done as it was told. That would make sense.
The other asset is so angry inside the conditioning rooms. Kicks at a table where researchers and technicians would work. The other asset’s face is twisted up in a scowl, and the other asset’s eyes are dark and moody.
And the flying man keeps muttering under his breath, too. And into the comms, telling the others what is here, so that when they get to the bottom of the stairs they will be able to skip ahead and come straight through to the prep room.
But there is no need to closely examine these rooms, and this time the others in the splinter of the team that is not a cell agree with it. They do not linger in the rooms, but just look in and walk through as needed to get to the rest of the base.
This is good. The others have already spent so much time looking and looking, and poking at things and opening things and moving things aside to look at what is underneath them. Now they are finally moving at a good speed, just cautious enough to make sure that the others from the wolf pen are not waiting to be found in the rooms.
They will be further ahead, it thinks. The other assets from the wolf pen. They must be further ahead. If they were somewhere else, if they were not in the tubes where it is so, so cold, then they would have heard all of the commotion and come out to greet the team that is not a cell.
But they are, instead, silent. They must be asleep in the tubes where it is so, so cold, further ahead, where assets are kept.
Where the chair with the white electric fire is kept, too.
Will they all be in one big tube together, or will they be in their own tubes, each of them where it is so, so cold and on their own?
And there—there is the prep room, finally, just beyond a triply reinforced door that scrapes along the floor when it opens.
“We’re here, Steve,” the flying man says into the comms as the door opens to show the chair with the white electric fire in the middle of the prep room, looking up, up, up. Up through the hole in the ceiling that all of the hallways wrap around.
The chair with the white electric fire is dangerous, but not important. The team that is not a cell will not put it into the chair with the white electric fire, and there is no one else here who would. There is something more important inside the prep room that cannot be seen while the door slowly opens and scrapes along the floor: the other assets in the wolf pen will be—maybe—inside of tubes where it is so cold!
“And the Winter Soldiers?” comes the clown man’s voice on the comms, hard and tight and tensed up.
“Cryo,” the flying man says. “Dormant.”
It ignores the chatter on the comms—this is not meant for it and it should not have listened in at all—and goes up to the closest of the six tubes where it is so, so cold.
It is the smallest of the tubes, the most familiar one. It looks like all of the ones it has known, made for standing in and being safely strapped upright so that it will not fall over and be damaged in the fall. It would be terrible to be broken into so many pieces just because the straps were not there to protect it.
The tube is empty because this asset is not there to fill it up. It wants to break the tube where it is so, so cold, but it is not time for that. It is time to see the other assets, to wake them up, to welcome them to the team that is not a cell!
It moves on to the next, one of the other five, with shapes inside, so shadowed behind the glass in the yellow light from above!
This one has a chair inside of it, it can tell when it presses the hands against the glass and looks so closely inside the tube and—
It blinks.
No.
No, this is not right.
It goes to the next of the tubes where it is so, so cold, presses the hands to the glass, presses in close, looks inside, looks and looks and sees, sees—
No!
There is not another asset at all, but only a paper-wrapped skeleton seated in the chair and wearing the cryo suit. There is a little hair, just some wisps of blond hair, gathered together behind the skull, and more of it hanging from the hair tie with pieces of skin-like paper that have torn off of the skull.
The skeleton is strapped safely into the chair, and the chair is just a chair, not one with any kind of halo on top of it or arms that would hold a halo, and the skeleton is tucked inside of the cryo suit like it was inside of the suit before it was a skeleton, and…
And this is wrong. It is all wrong. There should be an asset inside of the tube where it is so, so cold.
It goes to the next, to the next, to the next. That is all of them, though, there is no next. It is back where it started, and there is not another wolf-pen asset in any of the tubes. Only skeletons, only half-empty cryo suits crumpled into the seats of the chairs, and sometimes bones that are wrapped in paper and sometimes bones that are bare and sometimes bones nestled inside of the cryo suits, and no, no, no…
It makes another trip around the prep room, looking at each of the tubes, hoping that it will find something different this time. But there is nothing different. Only more details. Only holes in the skeletons’ skulls, only holes in the glass tubes where it is so, so cold. Only holes… bullet holes.
But why?
Why?
Why are there holes, and why are there only long-dead other assets and not sleeping other assets that it can wake up and share all of its treasures with? Share the team that is not a cell with. Share the experts with.
Not the other asset with the purple crescents behind the ears. That is not an asset to be shared, but an asset to be cherished and held close and protected. But the other assets from the wolf pen should be able to meet the dog and the little cat, should be able to have the fruits and vegetables, should be able to join the team that is not a cell on missions and help take HYDRA down and maybe even convince the team that is not a cell that it is best to kill and kill and not to capture but to kill.
But they are not other assets inside the glass tubes where it is so, so cold. They are skeletons.
Executed. So long ago. Why?
The other asset has a hand on the metal forearm, is stopping it from making another round of hopeful, hopeless inspections. The other asset is looking at it with a sad face, with sad eyes, with a sad hunch of the shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Jigs,” the other asset says. “I know you wanted to be friends with them.”
It looks at the other asset until the other asset begins to blur inside of the killing face.
It thought… It thought there would be more of them. It thought there might be seven whole assets in the world, that they could be together, that it could share and share and be even less alone and share.
It makes the question sign, makes it many times. Asks why, why, why?
The other asset shrugs. “I don’t know why they got killed, Jigs. Maybe there’s a record of it somewhere and we’ll find out.”
It cannot see clearly anymore inside of the killing face. The upper half is filling up with tears and beginning to fog up and so it pulls that part of the killing face down around the neck and wipes the leather sleeve of the tac gear across the eyes, trying to dry them off.
“Aw, man, I’m so sorry, Jigsaw,” the other asset says.
The other asset draws it close and wraps arms around it, and it lets the chin come to rest on the other asset’s shoulder. After a few moments, it lifts the arms and wraps them around the other asset’s waist.
It wanted them to be alive. It wanted that so, so much.
Chapter 79: Super Soldiers | Don’t get caught in foreign towers
Notes:
Chapter title from “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M.
Chapter Text
Steve
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—
The door finally responds to the edge of the shield jammed into the controls and begins to grate along the floor as it slides back and to the side. Steve returns his shield to its magnetic holster on his back and wedges his fingers in the opening to help the door along its track.
This is ridiculous. So much time wasted on doors and they aren’t even investigating the rooms that line the outside of the hallway as it slowly spirals around the central well of the base. At the rate they’re going, it might be better to have Bruce call out the Hulk and bust through the wall to the central well itself, and from there have Tony and Sam fly the three of them down to the lowest sub-level.
The three of them are stuck walking down a flight of stairs only to encounter a door before they can get beyond the end of the stairwell. Then a pair of hallways to go down before they can break into another stairwell and go down a flight. It's taking forever, and the longer the team is separated, the less he likes this situation.
“We’re here, Steve,” Sam says into the comms as Steve finally gets the door open wide enough for himself, Bruce and Natasha to slide through one by one.
Steve frowns. He wishes he was already down there, wishes they were going faster on their way down the stairs-and-hallways combination, wishes the base was arranged differently. He wants the team to be together for this. Things always seem to go wrong when they split up, even from the very beginning when they were still chasing Jigsaw down.
“And the Winter Soldiers?” he asks as the door slides shut behind them, much more quickly than it had opened.
That’s the important part right now—the other Winter Soldiers. This base is as empty as they come, despite the overly clean hallways and humming air purification system. The only threat is the possibility of there being five enemies on ice now.
“Cryo,” Sam says. “Dormant.”
He shares a concerned glance with Natasha and Bruce. He doesn’t feel any less tense about things in his gut—something is wrong about this place and those Winter Soldiers are at the heart of it—but he does make his shoulders relax a bit.
“In tubes?” he asks. “Like in the other prep rooms? Bakersfield and North Carolina?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the comms that he does not like one bit, presumably while Sam investigates. It shouldn’t take more than a glance to determine the answer to that question, so what is it that’s wrong or different about the setup in this base?
Then: “Oh, ew!” comes Tony’s voice. “Mummies. I don’t wanna be in this movie.”
Steve wishes they were all together down there. He wants to see what’s going on, wants to see what Tony means by mummies. Are the other super soldiers wrapped up in their cryo tubes? Are there some kind of sarcophagus structures down there? What?
In any case, if the Winter Soldiers are on ice, that solves the problem of needing to fight them. They can thaw one of them out at a time, get through to them, see what their take on things happens to be. If need be, they can restrain the first one they thaw out and simply leave the others here in their cryo tubes while they coordinate with Fury on what to do with them.
They’re presumably citizens of Russia, so there may be some interesting paperwork to skip or red tape to cut through in order to deal with them. They can’t just fly into a foreign country and take hostages, but they might need to do essentially that in this situation. Because those five people are also almost guaranteed to be HYDRA loyalists if they aren’t prisoners who have been experimented on.
They can’t just leave five super soldiers on ice once they’ve discovered them, and if the Russian government is as HYDRA-compromised as—
“We don’t need to worry about whether they’re friendlies or not, Steve,” Sam says. “They’ve all been executed. A bullet to the head through the glass. They’re long dead. Skeletonized.”
Oh. So the mummy comment wasn’t a joke. Steve isn’t all that familiar with mummies beyond what he’s seen of cartoonish wrapped up bodies and blue-and-gold Egyptian pharaohs, and he has a hard time imagining either in a place like this. Skeletons in the tubes, though, he can sort of see it. He doesn’t like it, though.
“Why store skeletons?” Steve asks. He feels like he’s missing the big picture, like the details aren’t adding up.
Bruce makes a considering noise in his throat. “I’m more confused about why they required execution in the first place. If they were in those tubes before being executed, then they were presumably enhanced enough to have some chance of surviving the cryo process. Why waste the progress by shooting them?”
Bruce looks incredibly uncomfortable as he continues. “Unless they were akin to Abomination and it was necessary to tell them one thing—we’re going to wake you up for missions—while doing another thing entirely and killing them once they were helpless.”
“Maybe there’s surveillance that will tell us,” Natasha says as they come to the next of the many doors in their path and tries the code from before. “We already found a few records rooms to go through. Maybe there’s something in there that can tell us what happened.”
“But we kind of know what happened,” Tony says. “They were a rowdy pack of fight-happy assholes and even HYDRA thought they were better off shooting their prized weapons in the head than waiting for them to misfire horribly. The wolf pen photo, remember? They’re all banged up like they’d been fighting each other.”
“And there are the barred fight rooms down here,” Sam adds. “Like you said, cage matches, almost.”
Steve shakes his head, even though they’re not going to be able to see him, and applies the shield to the door’s control panel, prying the cover off so that he can get a good strike in at the wires.
“We don’t know that, though,” he says between hits of the shield into the electronics. “We know there was a fight, a sparring match maybe, that got out of hand. We know of possibly one or possibly multiple incidents that led to the injuries in Jigsaw’s photograph, yes. But the rest is conjecture.”
They might have been forced to fight each other to curry favor with their captors or to earn privileges like blankets or food. They might have been trying to establish a ranked order of skill or toughness. There are any number of things that could have led to that photograph, and not everyone in that photograph had been beaten up.
Jigsaw had looked like he was in very good shape in the photograph, better even than when they first encountered him months ago. Better fed, for one thing, though he’s been catching up and fleshing out during his time in the Tower with them. If he was considered a lesser Winter Soldier or an older soon-to-be obsolete model, then surely he’d be banged up in the picture.
“Conjecture it may be,” Bruce says as the current door finally begins to inch open on its tracks. “But it’s probably fairly accurate conjecture.”
Natasha shakes her head. “I’d still like to know for sure what happened here.”
Steve can get behind that, yeah. He wants to know if the Winter Soldiers were captives like Bucky was, experimented on against their will. Or prisoners offered a pardon if they participated. Or willing and eager test subjects promised great power and the ability to use it violently. So many options. And how had the serum enhanced them? Purely physically, or had it been more like Erskine’s formula and made them more themselves as well?
Because that would give them some clues to go on for what exactly happened. If they were HYDRA volunteers, selected from a pool for their HYDRA-approved “qualities,” then they could have gone mad with the power and tried to take over. If they were prisoners or captives, their desperation might have been enhanced to the same end.
They were put in cryo storage at some point, and if there are cages for containing a sparring session until both parties cooled off sufficiently, that might signal that they were more dangerous than was worthwhile to keep around.
Just like Jigsaw had ended up being once he managed to turn on his captors.
Just how much of a tragedy is this particular loss of five lives? Are they all better off for it, or is this just another atrocity committed by HYDRA?
Steve is about to slip through the door when it finally opens wide enough to let him through, but there’s a new tempo to the low rumbling hum of the ventilation system, something he doesn’t like the feel of under his feet.
He holds back, an arm up to keep the others from moving ahead of him.
“Something’s wrong with this door,” he says. “More so than whatever is wrong with the other doors we’ve had to pry open.”
Natasha puts a hand to the side of the shattered control panel while she studies it. “It doesn’t look any different,” she says. “All the same wires and buttons, nothing out of the ordinary.”
They exchange glances and after a moment, Steve shrugs. “There’s really no other way to go down than to get through this door and into the stairwell beyond it.”
“Feeling like taking a chance?” Natasha asks with a playful smile. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Steve groans while Bruce chuckles, and he readies his shield, just in case. “Alright, then. Let’s go through.”
Jigsaw
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
“Sounds like they’re having trouble up there,” the hamburger technician says as he studies the insides of the panel underneath the controls of the chair with the white electric fire.
“Think we should head up the way they’re coming down, see if we can meet in the middle?” the flying man asks, looking over the hamburger technician’s shoulder. “Or I could probably get Redwing to them through the ventilation system.”
It watches them working to dismantle the machinery without exploding anything or tearing it apart physically. They are trying to preserve the tubes where it is so, so cold, and where the others from the wolf pen are not slumbering but are dead.
Dead, dead, dead.
Instead of tearing the machinery apart in anger and sadness, it is sitting off to the side of the prep room, balancing on the metal railing around the chair with the white electric fire, with the other asset leaning against the railing beside it and the little red and white metal bird in the arms. It is not a soft little cat or a dog to stroke the hand along, and it is not a fish-looking soft thing to bring up and squeeze against the chest. But it is little and cute, and makes little twitches sometimes almost like a purr.
The upper part of the killing face is still down around the neck—there is nothing to kill here but the chair with the white electric fire. No enemy agents. No friendly other assets. Nothing. The lower part of the killing face is still in place, though. It is easier to leave it on than to take it off and put it back on later. They are still on a mission.
There are a few sparks coming from the paneling under the controls, but that is nothing to be concerned about because the team that is not a cell will not put it into the chair with the white electric fire. Will not, will not, will not. The hamburger technician just wants to know more about it, wants to see what the controls do beyond the obvious. Wants to understand how the halo above the chair works.
The hamburger technician said that it wanted to know how it works so that he can make it not work, or can find a way to undo whatever it does. It knows that there is no undoing the white electric fire, though. There is no way to gather up the ashes that are left in the burned-out skull and return them to a fully built asset again. No way other than time and work and slow rebuilding through living life.
It has not bothered to explain this to the hamburger technician, though. The hamburger technician was so hopeful, and it… It does not want to crush the hope the way its own hope in the other wolf-pen assets has been crushed.
Executed. A bullet through the glass and through the skull and into the brain. All five of them, one by one. While they were still deep asleep in the cold.
And it does not know why. It cannot think of a reason to do that. Who would be so wasteful as to destroy assets when there is the potential usefulness that will be lost forever if the assets are destroyed?
That is not punishment, whether a punishment that makes sense or one that does not make sense. It is not punishment at all. Punishment must be survivable or it does not accomplish what it is meant to accomplish.
Order comes through pain, not destruction.
And the other assets from the wolf pen have been destroyed, not put into order.
But the base itself is still humming like the others are still alive in their sleep. None of it makes sense.
“Yeah,” the hamburger technician says, not looking up from the panel. “Why don’t you send Redwing up through the vents. He can bust through the ductwork and into wherever they are if needed. Might be able to talk to the doors like R2-D2.”
“I’m sending Redwing to you through the vents, Steve,” the flying man says into the comms. “Not sure what that’ll help, but maybe we can run some diagnostics through the interface, let Tony get a good look at what you’re seeing with the door wiring.”
The little metal bird in the arms shakes itself free, and it releases the little metal bird without a struggle. If it is time for the little metal bird to go on a solo mission for little metal birds, then it is time. It will not keep the little metal bird against its wishes.
“There’s no response,” the flying man says to the hamburger technician, “I’m thinking you or I should go up through the elevator shaft, too. If they can get to the elevator shaft, we can just fly them down, as long as they’re below the elevator itself.”
“Good idea.” The hamburger technician stands up and gives the controls he was working on a light kick with the robot foot. “I’ve got a bug going through this stuff. No need to stay here and watch it work. We can both go. Save some time.”
It watches as the flying man pushes buttons on the control panel on the forearm gauntlet of his armor and the little metal bird hovers around the flying man’s shoulders, and then watches as the little metal bird flies up and away through the wide open ceiling grates dangling from their openings.
Now it does not have anything to hold onto in the lap. Does not have anything to focus on that is not the other assets in their glass coffins, the sparks from the control panel, the looming of the chair with the white electric fire that it is not supposed to dismantle the violent way.
It inches closer to the other asset on the metal railing, careful not to tip over as it does so. It has excellent balance. It will not fall. And the other asset perks up as it comes to rest against the other asset, this asset’s thigh pressed against that asset’s shoulder with the basket of fangs on sticks.
“Hey Jigs.”
It wonders if the other asset is sad about the others or if the other asset is only sad for this asset.
“Wish we had something to do down here,” the other asset says, tilting the head sideways to rest against this asset’s side. “Other than wait around, I mean.”
It puts a hand on the other asset’s hair. So soft and fluffy. Sometimes, the other asset puts something in to the blond hair that makes the hairs less soft, less fluffy. More thick and spiky. It starts out wet and then it dries all stiff, and then the other asset will run hands all over and through the hair and it will soften up a bit.
But the other asset does not always do this, and did not do that this morning at all. So the other asset’s hair is very soft.
“Mm,” the other asset mumbles.
“You two coming?” the hamburger technician asks. “I know the cat’s out of the bag, but don’t split the party, you know?”
The hamburger technician says so many things that do not make sense. There are no cats here, or bags to put cats into. Why put a cat into a bag in the first place?
The other asset pulls away from it and from the railing, standing upright and cracking the fingers of both hands over the head with a yawn. “Alright, let’s go, Jigs.”
It looks at the open panel under the controls for the chair with the white electric fire. They are leaving it in worse condition than when they found it, but it is still not destroyed utterly. It points and asks why.
“We’ll come back, Jigmeister. Let’s go get the others.”
It slides down off the metal railing and gives the tubes where it is so, so cold another look. The tubes where the others are so, so dead. There is nothing it can do for them. It cannot share anything with them, because they are dead. It will never be able to reunite with them, will never form new memories to make up for the ones it has forgotten of the time they must have spent together.
So much that it had hoped for, and so much lost to it.
“It’s okay, Jigs. If you want we can bury them or something. Say goodbye properly.” The other asset puts an arm around the shoulders briefly, just for long enough to squeeze it close for a moment, and then releases it again.
It sighs, just a movement of shoulders and air, and turns to follow the rest of the team that is not a cell out of the prep room and through the other rooms. They will now go back to the elevator and wait there while the flying man and the hamburger technician bring everyone down. It does not see any reason it could not be dismantling the chair with the white electric fire while they do this. But it is not in charge of the mission. It is just an asset, following the orders.
And orders are that they will all go back to the elevator.
But just after the flying man and the hamburger technician move beyond the room with the bars and glass walls for training with other assets, there is a loud clang of a panel shutting behind their group. It turns around to see which panel has clanged shut and why, and as it does so, there is another clang, and then another and another.
“Aw, bars.”
It used to be that there were two operatives and two assets all together in a group moving through the sub-levels, but now there are two groups. There is the group of flying operatives—the flying man and the hamburger technician inside the robot—and there is the group of assets.
“We’ve got problems,” the flying man says into the comms. “Something just glitched into life and Clint and Jigsaw are stuck.”
The hamburger technician pulls at the bars, then motions them to move away before an energy beam comes out of the hamburger technician’s robot hand and blasts at the locking mechanism. Then at the hinges. But nothing moves even a little, even when it helps pull at things.
“Steve?” the flying man asks. “Can you guys hear me? Natasha? Bruce?”
There is no answer in the comms.
The hamburger technician thumps a metal fist into the bars that separate the group into two groups.
“Well fuck.”
“Redwing is picking up a blockage in the vents, Tony.” The flying man pushes some buttons on his forearm armor. “Looks like a cave-in.”
“Double-fuck.”
The other asset groans. “Okay, so you two go dig them out, and Jigsaw and I will start picking locks and getting out of here. Worst case, we all head for the nearest exits to us and meet at the quinjet.”
“I know you didn’t just say ‘worst case,’ Cupid,” the hamburger technician says. “Might as well jinx it well and good and say—”
“Well don’t you jinx it,” the other asset interrupts. “Let’s just keep moving, okay? It’ll be fine. There’s no one here. It’s just the base objecting to our visit. It wants us out, we want us out, it’ll be okay.”
The flying man sighs. “I don’t like it. But alright. Tony, let’s go. The faster we get through this cave-in to Steve and the others, the faster we can get out of here.”
“And hey, maybe someone big and green is angry about the rocks falling on his head,” the hamburger technician says as he and the flying man turn to leave. “Hulk dig, you know. Hulk dig very well.”
“I got a firsthand look at how well he digs back in Bakersfield, yeah.” The flying man’s voice gets softer as they turn another corner. “But he wasn’t the one who’d gotten buried. Might look a bit different this time around.”
It cannot make out the hamburger technician’s response.
“Well, time to break out the lockpicks,” the other asset says, digging into a pouch. “You know, I learned how to do this when I was just a little kid, after I ran away from home. Was training to be like Houdini. You don’t know who that is, probably.”
The other asset is very worried. It can hear the worry in the other asset’s voice, the way it wavers a little, the way the other asset is talking and talking about someone who used to be chained up and drowned in front of a crowd, over and over again.
The other asset wanted to be like this person. It has been chained up and drowned in front of a crowd before. Over and over again. It is not something to want.
The other asset is not making any sense.
And the air smells faintly sweet now, with a hint of bitter. And the other asset drops the little metal picks, fingers fumbling for them and losing them.
The air is— and the other asset is— The other asset is fumbling.
It knows this smell. The eyes widen. No. The other asset is not enhanced. The other asset cannot breathe this smell for long. It reaches back and yanks the strap loose to take the rest of the killing face off. It will survive in this bad air. The other asset will not. Not unless the other asset can breathe clean air that only smells a little.
“Jigs, what’re you—” The other asset bends down, tries to pick up the little metal picks, cannot make even the bare fingers wrap around them no matter what. “The fuck…”
The other asset tries to rise up and ends up leaning against the bars instead.
It presses the killing face to the other asset’s skin face, presses and presses, and wraps the strap around and pulls it tight, even while the other asset struggles to fend off the killing face and makes muffled choking sounds in the throat since there is no more space for the other asset’s jaw to open.
The killing face is a very tight fit, yes.
But it will not let the other asset breathe the bad smelling air. It will save the other asset from this air, will survive without the killing face where the other asset will not. This way they will both survive.
The other asset loses even more balance and slides down to the floor, patting the ground with blind fingers, maybe trying to find the little metal picks still.
It pulls off the goggles, pulls them over the other asset’s eyes. A complete killing face. The other asset will be safe now.
And it… It will find another way out of the rooms for fighting with other assets to train properly and learn the limits of the limbs and body. It has done so before? It feels like it has done so before…
Up. The answer is up. Over the tops of the bars and over the glassed in walls and the sweet bitter smell will sink while the air above is fresher and cleaner and… yes. Up.
The other asset will be safe while it escapes and finds a way to stop the sweet bitter smelling air from coming into the rooms.
Up. It will go up.
Chapter 80: Brock (Rumlow, aka Crossbones, B-RUM) | Maybe I’m a monster (maybe you should run for your life)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Monster” by Hidden Citizens and Ryan Innes.
Posting the midweek chapter way early because I need the distraction it will provide tomorrow. There'll probably be another one later in the week, too. ^_^
Also, I know the POV character for this chapter is a content warning in and of itself, but there are some content warnings for this chapter in the end notes if you feel you might need or want them.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
Fucking finally.
Brock looks at his phone, at the notification from the Z.E.L.U.S. app that it’s finally time to get to work.
He’s been here over a week with Jakenhall and his newly assembled STRIKE team, and it’s been hell trying to keep his men from getting antsy and getting into trouble in this creepy old Soviet base. So many traps to leave unsprung and ready for whoever might follow them, so many areas to stay away from lest someone notice their presence and be forewarned.
The Z.E.L.U.S. app said there’d be someone here worth waiting for even after the Winter Soldiers turned out to be a bust, and now here they are. And it’s the Avengers of all teams to spring the trap. The Avengers… and the asset they stole.
Brock sends out the alert to the boys, warning them to get themselves ready but keep themselves quiet while they do it. They don’t want to ruin things at this point, and Brock will personally skin any agent who fucks this up for him.
While they’re donning tac gear and divvying up the tranqs and ammo and gas masks, Brock makes his way to the surveillance station they’ve had set up since their first day here. Time to see exactly how the Avengers are going to play their opening move.
Because it’s up to the Avengers to pick the playing ground. Do they come through the rooftop entrance, bust through the front, sneak in through the back or side? Whatever the Avengers pick, this base has a trap ready and waiting for them.
Surveillance shows they’ve gone for the front door, which is just what they did in North Carolina. Excellent. That’ll put them in position for some cave-ins down the road, if they don’t cram themselves in the elevator to get corralled that way and shot up like fish in a barrel. The important parts of the group will survive it—Rogers, the asset. That’s what matters.
He wants his asset back, and if he can get Captain America as a bonus prize, that’ll be great.
Brock flips on the speakers in the sub-barracks they’ve taken over and triple checks that only those speakers are working. He’s not about to announce their plans to the clueless Avengers, but he does need to give his team a pep talk.
“Okay boys,” he says into the mic. “This is it. Avengers are on the doorstep, and they brought our asset back. So kind of them.”
He laughs. If the Avengers knew what he had in mind for that leatherbound gimp, they’d have left the thing at home for its safety. But they didn’t. They brought it here, like they were willing to hand it over. He adjusts his pants. They won’t be willing, though, and that’s what will make taking the asset back that much more fun.
“There’s been a lot of fuckups in trying to catch this slippery little shit, but we’re STRIKE Alpha and I recruited you for a reason,” he continues. “They should have sent us after the asset the very first time it slipped its leash. But all those mistakes end here. Because we’re on the case. The asset isn’t leaving this base without a fucking choke collar and spider gag, and if we play our cards right, we can snag ourselves another super soldier while we’re at it.”
In fact, they might not leave for a good long time once they do catch the asset and get their bonus super soldier. There’s no rush. There’s plenty of time for the whole team to drown their dicks in the asset’s tears, hack up all those tally marks, really break it in again after it’s gotten all rusty from disuse. There’s a room for medical experiments—it’ll have some of the tools they need.
For the other tools…
“Jakenhall, Travers, you have your travel halos and you know how to use them.” Brock pats his own travel halo fondly. Soon. “The rest of you, you know the drill. Same as it was when we thought there’d be five Winter Soldiers in this place. Tranqs for the asset and Rogers—they’re enhanced, but they’re valuable alive, so take no chances. Bullets for the rest. Drive the super soldiers to the halos, run support, dispatch the chaff.”
The app on his phone sends an alert that the ventilation system is ready for the gas as soon as it’s advantageous to flood the hallways.
But it’s too soon to do that. Brock wants them deeper in the base before that particular trap springs on them. Maybe they can split the team up and be a bit choosier with which Avengers they use the gas on.
This stuff will kill a normal, unenhanced human if enough of it gets breathed in for long enough, but it’s designed for use on a super soldier. Its purpose, according to the base’s records and the Z.E.L.U.S. app’s confirmation, is to incapacitate the enhanced, render them more malleable without doing permanent damage.
There’d been something about the chemical properties, the gas interacting with serum-laced blood in the capillaries in the lungs, temporarily cutting down on the serum’s effectiveness. Brock hadn’t bothered to read much about why the gas works; he’d been satisfied with the video evidence that it does work.
Five enraged super soldiers, rabid and viciously attacking everyone in the cage with them, teeth bared and eyes wild, and no match at all for the gas. In just a handful of minutes under the concentrated gas got pumped in, their jaws were slack, their eyes glassy, their movements sluggish and uncoordinated. They’d still wanted to fight, but the masked operatives who entered the cage had no trouble at all subduing them.
If everything works as he wants it to, that’ll take care of Rogers, Banner, and the asset. Banner’s only dangerous if he hulks out, and the gas should stop that from happening. The other two… well, they’ll be just as easily neutralized by the gas, and then it’s halo time.
The surveillance monitors are glitchy after this long, but he can see that the Avengers have split up. One super soldier still in the upper levels, the other down near the prep room. Of the two of them, he’d rather have the asset than Rogers. They’ll concentrate the gas on the lower levels first. Wait to overpower the asset and then turn all their attention on the others. There’s bound to be a cave-in soon, and that should keep them at bay long enough.
“Gas masks on,” Brock continues, “and check the seals before go-time. You breathe this shit in before you even get to the fight, we’re leaving your ass behind to die. I hear it’s not a pleasant way to go.”
He hasn’t heard any such thing. If anything, the confusion the gas causes should make for a relatively nice send-off. In theory, you wouldn’t even know you were dying. But he’s not losing his boys in the hallways to sloppy protocol, and the threat of a gruesome end will make sure they aren’t careless with the gas masks.
Surveillance in the barracks shows him that his team of thirty-five is scrambling to get things ready, and that they aren’t skimping on the ammo or slacking with the gas masks. Good. There’s no way to tell where the asset’s little group will go within the base’s lower levels, who will encounter the thing first. Brock hopes he’s the one, but he knows as well as anyone that you don’t always get what you want.
But you might get what you need, and he needs the asset under his control again, whatever it takes.
“Take the asset alive,” he repeats, “and Rogers if you can. Kill the rest, even Banner. No chances. Hack their fucking heads off if you’re not sure about it.”
If this was his original STRIKE team, he’d need to warn them not to bother with the trigger words until the asset is already down, but Brock himself is the only one he still has who knows the damn words in the first place. And he’s not stupid enough to pull off a gas mask so the asset can see his face when he barks those trigger words at it, even if he thought the trigger words would work as they were intended to work.
No matter. Pierce’s deactivation codeword, sputnik, was overused and ineffective—how else could the asset have attacked him?—but Livingsworth’s should still be nice and potent. And Zola shared it with him before, so he should have a bit of verbal ammo at his disposal as well as the tranqs, the travel halo, the fear he’s instilled in the asset over the years of brutal treatment.
He cannot wait. And now? Now he doesn’t have to wait.
Brock grins at the surveillance monitors, where the asset is now crying on Barton’s shoulder. Pathetic. But also so good. It’s been too long since he’s seen that thing’s tears. And there’ll be a lot more tears where those come from. Brock’ll make it cry for years for what it’s done.
He’s been waiting for this since the equipment first picked up renewed LiDAR pings over the area, pings the Z.E.L.U.S. app had insisted were the sign of someone doing a search for them.
Actually, he’s been waiting for this since the trap was first laid well over a week ago, the crumbs of usefulness from that hack Ward getting gathered up by his little mouse of a protege. Whatever her name was. He doesn’t even care enough to guess. The Bus crew assembling and then passing on some tips planted in the information available to them has finally led somewhere, and it’s this.
His face hurts from ginning so hard. His dick is hot and heavy in his pants, already growing in anticipation. This is going to be so good.
This almost makes up for the disappointment of finding out that those Soviet fools had put bullet holes in their assets before shipping the defective asset over to the States. He’d been counting on having some serious manpower under his control once he woke those Winter Soldiers up, and poof—turns out there’s nothing here worth the trip, let alone anything that would help him sweep his way to the position of East Coast operator and North American HYDRA Supreme.
But maybe he’ll have some manpower for that after all. Because there is an asset here after waiting for the Z.E.L.U.S. app’s predictions to come true, for its plans to actually produce something. And what a thing for those plans to produce.
He’s been dreaming of going after the asset and getting that miserable little fuck rag back under control, and here the asset is coming to him. From across an ocean, even, and half a continent. Almost like it knows where it should be—on its knees, ass up and cheek digging into the concrete, full of cock and choking on its tears.
He should have been the one to infiltrate that fucking ugly Avengers Tower, the one to drag the asset out of the Avengers’ cage and back into HYDRA’s. He should have been the one to go after the asset in that ambush in D.C., too. The one to lie in wait for the asset in Bakersfield instead of coming in later to try to pick up the remains.
The asset is terrified of him and rightly so. The asset will run, hide, cower. The asset recognizes where the power resides and where the pain is going, and knows full well what its place is in relation to its masters. Particularly, in relation to Brock. If he’d been allowed to be in the right place at the right time, any number of times in the past, they’d already have the asset with its flat, hopeless, empty eyes, its slack jaw slicked with blood and cum, its bleeding ass and thighs.
But no. He was denied, and as a direct result, they lost the asset time and again. But not this time.
Fucking Zola, sending him on a wild goose chase through the Western geography, picking up loyal sleepers and for what? Just to turn them over to the main group. Johnson loyalists, every one of them, bowing to Zola’s will and doing Zola’s bidding, and was there any thanks to Brock for waking them up and letting them live their real lives? Nope.
So much wasted time. He could have been rebuilding his STRIKE team in Camp Lehigh. Hell, he could have been recruiting on the streets and had better luck consolidating power around himself.
What he needed—still needs—is demonstration of his prowess. Demonstration that he’s worth following and gets the job done. Demonstration that he’s the rightful ruler of this geography, that Crossbones is taking over whether they like it or not and they’d better get in line if they don’t want to be crushed under his bootheel.
Five Winter Soldiers stolen out from under the dusty remains of the Soviet Union? That would have done it. Anyone who objected could have been turned into an example for the others, too. It wouldn’t have taken many gruesome deaths for everyone to praise the idea and get behind him.
But this might be even better, if it works out. Here’s the asset they all know, the asset they all got used to fearing back in the States when it was running around killing them left and right, the asset they need to put back where it belongs for morale reasons and strategic reasons both. And when Brock comes back home with the asset successfully wiped and ready for duty—for all of its duties—that’ll give him the edge he needs to fully stock his roster of followers.
And when it turns out that he’s killed the Avengers in the process of obtaining their asset, when it turns out he’s killed Captain fucking America, Iron Man, the Widow, and all the rest, that’ll send them flocking to his side, each of them eager to follow.
And he might as well kill Rogers, even if he’s instructed his boys to take the man alive. It’ll be too much work making actual use of him without the conditioning and foundation work the asset has, and probably too dangerous to keep him around long term without making use of him.
He’s got three of those portable halos here, and there’s the chair in the base itself with its stationary halo. There’s no way the asset is getting out of here without its brain scrambled, and no way he’s letting Rogers die without having a little fun first.
Brock’s not sure which is more powerful—the chair with the halo that sucks down the whole region’s electricity to fry a super soldier into compliance, or the arches powered by Tesseract energy packs that should do the trick without external input. But he’s got all the time in the world to test it out once he has those two subdued.
And there’s a Hulk in there somewhere, too. He’ll have to do something about the Hulk.
They have the Abomination on ice in Alaska in human form, so he knows it’s possible to contain the Hulk inside Banner. If they fry Banner’s brain after gassing him, will the Hulk comply? Or will they just have to treat Banner to a little execution-style send-off when there’s no way to get compliance out of the weapon he hides inside himself?
Either way, there’s a decent chance Brock will get two enhanced assets out of this—his personal fuck toy returned to him for the rest of time and the new one for temporary use—and a guarantee he at least gets the original asset back.
The others on the team, well, he’s not stupid. He’ll just shoot them while they’re down. There’s no use for Sideshow Barton, the Widow, or whatever bird-themed idiot they recruited. Eagle or some shit. Whatever. And while they’ll keep Stark’s suit of Iron Man armor, they have no use for Stark himself, and Brock isn’t falling for the whole “make him do work for you” trap that got the Ten Rings served a faceful of fire.
Rogers, they’ll stick under the original halo, assuming it still works. If they get it right, Brock might actually keep Rogers around and try conditioning him so he’ll have two assets to trot out as reasons to follow him. If they get it wrong and the results are a worthless drooling idiot, well, Rogers has all the same holes as the asset and should be just as fun to play with until he chokes to death on a big fat cock.
And it should take a damn long time for him to die, too, enhanced as he is. That means more fun for them, and they have the time for it. There’s no hurry once they have their toys under control.
Brock will take pictures of Rogers, too. Video. Lots of it. It might even be better if he and his team take turns fucking Captain America to death on tape, faces blurred out, of course. That shit can get broadcast everywhere, and there’s no escaping it once it’s out there. What could be more destructive to his patriotic legacy than a days-long rape-filled snuff tape that is the last anyone hears or sees of him?
The disgrace to his name will be just one more thing to enjoy, too. They don’t have meat hooks here in this base, or brands with letters for marking up his hide, but there are plenty of other things they can use as makeshift tools to get the job done. And let the original asset watch, let the thing know what’s coming more than usual, let it see how long they can last and how vicious they can be.
Let it know its fate and accept the necessary calibration and the punishments on top of that.
Brock watches the surveillance screens for a moment, looking for a massive green hand to bust up through the rubble of the cave-in that just happened on the upper levels, but he doesn’t see anything but the rubble. Serves them right, getting buried like that. They should have risked the elevator shaft and gone straight down if they wanted to avoid this. Now it’s a matter of how soon can the Hulk dig them out, and is the Hulk even aware of the others in there. The Hulk might just know that it’s mad about being under the concrete.
He isn’t too worried either way, though. They have enough tranqs to take down a herd of bull elephants, and then some. And then there’s the gas. They’d thought there might be a need to subdue five super soldiers, after all. They can take down the Hulk and have plenty left over for the other two, especially if Rogers gets injured in this cave-in.
And yes, now they’re splitting their party again. Three whole groups of them now, and better yet, the asset and the weakest of their number—the circus performer armed with a stick and string—are stuck together in the sublevels while the others take off. Excellent. It’s like they want to be gassed.
Z.E.L.U.S. is jacked into the system here, and the app will take care of the timing and direct their STRIKE agents where they’re needed most. Need to conserve resources when it comes to that, after all. The gas ought to kill Barton, which is a shame—Brock wanted to kill him personally, especially after watching the man hug the asset earlier on the surveillance feed—but the asset will live.
The asset won’t even be impacted until Brock can find a way to get that muzzle off its face. Hilarious that the stupid thing is so attached to its muzzle that it voluntarily wears it. Hilarious, but unfortunate at the same time. It means that Brock will need to find an opening in its new tac gear to get a tranq dart or three in there before the asset is slowed down enough that it can get a solid lungful of the gas—
What?
He watches in disbelief as the asset—either truly stupid, or truly attached to Barton of all the worthless shitheads—removes the muzzle all on its own and fits it against Barton’s face instead.
What is it they say when you fly commercial and not via quinjet? Put your own mask on first. Looks like the asset hasn’t picked up on that lesson yet. Ha! What an absolute idiot.
It’s like the asset wants to be on its knees with a cock down its throat and a stomach full of cum. It’s doing everything in its power to put itself under Brock’s power. Breathing in more and more of the gas while coming back this way, over the bars and back toward the main prep room. Maybe it’s looking for a shut-off valve for the gas.
Well it won’t find one.
The Z.E.L.U.S. app is not using the manual valve controls. It actually disabled the manual controls when the Avengers showed up to spring the traps they’d laid throughout this place.
Brock chuckles as the asset stumbles over a bit of nothing. Already feeling the effects, huh? Better and better. Between the coordination issues and the hallucinations, the asset will be easy pickings.
He slides his own gas mask on, checks the seal—it’s good and tight—and pats the travel halo hooked onto his belt.
He’s given the halo a cursory inspection, and he paid attention to the engineers explaining how to use it back in New Jersey. It’s simple. Shove it over the asset’s eyes, make sure the paddles at the ends are over its temples, calibrate the output and push the button. Zap, one brain-scrambled asset thrashing on the ground until the halo runs through its cycle. Repeat as needed.
Brock isn’t going to waste much time calibrating it, though. He knows better than the engineers how to handle the asset. Less is more? Calibrate it for just enough charge? Fuck that. More is more. He’s going to crank this baby as high as it’ll go and fry that thing’s brain good and crispy.
If he’s lucky, he’ll still get to repeat the process a few times before the Tesseract charge that runs it fades away to nothing. He’s looking forward to it.
Brock checks the surveillance again to be sure that his team is in motion, and then confirms that the asset is currently in the maze of smaller rooms that contain the main controls of the medical and research wing of the sublevel. Well, he’s got a tracker to solve that problem, and it’ll guide him to the asset’s metal arm, even this far underground.
Following the asset through the warren of hallways and surgical rooms the others never got around to exploring and pinning it down with tranqs will be easy. And to make it more fun…
Brock flips a few more switches on the controls to activate the speakers in the prep room and medical areas of the sublevels and pockets the portable mic. What’s even better than stalking prey? Making sure that prey knows it’s being stalked, knows who’s stalking it, knows enough to be properly terrified. This way, he can let the asset know he’s coming for it and even taunt the wretched thing from a distance, drum up a good fear response, maybe even get it pissing its tac gear in terror.
He smiles. Everything is ready. Time to go hunting.
Notes:
Content Warning: Rumlow is an evil man with evil intentions, and he’s thinking HYDRA Trash Party thoughts about Jigsaw and also about Steve. On a more nuanced level, there’s also the assumption on Rumlow’s part that being sexually assaulted is shameful and that victims’ reputations are rightly ruined when others learn of the sexual assault.
Chapter 81: Assets | There’s nowhere to run when darkness falls
Notes:
Chapter title from “Darkness Falls” by Cece And The Dark Hearts and UNSECRET.
Content warning in endnotes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:45 p.m.—
It puts a frustrated fist through the now-loosened panel that it vaguely remembers used to hide the controls to the sweet bitter air. It has pressed buttons, has flipped switches, has rotated things and pulled things, and the air will not stop smelling so sweet and so bitter, increasingly sweet and bitter, no matter what it does to the controls under the panel.
And these are the right controls… It— It remembers technicians with masks, not killing faces but other masks with clunky external filters unlike the sleek internal filter of the killing face. They were working at the controls, wearing their white coats, pressing the buttons and sliding the levers back and forth to send the sweet bitter air out and then to stop the sweet bitter air and keep it inside the vents or canisters where it belonged.
The mind is full of images, each of them blurring into the next and all of them shaking, jittery and full of static.
The researchers with the white coats, the clipboards, the medical measuring devices for how the body is working, the heart rate, the temperature, all of that. They are milling about.
There are other assets fighting this asset, fighting each other, fighting the technicians and the handlers, fighting everything and everyone that crosses their path.
There is a handler with a gun, “get me out of here.” There is a slammed door with bars, the vibrations of the metal going through the arm and into the chest with the force of the closing.
There are the glass walls going up, outside of the barred cage where they cannot be broken, where they can provide an airtight seal. Inside the glass walls, the remaining support team drops to the ground.
The researchers and handlers have given up on the support staff inside the bars, inside of the glass. The support staff agents are dead or dying, anyway, are being ripped up by the other assets in the wolf pen.
The air smells so sweet and so bitter and the others from the wolf pen, the other assets, they stumble, their movements are like the slurring of words after so much vodka, running clumsily together and getting turned around and twisted up, until they cannot land their blows at all but swing at the air itself.
There are support staff outside of the glass walls, with it, with the handler with the gun, the handler from before, the handler who left it all alone… The support staff with their masks that are not killing faces, and the handler from before with a mask now, too, and then the walls of glass move back again and the barred door opens again and the other assets are brought out, docile and slack-limbed and weak.
It is the sweet bitter air that does it. The air is bad, wrong, danger, poison.
And it comes out of the vents wherever it is needed in the sublevels, comes from working on the controls under this panel, comes on and goes off because of buttons pushed under this panel. But it cannot turn the air off, even with a fist of metal, even with wires tangled up in the metal fingers and yanked so hard out of the panel box that they snap with electric sparks falling like fireworks from the sky, so slow and bright.
It needs to stop the air or it will become docile and slack-limbed and weak, just like the others it can still see in the corners of the eyes, moving moving moving where there should be no one there.
How can it stop the air? It rips the dented panel off of the hinges that keep it in place. How can it fight the air? It throws the panel aside like the useless piece of metal it is. How can it—
“How’s my little fuck rag feeling today? Did you miss me?”
It freezes, wide-eyed.
Did it… hear something? Hear words? New words, from a new voice? Not the voices of the team that is not a cell coming in through the comm device in the ear. But also not a new voice. A familiar voice.
It is on a mission, has the comm device in the ear. That makes it okay to listen, but… this voice did not come from the comm device in the ear.
Was it a voice from the past? The handler from before, “get me out of here.” That had been a voice, a voice it heard, a voice from nowhere, from the past. From a time and not a place. Are there more words now to go with the images it half sees from the corners of the eyes?
“I missed you, sweetheart.”
There are words now. Not just the imagined movements, but words. Muffled but clear, distant but close up, without a mouth but… But it knows the mouth that makes those sounds. Knows the feel of the breath of that mouth on the skin as the mouth hisses threatening promises of what will come next. It knows the words. Fuck rag. Knows the sneering twist of the lips that say those words. Sweetheart.
No no no.
There is not anyone in the base. There is not. The team that is not a cell checked the base from the sky, used the other little metal birds to inspect the details when they got close, saw that none of the entrances had been entered, that none of the exits had been exited, that the doors were so slow and so rusty from disuse.
It is not really seeing the breathy heave of the snaking ventilation ductwork, is especially not hearing those words from that mouth, is not, is not, is not. It is just the sweet bitter air. It is not real. It can’t be real. It can’t be.
The throat contracts, swallowing nothing at all, aching like there is a large apple lodged inside of it, hard and unmoving no matter how it swallows.
“Been looking for you, and now I found you,” the voice croons into the control room.
It raises the hands to the ears, presses the head tightly between them, squeezes the burning eyes shut. It has not been found. There is no one here to find it. The flying man and the hamburger technician are elsewhere, are looking for the others, and not for it.
There is no one here. There is no one. There cannot be anyone. There cannot. Even the other assets in the wolf pen that it sees in the corners of the eyes were dead for so very long that they were turned into just bone and papery skin stretched tight over skulls.
There is no one here to say those words, no one who would say the words. No one. And especially not anyone who would say them that way, with the slow and taunting lilt, the grin of the lips flavoring the words themselves.
It should not even be listening to a voice without a mouth, except that it is on a mission and that makes it okay to listen to a comm device. Usually cannot even hear those voices at all, but the mission, the comm device in the ear… And this voice has a mouth, it knows. It knows, knows, knows the voice… But no.
“You’re eager to catch up, I bet,” says the voice that it is not listening to, but that it hears, hears, hears, the voice that it knows, knows, knows. “Can’t wait to get down on your knees and taste a little bit of home, right?”
The voice is muffled but so sharp, sharp like pain and pain and order comes through pain and—
It shakes the head and gets to the feet, straightening up from its crouch before the hole where the panel had been and leaning suddenly to the side before it catches itself on the controls and steadies itself. The sweet and bitter air is… Is already…
There are the mind images of the others, stumbling, struggling to continue their violence, while the sweet bitter air does its work on them…
It needs the killing face if it is to withstand the sweet bitter air. But the other asset is wearing the killing face, and it will not take the killing face from the other asset. The other asset needs the killing face more than it does. The other asset…
It has left the other asset slumped against the bars. Is the other asset safe there? If the voice… if this voice, is in the sweet and bitter air, is in the base, then are any of them safe?
Is the voice in the air itself, in the base, creeping along the corridors? Or only in the mind? It thinks that the images of the other figures in the room are only in the mind. It thinks that the walls and floor only heave and twist in the mind. So the voice must be only in the mind…
“I’m coming for you, sweetheart,” says the voice it tries so hard not to hear but hears all the same. The voice of… It’s that voice… Is B-RUM’s voice, just muffled and mechanical and not coming directly from B-RUM’s mouth…
“I can find you wherever you run in this place.”
No no no, please. Not B-RUM.
It does not have a killing face to protect it from B-RUM, only has the skin face, and the skin face is no protection at all, is almost as vulnerable and open as the choking face.
“We’re gonna have so much fun. You came all this way to me,” says B-RUM, a low growl full of promise. “I’ll make it worth your while. Got a big fat cock ready and waiting, and more where that comes from.”
It looks around the room, through the wavering figures of support staff it knows cannot be there, at the doorway through which the other asset is slumped against the bars. The other asset cannot save it, cannot even reassure it, is still reeling from the sweet and bitter air. The other asset will survive, but only if B-RUM does not come to where the other asset is so vulnerable.
Is the voice really B-RUM? Is it really there at all? Is it just in the mind, a figment of the sweet and bitter air? If it is just the mind bringing up horrors from the past and forming that horrible voice into new words, then there is nothing to fear.
But does it dare take the chance? What if the voice is real, is B-RUM in the base with it? Is B-RUM coming for it? What if B-RUM does come for it and finds the other asset helpless?
Can it protect the other asset from B-RUM while it is breathing in all of the sweet and bitter air? While it is seeing things that are not there and hearing things that are not there? While it cannot be sure of its own movements? B-RUM would attack the other asset, preys on the weak and helpless whenever possible. And the other asset is weak and helpless right now. Vulnerable.
But B-RUM would also do everything in his power to hurt this asset, would be preoccupied with this asset, would want to attack this asset before bothering with the other asset.
So it will lead B-RUM away from the other asset, so that no harm can come to the other asset when the other asset is unable to fight back.
It will…
The other asset said to it once, after the team that is not a cell had gathered in the training room for the team training exercise, while the assets were eating the snack in the nighttime… The other asset had said it was smart to run away from some threats. That it was not a weakness or a failure.
It still feels weak, though. Feels like a failure. But it is not going to leave this area of the base just to leave and get away from the voice and maybe from B-RUM. It is going to leave to keep the other asset safe. That is not weakness or failure. That is… that is…
B-RUM is not coming for the other asset. Does not care about the other asset. Might not even know the other asset. B-RUM is coming for it, for this asset. And if it is nowhere near the other asset, then B-RUM will not be near the other asset, either. The other asset will be safely overlooked while B-RUM comes after this asset.
Yes. It will draw B-RUM's attention away from the other asset.
It runs. Or it tries to run. It tries to run and only staggers, and then it tries to walk, and this works better but is not fast enough, will not be enough to flee to safety, if there is any safety at all in a base with B-RUM inside. It is fast enough to lead the danger away from the other asset, though. So it will have to do.
It is the sweet and bitter air’s fault. The heavy limbs dragging it down. The darkness in the corners that crowds out everything else in the center of the vision and makes the medical room with the tables and the equipment waver and swim.
“I’m going to wipe you ‘till you’re crispy, sweetheart. Get you all ready to start over again. Shove a taser baton so far up your ass you taste the electricity when I turn it on.”
It will not go back. No, no, no. Cannot go back. Retire itself before it goes back, but…
It slinks out of the room, away from the other asset and across a hallway that bobs and weaves and heaves under the feet like a living, breathing thing. It has to get away. It cannot go back. It will not start over again. It will not, does not want to, will not. And if it can manage it, it can stay ahead of B-RUM. Can ensure that B-RUM is not anywhere near either asset.
“I’ve got a halo in my pocket just waiting to work its magic, sweetheart. And I see you.”
B-RUM sees it?
It tries to duck behind an outcropping in the wall and instead walks into the wall itself. There is no outcropping. The wall is moving under the fingers as it feels its way along in the growing dark. Is slipping and sliding and moving, moving, moving.
It feels so stupid, so pathetic, so weak. A failure. Cannot even manage to hide from surveillance. It must be surveillance. That must be how B-RUM sees it. How can it hide from that in this base?
“Hell, might not even need these tranqs the way you’re stumbling around. That’s good,” says B-RUM’s voice as it weaves a path through the room of beds with the restraints and straps and poles for hooking up— For hanging bags of— For hooking up the drugs to the assets with the tubing.
“Yeah, that’s real good. Means you get to be aware the whole time.”
There’s a scuff of a boot somewhere in the room. Is there? Is that the scuff of a boot? A boot that is not this asset’s boot? It should have turned the lights on so that it could still see well despite the sweet and bitter air it is breathing that dims everything in its peripheral vision.
It cannot be B-RUM. This is just the air that has been poisoned, and the brain is showing it things that are not there, is listening to sounds that are not there. Voices that are not there. That cannot be there. Please.
It tastes blood and adjusts the teeth so that they are not biting the lip. That is real. B-RUM is not. Cannot be real. Cannot be here.
Cannot be.
No.
Please.
“I know you’re here somewhere,” says the voice of B-RUM, strangely doubled, as though coming from multiple places at once.
It puts all of its concentration into leaving the room—and maybe B-RUM’s voice—behind, behind, behind. The room is real, B-RUM is not, and it must get as far away from the other asset as it can, in case B-RUM is real and is following it.
“Come out, come out wherever you are!”
There is a laugh, and it knows the laugh from its waking days and its sleeping nights, knows the laugh so well. It is real, is here, is his laugh.
“Play nice and maybe I’ll hose you down after we have our fun. Let you be clean for a few minutes before the next round starts up.”
Clint
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:15 p.m.—
Clint groans and tries to roll over and get his eyes checked—his bedside mirror gets more use than the mirror in the bathroom—and finds that he can’t. Why can’t he—?
Oh. He’s slumped down with an arm trapped by a pair of bars, wedged in real tight, and he couldn’t be further from his bed in the Tower.
He carefully extracts his arm from the bars as he sits up, and the moment he’s even an inch more upright than before, a tsunami of blood rushes through his head and throbs so hard he sees bright spots.
Not good. What happened?
“Getting real tired of your antics, sweetheart.”
…What?
What antics? And who’s sweetheart? And why is the PA system complaining about it? Isn’t this place supposed to be empty?
Clint reaches up to rub at his temples and finds that he’s wearing a pair of goggles. That would explain the dark tint on everything. That’s probably part of why his head hurts. The other part… His fingers meet a buckle at the back of his head and he realizes why his whole face hurts.
Why is he wearing his roommate’s killing face?
And why is the air smelling like a granny’s stale potpourri with a hint of burnt popcorn?
He’s about to undo the buckle and stretch his aching jaw, maybe check in with the others, when it hits him. Oh. If the air smells funny and he’s wearing his roommate’s mask with the filtration system somehow built into it, then Jigsaw must have put the mask on him to protect him from some kind of gas. They’ve been gassed, like they set off another booby trap or something.
Very not cool.
The lack of a Jigsaw nearby or any signs of a struggle tell him that Jigsaw’s probably fine even with the gas. Maybe just didn’t want to haul Clint around the base and planned to come back for him.
“You know it’s over now.”
Clint blinks. Who the hell is—?
“Order comes through pain, you fucking miserable shit stain. Time to get yours. Stop with the cat and mouse and accept what’s coming to you.”
The voice is familiar, but muffled a bit. Muffled too much for Clint to place the owner. But he doesn’t have to know who it is exactly to know it’s bad news. Anyone spouting that nonsense in a HYDRA base is going to be HYDRA, and that plus the gas is a sure sign that they’ve been ambushed.
“You had a good run, sweetheart,” the speaker system all but croons out, the tone shifting from the earlier anger into something darkly playful. “But it’s time to stop pretending you’re anything other than a pair of holes to fill. With occasional bouts of usefulness when there’s a blood-and-guts mess to be made. You forgot. We’re gonna have a lot of fun reminding you. Got a big fat cock with your name on it.”
Clint glares at the laugh that follows that. Definitely HYDRA, and the only one of them this goon could be talking to is Jigsaw. Trying to intimidate him, maybe. But Jigsaw ignores JARVIS, so why wouldn’t he ignore this asshole? And Jigsaw has demonstrated pretty violently that he’s not afraid of them. He spent a couple of months hunting them down, after all. Except…
“Got your name on it. Get it? ‘Jigsaw.’ Pft. Thinking you get a name. Thinking you’re worth that. You’re not worth your weight in piss.”
There’s only the one HYDRA goon Jigsaw’s afraid of, that he knows about. Rumlow. B-RUM. And what happened the last time Jigsaw encountered Rumlow? Jigsaw had gone out the window and up to the roof and jumped right off the edge to get away from him. Sure, Cap and Natasha had been there, too, and they’d registered as enemies, or at least as threats, but the panic had been about Rumlow, according to Natasha.
And if Rumlow is here in this base, well shit. That’s not just danger to Jigsaw, but an encounter Clint doesn’t want Jigsaw to have to deal with, especially not alone.
Clint shifts around on the floor and pulls himself upright with a grip on the bars he was slumped against. His head throbs and the floor sways under his feet like a ship, but he manages it.
“But we’re gonna change that, aren’t we? Gonna give you back some real purpose so you have a goal to suffer toward. Gonna wipe away all that nonsense those losers told you, educate you real well, teach you all about how to comply again.”
He needs to get out of here and find Jigsaw before Rumlow does. Maybe Jigsaw’s picked a hiding place and is hunkered down there, waiting for this waking nightmare to be over. Or maybe he’s on the move. Or maybe he doesn’t even hear this crap and isn’t aware Rumlow’s there.
But Clint won’t be any good to him here, either way. He keeps a hand on the bar for stability as he reaches down to get his lockpicks from where they’d fallen.
Given how difficult he’s finding it to stay upright and focus on the task at hand, Clint kind of hopes Jigsaw found a hole to hide in. Because he doesn’t have his mask with the filtration system, and that means he’s been breathing this shit in for a while. He’s enhanced, but Clint doesn’t know what that means in the face of HYDRA-designed gas. Maybe it was formulated to take down a super soldier, or to mildly incapacitate one for easier handling.
Better in either case for Jigsaw to conserve what energy and focus he has instead of trying to sneak around while the walls are all jumpy.
Clint would swear under his breath at his clumsy fingers fumbling with the lockpicks if the mask strapped to his face was loose enough to allow his jaw to move. How does Jigsaw wear this thing for as long as he does? And why can’t Clint get this damn lock open? He learned lockpicking as a little kid in the circus and it’s as easy for him as tying his shoes.
“And I don’t even need that clunky chair to empty out that head of yours,” Rumlow says over the speakers. “Got myself a halo I can carry. Gonna slap this thing on your miserable, cocksucking face and light you up like the Fourth of July.”
What?
Clint almost drops the damn lockpicks again. A halo he can carry? They’re not going to have to bring Jigsaw kicking and biting to the prep room and lock him in that chair, but can just… wipe him wherever they find him?
He attacks the lock with renewed energy. He has to get out of here, has to get to Jigsaw, has to—
Damn this fucking lock!
Clint slips the lockpicks back into his pocket and takes several wavering steps away from the locked door, as many as he can take before he backs into the other bars. He takes his hearing aids with the comm in them out and shoves them roughly into a different pocket. He doesn’t have the finger-level coordination for lockpicking after being gassed, apparently, or the mechanism got melted a bit by repulsor beam, or whatever, so he’s not picking this lock. But he’s getting out of here one way or another. Jigsaw needs him.
He readies his bow and an exploding arrow, lines up his shot, and waits for the lock to stabilize in his vision. Stark’s repulsor thing didn’t do the trick on its own, but maybe it weakened things enough for this other thing to work. He only has one shot at it, one exploding arrow, and gas or no gas, he’s going to blow that fucking lock off that door.
Hopefully this popcorn-potpourri bullshit isn’t flammable.
Notes:
Content Warning: Even though he is not the POV character, Brock Rumlow is present in this chapter, armed, and equipped with a speaker system, with all the horribleness that implies. Be prepared for bad things and creepy trash talking. ^_^
Chapter 82: Avengers | When the world goes down in flames (and all hope is left to die)
Chapter Text
Sam
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
He’s not sure why he feels so uneasy about leaving Clint and Jigsaw behind in that fight cage. It should be an easy enough lock to pick, and Clint had seemed confident in his ability to do so. There isn’t anything threatening about five dead super soldiers long since skeletonized. There aren’t any threats anywhere on the lower sublevel that he can pick out. Even that chair has its controls messed up, and there’s no one down there to use it.
But the doors all shutting at once—and at that specific point in time—is questionable. Sure, it could just be the base glitching in response to all their assaults on other doors. And it could also be a trap. But there’s no one here to make use of a trap, no one who can come along and hurt those who’ve been caught up in it.
The more worrying situation by far is Steve’s. The three in the upper levels still aren’t answering their comms, and for all three of them to be silent, something must have happened. Sam’s hope is that the cave-in Redwing discovered is merely blocking their comms’ signals somehow, rather than actually burying the others.
But that might be wishful thinking, and he knows it. They didn’t have their comms set to transmit every word they said—that would have led to confusion at best with three comms transmitting echoes of the same three voices—so there’s a chance that they simply can’t get their arms up to tap the comms into transmission mode. For all three of them to be unable to reach up and do that, a cave-in seems likely to have buried them.
Steve’s reflexes probably got the shield up in time to keep at least his head clear, but that means his arms are stuck up over his head in all likelihood. And Bruce will be okay even if a chunk of concrete struck him directly on the head—if anything, a direct hit would be more likely to bring out the Hulk than something more traditionally survivable. But Natasha… He worries about Natasha.
Redwing says the cave-in is on level six, but the levels aren’t exactly labeled on the inside of the elevator shaft, and the numbers in the hallways aren’t linear for some reason. He and Stark end up flying up the elevator shaft and prying open doors to peek at the floor numbers displayed on the hallway side, and with every wrong level, Sam’s unease grows.
Not just about the teammates left behind in the sublevels, but for the teammates left behind in the upper levels. So many teammates left behind, and… Sam has to admit that a disproportionate amount of worry is dedicated to Steve. He’s a super soldier, and he’s survived a lot, and will be fine. But Sam can’t help but worry about him, specifically.
Hopefully, if they’re caved in, Steve was able to gather Natasha under his shield and protect them both. Banner, of course, can “hulk-out” when injured, as Stark calls it, and wouldn’t be harmed by falling buildings or caved-in hallways. But Sam suspects that even being a super soldier wouldn’t save his partner if a slab of concrete shattered his skull. And Natasha doesn’t even have that much protection.
He finally found someone he really likes, someone he could get to love with the same depth and fullness as he loved—and still loves—Riley, and he will not lose Steve to a cave-in where he can do nothing but watch. He won’t. It’s too close to losing Riley, and yes, he realizes that this means he’s compromised and shouldn’t be going on missions with Steve because he’s preoccupied with Steve’s safety now at the potential expense of others on the team, but—
“Found it!” Stark calls out.
Finally.
Sam breathes out a sigh of relief and follows Stark into the hallway. It’s too narrow to open his wings, so he can’t fly down the hallway the way Stark can, but he doesn’t have to call out for Stark to stop—the man does it after only a few yards of flight.
“Thanks,” Sam says as he catches up. “Last thing we want is to split the party even further.”
They should be able to get to the others soon enough, if they pick up their feet and really get a move on. It’ll have to be enough, and the fact that Clint and Jigsaw haven’t checked in—or at least, the fact that Clint hasn’t checked in—will have to wait for another time.
Tony
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 5:45 p.m.—
It’s a good thing the others are trapped where they are, and not above the elevator carriage itself. If they hadn’t gotten low enough down, he and Icarus would have needed to go around the elevator and into the hallways, where they could have gotten trapped themselves in some other cave-in. And wouldn’t that be a pretty picture? A totally empty base without an enemy in sight, and the mighty Avengers get stuck in three different booby traps?
Because these have to be booby traps left by the prior occupants. The elevator failing, he can see. Not enough power to keep it going, not really, and then they ask it to work several up and down shifts all at once? Sure, that’ll break it. But the walls of this very sturdy-appearing concrete base suddenly collapsing on someone as soon as they go through a door? A bunch of barred doors swinging shut and locking, made of something his repulsor beam won’t melt?
Gotta be a set of traps they happened to spring. Nothing else makes sense, given how empty this place is.
“Found it!” he calls out as the current hallway he’s sticking his head in has a big old six by the elevator door he’s pried open.
Finally.
He holds the doors open for Wilson and then starts off down the hall, stopping a few yards into his flight and coming to a stop. Wilson’s wings won’t open up enough to get him airborne in this hallway or in most of the others they’ve seen this far. Which is a crying shame because they could make some very quick work of this if they were both flying.
“Thanks,” Wilson says as he catches up. “Last thing we want is to split the party even further.”
“Yeah, with our luck going so well this far, that would be a bad move.”
Tony sets a pace he knows they can both keep but that will get them there as fast as they can manage without overdoing it. The suit might make a lot of things easier with its hydraulics, but some things are even harder in the suit than out of it, and walking at certain speeds is one of those things.
“I figure we get there, help our green anger machine dig our teammates out, and then fly everyone down to the sublevels to pick up Bartonio and the Jigmeister,” he says. “They’ve been awfully quiet down there, and only one of them has a good reason for it.”
Wilson frowns. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”
“I had JARVIS try to hack into Cupid’s comm, see if we could chatter to him, but the link is dead.” Tony makes a cutting motion across his neck. “Thought about trying Jigglypuff’s, but what’s he going to do, really? He’s been ignoring the earpiece all day.”
“Maybe try it anyway? See if it’s at least working. If he ignores it, he ignores it, we knew that was a possibility. But if it’s dead, then we know something’s wrong.”
“You mean more wrong than the whole ‘trapped in a fight cage designed to keep super soldiers contained’ kind of wrong?”
Wilson sighs. “Yeah. More wrong than that.”
Tony shrugs inside the suit, even though the movement would hardly appear to his partner in rescue. “Sure, J, give it a—”
“You’re eager to catch up, I bet,” comes the response, but it’s not JARVIS at all. It’s like some muffled version of an echo from a speaker system. “Can’t wait to get down on your knees and taste a little bit of home, right?”
“What the hell?” Tony says. He looks over at Wilson. “Are you picking that up? Jigsaw’s comm’s on mic mode. He must have turned it on by mistake.”
Wilson looks at him with his mouth fixed in a horrified grimace. “Someone’s down there with them.”
“I’m coming for you, sweetheart… I can find you wherever you run in this place. We’re gonna have so much fun. You came all this way to me. I’ll make it worth your while. Got a big fat cock ready and waiting, and more where that comes from.”
Tony feels like he’s going to be sick in his armor. He raises the visor to get what fresh air is even available in this base, which is a surprising amount due to the ventilation system bussing in crisp air from outside.
“I know that voice,” he says. “Where do I know that voice from?”
Wilson shakes his head.
“I’m going to wipe you ‘till you’re crispy, sweetheart. Get you all ready to start over again. Shove a taser baton so far up your ass you taste the electricity when I turn it on.”
“Sir,” JARVIS’s voice says smoothly into the comms. “If I may, that is STRIKE leader Brock Rumlow’s voice. Likely muffled by a mask.”
“I’ve got a halo in my pocket just waiting to work its magic, sweetheart. And I see you.”
A halo in his pocket? What the hell? No. A halo attached to a huge-ass immovable metal chair, yes. Not pocket-sized. Not travel-sized. Not portable. Oh shit.
“Where is Barton?” Wilson hisses.
Tony shakes his head. With the man’s comm dead, there’s no telling. Hell, maybe the man himself is dead.
Wilson turns to look back the way they came. “We’ve gotta get back down there.”
“We’ve got to get Capsicle and the others out,” Tony argues, “and then we can all get back down there. Rumlow won’t be alone. That’s probably how they got split up down there.”
Tony hates that he can’t split himself in two like an amoeba and be in both places at once. But he can’t, and the group of them might be what’s needed against whatever Rumlow has going on down there.
“Okay, we do both,” Wilson says. “You go forward, I go back. You have the armor, it’ll give you the strength you need to haul concrete slabs out of the way. Get the others out, Hulk will help you.”
“I’d rather go find Rumlow and put a repulsor blast through his skull.”
He half wonders if Wilson will push for nonlethal options, but the man just grimly shrugs. “Tough. Banner can come back out and serve as medic up here, but Clint and Jigsaw don’t have a medic. It sounds like they might need one.”
“Alright,” Tony says. “Good luck. Keep the comms open. Even if…” he grimaces. “Even if the trash talking is on a whole other level of sick.”
Steve
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—
“I’ve got a halo in my pocket just waiting to work its magic, sweetheart. And I see you.”
Beyond the scrape of concrete on concrete in the distance, Steve can hear the leather of his shield’s handle creaking under his fist as Rumlow’s muffled voice continues to come over the comms in its weird echo.
“Steady, Rogers,” Natasha says from her position pressed against him with her arms trapped around his waist. “We can’t do anything about it now.”
She sounds just as tense as his grip, which is shaking with the force of his rage and his helplessness.
And his rage at his helplessness.
Crouching down like this, straining to hold up his shield with both hands, with Natasha tucked in tightly where she’d leaped under the umbrella of protection his shield could provide for them, there truly is nothing he can do about anything but continue to hold up the shield and hope that they can get out via Hulk’s digging before Rumlow can do whatever he’s planning to do.
Which is probably to wipe Jigsaw back into blank-slate state. Which can’t be allowed to happen. Jigsaw has come so far, they’ve all come so far with him. And he can’t be re-created. His experiences made him who he is and they can’t be allowed to get wiped away.
Those halos were supposed to be attached to massive chairs that were bolted to the floor. They weren’t supposed to be portable. They weren’t supposed to be a threat anywhere outside one of those prep rooms. This entire situation should be impossible. Was supposed to be impossible.
If he’d known there were halos monsters like Rumlow could carry around with them, he’d have insisted on the party staying together no matter what, with Jigsaw safely in the middle of the pack of them. He’d have tried to leave Jigsaw safe in the Tower. He’d have called in backup and made sure they were all present and accounted for before they even opened the front door.
Hell, he’d have done what he could to bomb the base from orbit and never set foot in it.
But how could he have known?
“Hell, might not even need these tranqs the way you’re stumbling around. That’s good,” Rumlow purrs over the comms. “Yeah, that’s real good. Means you get to be aware the whole time.”
Steve’s teeth ache from grinding together, his jaw feels like it’s clenched past the point of never opening again, his head throbs as he tries to channel his anger into something constructive, like ensuring that he and Natasha aren’t crushed by the weight of the concrete over their heads.
“We should have gone back,” he grits out. “Should have trusted our instincts, not tried this hallway, gone back to the elevator and tried to get below the carriage.”
“Can’t change it now,” Natasha says smoothly. “All we can do is hope Clint is with him and that he plants a garden full of arrows in Rumlow’s craw.”
Steve takes a deep breath and lets it out harshly. “I would rather he plant them in Rumlow’s fucking heart.”
“Language,” Natasha says, but her heart’s clearly not in it. “Bruce will get us out of here, as soon as Hulk gets around to us. And the others are on their way up.”
Steve hopes they have their comms on and can hear this. He hopes they turn around and leave them here. He can do this all day if he has to. Hold the shield up. He can do this until it’s safe to relax, until Jigsaw is safe.
“I can’t believe I’m letting him down again,” Steve whispers. “Not checking this place thoroughly enough, not being there when he needs me, not realizing what Rumlow was back in D.C. when I could have stopped him, when we knew STRIKE was rotten.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Natasha says. “None of us could have known. He was S.H.I.E.L.D., we thought. STRIKE was S.H.I.E.L.D. Just an unsavory part of it with unsavory goals for the Soldier.”
“I know you’re in here somewhere,” Rumlow croons mockingly over the comms. “Come out, come out wherever you are!” There’s a cackling laugh.
Steve hates this man more than he can fathom. He isn’t sure he’s hated anyone this much other than Zola himself. And Zola is long since dead, but also somehow a cloud. Tony had tried to explain it and it hadn’t stuck.
What is sticking right now is that Rumlow is a very real, very present threat to Jigsaw, and Steve can’t do a singular damn thing about it.
Rumlow’s laughter finally stops, only to give way to more taunting. “Play nice and maybe I’ll hose you down after we have our fun. Let you be clean for a few minutes before the next round starts up.”
Steve struggles to keep his rage pointed toward the shield and holding it up. “I’m going to kill him,” he swears. “When we’re free and I have the opportunity to go down there, I am going to rip his head off his shoulders with my bare hands. See if I don’t.”
“You may have to fight Clint for that privilege,” Natasha says. “Or at least get in line.”
He feels the weight on his shield shifting, not lifting up or lessening, exactly, but moving all the same. Bruce, then—or the Hulk, rather—finally reaching them from where he’d been thrown apart from the group. But without a roar, for some reason.
Maybe he’s aware that there could be a further cave-in if he roars. Steve isn’t sure how aware the big guy is about these things beyond knowing how to smash and—hopefully—dig.
Then there is a roar, and also the sound of gunfire.
Natasha
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:15 p.m.—
Now they’re being shot at while being unburied. It just gets better. Clearly this whole base was a trap, set for them or for whoever came looking for the Winter Soldiers.
Well, she hopes the Hulk can split his attention between the shooters and freeing her and Rogers, because she could stand to crack a few HYDRA skulls for setting this trap for them, and she doesn’t want to miss out on the action. Rumlow and the others must have originally come to wake up the Winter Soldiers, and then just stuck around somewhere in the lowest sublevels waiting for them to come along.
She doesn’t know whether she suspects another of Phil’s crew purposely passing along tainted information to lead them into this or whether she thinks it’s just old intelligence left by Ward and assumed to be good, but somehow, the very knowledge of the Winter Soldiers was a trap this whole time. An ambush, just waiting for them to split their party up.
And now they have three parties, maybe four if Clint got separated from Jigsaw somehow. Multiple small parties easily attacked rather than one large party difficult to defend against. She sighs. Lucky them.
Beneath her ear, Rogers’s heartbeat is strong and fast. Too fast. Too upset. He won’t be thinking clearly at this rate. And she doesn’t know that she blames him. She’s not sure she’s thinking clearly, herself. But while an irate super soldier will be an asset on the field, an utterly enraged one will be a liability. Time to try calming him down.
“Rogers, you can only do what you can do,” she reminds him as rubble shifts to the side overhead and a bit fresh air filters in to their pocket along with some concrete dust. “Right now, you help him best by keeping a clear head. Even if you’d rather go fully berserker on the lot of them.”
“I know,” Rogers grinds out. “It doesn’t help, but I know.”
She nods against his chest. “We’ll kill them all if that’s what you want. Not a single one of them needs to leave here alive.”
He’s silent for a moment, and then: “Try to keep them alive. We do need information. But if you happen to apply too much force… No one’s watching.”
Notes:
Content Warning: We continue to hear Brock Rumlow's trash talking in this chapter. He continues to be a real piece of work.
Chapter 83: Brock (Rumlow, aka Crossbones, B-RUM) | Fear in the dark (all these thoughts have never stopped)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Let Me Live/Let Me Die” by Des Rocs.
Content warning in end notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:30 p.m.—
“Gonna slap this thing on your miserable, cocksucking face and light you up like the Fourth of July.”
Brock grins beneath his gas mask as he looks at the tracker in the Z.E.L.U.S. app. He’s getting close. Any minute now, he’s going to turn a corner and the asset will be right there, terrified to the point of petrification.
That’s the pattern it always follows in the end, no matter how badly it’s screwed up or failed or rebelled. There might be resistance or noncompliance, a challenge to someone’s rights, even a bit of lashing out or snapping at those around it, but then there’s the fear and the trying to escape what’s coming to it. And finally the fear of what’s coming to it overcomes everything, even the efforts to escape what’s coming to it.
Give it enough time and the asset goes practically catatonic with that fear, if they do it right.
And Brock is doing it right. He has the right amount of menace, has built up the right amount of threat, has thoroughly and completely made himself an icon of terror for the asset. Why be so brutal? Why so sadistic? In part, it’s fun, yes. Even without the screams, the asset is so expressive that just watching it in pain is sometimes enough to get him hard. But there’s method behind it, too. This method. Planned out for just such an occasion where he’s in position to recapture the thing and keep it.
Pierce and the others, most of them, didn’t have the stomach to take things as far as Brock did, and that didn’t work out so well for them. That got them on the asset’s misplaced revenge list, but not on its untouchable list. Brock, though? He’s got this in the bag.
The asset has always feared him, always panicked to the point of near hyperventilation when he even enters the room with it, always locked its eyes on him in a combined effort to both not lose track of the dangerous threat and not miss an instruction and bring that dangerous threat to fruition.
Brock’s never needed a codeword to bring the asset to heel. The asset brings itself to heel out of fear of the consequences of doing otherwise. True, the asset had fled back in Sitwell’s apartment, but that’s to be expected in that situation. The asset had tasted freedom and thought there was an opportunity to retain that freedom.
In this situation, the asset will flee again, is fleeing now. It still thinks there is an escape, thinks there is a way out that doesn’t depend on pleasing its rightful owner. It might be thinking that it can run and hide, it might be thinking it can inflict some kind of damage on the one chasing it. Hell, it might even think one of the others will be coming along to intervene on its behalf, to save it from what it deserves.
But Brock will convince it otherwise, and then the fear will take over. No way out, a displeased handler, no strength or coordination to fight back, this particular displeased handler, no one to help it, and only Brock in sight.
Better yet, Brock with a halo.
There’s a beep from the tracking app and a note on the screen that obscures the tracking dots, and Brock brushes up against something while reading it, sending some clipboard or other falling to the ground with an echoing clack.
He hopes Z.E.L.U.S. is happy. Now he’s warned the asset just how close he is.
>> The gas supply has run its course. Rapid dissipation is expected due to superior ventilation systems. Anticipated time to safe air supply is five minutes.
He scowls. Guess it’s quick to get sprayed out and just as quick to get sucked back up. That’s Soviet engineering for you. Or maybe it was only ever supposed to be concentrated in one spot and they’ve been bussing it around to keep the asset breathing it in regardless of where it goes down here.
No matter. The asset is still faltering, and the effects should linger…
“How long is the asset going to be compromised?” he asks, knowing the app is tuned in to whatever he’s saying. He doesn’t have time to type shit into a phone while on the hunt.
>> Estimated half-life based on duration of exposure and nature of enhancements is seventy minutes.
Half-life? What the hell does that mean? Whatever. He’s got seventy minutes before this stuff wears off, or something like that. It won’t take him that long to hunt the bastard down and wipe it.
Maybe he’ll wet his dick while the asset is still convulsing with the halo latched onto its face and sending wave after wave of Tesseract charge into its brain. That’ll feel real good, maybe as good as fucking into it with a taser baton pressed to its lower back to tighten it up a bit after it’s gotten all loose and sloppy from use.
And the asset will be plenty tight to start, unless he’s misjudged the Avengers’ interactions with it. The only one he can imagine fucking the asset is Barton, anyway, because that’s who the asset was seen with time and again.
The reports from North Carolina showed the archer acting like a handler, leading the asset back to the others, guiding the asset to the team’s medic, gesturing for the asset to sit on the ramp and being obeyed. And here in the base, the asset was closest to Barton, accepted Barton’s touch—even sought it out—and did its best to protect Barton from the gas.
There’s a fair to good chance that Barton is seen as its handler, and a benevolent one, at that. Brock remembers reports of the Soviet handler who came over with the asset, Karpov, being almost affectionate with the thing. Treating it like a favorite dog, handling it gently and giving clear directions to get what he wanted.
And that’s fine for missions and other wetwork, at least in a pinch. But you have to build in a little ambiguity so the asset truly believes it’s fucked up when you tell it so. Otherwise, that’s no fun at all. It spends time wondering what it did or didn’t do, and its attention isn’t fully on what’s happening to it at that moment.
So it’s no wonder they exiled Karpov to Cleveland when he objected to Pierce’s treatment of the asset off the field and tried to insist the asset be treated better. And had all that kindness saved him once the asset was loose? Not one bit. Old man Karpov still ended up dead and torn apart, no matter what order that had happened in.
Because the asset is a dog, sure, but a rabid one in need of frequent reminders of its place.
Brock clears the room finally and scowls as he crosses the hallway to the next, where it’s just possible the asset has decided to hide.
This area of the sublevel didn’t get the memo about overhead lights, and there’s just the glow of the running lights along the walls to see by, flickering orange and illuminating almost nothing. But he can still see enough by that light to pick up movement across the room.
The asset. There’s nothing else down here but Barton, and Agent Fuckup is still locked in a fight cage and passed out from the first several lungfuls of the gas. Hell, maybe he’s dead for all Brock knows. How much of this stuff can a human really breathe in and survive when a super soldier gets fall-over drunk off of it?
He’s so close he can taste his victory. If he was just a little closer, had just a little more light, fewer obstacles between him and the asset, he could fire off a tranq dart right this second. But he’ll do the smart thing, not the eager thing. He’ll wait, bide his time, maybe sneak—
A distant explosion stops both Brock and the asset where they stand, and then the shadowy figure across the room tries to slip through a doorway only to hit the doorframe as it does so and course correct with movements like a puppet on strings.
Misjudged that by several inches, clearly. Brock kind of wants to laugh. That’s coordination and depth perception shot, probably also reaction time.
“Gotcha, sweetheart,” he says as he makes his way through the room. He doesn’t have to bother with the mic anymore, since the asset’s hearing will pick up his voice even with this gas mask muffling everything. But he does all the same—the mic will help lend an air of inescapability to the situation, and that thought makes him grin.
He was lying about having eyes on it before, just to spook the thing into making a mistake, but now he can see exactly how effective the gas is, even on a super soldier. Just like the instructions said. It’s just a matter of time now, and there’s no one around to save it from its upcoming HYDRA family reunion.
“Welcome home,” he croons.
He readies his tranq gun and picks up his pace to get around all the medical equipment in his way. There should be another hallway beyond this room, and that’ll give him a clear shot. All he has to do is graze some skin with this thing, though an actual hit would be better, quicker. And the asset isn’t wearing the muzzle or the goggles. Plenty of skin and scalp to target, and Brock counts himself as a pretty good shot.
Get a dart in the wayward asset, maybe two, and there goes any lingering coordination the gas didn’t strip away. Easy to wrestle it to the floor, then. Easy to pin it down and get the halo on it. Easy peasy. And while the halo works its magic, he’ll just go ahead and work the asset’s abandoned asshole open, revel in the muscle contractions and the barely slick slide that blood and spit will provide. Just like old times.
“It’s been a while,” he says as he reaches the doorway and looks right, the direction the asset went and therefore the only direction a threat could come from. “Why don’t you stop running and give me a proper greeting.”
The asset is obviously struggling, leaning against a wall and feeling its way along. And it hasn’t gotten very far down the hallway, either, is hardly picking up its feet with each step, like just doing that takes more energy than it has.
He probably doesn’t need the tranqs, just like he said earlier, but hubris will get you killed when you’re up against the asset in a corner, and Brock isn’t playing that game. He’s playing a game where he wins, and that requires the asset to be as out of it as possible when Brock closes in, and unable to turn a final moment of panic into a final deadly action.
Brock raises his tranq gun, takes aim, and pauses to savor the moment before pulling the trigger.
The asset flinches away from the wall just as the dart would have hit, avoiding a dart directly to the neck but staggering for balance and nearly falling over as it spins around to face the threat with wide eyes.
Brock fires another tranq before the asset can recover its bearings and get its legs firmly under it, and this one is a hit. Right to the side of its neck, down near the neckline of its tac gear.
“Muzzle would have saved you from all of this, you know,” Brock reminds it as he readies another pair of darts. “But you gave that away to Barton. You know, C-BAR the second.”
The asset shakes its head, but the movement is more sluggish than smooth. The flesh arm rises up to brush the dart away, but Brock can see that the damage is done. Fast acting, these tranqs. They have to be when you’re up against a super soldier. Fast acting and long lasting.
“No? Did you not realize those are his letters, too?” Brock grins. “So you gave your only protection to C-BAR and left yourself wide open for B-RUM. And I’m gonna open you up, sweetheart. Don’t you worry about that. Going to open you up so wide you’ll gape for days.”
The asset takes a faltering step backward, eyes wide as anything and breathing harsh and fast. Just like Brock likes it. Scared out of its mind and thinking about all the consequences of its actions coming back to greet it right up the ass.
And from this range, a dart should pierce its tac gear, so he has a much bigger target. Brock takes a few casual steps toward the asset, enough to put him in an even closer range, but not enough to put him in harm’s way if the asset does manage a burst of resistance.
His phone chimes and he takes the time to look at it. The asset isn’t going anywhere. It’s a long hallway and blocked by a door set with bars halfway up. Brock doubts the thing can even manage to open an unlocked door at this point, anyway, let alone this locked one, and it’ll never manage to get its drugged ass through the barred window.
>> Air quality is fair to good. It is safe to remove your mask.
Well how about that. Now the asset will be able to see his face before the end.
He puts the phone away again and unstraps the gas mask, tosses it aside, along with the mic. Grins wide.
“That’s better, isn’t it sweetheart?”
The asset takes another step back, its hands coming up to cover its ears.
“What’s wrong?” Brock taunts. “You don’t like it when my voice is loud and clear?”
He laughs, and then fires off another dart. This one sticks in the tac gear around its right clavicle, and Brock can’t be sure it got through to the skin, but it probably did. He’ll fire another just in case.
“We might be out of gas,” he says, “but you’re out of time. This is it.”
The asset sluggishly pulls the dart out, the metal arm moving more slowly than the flesh one had. Must be feeling heavier than usual. Good. That thing’s the only defense the asset has left—short of biting—and without being able to use it to full effectiveness, the asset’s practically helpless.
Brock closes the distance again, and he’s about to kick the asset down so he can tower over it and shoot his next dart at point blank range, when the asset stumbles in its backward walking and falls all on its own.
This is almost too easy.
Brock pets the halo hooked to his belt and leers as he approaches the downed asset. Gives it a kick to the shoulder to get it on its back. Points his tranq gun and shoots.
“You ready to forget it all like it was some kind of pleasant dream? ‘Cause you’re about to.”
These darts are fast-acting, but he still gives the asset a minute to try to resist the tranquilizer while the drug takes effect. It’s hilarious to watch it struggle, especially once he pins it with a boot to the right clavicle, safely out of the way of the now nearly useless metal arm, and puts more and more of his weight on it until he hears the crunch.
The asset manages to draw a knife despite the break, but that’s easily kicked out of its hand.
Eventually the asset’s breathing slows down, the darts taking effect through its panic, and its eyes get that glassy look to them, and it really is finally time.
Brock kneels over the asset with a knee to its sternum and unhooks the halo. Unfolds it, and makes sure the setting is cranked up as high as it will go. Sure, he could calibrate this thing while it’s running for the best effect and save energy for another handful of wipes down the line. It’s what the engineers said to do. But why bother with calibration when he can inflict the most damage possible?
More is more, after all.
The asset will heal from it all the same, and they can take the time for calibration later with the other two halos. Turn it back into a useful weapon instead of a catatonic mess. Right now, all they need is the catatonic mess. Right now, it would be dangerous to actually prime the thing for a mission—it needs to learn how to comply again, first. Right now, he just needs to get rid of this stubborn, rebellious nobody that’s taken up residence in the asset’s formerly empty skull.
“Bye-bye… ‘Jigsaw,’” he says with a leer.
The halo goes on easily, like it was made to rest over the asset’s eyes with the ends clamped over its temples, even with the asset tossing its head in an attempt to resist. Brock grins wide enough to hurt his face as he holds the asset down by the throat, his thumb digging into the side of the asset’s neck while the asset tries to reach for his arm with its own heavy limbs.
Well, let it try. That just makes this all the sweeter.
Brock gives the Tesseract-blue button on the side of the halo a gentle, teasing fondle before pressing it firmly, and then allows a gleeful cackle to work its way out into the world as the device comes alive with a blinding blue hum.
Bye-bye Jigsaw, indeed.
Notes:
Content Warning: With this narrator, you know shit will be bad. Brock Rumlow continues to be a threatening creep with a mind full of bad thoughts, so be prepared for bad things and gross trash talking. ^_^
--
...Happy Valentine's Day?
Chapter 84: Clint | A hero will save me (just in time)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Hero” by Skillet.
I was going to post this later tonight because Sunday morning's due to be chaotic around here, but something has come up for tonight as well, so instead of posting Sunday afternoon and making y'all wait even longer, I'm posting now.
Content warnings in end note.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:45 p.m.—
The bars slam into him as the super-heated air shoves him backward, and his quiver presses hard enough against his back that he’s worried it might break—that, or his back will. His eyes feel hot and his vision is a mess of blue and yellow afterimages despite the protection offered by Jigsaw’s goggles, and his forehead feels like his skin is crisping up like a turkey’s. His arms don’t feel much better.
All he can hear is a high-pitched squeal and he’s glad he pulled his hearing aids out.
But when he stumbles forward to check the door, he can see that it has been blown apart by the blast, the locking mechanism still intact but sheered from the bars themselves, which are not intact. The door opens with ease and releases him into the room as a whole. The glass enclosure outside of the bars—when did that come down?—is already broken by the explosion, and he steps out with a crunch under his feet as shards are ground into the concrete.
He has to get to Jigsaw. Has to get to him before Rumlow does. And there’s a decent chance Rumlow knows the layout of this place better than Clint does. Practically a guarantee of it. But Clint is willing to bet he wants to get to Jigsaw more than Rumlow does, and for much better reasons, and life has to cut him some slack, just this once.
Clint takes the time to put his hearing aids back in, with the comms, and gives them a test. He can’t hear much of anything from the comms, and a test of the mic’s functionality reveals that the thing’s been fried in the explosion despite being in a pocket. Great.
But he can at least hear the glass under his boots in his right ear as he leaves the room, so one of his hearing aids is fine. The other one just sounds like static whistling, so he pulls that one out and turns it off. Slides it back in a pocket. He’s got a second set in a compartment at the bottom of his quiver, and he pauses to get those out and put the left one in.
Time is of the essence, yes, but if he can’t hear, he doesn’t have a chance in hell of finding Jigsaw or of tracking Rumlow. Jigsaw’s already quiet enough that hearing aids won’t help him, but Rumlow should be like a bull in a china shop by comparison, and hearing will help Clint find the man before he finds Jigsaw, maybe, or at least will help him avoid an ambush.
He hopes.
Oh, man, does he hope he’s right about that.
As for tracking Jigsaw… where would he have gone? There was gas, and he’d know where that was coming from, probably. Would have tried to turn it off. So where would a control panel be for sending gas into a fight cage?
His vision is clearing with just a bit of a blur, but he can’t see anything in the room that looks like it would be a control panel. There are some tables on wheels, like at a dentist’s office or something. Some benches. Some chairs.
Clint scratches at the strap holding the mask to his face. It feels like his whole lower face is being squeezed in a vise, and his head already hurts from the blast. The combination is a lot to block out so that he can think.
He could go back to the room with the Winter Soldiers. There was a control panel there, something Stark was messing with. But it doesn’t make sense to have a control panel for one room all the way through a hallway three rooms down. It’s gotta be one of the other doors.
The first door he tries is the one the others went through, but it’s just a continuation of hallway. The other one, though, that’s promising. There are some chairs tossed aside and a twisted up bit of panel cover off to one side. He can see an agitated Jigsaw doing that, throwing chairs out of his way and ripping off a panel that was in his way.
The controls obviously hadn’t worked, because there’s still gas in the air; Clint can smell it through the mask’s ventilation system. Where would he have gone after that? And why would he have left Clint? Did he hear Rumlow at this point? Did he try to lead the man away from him?
He looks at the rest of the room, imagines that Jigsaw might make a path for himself through the room if he was in too much of a hurry to walk around the various things in his path. And there is a path of a sort. Not straight for another door or anything obvious like that, but close enough to provide a clue.
And in the absence of anything else, Clint has to follow it. He doesn’t have time for anything else. He messes with the controls on the side of the goggles until he can see everything in a cool greenish grayscale despite the lack of light.
When did Rumlow start talking over the speakers? How long was that going on before Clint came back around? What sort of trash talking has he missed?
And would Jigsaw have eventually found a place to hide, or would he have kept moving to try to put more and more distance between them? Clint still doesn’t have the answer to that question and it’s an important one.
Given the responses Jigsaw’s had to Rumlow in the past, Clint suspects he kept himself on the move, and there’s a chance he’s still on the move. But how far can he really get in this base? It’s all twisted up around the central bits with the Winter Soldiers and the chair, but there’s not that far to go that isn’t just in circles, albeit circles on different levels of the base on a spiral.
His best bet is to just rush through that loop of rooms and hallways until he catches up to one or the other of them.
“Muzzle would have saved you from all of this, you know,” the speaker system blares out, “but you gave that away to Barton. You know, C-BAR the second.”
Clint sees red for a moment, and he huffs out an angry breath through his nose. He can’t swear with the muzzle trapping his jaw shut, but his mind is awash in obscenities. Fucking Rumlow. How fucking dare he?!
No one gets to compare him to that trash but his own shitty brain in self-defeat mode.
“No? Did you not realize those are his letters, too?”
Clint takes a guess and runs to the left. He’ll go left around the hallways and the rooms they connect. Either Jigsaw and Rumlow are going left and he’ll be going the long way around to get to them—which will suck—or they went right and he’ll catch up to them sooner rather than later. Jigsaw isn’t likely to have backtracked with someone on his tail, so it’s going to be all forward going, trying to put distance between them, until it was time to go up a level.
“So you gave your only protection to C-BAR and left yourself wide open for B-RUM. And I’m gonna open you up, sweetheart.”
He can hear the cruel smile in Rumlow’s voice despite what must be a mask of his own muffling his words a bit. Can hear the confidence. The surety. Rumlow is close to Jigsaw, maybe too close. Hell, anything is too close.
His stomach clenches. Jigsaw has to be so scared right now and Clint is nowhere near him, can’t help him, damn it!
“Don’t you worry about that. Going to open you up so wide you’ll gape for days.”
Clint doesn’t even need the mask to keep his teeth gritted tightly together anymore as he sprints through rooms and takes turns through doorways at a speed that slams him into the opposite walls before he can adjust course. His whole face is throbbing with the force of his teeth grinding.
That fucking asshole, that absolute bastard, that sick freak of a man, that—
“That’s better, isn’t it sweetheart?”
No. Nothing will be better until Clint has at least six arrows planted in that asshole’s fucking lying face!
Wait, that wasn’t on the speakers. That was closer, slightly less echoey. That was—
“What’s wrong?” Rumlow taunts. “You don’t like it when my voice is loud and clear?”
He’s getting closer. Finally. He can hardly breathe with this mask keeping his mouth closed. He doesn’t know how Jigsaw does it. And maybe he should start running more, just so he can keep it up for longer when he needs to. Endurance and shit.
“We might be out of gas,” Rumlow says, “but you’re out of time. This is it.”
Out of gas? Rumlow took his mask off, then. That’s why his voice sounds different. Clint grabs for the strap on his own mask—on Jigsaw’s mask, anyway—and yanks while he runs, wincing as the buckle pulls hair as it comes loose. He takes the mask off and gasps in some full lungfuls of air finally. His whole face aches.
“You ready to forget it all like it was some kind of pleasant dream? ‘Cause you’re about to.”
Clint rounds the corner head of him—left again, always left and he’ll find them faster than if he tries to backtrack at all or second guess himself—and slams into the opposite wall again, just like every other corner he’s not bothered to slow down for. He shoves off from it and starts to gather speed again, only to take a tumble down some steps that come from out of absolutely nowhere in front of him.
Shit!
Clint drops the mask as he flails, grabbing for the walls as he tries to get his feet back under himself. He doesn’t have time for this bullshit—Jigsaw doesn’t have time for it! Rumlow’s got some kind of portable halo and he’s threatening to use it. Will use it, if Clint can’t stop him. And then—
“Bye-bye… ‘Jigsaw,’” Rumlow says with some kind of mocking singsong that grates on Clint’s ears and turns his churning stomach into a block of ice inside his chest.
No!
Clint manages to land on his feet at the bottom of the stairs—and with all his equipment intact, somehow—and finds himself stumbling into a metal door with a barred window with a clang that’s followed by the mask coming to a stop by his feet after its own fall down the stairs.
Through the bars, with the help of the night vision on the goggles, he sees Rumlow kneeling over a convulsing Jigsaw, and a blinding blue light at Jigsaw’s head. And not just any blue light—that blue, the wrong kind of blue, the kind of blue that makes his skin crawl and the hair on the back of his neck rise and his stomach clench in fear.
The halo. It’s powered by the Tesseract somehow, as if that twice-damned blue death cube hasn’t done enough damage already.
Rumlow stops in the process of undoing Jigsaw’s belt, and turns to look at Clint with a grin Clint can make out from the full fifty feet of distance between them.
“Done is done, Barton,” the man cackles. “Don’t worry, it’ll be a better cocksleeve this way, you’ll see. I’ll give you a little show and tell.”
Clint might not have the best shot and he might not have the best vision with the brightness of the halo burning itself into his retinas, but he won’t let Rumlow win. And he’s sure as hell not going to stand idly by while Rumlow rapes his partner.
“Oh, you’re going to shoot me?” Rumlow says with an incredulous laugh. “You got at least a lungful of that gas, you idiot. You’ll never hit me. Might hit your precious asset, though.”
Clint ignores him, flicks off the night vision on the goggles to take the brightness level down a notch, lines up his shot, and tries to block out the creepy blue light that’s strobing through the hallway as Jigsaw’s hair occasionally gets tossed in front of it. He’s going to shoot this bastard and that is the end of the discussion. There is no room for what ifs, because it’s going to happen.
He goes for center mass, and he’s gratified to hear the abrupt gurgling stop to Rumlow’s laughter as his arrow hits the man in the upper right chest. Not an immediately fatal wound, but enough to shut his asshole mouth. Enough to stop him from pawing at Jigsaw’s tac gear.
While Rumlow coughs and splutters and Jigsaw thrashes with his metal arm scraping and scratching along the concrete, Clint digs his lockpicks back out of his pocket and applies more concentration than he thought he had at his disposal to getting the door open. It smells like ozone and burning hair and meat, and Clint cannot seem to move his fingers fast enough.
Maybe it’s the desperation, though, or maybe it’s the effects of the gas fading away as he pulls in heaving breaths of fresher air. Hell, maybe it’s the fact that this lock hasn’t been blasted with a repulsor beam. But the jangle of his lockpicks finally settles into faint clicking and the door opens in what feels like forever but can’t have been that long.
He leaves the picks in the lock and sprints for Jigsaw, narrowly dodging a tranq dart as he closes the distance.
“S’already over, Barton,” Rumlow slurs out, his lips bloody. “Done’s done.”
“Shut up, Rumlow.”
Clint kicks the tranq gun out of Rumlow’s hand when he raises it again and shoots another arrow in him—gut shot—to help keep him from trying anything. He doesn’t appear to have an actual gun on his person, at least that he can reach from where he’s sprawled on the concrete clutching at his wounds.
Clint kneels beside Jigsaw and grabs at the halo with his left hand. Gotta get this thing off him, gotta— His hand jerks back from the pulse of creepily familiar power before he can force it to do what he wants. He’s getting this fucking goddamn halo off his partner.
And he manages it on the second try, despite the searing heat of it along his palm and fingers and the way his whole arm goes numb from just just that brief contact. He throws the wretched thing as far as he can down the hallway, back toward the door and Jigsaw’s mask, and that doesn’t end up being very far because a swath of his skin and flesh comes off along with it and slows its momentum.
The bite of it tearing flesh from his left hand cuts through the numbness to let him know he’s hurt, but fuck that. He’s not what matters now; Jigsaw is.
“Jigs,” he says, low and urgent. “Jigs, I’m here, it’s going to be okay, alright?”
He doesn’t know if that’s true. He doesn’t know if the man trembling on the floor from aftershocks is even still Jigsaw, or if he’s some horrible clean-slate state of asset that won’t remember anything but protocols and fear.
But he has to hope. He can’t lose Jigsaw. He can’t.
“Always you an’ the asset, izzit?” Rumlow manages. “Together in North Carolina, together here, sharin’ a muzzle. You think you can be its handler, huh?”
Clint ignores him. Rumlow doesn’t matter right now. Rumlow never mattered.
Jigsaw can’t meet his eyes, but that’s because of the burns all across his upper face, blistered in some areas, skin missing or charred in other areas, eyelids raw and fluttering with blood-slick eyes underneath. He can probably still hear him, though. Feel him. And Clint’s arm might be asleep now, pins and needles, but he can still move it.
Clint reaches for Jigsaw’s right hand—the safe one to hold, he hopes—and holds it in his own bleeding left hand. If Jigsaw’s grip is still enough to break his hand, at least it’ll be the hand that’s already fucked up.
“The halo’s gone now, Jigs. We’re going to get out of here and get some help, okay? Just hold on.”
It’s kind of a lie, because the halo is only about ten feet away, still lit up, with a line of blue power between each end of it, looking like a bowstring and humming like it’s just been plucked. Clint tries not to imagine that power going through Jigsaw’s brain. Tries not to imagine the results of that.
It wasn’t for very long. He got there as soon as he could. He did everything in his power to stop it. Surely that’s enough to have saved him. Of all the things he can fuck up, surely he didn’t fuck this one up. Not when it counts. He can fuck up anything, but not when it really matters. Please.
“Does it comply for you?”
Clint sits back on his heels, Jigsaw’s still-spasming hand in his own, and tries to think about what he should do. Other than try to comfort Jigsaw, his mind is a blank of despair. What else is there to do? What can even be done now? Isn’t it too late to do anything else?
“You like fuckin’ into it with your initials right there on its back, C-BAR?”
“I said shut up!” Clint snaps. “Just shut up!”
Rumlow cackles wetly. “S’your name.”
“It isn’t!”
Rumlow spits out a mouthful of blood and then laughs again.
Clint grits his teeth. What the hell is he doing, engaging the asshole. If Jigsaw can hear him, he can hear Rumlow, too. That’s reason enough to slit Rumlow’s throat as far as Clint’s concerned. Take his tongue out of his mouth.
But they should try to take him alive, try to find out what they can from him—not just about HYDRA and Project Insight, but about the halo and what its effects would have been if it had been allowed to complete whatever cycle it’s on. What its effects will have been having been allowed to get as far as it got.
Help. He needs help. Jigsaw needs help, and Clint doesn’t have anything to offer now. But Clint can’t call for help. His comm is dead. There’s no telling how long it’ll take to dig the others out and come back down looking for them, or what the others are even facing if Rumlow was lurking in this base waiting for them.
How many men did Rumlow have with him? Was the cave-in a trap or just a bit of unsturdy ceiling disturbed by a creaky door getting forced open?
And he can’t very well ask the man in front of him—he’ll only lie.
But Jigsaw has a comm device, even though he has no way to use the mic on it. The halo might not have fried it. It might still work. It’s unlikely, it’s desperate, but it’s worth a try.
Clint disengages his right hand and reaches for Jigsaw’s comm, gently guiding it out of his ear and giving it a test.
There’s a signal. Somehow. Maybe life is offering him a chance.
“Hawkeye to team,” he says into the device, hating how his voice shakes and how Rumlow’s laughter picks up at his words. “We need help down here. Jigsaw’s down. Rumlow— There was a halo— We— Just send help. Please.”
Clint can’t think of anything else to say. He turns the comm’s beacon on and swaps his hearing aid for the comm. Directly in his ear like this and turned up all the way, he should be able to hear any responses if that function is still working.
“Пустыня,” Rumlow mutters wetly.
Jigsaw’s breathing hitches and he convulses once before resuming his thready breathing and general trembling.
Clint knows the word, “desert.” It’s one of the operator words from the red Winter Soldier manual, like “bliss” and “satellite.” Pierce’s had been “satellite.” Sputnik. What he doesn’t remember is what it’s supposed to accomplish. He hadn’t read the book that closely and it was a long time ago.
But if Rumlow’s going to play that game, they don’t need him alive. Too risky. Even Wilson couldn’t get on his case for it if Rumlow happened to run his mouth all the way to a slit throat. That might even be what the man’s gunning for. Clint won’t be too upset if he gets his wish.
“Shut it. Last warning,” Clint growls out. “You open your mouth to do anything but fucking gasp for air and I’m putting an end to it.”
“I already put an end to it, C-BAR,” Rumlow manages. “And an end to your ‘Jigsaw.’ Желание.”
Clint’s eyes widen.
“Stop it!”
“Pжавый.”
Clint grabs for Jigsaw’s nearest knife and lunges.
“Семна—”
Rumlow cuts off mid-word as the knife goes in his neck and across, but his eyes are laughing, mocking, all the way to the end, and Clint is left feeling empty and afraid.
That was what, two and a half of the trigger word string, and whatever the operator word was supposed to do. Is that enough? What would that combination do with what he hopes is an incomplete halo wipe? And how could Clint have failed his partner so badly that those words were even spoken in the first place?
Clint swallows his fear and self-loathing, and returns to Jigsaw’s side. Picks up his hand, which is now limp, just barely trembling.
Is that a good sign? A bad sign? A sign at all?
Shit. He doesn’t know. Banner might know. Banner is nowhere near here.
Clint pulls Jigsaw partly onto his lap, rests Jigsaw’s head on his thigh so that none of the burns rub up on his tac gear and his head isn’t on the concrete. He strokes the plates on the metal arm, the same light motions that he knows Jigsaw enjoys, that he finds soothing. He tries to block out the harsh blue glare coming off the humming halo in the mid-distance, tries to pretend he has Jigsaw’s head and shoulders in his lap for happier reasons.
Fails miserably.
“Hang on, Jigsaw,” he begs. “Just hang on, okay? It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get some help down here.”
Clint wills it to be true, despite the others being occupied with digging out Natasha and the rest, despite the likelihood that Rumlow had a goon squad waiting for them. It has to be true. It has to be.
He won’t accept anything else.
Notes:
Content Warning: Brock Rumlow continues to be present in this chapter, so be prepared for bad things and creepy trash talking. Also brief depictions of gore. ^_^
Chapter 85: Medics | I feel the rage, and I just can’t hold it
Notes:
Chapter title from “Monster” by Skillet.
Time stamps are kind of weird in this chapter because I’m going back and forth between events that are happening largely at the same time and not in neat fifteen-minute intervals, but hopefully it’s not too confusing. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Bruce
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:15 p.m.—
Everything hurts, and everything is dark. He has the sense that it should be almost breezy with crisp clean air piped in from outside, that there should be a steady hum where the floor and walls seem to vibrate. But it’s still, closed in, almost musty. And it smells of concrete dust.
He opens his eyes and sees that he’s in a tent of sorts where two slabs of concrete have collided to create a pocket of space. There’s plenty of rubble surrounding him, and his head hurts more than anything else.
He can hear, faintly, Steve and Natasha. They’re nearby, muffled as though in another room, and strained. He can’t pick out enough to determine what they are talking about in specific, but the topic seems to cover Rumlow and Jigsaw.
But why would they be talking about Rumlow at all? The man was old news, hiding out wherever the STRIKE teams were, back in the States. What’s happened? Is he here? Is he responsible for the current situation?
Bruce tries to piece it together as his heart beats steadily faster, and it finally clicks. There was a cave-in. They’ve been buried and the others are nearby in their own pocket of air, possibly holding that pocket up.
They need his help. More to the point, they need the Other Guy.
And if there is a STRIKE team here in the base, maybe the rest of the team needs the Other Guy as well.
It’s time to get angry. Past time to get angry. He’s surprised he’s even still in control. He was obviously hit on the head… Why didn’t the Other Guy come out then, immediately?
A question for another time. The team needs the Other Guy now, and there’s plenty to be angry about. The Other Guy never liked this place, and now the place itself has gone and hurt their friends. They finally have friends who accept them for who they are, both parts of them, and this place has hurt those friends!
Bruce vaguely remembers that Clint and Jigsaw had been split off from the rest, hearing that from the comms. Jigsaw is a favorite of the Other Guy’s, and he’s in danger. They’re alone and lost, and it’s because this base has woken up and sprung traps for them, and no one traps Hulk’s friends!
Hulk punch where the concrete slabs meet up and shove them aside. Hulk stand up, open Hulk mouth to roar, and then does not roar. If Hulk roar, maybe the concrete will shift. Maybe Hulk puny friends will go smush under the concrete.
Instead, Hulk lift concrete carefully, so carefully, just like the last time when Hulk dig out puny friends after some missiles. Gradually, Hulk get closer to puny human friends, can hear them talking about calming down—but they are talking to each other, not to Hulk. They do not want Hulk to calm down.
Hulk finally lift a slab of concrete so close that Hulk can see the red metal of a shield—Hulk is almost there, has almost freed Hulk friends!—and then Hulk roars in pain as loud guns fire bullets into Hulk.
Puny humans in funny masks with their puny guns crowd the far side of the collapsed hallway, trying to hurt Hulk, waiting to hurt Hulk friends once the concrete is moved away.
No!
Hulk roars and roars. Hulk heave huge piece of concrete at puny humans with their guns. Hulk not satisfied when puny humans scatter. Another piece of concrete, and another. There are puny Hulk friends to unbury, and puny enemies to fling concrete at, who dodge out of the way like ants but smart.
The metal crab man comes then, says “Hey, big green,” and then there are concrete slabs Hulk is throwing and bright light that the metal crab man is throwing, and the puny human enemies scatter again but this time because they are thrown back, not dodging.
Good. Metal crab man is a good Hulk friend. Hulk give metal crab man thumbs up—good job, Hulk remember from puny Banner watching the newest Hulk friend with the yellow dog.
“You too, Big Guy,” the metal crab man says. “Keep digging. I got these guys.”
Hulk go to dig more and sees the rest of the shiny metal shield of another Hulk friend, but then there is a flash of blue, and the metal crab man’s glowing hands and feet stop glowing, and he stops flying.
“Shit fuck!” yells the metal crab man. “Tesseract EMP? Again?”
“You okay, Tony?” says the Hulk friend in the colorful outfit as he and the redheaded Hulk friend crawl out of the rubble with the shiny metal shield between them and the gunfire.
“Joke’s on them,” says the metal crab man. “Over half of my systems are still go. They thought they could knock me out of the fight, with something I’ve seen before, and they’ve got another thing coming. J-man, time for a reboot.”
The metal crab man’s chest and eyes stop glowing for a second and then start glowing again, along with the metal crab man’s hands and feet, and Hulk grin.
Together, they will smash them all.
Sam
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 7:00 p.m.—
The hallways in the sublevels are even narrower and more cramped than the ones above, and Sam has to abandon his flight path and resort to running once he gets down the elevator shaft and picks a hallway. Redwing is flying on ahead of him, picking the best paths that they know of to get to the beacon Jigsaw’s comm is sending out.
That he has heard from the comm and from Clint, it’s over now. Whatever wipe Rumlow had intended to perform has been interrupted, along with what sounded like some Russian mutterings from Rumlow. Trigger words? Probably so. Jigsaw is well and truly down, Rumlow’s silence likely means the man’s dead, and Clint sounds like he’s on the verge of tears as he reassures Jigsaw that help is on the way.
But he hasn’t responded to Sam’s attempts to contact him while on the flight down. Maybe the comm’s settings aren’t adjusted to the right frequencies. Maybe whatever portable halo was involved fried part of the comm device. There’s no telling until he’s there.
Because help is on the way, and even if it’s over, that doesn’t mean it’s final.
Sam just hopes Clint and Jigsaw are finally alone down there. Because if Rumlow had backup, he isn’t sure Clint’s in any position to take them on. He’s distracted, compromised, at the very least.
“Falcon to Hawkeye,” Sam tries again, leaping over tables and equipment with a little boost from his wing pack as he takes a shortcut through a room that looks like it comes straight out of a horror movie about medical torture.
“Clint, I’m on my way. Do you copy?”
There’s no response, and Sam curses this portable halo or whatever it is that’s messed up the comm Clint’s using.
If only he could get more information on the situation. If only he could get a verbal assessment of Jigsaw’s condition and offer some advice—elevate his head, or his legs, or keep him on his side. Something.
He knows Clint doesn’t have a medical kit on him—Sam and Bruce were the only two to carry that in because they were supposed to be staying together. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something Clint can be doing in the meantime to help, if only Sam knew what the situation was.
What is Jigsaw’s breathing like? Is he still seizing up from the halo? How do his eyes look? He’s obviously not responsive or Clint would be a little calmer, might be asking him questions instead of repeating his hopeful, if desperate-sounding, reassurances.
Another hallway bypasses what Sam would have assumed to be the correct path, but he puts his trust in Redwing to get him there as quickly as possible, rather than whatever is the technical shortest route. Another room, then, one with a row of beds and IV stands, each bed fitted out with restraints and a vital signs monitor.
Sam unfurls his wings and flies over the whole mess instead of navigating around the stools and medical equipment littering the rest of the room. He tucks his wings in close and manages to fly through the door at an angle and get several yards down the next hallway before he has to start running again instead.
This place is a downright maze, but Redwing seems to be taking him in largely the one direction, despite a few trail-backs to avoid what appear to be metal doors with barred windows set in the top half.
Sam tries to imagine how living in this place could possibly have been pleasant enough for Jigsaw to have fond memories of it. With the steady hum of the ventilation system, the dark and twisting hallways, the prison-like doors blocking off access, the surgical equipment that must have been used on him, whether on his arm or on his throat.
There’s a distant-sounding roar on the comms, and then Stark is speaking: “We have a Hulk. We also have gunfire. Looks like another party in the works.”
Sam concentrates his attention on the task at hand—getting to Jigsaw and Clint, assessing Jigsaw’s injuries and mental status, getting them out of there and back to the surface. He can’t think about Steve, trapped in rubble with only a rain of bullets to greet him once the concrete is lifted.
Will he be able to get the shield free in time to use it to block the bullets? Will he be shot instead? What about Natasha, who has some bulletproofing in her tac gear but otherwise has little to no protection? Just how impervious is the Hulk? Will the gunfire injure him or just piss him off? Can Stark use the repulsor blasts to clear out a rank or two of gunmen and give the team enough breathing room to get the rubble between them and the enemy, to provide some cover?
The questions swirl about in his mind and Sam knows that he can’t do anything about any of that. The only thing he can do is run through this maze of halls and rooms, get some medical equipment and expertise to where it’s needed… search and rescue. Something he knows he’s good at despite what happened to Riley.
When he finds them, it’s in a hallway bathed in bright blue light from a humming arch of metal off to one side—the halo, he assumes. Clint is leaning against a wall with Jigsaw partly in his lap, stroking his metal arm and still murmuring reassurances through the tears running down his bleeding cheeks. Rumlow is beyond them in a pool of blood, throat partly slit with a handle still sprouting from his neck.
“Oh thank fuck,” Clint says when Sam barrels down the steps and sprints toward them, skidding to a stop and dropping to his knees by their side.
“I thought it was just the robot and—” He shakes his head.
Sam places a hand on Clint’s shoulder and gives it a gentle squeeze of reassurance. “Not just a robot, no. But Redwing got me here. You should thank him.”
Try a little light humor to gauge the situation. Then triage. In this case, with Jigsaw enhanced and seemingly stable, he’ll confirm Clint’s condition and then if Clint is okay, they’ll try to move Jigsaw somewhere safer.
Clint just looks at him with big, tearful eyes, the pupils equal in size, but larger than he’d expect with the blue light bathing the hallway. “Huh?”
Sam frowns at him. There’s a thin line cut into the tops of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, following the shape of Jigsaw’s unfortunately named “killing face”—that’s why his face is smeared with blood. Jigsaw’s goggles are around his neck. His hair is singed, and his arms and the very top of his forehead look like he has a flash burn where the goggles and tac gear wouldn’t have covered him.
So there was an explosion at some point after he was wearing Jigsaw’s gear, and when he adds that to the gas mask further down the hallway, probably worn by Rumlow, Sam can piece together what must have happened and in what order.
“Jigsaw wasn’t in the explosion,” Sam says, testing out the theory. “His burns are all from the halo.”
Clint nods miserably. “I couldn’t get here in time. I ran, I— But I— I couldn’t—”
“You don’t look good, either. How much of the gas did you inhale?”
“I don’t matter,” Clint says. “Help him.”
“Both of you matter,” Sam snaps. “I’m not listening to any self-sacrificing bullshit today. I don’t have the patience for it. How much of the gas did you inhale?”
Clint looks like he’s about to argue for a second, and then the fight drains out of his face and his shoulders slump.
“I don’t know. I dropped the lock picks a lot. I don’t remember Jigsaw putting the mask on me, but he must have. I noticed the smell, though, just a little bit, before I blacked out. It was stronger later, when I woke up. Must have been more gas— A lot more gas, because I was smelling it through the mask.”
Sam nods. It’s a good thing Jigsaw thought to put the mask on him, then. Who knows if the gas was deadly or just to disable someone.
“I blew up the lock with an exploding arrow,” Clint volunteers. “Couldn’t get the lock picks to work. The gas, it— My coordination was shot.”
“Good move.” And that explains the flash burn and the singed hair and tac gear. “How long was that halo thing on him?”
“…just a few minutes.” Clint shuts his eyes. “Long enough. Too long. I don’t know. And there were some trigger words. I really fucked up this rescue.”
“Halo’s over there,” Sam says with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder. “Not on Jigsaw. Rumlow’s dead, not spewing his disgusting garbage all over the comms. Might not be a clean win, but it’s definitely still a win.”
Clint grimaces. “You could hear that?”
Sam nods. “Jigsaw must have turned his mic on high enough to pick up ambient noise. We heard the whole thing. If you were gassed in that fight cage, you did the best you could have with the circumstances. Your eyes tell me you’re still suffering some of the effects.”
“What do his eyes tell you?”
Clint gestures toward Jigsaw with a hand Sam sees is slicked with blood across the palm and fingers—maybe from slicing Rumlow’s throat, maybe from some other injury. It’s hard to tell.
Sam turns his attention to Jigsaw, whose eyes are a bloody, cloudy mess with burned eyelids only half closed. What he can see of the pupils indicates they’re beyond blown, but evenly so. His hands aren’t anywhere near clean enough to raise Jigsaw’s eyelids and see more. That the pupils look even is about the only good sign in all of this. The band of burns follows the entirety of his face some two inches wide and comes to a stop above his ears, where the scalp is charred and the muscle exposed in places.
He looks back up at Clint. “It doesn’t look good. And he’s clearly still under the effects of that gas. And some tranquilizers, maybe. But eye injuries can heal faster than they look like they would, and he’s enhanced. I’m more concerned about the wipe itself than his eyesight.”
Sam had heard Clint try to communicate with Jigsaw while he was making his way to them. The one finger or two finger communication method had gotten no response. But the squeezing his hand…
“Did he squeeze your hand at all, when you asked him?”
“Not—” Clint shakes his head. “Not in response to a question. Just sometimes, when a convulsion hits him. He shakes a lot. Sometimes. Tenses up all over and then relaxes again. Or his limbs will jerk.”
Sam puts on a reassuring expression that he doesn’t feel. Jigsaw might not be as stable as he’d originally thought. He raises his arm up to check the Redwing control panel on the armband. The others are cleaning house, it sounds like, and it’s unlikely that Redwing will be damaged in the fighting if he sends him up there.
They need someone who can carry Jigsaw without risk of dropping him if he starts to seize up, and that means either Stark in the suit or the Hulk. With Clint still feeling the gas’s effects—not to mention what is probably an injured left hand—it might not be safe for him and Sam to try it. Steve might want the job, but Jigsaw would be a handful for him, where he’d be hardly an imposition to the other two.
He programs Redwing to return to the upper levels and guide someone down.
In the meantime, there are beds he can probably get a mattress off of—they’d looked thin and light when he passed over them—and he and Clint can get Jigsaw onto one, after he does what he can for Clint’s hand.
A mattress will be far more comfortable than the concrete for all parties involved. And while he wouldn’t trust a single medical supply this base has to offer, he does have what Stark somehow managed to fit in his wing pack with the wings and propulsion engine. It’s not much, because even Stark can’t work actual miracles, but it’s something.
Yes. They can bandage Clint’s hand and Jigsaw’s head injuries at least, and worry about cleaning the wounds on the quinjet where they can trust the water supply.
Hulk
—Siberian HYDRA base | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 7:30 p.m.—
Hulk roars and tries to swat the metal bug that flies around Hulk head, but the metal bug is always just out of reach.
“Hey mean green,” calls the metal crab man. “That’s a friend. Don’t hurt him.”
The puny humans with the guns are almost all gone now. The metal crab man blocked them in and it was time to smash and smash, and now there are pieces of puny human smeared on Hulk hands. But there are also smears on the shiny metal shield and on the walls and on the floors.
The redheaded Hulk friend is sitting on one puny human’s shoulders, squeezing and squeezing while his face turns red and his eyes and tongue bulge out. The Hulk friend in the colorful outfit is slamming another puny human’s head into the wall, leaving more smears.
Hulk picks up the last of the puny human enemies and slams him into the ground, crunching bones inside of the puny human’s tac gear. So many pops and crunches.
These are the puny humans who hurt the guest in Hulk suite, the one Hulk shared with. The one who was not afraid of Hulk but looked at Hulk with awe and gratitude and trust. Hulk friend with the metal arm, Jigsaw.
It is quiet for a long time while Hulk friends kick over bodies and put their fingers on necks. Hulk has impression from puny Banner that they are finding out if there are any of the puny humans still alive. The redheaded Hulk friend finds one and cuts his throat.
Then Hulk friends tell Hulk to follow the metal bug down to Jigsaw and Hulk archer friend, to help, and Hulk agree. Hulk protect Jigsaw. Hulk bring Jigsaw to safety. And Hulk smash anything that gets in the way.
Notes:
Content Warning: There are some semi-graphic depictions of injuries in this chapter, which might be disturbing to read.
Chapter 86: Avengers | Feeling my way through the darkness (guided by a beating heart)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Wake Me Up” by Avicii.
Remember my time stamp note at the beginning of the Siberia chapters? It still applies as the team is traveling back in a westward fashion. The time zones and quinjet speed make for some time stamp fuckery. Please know that things are in the proper order even if the time stamps make it seem like they are in a jumbled order. ^_^
Chapter Text
Clint
—Airspace over Siberia | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
Numb. His left arm isn’t numb anymore—that’s still pins and needles except for his palm and the tips of his thumb and fingers, which are cleaned and bandaged up and still burn like when he was holding that halo. But the rest of him is numb. He’s numb. Inside.
They’ve gotten Jigsaw settled on the floor of the cargo hold, and Wilson and Banner are satisfied that his injuries are as clean and well bandaged as they can get with the supplies they have on hand. Which don’t include any of the supplies in the base they’ve left because according to Banner and Wilson, everything designed for a super soldier in that base has a high chance of not being meant to help that super soldier.
They both seem to think the periodic muscle spasms will pass in time. They both seem to think Jigsaw’s collar bone will heal once the spasms stop and it has time to knit together. They both seem to think he’ll be able to see as well as ever after his eyes heal. They both seem to think he’ll come around after the tranquilizers wear off.
No one is willing to hazard a guess as to who it is that will come around.
There’s been some chatter, in hushed tones that he only partially understands with his hearing aids, about how long the tranquilizers would last. Quick-acting, some of the chatter indicates, should also mean quick to leave his system. But that’s not going to be effective, is it? They—HYDRA—would have needed something long-lasting. So, the chatter goes, something something best of both worlds. Something something, HYDRA designer drug.
Wilson grabbed Rumlow’s tranq gun with its spare darts, and the hope is that Banner can reverse engineer the drug if needed, maybe come up with something that counteracts it. If it turns out that no one comes around, after all, and Jigsaw is stuck in some kind of twilight coma, an antidote to the tranquilizer should help.
In the meantime, Stark and Banner are reading through the scanned copies of the Winter Soldier manual, trying to piece together exactly what to expect after a wipe of dubious completion with partial trigger words. If the halo even did a wipe and wasn’t just inflicting pain and injury.
Stark looked at Rumlow’s halo and at the other halo they recovered from one of the guys in the other side of the ambush, and there are settings. Calibrations. And a Tesseract halo might be different from the older model. Uses something other than electricity, so maybe has different effects.
Clint is half paying attention to the team’s mutterings in the main area of the quinjet, and half wishing they would all just be quiet. He’s tempted to turn his hearing aids off, but then he might miss something important.
His focus is mainly on the man lying beside him on the floor, bundled in soft blankets and tucked in with his stuffed shark. Clint feels like an absolute idiot holding one of his worn shirts next to Jigsaw’s face, but if that’s what’s in his go bag so that he can smell it, then Clint’s going to put it near his face so that he can smell it.
If Jigsaw was awake, he’d feed him some of the cut up peaches in their tupperware container. Maybe play him some music on the tablet. Go through his list of happy songs that he likes. Even fucking Rick Astley. Never Gonna Give You Up. He guesses he can see why Jigsaw likes the song. The lyrics are pretty nice once you get past being Rickrolled.
“B-RUM is dead,” Clint whispers again, confident that Jigsaw can hear him but the others can’t. “I killed him for you. Shot him twice and slit his throat. He’s gone. Rumlow’s gone. He can’t hurt you again, ever.”
There’s no response.
It’s not the first time Clint has relayed this critical piece of information, and it’s not the first time there’s been no response.
He tries not to think about what will happen if it isn’t Jigsaw who wakes up. If it’s just “the asset” ready to be hurt and to follow orders. What will the asset think of Lucky, Alpine… What will the asset think of Clint? Will the asset think that they have injured his eyes for the crime of looking at a screen? Will the asset think they are HYDRA?
How long did it take after his escape from HYDRA for Jigsaw to start putting himself together as a self? Clint knows he never has seen himself as a person, but he only rejected Bucky because he was afraid of being replaced. So he knew there was something, some level of selfhood, to defend against this Bucky character.
If it’s the blank-state asset who wakes up, what sort of self will that man create? He won’t have the memories or experiences of targeting and killing so many HYDRA operatives. He won’t have the memories or experiences of running all over the country or of coming home when Clint asked him to. He won’t have the memories or experiences of finding Lucky or Alpine.
He won’t have any memories or experiences of Clint.
Not their first sort-of encounter the night he went for Chapman and Clint shot an arrow at him. Not Clint brushing his hair and putting it up in a ponytail. Not anything in between. Not even rescuing Clint from the tracksuit mafia. No memories of crying on Clint’s shoulder, playing together with Lucky in the park, spending time at the range.
Jigsaw’s resilient, but he’s made from his experiences, and what if all of that is gone? What if Jigsaw is gone?
Rumlow had said as much, but Rumlow might have been lying to upset Clint. Or maybe he knew that the truth would be upsetting enough that he didn’t have to lie.
“How’re you doing?” Cap asks, his voice filled with unspoken emotion.
Clint looks up at him and shakes his head. “Not so hot, Cap.”
“Can I sit?”
Clint gestures to the floor on the other side of Jigsaw. He hopes this isn’t about to be a feelings thing.
As Cap folds himself up to fit in the space, Clint can’t help but think that maybe it will be Bucky who wakes up from this. Maybe Cap will be happy about that. Maybe the whole world would be happy about that, and only Clint and Natasha would mourn their losses. He hopes it’s not Bucky who wakes up.
“Tony and Bruce don’t think the halo worked,” Cap says. He carefully adjusts a bit of the blanket that his sitting had disturbed. “They don’t think it wiped him. Just hurt him.”
Clint closes his eyes. On the one hand, that is undeniably good news. On the other hand, while it seems possible that Rumlow fucked up the wipe in order to hurt Jigsaw even more, Clint is afraid to hope for that. Because what if they’re wrong? What if he dares to hope and it turns out they’re wrong?
What he doesn’t say is “don’t give me hope.” Because Cap means well, and he appreciates the man’s presence and companionship. But he’s got to say something.
“I fucking hate the Tesseract so much,” Clint says, leaning his head back against the cargo hold’s wall. “I hate it. I hate everything about it. I wish it never showed up on this planet.”
“I feel you there,” Cap says. “The Tesseract is what gave HYDRA the edge they needed back when they were first active under Schmidt, and it’s still messing up lives today.”
“I thought—” Clint opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. “I thought when he took it with him, Loki, I thought that would be the end of it. Except for in my nightmares. It would be the end of it in my waking life.”
Cap sighs. “That would have been nice, but HYDRA stockpiles things. There’s no way we’ve seen the last of the Tesseract’s energy. Even with the weapons in North Carolina destroyed. Even with these two halos destroyed.”
Destroyed? Both of them destroyed? Not just carefully disassembled for research?
Clint frowns. “I thought the science duo would want to keep them around. Take them apart and play with the pieces to see how they worked.”
“And risk Jigsaw seeing—” Cap stops himself. “I mean, later. When his eyes heal. No one wants a halo just floating around where he could come across it and be afraid. Or angry. Or both at once.”
That much is true. And it’s nice that Cap really does think it will be Jigsaw who wakes up once the tranquilizers have worn off. Clint wishes he could have that amount of optimism about the state of things.
But he doesn’t. He didn’t get there in time to save Jigsaw, and because he fucked up, Jigsaw suffered. Might not even be in there anymore. Clint knew he’d fuck up the relationship somehow, but he didn’t think allowing his partner to be erased by a rapist with a bit of Tesseract technology would even be an option.
“What makes them think it didn’t work?” Clint asks, going back to Cap’s original volley because apparently he does want some hope after all.
“The wiping,” he clarifies. “Because…” He can’t make himself say it. Can’t make himself describe how that vibrating bowstring of eye-searing bright blue energy would have passed right through Jigsaw’s brain.
“Because what?” Cap asks.
Clint shakes his head. No, he can’t say it. Not exactly. “It… looked really effective, is all.”
“There were settings on the halo,” Cap says with a shrug. “He was supposed to adjust things, but all he did was pick the highest setting. More power used up, but less effective. At least that’s what Tony and Bruce said. Something about success being based on nuance, not brute force.”
So instead of gently wiping away the dry erase marker of Jigsaw to restore the clean whiteboard, the halo what, resurfaced the entire whiteboard? Jigsaw would still be gone in that case. Clint doesn’t see how that would help things.
But Clint supposes they would know, if they’ve looked the fucking halo over. All he knows is that the halo burned hot enough to stick to his hand, and blue enough that Clint is going to have so many Loki nightmares mingled with nightmares about his bungled rescue attempt. If he sleeps at all. Right now, he’s aiming to be awake as long as he possibly can be.
At least until…
Until he knows.
Jigsaw, Bucky, some blank-slate asset ready to comply… Someone is going to wake up. He can only hope the science bros are right and that it’s Jigsaw who wakes up.
“Do you really think it’ll be Jigsaw?” Clint asks.
Cap is quiet for a moment. Then: “I think so, yes. If anyone could come through that with their mind mostly intact, it’ll be Jigsaw.”
“Do you wish it was Bucky instead?”
Clint hates himself for asking. He doesn’t even know why he asked it. Is he trying to hurt Cap? No. So why even bring up the possibility? Stupid garbage brain making things worse all the time. Chasing away people who want to help.
“I think if Jigsaw wakes up and decides to accept his past as Bucky, that would be great. But if he wakes up and isn’t sure who he is, I won’t try to lead him to any conclusions.”
Cap hasn’t, Clint notices, actually answered the question. He’s stepped around the question Clint asked and answered the unspoken question Clint hadn’t consciously realized he needed an answer to. Which was, will there be a tug of war over this man with Clint pulling for Jigsaw and Cap pulling for Bucky? And the answer is No. No tug of war.
“Just the truth then, in order, and let him make up his own mind?” Clint asks.
“Just the truth, in whatever order seems best, and he makes up his own mind.”
“…You’re a really good guy, you know.”
Cap smiles sadly. “So I’ve been told.”
He reaches over Jigsaw to clasp Clint on the shoulder again, and then gets up, careful not to jostle Jigsaw.
“Hang in there,” he says. “Those tranquilizers can’t last too long. He might even wake up while we’re still in the air. We’ve got hours.”
Clint nods and watches as Cap rejoins the rest of the team in the seating area of the quinjet. Then, he leans closer to Jigsaw, gives his cheek a soft caress, returns the t-shirt to its place where Jigsaw can smell it easily, and sighs.
“B-RUM is dead,” Clint whispers. “I killed him for you. Shot him twice and slit his throat. He’s gone. Rumlow’s gone. He can’t hurt you again, ever.”
Steve
—Airspace over Europe | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 7:45 p.m.—
“How is he?” Natasha asks from the cockpit.
Steve isn’t sure whether she means Clint or Jigsaw, and maybe she’s not sure, either.
“Clint’s upset, but handling it well,” he says. “Jigsaw isn’t awake yet. But he didn’t seize up at all while I was back there.”
That’s an improvement. For a while there, Jigsaw had been spasming semi-regularly, limbs jerking and head tossing. Aftershocks of the halo, maybe, or maybe unrelated seizures. It’s hard to tell.
The manual never mentions seizures after a wipe, though it says during some wipes they’re possible. It’s one of the reasons he was strapped to the chair. After a wipe, Jigsaw is supposed to awake, aware, ready to accept a mission and then get hosed off, dressed for the field, and sent on his way.
It’s a reason Steve is holding out hope that the wipe wasn’t done right, that it didn’t take, that what memories Jigsaw has made will still be there when wakes up. But he has to admit that there’s a chance the halo just destroyed everything without paving it over afterward. It didn’t get to finish the job before Clint got it off of him, on top of being set too high, too hot.
He supposes there’s a chance no one really wakes up, that Jigsaw is catatonic for ages while his brain slowly heals from the damage, and that in the meantime, there is simply no one behind his eyes.
Steve is hopeful, though. Hopeful that in his eagerness to exercise his sadism, Rumlow ruined his own plans and failed to do what he set out to do. It would be fitting if, in the end, Rumlow’s sadistic streak is what did him in, while at the same time leaving his victim relatively unscathed—or at least unscathed by comparison to what Rumlow had wanted to have happen.
“And yourself?” Natasha asks. “How are you doing?”
Steve manages a smile, though he’s not exactly feeling it. “I feel like my therapist is on this quinjet. You asking me how I feel, Clint asking me if I want Bucky to be the one who wakes up…”
She turns toward him, an eyebrow raised. “And how did you answer?” she asks. “Or is that between you and him?”
Steve takes a seat in the copilot’s chair, even though he’s been forbidden to touch the controls lest they all take an Arctic bath, har har.
“No secrets, Natasha,” he says. “I guess I just told him the truth. I really do think Jigsaw’s going to wake up and know who he is. Er, know that he’s Jigsaw, I mean. And if he wakes up without knowing that, or without knowing much of anything, then…”
He shrugs. “As much as I’d love to have Bucky back as Bucky, accepting his whole history, myself included, I’ve got to respect that Jigsaw is his present, and that I’d miss Jigsaw if this were the end of him. I’m trying to build a new friendship, even if it’s going painfully slowly, and I don’t want to lose that.”
“That’s a very mature, respectful take,” Natasha says. “It almost sounds rehearsed.”
Steve maintains his gaze out the front window of the quinjet. So what if he rehearsed it? He’s had almost an hour of this flight to ponder the possibilities in front of them, same as the rest of them. And if he spent it thinking about where his loyalties happened to lie while the others spent it dissecting that awful manual, that’s between him and, well, himself.
Because on the one hand, he is loyal to Bucky, to his memory and to the life they lived together for so many years. And on another hand, he’s coming to terms with that loss and with the loss of everything else that vanished in the course of one ice nap. Losing Jigsaw to get Bucky back would, in some ways, just be another loss on top of everything else. Because he won’t be getting Bucky back.
At “best,” he’d be getting a blank slate on which to paint Bucky’s memories and hope they stick. Tell him who he started out as, tell him what has happened over the course of decades, tell him what decisions he’s made in more recent months and days, what he’s been up to, who he’s in love with. And then just see what takes root.
They won’t be lived memories, though, in that scenario. They’d be history book retellings, maybe an occasional impression that something is accurate or inaccurate. And you can’t just tell someone they did a thing or made a decision or loved a person and guarantee that all those things still apply without the lived experience of that decision or that love.
When it comes to what Steve knows and accepts, the Bucky he knew is largely gone except for glimmers he sees inside Jigsaw, who he’s working on being better friends with. As for Clint, well. Clint has a lot more to lose than Steve does, and Steve doesn’t want him to lose any of that. He doesn’t want any of them to lose Jigsaw.
“Alright, then,” Natasha says after a while, with a smile he can hear more than see. “Keep your thoughts to yourself.”
Then, a few minutes later, and much softer: “Thank you for checking on him. I’d be back there with him, but someone has to at least monitor the autopilot.”
Steve looks around to see if Sam is still in the huddle of scientist types or if he’s gone to grab a more comfortable seat elsewhere, or even to check on Jigsaw. Sam’s still there with Tony and Bruce, hashing out what sorts of questions to ask to confirm Jigsaw’s mental state when he wakes up, since he might not know some of the typical answers.
“You know,” he says, “I’m pretty sure Sam has the training needed to take over for you if it’s just making sure things are on a steady course. He might not have flown a quinjet before, but he’s flown lots of other things. How different could the controls really be?”
And Sam probably won’t mind being volunteered like this, either. Maybe he and Steve can sit up here and leave the science types to their own devices.
“If you wanted to take a break and spend some time with Clint and Jigsaw,” Steve adds.
Natasha
—Airspace over the Atlantic Ocean | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 6:15 p.m.—
When Clint looks up from watching Jigsaw’s breathing, he doesn’t look nearly as morose as she’d anticipated. In fact, he looks downright hopeful. Maybe Rogers made a difference.
“He squeezed my hand, ‘Tasha. Before you got here.”
Natasha doesn’t ask if it was just part of a spasm, not wanting to dash his hopes. Instead, she perches on a crate anchored to the floor. Her knee is hurting after all the exertion and being trapped in a kneeling position for so long while Hulk dug them out. She won’t put any extra strain on it by getting on the floor with them.
“And not to break it,” Clint adds. He doesn’t remind her of Rogers getting his hand broken for daring to comfort Jigsaw when they’d first brought him in after Bakersfield and the surgeries on the Bus. She doesn’t need the reminder.
“And how is your hand feeling?” she asks with a pointed nod and look at his bandaged left hand, still tucked in Jigsaw’s right hand.
“It hurts like a bitch, and I should know better than to be holding his hand in the first place,” he admits. “But also, I don’t care. My hand would hurt whether he squeezes it or not. He didn’t really wake up, though. Didn’t respond to questions.”
She wonders how long Jigsaw will be in and out of consciousness. She wonders what kind of damage there will be from Rumlow’s attack. And she wonders just how many halos there are in the world now that aren’t attached to stationary chairs tucked in basements and dungeons and vaults. They found two.
Two seems like a low count. If it were her, and she was obsessed with getting Jigsaw back under HYDRA control, she’d make dozens, even hundreds. She’d outfit every decently sized base with at least one in case the Avengers paid them a visit, and she’d stash them in a number of safehouses as well. But they need the Tesseract energy to run them, so that might impede mass production.
And they have Project Insight that’s also taking up their attention. Hopefully that means there aren’t more than a dozen such halos out there. If they’re ubiquitous, there will be a greater level of danger for Jigsaw—and she supposes also for Rogers if his cowl doesn’t stop the energy flow—in all of their missions into HYDRA bases.
And there will be more missions into other HYDRA bases.
She’s nearly certain that such danger won’t keep Jigsaw from accompanying them on missions. No matter how much fear Jigsaw has, he always seems to have a greater amount of daring. That was part of his pattern back in D.C. and when they were hunting him across the country. Walking into ambushes willingly. Facing agents who have the trigger words memorized. Attacking his tormentors whether they can control him or not.
Unless she’s very much mistaken, Jigsaw’s drive for revenge and to protect others won’t let him stay in the Tower if there’s a mission, no matter the outcome of this particular mission.
But with halos like this, the danger is so much greater than it was before, and for more than just Jigsaw. Jigsaw and Rogers, maybe even Bruce, would all survive a halo. And if there are different settings, who’s to say someone else on the team wouldn’t survive as well? Are they all potentially just a halo away from being under HYDRA’s mind control?
The thought makes her itch all over. She’s done being controlled. She doesn’t want to go back to that life.
Maybe it’s possible to detect Tesseract energy without all the equipment on Nick’s helicarrier. Bruce could probably help Stark put something together that would accomplish the task. Then they can put a target on any HYDRA operatives with halos or those Tesseract-powered guns and make sure to take them out early on.
She sees Clint wince from the corner of her eye and knows that Jigsaw has squeezed his hand again.
“I’m right here, Jigs,” Clint says. “Natasha’s here, too. We’re on the quinjet headed home. Could you squeeze my hand once if you understand me?”
Instead of squeezing his hand, Jigsaw’s fingers explore the bandage around Clint’s hand, which is arguably a better sign of consciousness than merely a hand squeeze.
Maybe they should be calling out for Bruce to come inspect him, or Wilson maybe. Someone to give him an assessment and see just how with it he is, and if it really is Jigsaw or just someone who doesn’t know what’s happening.
But then Jigsaw pulls his hand up and out of Clint’s and makes what looks like half of the sign for “pain” and then a Y-shape with his hand—his question sign, minus the movement.
If he’s signing, that’s a good sign. And those must be signs, even if the movement is… She can’t quite place what’s different about his movements in general, other than that they’re sluggish and minimal. And why wouldn’t they be? Between the drugs and the broken clavicle, moving his arms might be difficult in addition to painful.
So, if she’s guessing right, it is Jigsaw inside that body, and he’s asking about pain. Natasha isn’t surprised he’s hurting, but she’s not sure what the best answer would be in this case. They don’t have any pain medicine that would work on a super soldier for very long, and the medicine they do have would just make him sleep if they gave him enough to have any effect at all.
“Yeah,” Clint says, clearly having no such difficulty forming an answer. “I hurt my hand. But it’s nothing. It’ll heal up fine.”
Oh. She can see that interpretation, yes. Jigsaw maybe wasn’t asking why he was in pain, but instead was possibly inquiring about whether Clint was hurt. And that does seem very like him, yes.
Clint strokes Jigsaw’s shoulder gently. “I’m more worried about you than me. You were out for a few hours.”
There’s a lengthy pause, lengthy enough that Natasha suspects Jigsaw’s gone back under, but after a few minutes, Jigsaw shifts in his blanket nest to pull his left arm out into the open. And that’s what’s different about his movements.
They aren’t just slower than usual and smaller than they’d normally be, but they also aren’t as smooth as they usually are. They’re not even normal in comparison to any of the rest of them, but almost jerky by comparison, trembling.
He signs “exhausted” and then “safe” and the motionless Y-shape question, all with small movements, signs that are barely complete.
“B-RUM is dead,” Clint says softly. “I killed him for you. You’re safe here. He can’t hurt you ever again.”
Jigsaw signs “kill,” possibly just to confirm what he’s been told.
“Yeah. I shot him and slit his throat. Cut his head half off while I was at it, the knife went so deep. He bled out. I made sure.”
Clint doesn’t look or sound proud of his actions, but he also seems to have no sense of shame or apology in his demeanor. That’s good. It would be less than ideal if he rolled Rumlow’s death into his general stockpile of things to feel bad about in life. It’s true enough that they had intended to gather some information from anyone they found in that base, but…
But she doesn’t regret killing their enemies on this mission, and she knows Rogers and Stark feel similarly. No one’s watching, Rogers had said. She hadn’t needed to be told twice. Every single one of those HYDRA operatives would happily have killed them or done worse if their positions had been reversed.
“You want to sit up?” Clint asks.
If he does, they should definitely get one of their medics back here to check him out. But that would be so much extra stress for him, given how he’s responded to medical treatment in the past. Maybe it can wait.
“I can help y— Okay,” Clint says when Jigsaw shakes his head, just a slight side-to-side movement. “You don’t have to sit up or anything. Maybe it’s better if you get some sleep, anyway.”
Natasha watches as Jigsaw laboriously pulls himself and his blankets at an angle until he can curl on his left side and rest his head in Clint’s lap. The added pressure of his burned and bandaged temple pressed into Clint’s thigh must hurt more than lying on his back had, and the broken bits of his clavicle must be grinding together, but she supposes it’s all the same to him, as used to pain as he must be.
In any case, the preferred position must make up for the increased pain, because he wraps his right arm around his stuffed shark and sighs before releasing tension she hadn’t previously noticed.
Clint looks up at her with a tearful smile and strokes his hand along Jigsaw’s back and the nape of his neck.
“I’ve got you, Jigs. I’ve got you.”
Chapter 87: Kate | It’s been a bad day, please don’t take a picture
Notes:
Chapter title from “Bad Day” by R.E.M.
Aren’t you glad the time zones work out so that this chapter didn’t interrupt the earlier ones while things were still so in-the-air about Jigsaw?
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
Alpine is a cute little thing, but man is she vicious. Kate’s learned by now not to tempt the kitten with a wiggling fingertip lest the kitten in question try to take that finger clean off her hand. She always thought kittens were gentle, but she is learning some serious lessons about how gentle this kitten is not.
She only looks gentle, and mostly when she’s sleeping.
Right now, in the common room with the huge squishy sofa, off the end of the hallway where her guest room is, Alpine is not sleeping. She’s trying to rip the stomach out of a stuffed blue bird on the end of a wand toy Kate is swinging around.
And she’s making progress. There is some white fluff coming out of three different seams, the curly orange ribbons coming out of the bird’s butt are snaggled and torn up from her teeth and claws, the feathers that used to be the bird’s wings are in Kate’s pocket to make sure Alpine didn’t eat them after tearing them off of the toy. She’s not letting Jigsaw’s little baby kitten get an intestinal impaction from eating feathers, or whatever bad thing would happen.
On the sofa beside her, not caring much about the movement of her arm with the wand toy but occasionally giving his gigantic plastic bone a chew, Lucky is currently curled up with his bone between his paws and his head resting on his bone. Lucky is much more low-key than Alpine. Lucky knows the meaning of taking it easy. Lucky isn’t even trying to break that bone when he chews—he’s just gumming at it a little.
Kate had thought when she brought the animals out to the common room that she would watch a little TV and idly sweep the wand toy around to keep Alpine in the area and not getting into trouble. But it’s been about half an hour, and she’s not even sure what show it is that’s ending because she has been paying so much attention to Alpine.
The sign of a good pet-sitter, she hopes.
She wonders how much time Jigsaw devotes to playing with his pets. Probably a lot. He seems like a pretty good pet owner, and his instructions—clarified by JARVIS after the fact, thankfully—had had the kind of picky detail that indicates he’s fussy about things being perfect for the pair of animals under his care.
Exactly how much to feed, exactly how often to give treats, which treats to give, a whole list of poisonous foods to avoid, the precise way to handle the weird pine pellet litter situation, the favorite toys and what the pets like to do with those toys, how to swish the wand for maximum kitten engagement, the instruction to allow both animals to lick her face whenever they want to… There’d been a lot.
And she isn’t playing that lick-your-face game. Dogs and cats lick themselves all over, including and especially their butts, and she doesn’t think she wants butt-spit on her face. So she has let Lucky lick her in greeting, sure, but she’s not about let them both lick her just any time they feel like it.
The TV changes channels partway through the opening credits for some show about making chocolate sculptures, and Kate blinks in surprise. She knows she didn’t press any buttons or give any voice commands or—
“What’s the latest on the Avengers front, Heather?” asks the news anchor in the studio. He takes up half of the screen, while on the other half…
“A young woman has been employed to walk the Falcon’s dog, Alex,” says a redheaded field reporter Kate recognizes as the woman with the mic and camera crew who ambushed her in the morning while crossing the street.
Oh shit.
And yes, there on the screen in the upper left corner is footage of Kate being an absolute klutz and nearly falling over when Lucky wound the leash around her trying to get between her and the reporter. It’s definitely Lucky, definitely Kate, and definitely proof that she was there and not at her aunt’s place.
“The pet-sitter had no comment for us,” the field reporter continues, “but has been identified as Kate Bishop, a local university student and winning bidder on the Avenger Hawkeye’s time at last summer’s ill-fated charity auction at Avengers Tower.”
Oh crap, crap, crap.
Why is this on the news?! What’s newsworthy about someone walking a dog? What channel is this?
“Winning bidder turned pet-sitter,” Alex says, emphasizing the way the words sound alike in some kind of attempt to be witty. “What significance do you see in this development?”
“Combined with reports of an aircraft taking off from the top of Avengers Tower late last night, we can reasonably say Bishop’s involvement points to the Avengers leaving the Tower for an unknown destination, possibly a mission.”
“And just to clarify for our viewers at home, the team’s ‘quinjet,’—a private military-style aircraft possibly on loan from what’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D.—is not on the roof of the Tower?”
Heather shakes her head. “Aerial drone footage reveals the quinjet is gone, Alex.”
“Any ideas when they could be back?”
“We’ll have to keep a watch on the street,” Heather says, “and on Reddit. Their mission to North Carolina was leaked a matter of days after completion, and there’s no word coming from S.H.I.E.L.D. as to their potential whereabouts or plans.”
The news anchor taps a few sheets of paper on the desk to put them into neater order. “We’ll circle back to you later, Heather. Good job out there.”
Then Alex is taking up the whole screen again, and the looping footage of Kate nearly tripping over Lucky’s leash is thankfully gone along with the redhead’s camera feed.
“Oh crap,” Kate mutters.
Here she thought she was being so clever sending that other reporter a no-comment message and telling him to get lost, and she somehow ends up on the news anyway. Just for walking Lucky! She wasn’t even doing anything noteworthy.
Hawkeye didn’t tell her to avoid the park or to hide in a Stark car with Lucky until they were at some less recognized park. He just said that the park is where the Falcon walks Lucky, so she thought it would be a good place to do that, herself.
Alpine drags the wand toy out of Kate’s hands and pulls it under the coffee table with a low growl that’s somehow still cute, even though Kate knows that bird isn’t going to look the same when she retrieves it later.
That’s the least of her worries, though.
She’s been caught in a lie on what might be local but might be national television. There’s no denying she was there walking the dog. They have the footage, and they played it. She’s just fortunate she didn’t fall over on camera while Lucky wound the leash around her. It was still memorable footage. People like watching other people being klutzes. There’ll be some talk about it.
And that means everyone will know that she wasn’t at her aunt’s apartment doing chores. Maybe people will know she wasn’t even seeing her aunt at all, but was instead pet-sitting for the Avengers.
Her roommate will definitely know what she was up to now, and probably her classmates, too, her friends. They’ll all want details. And any of those details could get out of containment, leave the campus or her apartment, travel to fucking Carlton Badger, who will have some kind of nasty thing to say about the Avengers or about her or about the dog. Maybe just something generally nasty, on top of it.
Her friends will at least understand why she had to lie, and her roommate will understand even if she pretends to be mortally offended by the lie. But will they understand that she can’t explain the situation? She didn’t sign anything saying she couldn’t this time, but the old forms from the bidding at that auction would still apply. She can’t just blab all of the Avengers’ business all over the place, and she won’t. She wouldn’t do that even if she hadn’t signed non-disclosure agreement forms.
Kate sighs and rests her head on the sofa, looking up at the ceiling.
Maybe people will think she’s stuck up or thinks that she’s better than them. It’s a possibility. She had to work hard to get her friends to accept her as just another person their age and not some stuck-up rich bitch. It’s one of the reasons she lives on campus instead of with her mother or in her own apartment off campus. She wants to be a normal university student like them.
Maybe they’ll leave her if they get to thinking that she is a stuck-up rich bitch after all, though, if she doesn’t spill at least a few gossipy beans about Lucky. And there’s one bean that’s the biggest bean of all as far as she’s concerned—that Lucky isn’t the Falcon’s dog at all, but is Jigsaw’s dog.
On the surface, that seems pretty benign as far spilled beans go. But she still won’t do it, though. What even is there to know about Lucky that the public has any legitimate interest in? He’s a dog. He needed to go for a walk in the morning and the person who usually walks him wasn’t available. So she did it. It was a favor.
And yes, she got a ninth hour of Hawkeye’s time in return, a value that is more than a little outrageous for merely watching his boyfriend’s pets for however long.
Oof, that’s another major bean she can’t spill. They’re roommate-roommates, and the world could get very mean about that if it was discovered. There are an awful lot of bigots in the world who would object to a role model like an Avenger being gay, or bi, or just anything but purely hetero. And there are people a little more well-intentioned who would object to someone in Jigsaw’s position being in a relationship at all, what with the ongoing-rehabilitation thing.
And even without that, if two of the Avengers were close to each other like that, then they might put each other first on a mission and not the mission’s goal. Right? Save the boyfriend instead of the burning building’s worth of civilians.
She doesn’t think a situation like that is likely—Jigsaw doesn’t need saving and really she can’t see Hawkeye needing saving, either. They’re both pretty badass, just each in his own way. But someone somewhere will say it. Probably the Honey Badger.
And she has to take Lucky out for a walk tonight, too. What if that reporter is out there waiting for her? Either the redhead from before or the mystery reporter Allison had told her about? If he thinks she’s at the Tower—because she is—then he might try to find her here instead of returning to her apartment to pester her roommate.
Kate doesn’t even know how long she’ll be watching Lucky and Alpine. Sure, the team left in the middle of the night, but where are they headed? For how long? To do what, exactly? She didn’t pry last night, and she didn’t pry in the morning when they handed over Lucky and Alpine. She doesn’t know anything worth telling anyone, anyway. Not about this mission.
Her phone goes off, a text coming in. And not just one text, but a barrage of them.
Kate looks at her phone, sees that it’s her mother texting her, and sighs. It just doesn’t end, does it?
[What have you gotten wrapped up in now, Katie?]
[It was bad enough you wasted all that money on archery and some washed-up circus performer turned so-called super hero. Now you’re walking dogs for a parttime job?]
[My daughter is better than that.]
[What about that internship at Bishop Security? I keep offering you an internship and you keep spitting in my face.]
[Yet you’re so willing to curry favor with a gimmick group like the Avengers. Get a real job, Kate. Advance yourself. Your trust fund won’t carry you through life forever.]
[Answer my texts.]
Kate’s phone rings—her mother—and she silences the ringer rather than reject the call and let her mother know she’s even received any of the messages. She just doesn’t have her phone on her person right now. Maybe she’s head-down in her schoolwork. Yeah. There’s a Biochem test coming up. She’s studying for it.
“‘Get a real job,’” Kate mutters at the phone. “I have a real job. I’m taking a full load of courses and running three different extracurriculars and also learning how to be a super hero to actually save people. One archery lesson at a time. I’m going to help people who can’t afford to pay me for my services. Don’t need your internship, Mom.”
Lucky nudges a paw forward to rest on top of her thigh and looks up at her with his deep brown eye.
“Yeah,” Kate murmurs as her phone pings to let her know her mother’s left a message. “You get it, Lucky. You get it.”
She could probably have just made a sandwich in the kitchen and called it a meal, but she wasn’t really interested in a sandwich for dinner, despite the ingredients being there for a lot of different kinds of sandwiches.
Kate had wanted pad thai, though, and while there was probably also the whole list of ingredients she’d have needed to make that, she’s not some culinary whiz kid and has no idea where she’d even start with that.
So delivery it is. She won’t risk getting takeout because there could be reporters out there wondering all about her, and she doesn’t want to be on the news again if she can avoid it. But if someone delivers food to the front desk downstairs and then she goes and gets it after they’re gone… That should work.
And it does. She doesn’t have to interact with anyone who doesn’t already know her, she’s not on any cameras but the security ones in the Tower lobby—and JARVIS, but she thinks of JARVIS more as a person and less as a surveillance system—and she gets nice hot pad thai without having to dirty up a single pot or pan. Perfection.
Kate brings her food up to the dining room, thinking she’ll eat at the table and avoid getting her room smelling like dinner, and is surprised to find that there are actually people in the residential areas of Avengers Tower aside from just herself.
That’s odd. She really hasn’t seen anyone up here since last night when Hawkeye and Jigsaw dropped off Lucky and Alpine. And now she’s seeing three people at once.
And they definitely belong here, just the way they’re chatting about some party or other that’s coming up. One of them is even Pepper Potts, wearing a navy pantsuit with a yellow scarf around her neck. Pepper belongs here even more than Kate herself does.
They all three look perfectly at home together in the dining room, and they’re even all eating the same thing, Kate sees as she enters the room itself. Some kind of pesto chicken pasta from a big pot in the middle of their grouping at the end of the dining table. It smells good, even if it isn’t pad thai.
“Hi,” Kate says with a bright smile. “Mind if I eat here?” She holds up her bagged meal.
Pepper gives her a warm smile and gestures for her to come sit. “Of course not,” she says. “Kate, this is Yasmin Esparza and Zoe Braxton. They work with Jigsaw. Yasmin, Zoe, Kate Bishop. Kate’s pet-sitting for Jigsaw and Clint.”
Yasmin, she’s never heard of. Yasmin has light brown skin and dark brown hair in a ponytail down her back, except for her bangs, and she has on a professional but flirty cream blouse with a pair of jeans. Not as professional looking as Pepper’s pantsuit, but maybe professional enough that she could be a business colleague of Pepper’s all the same. Except Pepper said she worked with Jigsaw. So maybe that's the only reason she's here.
Zoe, though… Zoe she has heard of. Hawkeye and Jigsaw were supposed to meet with her last night at 9, but it got canceled because of the mission coming up. So they could get some sleep. Jigsaw had been maybe a little disappointed-looking about the missed “session,” but Hawkeye had seemed relieved on his behalf. Zoe is Black, with her many braids piled on top of her head, and is wearing a casual denim button-up dress with bangles on both wrists.
Both Yasmin and Zoe would be sort of business colleagues with Pepper in the sense that there’s business in the Tower revolving around Jigsaw’s continued recovery from all the mysterious science project stuff that apparently happened to him before if those tabloids with the “source close to S.H.I.E.L.D.” were right. But Jigsaw isn’t here, so why are they?
“So how is little Alpine treating you?” Yasmin asks with a smiling glance at Kate’s scratched up right hand.
“Oh, that’s my fault,” Kate says with a laugh. “I learned my lesson pretty quick. It’s cute when Jigsaw wiggles his fingers for her, but it hurts when I do it.”
Zoe murmurs that the kitten is getting so big, and that it’s definitely time for someone to start teaching her how not to bite or scratch too hard. “It’s harder with only the one kitten,” she continues. “When they have other kittens to play with, they learn how to be gentle.”
Kate figures that makes sense. “I can’t imagine having to watch two of Alpine, though,” she says. “That kitten is excited to play with anything, even just bare toes. Maybe especially bare toes.”
“Ms Potts,” JARVIS says when their laughter has died down, “There is a Thomas Welling asking for you.”
Pepper makes a disgruntled noise in her throat and stands up, taking her empty plate to the sink. “Tell him I’m on my way, JARVIS.”
“Certainly, Ma’am.”
“It was nice getting your ideas for the party,” Pepper says to Yasmin and Zoe as she tops up the ice in her tumbler. “Especially the warning about scarecrows. We’ll talk again soon. Enjoy the rest of your stay, Kate.”
They say their goodbyes and then Kate is fielding questions about how her studies are progressing, how she’s liking her archery lessons with Hawkeye, how she’s enjoying her stay at the Tower and the random Stark technologies that make life easier around the place, like the kettle that heats water at an alarming speed.
She gets in a few questions of her own, but while the two woman are amiable, they don’t share more about why they’re there than that they “work with Jigsaw,” which is what Pepper already said. So Yasmin and Zoe are colleagues with each other more than they’re Pepper’s colleagues, but they all three have party planning sessions together over lunch.
Interesting. Kate wonders what the party is for. Maybe some kind of Avengers team-building thing, or maybe there’s more holiday spirit in Avengers Tower and Stark Industries than she’d thought and they’re planning a Halloween party, or a Thanksgiving feast, or a really well-planned Christmas or New Year’s party. Probably Halloween based on the scarecrow comment.
She wonders what exactly Zoe and Yasmin do, working with Jigsaw, and by the time she’s done with her pad thai, she’s come to the conclusion that they must be therapists or S.H.I.E.L.D. specialists working on the “ongoing rehabilitation efforts” that one article had mentioned. They're familiar enough with the Tower that they might even live here, at least temporarily. Kate can't imagine actually living here.
They must be doing a great job with Jigsaw, because Kate has seen both sides of the man now and the side that looks scary has only been on display the one time. It had looked almost out of place on him, even. Like that wasn’t the real Jigsaw, but just a mask he wears when dealing out violence.
She’s really glad she’s had the chance to meet the actual man, though. He’s quiet to a fault and not just because he doesn’t talk ever, but he’s nice and helpful and hospitable, getting her arrows for her when they go astray and handing her that mug of water. And he cares about his pets and about Hawkeye very much.
Maybe someday the world will get to see that side of him and not the side that must have been running around killing people in May and June.
Chapter 88: Assets | Turn your face towards the sun (Let the shadows fall behind you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Towards the Sun” by Rihanna.
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—Airspace over the Atlantic Ocean | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
Pain.
There is pain in the muscles, everywhere, a throbbing ache in time to the blood going around the body. There is pain in the head, sharp and hot and tight, like a burn. There is pain in the right shoulder, grating of bone on bone with every movement, every breath.
And it is so dark, darker than just with the eyes closed against the pain. Dark because, because…? Oh, that is right.
It cannot see.
There is a blindfold over the eyes, keeping them closed. And there is no light peeking through the blindfold, not through the fabric or through any gaps between the fabric and the skin face.
The other asset says that the blindfold must stay on, that it is a bandage, that it is protecting the eyes and covering the burns on the skin face.
It can feel the burns, can feel how they hurt it, can feel where they are, and so it knows that there are burns across the skin face, from one side of the head above the ear, across the eyes, and to the other side of the head above the other ear. It does not need to be told about the burns.
But it does need to be told about the blindfold-bandage.
That, it has forgotten about many times. It has tried to pull the blindfold-bandage off of the skin face, or to explore the burns with the fingers to assess the skin face and the temples for damage. How will it know how careful it needs to be if it does not know how bad the damage is? It needs to know how bad the damage is and it cannot see the damage to tell or feel through the blindfold-bandage to tell.
But every time it reaches for the blindfold-bandage, the other asset reminds it not to touch, to keep the hands away from it, that the blindfold-bandage is there to help.
It is not yet tired of the other asset’s reminders, and the other asset does not sound too exasperated by the need to remind it. That is good. It does not want to upset the other asset any more than the other asset is already upset—the other asset sounds like there are tears building up deep inside the other asset’s voice, ready to crack the other asset’s voice and lead to many tears in the eyes.
The other asset is very, very upset. Upset that it is injured, and maybe upset about other things as well. It does not remember.
The flying man and the researcher with the curly hair have both finished asking their questions and have finally left it alone to eat more of the delicious peach chunks the other asset offers it.
No more “what year is it” or “what is my name” or “what month is it” or “what is your name” or any of the other questions. Do you know how you were injured?
No more asking it where they are. It cannot see out of the windows to make a guess where they are, and the vibration and noise of the quinjet make it too hard to hear anything from outside of the hull. It knows they are on the quinjet, though. And no more tapping on the elbow, no more asking it to turn the head to the left or the right.
So many questions that it cannot answer, and so many other questions that everyone knows the answer to and so there is no need to ask in the first place. It does not think it has ever known the year. That is for others to keep track of. What does it matter to an asset what year it is? Or what month? And of course it knows everyone’s name.
So irritating, and neither of them had appreciated the special finger sign it made to tell them to go away and leave it alone. One finger for “yes,” two fingers for “no,” or the special finger that says “we are done here, go away.” The hamburger technician had taught it that. Fuck off, the special finger says.
The other asset had laughed, though, and that had sounded very good to the ears, even if the laugh had been a tentative one, partway between relief and worry.
“Okay, last peach, Jigs.”
It opens the mouth and waits for the chunk of peach to be delivered and then pulls the bit of peach off of the fork with the teeth. Chews it up. Swallows. Releases the blanket so that it can sign “thank you.”
It wishes that the limbs did not feel so heavy, did not move so much without it telling them to. Little trembles that it cannot control. It hates when it cannot control the limbs. And it cannot remember why it cannot control them. What happened?
If it could be sure that the hand would reliably hold the other asset’s uninjured hand without accidentally squeezing too hard, it would be able to hold onto the other asset and not just the fish-looking soft thing and the so-soft blanket.
But the other asset could be hurt if either of the arms did what it does not want them to do, especially the metal one. And so it waits while the other asset puts away the container the peaches were inside of—the pop of the lid fitting on top of the container, the rustling of the duffel bag, the zipper that is an okay zipper and not a dangerous zipper.
It waits, and then it scoots closer to the other asset until it is sitting not at an angle to the other asset but instead directly beside the other asset. That is much better, sitting so that both assets are touching from shoulder to hip to leg. It rests the head on the other asset’s shoulder. There is a flash of pain from the burns and the shoulder, but there is always pain.
It is worse pain than before, sharper, like knives stabbing it in the temple where the head rests against the other asset’s shoulder, and along the clavicle—worse pain, but worth it. It wants to be as close to the other asset as it can get, wants to hold the other asset’s hand except that it cannot safely do that. This, though, the head on the shoulder, this it can safely do.
The other asset pulls the left hand over to run nimble fingers along, but wisely does not move to clasp hands. The other asset has seen the way it sometimes cannot control what the limbs do, knows better than to risk a broken hand.
It reaches over the torso to feel for and then run flesh fingers over the other asset’s face, tracing the bandages that follow a curved line over the middle of the other asset’s nose, and along the tops of both cheeks. The outline of the lower half of the killing face. The life-saving face.
“Thanks, again,” the other asset says. “You saved my life, you know.”
It nods, bringing the hand back down to its lap, where the arm can hang more naturally and not hurt as badly. It knows that. It just has to reassure itself that everything that it does remember happened the way it remembers it happening, for as long as it remembers. It only remembers parts of the mission, and not always the same parts.
Right now, it remembers that the other asset had not been able to get the lock open, that the sweet bitter air had been slowly killing the other asset, and that it put the killing face on the other asset before running. It remembers a lot of running. Slow running, like running through the syrup that goes onto pancakes and waffles.
Running from B-RUM.
But it is here now, with the other asset and the taste of peaches in the mouth. These things are not possible if B-RUM had caught it, so it must have run fast enough for long enough to escape.
Except that it cannot see to make sure of this because there is the blindfold over the eyes. It reaches up to take the blindfold off so that it can see the other asset.
“No, Jigs, leave it,” the other asset says. “You need the bandage to protect your eyes and cover the burns, remember?”
It… It had not remembered. It had forgotten. Not about the burns, but about it being important to keep the blindfold-bandage on.
It returns the hand to the lap and gives the fish-looking soft thing a squeeze.
What else has it forgotten? Why can’t it remember?
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 9:45 p.m.—
“You’re doing great, Jigs,” Clint says as he guides a shivering Jigsaw down the rain-slicked ramp of the quinjet.
It does figure that there’d be a cold rain to greet them on arrival. At least they missed the worst part of the storm, and it’s just the tail end of the thing at this point. He’s still getting rain under his collar dripping from his hair, which he could do without, if he was willing to let his partner navigate the ramp and roof by muscle memory or sound or whatever. But he’s not, so they’ll both get rained on.
“You want to eat with the team or— Okay,” he says when Jigsaw nods. “Yeah, we can eat with the team.”
Clint’s borderline shocked that Jigsaw wants to eat with the whole group, but that was a definite nod, and Jigsaw gets to decide what he’s up for. So it’ll be a proper post-mission nosh session, complete with utterly exhausted teammates and injured teammates in need of more medical work but too hungry to care and all that good stuff.
“Wonder what’s on the menu,” he says as they reach the rooftop and steadier footing.
Hopefully, it’ll be something relatively easy to eat. Like sandwiches or burgers. Pizza. Something Jigsaw can grab and stuff into his mouth without having to see what he’s doing. The last thing they need is for eating to become a difficult task instead of a favorite activity.
“JARVIS said it was fajitas,” Cap says a ways ahead of them, holding the door rather than go inside where it’s warm and dry. “Beef, chicken, and portabella mushroom.”
Clint scrunches up his face. No way is he putting mushrooms in a fajita. He’ll allow the onions and bell peppers, but he draws a line at slimy fungus.
“Think the mushrooms are for Jigsaw, Clint,” Cap says with a smile. “You’re fine.”
Phew.
Another good thing is that Jigsaw doesn’t seem to feel any need to move slowly or uncertainly across the rooftop toward the access door. Either he is familiar enough with the location even without his sight, or he just trusts Clint not to steer him wrong, but they make pretty good time reaching Cap, and all three of them get to go inside sooner than Clint had expected.
“Gonna dry you off a bit, Jigs,” he says as he accepts the towel Cap hands him. “That okay?”
At Jigsaw’s nod, Clint carefully dries what he can of Jigsaw’s hair and shoulders, taking care not to press or rub the bandaging over the burns or to jostle his broken right collar bone or the sling his right arm is in. He could probably make good use of the towel to get Jigsaw’s tac gear dry as well, but the material is hardly dripping and he’s not sure what kind of reaction he’d get doing that.
Instead, he gives his own hair a quick rub and calls it good enough.
There’s food to be eaten, better than the protein bar he had on the quinjet when he was too worried about Jigsaw to taste anything anyway. And while there might be a few veggies involved in this food, for the most part it’ll be tasty meat and cheese and salsa, with some chips maybe, and if he’s feeling like it, some refried beans. Maybe he’ll even eat some rice.
Clint’s stomach growls, and Jigsaw reaches over with his left hand to gently pet his abdomen with a little smile.
“I can’t help it,” Clint says. “I’m hungry.”
“We all are,” Cap says as they bypass the lockers and head straight for the elevator. “My stomach was making all kinds of noise earlier. It’s been a long day and not much time for refueling.”
“I’m just glad we’re back and in one piece.” Clint tries not to worry when Jigsaw leans his head back against the elevator wall. Is he that tired? Just taking an opportunity to rest that presents itself? Should they be getting him ready to sleep instead of eating? “As far away as we were, this mission could have lasted days.”
Cap frowns. “I don’t think we’d have made it days in that base. Once we got deep enough into the place, all the traps came out to play. Even without the HYDRA agents, that base was trying to kill us all.”
That’s true enough. And they’ll have to send someone else out there to take the base fully offline, too. Warned about the traps, it should be an easier feat. Maybe Phil’s team can tackle it after they find the Insight base in Montana. Take one of the exits that still works. They’d caved in the helicopter entrance when they left through it, so at least the central well portion of the base is harder to access. No elevator at all now, and the bottom of the place filled with rubble.
Hopefully the rest of the base will prove not to be an issue later. But they didn’t have the chance to fully explore every part of the base. For all they know, there’s still a pocket of enemy agents in hiding somewhere in there.
If there are, Clint hopes they starve to death.
But that’s over there, and the smell of beefy goodness is just a little further ahead, along with the sounds of dishes being passed around the table. Mmm. He cannot wait to dig into this meal.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
Portabella mushrooms must be very, very big, because there are slices of mushroom cap that take up the whole middle of a tortilla—which is what the very flat bread circles are called. The mushroom cap slices are just as long as the bell peppers and the onions. It can taste red and green bell peppers, and the onions are definitely the yellow kind of onion. So pretty. It wishes it could see all of the beautiful colors.
It is able to feel with the hands where on the plate the tortillas are, with their juicy, crunchy fillings. The ballerina woman is also eating the mushrooms, and she is sitting to the right of it, where she makes sure that there is always a tortilla with plenty of fillings inside for it to eat after it finishes the one it holds.
There is a horrible acid drink that many of the others are drinking at the table, but there is also water, which is very good and much better than the “soda” that burns and pops in the mouth and hurts the throat going down. It will not drink the soda, not after trying it. “Fizzy” is what the other asset said it was like. But while it did sound full of fizzles, it tasted like pain in the mouth.
There is also the delicious cheese-topped bean mush and the vaguely tomato-flavored rice with random pieces of corn or peas. And chips and salsa. So crunchy and flavorsome. These things, except the chips, it eats with a spoon, poking around on the plate to find out what it is scooping up.
Everything is so good that it does not know how many of the tortillas full of mushrooms, peppers and onions it has eaten before the ballerina woman says that this next one is just veggies because there are no more mushrooms.
It still tastes very good, and it is tempted to eat the next one as well, but even now at a post-mission celebration, it should try to feel a fullness cue. And if it concentrates hard on just the stomach and what the stomach is feeling, to the exclusion of what the mouth is feeling—the mouth is feeling that everything is so tasty and it wants more—it can sense that the stomach is all filled up.
The feeder, Caroline, would want it to think about whether it will eat more after feeling the fullness cue, or whether it will “honor” the fullness cue, meaning accept that its tank is full of fuel and does not need any more right now.
It thinks about it, which is all the feeder has said it must try to do. Will it be uncomfortable later if it eats more now? Will there be more to eat later if it does not eat all there is to eat now? That is the important part, not comfort. If there is not going to be anything later, then it will eat everything now. But if there is still going to be more later, then it can wait and eat more later.
It puts a hand on the other asset to get the other asset’s attention, points down at the plate, and then signs “eat” and “later” with the question sign, careful not to touch the blindfold over the eyes.
“You want to finish everything off later?” the other asset asks.
It nods.
“Sure. We can raid the kitchen for leftovers later tonight, if you want.”
“How can you even be thinking about eating leftovers?” the hamburger technician says with a groan from somewhere at the other end of the table. “Even you have to be stuffed, Jigsby.”
It signs “later” again, because the hamburger technician must not have been looking at it when it signed that before. Not now. Now it is honoring a fullness cue. But later, if it is hungry again… It needs to be sure there will be some of this delicious food available. That it will not get thrown away.
It cannot see what the hamburger technician is doing, but the silence in response means that the hamburger technician is probably making his face scrunch up, or is shaking his head in disbelief still.
“We’ve got plenty of leftovers, Jigsaw,” the ballerina woman says. It sounds like she is facing away from it, so she is probably looking at the hamburger technician to make her point. “Even if some people don’t want any.”
Especially if some people don’t want any. It can eat a tortilla with just the rice and the bean mush and some cheese, and maybe some salsa. There do not have to be mushrooms to have a delicious fajita.
Chapter 89: Therapists | Don’t you wonder sometimes ‘bout sound and vision
Notes:
Chapter title from “Sound and Vision” by David Bowie.
Thanks to resourceress7 for reading Zoe's section and walking me through the ideas I'd gotten wrong, and the ones I'd gotten right. That section has been almost entirely rewritten now. And it became huge! I haven't had a chance to polish this thing up much beyond that, so apologies for typos and the like. This is one of those "extra bonus chapters" that came from readers commenting that they would like to see what the therapy team's response is. ^_^
Chapter Text
Yasmin
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 9:30 p.m.—
Yasmin frowns at her phone, where the JARVIS app has relayed its message to the therapy team group chat.
There was always a good chance that the Avengers’ mission would go well into Thursday between the mission itself, the travel back to the Tower, and the need to debrief after arriving. She’d thought they might even need to sleep on the mission itself—it hadn’t been clear what kind of mission this was, so there was every possibility they’d have broken it into two days or even longer.
So she wasn’t expecting them to be back this soon. Not by a long shot. They’ve just touched down on the roof, though, and are on their way to refuel after their mission and before debrief.
It’s likely, based on the timing, that she will have a session with Jigsaw tomorrow morning, after all. If the team had arrived much later tonight or into the small hours of tomorrow, she’d have canceled their morning session so that Jigsaw could sleep more, whether he thought he needed it or not.
As it is… she decides that she will wait for him in the therapy room tomorrow morning, and if he opts to sleep in for maximum recovery, she’ll accept that. But if he does want to have a session with her, she’ll be ready for it. Or as ready for it as she can be.
Apparently, he’s been injured during the course of the mission—confronted with one of his primary abusers and nearly “wiped” again by this monster. The wipe itself appears to have been ineffective for some reason, and she’s beyond thankful for this, but it does seem to have left him blinded. JARVIS assures them that this is in all likelihood temporary.
She wishes she could say she wasn’t expecting Jigsaw to return injured, but she can’t. Jigsaw is likely to have put his mission objectives above his personal safety, right up until his abuser made himself known. Then he’ll have either frozen or fled. Perhaps the one and then the other.
Yasmin wonders why he wasn’t able to escape “B-RUM.” He can’t have escaped if he was dragged to a chair and wiped, after all. Perhaps his abuser overpowered him from a distance—and maybe Jigsaw has sustained more injuries that JARVIS has not mentioned—and then was able to relocate Jigsaw to the chair with the halo, the “white electric fire,” as Jigsaw calls it.
Perhaps there were many enemies who were able to overwhelm him. Perhaps…
Yasmin shakes her head and puts her phone away.
It doesn’t help anything to speculate. The salient points are that Jigsaw encountered an abuser he feared above almost anyone, that he was not wiped successfully, and that he has sustained significant eye injuries.
She had been thinking if he was injured on this mission, it would be another gunshot wound, or possibly a burn from a laser weapon or something. She’s not sure what sort of weapons the enemy would have. But she’d thought any injury he sustained would be something more traditional, less related to his very person being stripped from his body by one of those chair-and-halo combinations.
Traditional injuries, she can unpack with him. She can help him process the injury itself, any behaviors that might have contributed to the injury—whether that be self-sacrifice for the sake of another, or lax self-defense in pursuit of the mission objectives, or even just an honest mistake or ill fortune—and any hang-ups that might result in that injury.
Particularly, she can help him pick apart the internal voice telling him that he deserves an injury or earned one, that an injury is a punishment or lesson.
But she can’t do anything with a wipe. A wipe is just that, from what her initial briefing described—a slate wiped clean. All progress, gone. All connections, severed. All learnings, erased.
She can’t put Jigsaw back into his mind after a successful wipe any more than she can move the moon.
Would she still do what she could for him? Still try to help him process everything? Absolutely. However heartbreaking it would be to lose all of the progress they’ve made together, she would strive to achieve that progress again, even from the first steps.
She’s certain Zoe and Caroline would feel similarly. But she’s not sure what would be left after a wipe to even be worked with. Jigsaw had his name and his personality when she started working with him. Had his love of pizza, which she could use to get through to him.
Yasmin looks at the treasure box on her bookshelf. Inside are several scrapbook pages, some pictures Jigsaw drew for her, the construction paper pizzas that were the first time he’d agreed to engage with her…
She cannot imagine starting over from scratch without even the foundations of a name—an identity as “this asset” that has to be protected from being “the Bucky.” If there was nothing there, just an asset rather than this particular asset… It would be a nearly insurmountable challenge getting through to him.
So close, if B-RUM got him into a chair under a halo and tried to wipe him. They were so close to losing everything they’ve worked for—every scrap of effort Jigsaw has put into his recovery. And it’s been considerable effort from the beginning, before she even entered the picture, before the Avengers even entered the picture.
Recovery isn’t linear, and is full of backtracking to explore ground that was too quickly covered the first time or times, yes. And it’s more accurately visualized as an upward spiral some days. But for the tremendously successful recovery spiral Jigsaw has been climbing to be turned into a precipitous plummet to depths she hasn’t even seen… It’s unthinkable.
But she will need to think on it. Will need to be prepared to discuss it, whenever Jigsaw is ready to bring it up—or else will need to be prepared to bring it up for him if he is too resistant to the idea for too long. This event will have reawakened deep traumas, and she can’t hold off discussing it so long that it becomes another layer of buried trauma.
It can’t be allowed to settle like that. It might be days before Jigsaw is able to confront just how close he came to losing everything. But she can’t let it become weeks. This is best addressed when it’s fresh.
And even without the chair and halo, the wipe attempt, there’s B-RUM himself. She doesn’t name this man around Jigsaw, though they’ve discussed him many times. She’s not even sure what his full name is. Jigsaw has described him as the leader of STRIKE Alpha, one of the HYDRA teams hiding inside S.H.I.E.L.D. He’s explained that the name B-RUM is a signature, that all of his primary abusers over the years have carved or burned their letters into him.
To Jigsaw, B-RUM is a handler, someone who has hurt him more than many of the others over the years. There are many letter combinations that have played similar roles, from A-PIE to D-TOL to З-ЗЕЛ in faint Cyrillic letters—a surgeon, from his descriptions—but the ones he has been most affected by are B-RUM and C-BAR.
And when she asked him what letters an “Adam Smith” might have, he had asked to see the name, and then written back for her A-SMI. So she knows the pattern of the signatures, and knows that eventually, C-BAR will come up as a problem.
C-BAR is, or was, another leader of double-agents in STRIKE, but not a handler despite his “privilege” to hurt Jigsaw. And even though he’s dead and destroyed, his letters will someday become a problem when Jigsaw or Clint—more probably Clint—realizes that Clint’s own name would parse into that same letter combination. That may have already happened for Clint, if he’s seen the letters.
Yasmin doubts it will be a case where the actual C-BAR is conflated with Clint—Jigsaw is very good at keeping people straight in his mind, and Clint occupies a disproportionally large amount of his attention, enough that he wouldn’t be blended with anyone else. But there will need to be some discussion of this, and it might be because it’s Clint who has an issue with it.
And Clint… Clint plays such a large role in Jigsaw’s life. Possibly too large a role at times. That’s something she’ll need to address if they become too codependent, but it’s an issue for some other time. Right now, Clint is going to be playing an even larger role than usual, and rightly so. Jigsaw will naturally depend on him more while he’s healing, and that’s fine.
Good, even. Because Clint is the key to Jigsaw accepting personhood.
Clint is “the other asset,” yes, as far as Jigsaw is concerned. But he’s also well aware of his own personhood, and that she knows of, he hasn’t denied being a person in order to appease Jigsaw’s need to be “the same as” him. Clint occupies both roles, whether Jigsaw acknowledges the person role.
If Clint can occupy both roles, can be an asset and a person, then Jigsaw will likely be tempted to follow him into both roles so that they aren’t different from each other on such a fundamental level.
So she walks the line between encouraging Jigsaw to be his own individual self and allowing Jigsaw to define himself in light of what Clint is to him.
In time, she’s sure this will pay off.
First, help Jigsaw come to the understanding that not even an asset could have deserved what’s happened to him over the years—over the decades. The theft of his voice, the rapes, and everything else. The mind control, the loss of autonomy. The constant fear of punishment around every corner. The deprivation and dehumanization.
Then, help Jigsaw accept that he is not merely an asset, but is an asset and a person. That way, if he ever falls back into thinking that he is an asset only, he has already accepted that he did not and does not deserve what’s happened to him.
If she focuses on personhood too soon, Jigsaw might take refuge in his identity as an asset to combat the cognitive dissonance. He’s already done so on many occasions, prompting her to include assets alongside people when she speaks.
So. Not even an asset should ever be put under a halo. Not even by a handler. Not even an asset deserves to be blinded, if that’s the nature of his eye injuries. Not even an asset should be “taught a lesson” through pain. Order should not come through pain. Not for anyone, not even assets.
Yasmin sighs. Tomorrow morning might come entirely too soon. But at least her patient is alive, is aware, is himself. Hopefully he will have gotten to use his sensory grounding kit, which will have appealed to those senses he retained. It will be alright.
She has some modeling clay. Perhaps she’ll bring that to her sessions for a while to bring out when needed. It should give him something to channel his emotions into, without needing to see the results the way he might feel he needs to do with some of their other crafts.
And he’s bound to have a lot of emotions pent up after this mission.
Zoe
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
Zoe sets her phone on the table and fetches her notebook from its place on the shelf. It’s the third such notebook dedicated to Jigsaw’s journey toward more effective communication, and it’s getting near the end of its working life. Soon she’ll need to switch to a fresh one to jot out her ideas for new activities and variations on the games in their repertoire, her notes from their sessions, her theories on what will work best at any give twist and turn in the journey.
She turns to a fresh page.
What might Jigsaw need right now to be able to effectively communicate with others? He can still sign, assuming that his grasp on ASL hasn’t been eroded by an unsuccessful “wipe.”
She really hates that term. It’s too gentle for what actually happens, at least as far as she understands what a wipe entails. That kind of electricity and the damage stemming from it should not be able to share space with gently wiping something away.
And a person should not be one of the things that can be wiped away.
Zoe turns her attention back toward the problems she can work to solve. Jigsaw can’t see. They don’t know how long this will last. It’s true that he heals quickly—the gunshot wound hardly took a week, if she recalls correctly. But eyes are different, and maybe he will need to further augment his communication for longer.
Regardless, even if he’s only unable to see clearly for a day, he still deserves to be able to communicate with those around him. He’ll have important things to convey to others—to Yasmin in the morning, to Clint and the rest of the team, to whoever is serving as his doctor. He needs to be able to tell people when and where he hurts. He needs to be able to express his emotions and perhaps some of what happened on the mission.
And he will need to communicate with others, perhaps, about what he might want to eat, or how he might want to spend his time. He might want to ask questions about what is going on because he can’t see what is going on.
It will be important for the team to do their part. Letting him know when they’re actually looking at him and can see his signs. Letting him know when they enter a room or when they are leaving. Even letting him know what they are doing with their faces, or what they’re feeling. Jigsaw won’t know whether they can see his signs, and if they don’t respond, he won’t know what that means. And it can only help for someone to tell him they’re worried or happy or shrugging.
So. That should be put out as a memo for the Avengers team, and tonight. It might not reach them until the morning, but it should be waiting there for them so that they can start doing these things for Jigsaw right away.
And it might be good for the team to continue doing some of these things even after Jigsaw’s eyesight is restored, because it can be hard to know how people are feeling and easy to misinterpret things. The less misinterpretation the better.
What else would be helpful?
The feelings wheel. Jigsaw knows by sight where the various emotions are on the chart, by color, distance from the center, and location around the circle. But that won’t translate well without the ability to see what he’s pointing at. And there are so many small slices of the circle.
She’ll have a large printout made of the innermost circle. That should give him something he can navigate with his fingers, so long as there are some symbols to feel. And his Feelings board on the tablet already has different basic symbols for many of the feelings. Some of those might be adaptable to tactile symbols if she hot glues the shapes in the appropriate wedges.
Jigsaw can feel a happy face, a sad face, a surprised face. Maybe she can cut out some velcro to be an angry face, maybe sandpaper for a fearful face. There are lots of supplies in the therapy room from all of his scrapbooking efforts. She’ll have a lot of textures to choose from.
She really wishes Jigsaw hadn’t had such a bad reaction to the feelings stones. She still has them, a whole bag of them, each a different shape and size with a different emotion carved in one side. Jigsaw would have been familiar enough with them by now to select his feeling words by touch without needing to see the feelings wheel or locate the signs he needs when he needs them.
But a modified feelings wheel should at least prove helpful if he can’t get the ASL signs he knows to come to him when he calls them up.
It would be helpful if he could use the tablet to the fullest extent, as well. Sometimes pointing to something is just the easiest way to communicate, and he’s done so well with the AAC program they customized for him.
There is VoiceOver compatibility there, though. That’s something she’ll need to work with him on, rather than simply have Tony turn it on remotely and let Jigsaw struggle with it. They can walk through how to run a fingertip over the tiles on the tablet and hear whatever voice he chooses read out the selections to him.
Or if he prefers not to have the tablet read out to him what his options are as he searches for the words he wants to say, there are keyguards. Tony could print one out with ease and it would fit right over the tablet when he wants to use the AAC app. He could count the tiles down and across and find the one he wants based on where it is supposed to be. Jigsaw does have a good grasp on where many of his favorite words are located.
Zoe makes another line across the page and writes her separate requests for Tony under the line. The top of the page is for the Avengers team as a whole, and she’ll have JARVIS send that out soon. The middle section is for her own task list with the feelings wheel. And the bottom will be for Tony, including the keyguard, verifying the VoiceOver capabilities of the tablet, and modifying the various games on the tablet.
The sorting game is one Jigsaw enjoys greatly, and it will be easy enough to move the categories to the cardinal directions on the tablet’s screen, have them read out by the tablet, and instruct him to drag the items in the center up, down, left, or right to the appropriate basket. Each item would be described by the tablet at the beginning of the round.
Even the game she was planning to introduce at their next session, a modified variant of hangman called Snowman, can be made more accessible. Rather than have him select letters from a row of them, he can sign the letters and she or whoever is playing with him can enter them. Perhaps even JARVIS could assist if Jigsaw wanted to play by himself. JARVIS should be able to read his signing and transmit the responses to the tablet.
That will help Jigsaw work on his fingerspelling, even though she doubts he will ever approach proficiency with that. Letters are tricky for Jigsaw, and will probably always be tricky.
What else does she have on hand that she can work on with him while he recovers his sight? She didn’t come prepared to work with visually impaired clients, after all. She’d prepared for the specific client she was going to be working with in person, and vision issues weren’t part of the situation at the time. She doubts she’d have been the best candidate for the job, if they had been part of it.
How can she help him retain his drawing abilities? Jigsaw sometimes doesn’t have access to words and uses his notebook to draw when the tablet is too much screen for him. A tactile drawing board would be ideal. She remembers from a former colleague that there are papers that swell up when drawn on, or when put through a copier. That might do. But she has a feeling that an actual tactile drawing board would be a better option.
Something to have JARVIS source for her. It may have to come from APH, but she has every faith in JARVIS’s ability to overnight something suitable, and Tony’s willingness to pay the charges for it. There may even be options in the City. It’s a big place, after all.
Zoe flips the page over and makes her list for JARVIS. She’ll send in her request after she’s finished with her brainstorming.
What else is there?
Maybe some preventive things should be considered as well as the reactive things.
She thinks about the hand signals they’d agreed on for combat situations—different from the ones STRIKE or the military use, unique to this team. Were they useful on the mission, or was there no opportunity to use them?
If there was a wipe, however unsuccessful, meaning something called a halo fitting over his head and literally wiping his memories away, then Jigsaw was captured during the mission.
Does that mean he was ambushed? Does that mean he was overwhelmed in a fight? Does that mean the mission itself went so horribly that none of his teammates were able to help him? Her impression of Jigsaw is that he’s more than proficient in a fight, capable of explosive action on a hair trigger.
But also that he tends toward freezing when faced with certain triggers, so perhaps that’s what happened. Faced with an enemy he feared and had been conditioned to submit to, maybe he froze. Maybe the team couldn’t come to his aid because he couldn’t signal to them that he needed their help.
The team is supposed to look to him regularly during combat to see any signals he makes, but this is the first combat the team has seen since the signals were agreed on. Maybe they need more practice with combat signals.
She’s not an expert in combat itself, but she does know her way around tactical hand signals used in combat situations. Maybe she wouldn’t be welcome to work with the team on this, but maybe they will agree to have her lead a training session with the whole team together, and not Clint and Jigsaw in one group and the rest of them as time permits in their schedules.
She’d like to encourage some practice rounds where the team only communicates visually. It’ll have to wait until Jigsaw’s eyesight improves, but it could be very important for future missions, especially if that’s something that went wrong on this mission.
And if the signals are something Jigsaw wasn’t able to access during his distress, maybe there is another form of communication he can use during combat situations. Maybe a miniature tablet with some pre-set options that would transmit to their comm devices. Something like a smartwatch, with buttons he could press.
He’d have to remember which buttons corresponded to which statements, but with practice, he could do that. And if he was too distressed to pick any one option, he could press many in turn, which would alert the team that something was wrong even if not what was wrong.
In the long term, the whole Avengers team should probably have some alternate modes of communication for when one of them is injured and loses a sense or two, however temporarily.
What if something else goes wrong during a different mission? What if the team is trapped in the dark? How will Jigsaw communicate to them? She’d tried teaching him Morse code to use while tapping against someone’s hand or a comm device, but Jigsaw had even more trouble with those letters than with fingerspelled letters. He can draw letters on people’s palms, but he struggles with those letters as well.
Where Jigsaw excels is when a sign forms more of a picture with movement and less of a spelled out series of signed letters. They’ve made many unique signs for things that would otherwise be spelled out, starting with Clint’s evil-squid for HYDRA.
Handshapes sometimes give him pause, but taps come naturally to him, so long as they aren’t meant to be spelling anything out.
She’s seen Jigsaw’s original communication system of “one finger, two fingers” used as one tap or two taps against Clint’s thigh or shoulder for “yes and no,” respectively, during their sessions. And she knows from Jigsaw that they sometimes communicate at night this way without needing to turn the lamps on. Clint will ask questions and Jigsaw will tap his answers out on Clint somewhere.
Tactile signing would give them more opportunity in the future for further communication in those situations. Importantly, it should give Jigsaw more opportunity to contribute to the communication and express himself rather than merely reacting to Clint’s expressions. It’s something for another time, though. Once the immediate and pressing needs have been met.
But yes. She can make the most out of this setback in Jigsaw’s recovery. They nearly lost everything, according to JARVIS’s message, but they can use this as a signal to move even more aggressively in helping Jigsaw communicate.
Caroline
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
Caroline finishes putting the finishing touches on her lesson plan for Friday and closes the Notes app on her phone. The message from JARVIS is there on the screen still, read but not yet dismissed.
She reads it again and is gratified that it does not bring her to tears this time.
A wipe. The worst case scenario in a mission is death, of course, but a successful wipe—from what she understands of the process and results—would be a kind of death. It would have been the death of Jigsaw as Jigsaw, maybe.
And she’s gotten attached to this client. They’ve made so much progress from that first session where he was afraid of her, afraid to sit down, resistant to even being named and afraid that his resistance would be punished.
She can’t stand the thought that she came so close to losing that progress—and that client—in a mission.
She supposes there will always be a chance that some enemy will get in a lucky shot, will be more successful at it than the man who shot him on that earlier mission. It’s part of the dangers of being an Avenger and going on missions.
But there’s a difference, somehow, when someone is in danger of being erased. Not just shot or injured severely enough to die, but to be plucked from his mind and cast aside by whatever horrible amounts of electricity are needed to run a halo. All so that an empty imitation of him can be made to follow orders that run counter to his very nature.
Caroline shudders. It’s not right. Nothing about the wipes and the halos is right, and it shouldn’t be possible. It’s not right that it’s possible, and it’s less right still that it almost happened just today.
She’s glad that Jigsaw has a dessert book now. Something sweet and new during their session will give him something to look forward to, something to put in his books, something to share with Clint afterward.
The introduction of ice cream helped lighten Jigsaw’s mood earlier after a heavy session with Yasmin, and she is hoping that an introduction to cake will help lighten Jigsaw’s mood after this mission. And she’ll line up some new fruits for him to try as well. Not both in the same session. She’ll wait on the fruit until she knows that Jigsaw can see it properly.
Maybe lychees or rambutans. Those will have interesting textures and flavors as well as being visually appealing. And more kiwis. Jigsaw is fascinated by kiwis. A pomegranate will be something he can pick at and enjoy, and it’s been a while since he had a daikon radish, but she knows he enjoyed it.
Perhaps on Tuesday, they can eat these things. It will depend on his vision, of course. She’ll have to see how he’s doing on Friday during their session, and gauge things from there.
But in the meantime, cake. She’s got a contact at a cupcake shop who will be able to supply her with a wide variety of flavors and frostings to sample with Jigsaw on Friday, and they’ll have some edamame and tempura vegetables for their meal. Perhaps some tofu as well.
And she’ll discuss fullness cues with him again while they eat. Caroline is interested to know how the post-mission meal has gone, if the team did that this time. She remembers the Italian food they had after that earlier mission, where Jigsaw ate with the portion of the team that was in the Tower, rather than wait for leftovers.
She hopes that he has eaten with the team.
Meals are a tremendous social opportunity, and she has tried repeatedly to push for him to make the most of those opportunities, rather than eat with just his closest friends on the team. It’s good that he and Clint have folded Natasha into their meals, but Caroline would like to see the whole team eating together.
It should help him see the others as a team he’s a part of rather than a team he is apart from except for special occasions like missions. The more community they can build in Avengers Tower, the better things will be for all of them, but particularly for Jigsaw.
Maybe this near-disaster will bring them closer together.
Chapter 90: Jigsaw | Take comfort in your friends
Notes:
Chapter title from “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
Content warning below in the end notes!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
They are not going to the therapy room to meet with the expert with the signs—Zoe. It is after the team dinner, and so it is time to go to the therapy room, but they are going to the rooms for assets instead. The other asset says that it is too late at night for the session with Zoe, anyway. It does not seem to be able to tell that time is passing, but the other asset is probably right. It trusts the other asset. The other asset has a phone that tells the time.
Going to the rooms for assets instead of the therapy room is probably the right thing to be doing, since it does not have any way to see the tablet with the blindfold over the eyes, and anyway, it is very, very tired. So tired it could sleep right inside the tac gear and not even take it off before crawling into the other asset’s nest.
And everything is tired, too, not just parts of it. It remembers that it ran and ran—ran from B-RUM—but the legs are not more tired than the rest of it. And the lungs are not more tired, either, though they ache and burn still with every breath. All of the muscles are equally tired, and the head is tired. That does not make sense, but neither does the blindfold.
It is too tired to find the answer to what must have happened. All it knows is that it enjoys the other asset’s arm around the middle as the other asset guides it along.
“Here we are, Jigs,” says the other asset finally as the door is opened. “Home sweet home.”
There is not a jingle of collar tags or a mrrp from the little cat, no cold nose pressed up to a hand or faint pitter-patter of running footsteps, no huff of breath or thump of tail or anything at all. Just emptiness in the room for assets. It can hear the hum of the refrigerator, the slight, tiny sounds the lights make coming on, the other asset’s footsteps going around it.
But there is no sound of life, no little creatures. No dog, and no little cat. So empty.
It knows they brought the dog and the little cat to the auction woman’s room before the mission so that she could watch over them while they were gone. But they are back now. It wants the little creatures back, too. Then the rooms for assets would be home-sweet-home for real.
“You coming in?”
It goes into the rooms for assets and closes the door behind it. It cannot tell if the other asset is looking at it, but it makes the name signs of the dog and the little cat, makes the question sign. Just in case.
“…They’re with Katie-Kate, remember?”
Yes, it does. It may not remember everything, but it did not forget everything. It nods, then makes the question sign again and taps the wrist.
“Oh.” The other asset sounds so relieved. Why? Did the other asset think that it had forgotten something as important as where the dog and the little cat are? Maybe the other asset did think that. It has forgotten so much, after all. Cannot even remember how it was injured.
“I think we should get out of our tac gear and into real clothes before we bring them back in. Then I’ll go fetch them, and you can stay here and rest.”
It does not agree with the other asset that they should wait to bring the dog and the little cat back, but that is fine. They do not always have to agree. Yasmin says they are both individuals—individual assets, she obviously means—and do not have to be the same in every way in order to be the same as.
And it is too tired to argue with the other asset, anyway. So they will wait. The auction woman might not even know they are back yet. And she was very good with the dog and the little cat earlier, so it knows that she will not mind watching over them a little longer. She had agreed to watch over the dog and the little cat for even a whole night and another day, or longer.
It can wait until the other asset says that it is time to go get them.
The other asset is taking off tac gear, piece by piece, and occasionally hissing—probably when a piece of tac gear presses into the other asset’s injured hand. How did the other asset injure that hand? It does not remember.
It can hear the boots thudding to the floor when the other asset throws them into a corner of the other asset’s nesting room. So messy, the other asset. Everything in piles where it lands instead of carefully put into the exact right place. Another way they are different while still being the same as.
It should be doing the same thing, taking off the tac gear, not just standing by the sofa. Maybe not throwing boots around, though. It will put the boots in the closet that is just for it. Yes. Lined up as a pair, just inside the closet door. Easy to grab if it needs them again soon.
It goes through the living room slowly, in the direction it remembers, to the room that is just for it, just for this asset. It feels around for the door and goes inside, and then goes to the closet door. It knows the way this room is arranged, does not need to see anything to go to the right place. Everything is exactly where it should be, and there is a lot of empty space to maneuver.
It still bumps into the wall and has to correct course, back up and then open the closet door.
It should take the tac gear off now. The boots, to start. They will go into the closet. Or maybe the vest with all of the buckles and straps. It does not have the killing face right now, so that cannot be the first thing it takes off.
It should take the tac gear off now. But.
But if it takes the tac gear off, it will be vulnerable again. B-RUM might come for it, and it will not have anything to protect it from B-RUM. Nothing to serve as a barrier between them, a signal that it is not time for the fun, that it is not time for any punishments, that it is not meant to be a chandelier of asset but is on a mission.
Is… is not safe, perhaps, but is as safe as an asset can be when confronted by an irate handler.
B-RUM was there. It knows. Was there and chased it. That is why it ran and ran. Did not catch it, though. It hurts all over, and is tired all over, but it does not feel like it has been pushed into, does not feel like it has been punished or like there was any fun at all. B-RUM did not catch it, then.
If B-RUM had caught it…
It swallows, hard.
“You need any help, Jigs?” comes the other asset’s voice from the doorway behind it.
That is right. It is just standing here, stupidly, not even staring because the blindfold over the eyes keeps it from doing that. So stupid.
It reaches up to take the blindfold off, and—
“That needs to stay on, Jigs,” the other asset says, walking into the room. “Remember? It’s a bandage to help your eyes heal where they were burned.”
It shakes the head but lets the left arm drop again, feeling defeated and a bit lost. It had not remembered why the blindfold was there. It knows that the eyes and temples hurt, but it did not remember why—that it was burned. And it does not know how it was burned. Does not remember. What else does it not remember?
“Hey, it’s okay,” the other asset says, right by it now and holding onto the metal hand. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
It is not okay, though. The corners of the eyes burn more than the rest of the eyes, burn like they are trying to cry but cannot. Like there is something stuck inside of them, needles maybe, or like there were acid drops. It knows what those are like, and this is close to that but not exactly like it.
It is not, is not, is not okay.
Why can’t it remember? What can’t it remember?
It pulls the metal hand out of the other asset’s hands, tries to sign that the head is empty and there used to be things in it, things it cannot remember now, things like the blindfold-bandage, things like what happened.
Signing is difficult with the right arm trapped in the sling, only able to move a little bit in making the signs. But it does the best it can, and knows that the other asset will understand.
“Can…” the other asset says, and then stops. “Can we get you ready for sleeping tonight and then talk about what happened? You can’t sleep in your tac gear, Jigs, and I want you to be soft and warm and comfortable before anything else.”
It nods. The other asset wants it to be soft and warm and comfortable, and it wants that, too. But… How can it be soft and warm and comfortable if B-RUM might come for it? Safe is inside of tac gear. Safe is not soft, is not warm, is not comfortable. Safe is safe. Is hard and cold and tightly bound up in leathers and metal plates and a killing face, and weighed down with fangs and talons and even guns.
Safe is…
Safe is with the other asset.
“I’m going to take your boots off, at least, okay?” the other asset asks. “Can I take your boots off?”
It nods, and goes around the nest to the chair that is by the window in the room that is just for it. It sits in the chair. That will make it easier for the other asset to take the boots off of the feet. It just needs to lift up the feet, one at a time, and let the other asset take the boots off. It just needs to… to… It needs to…
“Um,” the other asset says from near the feet. “Could you maybe lift up your right leg a bit? I have these unlaced, but…”
Yes. Of course. The other asset is trying to take the boots off, and it is sitting too stiffly in the chair by the window so that the other asset cannot get the boots off of the feet. Cannot pull the legs out straight so that the boots are in the air and can be slipped off of the feet.
It signs “safe” and asks the question sign.
“Yeah, Jigs.” The other asset gives the right calf a gentle squeeze and then sighs. “You’re like a statue,” the other asset says. “I promise it’s safe. You can relax. No one’s going to come out and get you.”
There’s a pause, and then the other asset is running fingers along the clenched metal fist. Is murmuring that it is alright, that it is safe, that there are no enemies in the hive building. That it does not have to be so tense, to be so wary, to be so worried. That it does not have to be afraid.
And then…
“Rumlow is dead,” the other asset says. “I killed him. Myself. I did it.”
It swallows. It wants to ask how, wants to ask why, wants to ask when. It wants to confirm. Wants to make the sign for “kill” and make sure that it is hearing everything correctly. But the hands will not uncurl from their fists, and the arms will not move, and the whole body will not relax, like every muscle—every so, so tired muscle—is tensed up and cannot stop clenching.
“He—” The other asset stops. Starts over again. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe you needed to do it yourself. I don’t know.”
B-RUM is… is dead?
“What I do know is he was hurting you. And I had to stop him. And the only way I could think to do it was to kill him. I shot him. Twice. With arrows. And I slit his throat when he wouldn’t stop talking. It was trigger words. I couldn’t let him— I was so afraid, Jigs, and all I knew was I had to stop him.”
The other asset is saying that B-RUM is dead.
The other asset does not lie to it. So what the other asset is saying must be true. The other asset shot B-RUM! Put arrows into B-RUM like B-RUM was a target. And then cut into B-RUM’s throat with a glittering talon.
Is B-RUM… dead? Gone? Not a threat anymore?
But B-RUM is always a threat.
“It’s… It’s on the comms, if you want to hear it. JARVIS records pretty much everything, and…” the other asset is saying. “I don’t. I don’t want you to listen to it, though. The words, the trigger words, I don’t want you to hear them. And all the shit he said before. If you don’t have to remember it, that’s good. It’s better that way.”
It tries to nod or to shake the head, something to stop the other asset from talking so that it can ask the other asset to say the part about B-RUM being dead again, but it cannot decide what to do and so all that happens is it sits there all tensed up with all of the muscles so tight they scream about it, silently, inside of the skin.
“He was…”
It can hear the other asset’s voice shaking and wants to reassure the other asset, but it does not know how. Cannot move.
“The things he was saying. It was horrible. Taunting. And making these horrible promises about things that would happen to you, things he was going to do to you. And I just… Don’t listen to the recordings? Please? Just know that he’s dead. Really dead. Really gone. Not coming back.”
It finally manages to swallow, and the metal arm agrees to move a little, to make the fist nod yes because the head cannot do it right now. That is another way to say “yes” that it never uses because it is easier to nod most of the time. But this time the neck does not want to move at all, wants to clench and clench like the jaw until everything hurts so bad.
“Rumlow is dead,” the other asset says. “He’s dead. He’s dead. That’s what matters. He’s dead.”
The metal fist nods and nods.
Yes. B-RUM is dead. Yes. The words are spoken, and that is what matters, and it believes the other asset, it does, it does, but…
But how can it be?
If B-RUM did catch it, if B-RUM was saying the words, was saying those words, if B-RUM was hurting it… then why does it not remember?
It remembers everything about B-RUM, all the lines on B-RUM’s face, the way B-RUM’s teeth form a grin, all of the scars B-RUM has collected on missions, all the contours and veins along B-RUM’s dick, all the different flavors of B-RUM, all of the times B-RUM pushed into it, deep inside of it, with—
With himself and with other things, too. Batons with their white electric fire. Bottles with their sharp edges. Guns and even a knife once.
Alone and with others. Silently or with laughter. Before and after missions. As a lesson or just for fun.
Always carving up the skin and meat on the inner thighs so that the blood flowed freely and always leaving the tallies, the five and the five and the five and the two. The B-RUM big on the one inner thigh, the tallies big on the other, so that every push and shove would send fire shooting along the gashes and not just—
“Jigs?”
It wants to look at the other asset, wants to see what it is the other asset is worried about, but it cannot because there is a blindfold over the eyes. It reaches up to pull the blindfold down and the other asset stops it with a hand wrapped gently around the metal wrist.
“That’s a bandage, Jigsaw. You need to keep it on. At least overnight. Banner and Wilson will take another look tomorrow, okay?”
It sighs. So frustrating.
“Can I take your boots off?”
It nods, and now the head can nod instead of just the fist. The body has relaxed finally, while it was remembering. But the remembering isn’t what is important. It is the new information that is important.
B-RUM is dead. B-RUM is dead. There is no danger left in the world. B-RUM is dead.
It lifts up the right foot so that the other asset can slip off the boot, and then the left foot next. Another boot gone. The other asset does not throw the boots, though, the way the other asset’s own boots were thrown. That is good. It would not be able to see where the boots ended up if they were thrown, not with the blindfold-bandage over the eyes.
“Um, where do you keep your socks?” the other asset asks, pulling down the socks from the feet one by one. “The clean ones, I mean. I know you’re really good about dirty clothes in the hamper.”
It smiles. There is a special kind of sock that the other asset gave it earlier that is so fuzzy and soft and warm, a furry sock, like it has tiny hairs that are thicker than just the stretchy fabric of regular socks. And it keeps those socks in a treasure box.
The other asset has just asked for clean socks, which are in a drawer in the closet that is just for it, but the other asset will be happy to put the special socks on the feet, it knows. The other asset wants it to be soft and warm and comfortable, after all.
It points to the shelf beside it, between the window and the closet that is just for it, and signs “purple” and “shell” and “star” for the other asset, now that it can move freely again. There is a purple treasure box with shells from the sea—Yasmin told it all about them, and about the sea—in the shape of a star on the front.
The other asset hesitates for a moment, and then moves to the side. “That’s a really weird place for your socks, Jigs,” the other asset says, pulling the treasure box off the shelf. “Why not put them in a dresser or— Oh.”
The other asset is quiet for a moment, and then there are sounds of the treasure box being put back on the shelf. “Yeah, let’s put on the really good stuff,” the other asset says. “I had no idea you put these in one of your special boxes.”
There is an odd tone to the other asset’s voice, and it cannot place the tone. There is surprise involved, but also something else. Something warm. It feels like it would be able to understand the tone if it was not wearing a blindfold, but the other asset wants it to keep the blindfold-bandage on all night.
The other asset’s hands are so gentle when the special socks go onto the feet one by one. They were gentle before, when the boots were taken off and the regular socks as well, but they are somehow even more gentle putting on the special socks.
It wiggles the toes on the right foot once the special sock is on all the way, revels in the super-softness of the special fuzzy sock as the toes move inside of it. So warm, so soft, and in a very pretty red that it cannot see because of the blindfold. But it will see the red tomorrow, when it can take the blindfold-bandage off. If the eyes will see colors tomorrow. It does not know what the eyes can see because of the blindfold-bandage.
“Okay,” the other asset says when the second special sock is on the left foot. “That’s a little better, anyway. Can I help you with the rest of your tac gear, or do you want to undo the vest and things by yourself?”
It wants to sleep in the tac gear. It knows that it will be safe if it sleeps in the tac gear. And it is so tired. But they have to put on “civvies” before they can collect the dog and the little cat, and so…
“It’s okay if you want to do this on your own. I can help as much or as little as you’re comfortable with.”
It sucks the lower lip in between the teeth. It hurts all over from the muscles clenching and clenching. It does not want to move enough to get the tac gear off. Does not want to move enough to put soft clothes on afterward, either. And it really does not want to be so vulnerable in between the tac gear and the soft clothes.
But… It remembers when the other asset helped it before, after the earlier mission, with the injury and the bandaging. It does trust the other asset. It can trust the other asset to help it, right? They are both assets, are the same as, are as similar as two assets can possibly be. The other asset would never hurt it. Only wants good things for it. Only wants soft and warm and comfortable things for it.
And the sooner it is ready to get the dog and the little cat…
It can let the other asset help take the tac gear off. It will only be vulnerable for a short while, and the other asset will be right there to protect it the entire time.
And… And B-RUM is dead, is dead, is dead. It will be safe with the other asset.
And B-RUM is dead.
Notes:
Content Warning: There is discussion of Rumlow in this chapter, and also some detailed remembering of what Rumlow used to do to Jigsaw.
Chapter 91: Clint | Make this world a better place if you can
Notes:
Chapter title from “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” by Diana Ross.
It occurred to me that Clint’s injuries on his left hand would have included his fingers and thumb, since he didn’t just put a palm to the halo but grabbed it to pull it off. So I’ve made some tiny edits to prior chapters whenever it mentioned his palm, to have it include the rest. Just an fyi so no one feels like they missed something. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 10 October 2012 | 11:45 p.m.—
Never has he undressed someone this slowly, or for reasons as unsexy as these ones. And never has he been so confused and conflicted while doing so.
Frankly, he’s still kind of surprised that Jigsaw is allowing him to be in the room with him for this, let alone to help him with it.
Given how upset Jigsaw had been back in the quinjet in North Carolina when Clint had taken off his armored vest and how hesitant he’d been that evening when Clint helped him with the bandaging later, Clint had sort of been assuming he’d never see a single, solitary inch of Jigsaw beyond what was medically necessary.
And he’d been getting to be pretty okay with the idea of that, mostly because he worried about how upset he’d be seeing whatever scarring there was scattered around the rest of Jigsaw’s body. Clint doesn’t need any help avoiding what he wants to avoid, after all. He’s only brave when others stand to benefit from it, not when he would.
So when Jigsaw tries on the clothes Natasha occasionally buys him, Clint doesn’t expect to see anything but the final result. And when Jigsaw comes to bed for the night, Clint doesn’t expect to see anything more intimate than his bare feet. And when Jigsaw gets injured on a mission, Clint doesn’t expect to see anything at all, which is why seeing Jigsaw’s full bare torso after the North Carolina mission is what it took to get him to actually realize he wanted to see more.
And now?
Now he’s setting aside a leather tactical vest that really does resemble bondage gear more than tac gear, and he’s getting ready to lift up the soft woolen undershirt beneath it so that Jigsaw can get it off without jostling his broken collar bone too badly.
And his fingers are fucking shaking because this is somehow more intimate than anything he’s done with Jigsaw so far, and it’s just a fucking shirt for fuck’s sake. Jigsaw is trusting him despite his fear, is trusting him with this, with his vulnerability, with his bare skin. And while he’s confused and injured, on top of that. It’s almost so intimate that Clint can’t stand it.
And what’s more, it’s not something he hasn’t seen before, either in general or in specific, just in different circumstances.
Jigsaw’s been shirtless in front of him before—and Clint tries not to remember the way his own stomach had flipped over seeing Jigsaw’s bare stomach with its smattering of carved tally marks when he was bandaging the gunshot wound. Jigsaw doesn’t need him to be unsettled here; if anything, Jigsaw is depending on him to be very, very stable about everything.
Jigsaw’s shirt has flipped up while he’s been upside down in the gym—and Clint tries to push aside the way those scars made him feel about everything in that moment. The way the C-BAR across the small of Jigsaw’s back had made him grimace. Jigsaw doesn’t need him to grimace right now, even if it’s unlikely he’d be able to tell with the bandage over his eyes.
Jigsaw’s pulled his shirt up to show him the healing gunshot wound, even—and Clint tries to forget the way he’d blushed at the sight. Jigsaw doesn’t need that shit. What Jigsaw needs is for him to get a hold of himself and address the situation at hand, which is anything but sexy and stomach-flipping, anything but blush-worthy. But somehow so damn intimate.
And it’s not even Jigsaw in specific. He’s seen lots of naked people in his time.
Everything from fellow circus performers between sets getting into different costumes to fellow agents getting cleaned up after a sweaty gym session. Nothing to see here, we’ve all got parts on display, move along. Very businesslike.
And everything from one night stands getting playful with the strip tease to his actual ex-wife wandering out of the bathroom to put on clothes for the day. Except Bobbi wasn’t his ex at that point. But still. In those situations, it was more everything to see here, check out these parts I’m displaying, please do linger. Not businesslike at all.
But he’s seen naked people. It’s not a big deal. He’s been seen as a naked person, too, even by Captain America himself what seems like a lifetime ago when the man woke him up in the middle of the night to get the scoop on S.H.I.E.L.D.
But the idea that it might be Jigsaw who is naked is somehow this weird jumble of disconcerting and enticing. Disconcerting because it’s enticing, actually. Clint doesn’t want to be turned on right now. He wants to help Jigsaw get into comfortable clothes with the minimum amount of pain possible. So that he can sleep well and deeply, and try to heal from what happened on the mission.
He’s trying to get the mission-smelling tac gear off and the comfortable home-smelling civilian gear on. Jigsaw’s got a great sense of smell. He can probably smell the stress and the concrete and the air and maybe even that gas residue on his tac gear, and Clint doesn’t want him marinating in that overnight. He wants Jigsaw to feel comfortable and smell comforting things like clean clothes and their rooms.
He’s trying to care for his partner, not get intimate with his partner. But the two are getting muddled in his brain somehow.
If it was some other situation, maybe, if it wasn’t Jigsaw with injuries, if it wasn’t Jigsaw clearly reluctant and scared, then the enticing part would make sense. But it is Jigsaw with injuries, Jigsaw who is clearly reluctant and scared, and Clint cannot help but feel horrified at that part of his brain that is somehow enticed despite all of this.
What kind of sick freak is he? Jigsaw deserves so, so much better than him. Jigsaw is trusting him, is counting on him, is depending on him, and some stupid shithead part of his brain is conflating this incredibly intimate situation with nakedness and not just lack of clothes and trust.
Clint musters up a monumental amount of effort and puts it all toward shoving the hurricane of thoughts out of his head. None of that is helping the situation, and a lot of it is doing the opposite of helping. Better he doesn’t think at all than that he has those thoughts.
“You ready to get this shirt off, Jigs?” he asks. “I figure we’ll go up a bit, get your left arm clear, and then over your head and down off your right arm last. Might be the least amount of jostling that way.”
Jigsaw nods, biting his lower lip almost hard enough to split it.
That’s a fear thing, Clint knows. It’s not about flirting—Jigsaw doesn’t know about flirting—it’s not a seductive nibble on a lip to plump it up for kissing, it’s not sexy. Clint would love it if it was, someday, but maybe that’s a thing they’ll never get to, and it’s definitely not what’s happening now. It’s about nerves now. About uncertainty despite trust.
And damn it, Clint is going to earn Jigsaw’s trust. He’s going to be the kind of person all of Jigsaw’s therapists would be pleased to see him in a relationship with. He’s going to be the person Jigsaw deserves to be with, not the sad-sack waste of space that he’s actually with.
Clint places his right hand at Jigsaw’s side and gently tugs the shirt up from where it’s tucked in, and then tries to ignore the hitched breath and gritted teeth—he can’t hear them grinding, but he can see the clenched jaw muscles. He pretends that Jigsaw is breathing normally and isn’t breathing like a rabbit all fast and shallow.
This has to be so hard for his roommate—his partner—and Clint is going to make it as easy as he can. What would his captors have been doing or saying while stripping him for the rapefest that followed missions? Rumlow had called him “sweetheart” over the comms. At least that’s something Clint can avoid.
“You’re doing great, Jigs,” Clint says as he works with Jigsaw to get the metal arm down through the armhole. “I’m right here, and we’re alone. Just you and me—couple of assets getting some tac gear off. That’s all.”
That’s all this is. So what if he’s standing right in Jigsaw’s personal space? So what if he has his hands all over Jigsaw’s prosthesis? So what if he’s got his fingers bunching Jigsaw’s shirt up and guiding it over his head?
“Going to be careful of that bandage,” Clint says as Jigsaw lowers his left arm. He pulls the neck of the shirt wider to avoid dislodging the bandage or catching against his ears. “You want to try wearing one of my button-ups to bed instead of one of your shirts? Might be easier to get on.”
It’ll definitely be easier to get on, Clint knows. But it won’t be nearly as soft and comfortable as one of the stretchy knit shirts Natasha bought him. Or a hoodie. But it might be something he can easily put on himself and take off himself, which might be worth it.
Jigsaw manages a nod, but only after a long pause. Maybe he’s freezing up again. He did that earlier, with the boots, when Clint first tried to get them off. Was fixed in that chair like he was made of marble, and Clint hadn’t been able to get his foot up to slip the boot off. Clint isn’t sure what he’d been thinking about then, and he’s not sure what he’s thinking about now, but…
“We can try one of your shirts instead,” Clint says. “Maybe the same basic order, but in reverse. Get it over your right arm, then your head, then your left arm?”
If it was Clint, he’d just forgo a shirt entirely until it was necessary. But Jigsaw is definitely not Clint, and while he doesn’t seem to have any modesty issues around clothes, he definitely has a whole host of other issues around them. Or around the lack of them. Sleeping shirtless is… Maybe it’s not something he’ll ever be able to do. But at least it’s not happening now, and that’s what’s important.
Jigsaw shakes his head and then mimes a row of buttons going up the center of his chest. He points to his pile of pillows and blankets, and Clint frowns before following his motion with his eyes.
Oh. There is a button-up in the pile. That is so weird. He hasn’t worn a button-up in ages, not since his ribs finally healed up, and he can’t think of why Jigsaw would have a rumpled old shirt in his pillow pile still. But who is he to argue?
“Got it,” Clint says.
He takes a step back and then turns to pull the shirt out of the bedding by its sleeve. It’s the shirt he wore when meeting Kate for the first time. Sheesh. This thing’s been here for months.
“Let’s get this on before we tackle anything else, okay?” he asks.
This way, at least Jigsaw won’t be left with just his socks at any point. The last thing he wants is for Jigsaw to feel more vulnerable than he needs to. And if a wrinkled old shirt from a couple months ago is what it takes to serve as a shield against the terror of being stripped for “fun” times, then a wrinkled old shirt will have to do.
And if it ensures that Clint only has to see part of Jigsaw’s scar collection at a time, that’s an added bonus. The C-BAR isn’t even going to factor into things at this rate. Just the others, and the scars all along his shoulder where the prosthetic arm joins up.
And at least the painkillers are making it easier for him to move his left hand around. Sure, his hand still twinges when he presses against the bandaging or stretches his hand out too wide and pulls at the burn across his palm, but he can do up some buttons, surely, even if every one of them is a fiddly pain in the ass that sends shooting pains up from his fingertips to his brain.
And it’s a long shirt, too, with shirttails that come down over Jigsaw’s hips. It pays to be taller than his partner, even if he’s not quite as thick in the torso.
Clint shoves that thought out of his head before it even gets a toe in the door. He’s not going to consider how well-built his roommate is before taking his roommate’s tac pants off. He just isn’t. Not the time, not the place, not the situation, not the thought he’s going to entertain. His garbage brain can go sit in a dumpster and think about what it’s trying to pull here.
That’s it. Time out for his garbage brain.
“You want to undo your belt and stuff?” Clint asks.
He remembers Rumlow working at Jigsaw’s belt while Jigsaw was convulsing on the concrete. He’s not about to risk sending Jigsaw into a flashback of various HYDRA agents grabbing at his belt, even if it’s unlikely that last incident is even possible for him to recall because of the halo.
“I can help you get the pants down over your feet, after, if you need it. Even if all you need is something to steady yourself against.”
Jigsaw nods and gets to work with his left hand, and Clint tries not to think any thoughts at all.
He honestly isn’t sure what Jigsaw has on under his tac pants.
He’s reasonably sure Natasha bought him underwear to go with his jeans and his yoga pants, his shirts and his socks, his hoodies and shoes. But he’s managed to make it this long without thinking about underwear and Jigsaw in the same string of thought, other than to be sure he started wearing boxers to bed religiously after Jigsaw started joining him at night.
He’s not about to start thinking those thoughts now.
Clint manages not to think much of anything until Jigsaw gets to the point of trying to one-handedly pull down a pair of compression leggings, which he counts as a small miracle. There’s no telling what his brain would have come up with if he’d been letting it come up with anything.
What he does notice, though, now that Jigsaw has his pants around his ankles and the compression leggings partway down as well, is that Jigsaw is not even breathing as deeply as a rabbit anymore, and is practically ashen as he stands there trembling. And that is not okay.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Clint says softly. “You’re safe here. I’m going to kneel down and help you get these the rest of the way off, okay? You can grab onto my shoulder.”
Jigsaw doesn’t respond, but when Clint reaches out and places Jigsaw’s left hand on his shoulder, Jigsaw does at least give his shoulder a squeeze and leaves his hand on Clint’s shoulder while Clint kneels down.
“Nothing bad is going to happen,” Clint says. “Nothing fun is going to happen. All we’re doing here is getting you into soft, warm, comfortable pants you can sleep in. That’s all.”
Clint wants to keep talking—to ramble, in fact—but as he gets down to the floor to help pull the ends of Jigsaw’s tac pants down over his fuzzy-socked feet, he gets an eyeful of the butcher work someone made of Jigsaw’s inner thighs. All the way down to the knee. Big, broad strokes, and deep, leaving ridges almost as high as the mountain range of scarring at his left shoulder.
B-RUM, on Jigsaw’s right leg. And there on the left, the seventeen tally marks to go with it.
So that’s where Rumlow made his mark. And yeah, it’s bigger than the C-BAR, just as Clint had known it must be.
Clint wants to grit his teeth hard enough to crack rocks, but he knows all he’d manage to do is crack a tooth, which he doesn’t need.
With supreme effort, he manages—he hopes—to keep his audible reaction to a mere indrawn breath, and to swallow his rage and keep his movements smooth and measured. Lifting up Jigsaw’s right foot and getting the tac pants and leggings down over his foot while keeping the sock on. Lifting up Jigsaw’s left foot next and repeating the motions.
What he wants to say, but doesn’t trust his voice to manage to say gently, is that it’s okay. He’s not mad at Jigsaw. He’s not disgusted at Jigsaw. Nothing has changed. He loves Jigsaw, okay? Loves him. Fuck, he’s in love with Jigsaw. There it is. And some monsters have done horrible things to Jigsaw, but that’s not Jigsaw’s fault, and it never has been.
But since he doesn’t trust his voice to come out as anything but an angry growl, he leaves the words unspoken. He just gives Jigsaw’s ankle what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze when he’s got the pants and the leggings fully off, and then stands up.
“Yoga pants okay?” Clint asks, hearing his voice as if from a different room. He hopes he doesn’t sound as distant as that to Jigsaw.
Jigsaw doesn’t respond at first, and Clint reaches up to take Jigsaw’s metal hand in both of his own. He caresses the fingers, the wrist, the palm. Tries to use safe and familiar touch to get through his fear without having to rely on his own voice.
“I’m going to dig up some yoga pants,” Clint says. “Comfy, warm, soft yoga pants.”
And shit, he should have thought this through better. Should have had all of the clothes they’d need laid out ready to grab. What an absolute idiot he is!
Jigsaw doesn’t let go of his hand when he moves toward the closet, though, and so Clint ends up leading him there instead of going and coming back. And that’s probably fine. What’s the harm in a few steps here and there? It’s not like he’s going to let Jigsaw trip over anything, even if there were anything to trip over.
And there isn’t. Maybe it’s just because Jigsaw doesn’t have a lot of things, but the man is neat. Every one of his things has a place and it lives in that place and doesn’t wander off to get tripped over. Another of the many reasons Jigsaw deserves someone way better than Clint.
And after a few dresser drawers that are carefully filled with socks, food diaries, and assorted scrapbook pages, Clint finds some yoga pants that are practically professionally folded in one of the drawers, and he grabs the top pair.
Helping Jigsaw into yoga pants is way, way harder than helping him out of tac pants and compression leggings was, but Clint manages it. It helps that he’s had to help drunken circus performers into tights a few times in his life, and yes, had to be helped into his own tights a few times as well.
It’s actually not a whole lot different, scrunching up the legs and slipping them over Jigsaw’s feet one by one and then pulling them up a little at a time, one leg and then the other, until they’re high up enough that Jigsaw can manage on his own without having to bend over too much and jog his collar bone.
“Better?” Clint asks, when Jigsaw sucks in a deeper breath and then lets it out more fully than any other breath in the last several minutes.
Jigsaw nods and signs “thank you” with his left hand, still holding his right arm against his chest as though it were in the sling.
And that reminds him. Time to get the sling back on. Even if he only tolerates it for the night, that’ll be something. The bandaging around his head is clearly bothering him the way he keeps trying to reach up and pull it off, and Clint has a feeling the sling is just as irksome to Jigsaw. But they’re good for him, at least for a while.
For all Clint knows, Jigsaw will be halfway to fully healed in the morning, but for right now, he doesn’t want to risk Jigsaw moving around more than he should or getting something stuck in a forming burn scab or anything. And if they’re going to have the animals in bed with them tonight, it’s better if neither Lucky nor Alpine get it in their heads to lick his face.
“Time for the sling,” Clint says. “Just for the night. If you’re okay with that.”
Jigsaw nods and lets him help him into it. Then he signs Lucky and Alpine, and somehow—even with a bandage around his head covering his eyes—manages to look hopeful. Hopeful… and small. Fragile, almost, even though Clint doesn’t doubt he could fight even like this if needed.
And Clint knows then that he can’t leave Jigsaw up here on his own while he goes and fetches the pets. Jigsaw might be a little less pale now, breathing a little more evenly, more in possession of his words, but all it would take is one stray thought to land him in a panic, and there’s no telling how long it would take to get the pets and get back up here and relieve that panic.
But there’s also no way they’ll sleep well without Lucky’s weight at their feet, without Alpine’s fuzzy little body snuggled under a chin. Not even a stuffed shark will get them through a whole night.
“Alright,” Clint says.
He takes a long look at Jigsaw—at his roommate’s pallor and the mismatched clothes, the wrinkled purple shirt of Clint’s and the fuzzy red socks, the yoga pants. The bandage around his head, the wisps of burned hair around his temples, the sling.
And he’s probably not looking much better himself, with the little bandaids all across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks where Jigsaw’s mask cut into his skin, the bandage around his left hand. The redness along his forehead and arms from the exploding arrow. He might be wearing matching clothes, but he’s still not looking all that great.
Kate’s going to be worried sick if they walk down to get Lucky and Alpine looking like this. She’ll wonder what their mission was like, all the ways it must have gone wrong—because it clearly went wrong if they’re this banged up.
“Might I suggest, Agent Barton,” comes JARVIS’s voice from the ceiling, “that you and Jigsaw remain in your suite and send another to obtain the animals?”
Hm. Maybe Natasha is still up. Maybe she’s willing to go chat with Kate and bring Lucky and Alpine up with her. It’s worth a shot, anyway. Clint pats his pockets and realizes he left his phone in his room.
“You think you could ask Natasha for us?” Clint asks.
“Of course, Agent Barton.”
It really is amazing how warm an artificial intelligence can sound. Clint gives the AI a thumbs up. “Thanks, JARVIS.”
Notes:
Content Warning: There is discussion of Rumlow in this chapter, and while it’s nothing on the actual Rumlow POV chapters, it might still warrant a content warning.
Chapter 92: Assassins | When tears are in your eyes (I’ll dry them all)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 12:30 a.m.—
“They’re fine,” Natasha says in a perfectly calculated reassuring tone. Not too heavy on the insistence, and not too dismissive of the Bishop girl’s concern. “Just wrapping up some details on debrief, and I thought I’d have these two ready and waiting for them in their rooms when they get back.”
She smiles, despite very much not feeling it.
“Oh, okay.” Kate looks relieved, which is exactly as Natasha intended, and transfers a fidgeting Alpine from one hand to the other. “I’m glad everything went well.”
The unasked questions hang in the air for a moment—did everything go well, really? what exactly happened that they’re wrapping up that you aren’t there for, too?—and Natasha wonders if Kate Bishop might be interested in joining the team when she grows up.
From everything she’s heard from Clint, Kate is a quick learner, picking up the unique style Clint is teaching her almost faster than Clint had as a teen. And she’s sharp, not just a sharp shooter. Picking up on details, reading between lines, playing it off like she’s just accepting things at face value when she’s clearly not.
They might end up with two archers in a few years if Kate’s interested.
“About as well as any mission,” Natasha says, letting that answer the questions without any details. Kate might have the potential to be an Avenger someday, but she isn’t one now, and no civilian should be privy to the team’s assorted outcomes on this mission.
Kate nods and gives the kitten squirming in her arms a little head scritch. “Do you want any of the toys and things packed up? And I can put Lucky’s leash back on for you. I gave him his nighttime walk already, but…”
Natasha smiles. “Get the leash for his morning walk, and then you just focus on getting a good night’s sleep.” She holds out her hands for Alpine. “You did great, I’m sure. We can sort out the toys in the morning and get everything back where it belongs. And I’ll put out a warning for the press to leave you alone.”
“Okay. Awesome. That’ll really help me out.” Kate hands the kitten over and then fetches the leash, bending to get goodbye kisses from Lucky as she attaches it to his collar. “I’ve got class in the morning, so I might miss seeing you guys. But it’s been a lot of fun. Tell Hawkeye thanks for me?”
“I will.”
Lucky follows her out into the hallway, apparently eager to go for another walk, and Natasha schools her face into an expression of mild fatigue rather than let on how much it hurts to keep herself from limping as she makes her way toward the elevator, just in case Kate is watching through the peephole.
It’s been a long, long day, and she could happily go straight back to her rooms and collapse for the night, but there’s no reason to present anything less than perfect to the world until she gets to her rooms. In the meantime, she only has to get to the elevator before she can favor her left leg again and be a little more natural about the effects of this mission on her recovery.
She doesn’t think her physical therapist will be too disappointed, and she doubts there has been any significant setback. The leg brace Stark designed for her helped ensure that. But the rubble, and being stuck in that kneeling position for so long… there’s a limit to what a brace can do and she hasn’t had time yet to properly treat her aching knee.
Getting Clint and Jigsaw their support animals takes priority over that.
Clint, her best and first friend, who is doing surprisingly well but is also clearly holding onto his poise by a thread and only for Jigsaw’s sake. And Jigsaw, another friend and a closer one than she’d have thought possible considering where he started out with her. Her friends.
And friends clinging to each other for support if she’s reading the situation correctly through the lens of JARVIS’s having to ask her to collect Lucky and Alpine. She can well understand why they wouldn’t come down here themselves—they aren’t nearly as able to hide their injuries as she is her own—but it wasn’t Clint who asked her to come here. It was JARVIS.
Is Clint doing so badly with his near-loss of Jigsaw that he can’t even send her a quick text? Or is it that Jigsaw is doing so badly with his own near-loss of self that Clint can’t be distracted for even a moment?
Did JARVIS ask on their behalf without telling them, or did Clint ask him to ask her? And what does each possibility mean for how her friends are holding up?
Natasha sighs once the elevator doors close behind her and leans heavily against the wall of the carriage. Alpine makes her high pitched kitten mewls as the elevator ascends, and refuses to settle. Clearly, she objects to being disturbed like this. Natasha hopes the kitten will calm down once she gets back to her regular haunt.
Missions were easier when she wasn’t part of a large team of people she cares about. When it was just her and Clint, STRIKE Delta, she could be sure how her partner was doing and not worry about anything else other than mission success. And missions were easier still when it was just her on her lonesome, a widow of the Red Room, caring for herself and only herself.
Now she cares deeply about so many people and can’t do anything for some of them beyond offer an open ear and an open mind.
Rogers almost lost Jigsaw to HYDRA today, and wasn’t able to do anything about it but passively listen in while trapped with her in the rubble. Wilson was on medic duty again, pulling people out of disasters again, trying to patch things up on the fly again. Are they okay? She doesn’t know. They have each other for support, but is that enough? This was a brutal mission.
Bruce needed to call on his Other Guy, was more useful in the end as someone who wasn’t even himself, digging them out, carrying Jigsaw, smashing their enemies. And Stark, confronted by an unknown posed by portable halo technology that shouldn’t have been possible, forced to abandon the mission instead of fully securing the base and ensuring that all of that impossible technology was shut down. Are they okay? She doesn’t know, and she can’t help them.
Clint and Jigsaw, though, she can help. She can bring their pets back to them. She can use the opportunity to get a better assessment of where they are mentally, emotionally, physically. Is Jigsaw still in his tac gear? Is Clint? Have they cleaned up for the night or just changed clothes? Did they have a snack yet, or is it still too close to the team dinner? Are they unwinding at all or still on edge?
And have they discussed what actually happened? That she’s heard, no one has commented on the dead super soldiers of the wolf pen beyond the moments spent in the prep room with their skeletonized corpses in the cryo tubes. Does Jigsaw remember that they are dead?
And she hasn’t heard anything said about Rumlow other than Clint’s repetition of having killed him and how. Has Clint resumed that mantra after the team dinner, or has he let it drop because Jigsaw is able to keep that fact in his mind now?
If Jigsaw is, it’s a good sign. She’s seen him forget about the bandage over his eyes several times and need to be reminded of why it’s there and that he should leave it alone. He’s clearly having trouble forming new memories, which she hopes will fade as he heals.
But do any of them know what the portable halo did, other than not wipe him properly? Not that she knows of. Maybe that’s what Banner and Stark are distracting themselves with after the dinner, but they hadn’t hashed out everything on the quinjet. There are still unknowns.
Natasha pushes herself upright when the elevator comes to a stop and follows Lucky out and down the hall, moving at a much slower and more comfortable pace now that it doesn’t matter who sees her limp.
Time to be there for her friends, the ones she can help. And… And it’s time for them to be there for her, as well. For them to all be there for each other. Just seeing how they’re doing will put her mind at ease.
She remembers the jungle of flowers Clint and the rest had presented her with when she came back to the Malibu house after her knee surgery. That’s what friends are for. They’re there for each other.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 1:00 a.m.—
There is a new kind of halo.
It is not attached to a chair with white electric fire. It is all on its own, just an arched bit of metal, with blue electric fire. No, Tesseract fire.
That is how the other asset’s left hand was injured.
It holds the other asset’s injured hand in both of its own as they sit on the sofa and it is very glad that the muscles are not tensing up or clenching the flesh hand into a fist. This way it can hold the other asset’s injured hand and not worry about injuring it further.
But it feels so cold inside, despite the other asset’s warm hand in both of its own hands.
A halo that can be put on an agent’s belt? A portable halo? A halo that could be anywhere. That anyone could have right there. That could work with just a button and not a whole chair anchored to the concrete and powered by a grid of cables.
That is why it cannot remember about the blindfold-bandage. That is why it cannot remember about B-RUM catching it. That is why it cannot remember how the face and eyes were burned, the temples. That is why it cannot remember why the muscles hurt everywhere.
There was a halo. The halo burned it. The halo burned all of the memories away of the times right before and right after. The halo burned the other asset’s hand.
If there are halos that can be anywhere and can do all of that, then… Then it is not safe, even if B-RUM is dead. It is not safe at all. Not for assets. Not for this asset, especially. Because B-RUM is not the only handler-operator-trainer-technician who wants to wipe it and start over.
And now it does not matter if handlers-operators-trainers-technicians cannot get it into a chair with white electric fire. All they have to do is put a halo on the skin face, over the eyes, and turn the halo on. And blue Tesseract fire will come out of the halo and try to burn everything away.
Until there is no more Jigsaw the asset, but just an asset. Not even this asset, with all of the memories and information that this asset has. Just a blank asset.
“It’s going to be okay, though, Jigs,” the other asset is saying, even though it cannot be okay if there are more halos like that in the world.
“They took it apart, Stark and Banner. They pulled it into pieces and stuff. It’s broken now. And they’re figuring out how to stop them from working. Or how to undo the effects. Something like that.”
There are the parts of a halo in the hive building, then. In the lab. Is the lab not safe anymore? Is it a regular lab, now, full of dangerous things that could be put together and used?
“They’re smart. Geniuses. They’ll figure out how to keep those things from working. They will. It’ll be okay.”
It frowns and frowns, under the blindfold, and the skin face pinches where it is starting to heal, where the frowning eyebrows break up bits of scab, maybe—it cannot see the injury to know how bad it is, and cannot feel the skin face with the fingers to know, either.
“Fuck.”
The other asset is upset now. Again. The other asset has been upset for a long while, off and on, whenever the other asset forgets to be upset and then remembers to be upset again.
“I shouldn’t have said anything about it. I just— That’s what happened. That’s all. That’s.” The other asset sighs. “Rumlow got a halo on you, and I shot him, and then I ripped the halo off, and then he started talking trigger word shit, and I cut his neck apart to shut him up.”
The other asset groans. “I just— You asked what happened, and— I thought—”
There is a scuffle at the door, and it looks over at the door, despite not being able to see anything from under the blindfold-bandage.
“Thank fuck,” the other asset mumbles and then calls that it’s open.
The dog’s tags jingle-jangle as the dog rushes into the rooms that are for assets, and it feels something tightly knotted in the pit of the stomach start to loosen up a little. The dog is here now. And that means that the little cat is— Yes, there is the little cat’s mrrping and squeaking, and then the pitter-patter of the little cat’s paws scampering on the floor, and the door closes again.
“Kate has class tomorrow morning,” says the ballerina woman, sounding so very tired. “She might not be around for breakfast.”
That is fine. It does not know what they would do differently at the breakfast meal if the auction woman was there, but it could not be too different. The breakfast meal is the breakfast meal. One of the best meals of the day, with so many sweet things to put on top of toast and with pancakes and waffles and with eggs and delicious fruits. Cream, yogurt, cottage cheese. There are so many good things for breakfast.
“Apparently, she made the news,” the ballerina woman says. “I’ll have to do something about that tomorrow. Get them to leave her alone, same as with Monesha.”
It does not know what news the auction woman could have made, just by taking care of the little creatures. But if the ballerina woman is going to do something for her the same as with the feeder with the braids, then that is probably for the best.
The other asset shifts on the sofa next to it. “How could she get on the news just walking a dog?”
Get on the news? The ballerina woman said make the news. Which is it?
“You know they still like to gather at the street corner some mornings, Clint.” The ballerina woman sighs. “Heather’s crew is one of the worst offenders.”
“Huh. Thought for sure Happy’d have driven them to that other place. The one with the bridge over the creek.”
There is a place with a bridge over a creek? What is a creek in this context? Something to make a bridge over the top of, clearly. Maybe it is like a pond with ducks. It sounds pretty. Maybe they can go there some time when it can take off the blindfold-bandage and find out what a creek looks like.
“He did, tonight. No one thought about it in the morning.” The ballerina woman sighs. “Something for next time, I guess. All the preparation we did for the mission itself, and we left some things off the preparation list on the home front.”
It does not understand. What is it that has happened that is bad? The dog is fine. The little cat is fine. The auction woman is fine. Nothing has gone wrong. Everyone is fine who was left here in the hive building.
It is difficult to focus on things that might have gone wrong in the face of so much evidence that things have gone very well here while it was gone:
The dog is licking the hands and the skin face, and the dog’s breath is hot and humid against the skin face—huff huff—and the dog’s tail thump-thumps against the sofa while the dog licks and licks and licks. The dog missed it, and it missed the dog, too. And the little cat is scratching at the pillars of the carpet-and-sisal tree that is for cats. Stretching. It can imagine the little cat’s triangle tail up in the air, too.
Now it is a home-sweet-home the way the other asset had said it was, and things will be alright again.
Even if there is a new halo. Even if this asset was almost wiped—was partly wiped, maybe, because it has forgotten some things and cannot remember other things—before the other asset could help it.
It smiles as the dog keeps licking at the skin face, and as the little cat moves closer to climb up the leg with little velcro claws pin-pricking all the way up the calf to settle on the top of the thigh.
The little cat missed it, too. It lets go of the other asset’s hand and scoops the little cat up, depositing the little cat in the crook of the right arm, in the sling. The little cat loves to be held like a baby—that is how the other asset has described it, like a baby—on her back with all four paws in the air.
The little cat makes prrp-prrp sounds and the tiny delicate rumbles in her chest that are the signs of the little cat being very, very happy.
Now that the little cat is happy, it can scratch behind the dog’s ears for a bit and then seek out the other asset’s hand again. The dog’s head on the knee, the little cat prrp-prrping in the crook of the right arm, the other asset’s hand in this asset’s hand, and the ballerina woman settling into the chair that is so soft and cushiony.
So many good things. It is going to be okay.
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
She’s tempted to invite herself to stay the whole night with Clint and Jigsaw, just taking in the togetherness, the hand-holding, the way both Lucky and Alpine cling to Jigsaw like they know somehow that they almost lost him.
But she makes her goodbyes after only a few more minutes to make sure they’re okay and heads back to her own room, where she can get some light physical therapy stretches in and then go to bed where she probably won’t sleep despite being exhausted.
Her room is still warmly lit with the lamps instead of the harsh overhead lighting, and Natasha takes a moment to admire her growing plant wall before dressing for bed again. It’s not much, and it’s not as cozy as furry live animals would be, but it’s something. Living things under her care instead of living people being killed by her hand.
The bear from her surgery is waiting on her bed, and it’s also not the same as snuggling up with a cat might be, but she gives the bear a nuzzle all the same before getting her exercises in to some soft music.
They almost lost Jigsaw to a halo today. He was almost unmade. Wiped clean of everything that made him who he is and turned into a blank slate. And they almost lost Clint, too—that gas—if Jigsaw hadn’t put his mask on Clint’s face and drawn the strap tight…
Natasha takes in a shuddering breath and lets it out. They could have lost both of them. She could have lost both of them.
She’s not ready to lose these people. She’s gotten attached.
And she almost lost her knee again in the cave-in, either to falling concrete slabs or to the contortion of her leg in the huddle under Rogers’s shield. Not to the same extent that she lost it months ago and needed it fully replaced, but any injury to her knee is a threat to her ability to function as an Avenger, and she can’t lose this team, this family.
And all of that without a single enemy super soldier to worry about. Because they’d lost that opportunity as well. The chance to maybe save five more from HYDRA, if the wolf pen soldiers had been victims and not willing participants.
They’ll have to go back to the base to fully clear it out, or else Phil and the Bus crew will have to do it after Project Insight is taken down. They can’t leave any possible records there to be found and maybe used by enemy agents. Any formulas for the serums that were used to enhance the other five. Any prototypes for controlling a super soldier. Even any weapons.
The base needs to be turned into so much rubble, and all they managed to do was escape with their lives and turn two entrances into impassible piles of rock.
Natasha shakes her head and gives up on her exercises for the night. Her physical therapist wouldn’t want her to overdo anything after a mission like that.
And just think; she let Kate think it had been largely successful. Well. They did all make it out alive, largely intact, and with their minds as whole as can be expected.
Maybe it was a success, in some ways.
Chapter 93: Avengers | I can feel you in my sleep
Notes:
Chapter title from “Awake and Alive” by Skillet.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 3:30 a.m.—
Lucky is snoring.
Clint stares up at the pitch dark ceiling and listens to the sounds of the room around him.
There’s the dog, snoring. There’s the incredibly faint but still there sound of some instrumental New Age bullshit coming from Jigsaw’s tablet. There’s the weird suckling sounds Alpine is making as she twitches in her sleep.
Maybe Clint should have taken his hearing aids out before going to bed. Maybe he shouldn’t have them turned all the way up so that he can hear—hopefully—any hitched breathing or fabric shifting or gasps if Jigsaw wakes up, or has a nightmare and doesn’t wake up but needs to be woken up from it.
But he knew he wasn’t going to sleep tonight. He knew he wouldn’t be able to even if he wanted to. Because what if Jigsaw does have a nightmare? What if he has a nightmare? What if they both have a nightmare and neither one of them can comfort the other?
Clint moves his thumb lightly—but not too lightly, not light enough to tickle—along Jigsaw’s arm. Just enough of a touch to let Jigsaw know that he’s here, that he isn’t going anywhere, that he’s in it for the long haul. All night. Longer. Hell, he’ll even take something to stay awake all of tomorrow if he needs to. Something more than coffee.
So far, the memory of the blue glow around Jigsaw’s head is enough to keep him wide awake. The eerie Tesseract-blue lighting up the concrete walls and floor of that corridor, competing with the dim orange lights and dominating them almost completely. The way it reflected off Jigsaw’s metal arm, broken up by hints of orange. The way it hummed, so bright it made noise, like the light was vibrating its way into sound waves. The way it was somehow both steady and strobing.
Yeah.
And the sounds. Not just the humming from that damn halo, but the shifting of leather on concrete as Jigsaw convulsed. The way his head hit the concrete floor. The scrape of metal on concrete. Rumlow’s voice, taunting, mocking. Clint’s own breathing, harsh and panicked, his shaking voice on the comms.
And the trembling, after he got the halo off. The spasms, the full-body twitches. Then the stillness, which was somehow worse. The way Jigsaw was a dead weight on his lap, barely breathing and with his burns glistening in the blue light as the halo kept its Tesseract energy spewing into the hallway. Jigsaw’s unseeing eyes, blood-slicked with their charred lids.
Clint inhales slowly until he feels like his chest is going to pop like an overinflated balloon, and then tries to let it out as slowly as he can. It’s a thing Banner told him about. And he’s seen Jigsaw do it, too. Not often, but sometimes. So it must help.
All it does is make him take the next breath really quickly, because he feels like he’s out of air in a way he hadn’t been before. So much for that. Maybe there’s a knack to it that he just hasn’t picked up yet. Clint doesn’t exactly pride himself on his patience for things like that, though. He’s not going to pick up the knack.
He listens in the night for any sign that he’s woken Jigsaw up with the movement of his chest.
Nope. Jigsaw is still breathing evenly beside him, curled up on his left side with his prosthesis up over his head under his pillow, his face tucked into the side of Clint’s neck and his right arm draped across Clint’s chest.
It can’t be comfortable, to have his temple pressing into the pillow like that despite the burns, to have his collar bone moving with Clint’s breathing. But Clint isn’t about to insist that Jigsaw sleep on his back or anything. He’s not like some kind of traffic cop for where Jigsaw can put his limbs when he sleeps.
And anyway, if Jigsaw was sleeping on his back, Clint couldn’t be sure of his breathing, not really. Jigsaw does everything silently, even breathing while he’s sleeping. But Clint can feel the breaths he takes against his neck, and that tells him what he needs to know: Jigsaw feels safe.
That’s important. Not just that Jigsaw feels safe, but that Jigsaw is safe.
And he is. Now. Rumlow is no more, the halo didn’t work, the— The—
Fuck.
The relief floods through him all over again even as the back of his mind trots out the idea that the halo’s effects have just been delayed and that Jigsaw could still wake up blank.
But his mind can shut up. The halo didn’t work. It didn’t.
Clint’s eyes water as he tries to get it through his stupid thick skull that the halo failed. That Rumlow wasn’t able to take Jigsaw away from him, that that asshole ultimately wasn’t able to get anything he wanted from the encounter except a too-easy death.
But damn, it was close. It was so close.
It was too close.
He swallows as his right eye fills up to the point of spilling over, the tear stinging the corner of his eye as it leaves on its journey down the side of his face toward his ear. Clint blinks, and the other eye follows suit.
Damn. And now he’s crying, sort of, and it didn’t even happen. He didn’t lose Jigsaw. What’s he even got to cry about? How pathetic is this, crying over a tragedy that didn’t strike.
But it could have.
And who knows. Maybe the next time it will. Maybe the next agent with a portable halo won’t be a hothead rapist eager to inflict maximum pain and misery in the immediate present. Maybe it’ll be someone calm and measured, who takes the time to calibrate things, who has the long term goal in mind.
Who knows how many halos there are, even?
Clint reaches up with his left hand to wipe his eyes, trying not to jostle Jigsaw while he’s at it. Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Why can’t all of HYDRA just be rolled up into a wad and thrown in the trash together?
But it isn’t just HYDRA, is it? Wouldn’t the government like it if they could control super soldiers like Jigsaw? Wouldn’t the military? S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted it, and still does, even the parts that were never HYDRA. Nick might want that control to come from orders and mutual agreement, and not from a halo and abuse, but he still wants control.
And it’s not just Jigsaw, is it? With a halo, couldn’t Cap be in a similar boat? Couldn’t the same thing be done to him? Or to Banner? Or hell, even badass normals like Natasha—if it’s running on Tesseract juice now and not electricity, if it can be calibrated to different uses, couldn’t any of them find themselves suddenly not themselves?
Suddenly controlled by another, like— Like puppets, all of them, dancing on strings held by others, eager to please because pleasing is all they know anymore.
He’s been there. He’s done that. He doesn’t want that ever again, not for him and not for anyone else.
Especially not for Jigsaw or Natasha. They’ve both been unmade too many times, have been forced to re-create themselves from ashes.
The silence is what he notices first. Alpine has moved on from her dream. Jigsaw is still as silent as ever, and his tablet has run out of tinkly woo-woo music. Lucky has stopped snoring and is instead inching his way over onto Clint’s legs.
He must have been getting too worked up, then. He triggered the Lucky smother response and now he’s in for it: his legs will be fast asleep and numb to the world for the rest of the night.
If only his brain could be fast asleep as easily as that. Not that he wants to sleep and possibly miss Jigsaw needing anything, but he’d like it if he could stare at the darkness in peace instead of mentally running circles around the worst case scenarios.
Why can’t he just focus on the best case scenarios? Just for tonight? Just for the next few hours while Jigsaw sleeps? Rumlow is dead. A whole STRIKE team is dead along with that asshole. A HYDRA base has been compromised even if not entirely destroyed. Jigsaw is safe and reasonably sound. Natasha’s knee will keep healing despite the setback. His hand will be okay, just needs to grow some skin back. He’ll be shooting arrows like usual in no time.
Yeah. It’ll be okay.
Except that he can’t bring himself to believe that. The base in Siberia had been a trap, and what about other bases? Other potential traps? What happens the next time they spring a trap? And who set that trap, really? Was Rumlow there for his own reasons or was he sent there by some higher up? Some operator or other. Or maybe the mad scientist turned computer, Zola.
And if it was someone like Zola, or an operator, what if that mastermind is still waiting to set some other trap for them? Zola… That would be really upsetting for Jigsaw, and also for Cap. Just seeing him or hearing him would be upsetting. But there’s no way to tell where Zola really is, if he’s apparently in the cloud or whatever Stark had been talking about.
Clint still doesn’t quite get the whole cloud thing. Stark tried explaining it during a ramble in one of their planning meetings, but, well, to be honest, Clint hadn’t been paying a whole lot of attention. Something about databases all over the world and the internet. Parts of things scattered everywhere, maybe, and—very HYDRA-like—needing to get rid of all of the parts lest they grow back.
Clint can’t help but imagine a billion Zolas, each branching off of one zapped limb, somehow up in the clouds, maybe raining down like a billion evil raindrops. That’s not how it works; he does know that much.
And he knows that he loves Jigsaw.
Clint thinks about that statement. Is it… true? Does he love Jigsaw? Love-love him? Because that’s never turned out well for him in the past, loving someone. He always grabs on too hard once he loves them, and that makes them want to squirm away. Loving people gets him abandoned by those people, pushed away by those people.
Especially because he can’t seem to love right. He always forgets important dates and does unromantic things, always assumes it’s a pizza and sweats night when his partner thinks they should be going out to a steakhouse or something.
He can’t seem to get the whole love thing to go the right way. But… Well, Jigsaw doesn’t think in terms of steakhouses—not just because of the meat thing, but because he’s never been wined and dined. And he’s gotten rid of all of Clint’s sweats, or at least Clint can’t find his sweats anywhere.
Ugh, and he’s had these thoughts before, when he was just thinking about how much of a loser boyfriend he’d be. Why’s he having them again now? They’ve already established that Jigsaw doesn’t know the difference between a stellar boyfriend and a loser boyfriend, so he won’t know what he’s missing.
And he doesn’t like cut flowers. That’s the whole reason he agreed to move into these rooms with him, Sharon’s flowers.
The sad part, the hard part, is that Clint suspects he’s actually in love. That can only doom this relationship as it’s doomed the ones in the past. But if he can manage to avoid being too clingy, if he can learn from any of his mistakes… And Jigsaw might be clingier than he is, even. So even his holding on too tight might be just what Jigsaw wants out of things.
Maybe it’ll work out alright.
It never has before, but none of those partners were Jigsaw before. Now his partner is Jigsaw.
Lucky’s snoring resumes, this time coming from a few feet closer, as the dog’s head is resting over his crotch now, instead of at his ankles. And Jigsaw’s breathing is unchanged. That’s good, he thinks. Alpine is silent, too. That’s three of the four of them asleep. With Clint to watch over them all, on guard.
Maybe he’ll even do a decent job of it.
Sam
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 3:30 a.m.—
“Trouble sleeping?” Steve asks as he comes back from the kitchenette with glass of water. “Or did I wake you up?
Sam gives up the battle and hauls himself into a sitting position as Steve rejoins him in bed. “Trouble sleeping,” he says. “Same as you, I’m guessing.”
Not guessing, though, not really. He knows that Steve was awake for a while before getting up to get water, whether Steve will want to admit it or not. He knows because he was awake, too, both of them pretending to be asleep for the other’s sake.
By all rights, they should both be tired enough after the day they’ve had to sleep deeply, but physical exhaustion isn’t always enough when you can’t shut off your mind. And Sam’s mind, at least, has been turning over the various events of the day, from finding the super soldiers already long dead to piling up fresh HYDRA bodies after searching them for any other Tesseract-powered weaponry.
The world isn’t poorer for the loss of a couple dozen HYDRA loyalists, that’s certain. And the super soldiers from the wolf pen were already dead before they got there, so that’s only the loss of potential rather than the loss of actual life.
And he’ll grant that their enemies were trying to kill them, not merely take them prisoner. Except Jigsaw, and maybe Steve, though he’s not sure if Steve has put that part together yet. It can be difficult to perceive danger to yourself when you’re preoccupied with danger to others.
It still doesn’t sit right with him that the team killed everyone they came into contact with in that base, though. They’re the good guys. They’re supposed to be different, supposed to have morals and standards. They’re supposed to be at least trying to avoid killing blows. And he saw some of what was stacked up there through Redwing’s camera.
There were some very pointed killing blows involved. Punches were not pulled, at the very least. It’s hard to say with Tony’s repulsor blasts or Hulk’s fists whether it’s even possible to dial it back or whether it’s all or nothing. Hulk, at least, doesn’t appear to have degrees of smash.
But Steve and Natasha… They were going for kill shots. Natasha was aiming for center mass and also headshots, and Steve was shattering skulls with the thin edge of the shield, not even just the broad curved side.
And it’s true that the HYDRA operatives were trying to kill them, were shooting at them while they tried to take cover in the rubble. It’s true that HYDRA says it takes no prisoners and that Tony and Natasha—and maybe also Bruce and Steve—were probably slated for an execution if they had survived the gunfire long enough to be captured. Sam himself was almost guaranteed to be on the kill list as well.
But that doesn’t mean they turn around and aim to kill. It means they take extra precautions, that they use their environment defensively, that they watch each other’s backs more than usual. And that’s not what happened there.
What did happen was a massacre of HYDRA agents, a ruthless firefight on both sides, and a callous sorting of the remains. A search for Tesseract energy packs, for any more of the portable haloes, for anything of interest or importance. Like the bodies themselves weren’t important, or like the fact that they were just bodies now and instead of people wasn’t important.
And no, none of them had toyed with a HYDRA agent. There hadn’t been any sort of slow or agonizing end. No purposeful gut shots or gratuitous injuries beyond the ones needed to end lives. It wasn’t like they’d released the essence of Jigsaw into the hallway and let him take people apart piece by bloody piece.
But it still just doesn’t sit well with him. Sam can’t see their way forward if they continue down that particular path. Or he can, and he doesn’t like that way forward. Doesn’t like where it leads, where they end up, what kind of team they end up being.
Rumlow’s taunts had gotten to them all, yes, and the awful things he was promising made them all angry. But it wasn’t anything they didn’t already know had happened in the past. And it wasn’t a good reason to kill their opponents outright. Anger shouldn’t lead to overzealous violence, even if it’s anger on behalf of or in defense of someone else.
Steve drains half of his water and sets the glass on the coaster beside the bedside lamp. “What is it that has you still up?”
Sam frowns. “I think, as a team, we’re sliding into Jigsaw’s territory instead of the other way around,” he says. “It bothers me.”
Steve climbs back into the bed and turns to face him, the blankets pooling around his hips. “You mean in the corridor. After the cave-in, when they were shooting at us.”
Sam nods. “And with Rumlow, even. We don’t have any more information now than when we left the base because we killed everyone who could have given us information. It’s not how we’re supposed to operate, as Avengers.”
There’s a bit of silence between them, which Sam allows to hang in the air. It’s not his job to make Steve feel better about killing people. If anything, it’s his job to be the voice of reason against killing people, since the rest of the team seems to have forgotten about that.
“You know,” Steve says finally. “You are right. I know you’re right. And I was planning to talk with Dr Linda about it later this week during our Friday session. But I can’t help but feel like there was…”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. An extenuating circumstance, maybe. Something that made it, not alright, but understandable.”
“Understandable? Steve, you were slamming the shield so hard into their heads that their skulls were sliced open at the ear.”
Sam holds up a hand when Steve opens his mouth to reply. “I’m just saying, we should always be on our best possible behavior because we don’t know who is watching.”
Steve nods. “Although we did know no one was watching this time.”
“No. But we might not be on the nightly news for the Siberia raid,” Sam says. “What about next time? What about for Project Insight? What if that weird robo-Zola starts taunting you about Bucky?”
“Jigsaw, you mean.”
Sam shakes his head. “No, I mean Bucky. Your Bucky, from WWII and before. But yes, also Jigsaw. You can’t let them goad you into treating them like a kevlar heavy bag and trying to burst them with a punch to the sternum.”
Steve nods again. “I know. I do know.” He gives his fingers a brief examination before looking back at Sam. “It felt good, though. To finally be at war with them again in a way that was real. Not just raiding a base and clearing it out, but defending people I care for and really cleaning house.”
“It felt good to fight again, or it felt good to kill them?”
Steve’s eyes say that the answer is simply “yes,” but he leaves the answer unspoken.
“I don’t like bullies, Sam,” he finally says. “Never have, never will. Doesn’t matter where they are or who they are. And HYDRA are some of the biggest bullies there ever were.”
“What happens if you fight hard enough to become the bully?” Sam asks. “Not that defeating HYDRA is bully behavior or anything. And I don’t think we need to make any fight against HYDRA a fair one. But…”
“But?”
“I just want us to think about these things. About the lethality levels we’re bringing to any fights we have. We’re supposed to be setting a good example for Jigsaw, and we didn’t. This last mission, we really didn’t.”
“I’ll think about it,” Steve says. “But I won’t stand by and watch someone else get hurt if there’s something I can do to stop it.”
“No one’s asking you to.” Sam reaches out to take Steve’s hand in his own. He tries to find the right words for what he’s feeling. “I just wish we could have dropped off some zip-tied HYDRA guys for Fury to deal with. More ‘raiding the Happy Cow Creamery’ and less ‘killing them all behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany.’”
Steve squeezes his hand and smiles. “That I can agree to.”
Notes:
Content warning: Just a brief description of Jigsaw's eye damage, but it might make some readers uncomfortable reading it.
Chapter 94: Science Bros | If I just believe it, there’s nothing to it
Notes:
Chapter title from “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly.
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 3:30 a.m.—
“Sir, if I may suggest—”
“I’m not going to bed, J. But you can suggest it all you want.”
“…Very well, Sir.”
Tony stops at that, looks up from his schematics, and glances at the clock. Huh. It’s after 3 AM, he’s been awake well over twenty-four hours, he’s upset, he’s resorted to salted cashews and dried blueberries instead of making like Jigsaw and heading for the leftover fajitas in the kitchen…
And JARVIS isn’t insisting that he go to bed.
Maybe he’s finally onto something, or about to make a breakthrough, or things are about to get good finally. JARVIS can usually sense these sorts of things, and doesn’t tend to interrupt him too strenuously on those occasions. It would be nice if that was the case right now.
Bruce didn’t even try to keep him company tonight, and he hardly expects the Great Jigsby to stop by for anything. Not with his eyes out of commission and his head probably hurting more than a little. Hurting enough to actually register for him.
So it’s just Tony and his bots, his schematics of the halo he dissected, and the map JARVIS made of the HYDRA base they ultimately failed to wipe off the map.
And his wannabe trail mix.
He doesn’t blame Bruce for going to bed. The man was looking haggard on the quinjet and a big meal didn’t quite get him back in good shape. Hulking out has to really take it out of a guy, just with the energy involved in breaking the rules of physics, even without smashing people into smears on the concrete and all that. And Bruce had to hulk out for a while there, and after getting caved in.
So yeah, Bruce went to bed right after dinner and a meditation session, and Tony’s feeling fine about that. Better than fine, actually. Because Bruce would be telling him not to do what he’s doing right now.
Or part of what he’s doing. He’s doing more than one thing, obviously, because he’s Tony Stark and the day Tony Stark has to resort to monotasking is the day something has gone severely wrong with the world.
The whole “let’s find a way to detect Tesseract energy packs without having the Tesseract to study” thing, that’s probably fine in Bruce’s mind. If anything, Bruce will come by in the morning and help him finish the job. They’ll have these fucking portable Tesseract haloes at least setting off their alarms so no one gets surprised by them. Might help with detecting Tesseract-fueled EMPs, too.
And the design testing for some gas masks that the team can clip onto their uniforms somewhere to prevent another poison gas disaster, that wouldn’t be a problem in Bruce’s mind, even if he probably wouldn’t need one due to the whole Hulk thing.
And printing out a plastic grid thing to go over Jigster’s tablet for Zoe, so he can count tiles on his AAC app and pick out the ones he wants based on his memory of their location while he can’t actually see the app—sure, that won’t be an issue at all for Bruce.
But the whole “let’s program a dozen or two self-healing bots and the whole fleet of self-driving Iron Man armor to return to Siberia in the middle of the night and at airspeeds a human wouldn’t survive and nuke that blasted HYDRA base from orbit along with everything inside it” plan… That, Bruce might object to.
But Bruce isn’t here. Tony’s here.
And Tony is just waiting for the bot firmware to finish compiling before he can pair up a bot to go with each of his older suits of armor and fly off into the night to finish what the Avengers started. The suits can carry the bots to the right place. The bots can take out any lingering survivors that are still hiding in the base.
And the suits and the bots can both dismantle that base, pulling piece from piece and leaving nothing so much as a cotton swab from the medical supplies intact. Can also bring back some files, some footage, some samples of that cage door that wouldn’t open. That still bothers him, about the cage door.
And if anything tries to get past the bots and the suits? Good luck to it. Tony’s got it covered. The whole nuke from orbit thing.
Well, Tony’s not actually sending nukes. That would be a PR disaster and he’s pretty sure even Jigsaw would disapprove of using a nuke against a HYDRA base—if he knew what a nuke was—on account of the lingering radiation and damage to nearby wildlife.
Is there wildlife in Siberia or is it too cold for anything but mosquitos? He’s pretty sure there are mosquitos in Siberia. There are mosquitos everywhere. Maybe he’ll have JARVIS do some research into Siberian wildlife. That might be interesting.
But the point is that Tony’s not nuke-nuking anything. He’s just figuratively nuking things. Specifically that base in Siberia.
Because someone is going to see that there is rubble there, someday, and check it out. And the last thing they need is evidence of what went down in that base getting to anyone outside of this team.
First off, who knows whether you can extract super soldier serum from a dusty old skeleton? You can get dino DNA from amber according to the movies, so maybe. If Tony was going to try it, he’s pretty sure he’d eventually succeed because he’s confident like that. They don’t want anyone else doing it, though. That serum should stay buried except for the very small handful of people who have it in their blood right now.
Second, if there’s more of that gas, or more halos, or more chairs with halo attachments, or other nasty drugs that are designed to work on a super soldier in ways HYDRA thinks are good—which means, ways that are bad—that should also stay buried. No one needs to know that Jigsaw can be gassed into being an ungainly mere mortal and taken down by a single agent. It’ll give people ideas.
People like Thaddeus Ross. Who shouldn’t have ideas, and who already have a whole missile-bombed HYDRA base in Bakersfield to comb through and don’t need evidence of another stockpile of clues. Not that he’d have much access to Siberia short of declaring war on Russia.
Third, there’s every possibility that there is a live recording in that base of the trash-talking that freak Rumlow did, and one way to erase that from existence is to burn the whole place down to the last magnetic tape spool or whatever that recording is on.
Fourth, if there’s surveillance like that being saved, then there’s also surveillance of what they did to each and every HYDRA bastard they found in that base, which is reduce them all to bloody smears on walls and so many stacked corpses. And they’re the Avengers. Sure, they got a bit angry about things, anyone would, but they don’t need the world to know they pretty much intentionally left the place without bothering with prisoners.
And really, isn’t that enough of a reason to nuke the base? Figuratively. To figuratively nuke the base?
He left a jamming device in place when they left, so he knows that so far nothing has been uploaded to some network or other. The base was pretty much not wired for that anyway, siloed to a dangerous extent, probably to keep news of the five wolf pen soldiers secret to just those already in the know.
But that jamming device is only as good as time lets it be. Someone could easily bust into the base and take physical evidence out to upload it from somewhere else. And if there is a Tesseract connection he can’t know about, that could render the jamming device pretty useless.
And who knows about Tesseract-powered things? There could be Tesseract-powered toasters in that base for all he knows, lighting up blue instead of red and still burning the toast every time. The metal that made the fight cages could be structurally altered by Tesseract energy, ionized somehow to resist his tech, at least at first. Bartonio’s exploding arrow might have only worked once the repulsor weakened the metal.
But if he sends in the bots—like sending in the clowns but better—and some shepherding suits of Iron Man armor, then all of these potential problems go away.
The suits can clean things up, burn bodies if the base doesn’t have an incinerator, burn evidence and mechanical bits and whatever else, even give those five maybe-victims in the cryo tubes a nice cremation ceremony and spread some ashes around. The bots can be trained in this last bit of programming to do pretty much anything, including cleanup detail and sample gathering.
Hell, maybe he can make some search-and-rescue bots using the data he gathers from this search-and-destroy mission no one knows about and no one has cleared. That would be nice. Polish off his philanthropic resume with some rescue bots. He’d have to lock the firmware down—lock everything down—so no one can reverse engineer killing bots out of them…
But that’s doable. And self-healing bots can easily be made to self-destroy if tampered with.
Bruce
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 6:00 a.m.—
By unilateral agreement the night before, they aren’t meeting up for a team breakfast, or even a debriefing with Fury, until after 10, so Bruce feels content to remain in bed longer than usual, nursing his aching muscles and asking JARVIS to prepare a hot bath before he even gets out of bed.
It’s a luxury that he could make use of regularly, asking JARVIS for such favors, but he usually feels downright silly doing so. Today, though, he can take a load off of his plate and let himself relax as much as possible.
He spent more time inside yesterday than he’d intended, between digging the team out of the rubble, smashing enemy agents, running to get Jigsaw, and carrying the man to the helicopter pad. And the Other Guy is still feeling worked up from seeing Jigsaw motionless in Clint’s arms.
The Other Guy is pretty fond of Jigsaw, possibly because Jigsaw’s first reaction to him, months ago, was a kind of appreciative awe and not fear. There aren’t many people out there who respond to the Other Guy yelling at them with anything but fear.
And so the Other Guy is close to the surface, riding his thoughts, maybe even picking through them for any indication of how Jigsaw is doing today. Bruce isn’t entirely certain how much of his daily life the Other Guy shares, only that sometimes he’s closer to the surface and sometimes it seems like he’s miles away.
Today, he’s close by, a looming but ultimately benign presence.
And a presence that is at once relaxed and alert, even while Bruce mulls over the events of the prior day’s mission while soaking his muscles in the hot water of a bathtub he could swim in due to its being sized for a hulk-out.
He’ll need to check Jigsaw’s burns this morning, if Sam hasn’t already done so while collecting Lucky for a walk. And Clint’s burn, too. Clint’s hand might give them as much issue as Jigsaw’s eyes simply because Clint isn’t enhanced and doesn’t have a healing factor churning away with ample caloric input to achieve maximum healing speed.
And there’s no telling whether a Tesseract-induced burn will heal the way other burns do. Is there a chemical element to it? Merely light? Heat? A combination, or even something out of this realm?
He does have a feeling that Jigsaw will heal from the halo’s damage completely in time. This was a single exposure, and Rumlow didn’t calibrate the halo correctly from what they can tell—Jigsaw still knows his name and theirs, was able to describe a number of details from before the exposure. He wasn’t wiped clean.
Clint did report some difficulty in retaining new memories, particularly those related to things Jigsaw is avoidant about, like Rumlow himself. But that should be a temporary effect as well. Bruce has every confidence that Jigsaw will be forming new memories again before this day is out if he isn’t already doing so.
The water is beginning to cool by the time Bruce decides that he’s had enough of a soak and is ready for breakfast. It takes a lot to fuel an enhanced metabolism, and while his own metabolism is only truly enhanced when the Other Guy is out and about, he does go through a lot of food after his accident with the gamma radiation.
He’ll meditate after breakfast, not before. That will have him plenty calm and tension-free before any debriefing they have with Fury, and it ensures that he won’t be distracted by hunger while he meditates. Yes.
But something tells him to visit the lab before he gets into breakfast mode, and he’s glad he heeds the suggestion because the lab is decidedly different this morning than the last time he saw it.
There are usually lots of bits and bobs around the place—and there still are—but there is also usually a gallery of empty Iron Man suits lining the perimeter like sports cars on display, and these… are gone. All of them.
Tony is slumped forward on what appears to be printed blueprints of some building or other, snoring softly and drooling peacefully onto the printouts with a small pile of spilled cashews near his hand.
And while a part of Bruce wants to leave him be to sleep for a while—lord knows the man needs whatever sleep he manages—the lack of Iron Man armor is alarming enough that Bruce puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder and gives it a brief shake.
“I’m not sleeping!” Tony yells as he sits up. “You’re sleeping!”
“Tony,” Bruce says with a calm born of considerable practice. “What did you do last night? Where is all the armor?”
Tony blinks up at him. “It’s not back yet? What time is it?”
“Back yet?” Bruce asks. “Where did it go? Why did it go there? When? Why? To do what?”
Maybe he’s not as calm as he thinks he is. Bruce takes a breath and lets it out in a measured count of eight. He needs some green tea and an English muffin.
“Okay, so don’t be mad—”
“Tony.” Bruce can feel his heartbeat in his ears. The Other Guy is still pretty near the surface despite a long meditation session last night and a full night’s sleep. That’s right. He needs to be careful. “What did you do?”
“I said don’t be mad,” Tony says. “I didn’t feel good about the way we left the place, what with the dead bodies everywhere, and the super soldier mummies, and all of that technology, so I sent the suits to blow shit up.”
Bruce takes a moment to process. “You remote-controlled the suits to fly to Siberia and demolish the HYDRA base.”
Tony shouldn’t be looking quite this proud of himself. But now that he’s awake again, proud is what he looks.
“With some bots, yeah. It’s all good.”
They aren’t back yet, and Tony seems to think they would be. That’s not necessarily what Bruce would call “all good.” What if something happened to the bots? Or the suits? Did Tony just send a small army of Iron Man suits into enemy hands? Or the self-healing bots?
“Who’s controlling them now, since you were sleeping?” Bruce asks.
“J-Man,” Tony says with a snap of his fingers. “Status update on the Siberia base?”
“Sir, the mission has been a partial success. Damaged units have been retrieved and all materiel is en route to the Tower, to arrive after dark.”
Tony beams and then frowns. “Partial success? A bit of damage is to be expected. What’s the partial about?”
Bruce braces himself to hear whatever the bad news is. It’s too early in the morning for this after a very long and very exhausting day before. Part of him wishes he’d come by the lab later.
“There is evidence of HYDRA survivors, Sir,” JARVIS says. “At least one STRIKE squad has had time to vacate the premises before the arrival of your suits. There is no way to tell what they left with.”
“Shit.” Tony scowls. “That’s what I was hoping to avoid. But the base is wiped off the face of Siberia, right? No one else can cart anything valuable away.”
“That is correct, Sir.”
Bruce toes out the rolling chair across from Tony and has a seat. “This seems like a course of action that we’d ordinarily discuss as a team,” he says. “Probably with S.H.I.E.L.D. in on the meeting as well.”
Tony waves the thought aside. “Pfft. Tell S.H.I.E.L.D. something, you tell HYDRA something. Maybe not Fury and Hill, and maybe not Agent Agent or Carter, but on the whole, I still don’t trust ‘em.”
“And the rest of the team?” Bruce asks. “Our team?”
“Was sleeping,” Tony says. “I wanted to get in, get the job done, get out.”
Bruce sighs.
There’s pretty much no way he’s going to get anything through to Tony about letting the team as a whole have some say in the matter, or about how it might be kind of morally gray to send in the armor specifically to hide that other morally gray action the team took in outright killing the HYDRA operatives they encountered.
“You know we’d have had to do it anyway,” Tony says. “Can’t let it all just sit out there in the Siberian winter and wait for when Russia’s answer to General Ross comes knocking.”
Well, Bruce does have to give him that point. The last thing they need is for Thaddeus Ross or anyone like him to have any reason to get involved. They were stealthy enough in the quinjet that there is some hope no one saw them coming but the people eagerly expecting them in that base. But that could change if someone were to come along and see the ruins of the front door, or the damage they did to the helicopter landing pad.
Or the insides of that base, with all the damage and the bodies.
And if there were some knowledge of their actions, well, it was questionable at best for the Avengers to be raiding a base on Russian soil. And they aren’t explicitly a US national asset despite being housed in New York. They are meant to be the whole planet’s protectors, after all. There’s World Security Council oversight, through Fury, and that should get them where they need to go provided there isn’t a big deal made of the raid.
And if Tony took as many precautions with his suits and bots as he did with the quinjet, they should be alright. Bruce still doesn’t approve of this kind of action without at least a discussion with the whole team, but he can see why Tony would have gone for it.
Chapter 95: Assets | Sometimes everything is wrong
Notes:
Chapter title from “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
Happy early chapter, everyone! Tonight and tomorrow morning might be busy for me, so I'm posting way early. ^_^ I have a bit to write still for the next chapter, so there likely won't be a midweek chapter this week.
Content warning in the end note, along with some other notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 6:00 a.m.—
“I don’t even know how that’s possible,” someone mutters from down the hall.
“And stop trying to touch that. I just got the ointment on it, and you’ll get ointment on your fingers. And I’ll have to start over with the cleaning.”
Clint rolls over into the warm spot left by Jigsaw and Lucky and shoves his face into Jigsaw’s pillow. Still so warm. Bordering on hot. And he’s so tired. Has he been this tired before? Yeah, sure. But not for a while.
“Sure, fine, go ahead and eat some more grapes. I need to get this first aid kit in order before we can do anything more, anyway.”
There’s a bit of rustling.
“Who used this last? It’s a huge mess.”
Clint sighs and hugs the pillow closer. The pillow is soft and squishy, but his left hand still throbs painfully when he grabs it. Must have strained something while training.
“Of course it was. I’m surprised it even all fit in the box when he was done with it.”
He wishes they’d be quiet, whoever that is making such a racket about first aid kits and grapes. He’s trying to sleep here, and usually Jigsaw is a lot better about sneaking around in the morning and not actually waking him up beyond this kind of half-asleep limbo.
Must be Wilson making the actual noise, anyway. No one else would come over this early, before Jigsaw’s first therapy session, before breakfast. Not even Natasha.
And usually he doesn’t hear it when Wilson comes to walk the dog. Why’s he hearing it now?
And why’s Wilson need a first aid kit to walk the dog? Lucky’s fine. Everyone’s… Oh wait. Everyone’s not fine.
The details of their mission come crashing in on him, everything from the catastrophic mission itself to the aftermath and his relief at Jigsaw remembering himself to the fact that he had been planning to stay awake the whole night and clearly failed at some point.
Shit.
That’s why he can hear. He’s still got his hearing aids in and somehow didn’t knock them out with his tossing and turning just now. He must have fallen asleep real deep to not fully register Jigsaw getting out of bed with Lucky when he could hear them doing so and not just feel the bed move.
So much for guarding Jigsaw’s sleep.
Clint turns over again and sits up, checks his phone for the time, and groans. There’s some kind of memo from Zoe that he can read later. And it’s super early.
Technically, he could take his hearing aids out and go back to sleep. But he isn’t going to do that when he should be looking after Jigsaw, making sure he’s got his pre-breakfast snack in order, helping him pick out clothes to wear for the day, finding out how his eyes are doing this morning, and his burns.
Surely wearing a bandage overnight has helped, and maybe Jigsaw can even see a bit now. They said he’d heal from the burns, and it isn’t that Clint doesn’t believe them, but he’s not sure how long it will be before everything heals up.
He swings his legs out of the toasty cocoon of bedding and reaches down for a shirt from the floor. Pulls it over his head. That’ll do. Boxers and a t-shirt. It’s not even seven yet, so it’s fine to dress like this. He’s decent enough. And his left hand throbs hotly from just doing that much, so that’s all he’s doing.
“Hey,” Clint says as he comes into view of Wilson fussing over their first aid kit in their dimly lit kitchen while Jigsaw eats a bunch of grapes at the kitchen table beside a pile of bandages that used to be around his head. “How are things looking?”
Wilson looks up at him briefly. “Messy.” He lifts up the first aid kit, which, yes, is messy. “But also healing faster than should be possible.”
Clint ignores the jibe about his first aid kit and turns his attention to Jigsaw instead.
The burns still look… bad. Real bad. And faintly shiny, though that’s probably the ointment Wilson was talking about. And he isn’t an expert on what healing burns look like, being much more familiar with broken bones and lacerations than burns, so he’ll have to take Wilson’s word for it that things are healing quickly.
Jigsaw’s eyes, when he opens them, are a huge mess of red sclera and cloudy irises, but they don’t look as raw as before.
“Can you… see now?” he asks Jigsaw.
He feels kind of stupid asking, but Wilson said he was healing faster than possible, so maybe he can. Earlier, on the quinjet, he couldn’t, though the lights Banner and Wilson had shined in his eyes while asking questions had bothered him all the same.
Jigsaw shakes his head, his eyes closed again, and then offers him a grape, holding it up in the air in his general direction.
“Uh, thanks.” Clint reaches out to take the grape and puts it in his mouth. Grapes are okay, and it’s not like he’ll have to eat a lot of them. Jigsaw shares his food as a gesture of caring, more than from a desire to give it all away. And the cheese cubes he usually pairs with his grapes aren’t present, so they’re probably all eaten already or Jigsaw would have shared that instead.
“I’ve got some more eye drops for you,” Wilson says. “We’ll want to keep your eyes lubricated so they heal better, and this should help with the pain a bit, too. Three times a day, and the bandages on the rest of the time. I’ll show Clint how to do it.”
Jigsaw scowls and shakes his head again.
Wilson gives Clint a pleading look, clearly asking him to intervene and work his assassin whisperer magic.
And Clint can do that, yeah. He doesn’t want to even think about Lucky licking all over Jigsaw’s face with those burns, and Alpine with her sandpaper tongue would be even worse. They definitely need the bandage back on, even if they skip the eye drops.
Probably, Jigsaw’s used to being left unbandaged, without anything to soothe or ease any pain, and he’s had to heal however he could. Clint can’t see HYDRA taking the time to bind his wounds when he’d just heal anyway, especially since they took pleasure in hurting him.
So maybe Jigsaw’s thinking that he can just heal like that again, maybe just keep his eyes shut and therefore not have to bother with all this medical attention. But he’s in a better place now, with access to clean bandages and eye drops and people who care about his healing. Who care about him. People who don’t get their jollies from seeing him in pain and causing more pain whenever they see a way to do it.
“I know it’s irritating,” Clint says, “but it’s supposed to help you heal even faster. Don’t you want to heal faster?”
Jigsaw lifts his left shoulder to indicate his indifference and eats another grape. He signs that he is safe as though that means there’s no rush on healing or something.
And maybe, to him, that’s the case. Maybe if there were danger in the area or an impending mission to be ready for, he’d be keen to heal as quickly as he could, but now that there’s no danger and the mission is over, he can take his time. Especially if that means he can skip eye drops or wearing the bandages he’s complained about and tried to remove more times than Clint could keep track of.
Time to break out the assassin whispering.
“I just don’t want Lucky to get your burns infected, is all.” Clint grimaces. “He licks your face a lot, and the bandages would help keep your wounds clean.”
“And your eyes need the moisture,” Wilson adds. “These are soothing eye drops, with medicine in them. They’ll make things feel better.”
Jigsaw frowns, but Clint has the feeling it’s not a frown of consideration but a frown of stubbornness. And just half a second—and one more grape—later, he’s proven correct.
Jigsaw signs that the pain is a good thing, a proper thing, a normal thing. And then before Wilson can disagree, he adds the bit Clint was waiting for, about order coming through pain. That stupid HYDRA mantra that won’t leave them alone.
“What do you think is the benefit from this particular pain, Jigs?” Clint asks, thankful now that he asks enough questions about his therapy to know about this. “What’s the lesson you’re learning?”
“Lesson?” Wilson asks, incredulous. He sets the first aid kit down on the table beside yesterday’s bandages. “What lesson? How could there be a lesson?”
There’s no response to that aside from Lucky putting his head on Jigsaw’s knee, and Clint sighs.
“You know, I don’t think there is a lesson,” Clint says.
He digs around a bit in the first aid kit Wilson was organizing, just to make sure he’s got everything here that they used on the quinjet when rebandaging Jigsaw’s eyes.
“I just finished putting everything where it belongs,” Wilson complains.
Clint shrugs and brings out the big guns.
“But if we’re going to get you to your therapy appointment,” he says, “you’ll need the bandages on, at least. I mean, what’s Yasmin going to think if you walk in there with your face and eyes all burned like that, and not even a bandaid for it? It’ll look like we don’t care about you.”
Jigsaw hesitates with a grape partway to his mouth, and then sets the grape down in the bowl. His left shoulder hunches just a tiny amount, but it’s something Clint’s looking for.
If Clint’s guess is right, now Jigsaw’s going to be worried about upsetting someone else, something he likes to avoid doing. If he won’t let them take care of his injuries for his own sake, he probably will let them bandage things up for someone else’s sake.
He hates guilting Jigsaw into accepting medical attention, but if that’s what it takes… Well, sometimes the shortcut is worth it.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 6:30 a.m.—
Just one drop in each eye, the other asset had said. Then would come the blindfold-bandage again until it was time to put two more drops in the eyes at the lunchtime meal, just one drop in each eye. Then the blindfold-bandage. Then drops again after the session with Zoe. Then blindfold-bandage. Drops, blindfold-bandage, always together, three whole times a day.
It did not want anything to go into the eyes, and still does not. Things that go into the eyes hurt the eyes, are a punishment it has not earned. Not only has it not looked at any glowing panels, but glowing panels are not even off limits to this asset anymore. It is encouraged to look at glowing panels, especially the tablet. So why drop acid into the eyes, even if only one drop in each eye?
But the flying man was right when he said they were soothing. The drops had not been acid. It checked the facts before the drops were used and the facts were that the flying man does not lie to it, and the flying man does not want to hurt it, and the flying man wants it to heal. With drops. It did not want the drops, but the other asset had asked it to try them, just this one time. Just one drop in each eye.
And then the other asset had put a drop in each of the other asset’s own eyes, to show it that the drops did not hurt. Before it could stop the other asset, the drops had gone in, but the other asset had not been blinded by acid after all, because the facts were the facts and the fact was that the drops for the eyes were soothing, just like the flying man had said.
And the drops were soothing, after the first shock of them falling into the eyes. So soothing. It had not realized how much the eyes hurt until the drops were in the eyes. The flying man was right. It does not know why it was so certain that the drops were a punishment for it. The flying man does not dole out punishments. It is not the flying man’s place to do that, and it suspects that the flying man would not do it even if it were his place.
And so the drops were not terrible and burning pain to combine with all the other pain. It is not sure the relief from the hot, dry, aching pain in the eyes is worth the ordeal of the drops, though. The head held back, the eyes open and staring, waiting waiting waiting, waiting for the drop to fall, waiting for the screaming pain that does not come this time the way it has come all of the other times there have been drops to go into the eyes.
Too many other drops have gone into the eyes for it to like drops in the eyes as a concept. Drops that have hurt so bad, like nails being driven into the eyes, like needles injecting liquid agony into the eyes, like shards of glass.
It checked the facts, and it will keep checking the facts, and the facts are that this is the hive building where there is no punishment. But. But the mind keeps expecting the punishment with every drop. And it has only had the two so far.
And it still does not want to wear the blindfold-bandage that the flying man is winding around the head. It cannot see much without it, just vague blocky shapes and lighter areas and darker areas, with stabby pain all the way inside the brain. To the center of the head.
But with the blindfold-bandage, it cannot see anything at all. It does not like to not see anything at all. And there is still stabby pain deep into the head.
It is true that it does not need to see in order to protect the ones around it, or in order to protect itself. To kill threats and targets. It does not need vision to be an asset capable of great destruction and violence. It can hear well enough to fight when the fighting is close by, an keep track of the breathing and footwork of its opponents. But these things are much easier with sight, even damaged sight from a prior punishment.
And it must have been a punishment that damaged the eyes. What else could it have been? Not a punishment given to it by the team that is not a cell, but… But a punishment from B-RUM, maybe. B-RUM is dead now, though. The other asset said so. The other asset killed B-RUM.
Just not before the punishment.
“There you go,” says the flying man, tucking the end of the bandage under the rest behind the head. “Need to see it again?”
“No, I got it.”
“Great. Your turn now. Let’s see that hand.”
The other asset has got it. The next time there is a need for the blindfold-bandage, the other asset will put it on the head, not the flying man. And the other asset is in charge of the drops for the eyes, just one drop in each eye. That is good. It would rather lean the head back and accept the drops from the hands of the other asset than to have to check all of the facts all over again.
With the other asset, the only facts that matter are that they are the same, the same, the same, and would never hurt each other, and are there for each other no matter what. To save and protect each other. They are together.
And they will go together out of the rooms for assets and down the hallway and into the elevator to go down to the room for therapy, just as soon as the other asset’s left hand can get cleaned and smeared with ointment and rebandaged, and as soon as the other asset can get more soft clothes on and some shoes.
It does not bother with the shoes. If it was going to put shoes on, it would have to take the so-fluffy special socks that the other asset gave it off and put on normal socks—still soft, but not so-fluffy—so that the shoes would fit right.
It does not want to take off the so-fluffy socks, and they are so warm and so fluffy that the other asset will not have to worry about this asset’s feet being cold on the floors.
It does wish the flying man were more gentle with the other asset’s hand. The other asset hisses as the wounded hand—the burned hand?—is cleaned, and then again when the ointment goes on. The flying man should not make the other asset hiss in pain.
But it knows that wounds hurt, that this is the nature of wounds, and there is nothing that can make the wounds stop hurting. Sometimes even after they have healed. That is like the left shoulder, and the way the left arm sometimes itches or throbs, even though it is not there anymore and there is a metal arm instead.
And it knows that the other asset heals so slowly. The other asset might be in pain for a long time from the wounds on the other asset’s left hand.
How did that hand get injured? Oh, yes. The halo. The other asset grabbed the halo. That is how the other asset’s left hand was injured. The halo burned the other asset. Unacceptable. But halos are meant to hurt, even if they do not usually burn. Maybe the new halos do usually burn.
“Jigs, you okay?”
It nods. Everything is wrong, the injuries and the halos and blindfold-bandage it has to wear and the other asset hissing in pain that is unavoidable. But for all of that, it is okay.
The other asset is right here, beside it, and the dog gives the right hand a lick before the flying man heads off with the dog for the morning walk.
“…Okay,” the other asset says, sounding like there is doubt about that. “I just need to get some pants on and then find those slippers I wore back when my ribs were all banged up.”
It nods and eats a grape. It can wait, and while it waits, it can finish the grapes. The little cat is busy playing with a spring inside of the three-pronged nylon tunnel, safely away from where an uncareful step could smush the little cat.
Breakfast for the little cat came before anything else, and it had the flying man’s help getting that set up because it was bumping into things and knocking things off the dish rack trying to find the right bowl and the right pouch for the little cat’s breakfast. Today is tuna day. Tomorrow is chicken. The little cat is something called an obligate carnivore and must eat other creatures. That is sad, but the little cat’s health is important.
The flying man even poured the tuna mush from the pouch into the bowl for it.
And after breakfast is play time—the little cat knows the schedule very well. The little cat did not even try to stay on the table to play with spent bandages. Such a good little cat. So well behaved.
“You ready?” comes the other asset’s voice.
It eats the current grape and then inspects the stems from the bunch to be sure there are not grapes left that it missed. The stems all seem to be free of grapes, at least that it has been able to feel, so it puts the empty stem bunch into the bowl and gets up.
It holds onto the table and feels around the other chairs until it gets to the other side of the table, and from there… just a little reach… and there is the counter. It can put the stems on the counter for now. The little cat cannot jump from the table or chairs to the counter top. It will be safe for the grape stems to live here.
And then… It turns around to face what it thinks is the sofa, the next thing it can touch on its way to the door. But the other asset must sense its uncertainty, because the other asset comes up beside it and wraps an arm around its waist.
“I got you, Jigs,” the other asset says. “Let’s get you to therapy.”
Notes:
Content Warning: Some stuff in here about eye injuries past and present, which might make some folks squeamish.
Other notes: You're not actually supposed to grab blind people and move them around a space like Clint is doing with Jigsaw at the end of this chapter and in previous chapters. Clint doesn't know better, though, and Jigsaw certainly doesn't know better, and doesn't mind the added closeness one bit. You might say he appreciates it, haha!
Just know that this is not the way it's supposed to go in real life--ask first (and pay attention to the answer; they may not want or need help), and let the blind person hold onto your elbow, and don't leave them adrift in the middle of empty space unless they say they know where they are and are fine. Get them to a landmark of some kind instead, so they can carry on from there. There's way more nuance to it, of course, but that's the basics.
Chapter 96: Super Soldiers | No, no, no, you are not alone
Notes:
Chapter title from “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
Thanks to resourceress7 for the info on tactile symbols and landmarks in this chapter! We had a lot of fun brainstorming them. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
“You gonna be okay, Jigs?” the other asset asks as they come to the door to the therapy room. “I can come back in an hour or so, when you’re done.”
It nods—it will be okay here with Yasmin, of course. Yasmin is a very good expert, and would not hurt it.
“Thank you for bringing him, Clint,” Yasmin says from inside of the therapy room. “And good morning, Jigsaw. I’m happy to see you. Can you sign how you’re feeling this morning?”
The other asset makes a mumbled departure noise and then hastily retreats toward the elevator, as though worried that Yasmin might turn her attention and her question in the other asset’s direction.
It cannot understand what is scary about Yasmin as far as the other asset is concerned. She is nice and not controlling. Does not train or condition it. Only wants to understand it, and to help it understand the ones around it. And she has helped it understand so much.
It touches the door frame to get a feel for its exact position, and then comes into the therapy room and shuts the door behind it before feeling for the sofa and settling onto it.
It cannot point to a chart to tell Yasmin how it is feeling, and it did not bring anything with it to the therapy session that it could point to anyway, but it signs “pain” and “tired.” That is not the answer to Yasmin’s question, though.
Yasmin starts their sessions asking about inside feelings, not outside ones. Feelings in the mind and emotion feelings. Sometimes physical feelings can help it determine what else is going on, but they are not what Yasmin is asking about. They spent a lot of time discussing the differences before it really understood what kind of feelings she was asking about. It knows now. It just wants her to know that it hurts and that it is tired.
“I’m sorry that your injuries are hurting you, Jigsaw. If you’re too tired to have a session this morning, we can skip today’s morning session so that you can get some more sleep.”
It shakes the head. No. It does not like to miss a session now that it is so used to having them so often. It would feel bad to miss a session. And it is awake now. And it is not wanting to sleep for just an hour—it is wanting to sleep for many hours.
But how else is it feeling? Is there any one sign it can make to cover all of the things? It thinks for a while, and Yasmin lets it—she always gives it time to think when it needs the time.
Eventually it signs that it is not sure how it feels. Because there are so many things it feels, all at once, and it does not know where to start. How to pick just one of the things it is feeling, or how to put them in order.
“That’s alright, Jigsaw. I have a simplified feelings wheel here that Zoe made for you last night. It might help you get started.”
Yasmin has a feelings chart, but even if it is simplified and there are not all of the many options, how will it see the chart with the blindfold-bandage on? The other asset and the flying man agreed that it should not take it off until they are there with the drops for the eyes after the lunchtime meal.
“It has symbols for you to feel with your fingers,” Yasmin says, and there is the sound of something being placed on the coffee table between them. “I’ve put it on the table with the same orientation you like to use the chart in. The upper left corner is missing, so you can tell what side is up. If you’d like, you can take some time to explore it with your hands.”
With the hands? Feel the chart with the fingers. It does not know what this will accomplish, because charts are flat things that will feel flat. But it reaches forward, to the chart, and it is not paper at all, but cardboard with paper on top of it. It picks up the cardboard square, feels the missing corner just like Yasmin said, and runs the metal hand across the surface.
It is not flat! It does not feel flat. There are the wedges, the slices of the circle, all the lines coming out of the center and going to the edge of a circle on the cardboard. And there are raised bits, like hot glue but without the strings everywhere. There is some velcro, too, and some sandpaper. All of the things in the same places it is used to on the chart.
It feels the smile face, the circle with oval buttons for eyes and the curve of a smile. And there is the sad face, with smaller round buttons for eyes and little hot glue teardrops and the mouth curve going the other way.
Disgusted has square buttons for eyes and a felt tongue sticking out of the mouth, and angry—that is where the face is made of velcro, the scratchy part with all the tiny plastic hooks.
The fear face has a circle for the mouth and is made out of a kind of sandpaper that is scratchy and rough. And bad is a face with triangle buttons for eyes and a frown mouth. Surprised is like the fear face, but it is glue on nubby fabric with big round buttons for eyes.
Zoe made it a feelings chart it could touch! It has all of the middle parts of the chart without all the tiny slices around the outside.
It feels the chart all over, exploring the shapes and sizes of the buttons, the textures of the faces, the shapes the glue lines make. There is something calming about touching all of the feelings, like it holds the feelings in the hands and can control which ones it wants to sign in which order.
It puts the cardboard feelings wheel onto the coffee table and points to the fear face first. That is where it will start.
Part of it is still very afraid. It mimes the halo as it imagines it—it cannot remember what it looked like. There are halos that can be carried by ordinary operatives. That must have been what damaged the eyes and caused the burns around the face and temples. B-RUM is no more, is dead, is gone, but there are halos. And it is afraid of them, terrified. It points to the fear face again and signs “big.” There is big, big fear of them.
And part of it is happy to be home again and that the dog and the little cat are back in the rooms for assets where they belong. There is the happy face with its oval buttons. It had missed the dog and the little cat when they first returned from the mission and there was so much silence in the rooms for assets instead of the jingle of collar tags and the mrrp and pitter patter of the little cat.
And part of it is tired in the emotion-feeling way. It can sign “tired” right now, so it adds “tired” to the fear face. It is tired of being afraid of being taken back. Tired of handlers-operators-trainers-technicians trying to take it back. Tired of there being the words that control it and the halos and all the horrible memories that could become real again if it is captured. Why can it not finally be really really safe and really really away from all of these horrible things?
And part of it is sad—fingers trail along the glue teardrops—because it thought there would be more assets coming home with the team that is not a cell, assets that could live in other rooms for other assets, maybe on the same hallway as the two assets and the ballerina woman. But it asked the other asset about them last night, and the other asset had told it. And it remembered, then. They are all dead, dead, dead. Were executed long ago.
And part of it is guilt-feeling. This is not a face on the chart it can feel, but it can sign “sorry” and point to the bad face. The other assets in the wolf pen were left behind, were executed, were killed and are no more, but it did not think of them for a long time after the mission. Was too busy thinking about itself, about this asset and the other asset, and about what happened to them. It only remembered to ask about them later. And it had forgotten them before.
It signs all of these things the best it can with the sling on the right arm, the best it can with the new feelings chart it can feel, with the buttons, the best it can with the words and signs squirming around in the brain and sidling out of reach when it needs to sign them, the best it can without adding a drawn image or a word from the tablet.
“It seems like there’s a lot going on,” Yasmin says when it has finished. “That’s a lot to feel all at once.”
It nods.
“Before we start to unpack some of that, I want to ask you a question. Can I do that?”
When it nods—Yasmin can do whatever she wants; it trusts her—she continues.
“I remember after your previous mission, you thought that you deserved the injury, the bullet wound. You said that it was a lesson you needed to learn and that the pain of it put you in better order.”
Yasmin pauses. Then: “Do you feel that way about your current injuries?”
It… It does not know. The other asset said that there was no lesson, earlier. It will have to think about this. Did it learn something? Did it do something wrong and bring the lesson upon itself?
It put the killing face on the other asset to protect the other asset. Life-saving face, now, too. It would do that again, though, whether it was wrong or not. It feels like a very right thing to do, and how it feels about an action matters. Yasmin says so.
And it ran from B-RUM. But if B-RUM were alive, it would do that again, too. The other asset had said it, a very long time ago, that retreat was sometimes the wisest thing. And B-RUM is dead, anyway. Is dead dead dead, is gone and dead.
And it does not remember all of the rest, not clearly.
It shakes the head, finally. The halo, the burns, they might have been a punishment from B-RUM, maybe for running away instead of submitting and complying. But B-RUM did not have the right to punish it, and is dead now. It did not learn anything.
“I’m glad. I was sad and afraid for you when I heard that you were injured, but I’m very glad that you don’t feel like you deserved it this time.” Yasmin is smiling, it can tell by the way her voice sounds. “I’m smiling really big right now because I’m so happy for you. Hopefully, you don’t ever feel like you deserve to be hurt again. But if you do, we can talk about it.”
That is right. They can talk about anything. She has said so.
“So one of your abusers is dead,” Yasmin says. “I understand he was someone you were very afraid of. How does that feel, knowing that he can’t hurt you ever again?”
Confusing. It can access that sign. And more. It knows that B-RUM is dead. The other asset said so, and told it everything about how it happened, too. Has told it more than once, when it has asked about it, asked about B-RUM, about how it happened, about how the other asset is sure of B-RUM being no more.
It draws the next part in the air since there is nothing to draw on that it can see, anyway, and adds signs for things as well. Demonstrates on the body where things are happening.
B-RUM was shot with the fangs on sticks, two times, once in the middle of his center of mass and once in the gut. B-RUM was cut across the neck, too, hard enough and deep enough to almost split his head from the rest of him. He is not enhanced. He will have died from those injuries. B-RUM bled out. B-RUM was not breathing and had no blood left when the other asset was finished with him.
But it is still so afraid, even after checking the facts. And it sometimes forgets that B-RUM is dead. It thinks about B-RUM with a halo that fits in his hand, B-RUM coming after it, B-RUM hurting it, pushing into it, carving the letters and tallies into it, everything. Thinks about B-RUM stringing it up on the meat hooks. Chandelier of asset. And then pushing into the holes when it is brought down off of the hooks. Laughing and laughing.
“Jigsaw, I sense that you’re getting distressed. Can you pull the fleece throw off the back of the sofa and tell me how it feels?”
It nods and does so. The soft blanket is so soft. Is warm. Is fluffy against the skin face just like the so-fluffy socks that the other asset gave it are fluffy against the feet. It cannot see it, but the soft blanket smells the same as before, so it is not new—that means it is a buttery white, a cream color that is so soft to look at just like it is so soft to hold.
“Thank you, Jigsaw. You mentioned that you were feeling confused about this abuser’s death, that you were still afraid even after he died.”
Yes.
“I want you to know that this is normal. You aren’t alone. Many people need time to catch up to the absence of an abuser, or any other trauma trigger. You might be afraid for a very long time, because your body has learned that fear, as a protective response.”
That makes sense. If it did not know to be afraid of B-RUM, it might have earned more lessons and punishments from him, back when B-RUM was alive and was a handler who could hurt it at any time.
“That fear used to serve a purpose,” Yasmin says, “and now it doesn’t. But your body and your mind will both have to unlearn that response. And it will take time.”
But it does not want to be afraid anymore. The other asset protected it from B-RUM in the best, most permanent way possible. It feels ungrateful to be afraid still, like it has seen the gift and rejected it.
It tries to sign this, tries and tries, and gets so frustrated when the best it can do is not good enough and Yasmin cannot understand it after all. Ungrateful is not on the feelings chart at all, not even on the paper one with all the tiny slices. Just on the tablet. It signs “thanks” and then shakes the head. Not thankful. That is how it feels.
“You’re not thankful?” Yasmin asks. “What aren’t you thankful for?”
No. No it is thankful, but it feels like it is not being thankful, like the other asset did it a huge favor and it is pretending the favor was not done. Is still afraid even after the other asset killed B-RUM for it. Ungrateful. If only it could make that sign right now.
“We’re nearly at the end of our session this morning, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says finally, after many failed attempts to say back to it what it is trying to say to her. “Why don’t we pick this up this afternoon? I should have an activity that you might enjoy that can help you vent some of your frustration if you’re still feeling that later today.”
It sighs and nods. It wishes that it could see well enough to use the tablet, to line up words and have them come out the way it plans for them to come out. Or could draw on a piece of paper instead of tracing in the air. It wishes that the signs would stay in place when it reaches for them and not squirm away from the fingers like slippery water-snakes. Eels.
“Jigsaw.”
It turns the head to face her directly, tilts the head curiously.
“Thank you for trying so hard. I’m glad you made it back safely from your mission, even though you were injured.”
It smiles. Of course it made it back. The other asset was there to protect it when it needed protection. They are the same, the same, the same.
Together.
“I’d like to spend the last few minutes of our session talking about ways you can still get around on your own while you can’t see. So that you don’t bump into things as much, and so you can go wherever you want without needing someone to guide you if you don’t want their help.”
It nods. It would not mind if the other asset came with it everywhere it wants to go, but the other asset is afraid of Yasmin and Caroline, and so it would like to come to those rooms without bringing the other asset along and making the other asset face a fear situation.
“First, I want to talk briefly about JARVIS. I know you don’t listen to him, and I understand why, though it makes me feel sad,” Yasmin says. “If you are lost or stuck, you can sign for help and JARVIS can tell someone you trust to come help you.”
The voice without a mouth can send someone to help it, and it will not have to listen to the voice without a mouth to get that help? It will only have to sign for help. It can do that. And probably the voice without a mouth will let the other asset know to come and help it.
“How does that make you feel?”
It thinks. It feels… maybe a little safe. It knows that it is being watched always by the voice without a mouth, because the voice without a mouth is everywhere in the hive building, always watching everything and everyone. But instead of just watching it, the voice without a mouth is going to help it if it needs help.
It signs that it feels good, happy, safe.
The voice without a mouth was a formidable enemy when it tried to escape the hive building before the auction. The voice without a mouth saw it everywhere it went and kept doors shut and blocked off ducts and secured grates. Now the voice without a mouth can find it anywhere it goes and send someone to help it.
“That’s wonderful, and it makes me happy to know it. Now, I’m no expert in this next subject,” Yasmin says, “but I did a little research last night. First, we’ll talk about how to hold your arms to avoid bumping into things. You might only be able to use your left arm for a while, but that’s okay.”
Steve
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 8:30 a.m.—
Steve leans his head back against the wall outside of Clint and Jigsaw’s rooms, Lucky’s head in his lap and his hand gently stroking the dog’s head and ears. He can see why and how Lucky is so comforting to Jigsaw. The dog’s head is a warm, heavy weight on his thigh, his breathing is soothing, and his fur is so soft. Steve feels like he could sit here waiting for Clint and Jigsaw to get back from the morning therapy session all day if he had to.
He and Natasha had been busy this morning, after getting Zoe’s memo and finding the crafting materials she’d left for them in the common room on the therapy floor. Landmarks and tactile symbols had been the name of the game. Make things that Jigsaw can feel, each one distinct from the rest and representative of whatever it’s a symbol for. Then put those things around the Tower where he’ll need to go while he can’t see.
Steve really hopes they’ve done everything correctly and that they have the chance to show them all to Jigsaw before breakfast. There are many different symbols for the various places they’ve been advised to use them.
The area just below the floor designator on the elevator on the kitchen level has a wooden spoon stuck to it now, so that Jigsaw will know on feeling it that he’s on the right level before he even gets out of the elevator. And on the gym level, there’s a bit of spent canvas from a heavy bag. The range level has a practice arrow there, tip pointing down. The lab level has a small spring.
The more personal levels, like the level he and Sam live on, have personalized tactile symbols under the floor designators. For his own floor that he shares with Sam, a circular piece of cardboard with a feather and a small plastic Captain America shield that Tony gleefully supplied from his father’s collection of fan memorabilia.
And on this level, where Clint, Jigsaw and Natasha live, there’s another cardboard circle, this one with a small bone shape made out of something called a pipe cleaner that’s too narrow to clean any pipes Steve has seen. But it was part of the crafting materials Zoe left for them in the common room, and the dog bone shape had seemed like a good symbol for the level Lucky spends so much time on.
Per Zoe’s instructions, directly across from everyone’s door there’s a landmark, also made of cardboard, but in a large rectangle secured with painter’s tape around the edges so that the cardboard doesn’t catch on anything as Jigsaw trails his fingers along the wall. Each landmark has a symbol in the upper left corner that will signify which of them lives behind the door across the hall.
Apparently, Jigsaw will be learning this morning how to trail his hand along the wall as he walks and to “square off” when he gets to the landmark with the symbol he’s looking for, putting his back flush to the wall and facing straight ahead before walking forward toward the door.
And tied to the door handles themselves, there are still more symbols to let Jigsaw know he’s arrived at the correct place.
Natasha has a small stuffed spider hanging on her door handle, selected from among Pepper’s decorations collection for the Halloween party that’s coming up. Steve’s not sure that’s the best thing to convey Natasha, but she insisted that he would know what it meant even without calling her Black Widow. Her landmark cardboard across from her door has another Halloween decoration, a little rubber spider with wiggly legs glued in the upper left corner.
Clint and Jigsaw have a small stuffed mouse hanging from the door handle now, cut off a wand toy that Steve and Sam hadn’t brought over yet. But it should signify the pets well enough, which should in turn signal that Jigsaw’s arrived home. Their landmark has a plastic star in the upper left corner, which Natasha assures him will not be interpreted as a mission completion but instead will be seen as matching his arm.
Steve’s door handle has another of Howard’s Captain America memorabilia, this time a small metal shield. His cardboard landmark has a third shield glued to it. Steve hasn’t really questioned Tony about the wisdom of using these things for this purpose, but it had seemed to give Tony some degree of satisfaction.
Jigsaw doesn’t often visit Sam, but they set Sam up with a feather in the upper left corner of his landmark and a collection of feathers hanging from his door handle, something like a feather duster without the handle. Steve hopes Sam likes it. The feathers are all dyed bright red, sort of like Redwing.
While bringing down the three miniature shields, Tony had picked out a small teddy bear in black and white, which is apparently called a panda bear, and which Jigsaw should be able to recognize from a late night animal discovery session in the lab. This, he assured them, he’d find a way to attach to the door of the lab for Jigsaw to feel.
There are gardening gloves for the gardening room, cutlery and a “solo” drinking cup for Caroline’s usual room, more arrows for the range’s landmark to match the arrows by the door, and some seashell-studded scrapbook pages for the therapy room. If all scrapbooking is as satisfying as those pages were to make, Steve might take up a new hobby.
Steve’s set up most of the landmarks and door hangers while Sam and Natasha work in the kitchen on breakfast and labeling cabinets and drawers with “please close me” signs, but not the therapy room itself.
The therapy room will be set up later, because Steve didn’t want to risk overhearing any of Jigsaw’s session. But he’s got the materials ready and waiting to put up after the morning’s debriefing session.
All of these floor designators, landmarks and door hangers, according to Zoe’s memo, will help Jigsaw navigate the Tower on his own, or at least the places he goes regularly or might go in search of someone. He never visits Bruce except in the lab, so Steve and Natasha decided there was no point in putting anything leading to Bruce’s Hulk-proof suite of rooms.
Steve wonders idly if that’s a mistake and they should maybe find or make some things to lead to Bruce’s rooms. There’d be time for it, afterward. Jigsaw’s eyes won’t heal in a day, after all.
He’s tempted to go down to the therapy room to see what’s taking Clint and Jigsaw so long to get back to their rooms, but Lucky shifts his attention to the elevator right around the time Steve hears it coming to a stop on this floor. Whatever took them a while, they’re here now. He gets to his feet and heads toward the elevator to meet them, Lucky at his side for a few steps but then trotting toward Jigsaw.
Time to show off his and Natasha’s work, and then maybe have breakfast together before the debrief with Fury at 10. Sam and Natasha are probably done in the kitchen making breakfast tacos, which Steve hopes don’t fall apart on the first bite like regular tacos do.
Notes:
Content Warning: Some reflection on B-RUM in this chapter, but nothing too bad.
Chapter 97: Avengers | You can find love (if you search within yourself)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Hero” by Mariah Carey.
Chapter Text
Sam
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
“Wait,” Sam says. “So you what? ”
Tony did not just say he sent in his empty Iron Man suits to take out what was left of that base in Siberia. Not without discussing it first. They’re a team, damnit, and that sort of decision should be made as a team.
“Sent in an armor army and dismantled the hell out of that base,” Tony confirms. “Burned everything up, tore up the foundations, destroyed it all.”
“You didn’t think that warranted some discussion?” Fury asks on the screen. “Some oversight?”
Likely, Tony hadn’t been thinking that, no. Not exactly that, anyway. He’d been feeling, not thinking, and no one had been around to help him put the other pieces into the puzzle, the pieces that said it would be better to go over the courses of action available to them as a team, and maybe still come to the same conclusion.
And from Steve’s conflicted expression and Natasha’s vaguely cagey one, they might very well have come to the same conclusion after discussion. Sam doesn’t run the Avengers, and this last mission changed something in the team. Hearing firsthand some of the horrors HYDRA had planned for Jigsaw, or seeing the executed Winter Soldiers in their tubes, or the traps. Something changed.
“What?” Tony says. “Everything came back out in more or less one piece, none of the tech got lost or stolen, and all the incriminating ‘we slaughtered them without hesitation’ evidence is wiped out. Wins all around.”
“Back up,” Fury says. “What do you mean you slaughtered them? I take it from the lack of prisoners that there weren’t survivors, but…”
Sam sighs. Yeah. Not only were there no survivors, but they really did slaughter everyone without trying to take prisoners. Hulk was smashing people like they were bugs, Tony fried a few people to charred chunks, Natasha shot to kill, Steve did not hold back with his shield even a little. It was something Jigsaw would have reveled in.
And the man in question does look very interested in the proceedings, for all that he’s still bandaged up and Sam can’t see his eyes. The set of his shoulders is interested, attentive. The way he follows the voices around the room, with the exception of Fury’s. He’s hardly touched the Chex mix Tony is sharing around.
“Well,” Tony says. “About the no survivors. JARVIS thinks there was a pocket of HYDRA goons that stayed out of the fighting. They got out after we left.”
Jigsaw scowls and tentatively feels out a mini pretzel to turn over in his fingers. The metal fingers are surprisingly gentle with the mini pretzel, considering Jigsaw’s obvious irritation. It’s a good sign, though, after the earlier jerkiness and coordination issues he’d been having. The man really is healing at the speed of light.
So there were survivors, and they still didn’t manage to get a single prisoner out of the deal. That’s really too bad. And it means that Steve might be wrong about no one having any footage of the team going overboard and overkill against their opponents. Not that it’s likely HYDRA would release footage of themselves getting curb stomped.
“Let’s start over,” Steve says. “We’re losing the details jumping around like this.”
Fury waves for him to proceed, and the mission debrief gets off to a much better start this second time, with Tony adding new information as they get to the appropriate spots, instead of jumping in with his extracurricular attack on the base.
No one goes into any detail about the nature of the trash talking they overheard on the comms, and Sam doesn’t see any reason to add to the overview with any specifics. Natasha merely states that there was nothing of value in the communications they overheard save that there are now portable halos.
“And I’m working on a detection system for that,” Tony says. “Something we can all keep on our person, hopefully, that would let us know Tesseract stuff is in the area.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” Fury mutters. “I wish we’d never looked into that thing at S.H.I.E.L.D. There’d be a lot fewer of those power packs in the world for HYDRA to snap up and put to use.”
Steve looks like he’s about to say something somewhat sharper than “I told you so,” but he restrains himself. What he finally does say is: “We’re agreed that we’re destroying every single one of them we come across. Used for good or evil, they all go.”
“With some luck, the Tesseract itself will stay off-world,” Bruce adds smoothly, “and we can locate and destroy any lingering relics of its energy on this world.”
“Hear, hear,” Tony says with gusto that surprises Sam a bit. He’d have thought Tony would want to pick one apart, study it, come up with some new gadget or energy source based on it.
“While it’d be nice to know how it works and therefore how to keep it from working,” Tony continues, “it’s too risky. We’ve got at least three people on the team who can be brain-fried by one of those halos and keep on ticking like the enemy’s brand new brainwashed Energizer Bunny of mayhem. Maybe more of us.”
Sam half expects Clint to hunch his shoulders while Tony’s talking, but instead he reaches over to give Jigsaw’s arm a pat. He’s glad they have each other. Each of them seems to make offering reassurance to the other a priority, and that’s a good sign, even if they do seem to depend on each other a bit too much at times.
“We know they have different settings,” Bruce says, “and we have no clear understanding of what various settings would accomplish.”
“And you’re suggesting these portable halos could work on anyone,” Fury says, testing the idea out. “If they’re survivable without enhancements.”
Tony and Bruce nod.
“And JARVIS and the suits and the bots didn’t find anything like a prototype, blueprint, manual—nothing.” Tony taps his current piece of Chex mix on the table. “So these things didn’t come from that base in Siberia. They’re probably home grown.”
“By Zola,” Steve mutters under his breath.
“Probably,” Bruce agrees. “Or maybe by the app version of him they have. Z.E.L.U.S.”
“Another thing to tackle,” Tony says with a nod. “Zola, Z.E.L.U.S., Insight, Tesseract power packs, portable halos… I’ll be busy well into Spring.”
“It can’t take us that long,” Natasha says. “Because it won’t take them that long. Not to build a couple of helicarriers and get Insight off the ground. If that’s even all Insight is.”
Sam happens to think a trio of helicarriers with that much weaponry aboard is plenty for Insight to be a threat worth taking very seriously, thanks. The damage they could do… It’s unthinkable.
“For now,” Fury says, “let’s leave Insight and Zola to Coulson. We’ll bring you in when there’s something to go after. In the meantime, those halos worry me.”
They worry Sam, too. If any of them could be fitted with a properly calibrated halo and survive the effects, they could do far worse than lose an ally—they’d gain a very well-trained and dangerous enemy.
They don’t know yet whether there is a setting for unenhanced individuals to be wiped, but the mere thought of that is more than alarming. It’s downright terrifying.
“I’m also worried about the press this mission got,” Fury says, “particularly since it was meant to be a top secret mission.”
There is that, also, yes.
It isn’t as though they could have just not walked Lucky or had someone in to pet-sit. But there were better ways to go about it than to just let the Bishop girl take the dog out on his usual rounds. It’s a shame that reporter caught up to Kate, though Kate had at least handled it well and offered no comments.
And had taken Lucky to a completely different dog park for his evening walk, having a car take her and Lucky there and back.
This morning, Heather—because he and this reporter have been on a first-name basis for nearly the entire time she’s been out there with her crew—had remarked on him being “back already” and wanted to know more about the mission.
When he said there was no mission to comment on, she’d rattled off enough circumstantial evidence of a mission that he’d had to just keep walking to be done with the conversation and not get caught up in her narrative.
And Sam had thought the quinjet was entirely cloaked on the roof, and not visible when taking off, landing, or just sitting there. But apparently someone had seen them taking off, though somehow whoever that was had missed their landing.
That’s for the best. The last thing they need is drone footage of a blood-splattered Steve and an injured Clint helping an even more seriously injured Jigsaw off the quinjet and inside the Tower.
“No one knows where we went,” Steve insists. “There weren’t any HYDRA agents peeking through windows to take rainy footage of us. The reporters aren’t even sure when we got back.”
“But they do know we went somewhere,” Natasha says. “They know we had Kate Bishop come to walk the dog. They know where she goes to school, where she lives, and that she spends Sunday mornings at the Tower working with Clint.”
“That’s not her fault,” Clint says. “She hasn’t said a word to anyone other than ‘no comment.’ She’s better at giving no comment than S.H.I.E.L.D. is with the whole press release on a dime thing.”
“No one’s saying it’s your protege’s fault,” Fury says from the screen. “We just need to work out a better system for sending the team off on a mission without anyone knowing. It would be easier,” he mutters, “if you were based out of the Triskelion. Somewhere with a lot of coming and going to disguise your travel.”
“Not happening,” Steve and Tony say in unison.
“Jinx!” Tony crows. “But seriously, not happening. We have a whole Tower to ourselves here and no need to worry about secret HYDRA tunnels filled with secret HYDRA rats.”
Fury shrugs. “Just a thought.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—
The other asset is flagging.
The meeting in the big room with all the chairs and the large glowing panel it cannot see through the blindfold-bandage had lasted so long, and the other asset was awake almost all of the night—certainly every time it woke up, the other asset was already awake, except the last time.
The other asset is yawning despite the disgusting bitter coffee that is supposed to keep the other asset awake, and it can feel the exhaustion radiating off of the other asset like waves of heat off a sunbaked metal roof.
It knows what they should do. There are still hours to go before there is the lunchtime meal, and they should spend those hours buried in blankets and pillows, spooning. It wants to be the big spoon so that the other asset has the chance to be the little spoon, since the other asset likes that so much. That will also help it position the right arm so that the clavicle is able to heal without too much friction of bone on bone.
They can have the dog with them in the blankets, and even the little cat. Maybe it can find a knot of bunched up muscle in the other asset’s back or shoulders, maybe in the other asset’s neck, even, and can dig dig dig with the metal thumb until the knot breaks apart and the blood is flowing smoothly once again.
The other asset would fall asleep again, just like the last time it did that for the other asset, and then the other asset would not be so tired anymore. The other asset deserves a safe and deep slumber, without any terrifying night images.
“Well, what are you two up to now?” the clown man asks as it follows the other asset out of the big room with all the chairs, holding onto the other asset’s elbow with the left hand. “Jigsaw?”
It lets go to sign that they are going to sleep, and the other asset does not correct it. So they really will go curl up in the soft things and burrow deep within their snuggly warmth and spoon! It grins.
“Sleep is good,” the flying man says. “Promotes healing. We can do eye drops again after lunch.”
Ugh. More drops in the eyes. It does not want drops in the eyes.
“I mean, we’ll probably just be playing with the kitten and all that,” the other asset says. “Tug-of-war with Lucky. Something like that.”
It signs “sleep” again and then “the same as.” They will both be sleeping, the same as each other.
“You’re really tired, huh?” the other asset asks.
It nods. It is very tired. And it still aches everywhere, all of the muscles, as though it had been tensed up too tightly for a long time, or had been training to the failure point. Or as though it had been wiped.
And more importantly, the other asset is tired. Is so tired. Was awake for so long in the night, and so alert. The other asset’s heartbeat under the hand was fast and slow by turns, but never sleeping-slow. It knows how to change that, how to make sure that the other asset sleeps so deeply and so well. The other asset will be so well-rested.
“Then I guess we’ll take a nap,” says the other asset. “Worst case, if I can’t sleep I’ll play some video games with just my right hand. Who knows? Maybe I can catch a fish right-handed where both hands failed.”
The other asset has not once caught a fish in the fish game. It knows this because there are letters at the end of the game where points are stored for the biggest fishes caught, and the auction woman has her name there, and the ballerina woman, too. But the other asset has not yet caught anything that would get a name at the end of the game. No inches for the biggest fish for the other asset.
“How about yourself?” the other asset asks. “Anything interesting planned for lunch?”
“Not yet. But dinner will be great,” the flying man says.
As they walk, there is talk of cubes of chicken, and vegetables, and mushrooms, all stabbed onto a stick and then set on fire. Some of the sticks will not have any meat on them, just the vegetables and mushrooms. And some potatoes, too, set on fire in a way that will bake them and not turn them into ashes. There is foil involved.
The flying man is going to teach the clown man how to do this on the roof of the hive building. How to set food on fire so that it “grills” and does not burn up.
And they got some peaches that will be set on fire, too, and then will be eaten with some ice cream. It cannot wait for the dinner meal. And for the dessert that will come after. It can put peaches in the dessert book as a food there that does not have to be made into ice cream or pie, but is just part of a dessert.
Set-on-fire peaches will be very good. It can tell.
But in the meantime, it is time to go back to the rooms that are for assets and spoon with the other asset until they both fall asleep. The ballerina woman will wake them up for the lunch meal. Or at least she will wake this asset up and then it can help her bring lunch to the other asset for when the other asset does wake up.
That is what happened the last time it chased all of the twists and bunches out of the other asset’s muscles and let the blood flow freely again. The other asset had looked so rumpled coming out of this asset’s room. Sleepy but rested at the same time. Relaxed.
It wants the other asset to be rumpled again, for the good reasons. Not rumpled in a bad way, not rumpled like the other asset had been after the tracksuit men had held the other asset captive. A better kind of rumpled.
“So you two are taking a nap,” the ballerina woman says as they join her in the elevator.
There is a smile in her voice, one that says she is saying things with her eyes and face that it cannot read with the blindfold-bandage on. The other asset can read the ballerina woman’s face, though, because the other asset shifts weight from one side to the other, makes a barely vocal stammer sound.
“That sounds nice,” says the ballerina woman with her smiling voice. “Need an alarm clock?”
“Actually, uh, yeah. Don’t want to miss lunch. Whatever it ends up being.”
Yes, she is definitely making expressions. She and the other asset are having one of their silent conversations with just eyes and eyebrows and lips, maybe the set of a shoulder or the tilt of a head. It cannot always understand their silent conversations when they have them, but now it cannot even see the silent conversation.
It hates the blindfold-bandage. It wants to see the conversation and make guesses about its meaning.
Maybe it will be able to convince the other asset that there is no need for more drops in the eyes or more of the blindfold-bandage after the lunch meal. It would like to see the set-on-fire peaches, too, while it eats them later that night.
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
The others should be done eating soon, which means it’s about the right time to go bring some of the leftovers down to have for her lunch with Clint and Jigsaw, assuming the other two are awake.
Jigsaw, she knows, will wake up when she approaches the door, either because he hears her somehow out in the hallway or because Lucky will perk up when she gets close. The last time, he’d been ready and waiting for her despite Clint still being fast asleep, and it’s likely to be a repeat of that.
It would be nice to catch Jigsaw unawares—from a safe distance, of course—and to be able to watch him the way she’s sure he watched her the first several nights she was back in the Tower. But that’s wishful thinking, she knows. And dangerous thinking. She can do without a setback in her healing.
She puts her book aside on the coffee table between the kinetic sand and the tub of silly putty and stretches for a moment before getting up.
“JARVIS,” she says, “how portable is lunch? Should I get Jigsaw on my way down to the kitchen or can I handle it all myself?”
“For lunch today, the team has decided on sandwiches, Agent Romanoff. I would suggest availing yourself of Jigsaw’s help.”
“Thanks.”
“You are welcome.”
Natasha heads out, considering whether she wants to rouse just Jigsaw or both him and Clint. They could eat in the kitchen if it’s something like sandwiches. All the different fixings on their plates, whatever sides are available, the need to keep the meat separate from everything else… it would be much easier to eat in the kitchen.
Decided, she rubs the felt ear of the little mouse hanging from their door handle and then knocks on the door instead of just letting herself in. Clint’s lights are all set to flick on and off when someone knocks on his door, and that will help him wake up where the sound of her knocking wouldn’t register if he has his hearing aids out.
“It’s me,” she says.
She knows that Jigsaw will hear her voice and come to the door to let her in while Clint scrambles to make himself “decent” and get his hearing aids properly placed. And she’s reasonably sure Jigsaw has managed to massage Clint into a putty man again. If she were comfortable with people that close to her and in position to hurt her, she’d ask for a massage herself.
It takes Jigsaw several minutes to get to the door this time, which is probably because he’s navigating the suite of rooms without his sight. Or maybe he was fast asleep himself. Or maybe he just hoped she would go away instead of knocking again so that he could stay curled up next to Clint. It’s hard to say. He doesn’t look put out when he opens the door, after all, though it’s hard to tell with the bandaging around his head and eyes.
“It’s sandwich o’clock,” Natasha says in greeting. “I thought we’d eat in the kitchen. Is Clint getting up?”
There’s a muttered “I’m up, I’m up” from further into the suite of rooms, and Jigsaw nods before letting her inside.
Clint looks just as dazed as the last time, and yes, he’s only got one hearing aid in by the time he emerges from Jigsaw’s room. He yawns big and loud before retrieving his shoes from the floor and moving around to the sofa to put them on.
“I had the most incredible nap, ‘Tasha,” he says. “Feels like I slept for days.”
Jigsaw has a distinctly proud set to his shoulders and the smile on his face conveys a mixture of triumph and satisfaction.
He must have spent most of that nap working on Clint’s back, then. And Clint probably needed that. He’s been so tense today every time Natasha has seen him. And on the quinjet after the mission, he couldn’t relax. He probably had a terrible night, too, worrying about Jigsaw.
“Alright,” Clint says as he gets up again. “Let’s go demolish some sandwiches.”
Jigsaw is the first one out the door, but in the hallway he hangs back to walk beside Clint on their way to the elevator, and Natasha sees that they’re holding hands when she turns inside the elevator car to push the button for the kitchen.
She gives Clint a knowing smile and signs that she’s happy for him.
And she is. She’s seen a number of disasters unfold in his love life over the years, and it’s nice to see something going very, very right for once. Even if it’s going slowly.
Chapter 98: Jigsaw | The grabbing hands grab all they can (everything counts in large amounts)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Everything Counts” by Depeche Mode.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
It is not able to convince the other asset that there is no need for more drops in the eyes after the lunch meal. One drop goes into each eye, and yes, it feels better once the drops are in the eyes, but it does not, does not, does not like the drops. It will be much happier when there is no more need for drops in the eyes.
And it is not able to convince the other asset that there is no need for the blindfold-bandage, either.
So it is wearing more of the bandages that it hates around the head, covering the eyes, a snug but not tight presence around the head that it wishes it did not have to keep in place. But the other asset did promise that they would ask about whether it needed the drops for before they go to bed, and whether the blindfold-bandage is needed for another night.
It heals fast, so it is hopeful.
It has had lots of fuel and lots of sleep, and the flying man said that the drops and blindfold-bandage would help it heal faster. So maybe it is healing very, very quickly. It can feel the itch and ache that often go along with healing, the tightness of new skin forming, the delicate throb of bone knitting together with bone.
And it is able to hold the left arm in the position Yasmin taught it, to form a protective cage around the head and torso. It knows the rooms for assets well enough to not need the protective cage, but it practiced after the morning session, and the cage of arms is very effective.
It can also trail a hand along the wall as it walks through the hallways and can sign Yasmin’s name so that the elevator takes it to the right floor for the therapy room. It can count doors as well. That will tell it how far down the hallway it is from where it wants to be.
And it can follow the jingle of the dog’s collar tags and the click of the dog’s nails on the floor, on top of all of that, because the dog knows the schedule, knows that this is where they go at this time of day, every day, without fail.
It can combine all of this with the seashells on the wall and door to get to the therapy room without the other asset needing to come with it, even though the other asset had offered. This way the other asset does not have to be nervous around Yasmin.
It does not know why, exactly, the other asset is so nervous around the various experts. They have not paid the other asset much attention, and are more focused on this asset. But the other asset must have some history with experts that is not pleasant.
It understands. All of the history it has with experts has been full of pain and suffering, except for the latest feeders, the expert with the signs and the expert without the words. Yes, since it escaped and began the freedom portion of its life, the experts have all been good ones.
“Hi Jigsaw,” Yasmin says as it slips into the therapy room after the dog. “Are you feeling any better this afternoon? Any less tired or less pained?”
It nods. There was a wonderful, glorious spooning session, and the other asset was so deeply asleep that there was a need to poke the other asset awake for the lunch meal. And the other asset was so sluggish at the lunch meal, moving so slowly and sleepily, but in a rested way.
And the drops, even though it does not like them, have made the eyes feel better.
“It’s nice that you gave Clint a massage,” Yasmin says after it explains the nap and the spooning and the kneading of muscles in the other asset’s back with the metal thumb. “Have you done that before?”
It nods and holds up a finger. It has done it one time before. Now there are two times.
“And has Clint given you any massages?” Yasmin asks. “On your back or anywhere else?”
It nods. The other asset has applied gentle pressure all over the flesh hand sometimes when holding hands with it, making little circles with a thumb and stroking each finger from the palm to the tip. The whole hand felt so good afterward.
It points to the hand and gives it a gentle squeeze, rolling the metal thumb in circles along the flesh palm.
“Clint has massaged your hand.” When it nods, she continues. “That’s nice of him. Do you want him to massage you anywhere else?”
It… It feels like that would be good, like it would feel nice—the other asset definitely enjoys the way it feels when it massages the other asset’s back and shoulders. And its own back and shoulder always hurt. Maybe it would feel nice like the hand did after the other asset massaged it. Or maybe it would only hurt more.
But it would not be upset if the other asset wanted to try it out. They are the same, after all, and it loves being able to feel the other asset’s muscles under the skin and the shirt, loves the feeling of the other asset under the fingers, loves that it has a way to help the other asset feel something enjoyable.
It has wanted to put hands on the other asset for a long time before it was able to do so. And they are the same. Maybe the other asset wants to put hands on it?
Yasmin makes a prompting noise in her throat, and it nods again.
Yes, it would like for the other asset to be able to put hands on it, even if the result was not enjoyable. The other asset should get what the other asset wants, just the way this asset has gotten what this asset wants.
“Alright. Have you thought about asking him for a massage?” Yasmin asks. “It’s important to advocate for our needs and our wants. Clint might not know what you would like unless you ask him for it.”
That is a good point. The other asset might not know. The other asset understands it better than a lot of the others in the hive building, as much as Yasmin does, or even more. But sometimes the other asset does not understand it, or does not anticipate what it wants.
“Are there any other things you want from Clint that you haven’t asked for?”
No more blindfold-bandage, no drops in the eyes… It thinks about other things. Maybe killing targets, but the other asset did kill for it already—killed B-RUM, the most dangerous enemy. The other asset will kill when it is important to kill, just the way it will not kill when it is important not to kill. They are the same, the same, the same.
It shakes the head. Signs that it does not know what else it would ask for. What else is there?
Dancing maybe. That would be a way to get hands all over the other asset while the other asset could get hands on it. And the ballerina woman had enjoyed dancing with the clown man. They had both enjoyed it, and had danced more times before the mission. It had watched them while the other asset was sleeping after the morning session with Yasmin but before the breakfast meal.
Maybe it would like to dance, after all. With the other asset.
“Dance,” it signs. It would like to dance with the other asset. Lovely music, physical exertion, skill and fluid movements, and being so close to the other asset, like upright spooning in motion, almost. Everything about it sounds good.
“You’d like to dance with Clint,” Yasmin confirms. “Does Clint dance?”
It nods. The other asset said that there had been dancing before, a long time ago, with the ballerina woman.
“So there are two things to ask Clint for your homework tonight.” Yasmin’s voice has a smile in it. It wishes it could see her as well as hear her. It hates the blindfold-bandage.
“During the rest of our session today, I’d like to revisit what you mentioned earlier, about feeling all of those things at once. Are you still feeling these things?”
It swallows. It had pushed all of the feelings thoughts away, had chased them off so that it could focus on the other asset and on the mission debrief and on the prospect of set-on-fire peaches. Now it all comes crowding back in. So much to think about, so many things to feel.
It mimes making a marking on the palm and then wiping it away. Then it points to the head and repeats the wiping motion. It signs that it is still afraid of being erased, and that it is still tired of being afraid.
“It can be exhausting looking over your shoulder all the time, expecting to be captured and wiped,” Yasmin says. “Is there a way to check the facts there?”
But the facts are that it is in danger outside of the hive building because of the halos. The facts will not help it be less afraid. It shakes the head.
“I’m not saying that there is nothing to be afraid of, Jigsaw. That is a very real threat, and there is a time and place to be afraid of it. But is that time now? Is that place here in Avengers Tower? Surrounded by people you know and trust?”
It hesitates, and then shakes the head again. There are dangers out there, but they are lessened in the hive building. And the hamburger technician said that he was making a device to detect the halos so that it can be sure to stay away and kill the operative with the halo from a safe distance.
It will not go back.
“Maybe you can remind yourself that you’re safe here when that worry thought comes up and you don’t want to be afraid,” Yasmin says. “Maybe you can share your worry thought with Clint and get some reassurance from him, as well.”
It nods. Yes. Yes, it can do that. When it is afraid, it knows that the other asset will protect it. Has killed for it, killed B-RUM, even.
“To be clear, that is certainly a valid and important thing to have fears around,” Yasmin adds. “I don’t want to minimize your fears in any way. I also don’t want you to be consumed by them all the time so that you can’t enjoy your life. We’ll work to find a balance.”
A balance. So that it can… enjoy life? Life is just a thing that is or isn’t. Something is alive or it is dead. That is that. It does not know how to “enjoy life.” It makes the question sign and then “life” and “enjoy.” What is that? Is that a thing that assets can do? How would it do that?
“There are many ways we can enjoy our lives,” Yasmin says. “We can take pleasure in what we do, things we do simply because they make us feel happy, or things that we do to make a positive impact on those around us. We can relax and spend time with people we love. We can learn new things and eat new foods. Does that give you an idea of what I mean?”
It nods.
So it is already enjoying life. It does things that make it feel happy, and things that make the other asset feel happy. It relaxes sometimes, and it spends time with the other asset and the ballerina woman, the hamburger technician, the others. It is learning and eating new things.
And if it was worried all the time, there would not be enough time for all of those things that it enjoys. So there is a time for being afraid and a time to not be afraid. And Yasmin is teaching it ways to not be afraid.
So that it can enjoy its life.
“One of the things I know you enjoy doing is drawing,” Yasmin says.
It does enjoy drawing, yes. It nods. If it could see what it draws, then it could write out words with letter shapes, and it would not be so stuck when the signs escape it.
“Zoe ordered some things last night, including a few tactile drawing boards that will let you feel your drawings, so that you can tell where you’ve drawn on the page, and what you’ve drawn.”
Yasmin pauses, and there is the sound of something being placed on the coffee table between them.
“This one arrived around noon today, and I’d like to explore it with you now. Zoe can show you more tonight, depending on what’s arrived by then, but I thought you might appreciate having this earlier than that.”
It reaches forward to the coffee table and feels for the thing Yasmin is calling a tactile drawing board. It is flat, like a board. Like a really thick clipboard without a clip, one that is also a box for holding papers. Something like a plastic film is on top of it, tucked into the top and bottom edges, the long edges of the rectangle. And a bar is over the middle of the board.
“There’s a stylus you can use to draw on the plastic sheet,” Yasmin says. “And we can take the ruler off if you would like.”
Ruler? It asks the question sign. What is a ruler?
“The flat plastic bar with the raised notches is a ruler, for drawing straight lines and for measuring things.”
Oh. It nods. Yes. They can take that off and it will have more room to draw. It can draw straight lines without help. And it does not need to measure things.
“Yes, you would like to take the ruler off?” Yasmin asks.
It nods again, and there is the sound of shifting fabric against upholstery as Yasmin leans forward, and then plastic-on-plastic sounds. She is taking the ruler off of the drawing board. It will be able to draw on the whole surface of the plastic sheet now. It does not know how it will be able to feel what it draws, but Yasmin said that it would, and it believes her.
“There you go.” Yasmin sits back in the chair.
It returns the fingers to the drawing board and pulls it off the table and into the lap. It is heavier than the little cat, but the little cat is very small still. And there—that indentation along the bottom of the wide plastic rim with the thin penlike cylinder must be where the stylus lives. It picks out the cylinder and explores it. Pointy on one end, and with a little ball on the other.
A stylus is like a small pen. It has learned that just now.
And a pen is for drawing, and this is a drawing board, and… It licks the lips and puts the pointy end on the plastic sheet in the middle of the board. That side of the stylus is more like a pen than the other end. It must be the right side to use.
It draws a short line and then moves the fingers and— It can feel the line! The line is raised up a little and it can feel where the line begins and ends! It can feel what it draws so that it can make pictures again even without seeing them!
It carefully moves the right arm out of the sling, endures the pain as freshly knitted bone meets the demands of gravity, and runs the flesh fingers over the line. It can feel even more distinctly with the right hand. There is the top of the line, there is the bottom, there is the line in the middle.
It adds arms and legs to the line, feeling with the right hand where along the line to put each additional stroke, and then it adds a star to the figure’s left arm. The head it makes bigger than usual so that it can feel where to draw a smile on the face. A big smile.
It can draw still!
It has only two homework assignments to accomplish after the session with Yasmin is over. And it has two hours of time to complete the homework in before the dinner meal—with the set-on-fire peaches!—and the nighttime session with Zoe. Two hours should be more than enough time to do the homework.
It has to ask the other asset for a massage and it has to ask the other asset to dance with it. The other asset does not have to say yes, does not have to agree to do either thing. And even if the other asset does agree, they do not have to actually accomplish the massaging or the dancing before the next session with Yasmin. It just has to ask.
Maybe it will ask to hold hands and the other asset will knead at the flesh hand and that will count for the first question. Maybe it will gently squeeze the other asset’s shoulder and then turn the back to the other asset in invitation.
It tries to imagine the other asset behind it, like spooning or like when the hair was brushed and gathered up at the nape of the neck. That is good, and it likes the imagined situation. But it cannot imagine how it would feel to be prodded with thumbs by the other asset. Would it be nice? Would it hurt?
It trusts the other asset’s understanding of anatomy to know the muscles in their positions and how the muscles should feel in ideal condition. But there is more than muscle on this asset. There is the metal deep inside of it and just under the skin. And it knows that pressure along the joint between metal and flesh hurts. What if it hurts to be massaged? It does not want the other asset to hurt it, and it knows that the other asset would feel terrible if it was hurt.
Maybe it will ask about dancing first.
It does not know any dancing but what it has seen in the training room and the kind of deadly dance that is killing targets with the glittering fangs and talons. And while it would love to dance with the other asset in a room filled with targets until they are the only ones standing, two assets standing over the many pieces of their targets… It is going to ask to do the training room kind of dancing, with pretty music and no weapons.
Maybe some other day it will ask if the other kind of dancing is something the other asset would be willing to join it in doing. Maybe if the other asset’s moral compass shifts, or there are targets who richly deserve to be eliminated permanently, enough that the other asset agrees. They could even do things quick and clean, like heroes.
There is the start of the landmark, where it needs to square off before it reaches the door to the rooms for assets. It turns to put the back up against the cardboard and makes sure it is facing straight ahead, and then crosses the hall. Yes, there is the soft mouse toy. It has arrived.
“Hey Jigs,” the other asset greets it as it enters the rooms for assets. “I’m glad you made it back okay. How’d it go? And hey, you have a new tablet.”
The other asset always asks how the sessions have gone, is very interested in the sessions with Yasmin and with Zoe and even with Caroline. Is looking out for it, making sure that the three of them are not hurting it or posing a threat of any kind. It does not need the protection anymore—the feeder and the two experts will not hurt it, it knows—but it still feels nice that the other asset is interested.
It signs that the session was good and goes over to sit on the sofa beside the other asset, walking slowly toward the sounds the other asset made and sweeping a hand along the cushion to make sure that the little cat is not there where it will be sitting. It does not want to sit on the little cat, after all. Or step on the little cat.
It has been very careful walking so that it won’t put any weight on the forward leg if it feels there is a little cat or a toy under the forward foot. And so far the little cat has stayed out of the way like the little cat knows that it cannot see where it is walking.
It holds out the drawing board for the other asset to explore, and then mimes brushing fingertips along the surface to feel the drawings.
“Oh, so not a tablet, but— Hey, that’s really cool. How does that even work?”
It does not know. But it knows that it does work. It takes the stylus out and demonstrates a small mark in the corner when the plastic sheet is still blank and perfectly flat, and then holds it out for the other asset to try.
The other asset takes the stylus and hesitates. “Are you sure it’s okay, Jigs? I don’t want to mess up what you have here.”
It nods and smiles encouragingly.
“Damn,” the other asset says after a moment. “That is awesome. So you can feel where you drew and know where to draw more.”
It nods again.
“So then why did you write 'ungrateful,' on it?” the other asset asks. “You have that written on the, er, the paper, I guess. Plastic. The plastic paper. Ungrateful, B-RUM, there’s a drawing of me with my hearing aids… Oh, this is your therapy stuff. Shit. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have read it.”
The other asset hands the drawing board back, tapping the drawing board to the metal bicep.
It shakes the head but does accept the board and the stylus back, putting the one back inside the other so it does not get lost.
It signs that it is okay. It feels the plastic to find the B-RUM on it and points to it, and then mimes slitting its throat. It thanks, thanks, thanks the other asset. It is not actually ungrateful. It just feels like it is being ungrateful when it is still afraid.
“You’re welcome. Um. I’m confused.”
It finds the AFRAID on the bottom right of the board and points to it. Signs that it is still feeling this, even though B-RUM is dead. Then it points to the UNGRATEFUL up in the top right of the board with B-RUM and the figure of the other asset.
There is a long moment of silence, and then the other asset speaks again. “I’m sorry you’re still afraid of him. And I don’t think you’re being ungrateful. That’s what it means, right? That you feel ungrateful because you’re still afraid?”
It nods.
“I’m still afraid of Loki, and he only had me for three days and isn’t even on the same planet as me. I think it’s probably normal for you to still be afraid of Rumlow. He did awful things to you for a really long time.”
It nods again.
The other asset puts away the stick that controls the game in the glowing panel—it hears the bloop bloop of the fish game shutting down—and then taps the back of the hand before sliding their fingers together, flesh fingers fitted in with metal fingers.
It smiles and gives the other asset’s hand a gentle squeeze. It leans over against the other asset, just a little, not enough to jar the healing clavicle loose, and rests the head against the other asset’s shoulder. The burn on the temple stings in protest, but it does not care. It is just one pain among many, and being close to the other asset is worth that addition.
“Got any homework to work on?” the other asset asks. “Or did she give you a break after that mission?”
It holds up one of the flesh fingers, yes it has homework, and then sighs happily. It does not mind the homework. It actually enjoys having tasks to complete and being praised for completing them. And even when it does not manage to complete the entire task, Yasmin still acknowledges the work that it did and gives it more time. It is a very good system.
They sit there on the sofa, the two assets with their fingers interlocked, for many minutes, and it is tempted to allow itself to fall into a nap up against the other asset, even without any need for more sleep. It is just so comfortable, so warm, and the other asset such a solid and dependable presence.
But it does have homework to accomplish.
It sits up and gently extracts the hand from the other asset’s hands. Then it signs “dance” and the question sign. Makes the “the same as” sign and the “together” sign, and then “dance” again.
“So you changed your mind about the dancing, huh? Want to try to waltz or something, after all?”
It nods. Asking was so easy. Advocating for itself, Yasmin calls it. With the other asset, this is so, so easy. It wishes it was easier to do with others. To ask for things. It has asked for peaches during a team dinner after the first mission, but that was a special occasion. It knows it could ask for other things to eat, for meals that it likes even more than usual, but it is so hard to do.
Not so with the other asset. With the other asset, it feels like it could ask for anything, even eventually for the other asset to kill again. But only if the other asset wants to. It does not want the other asset to do something the other asset does not want to do.
“I take it Natasha was dancing with Cap in the mornings before our mission, yeah?” the other asset asks. “Was it all the same dance?”
It nods and signs “dance” again. They were dancing in the mornings, yes, and they were always dancing.
The other asset is quiet for a moment. “Let’s see if Natasha is around. I mean, I can waltz and stuff, but she’s the one who taught me, and it was ages ago, and I have no idea how to teach someone else. There’s two parts to it and there’s the music and the count and…”
The ballerina woman will teach it something, then. It will learn how to dance with the ballerina woman the same way the other asset learned to dance with her, and then they will both know how to dance and can dance together. That is acceptable.
It taps the other asset on the shoulder to make sure it has the other asset’s attention, and then taps the blindfold-bandage and asks the question.
Can it take this off so that it can see the other asset and the ballerina woman? It will not be in any danger of the dog or the little cat licking the burns, or of getting anything in the eyes. And it could see better after the lunch meal than it could in the morning. Shapes.
“Those are some pretty bad burns, Jigs. I know you’re a fast healer, but let’s wait until tomorrow morning to ask if we can leave that off. I’m betting she can teach you without showing you.”
It frowns. That is… acceptable, it supposes. If the other asset thinks it should keep the blindfold-bandage on, then maybe it should. And there is hope that tomorrow after the morning snack, after the drops in the eyes, maybe it can go without the blindfold-bandage for the whole day.
“Hey JARVIS, is Natasha in her room?”
There is a response that it will not listen to, will not even hear, because the voice without a mouth is speaking into the room and it knows better than to listen. But the other asset will find an answer to the question, it knows. The voice without a mouth means well, has agreed to send help when it asks for that help.
“Awesome. Let’s go ask her.”
So she is in her room, or at least her location is known, and it can learn to dance! Then it will be ready to dance with the other asset.
It has seen how the arms are placed when dancing. There is holding hands and also a hand on a back and also a hand on a shoulder. It wonders where these hands will go and where the other asset’s hands will go. Which asset’s hands will go where. The other asset has a burn on the left hand, and this asset has pain in the right shoulder from the clavicle knitting together.
But there will be two assets so close together, moving as one, holding each other in the arms. Spinning around, even.
It has watched the way the feet move, and it is sure that it can do that. It has watched the way the dancers hold each other, and it wants to do that. And it has heard the music so beautiful that goes along with it. It does not know about counts—neither the clown man nor the ballerina woman had been counting—but it can count if it needs to.
It is so excited. It asked—advocated for itself—and now it is going to dance!
Notes:
The tactile drawing board featured in this chapter is based on The Draftsman, though I'm not sure when that came out. Still, there were tactile drawing boards at this point in time, and I'm okay with assuming this specific one is available in 2012. See more about it here: https://www.aph.org/product/draftsman-tactile-drawing-board/
Thanks to resourceress7 for info used in this chapter!
Chapter 99: Avengers | Dancing like fools (right into the arms of the truth)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Unbreakable” by BUNT, ft. Clarence Coffee Jr. <<
My floors are getting cleaned today, and I have movers coming tomorrow, so while I'm trapped on the area rug in the living room, I thought I'd post an early weekend chapter. ^_^ Hurray for early chapters and clean floors!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—
She had expected this to take weeks, maybe even months, but it turns out Jigsaw has been watering that seed of inspiration and it’s already sprouted into a desire to dance with Clint. She’s not sure whether that’s an aspect of the original coming through—from what she’s heard from Rogers and what she’s read, Bucky had enjoyed dancing—or if it’s a desire for more closeness coming directly from the current iteration.
And it really doesn’t matter. Dancing is dancing, and it’ll be the current iteration dancing with Clint. And maybe someday, with her.
Starting with a simple waltz is a good idea, too. For one thing, it’s the only dance form Jigsaw has watched from the rafters of the gym, and for another, it’s a simple one to learn. She can choose some waltz or other for them to listen to while they go, can count for them for a few measures until he picks up what the counting is all about.
Yes. And she’ll finally get to see how Jigsaw takes to dancing. She’ll be sure to tell Rogers all about it, too. He’ll definitely want to know.
“Are you ready?” she asks. “Okay. Stand side by side, and I’ll walk you through the steps for this. We’ll be making a box shape on the ground with three steps repeated twice.”
“Who’s leading?” Clint asks as they move to stand shoulder to shoulder facing her.
“Neither of you. Or both of you. At the moment, it doesn’t matter.” Natasha studies Jigsaw’s smile. It’s a little one, but eager. “Clint, take a step to the right. Jigsaw, stay where you are. You’ll need room to move.”
She guides them in the steps, telling them which foot to step forward with, which to move to the side, which to put their weight on at which points. How to step the full box and how to start from different positions. Then she counts with them, the traditional one-two-three, to keep them moving at the same pace.
“When you’re facing each other and actually dancing, one of you will start with a forward step on the left, and the other will start with a backward step on the right. Then you’ll keep going from there.”
And with that, she has them get into a modified position, careful of Jigsaw’s right arm. She smiles when Clint takes the second part instead of the first. She assumes it’s because resting his burned palm against Jigsaw’s back will be less painful than clasping Jigsaw’s hand with it. But it’s still bound to turn into confusion for him partway through, just as she’d envisioned when putting this idea into their minds.
“Clint, remember, you’re starting with a backward step,” she reminds him. “And on my count. One, two, three, and one .”
And there they go.
Natasha smiles to herself again as they make their way through the steps, gradually getting closer together. Clint has always had a hard time keeping up the count while dancing, but Jigsaw moves as steadily as a metronome, gliding through the steps like he’s made of water.
“Remember to bend your knees, Clint. Up and down,” she says.
They’ll make a great dancing pair once Clint loosens up and forgets to be self-conscious about it. Once he loses himself in the dancing and stops treating it like it’s a performance he must get perfect. He just needs some refreshers.
And music would help. They seem to have the steps coming together smoothly enough now, it wouldn’t hurt anything to add music, and would probably enhance the experience for Jigsaw. Well, for both of them.
She pulls up The Blue Danube on her phone and starts the music. “Listen to the rhythm and the beat. This is a waltz. One two three, one two three, one two three.”
They adjust their pace to match the music, and Natasha feels a ping of pride in her stomach. That she can pass along a skill that she takes so much joy in, that she can help others enjoy it, and no need for harsh words or beatings or any of the things she grew up with.
She remembers learning various dance steps herself, and it was nothing like this. There’d been the riding crop coming down on any errant girl foolish enough to misstep. There’d been yelling, not coaching. No encouragement and very little praise. It’s a wonder she still enjoys many of the things she had learned in the Red Room.
Watching them dance makes her itch to cut in, to dance a few measures herself, or even an entire waltz. With either of them, really. But Jigsaw… Dancing with Jigsaw would be an experience.
She doubts he’d be all that eager to dance with her, though, to have her so close to him and to hold her in his arms the way he’s holding Clint. But looking at his smile, he’s as happy as she’s seen him, dancing with Clint. And Clint, yes, is blushing as he looks down at Jigsaw.
Natasha wonders what exactly they’re thinking. Jigsaw… she has no idea. She rarely has an inkling of what’s going on in his mind, and even when he expresses his thoughts, she sometimes misunderstands. Clint, though, Clint is almost certainly thinking about kissing Jigsaw. He’s looking at Jigsaw’s smile more than at the rest of him, and probably not just because the bandaging around Jigsaw’s head is no fun to look at.
And she can’t blame him. Jigsaw’s smile is so excited, so exhilarated, and yet also content somehow, satisfied. Accomplished and relishing the accomplishment.
When the song ends, she plays another one, and another. Her knee is still recovering from their mission, but Clint will try to keep up with Jigsaw’s energy levels until it’s time for dinner, she knows. Anything to keep Jigsaw smiling like that. And Jigsaw’s energy levels seem to know no limits.
Natasha drags a pile of folded blue mats over to be closer to their dancing and has a seat. With any luck, she’ll be able to dance with them the next time. Because she knows there will be a next time.
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 7:30 p.m.—
It’s been at least an hour now that they’ve been actively dancing, and with only one break to get some water. And it’s not like it’s high-impact or strenuous in the slightest, but Clint is feeling like his legs are going to complain tomorrow about being worked like this. And he’s sweating. He’ll need a shower tonight.
Jigsaw doesn’t look like even a faint glisten of exertion is forming. Which is probably good for his burn but isn’t great for Clint’s self-esteem. Is he so out of shape that he’s sweating just keeping up with Jigsaw? Has he skipped too many leg days? Is it warm in the gym?
Or is it just the enhanced thing that’s working for Jigsaw? Probably the enhanced thing. Because even with their modified arm position, this much dancing has to be at least putting occasional pressure on Jigsaw’s collar bone.
But whatever it is, even though he’d welcome a break if one was offered to him, Clint is going to keep on dancing until Jigsaw signals that he’s done.
For one thing, this is a lot of fun. Just the two of them—well, and Natasha sitting off to one side with a smile like a cat that got into the cream. But it’s not a crowded dance hall, and the music is kind of nice, with lots of variety. And he doesn’t have to be wearing dancing pants or dancing shoes or anything.
And it’s not a club with club dancing. He likes this kind better than that kind, though he’d never admit that to anyone. Club dancing is fine when it’s just about getting out there and moving, meeting his next mistake, all that. And drinking. He can turn his hearing aids down so he can feel the beat of the music without having to listen to all the noise.
But this is so much more peaceful. And he already has his partner—and not a mistake. He’s sure of it. Not only has Natasha approved the match, she practically set it up. And even if she hadn’t, he really likes Jigsaw. Loves him. Even with the wonky “moral compass” thing that still says killing is the moral thing to do when confronted by evil or HYDRA or evil HYDRA.
Somehow, that’s not a dealbreaker for him.
And being so close to him, in his space like this, moving to the beat and to the gentle promptings of his hand in Clint’s, well, it’s kind of magical. He’s lost track of how many times he’s almost tripped them up because he got so wrapped up in the feelings that he forgot he was dancing. But Jigsaw has kept them moving, and for someone who had to be told there even was a rhythm to music, he’s keeping track of the beat way better than Clint expected.
And always with that smile. It’s close to the blissed-out “you just brushed my hair and it was magical” smile that he’d gotten earlier, but with a bit more excitement to keep going and a bit less closure. And his lips… Clint can’t stop looking at his lips. And he knows that Natasha is watching him do it, and that just makes his cheeks even hotter.
It’s probably a good thing Jigsaw can’t see him making a fool out of himself. He’d want to know what was wrong, and Clint would have to reassure him that nothing was wrong and everything was right. And maybe he’d believe it, and maybe he’d keep wondering what was wrong.
It would distract him from the joy of dancing that he’s found, and that’s something Clint doesn’t want to do.
Something Clint does want to do is dance even closer. So that they brush against each other, so that it is basically a hug in motion. He kind of wants Jigsaw’s head against his chest, wants their steps to be so small that they barely move from their current position, wants to break their dance only to tip Jigsaw’s chin up and kiss him.
It would be romantic, he’s sure, if Jigsaw had any social experience to recognize it as such, or if he could see Clint. But those aren’t the case, and Clint isn’t about to wreck a good thing like this with a surprise and the confusion—or worse, upset—that results.
When the current waltz ends, Clint expects another one, but is surprised by the silence. Even Jigsaw pauses in the dance to tilt his head in an unspoken question, without removing his hands from Clint to ask his question sign.
“Just got a text from Rogers,” Natasha says. “Dinner is ready. He’s wondering if we can all eat together this time. It took them longer to get everything ready and he doesn’t want you to have to rush to make your session with Zoe.”
Clint looks at Jigsaw, waits for an answer. It’s Jigsaw’s decision, really. Does he feel like he can eat a meal with the team? He did last night, though that was specifically a post-mission nosh session.
“What do you think, Jigs?” Clint asks. “I can give you the veggies off my skewer.”
Jigsaw licks and then bites his lower lip—something that makes Clint’s heart thump harder in his chest—and then nods slowly. He releases Clint with obvious reluctance and signs “fire peaches,” which takes Clint a minute to understand.
“Oh, right, dessert.”
It figures that the dessert would be the thing that Jigsaw’s most interested in.
“You can have my peach, too. I’ll keep my ice cream, though.”
Jigsaw smiles and thanks him.
“You want to change clothes, Clint?”
He probably should. He’s sweaty. But he’ll just have to do it again after a shower, and that’s a waste of a change of clothes. No one will mind him, anyway. It’s not like the rest of the team has never shown up sweaty to a meal.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
It is not a post-mission celebration meal, even though there are set-on-fire peaches to eat afterward, but it is a meal with everyone on the team that is not a cell. That is a lot of people in the room and around the table, but it will be okay.
It is just like the post-mission celebration meal; everyone will be focused on eating their food and no one will hurt anyone, not even an asset. It is a long way from the time when it could only hope that a scrap would be flung onto the floor for it in between being pushed into, for it to gobble up lest it be kicked out of reach.
And no one in the hive building would do anything like that, anyway. It has checked these particular facts many, many times, and they always line up the same way. It is safe here. No one here wants to have fun with it. No one here pushes into other people or into assets.
Everyone here just wants to eat delicious vegetables that have been set on fire, and potatoes that have been set on fire, and eventually, peaches that have been set on fire. Oh, it wishes it could see the set-on-fire peaches. But it will have to make do with eating them. Its own peach and also the other asset’s peach. The other asset said so.
There is also a salad made out of pasta and broccoli and cucumbers and tomatoes and olives and onions! It is cold like salads should be, and every time it stabs into the salad bowl it pulls up a different combination of things on the fork. So delicious.
And the other vegetables on the sticks smell so good. They are crispy and tender at the same time, and it can taste just a little bit of char on them from where they were set on fire. The mushrooms are so plump and tender, and the bell peppers—red and green, it can tell from the taste—are so juicy. The onions are still sharp-tasting but also sweet from the fire. The feeder calls that “caramelized.”
And the soft potato, all fluffy inside and filled up with butter and cheese. It can stab into the salad in the bowl, and it can pick up or stab at a vegetable off of its stick, but the potato needs a spoon. It can feel the outside of the potato, its skin, and then it knows where to dig the spoon into the potato for maximum fluffy soft potato.
Everything is so good-tasting and so good-smelling that it almost forgets the set-on-fire peaches to come.
And just like the facts said when it checked them, the team that is not a cell is busily eating and talking to each other, and there is no need for it to be worried about anyone having fun with it now that the whole team that is not a cell is gathered together.
They have talked about dancing and how the clown man wants to join them to dance sometime. The flying man has said that he would learn to dance, too. So there will be a lot of dancers. But that is not a problem. It already has a dance partner in the other asset. It does not have to worry about anyone else trying to dance with it.
And they have talked about the others in the wolf pen. The hamburger technician is still going through footage, but he says that they—the other assets—attacked the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians, that there was a training session that went so bad that many handlers and researchers were killed, and that the handler from the before times was only saved by this asset getting him out of the cage in time.
It is sad to hear that. The others in the wolf pen had tried to do what it has done, had tried to turn on their captors, had tried to escape and then kill and kill and kill the handlers-operators-trainers-technicians. And it… It had not helped them? It had helped the handler from the before times, instead.
It does not know how to feel about that. The handler from the before times was a good handler. He was… He… He gave missions that made sense with clear parameters. And he rewarded good jobs with good things and bad jobs with bad things. And everything was very orderly without a lot of pain needing to be involved. A good handler.
But handlers-operators-trainers-technicians are not good. Except the hamburger technician, who is very good.
It is all very confusing. It does not understand why it would not have helped the others in the wolf pen if they were all assets together on the same side of things. It does not understand why they would have wanted to attack a good handler like the handler from the before times.
But it does understand that this rebellion must have been the reason for executing the others from the wolf pen while they were asleep in the cold. If they were not able to be controlled, that would have been a dangerous place.
Was it weak, that it could be controlled where they could not be?
Maybe. But its escape, and the killing it did afterward, was successful. Their escape and the killing they did during their escape, not so successful.
It wonders how they were put into the tubes where it is so, so cold if they were noncompliant enough to be attacking handlers-operators-trainers-technicians. Maybe the sweet and bitter air was pumped in, and then they were dragged into the tubes.
It does not like thinking about that.
“Alright, here come the peaches,” says the clown man, sounding very proud. “I wasn’t sure this would work, but we pulled it off. Only lost one peach half to the grill.”
This is much better to be thinking about. The set-on-fire peaches are here!
“Huh,” the other asset says to its left side. “They actually don’t look too gross. Don’t worry, Jigs, you’re still getting mine.”
It points to where the sound of the clown man setting the platter down came from, and then asks its question sign and points to the eyes. What do they look like? It wants to see them so badly. But the blindfold-bandage has to stay on until later that night. The flying man said so and the other asset agreed.
“Uh, well.” The other asset pauses, probably inspecting a set-on-fire peach. “They’re cut in half, skin is still on, and the pit is out, and they have black cross-hatch grill marks on the cut side. They’re shiny.”
“That’s the honey glaze,” the clown man adds. “There’s also some cinnamon.”
They sound so delicious. It cannot wait to eat the set-on-fire peaches that are offered to it and to the other asset.
Oh, and it gets two set-on-fire peach halves to eat, and a scoop of ice cream on top of them! The other asset only gets a bowl of ice cream, and it does feel bad for the other asset not getting more than that, but the other asset does not really like peaches that much. Only in pie.
The set-on-fire peach is sweet and tart and spicy with the cinnamon, and the flavor of the honey mingles with the sweetness, putting another layer of flavor on top but in a way that is at the same time part of the peach taste. The skin is so fuzzy still, and parts easily under the spoon edge, and the flesh of the set-on-fire peach itself is tender but still has some bite to it. Not as soft as in peach pie, but not as hard as when a peach is not fully fall-apart ripe.
And the ice cream on top! A whole different kind of sweetness—and it is vanilla, which is delicious with the taste of the cinnamon and honey and set-on-fire peach itself. It is not the same as peach ice cream would be. The flavors of the ice cream and the set-on-fire peaches stay separate, and there is that hint of char like the vegetables had. It only makes the dessert sweeter.
Maybe peaches caramelize the way onions do. It will have to ask the feeder. Tomorrow.
In the meantime, there is another set-on-fire peach half for it to eat, and it cannot wait to dig the spoon into it.
Notes:
Content Warning: There is a brief matter-of-fact reference to HTP in the beginning of Jigsaw’s section, but nothing too bad.
Chapter 100: Assets | But just because it burns doesn’t mean you’re gonna die
Notes:
Chapter title from “Try” by Pink.
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 8:45 p.m.—
There is time to eat two whole set-on-fire peaches—four halves with ice cream on top of all of them—before it needs to leave the rest of the set-on-fire peaches behind for leftovers late in the night and go to the therapy room for the session with Zoe.
The other asset wants to come to the session, so it gets to hold onto the other asset’s sleeve and feel the thickness of the other asset’s arm as they walk through the hallways. The other asset has wonderful arms, and it does not get to see them at all right now, so it is only fair that it gets to touch them.
It does not need the guiding, because there are landmarks all over—seashells for the therapy floor and for the room itself and the hallway—but the other asset had offered and it is not about to pass up an opportunity to hold onto the other asset.
It is feeling happy when they arrive, after a stop by the rooms for assets to get the tablet because the voice without a mouth said so. It is feeling good. It cannot use the tablet, but the last time it gave the tablet to Zoe, the next session it had the AAC app on the tablet. So it wonders what will show up on the tablet this time. Maybe a game that it can play when the eyes are better.
“I’m happy, too,” Zoe says after they get settled. “And excited. I have so many things to show you, Jigsaw. There are more tactile drawing boards for you to try, and also some paper that will swell up when you write on it.”
More ways to draw while it cannot see? It grins. Now it is excited, too!
“First, I’d like for us to work with the quick-draw paper.” There are rustling sounds and a plastic bag opening. “This isn’t like regular paper, which is made out of wood pulp. This is made out of sponge.”
Sponge!
So there are three kinds of paper. There is the wooden paper that is everywhere, the plastic paper that gets clamped into the tactile drawing board from before, and this sponge paper that it is learning about now. Paper is a lot like bread, it decides. It can be made out of so many things.
“They can make paper out of sponges?” the other asset asks.
“They sure can,” Zoe says. “There’s even some paper made out of metal, though we don’t have any here.”
Metal paper!
Maybe that is like the foil that wrapped up all of the soft-inside potatoes at the dinner meal. It had been thin like paper, but very much made of metal. But there is no metal paper here for them to explore. Sponge paper will be exciting enough, though.
It has used sponges while cleaning dishes with the special soap that is for dishes, and now there is a whole piece of paper made out of them. It wonders if the sponges are the same kind of sponges. Maybe there are different sponges for dishes and for paper.
Zoe gives both assets sponge paper already tucked under the clips of clipboards, and also markers. It feels the sponge paper and is surprised that it is almost the whole size of the clipboard. It thought the sponge paper would be much, much smaller, the size of a sponge. But instead it is like regular paper.
“These are water-based markers,” Zoe says. “Jigsaw, I gave you a red marker because I know you love that color. Clint, you have purple.”
“So we just draw with these like normal?” the other asset asks.
“Yes. The paper will swell up as you draw.”
It knows how dish sponges swell up and shrink. It wonders whether this will swell up the same way, or whether it will dry out again after it has drawn on it.
It draws a star on its piece of sponge paper in the corner. And the star is puffed up under the metal fingers, just like she said. It can write and draw with sponge paper. Whatever it wants.
It sets the marker down after carefully feeling around to cap it properly, and then signs “dry up” and the question sign. Will this dry up and stop being puffy? Or will it always be the way it is when it has freshly drawn on it?
“We’ll keep the dried up quick-draw paper in a plastic bag to protect it from getting damaged or wet,” Zoe says. “And we’ll keep the used paper in another envelope to protect it. It might not stay puffed up forever, but it will last a long, long time.”
Maybe it can put some of the sponge paper drawings in a scrap book, then. In their own envelope to protect them, like she says. If it is going to do that, it needs to draw more than just a star. It needs to make something that would go inside of a scrap book.
It uncaps the marker again and adds two figures, one with a star on the left arm and one with a crescent behind each ear. It adds a third figure for Zoe, and makes sure that this third figure has many strands of braids coming from its head.
“That’s lovely, Jigsaw,” Zoe says. “Thank you for including me. I’m smiling because I feel really welcome right now.”
It is excited to find out what other things Zoe has to show them. But first, it wants to know what the other asset drew. It taps the other asset’s shoulder and then points to the other asset’s lap, where the clipboard with the sponge paper will be. It asks if it can feel the other asset’s sponge paper drawing.
“Sure. It’s not anything special. Just a house.”
There is a square of puffed up line and then a triangle on top of it. And inside the square, there is another smaller square—no, two of them—and a rectangle in the middle at the bottom. On top of the triangle, there is a little partial rectangle and some squiggling lines coming out the top of it. This, then, is a house. The little squares must be windows, and the rectangle a door. The squiggles do not make much sense, but maybe it is a present house with ribbon on it, a gift.
It gives the other asset a thumbs up. Good job. It is a good house with the ribbons on top of it.
“Thanks. I like yours better,” the other asset says. “I’m giving you a thumbs up, too.”
It smiles. Good jobs all around. The other asset should come to more of the sessions with Zoe.
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
Clint smooths on some of the burn ointment Wilson left with him and bandages his hand back up. Oh, man. That feels so much better. The shower with the glove on to keep his burn from getting soaked was good for the rest of him, but man did it suck for his left hand.
Once more, he’s pleased that he thought to grab that fucking Tesseract halo off Jigsaw’s head with his left hand and not his right. He could muddle through things using his left hand and keeping his right hand out of the action, sure, but if he doesn’t have to, that’s for the best.
He does prefer to do most things with his right hand if he has a choice, including holding his bow, so there’s that.
Not that he’s certain they’ll have a session this Sunday. It’ll depend on his hand, and whether Jigsaw’s burns are healing well enough for him to be seen without Kate suspecting something horrible happened on the mission. He doesn’t want to make Jigsaw stay away from a training session, but he also doesn’t want his student to think too hard about their mission.
It’s bad enough Zoe is thinking about their mission and thinking there were communication breakdowns that lead to Jigsaw’s injuries. Because it wasn’t that; it was just Clint’s failure, and he can do without the reminder about that. His failure, his fault, and he nearly lost Jigsaw for it.
At least Zoe had more ideas beyond that last one about communication breakdowns. And she’d been busy, if the session tonight was anything to judge by.
Not just the memo JARVIS sent to all their phones—or to whatever Cap is using; Clint’s never seen him with a cell phone in his hands—about all the door hangers and landmarks and about talking more about their feelings and what they’re doing with their expressions.
But also a cardboard feelings wheel with velcro and hot glue and buttons all over it for Jigsaw to feel. And it turns out she’s the one who ordered that drawing board thing and more where that came from. Half a dozen different ways to draw, it feels like, all of them beyond cool, though Jigsaw seems partial to the sponge stuff and the first of the boards.
And on top of that, Zoe figured out a way Jigsaw’s tablet can talk to him, telling him what’s on the screen and where his finger is. Also something she calls a keyguard, which is like the spaces between keys on a keyboard, if they were made of plastic and not, well, empty space.
But it fits over his tablet and is easy to take off again if he wants to play the sorting basket game or something. And it’s supposed to help him pick the words he wants in his AAC app without having the tablet read them all out to him as he runs his finger along the rows.
They spent pretty much the whole hour going over these things, picking a voice for the tablet—Jigsaw ended up picking a voice that sounds similar to Natasha’s, called Angie—adjusting the tablet’s voice’s volume to something Jigsaw seems able to hear but that Clint couldn’t quite make out, practicing different ways to use the AAC app without seeing it.
What time they hadn’t spent on that they’d spent touring the Tower and checking out all of the tactile symbols on the walls, practicing going to various places and squaring off, trailing walls, feeling symbols, all of that. Zoe had Jigsaw take the lead, and then Clint with his eyes closed, while she coached them both along the route from the therapy room all around and then back.
Clint is glad they spent the time on that, even if that part was kind of pointless for him personally. It’s Jigsaw’s session, anyway, so it doesn’t have to apply to him at all. Clint was only there for moral support and to make sure there wasn’t something specific he should be doing to help Jigsaw. He didn’t even need to draw on a sponge, though it was awesome to see it working and really thoughtful of Zoe to supply him with his own clipboard.
And he’d gotten some tips earlier from Yasmin, too, like the right way to help Jigsaw get around if Jigsaw wants the help—apparently, Jigsaw’s supposed to hold onto him, and not the other way around. It had been a good mini-session after the real therapy session. Clint actually kind of likes Yasmin, and he’s not sure why he doesn’t go to more of Jigsaw’s night sessions with Zoe.
Clint slides his hearing aids in and picks up the sounds of Jigsaw showering in the other bathroom.
He hadn’t thought Jigsaw was going to do that until his burns healed up more. But that’s good, in a way. If the man wants a shower, he gets to take a shower, and he must know where everything is in there.
It’s just that Clint has no idea how he’ll keep his burns dry in the shower, especially if he washes his hair. Is shampoo bad for burns? Probably. And it’s gotta be even worse on burned eyes. He had to wear a glove to protect his left hand and keep the bandaging dry. So getting soaked can’t be good for Jigsaw’s burns, either, even if he’s enhanced.
He kind of wishes Jigsaw had opted for a bath instead. There’s a tub in there, after all. Maybe Clint could even have helped. Oh, but wait. Hadn’t Jigsaw drowned those two targets in lye after slicing their faces up? The sibling pair, yeah. And if all of his kills were some kind of retribution with mirrored actions—literal eye-for-an-eye stuff—then he probably has bad experiences with bathtubs.
Clint shakes his head and lets his breath out slowly. It’s not enough that they did all that other stuff to him, they had to make bathtubs a dangerous thing, too.
He finishes drying himself off and then grabs the first things out of his closet to wear, which turn out to be a soft snug t-shirt with a purple bullseye on it, and—
And a pair of Jigsaw’s yoga pants.
Clint blinks. Yoga pants? What are Jigsaw’s pants doing in his closet? Jigsaw has his own closet full of all his favorite things to wear. And he hasn’t done laundry since before the mission, so there’s not a chance that he got confused about what went where after a near-wipe.
Clint studies the yoga pants. Over his boxers, these will be super uncomfortable. He could just wear jeans and call it good. But Jigsaw does curate his closet more than merely keep it organized. This is definitely something with meaning, something thought about, something planned well in advance.
Clint pulls the t-shirt on and a pair of boxers while contemplating the likelihood that this is Jigsaw’s way of saying his pants aren’t tight enough.
On the one hand, that’s an excellent development. He’s been worried that maybe Jigsaw wasn’t ever going to be attracted to him in any capacity beyond them both being “the same as” each other. That Jigsaw had a competence kink of some sort and was only interested in him for his archery and cat-tree assembly skills.
On the other hand, is he interpreting the signal accurately? Did Jigsaw want to ogle his legs when he planted these pants in his closet, or is he more interested in the softness of the yoga pants versus the hardness of the denim? Does he like to see Clint’s body, or does he want Clint to be more comfortable?
Or is this just a way to be even more “the same as” each other?
After a few more moments of thought, Clint strips out of his boxers and into one of the boxer briefs he wears under his tac gear. It’ll be way comfier to wear yoga pants over those than the boxers. And if Jigsaw would like to see his legs more clearly, then Clint wants him to see his legs more clearly—even if that’s kind of not possible right now with his burned eyes.
If Jigsaw is attracted to him for more than communication, Lucky’s friendship, and the fact that he looks good shooting arrows, then Clint definitely wants to encourage it. Jigsaw is hot as hell, and if he’s making a move of any sort, Clint wants in on that move.
But if it’s just the desire for them both to wear yoga pants, then Clint doesn’t want to disappoint him or make him think that he’s being rejected.
As for which it is… That he’ll leave up to Natasha. Tomorrow, maybe. She’s bound to have something to say about it.
The water shuts off in the other bathroom, and Clint adds a pair of socks to his ensemble before poking his head out of his room. Yep, there’s Lucky by the open bathroom door, the world’s most casual but loyal guard dog.
Clint would ordinarily find something to do in his bedroom until Jigsaw was finished getting dressed, just out of courtesy. But this time the door is merely ajar rather than wide open, and Clint feels like it’s probably okay to just walk down that hallway and into the living room, so long as he doesn’t pause or peek inside.
And Jigsaw does appear fully clothed in another of Clint’s button-ups and yoga pants of his own in the living room just as Clint is getting the gaming console put away and the TV set up.
Clint looks up and winces at the sight of Jigsaw’s burns. The blisters have all long since burst, and the skin is healing, but it looks bad still. Painful. Wilson is due to come by any minute now to supervise eye drops and probably insist on the bandages again, and maybe he’ll want to use some of the burn ointment on Jigsaw’s burns again.
But Jigsaw is smiling all the same, as if the pain didn’t bother him. Jigsaw reaches down with his left hand and plucks at the fabric of his yoga pants, and then asks his question sign.
“Yeah, I’m wearing the yoga pants,” Clint says. It really is a shame Jigsaw can’t tell by looking.
And Jigsaw is definitely pleased he’s worn the yoga pants, because he signs that Clint is very good and the same as and like an asset.
Because “like an asset” is definitely a good thing to him. Clint kind of wonders when Yasmin is going to start trying to convince him that he’s a person. How soon is too soon? Would Jigsaw reject that at this point without listening, or would he be kind of open to it?
He knows that he’s “the other asset” in Jigsaw’s mind, to distinguish him from Jigsaw. If Jigsaw and he are both assets, it might be hard for him to accept that he’s a person just because it would make him different from Clint.
Oh well. Jigsaw’s getting better with nuance and blurred lines. Clint supposes that category game of Zoe’s is worth something, after all. Maybe he’ll be okay being an asset and a person, and they can move from there. It’ll be Yasmin’s call.
There’s a knock at the door before Clint can ask Jigsaw if he wants to listen to more of Bob Ross or just hold hands on the sofa.
“It’s open,” Clint calls.
Wilson greets Lucky at the door as though they hadn’t had a walk while he and Jigsaw were in with Zoe for the evening therapy session. Then he takes in the sights. Jigsaw with his wet hair, his lack of bandaging, his open, squinting eyes. Clint with his haphazardly bandaged hand and his yoga pants.
It’s the last one that seems to give him pause, but Wilson recovers quickly and heads to the kitchen to wash his hands.
“Those burns are looking better,” he says as he dries his hands on a paper towel. “Much better.”
“Better enough to leave the bandage off?” Clint asks.
Wilson considers it while Jigsaw sits at the table with Alpine in his lap.
“I want to give it one more full night with the ointment and bandages, and then we can leave the bandages off tomorrow if there’s enough improvement overnight.” Wilson sets the eye drops on the table and ignores Jigsaw’s scowl. “Eye drops until there’s no more redness.”
Jigsaw sighs but allows Clint to apply the eye drops.
Clint helps keep Jigsaw’s hair out of the way of the bandaging process, and then at Wilson’s prompting ties the top part of it back to keep it from making the bandaging over his temples wet. It’s not the neatest ponytail, and it looks kind of weird, more like a topknot, but Jigsaw seems pleased enough with his efforts and reaches up to stroke his hair with a smile on his face.
Clint supposes that will do.
Chapter 101: Assets | No, I don’t want to mess this thing up
Notes:
Chapter title from “Just a Kiss” by Lady Antebellum.
Just a heads up that I won't be posting a chapter next weekend. I'll be back the week after, though! ^_^
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 11 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
Tomorrow, it can take off the blindfold-bandage, and then not have to let anyone put it back on again after the drops go into the eyes. The flying man said so, if there is improvement. And it ate a lot and will rest a lot, so there will be improvement. Only one more night and then it can see again. Mostly.
The other asset and the dog and everything were blurry and unfocused before the blindfold-bandage had gone back on, like it was looking through a cloudy window into a dimly lit room, so the vision is not yet fully recovered—not even close.
But the other asset is wearing the soft and stretchy pants instead of the jeans. It had asked and the other asset had answered. It had not known whether the other asset would do that, but it had hoped.
If only it had been able to properly see the other asset in the soft and stretchy pants. So like tac gear at a glance, and it loves the way the other asset looks in tac gear. But at least it can feel the soft and stretchy pants under the back of the hand, where the other asset is holding hands with it.
The other asset’s burned hand is going to need the bandage for a while longer, at least a few days. It wonders whether the auction woman will see it. Even if she does not see the bandage, though, she would see the burn itself.
Or maybe they will not all go down to the training room or up to the range. Maybe this Sunday will not be an archery day. Maybe it will be a dancing day! Maybe the other asset will dance with it all morning until it is time for the lunch meal. Maybe they will dance fast, to fast music. Or maybe they will dance slow, to slow music.
It likes both kinds of dancing, and the in between dancing, too.
The little cat scampers across the floor after one of the little plastic springs, her feet making little pitter-patters on the carpet and the spring bouncing off of things with a faint clack. The little cat enjoys the springs. It is glad they bought more of them. There are springs everywhere now, from where the little cat has been chasing them and then losing interest—or else losing the spring itself under something.
And the little cat does lose interest again and scrambles instead up the leg and onto the lap where the hands are being held together.
It pulls the metal hand from the other asset’s hand and reaches down to pet the little cat. Gentle strokes in the little cat’s soft fur, all the way from between the little cat’s ears to the end of the little cat’s tail. The little cat loves it, and purrs so loud as she flops over onto her side so that it can pet her belly, too. The little cat does not always like for it to run fingers along her belly, but sometimes she does. Right now, she does.
“See, if I tried that, she’d rip my hand to shreds,” the other asset says. “I wouldn’t have any fingers left.”
The other asset is exaggerating. The little cat might claw the other asset up a bit if she did not like the other asset petting her belly, but the little cat is still so little, and her claws are still so small. The other asset would definitely still have fingers left afterward.
It shakes the head and smiles, to show that it understands that the other asset is partly joking, and continues to stroke the little cat’s belly, alternating belly strokes with pets along her side and occasionally rubbing a thumb against the pads of the little cat’s tiny feet.
It is supposed to be getting the little cat used to having her feet played with. It will make it easier to take care of the little cat if the little cat is ever hurt, and it will make it easier to trim the little cat’s claws sometimes. The ballerina woman says that it will be like trimming fingernails and toenails, which it does with a knife, only there is a special pair of clippers for doing that for the little cat.
It is not so sure that the little cat needs that, though. Or would want it. If the little cat’s claws were not sharp at the ends, how would the little cat climb so fast up the tree for cats? How would the little cat defend herself if there was ever danger? How would the little cat snatch the blue bird shape wand toy out of the air?
It does not mind the prickle of the little cat’s claws. Maybe when the little cat is not so little anymore, maybe then it will be time to trim her claws. They would have to make sure there are a lot of places the little cat could go to sharpen her claws again, though. Scratching posts like the sides of the trees for cats, and like the cardboard circle inside of the ball track, where the little cat will stand and dig and dig and dig into the cardboard circle.
The other asset sighs, and it asks if anything is wrong, using the question sign.
“Just thinking about the day,” the other asset says. “I didn’t sleep great, so it should have been a shit day. But with the nap and that massage, and then the dancing, and now this… I don’t know. I feel like I’m finally unwound from our mission, or like I’m able to start unwinding, at least.”
It nods. The mission was only yesterday, after all. And the other asset almost died from the sweet and bitter air. It is difficult sometimes to relax after a mission. And not just because of what has always come after a mission in the captivity times. But the excitement of the mission is hard to chase away sometimes, and makes it feel like the best thing to do is choose another target and do the mission all over again.
“I mean, I nearly lost you,” the other asset says, voice cracking. “If that halo had done its job, if it had wiped you away, I’d have lost you.” The other asset swallows hard. “I don’t want to ever lose you, Jigs.”
It does not want to be lost, either. It does not want to start over.
It reaches for the other asset’s hand again and gives the other asset’s hand a squeeze, gently, before it scoots closer. Lifts the other asset’s right arm up and over the shoulders so that it can snuggle up against the other asset with the other asset’s arm around it.
The little cat makes a soft protest and then curls up in the valley between the other asset’s thigh and this asset’s thigh, pressed up against it. Soft pants and soft pants. Snug shirt and snug shirt. Socks and socks. Two assets, together, not lost, the same as.
Clint
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 6:15 a.m.—
It’s not Jigsaw getting out of bed that wakes him up—somehow, it never is—but Jigsaw getting back in bed that does it.
Clint usually wakes up to breakfast or the call of breakfast, but it feels too early for that, and there aren’t any breakfast smells coming from the kitchen area. There’s no Natasha, either. Just Jigsaw, draped on top of him with his head resting on Clint’s chest.
The room is partially dark still, but the light on in the hallway gives Clint enough light to see that there is no white bandage wrapped around Jigsaw’s head. He must have already done the eye drops with Wilson, then, or else he decided that morning meant any time in the morning, whether he was up for the day or not.
And who knows, maybe Jigsaw is up for the day. He’s on top of the sheets instead of between them, so maybe he’s just getting a little more Clint time in before he needs to go to his session with Yasmin. Lucky’s not there, so Wilson must have already come to get the dog for his walk. Right?
“Morning,” Clint says with a mumble.
He reaches out for his phone on the nightstand, feels around for it, and looks over to check the time. Sheesh. Wilson showed up early today. And Clint’s awake enough now to stay awake, more’s the pity. He’d love to fall back asleep with Jigsaw sprawled on top of him, just like old times.
But they’re well beyond old times now. This isn’t the only time he gets to spend with Jigsaw in very close proximity, and the more time he gets like this, the more time he wants like this.
Clint sets his phone back on the nightstand and rests his hand on the small of Jigsaw’s back. This is nice. Cozy. Especially when Jigsaw gives his shoulder a gentle stroke before settling his right hand back in its place over Clint’s pec.
It’s not spooning, and it’s not hand holding, but it’s every bit as good, and Clint can’t help but think about what else they might do someday. If Jigsaw likes him the same way Clint likes Jigsaw—if Jigsaw loves him back—they might do a lot of things. And maybe he does, including the physical attraction element. He did put the yoga pants in Clint’s closet.
Clint’s still wearing the yoga pants Jigsaw picked out for him last time he did laundry, and while it’s very toasty under Jigsaw, he doesn’t regret the choice. Jigsaw sort of asked him to wear them, and he might as well.
And does Jigsaw’s asking him to wear the yoga pants signify something… intimate? Does he think Clint is as hot as Clint thinks Jigsaw is? Or is it even that kind of intimate and not just a desire to be more “the same as?” He makes a mental note to ask Natasha to weigh in on that today, maybe while Jigsaw is with Yasmin or Caroline so there won’t be any accidental eavesdropping.
She’ll probably tease him, but she might have some good advice for him. It’ll be worth the teasing.
Jigsaw raises himself up a little, propped up on his left elbow at Clint’s side and looking down at him. Either his collar bone has patched itself up already, or he’s ignoring the pain from it—Clint can’t tell which.
Jigsaw’s eyes are still cloudy and reddened, though it’s not easy to see from just the hallway light. But the burns around his eyes are lessened a little, healing. They don’t glisten, at least, and the edges look a bit less red than before.
Clint wonders how much he can see, whether the drops are helping enough, whether his vision will return to normal eventually. Just how fast do eyes heal in the case of Tesseract damage? And when the person who’s been burned is enhanced like Jigsaw is? He hopes that Jigsaw’s vision will heal quickly and completely, like Wilson and Banner predicted.
He’s kind of missed the way Jigsaw looks at him all the time this past day, and he knows that the man’s eyes and burns must be painful. He doesn’t know how he’d cope if it was his vision that was damaged. Everything he’s actually good at depends on his having excellent eyesight. Take that away and what does he even have left to offer the world?
And Jigsaw has missed seeing him in these yoga pants—really seeing him. Clint thinks back to the days when his clothes were all scattered in the living room and he had to go wandering through the piles in just a towel. Did Jigsaw… did he like the view? Are the yoga pants a way to get some of that view back, with the tightness of the pants? Does Jigsaw want him that way? In a towel, or maybe even in less than a towel?
Clint swallows.
Jigsaw taps his free hand against Clint’s chest rapidly and asks why. Makes the signs for “afraid” and “thinking.”
Ah. And his stupid heartbeat has betrayed him, then. Jigsaw somehow picked up on his heart rate speeding up and now he’s wondering if Clint is thinking things that make him worried or afraid.
Clint considers lying for a hot second, telling Jigsaw that yes, he thought about losing him again, but his eyes are locked on Jigsaw’s lips, softly pink, and plump, and inviting. And he honestly doesn’t want to lie.
He wants to kiss him.
Wants to reach up and bring Jigsaw down for a lingering kiss, wants to get to know those lips even better than he can by studying them with his eyes. Wants to study them with his own lips. Wants to memorize everything about them.
But Jigsaw probably wouldn’t want that, so…
“I just got excited about something, is all,” Clint says. “Not afraid.”
It’s not a lie. He is excited about the prospect of kissing Jigsaw at long last. But it’s maybe not the whole truth.
“Maybe a little nervous,” he adds.
There’s every chance Jigsaw will shrug and move on after that, and if he does, Clint will take it for what it is and move on alongside him. But maybe, just maybe, Jigsaw will ask about it. Maybe he’ll ask what Clint is nervous about, and then Clint can float the idea and see if it sinks.
It’s going to sink. It’s bound to sink. Honestly, he shouldn’t even ask. It’s better if Jigsaw just moves on.
But no, Jigsaw doesn’t move on. Instead, he asks. It’s just the question he always asks, “why,” but he repeats the rapid tapping on Clint’s chest afterward, so it’s kind of like asking about the nervousness and heartbeat at once. At least, that’s how Clint is going to interpret it.
Clint licks his lips, aware of Jigsaw’s hand on his chest and the likelihood that Jigsaw can therefore—somehow—tell his heart’s going even faster now. Better just come on out with it.
“I, uh,” Clint says. Great. What a loser. He forces himself to say what he means despite his nerves.
“I really want to kiss you.”
And then the waiting begins.
Jigsaw processes the statement for a moment, turning the words over in his mind and coming to conclusions Clint can’t begin to guess at but can only formulate hopes about.
Then he points back to the living room and signs T and U before miming opening a book and smelling the pages. He asks his question.
TU? Oh, so the TV, probably. Maybe Clint’s soap opera, Hospital of Passion. And the book. Maybe a magazine, like that ad for the perfume when he was cutting out pictures for his collages. Clint realizes that Jigsaw is merely verifying that that is what he’s referring to.
“Yeah, like they kiss on Hospital of Passion.” Clint nods. “But without all the drama and backstabbing. Just… Just my lips on your lips.”
Clint swallows the lump in his throat, or tries to. “If you felt like giving that a try.”
God, Jigsaw has such kissable lips. If there is anything out there smiling down on him, please let Jigsaw feel like giving it a try.
And then he predictably starts destroying everything. Because he’s a dumpster fire, not a man.
“I mean, if you don’t, that’s okay, too,” Clint says even while telling himself to shut up. “I don’t want to make it weird. And kissing might make it weird. I, uh, I get that. That’s— That might make it ten kinds of weird in a five pou—”
Jigsaw puts a metal finger over his mouth to shut him up, and then traces Clint’s lips with his fingertip, pensive. Then he makes the sign for “allowed” with one hand and asks.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it’s allowed.” Clint blinks.
Why wouldn’t it be allowed? Who’s even here to say boo if it weren’t allowed? Is this an asset thing, a hangup where only people are allowed to do certain things? Is…
It happens slowly, while he thinks. Fluidly. With that same liquid flow of movement that had been so creepy when he first saw it above Chapman’s window in D.C. and that has become better than normal. Jigsaw gradually goes from studying Clint’s lips to tentatively pressing his lips to Clint’s.
And Clint sees every second of that slow, slow progression, but he also suddenly has his lips pressed against Jigsaw’s and doesn’t know how either of them got there. Maybe he was thinking too hard to notice. Maybe it happens faster than he realizes. Whatever the case…
They really are kissable lips.
They’re as soft as they look, gentle, warm like everything else about Jigsaw is warm. They taste faintly of grapes, which Jigsaw must have eaten for his pre-breakfast snack. And they ghost against his uncertainly, testing the water, and then retreat again.
And Clint wants to follow them, wants to reach up and cup Jigsaw’s head and pull him back down for another and another, deeper kisses, more movement, but that’s not how this is going to work and he knows it.
Jigsaw isn’t a nervous but adventurous young man on a foray into the unknown who will be charmed by eagerness on Clint’s part. He’s a skittish wild thing ready to bolt at the first sign of danger, and Clint is not going to be that danger.
Jigsaw looks down at him, from closer than before, and signs a K with raised brows.
“Yes, that’s okay,” Clint breathes. “That's a good start. A great start. I liked it.”
Jigsaw smiles, with those kissable lips.
And Clint wants more.
“Did, uh, did you? Like it, I mean.”
He gets a still-curious nod in response, and so he slips a finger into Jigsaw’s shirt front and very gently urges him forward for another kiss. It’s not pulling him, exactly, it shouldn’t feel too much like he’s trapping him or anything, it should be fine, it shouldn’t break what they have right now. It shouldn’t. Clint hopes it doesn’t.
And Jigsaw comes without protest, much to Clint’s relief.
Clint kisses him, delicately and gingerly, lips closed, but with the motion and interlock of a kiss, rather than an adorably clueless static press of lips to lips.
He holds it longer, too, and Jigsaw quickly mimics his technique, kissing him back. Clint breaks their kiss and immediately starts another, and they eventually get a sort of rhythm going. It’s slow-paced, gentle, tender. Warm rather than hot.
And it makes Clint’s heart go absolutely nuts the way a full-blown desperate makeout session might, for some reason. Fills him up with warmth and flutters, makes him want more of this, more of Jigsaw’s lips against his, more of Jigsaw’s weight on top of him, more of all of it.
Jigsaw seems to be in favor of the activity, too, because he doesn’t make any move to break away. He just lets his hand wander a bit, from Clint’s chest up to the side of his face, tracing a finger along the healing outline of his killing face that had dug into Clint’s skin.
Clint dares to let his own hands drift a bit, careful to avoid anything that could feel to Jigsaw like he’s being trapped or held in place. Just a hand along his arm, and a hand making little circles at the small of his back. He ignores the faint feeling of raised scarring under Jigsaw’s t-shirt, pushes all thoughts of it out of his head.
He can be distressed about that later. He doesn’t want anything to shatter this moment.
Chapter 102: Assassins | You’re not alone in all this (you’re not alone, I promise)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Courage to Change” by Sia.
And we're back! Comments might take me some time to answer, since my hands are pretty much covered with hives right now from an allergic reaction. But I will definitely answer comments as my fingers allow. ^_^
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 7:15 a.m.—
It slides to a halt in front of the therapy room, tablet and favorite drawing board tucked under an arm, and then slips inside the room. It knows that it should walk slowly while it cannot see well. It knows that it should not be running, especially. But it also knows that it is late for the morning session with Yasmin—that is why it is rushing despite everyone telling it to walk slowly.
But maybe Yasmin will not mind too much. Maybe Yasmin will understand both why it is rushing and why it is late.
Yasmin has to understand. Once it explains, she will understand. And she will give it the chance to explain. She is a good expert. She is, she is. She will not punish it.
It signs that it is sorry for being late, and Yasmin maybe smiles at it, or maybe frowns.
It cannot see clearly enough to tell yet, and the therapy room is not as painfully bright as the hallways, which is good but removes even more detail. Her mouth is just a darker smudge in her face, under the twin smudges of her eyes, and beyond the cloudy window pane of the burns on the eyes.
“That’s alright,” she says, understanding it after all, even before it has explained. “How are you feeling?”
There are no signs for how wonderful it is feeling right now. How warm inside, and like the stomach is full of squirming little creatures, but in a good way—not as though it has eaten them. How eager it is to get back to the other asset. How eager it is to tell Yasmin all about kissing.
It still has the taste of the other asset’s lips on its own lips, the feel of them pressed so tightly against each other, their lips moving and moving together. So good. It almost did not break away for this session at all. Almost kept on kissing the other asset, or being kissed by the other asset; it is not sure which actually happened. Maybe they were kissing each other.
No, it does not have the signs for these things, for how wonderful it feels. They are all missing in the churn of whitewater excitement that rages through it. There might not even be signs for it, even for people who have all of the words at their disposal.
“Something very good has happened, I see,” Yasmin says in response to its silent grin, her voice all smiles. “What is it?”
It does not know the sign for kissing, but it has the tablet and the drawing board, and it can make the word with the letter shapes on the drawing board, and maybe then they can add it to a board on the AAC app. And Yasmin can show it the sign for kissing once she knows what it needs to say. It cannot see her very clearly yet, but it can maybe still make the sign if she describes it while showing it.
It would have to hold the tablet very close in order to see the letter shapes to select them, to make the letter shapes big enough to see all across the fuzzy tablet screen. But it has the drawing board with its fresh plastic sheet, and it is determined. It takes the time it needs, and carefully draws out the the letter shapes it needs to tell Yasmin about the wonderful thing it has discovered really is something that assets can do.
It feels all over the drawing board, tracing the letters with the fingers and following their raised lines to confirm that it says what it wants to say, all three words of it, one two three, and then shows her the drawing board so that she can read what it has written.
ASSETS KISSING TODAY
“That’s wonderful,” she says, and her voice is so warm and full of smiles. “Do you know the sign for that?”
It shakes the head, no, and sits forward on the sofa so that it can see her a tiny bit more clearly while she shows it the sign.
Yasmin makes what looks like it might be a flattened shape with her hand with all of her fingertips touching, and she moves that hand shape from her mouth to her cheekbone.
“That’s one way to sign it,” she says. “A flattened hand shape going up from the side of your mouth up to your cheek. Another way is to make two of these hand shapes and touch them together as though they were mouths kissing each other.” She demonstrates, and it thinks she makes her mouth smaller while she makes the sign.
It circles the lips on the skin face and asks what is happening there. It wants to make the sign right so that the other asset will know for sure what it is trying to say.
“You’ll pucker your lips up like you were giving someone a kiss.”
It does not know about puckered lips being like a kiss, since there was very little puckering involved in the kissing it has done, but there must be a wide range of kisses available, and it is no expert. Yasmin is an expert. She would know all about kissing.
It makes a puckered mouth and touches all of the fingertips together in front of it.
“Good. Yes.”
It makes the fingers-all-touching shape and moves it from the mouth to the cheekbone.
“Excellent.”
It can make the signs for kissing! Now it can show the other asset and the other asset can know what it wants to do.
“Can you tell me what it was like, kissing with Clint? Who started the kiss? How did it happen?”
It launches into what it thinks is an accurate recalling of the morning, starting with getting up, brushing the teeth, and taking off the horrible blindfold-bandage so that it could see well enough to feed the little cat, because the little cat was so hungry for her wet food breakfast and making noises about how hungry she was and it did not want to bump around the kitchen like the other times.
Then it fed the dog, too, because they should eat together. And it ate some grapes and several pieces of cheese. And filled up the water dishes for the little creatures under its care. The flying man came to put in the drops and get the dog for the morning walk, and there was still so much time before the morning session with Yasmin—this very session—so it went back to the other asset’s nest to be close to the other asset for as long as it could.
“You went back to Clint’s bed,” Yasmin says when it pauses to gather up more signs from the happy jumble in its mind. “So you spent the night with Clint again?”
It nods. Just like the night before, and the one before that. And so many of the other nights before. It always spends at least a little of the night in the other asset’s nest, after all. It enjoys the closeness and the warmth, the way the other asset smells up close, and the way the other asset will move toward it even while fast asleep.
Yasmin seems to smile, though it cannot tell for sure. “I just wanted to confirm, Jigsaw. It’s important to get a full picture of the situation so that I can know you are safe.”
It frowns. It is always safe with the other asset, even when the other asset’s dick swells up during sleep. Doesn’t Yasmin know that? The other asset would never hurt it, but would only ever protect it. The other asset killed B-RUM.
Does she suspect…?
“Sometimes,” Yasmin says softly, “people around us—people who care about us—can do things that hurt us even when they don’t mean to hurt us. They can say things that hurt our feelings, or they can misjudge a situation and have the wrong reaction. Or they can pressure us into doing things we aren’t ready to do.”
It looks down at the drawing board, traces the raised lines with the fingers again. It wants to remind her that the other asset is an asset, and so what she is saying does not apply, but it can tell that she means “even assets” without saying it.
It will not be contrary just for the sake of defending the other asset, especially when Yasmin does not mean to insult the other asset by saying that the other asset would hurt it. And when she does not know about the other asset swelling up.
“The ones we care for most can sometimes accidentally hurt us.” Yasmin sounds very saddened by this.
It wonders whether she has been hurt by someone she cares for the most. It hopes not. If someone has hurt Yasmin, then it wants to find that someone and make sure they can never hurt her or anyone else ever again.
“I am just making sure that you have someone to talk to so that if you have any questions about what is happening between you and Clint, or any concerns or worries, you can get answers without feeling like you might upset Clint.”
It still does not understand why it could not just ask the other asset, but maybe there are things that if it asked the other asset about, it would be hurting the other asset’s feelings. Like the swelling.
But they can discuss killing and moral compasses and how differently they feel about those things. And it has let the other asset know about B-RUM and how afraid it is of B-RUM still, even after B-RUM is dead. How afraid it is of being taken back. And it has told the other asset about how they hurt it and pushed into it, B-RUM and C-BAR and all the rest.
What could ever upset the other asset if these things did not? The differences in moral compass, its cowardice in the face of danger, its weakness in captivity. These things did not upset the other asset.
“Would you like to tell me more about the kiss?” Yasmin asks. “Who initiated the kiss?”
It was many kisses. Many, many. So many kisses.
It signs as much, and explains that the other asset’s heart was beating so fast, and the other asset asked to kiss it, and then it kissed the other asset, and then the other asset kissed it, and then there was so much kissing that it does not know which asset was doing the kissing and which asset was being kissed.
Only that this asset’s heart was also beating so fast, like it was running—sprinting—even though it was not doing anything at all strenuous. Was just lying on top of the other asset. It had just been so so exciting, had felt so good, like nothing it has ever experienced before.
The skin face hurts around the eyes as it grins wide and signs all of these things, mostly miming and pointing to the fixed objects in the space in front of it, this asset to the left and the other asset to the right. And the heartbeat is speeding up as it remembers how all of that kissing felt, and how eager it is to go find the other asset again and do some more of that.
Maybe they can kiss sitting up, or standing. And now it knows how to ask for a kiss, so it can ask and ask and ask any time, and maybe the other asset will say yes and kiss it again.
“So you had your first kisses this morning,” Yasmin says. “I’m so happy for you. It sounds like you enjoyed that very much. Did you get a chance to ask Clint your questions last night?”
It waggles a hand back and forth. It started with dancing and then in the flurry of dancing it forgot the other one. The massage one. But how could a massage be better than the kissing? It will ask for more kissing, not for massages.
It signs that they went dancing together, the other asset and this asset, and the ballerina woman was there to tell it where to put the feet and how to move. And there was beautiful music, and the other asset was so perfect in the arms.
“I’m happy you advocated for yourself, Jigsaw. And I’m happy that you got to go dancing. I’m sure that was a lot of fun—the real kind of fun—being part of the music again, even if not by singing.”
It nods, even though it does not like that word. It is glad it advocated for itself as well. And that it got to go dancing. To be part of the music. Yes. To join in with the body the way it cannot join in with the throat.
It pulls the tablet close and switches to the AAC app. Something the other asset said yesterday is echoing through the head, and it wants to share that. It shares a lot of things with Yasmin. She likes for it to share so that she can understand it better and help it understand itself better.
After several minutes and many of the boards, and lots and lots of the tablet whispering the words to it, it taps a fingertip on the Speak tile. “Assets calm down after mission success finally. Good day and nap and dance after almost lose Jigsaw.”
Yasmin nods. “I’m glad you were able to calm down a bit, especially after you were almost wiped by that halo. Do you want to talk about it?”
They have already talked about how it is tired of being afraid of the halos and the wiping and the prospect of being taken back. They already did it. But…
It nods and returns its attention to the tablet.
“Almost lose Jigsaw. No more Jigsaw. What then?”
“That’s a good question,” Yasmin says. “And it’s a complicated one. I don’t know enough about the wipes or the halos to know the answer. But I have a feeling the people you’re surrounded with here would still care for you and would want to make sure that you were treated well and protected. We would still help you.”
It bites on the lower lip, thinks. Yasmin is not an expert on halos. It does not expect her to be. She is not a technician or a researcher, is not that kind of support staff. But the other… The people in the team that is not a cell would want to treat it well and protect it? Would want to help it? But how? How could they do those things if it is not there for them to do them to?
“But no Jigsaw to help.”
“You would still be you, deep down inside of whatever state came out from under the halo.” Yasmin’s voice is soft. “You might end up choosing a different name, but you would still be who you are. I don’t think the halo would change that. Not truly.”
But it is not the bucky, and everyone has said that the bucky went under the halo to become the asset. That is a change the halo caused. And the asset was under the halo so many times, and in the tube where it is so, so cold, and for so long, and then the asset became this asset, became Jigsaw, stole will from the operator, cut and sliced and eviscerated its way to freedom. Killed and killed.
If that is the truth, then the halo changed the bucky into the asset into this asset into Jigsaw. Then the bucky would still be there, Yasmin is saying, just “deep down inside.” And it is not the bucky. Is not, is not.
“Not the bucky,” it says, picking out the words and tapping Speak.
“No,” Yasmin agrees. “You are your own self, Jigsaw. I don’t know enough to have all the answers for you. I’m sorry. But the best I can understand from what I’ve been told is that it takes more than one wipe to fully erase someone. And it must have taken many, many wipes, over a long period of time, to erase all of Bucky’s experiences and provide the opportunity for Jigsaw to grow in that absence.”
It… it does look like the bucky. And it did fall once, a very long way down, just like the bucky fell off of a train. The asset has been in captivity starting so long ago, years, many years… and the bucky died many years ago. The other asset explained all of that, and the clown man was so sure that it was the bucky for so long. And the bucky was captured by the first researcher, and it was a captive with the first researcher.
It brings together the words it needs, and stares at them for a long time, unseeing. Minutes. It does not want to say them, but they feel right. It does not like them, but that does not make them untrue. It has checked the facts, and the facts all point to this.
“So it was the bucky.”
Yasmin is quiet long enough for it to add more words.
“It was the bucky,” it repeats. “Not now. Now is Jigsaw.”
“Alright,” Yasmin says, accepting the statement without challenging it or praising it. “And how does this make you feel?”
Natasha
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 7:15 a.m.—
She’s still in her bathrobe when Clint comes over, and it must be important, because he didn’t wait for a response to his “coming over” text while she was in the shower.
“Come on in,” she says, gesturing to the front room with a serenity she doesn’t quite feel.
Something is clearly afoot, because Clint is not in jeans for the day or still in boxers, but is in yoga pants. He looks out of breath despite not breathing hard, and he’s flushed like he’s been up several flights of stairs at a sprint when she knows him well enough to know he’d never do that voluntarily.
He’s only got one hearing aid in, and is putting the other one in place as the door shuts behind him.
“What happened?”
“We kissed. ‘Tasha, we kissed. It was—” he shakes his head with a dopey grin on his face. “That’s not what I came over to talk about, though.”
Natasha raises an eyebrow and waves for him to follow her to her bedroom. She’d like to get some clothes on, even if it’s still slightly too early to go down for breakfast. And she needs to do her knee stretches still.
“Well?” she asks as she pulls together an outfit. Baggy button-up and leggings today, she thinks. It’s a slouchy kind of day.
She can see him from the corner of her eye, looking flustered and fidgeting with the hem of his t-shirt. She’ll need to prompt him to continue beyond that, then.
“What did you come to talk about if not a major relationship milestone?”
“Jigsaw put some of his yoga pants in my closet,” Clint says, sitting on her bed with one leg pulled up. “Does he think I’m hot?”
Natasha holds in a laugh by sheer willpower and hangs her bathrobe up before beginning to pull on her underwear and other clothes.
It’s the sort of question she imagines schoolgirls asking each other in a similar situation, gossiping about a crush’s potential to return their affections. And while she knows that Clint is no schoolgirl—and neither is she—she can’t help but feel their friendship’s strength in times like these.
With other relationships Clint has had, however long or short, Natasha has put up with the pining to some degree, or the moon-eyed sighing over some lost opportunity. She’s had to listen to him talk about how attractive someone is, or help him decide on a date idea. And she’s heard more than her fair share of moaning after a breakup.
But this is the first relationship where she’s seen him so uncertain about the state of affairs. Clint hadn’t truly needed her for those other relationships, though if he’d taken her advice, some of them would have lasted longer or ended more amicably. Clint shared those earlier relationships out of camaraderie, but this one he’s sharing from a place of vulnerability.
He trusts her and he’s leaning on her, and she’s a part of his closest circle. She belongs. He is letting her in to more of this than she’d really thought he would, and it feels wonderful to be included and depended on.
“Don’t leave me hanging,” Clint whines. “Does he think I’m hot? Did he put the pants in my closet because he likes my legs, or because he wants us to match? I can’t tell.”
“What, it can’t be both?” Natasha rolls up the sleeves of her shirt to three-quarter length and begins doing up the buttons.
“I just— If he doesn’t see me like that, if he’s not attracted -attracted to me, if he doesn’t want -want me, then I’m some kind of horrible sleazebag for thinking he’s hot and wanting to, I don’t know.”
Clint runs his hands through his hair.
“Wanting to do more than kiss him?” Natasha suggests.
“Yeah,” Clint says with a gusty sigh. “I almost grabbed him when he realized what time it was and ran off to go see Yasmin. I didn’t want to stop kissing him. He really does have great lips.”
Natasha smiles as she pulls on her socks. “How’s his technique?”
“He’s a fast learner.” Clint flushes bright red and clears his throat. “At first he didn’t seem to have any idea what we were doing, but he picked it up really quickly. We didn’t do much. Just the basics. No tongue or anything.”
“That’s probably for the best,” she says. “Work your way up to that.”
If they ever get there at all. From what she saw in the bank vault—that horrible spider gag and the manacles thick enough to go around a neck, and the hoses and other things—Jigsaw doesn’t have a lot of great experiences around his face and mouth. More likely he’s been assaulted, had agents and personnel grabbing at his face and hair, shoving bits of rubber between his teeth for a wipe…
He might very well have bitten Clint in a kneejerk reaction if Clint had tried french kissing him. And then they’d both feel awful, Jigsaw for hurting Clint, Clint for scaring Jigsaw. She’d much rather their relationship go without any unhappy surprises like that.
“And explain it first,” Clint says. “Or maybe just don’t do it at all. I don’t know. I…”
Clint looks at his hands and then up at her again. “He said that they ‘pushed into’ him, ‘Tasha. That’s how he phrases it. He says ‘pushed into’ and not ‘raped.’ I’m afraid of what he might think about french kissing. I don’t want to hurt him like they did. Not even by doing something completely different.”
She nods. “You’re a good man, Clint. And yes, he thinks you’re hot.”
“Really?”
Oh, he sounds so pleasantly surprised. Natasha can’t help her laugh this time.
“Really, Clint. He looks at you and he likes what he sees. He likes it a lot. He has a hard time looking away.” The past couple of days must have been really hard for Jigsaw.
Natasha ducks into her bathroom to get a comb for her hair, and then continues. “In fact, I think he has a harder time looking away than you do.”
Clint grins. “He does?”
“Clint, he’s always looking at you. And he makes sure you’re dressed in clothes that show off your figure. Yoga pants are just one more step on that journey. And yes,” she says, “there’s probably an element of wanting to match. But that’s because of how much he likes you.”
“I love him, ‘Tasha.”
She blinks and tucks the comb into the pocket of her hanging bathrobe. “Really.”
“I’d been thinking of him as a roommate, maybe a roommate with benefits, because I didn’t want to hurt him with more, but when I almost lost him, when he was alone with Rumlow and I couldn’t get there fast enough, I realized that he was more to me than that. He’s the one. The right one.”
Natasha comes over to stand in front of him, places her hands on the sides of his head, and plants a kiss on his forehead.
“…Congratulations,” she says softly, looking down into his eyes.
Usually, when he proclaims his love for someone, it’s a fast-burning fuse, an infatuation that explodes in his face and turns his life to shambles while he picks up the pieces of his broken heart.
With Bobbi, it was slower—the whole thing had been slower, like a slow motion train wreck—but this is the first time it’s been this slow, or this out of order. Sleeping in the same bed before even knowing his name, followed by hand holding. And only much later, massages, dancing, kissing…
Maybe Clint just needed to take things at a different pace, in a mixed up order, to find the right combination.
“Any bets on when I’ll manage to ruin this?” Clint asks, looking up at her.
Natasha shakes her head and lets go of Clint’s.
“No,” she says. “I won’t place any bets there. I’m rooting for you.”
Chapter 103: Steve | It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life, for me
Notes:
Chapter title from “Feeling Good” by Michael Bublé.
Sorry it took so long to reply to all your comments last chapter. It turns out, those weren’t hives, but blisters, and they got so much worse before they got better. Thanks goes out to my nephew for bequeathing unto me his virus, which caused blisters and cysts and rash (oh my!) on my hands, feet and mouth, as the virus is so aptly named. I’m feeling much better now, though, and want to thank you for your well wishes and patience. ^_^
Special thank you also to Possum for sensitivity-checking this chapter! They have a great Bucky recovery saga posting now, and you should go check it out!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 9:15 a.m.—
“I sense we’re circling the heart of what you want to talk about, Steve,” Dr Linda says. “In the interest of giving you ample time to process…”
Steve sighs. “Get to the point?”
She smiles at him, her eyes twinkling. “Well, our time together is limited, but if you’d like to continue circling, you’re welcome to. This is your session.”
He nods. That is true. He can waste time talking about the complexities of giving his report to S.W.O.R.D. about how Jigsaw is doing with his rehabilitation efforts, and how hard it is to write omissions. Or he can get to the important bits. The bits Sam had brought up, and the bits that he needs to talk about for his own sake as well.
“We,” he starts, and then stops. “No. We were almost all in it together, all of us but Sam, but I need to talk about myself. This is about me.”
He can sense Dr Linda’s approval even without looking at her directly.
“This last mission we had, it was a hard one. It brought up a lot of things. Brought out a lot of things. Most of us were hardly even bruised, but I feel like I lost… Something. Some of what makes me who I am, maybe. And I lost an opportunity that wasn’t even really there, gave it up without trying. And I feel—”
He shakes his head, frowning at his hands and then at the ceiling. “I feel guilty. Not about my actions, but about what I didn’t even try to do. Like I let him down somehow, even though he’s already long gone.”
“Go on,” Dr Linda prompts. “I assume you’re talking about letting Bucky down.”
Steve steels himself to say it outright, grits his teeth briefly, and then just comes out with it. Dr Linda has the clearance to hear it. She’s signed the documents Tony insists will keep things between them.
“I killed a lot of people, Dr Linda. I didn’t even try to spare them. I used all the force I could muster, and I didn’t hold back even a scrap of it. It felt… It felt good. Liberating. Like I was finally doing the right thing, even though I know it wasn’t the right answer.”
And he does know that it wasn’t the right answer. That they should have at least kept the man with the halo on his belt alive so they could learn more about the halos, how to disable them, or how their effects could be undone. Something.
“It was like I was finally at war again, for real. Not having to rely on some external agency to come in and clear up, but being able to do it myself. I was the judge and the jury. And we were all the executioners, except for Sam. And Jigsaw, oddly enough.”
He wonders if Jigsaw regrets not being able to join in the fighting at the end of everything in the upper levels of the underground base. If he feels like he was cheated of the opportunity to kill some of his own enemies. Or, if he’s still too traumatized about what happened to himself—and what nearly happened—to even think about that.
“And why do you feel it was the wrong answer despite feeling like it was the right thing?” Dr Linda asks. “Or, the other way around. Why did it feel right and also wrong?”
“It’s not how we’re supposed to operate.” Steve sighs. “We’re Avengers, not murderers. And Sam reminded me that we’re not behind enemy lines in the War. We have a responsibility to set a good example for Jigsaw, too.”
He looks up at Dr Linda and finds that she’s not frowning like he thought she would be. He’d thought maybe bringing Sam and Jigsaw up would be making it not about himself, but apparently it’s fine this time.
“Because his freedom is on the line,” Steve continues. “He can’t go around killing his targets anymore, and we’re supposed to be showing him how to hold back, how to take prisoners, leave survivors, all that.”
“Did you want to kill your opponents during your mission?”
Steve nods. “I wanted nothing more than to rip their heads off their shoulders. One man’s head, in particular. But Clint took care of him.”
“And did you consciously aim to kill them, or did your anger overtake you?”
Steve has to think about that one. On the one hand, he did consciously want to kill them all. But did he set out to do it, or did he just… do it? He’d told Natasha to try to take some prisoners, but he’s also said that no one was watching.
“I’m not sure. I was trapped under some rubble, listening to this man saying horrible things, spewing out threats about, about raping Jigsaw, and wiping his mind away like they’d done to Bucky before, and—”
He takes a moment to swallow some water and get his thoughts back under control. The water sloshes in the glass until he sets it down on the coffee table between himself and Dr Linda. He needs to control himself.
“I wanted to kill him. I swore that I would. I swore I’d kill them all for what they’d done and what they were planning to do. But I…” Steve pauses. “I’m not sure what. I said we’d try to keep them alive, but when the rubble was lifted, it was like only the murderous part of me climbed out.”
“And do you regret that?”
Steve laughs, short and sharp and bitter. “I can’t make myself regret it. Every single one of those men would have taken their turns hurting him, and I wasn’t able to protect him before, but it was different in that base.”
She nods again and makes a note in her book.
“But I know that it wasn’t the way we should have handled it. I know that. I know we should have done better.”
“Tell me about the opportunity you say you gave up without trying.”
“…Jigsaw was wiped. They had these halos that were portable, and the man I was talking about, he put one on Jigsaw and turned it on. We didn’t— We didn’t know what effect it would have. Jigsaw didn’t wake up for hours.”
Dr Linda makes another note. “And you thought…?”
“I thought, what if Bucky wakes up instead? Or what if no one wakes up, just a blank slate with no memories of anything or anyone.”
Steve looks at the water on the table for a moment.
It hadn’t been something he thought about eagerly. It had only been a passing thought that came back around and settled for a while. He’d chased it out before going to talk to Clint, and it hadn’t come back. But he’d still had it.
“I thought, if it’s Bucky, will it really be Bucky? Or if it’s no one, could that man become Bucky the way Jigsaw became Jigsaw? Just with time and experiences, starting fresh again.” He shakes his head. “But that’s not how it works. They say you can’t step in the same river twice. There’s no way to re-create Bucky, and there’d have been no way to re-create Jigsaw, either.”
“But Jigsaw woke up,” Dr Linda says, “and he knew who he was?”
Steve nods. “He knew all of us, and that we’d been on a mission. He didn’t remember what had happened with the halo, or how he’d been injured. I think the halo only wiped away a short chunk of time.”
“So what do you mean when you say you didn’t even try?”
“I mean, I didn’t try to push for Bucky. I didn’t suggest that we try to bring Bucky back instead of Jigsaw if the wipe had worked,” he says. “Clint asked me about it, and I said that we’d let whoever woke up be whoever they were.”
“And would you have?”
“Yes,” Steve says.
“Even though I still miss Bucky, even though I’m still working on grieving him, even though he’d have loved the future and deserved to see it… I can’t take someone away from Clint or away from himself just to put someone else in there instead.”
And it was a moot point, anyway, wasn’t it? Jigsaw had woken up. Not Bucky and not a blank slate.
“It would have been wrong to try to imprint my memories of Bucky onto a blank slate asset. Bucky is gone. I have to accept that.”
Dr Linda frowns. “We’ve talked about how that’s not an all or nothing situation, Steve. You are dealing with a vast gray area, where there are shadows and hints of Bucky all throughout Jigsaw, and yet how there are also some things utterly foreign that make up who Jigsaw is now. His new experiences that Bucky did not have.”
“But he keeps saying he’s ‘not the bucky,’” Steve says. “Shouldn’t I accept that for what it is just because he wants it?”
“Not exactly. You’re right to treat him as the person he’s developed into, but there is no need to cut him off from his roots entirely.”
Steve frowns.
“When a person transitions between genders, for instance, they don’t necessarily lose all of their interests or personality traits,” Dr Linda says. “In many cases, they merely transition to a gender that is more accurate to what they experience inside themselves.”
She continues before he has a chance to say that Jigsaw isn’t doing that, or hasn’t.
“Jigsaw hasn’t lost all of what made him Bucky, only parts of it. And he doesn’t reject all of what made him Bucky, either. You’ve said yourself that he still loves animals, that he still strives to protect those who need it whether they want it or not, that he still hates bullies as much as you do.”
Steve has to give her those points. Jigsaw does exhibit a lot of Bucky’s interests in that regard.
“And he’s kept his curiosity and excitement for new things, once he can be sure they aren’t a threat,” Dr Linda says. “He loves technology and pesters Mr Stark about it, even though he was afraid of him for a while.”
“But,” Steve says, “if he doesn’t want to be Bucky, shouldn’t I respect that?”
“Of course . But you don’t have to ignore those parts of him that are still like Bucky or reject them because they are tangled up with Bucky as he was.”
She leans forward, and her voice is earnest when she continues. “Bucky is not so much gone as he has transitioned into Jigsaw, through his life experiences and through his perception of himself. Identity can be a very fluid thing. And it’s okay to be confused by it.”
Steve nods, taking it all in. He knew a few people back in Brooklyn, before the War, who were what the future would call trans. Some of them had a new name they used in the clubs, and others lived as a different gender entirely, no matter where they were or who they were with.
He wouldn’t have denied Mabel her interest in bowling just because she was born Marvin and Marvin had liked to bowl. But he also wouldn’t have insisted on calling her Marvin as long as he had insisted on calling Jigsaw Bucky. He still feels bad about that.
“Steve, you said you felt you lost something of yourself,” Dr Linda says, consulting her notes. “Something that makes you who you are. A part of your identity, perhaps. I’d like to discuss that.”
Steve recalls what he’d been talking about, earlier in their session. Yes. He’d said that.
“I meant that, that I’d…” He stops. Thinks through his words. Starts again. “Captain America is a hero. The Avengers are heroes, and Captain America leads them.”
“Okay.”
“And this whole identity has been made around Captain America. Selling war bonds, kissing babies, shaking hands, fake-punching countless fake Hitlers on the jaw.”
Steve doesn’t miss those days. Not one bit.
“Captain America is supposed to be this golden boy,” he says, “this icon. Even during the War, Bucky had to do all the dirty work so that my hands stayed clean.”
Bucky had been a sharpshooter and he’d been their scout in the Howling Commandos, and he’d picked off more enemy scouts than Steve ever found out about, he’s sure. He got answers out of the ones they captured, too, while Steve was visibly somewhere else and looking like he had no idea what was happening back in the barn.
Steve remembers coming up to Bucky—who never jumped at his approach, not once, and he should have known about the serum then, he should have—and finding enemies in the outpost with barbed wire wrapped around their necks like a garrote. Silently killed before the team even got there, and dragged away before anyone outside of the Howlies could see what had happened.
“The biographies, I read some of them, and they all treat me—treat Captain America, I should say—like a paragon of virtue. Hated bullies, always stood up for what was right, supported freedom and liberty for all, fair, just, brave.”
Dr Linda smiles. “And you’re not those things?”
“I am, but the biographies make it sound like that’s all I ever was. And I made mistakes. I got dirty. I killed enemy soldiers and didn’t feel bad about it. Even though they were just on the wrong side of the field following the wrong orders issued by the wrong commanders. Some of them were as young as I was, some younger, some terrified.”
Steve shrugs. “I was a soldier like all the rest, only I was enhanced. And I fought in that war the way everyone else did, and it wasn’t always a virtuous battle like in the movies. If we could rig something in our favor, we did. Fighting fair wasn’t on the board if we could avoid it.”
“You were also mostly outnumbered, if I recall correctly,” Dr Linda says. “As you are now, with this team. Does that change anything?”
“Not according to the books. Not according to the public. And maybe not even according to Sam.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“Sam reminded me that this isn’t the War,” Steve says again. “We’re not supposed to be killing the enemy. And I got the feeling that he might believe the hype. Might believe in Captain America, the myth. Not Steve Rogers, the man.”
He shakes his head.
“Maybe I lost the polish in his eyes. Maybe I lost it in my own eyes. I killed people without hesitation two days ago, Dr Linda. A lot of them. And I don’t feel bad. Shouldn’t I feel bad?”
In some kind of strange role reversal, Jigsaw is lingering down the hallway from the therapy room, just far enough away to not hear what Steve and Dr Linda were talking about. Steve knows, because that’s as far away as he needs to be not to hear Jigsaw’s sessions.
He looks terrible, but if Sam let him leave the bandages off then he must be healing well despite the blotchy skin at his temples and around his eyes, despite the cataracts-like cloudiness over his eyes.
“Hi Jigsaw,” he says as he comes closer. “Where’s Clint?”
Usually if Jigsaw isn’t on his way to or from anywhere, he’s hanging out with Clint, after all. And he’s just leaning against the wall with his tablet under his arm, so he’s not going anywhere. Maybe he was waiting for Steve.
Steve tries to think of why that could be and comes up blank.
Jigsaw mimes catching a fish, which Steve takes to mean Clint is in their room playing that weird fishing game and probably not catching anything.
“Can I help you with something?”
Steve feels terrible being like this, sort of short with him and not trying to engage him. He’s tired after that therapy session, though, and he really just wants to go slam his fists into some heavy bags to make sure he’s physically exhausted to go with the way he feels inside.
Jigsaw shakes his head, but then holds up his tablet.
“You… want to talk?” Steve asks.
Why now, of all times? Why can’t he want to talk when Steve has the energy levels for it, or when Steve hasn’t just talked his heart out, and about Bucky and Jigsaw?
“Sure. Let’s go to my room?”
Sam said he was going out to see some of his old neighborhood friends for lunch, so there should be plenty of time to talk with Jigsaw without Sam interrupting. Not that Steve would mind. But he needs to think about things with Sam, needs to think about whether Sam’s image of him is tarnished, or whether it was realistic to start with. Whether he wants to polish it up, or… or not.
Jigsaw nods and heads for the stairs, not the elevator, and Steve wonders if that’s a desire to help Steve burn off some physical energy or a desire to not be in an elevator with him. But he’d agreed to come to his room, so it can’t be the latter.
It occurs to him partway down that the stairs are just closer to his rooms than the elevator is, and that Jigsaw is just taking the most direct route without regard for physical exertion. Of course.
When they get there, Steve waves Jigsaw into a chair and sits in the other chair himself. “What did you want to talk about?”
Jigsaw taps and swipes along his tablet, and Steve catches sight of a long string of text and pictures that’s already been assembled before he politely looks away from the tablet.
So Jigsaw really wants to talk. Has a whole speech lined up and ready. Steve braces himself for whatever it could be. But despite bracing, he isn’t prepared for what comes out of the tablet. He’s not prepared at all. Not one little bit.
“They stole from the bucky,” comes the Russian-accented voice that Jigsaw has chosen for himself. “HYDRA. HYDRA stole everything from the bucky. Stole the bucky from Steve. Stole the bucky from the bucky. Made the bucky not the bucky. Many many wipes. Halos. Made the asset instead. This asset. This asset made Jigsaw.”
Steve takes in a deep breath, trying to process what he’s been told. That’s the most he’s heard Bucky’s name come from another… in a very, very long time. And the words themselves…
“Can you,” Steve says, his voice shaking a little. “Can you say that again? Please?”
Jigsaw nods and presses his fingertip to the Speak tile again. And the words come pouring out.
HYDRA stole Bucky from Steve. HYDRA stole Bucky from Bucky himself.
The room swims in tears for a moment, and Steve wipes at his eyes with the pads of his thumbs to clear his vision. They did. They did steal Bucky from them. From Steve and from Bucky. Stole Bucky from everyone. His family, his friends, his comrades in arms. But most of all, from Bucky himself.
He thinks about responding, but he has no idea what to say. How to respond.
Is Jigsaw acknowledging that he was once Bucky?
“HYDRA stole the bucky from Steve. Is Jigsaw now. Was the bucky. Not now. Sorry.”
Steve shakes his head.
“No,” he says more harshly than he intends. “Don’t apologize. That isn’t your fault, you aren’t to blame. You shouldn’t be sorry.”
It’s several minutes before Jigsaw’s next utterance, and Steve spends that time worrying that he’s made things worse somehow by snapping at Jigsaw. But what eventually comes out is—again—not what Steve expects.
“Jigsaw deny. Refuse believe. But Steve correct. Jigsaw was the bucky.”
Steve swallows, hard. He nods. “You were. You were Bucky. My Bucky. Is that what you were apologizing for? Not believing me?”
Jigsaw nods. “Steve does not lie Jigsaw.”
“No,” Steve murmurs. “I haven’t ever lied to you. What… What does this mean, for you?”
He prepares himself for a wait. The tablet makes Jigsaw easier to understand than his signing, but the pauses are something that takes some getting used to. He’ll accept any length of pause, though, if it means that Jigsaw is willingly, actively communicating this kind of thing to him. Something that matters so much, something that isn’t just about food.
“Jigsaw not the bucky. Not now. But was the bucky. Was friend with Steve. Can be friend again?”
Steve sniffs and blinks several times, and nods before Jigsaw can get the wrong idea. “Yeah,” he says, and he’s proud of his voice for only shaking a tiny bit. “Yeah, we can be friends. I would love that.”
Notes:
Content Warning: Some brief mention of what has happened to Jigsaw, but nothing graphic.
Chapter 104: Clint | I know that I’m a mess (but I ain’t trying to be the best)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Lost Control” by Alan Walker.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day and a stressful one, and depending on how it goes I may not be in much of a condition to post Sunday's chapter. So here is the weekend chapter way, way early. Your comments will be such a welcome distraction.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 11:15 a.m.—
This? This is awesome. He has the most gorgeous rainbow trout on the line, and the line is holding beautifully. He must have picked the right combo of pole and line and bait this time, gone to the right part of the river, at the right time of day.
He’s going to actually catch a goddamn fish in this game. Finally. Not just a dinky minnow that didn’t make it to the leaderboard.
And Jigsaw isn’t even here to see it. Oh well. Jigsaw can read the screen later, when Clint has his initials up there along with Katie-Kate’s and Natasha’s. Well, not his initials. Just his first name. He’s not going anywhere near anything that could become a C-BAR in Jigsaw’s mind. Or in his own.
Jigsaw’s off talking with Cap, telling him that he wants to be friends. It’s a breakthrough he and Yasmin came up with, from what Jigsaw has told him. Jigsaw’s “checked the facts,” whatever that is, and they finally line up for him.
He looks like the bucky, and even a perfect stranger said so on first meeting him, despite the disguise glasses and long hair and metal arm. He knows all about Zola from before the time when he turned into a computer—which is still weird to think about—and only the bucky would have known him as a torturer then. Hell, S.H.I.E.L.D. had let him in despite his human experimentation, which just raises unhappy questions about things that they haven’t answered yet.
But he knew all about the Tesseract from before and yet doesn’t recall ever seeing it, so where did that information come from? The bucky was captured in the Alps after a fall, and Jigsaw remembers falling a very long way in the cold. The Winter Soldier was “recovered” from that area by the Soviet branch of HYDRA according the Winter Soldier project records, before S.H.I.E.L.D. came along and grabbed him.
Those are the facts, and Jigsaw’s sticking to them. And as long as he doesn’t have to be the bucky now and lose out on being Jigsaw, he’s content enough to accept that he used to be this Bucky fellow, and friends with Cap from before he was Cap.
Clint’s half thinking that the loss of the Winter Soldiers from the wolf pen has something to do with it, too. Jigsaw was counting on their friendship and “sameness,” and it turned out they were dead beyond anyone’s ability to save them. What’s more, they were apparently hand-selected for maximum viciousness and loyalty to HYDRA. Talk about not the same.
So it’s time to make some new friends, or remake some old ones.
It’s probably going pretty well if Jigsaw’s still out there, too. Clint doesn’t know what they’ll be talking about by now. Jigsaw already had quite a string of sentences put together on his tablet when he left. By now they could be talking about anything.
And when Jigsaw gets back, Clint will tell him all about this fish he’s catching. He pulls up on the rod and hits the reel button a few times, not enough to snap the line, he hopes, and it works—the fish is losing points, he’s getting closer to catching it, and it looks like it’ll be a big one.
He just has to reel it in a few more times, maybe let it swim for a bit and pull on the line to tire itself out…
“How’d it go?” Clint asks when the door opens several minutes later to let Jigsaw back in. “He take it well?”
“Yes, I did, Clint,” comes Cap’s voice, and just like that, Clint loses the trout he’d managed to get on the hook and almost into the net. Son of a fish.
“Aw, trout, no.”
“Sorry.”
Clint turns the game off rather than listen to the fish at the end mock him with its bloop bloop fish laughter. He’s never going to win this game. He’ll never get his name on the leaderboard. It’ll just be filled up with Natasha and Kate. Even Jigsaw would probably win if he was willing to hurt the in-game fish by playing at all.
“It’s okay,” Clint says, trying to keep most of the mope out of his voice. “I’ll try again later.”
Jigsaw gives him a pat on the head that turns into a gentle ruffle of his hair, and then makes his way to the kitchen, where the little succulent pup is waiting in its new blue pot next to a bowl of kiwis. Jigsaw sets the tablet down on the counter and gestures for Cap to come into the kitchen with him.
So it’s finally time for the baby plant to leave the nest and go live with Cap. Nice. Clint’s watched it slowly grow more leaves while living in the kitchen here. It’s almost a decent size now, and Jigsaw has had his painstakingly hand-written watering instructions waiting by it since the day after he brought it back from that gardening session with Natasha.
It’s a thank-you gift, he said, so that Cap would know that he appreciated the bowl of sugary peaches and some other things. Clint has lost track of what all Jigsaw was feeling warranted a thank-you plant.
“This is for me?” Cap asks, looking down at the instructions. “Thanks. And you’re welcome. Oh,” he says, “and a kiwi, too?”
Jigsaw nods and signs “hair potato” at him with a pleased smile.
“Thanks. Do you want to eat one as well? We could eat together over the sink, to not make a mess.”
Well, that’ll do it, Clint thinks. That’s the secret to getting in good with Jigsaw—get in good enough to be offered food, and then offer some right back at him, even if it’s his own food you’re offering him. Sharing things, especially food, is definitely one of Jigsaw’s love languages.
Right alongside killing someone for you. Or maybe, in the case of the tracksuit mafia, just maiming them a little.
In a way, Clint supposes he’s already made his declaration of love to Jigsaw in the form of protecting him from Rumlow by killing the man. Jigsaw has made a point to bring that up periodically during the days after the mission. As soon as that fact could stick in his brain, he glommed onto it and didn’t let it go.
And Clint can’t really blame him. If someone got rid of Loki permanently, or even destroyed that fucking magic stick of his, Clint would need to constantly confirm that it happened and reiterate that he was free for all time from that kind of mind control.
And hadn’t Jigsaw promised to do that if Loki ever showed up? It’s a pointless thing to contemplate, since Jigsaw wouldn’t be any match for the scepter and Loki has the scepter, but the thought is a nice one, and the conviction with which Jigsaw insisted he would do it is heartwarming.
Jigsaw slips back behind the sofa, this time holding his vegetable, fruit, and dessert books along with his drawing board, and Clint waves him goodbye.
“Time for his thing with the food lady,” Clint explains to Cap, probably needlessly. “She said there’d be cake.”
Cap comes around to sit on the sofa with his new succulent and the instruction set for it, sets the plant and paper on the coffee table, and reaches for the controller Clint has cast aside.
“How does this work?”
“You want to play Here Fishy Fishy, or something else?” Clint isn’t sure he can bear it if another person in his life manages to catch a sizable fish before he’s even caught a single creek chub.
“What do you suggest?” Cap asks, eyeing the controller with curiosity.
Clint thinks for a moment. Fantastic Plumber Siblings is easy. Beginner stuff, and quickly picked up. But honestly…
“Tetris is a good one to start with. Gives you a sense of how to handle the controller, which buttons do what, how to watch multiple parts of the screen at once.” Clint nods. “Let’s get you started on Tetris.”
Clint gets up and grabs the second controller so they can take turns if they try another game after this. “It’s got good music, too,” Clint adds, turning the controller on and navigating to the right game on the console.
“Does Jigsaw like Tetris?”
“Jigsaw is amazing at Tetris.” Clint shakes his head. “He would get stressed out when the blocks sped up, at first, but he’s got a great eye for how the pieces will fit together, so he’s always got a lot of space to work with.”
Clint sets the game up on easy mode—no speeding up blocks, plenty of time to maneuver things where they need to go, all that—and then plays a round while explaining what the game is like and what the objectives are.
“This really is like if Arraial was a video game,” Cap says. “Sam had said it was, but I can really see the similarities now.”
Clint hasn’t got a clue what Cap’s talking about, but he nods when his turn is up and lets Cap have a go at it. “You’re up.”
Cap, as it turns out, is a natural at knowing how the pieces fit together, though it does take him a few minutes working the controller to know how each button affects the pieces in question.
“So you took it well, huh?” Clint asks after a few rounds.
Cap grins at him. “More than well. It was… I don’t know, it hurt at first, just hearing directly from Jigsaw that Bucky had been stolen from himself, like it was newly finalized just then. But after, it was like something lifted off of me. This huge weight I’d been hauling around was just gone.”
“I’m guessing you don’t miss it, then,” Clint says. He sets the level to intermediate and chooses a different song. “The weight, I mean.”
“Not even a little.” Cap pauses to get a Z-shape into a tricky slot. “I was honestly starting to think Sam was right, that there just weren’t enough experiences to be shared to make this work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Friendship is based on shared experiences,” Cap says, “and Jigsaw doesn’t remember any of the ones Bucky and I shared. And he was so resistant to building new experiences with me, I thought I’d never get anywhere.”
And now they’ll get plenty of places, if Jigsaw is as invested in making a friendship with Cap as he is with Stark.
“I think he agrees, if that helps. About the shared experiences. Being ‘the same as’ each other in some respect.” Clint takes over when it’s his turn. “I guess I was just lucky to be the one he started out being more the same as than anyone else here.”
“I don’t know that luck is all of it, Clint. Of the team who was here when he was first coming around, you’re the only one who had any experience being controlled like that. That’s a big deal, and it’s a big similarity you both share.”
Clint nods. “Yeah. And his dog liked me!” Clint laughs. “Lucky saved my bacon. I don’t know what I’d even be doing without, uh, without what I’ve got going on with Jigsaw.”
“How’s that going?” Cap asks, typing “STEVE” into the leaderboard after winning his turn’s high score. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Good,” Clint says. He can’t help but smile, even though he knows he looks like a total idiot with his face all red and beaming. “Great, actually. It’s going great.”
He doesn’t know that Cap really wants all the details, or that he wants to give all those details. But it really is going great. Jigsaw came back before breakfast and practically begged for more kisses, and honestly, Clint had been sort of irritated by Natasha texting them that breakfast was ready. It was a good way to start the day.
“You and Wilson?” Clint asks, partly out of curiosity and partly to take the attention off himself as he starts the next level.
“Good, I think.” Cap frowns at the screen for a moment. Then: “Maybe you can help with something. Killing is against your morals, right?”
Oh boy.
“I mean, generally, yeah.” Clint looks over at Cap out of the corner of his eye while a few rows of blocks vanish on the screen. “I had that Ronin chapter of my life, but I was just working through some stuff.”
Please, please, let Cap leave it at that. He doesn’t want to go and detail all the shit he did under the Ronin mantle. Can’t he just drop Ronin like it had never been him? Natasha is willing to let him, and he’d been Ronin right alongside her.
“But Jigsaw still thinks killing is okay, doesn’t he?” Cap asks. “It’s alright, you can tell me. I won’t report it to S.W.O.R.D. or anything.”
Well, in that case…
“Yeah. Only I’d say it’s more than ‘okay,’ in his book.” Clint frowns. “To him, it’s actually the morally correct thing to do when you’re up against evil. The immoral thing in that case is to let them live to spread more evil around and hurt more innocents.”
Where the hell is Cap going with this? Clint knows they ended up killing all the HYDRA goons they found in that base, and he knows why he killed Rumlow. What does any of this have to do with relationships? Specifically with Cap’s relationship with Wilson?
“How do you reconcile it?” Cap asks. “Your morals and his, they don’t align. You disagree, and on a pretty major thing.”
Clint cannot believe he’s giving relationship advice to Captain America. He should call in Natasha. Hell, JARVIS should be overhearing this and calling her in on their behalf. Clint’s advice—the advice of a raging nuclear waste inferno—will get someone killed.
“It’s about compromise,” Clint hears himself saying. What even is his life right now? Where is Natasha to save them both from this?
“I compromise by killing when it’s necessary to save others in the immediate situation—like with Rumlow.” He shrugs. “He compromises by learning how to take prisoners in all the other situations—like in North Carolina, only he’s working on that whole ‘throw them into the cryo fumes so they shatter like an ice sculpture’ thing.”
“It’s hard to imagine that murder is something you can compromise on.”
“Ah-ah, Cap,” Clint says. He pauses the game. This is getting too philosophical to do while playing a game.
“Remember, they’re different to him, killing and murder.” Clint holds up two fingers and taps them each in turn as he goes on. “Murder is what happens when someone evil kills someone innocent. Killing is what happens when someone justifiably takes out an evil target.”
Cap laughs softly. “That’s right. He spent so long trying to explain that to Sam and me, back when this whole thing started and you were off in Malibu.”
“So the compromise isn’t so bad, really,” Clint says. “There is no murder allowed.”
Clint feels reasonably sure that Jigsaw would agree to that. He wants to protect the innocent, after all. The only thing that’s up in the air is what counts as innocent. There’s a judgment call to be made there, and Jigsaw’s still a little uncertain of the boundaries of innocent and evil. Still getting to the point of accepting there’s a spectrum.
“Who decides when someone is evil enough to die?”
Clint shakes his head. “Wish I had an answer for that. Best I can figure, if someone is actively hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it, then they get killed, not murdered. But if they aren’t, then there’s still time to stop them nonlethally, and it would be murder to kill them?”
Cap nods, but not necessarily in agreement. He looks more like he’s thinking through scenarios.
“In North Carolina, it would have been murder because they weren’t actively poisoning the well water. But we were all combatants, so accidents can happen,” Cap says, testing a theory more than stating a fact.
“Accidents, including forgetting the limitations of an unenhanced human body,” Clint adds. “Because a lot of those agents ended up in really bad shape if they came across Jigsaw. Or you.”
“Right,” Cap agrees. “But in Siberia, except for Rumlow, we weren’t killing them. They weren’t in the process of hurting the innocent, just in the process of trying to shoot us—and we’re not innocents. So that was murder.”
Clint doesn’t like the ring of that. It doesn’t sound quite truthful. More like accepting more blame than was due, or exaggerating their actions a bit. Something. The Avengers don’t just murder people, after all. And they were trapped in rubble and being shot at.
But maybe Hulk didn’t need to make them bloody smears. And maybe Stark didn’t need to make them smoking grease spots. And okay, maybe Natasha could have aimed for their knees and elbows, and Cap could have knocked them out instead of knocking their brains clear out of their heads.
“Eh, I don’t know, Cap. Sure, you guys could have been less lethal. So could I, for that matter. I could have cut his fucking tongue out and fed it to him. That would have stopped Rumlow the same as slitting his throat, and he might not have bled out from that.”
Clint shrugs. “But they got under our skin. You heard what that guy was saying. What he wanted to do. Hell, you heard what he did manage to do. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut, and sometimes overkill is just right.”
Cap hmms in his throat, still considering everything.
“What does this have to do with Wilson?”
“…he’s pretty unhappy that we ended up killing everyone we encountered there,” Cap says softly. “And I… We’re having a difference of opinion. A difference in morals, maybe.”
“And a compromise won’t do the trick?”
“We can compromise.”
Clint squints at him. “Then I don’t see the problem? We did fine in that ice cream place this past summer. We did alright in North Carolina. And we messed up a bit in Siberia. We’ll do better next time.”
“I’m wondering if he sees me as Captain America, like you and Tony do, or if he sees me as Steve Rogers.”
Ouch. Clint supposes he does think of the man as Cap, but that’s just… just a name he uses. He doesn’t really think of him as just Captain America, does he?
Shit, maybe he does, in a way. Not “just” in a lesser sense, but in a flat sense, maybe. He’s Cap, the leader of the team, the one who’s supposed to hold them together, the one who came to him when this whole mess started and wanted to know what was going on in S.H.I.E.L.D. Definitely not “just” anything.
But also… Also maybe not the whole person.
“I’m sorry, C— Steve.”
Steve waves it off. “It’s alright. I understand. I’m used to it.”
“You shouldn’t have to be,” Clint mutters. No one should be their public persona to everyone around them all the time, even at home.
“I just can’t help but wonder if the reason Sam is upset about the killing is that Captain America shouldn’t do that, or if the reason is that Steve Rogers isn’t living up to Captain America’s image.”
Clint takes in a deep breath and lets it out in a rush. A million and three thoughts are whizzing around in his head and only one of them makes any sense at all. That one is: let’s get Natasha in here to sort it out.
But it’s kind of late in the game to bring her into this, and anyway, he’s gotten so much advice from her already that maybe he can channel some of it now. And her advice would probably be to ask Wilson flat out instead of stewing over it.
“And you haven’t asked him?” Clint asks. “Because Natasha would say to ask him. And she gives good advice.”
“I’m going to.” Steve pauses. “He was gone already after my therapy session, and I only really started to think it through with Dr Linda. I guess I just needed to hear it out loud before I went to Sam with it. To make sure it wasn’t selfish and pathetic.”
“Right,” Clint says. “Because you’re so well known for being selfish and pathetic.”
Steve laughs briefly, just a short chuckle, but it’s something. “You’d be amazed at what some of the theories about the Valkyrie say about my ‘death-seeking stunt’ and how I abandoned everyone to play hero.”
“Well that’s a load of bullshit.”
“You think so?” Steve asks with an unreadable smile.
“Yeah. The controls were stuck.” Clint shrugs. “Everyone knows that. You had to put the plane down or it would have resumed its course.”
There’s a moment of silence, and then Steve’s smile becomes entirely clear—relief and happiness, probably because someone is accepting his actions for what they were.
“Thanks for the talk, Clint.” Steve hands over his controller and collects his plant and instruction set. “I think Bruce is making sweet potato hash with asparagus and some other things for lunch. You want a meat-lover’s pizza?”
“Boy do I,” Clint mutters. “You keep your funky orange potatoes and stinky pee logs to yourselves.”
Chapter 105: Jigsaw | Please don’t make any sudden moves (you don’t know the half of the abuse)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Heathens” by twenty one pilots.
Thank you for all your comments on the last chapter! They really helped. ^_^ Have a midweek chapter as a little treat! But heed the content warning, also.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—
“Is there anything else you’d like to discuss before we get to my things to talk about?” Caroline asks.
It thinks about shaking the head, not taking up more time than is necessary—the feeder has things to talk about, and she should get to talk about them. But there were the set-on-fire peaches…
Finally, the set-on-fire peaches win out. They were delicious, with the ice cream on top of them, and the faint hint of char that made the rest all the sweeter. And the sticky honey mixed with the juicy flesh of the peaches. And the warmth from the cinnamon.
It has to tell Caroline all about them.
So it describes the “team dinner,” as the clown man had called it. Everyone was there at the team dinner, all of the team that is not a cell, even this asset and the other asset and the ballerina woman, who all three usually eat together later on. There was so much to eat. The vegetables on sticks, set on fire. The fluffy soft-inside potatoes, set on fire. The vegetable and pasta salad, cold, not set on fire.
And the so-delicious, so-special, set-on-fire-peaches to finish things off.
It is getting so hungry just describing these things, drawing them on the tactile drawing board, signing, feeling the plastic paper to make sure it is pointing to the right drawings. It wonders what Caroline has in the box on wheels today. It smells very good.
“Wow,” Caroline says. “I’m so proud of you, Jigsaw! You ate with the entire team. What an accomplishment. I know that has been very hard for you because of your trauma.”
Accomplishment? Caroline is proud of it? It smiles. Caroline is proud of it! Maybe it can eat another meal with the whole team before the Tuesday session with Caroline and she will be proud of it again.
“Did you find anything challenging about the meal?” Caroline asks.
It nods and points to the eyes. It could not see. It mimes the blindfold-bandage being over the eyes, then points to the plate of food it has drawn on the drawing board and shakes the head. Signs that it wanted so badly. It wanted to see the set-on-fire foods, especially the peaches.
“I’m sorry you weren’t able to see everything. But I’m sure JARVIS can provide some pictures. Maybe you can ask him to do that.”
Ask the voice without a mouth for a picture of the set-on-fire peaches? It has not needed to ask the voice without a mouth for help because it has not gotten stuck or lost anywhere while it could not see at all due to the blindfold-bandage. But maybe the offer to help is a “standing” one, which does not mean standing at all, but instead means that something is unchanging, or isn’t going away.
It would have to listen for a response, though. Listening to the voice without a mouth…
But Caroline is a feeder and is the one who suggested it. And it is about food. And Caroline is right there to make sure that nothing goes wrong and it does not overstep the boundaries of what is allowed when it comes to the voice without a mouth.
It hesitantly looks out the door to make sure no one is there watching, and then stops biting the lower lip. It makes the question sign and then mimes making a photograph with the camera, including the paper coming out of the bottom of the camera. It mimes wiggling the paper back and forth so that the picture on it appears. It signs about the set-on-fire peaches and points to the place where the photograph is in the space in front of it. Asks the question again.
And waits.
Tries to listen for the voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, the voice that should not be possible, the voice that is not for assets to hear, the voice without a mouth.
“Certainly, Jigsaw,” says the voice without a mouth.
The voice without a mouth is gentle-sounding, and different than all of the other voices it is used to hearing. There is the faintest hum that accompanies the voice without a mouth, that comes from the area around the ceiling corners of the room. That is where the voice without a mouth must be located. In the ceiling.
But it has traveled through all of the air ducts here and there is not anywhere in the ceiling for a voice to be. Where is the voice without a mouth?
“If you would care to observe the monitor,” the voice without a mouth continues, “I will put on screen an image of the fire peaches.”
The screen on the wall goes from a dark rectangle to a glowing panel, and on it are dim, blurry shapes of orange circles and ovals, each with a smudged set of lines across it, some going one way, some going another, forming a grid. Even without the blindfold-bandage, it can hardly see the set-on-fire peaches.
“I will also send a short video to your tablet, which you can watch at your leisure.”
It does not know what leisure is. But the voice without a mouth thinks that it has some of that. But it also does not have the tablet with it, so it cannot watch now. Maybe leisure means later on, when it does have the tablet with it.
“Thank you, JARVIS,” Caroline says. “That’s very kind of you.”
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
It makes the thank you sign as well. It is polite to do that. It asked the voice without a mouth to do something for it, and the voice without a mouth did what it asked. There should be a thank you.
“Those look really delicious,” Caroline says. “You know, I’ve never eaten a grilled peach. But you’ve described them so well, Jigsaw. I could picture them even before JARVIS shared a photograph.”
The feeder has not eaten everything that is out there to be eaten? It does not have time to wonder about that, though, because she is asking another question.
“Did you feel connected to the team a bit more during the team meal?”
It does not know. But as it thinks about the question, it realizes that it does know. It felt safer than usual around a large group of operatives. It learned a lot about the mission that it had not known because of the conversation the team had around it. It was sharing food with the team like it was supposed to be doing so, like it was normal and not a special occasion.
Like it belonged there, as an equal.
It nods. Yes, it felt connected to the team that is not a cell.
“Wonderful,” Caroline says. “You’ve made so much progress, Jigsaw. I’m really happy. I’m smiling so big.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says, “even if your eyesight is still not healing as fast as you would like it to.”
It nods. The eyes are getting better, it thinks, but not fast enough. Yasmin understands the frustration.
“I thought today we would work on a craft,” she says, “something that will give you an opportunity to work with your hands a bit and not worry so much about what you can see and how clearly you can see it.”
It wonders what the craft will be.
They have made treasure boxes before, but that had needed to be seen so that it could tell where to put the decorations on the boxes to make them actual treasure boxes. They have made scrap book pages and collages, but those require it to see even more clearly than the treasure boxes. It does not want to have to guess where to cut something and risk ruining a picture if it makes a wrong cut because it can’t see without the hazy pale curtain in front of everything.
It has seen the clown man working with colorful things and just with charcoals, but the clown man needs to see to know what is happening on the canvas. How much more would it need to be able to see if it worked with colorful things and just with charcoals, when it does not know what it is doing?
It does not want to ruin anything. It has no fear that Yasmin will punish it for ruining something while they work together, or even afterward when the ruined thing is turned in as homework. But it does not want to take something that could be beautiful and make it less beautiful because of a failure on its part. It wants to enhance the beauty around it, not destroy that beauty.
“I’m sensing hesitation on your part, Jigsaw. Is everything alright? Let’s check in with each other.”
It makes the signs for “beauty” and “destruction” and points to the eyes. If it cannot see the beauty properly, how can it preserve the beauty and avoid accidentally destroying it?
“Are you worried about breaking things because you can’t see them clearly?” she asks. “Maybe you’re worried that you’ll cut part of a picture off that you want to keep?”
It nods. She really does understand it so well. Just like she wanted to do at the beginning. And she is helping it understand as well.
“We’ll be working with clay today, Jigsaw, so there’s no way you could possibly destroy anything. Clay is not something that has to be preserved in a static form. It’s malleable, and you can form and reform it however many times you want until you are satisfied with the result.”
Clay?
Clay is a kind of dirt. They are going to be gardening? It could hurt a little plant if it doesn’t treat the roots very gently. It would hate to hurt a little plant. Not just a picture that is beautiful, but a living thing!
“Will you trust me that you cannot hurt the clay, and give it a try?”
It nods. Of course it trusts Yasmin. She must see its uncertainty, and must be thinking that its uncertainty is directed at her. That is not what it intended.
There’s a rustle as she reaches into her bag and produces a lump of something pale brown in a crinkly plastic covering. The clay, it must be. And covered with plastic so that none of the dirt gets on the insides of the bag itself.
“Clay can be really messy to work with,” she says as she sets the lump to one side and reaches back into the bag to pull out a cloth that she spreads over the coffee table. “I don’t mind a mess—life is messy, after all—but this will make cleaning up afterward easier.”
That is right. If all of the mess goes onto the cloth and not onto the table, then she can pick up the cloth afterward and put it in the clothes washer with special soap for clothes. They use newspapers instead of cloths when they are gardening, the ballerina woman and this asset. That way they can fold up the special plant dirt in the newspaper and dump it back into the bags it came from so that nothing is wasted.
Waste not, want not.
And so that the tables stay clean in the gardening room. That is less important than saving the special plant dirt, though. The tables are never entirely clean in the gardening room because gardening is not clean work. It is messy work, with special dirt that gets everywhere.
Clay is another kind of special dirt, it thinks, and it will get everywhere. Now it will only get on the cloth.
“Jigsaw, I know you felt upset and scared when Bruce wore gloves to treat your wounds.” Yasmin pauses and it wonders what she could be planning to say next. How does the researcher with the curly hair have anything to do with the special dirt?
“Would you be upset to wear a glove yourself while working with the clay?” she asks. “I’m worried that you might have a hard time getting the clay out of the grooves of your prosthesis, otherwise, but it’s up to you whether to wear a glove.”
It has gotten dirt into the grooves of the metal hand and arm. And all the way up under the skin, as well, and deep inside of the metal arm. It has gotten sand inside, which is like getting shards of glass trapped under the fingernails of the flesh hand so that the tender flesh where nail meets finger is torn up in the process of cleaning out the glass.
And it has gotten blood inside the metal hand and arm, of course. And more than blood. All kinds of things that are in targets’ bodies, and also chemicals and other things that are not in targets’ bodies.
It just opens up the plates and lets the water wash away anything that gets inside. And now that it does not have to worry about keeping a blindfold-bandage in place and dry, it can go into the bathroom that is for this asset and stand under the water for however long it takes for everything to wash away. It can open up all of the plates it needs to. It cleaned out the metal arm after the mission where it found the little cat, washed out all of the mud and the blood and gunpowder.
It can wash out clay.
It holds up the left arm and demonstrates how the plates can work, does an entire calibration loop, up from the fingertips and down from the shoulder cap, and then locks everything back in place.
“So a glove isn’t necessary, then,” Yasmin says. “You can clean out your prosthesis without an issue?”
Exactly.
Yasmin puts a pair of plastic gloves back inside of her bag and sets the bag itself on the floor, where it flops emptily on its side. Then she unwraps the clay blob and tears off a small piece for herself before handing it the rest of the clay.
“What I like about working with clay is that there is freedom to do whatever you want with it. If you want to make a bowl, you can make a bowl.”
Yasmin rolls her piece of clay between her palms and then flattens it by pushing her thumb into the center of it to make a little bowl.
“If you want to make a log, you can make a log.” She rolls the bowl back and forth under her palm until it is a rough cylinder.
It holds the bigger clay lump in the hand gingerly, slowly closing the fingers around it but not applying any pressure. It does not want to deform the clay from the current shape until it knows what it is going to do with the clay. There should be a plan in place, it feels.
“If you want to make a sculpture of a person, you can,” she says. “And if you want to just squish it as hard as you can between your fingers, you can do that, too.” Yasmin squeezes the clay until it squishes out between her fisted fingers.
“There are no wrong answers, no mistakes that you can’t recover from, no bad ideas. There’s just you and the clay, and whatever it is you want to do with the clay. Clay is eternally forgiving.”
Yasmin makes another cylinder with the clay, a longer and narrower one, like a worm or a snake, and then coils it up into a disc.
“You can be as creative as you feel like being. You can be as destructive as you feel like being. You can do one and then the other. Or both at once, destroying one shape in the process of creating another.”
It licks the bottom lip and gives the clay a gentle squeeze. The clay is harder than it looks, more solid, not giving under the pressure as easily as it seems to be doing under Yasmin’s fingers. But it does squish, and the feeling is… it’s different from flesh deforming under the power of the metal fingers, but not unlike some of the foam pellets that the ballerina woman has on her coffee table sometimes.
And if there is truly no wrong answer to be corrected, no mistake to be unmade, no way to ruin the clay or damage it with a careless squish… It tears off a small piece of the clay, something the size of an appendix, and copies what it has seen Yasmin doing with the clay. A sphere rolled between the palms, a bowl with a pushed thumb indentation, a thick worm, a full-force squish between the fingers.
The smaller piece of clay works more smoothly than the larger piece had, warms up in the hands more quickly, is more fluid between the fingers, like a thing that is alive and wants to be prodded into shapes and then returned to a lump that is not so much shapeless as it is all shapes at once, the shape of raw potential.
Yasmin murmurs encouragement to it as it forms flattened circles, plump spheres, bowls thick and thin, donuts with holes in their middles, cubes that are fully solid. It makes a star by pushing and pulling the clay from a circle, rolls the star into a snake, into a fat worm, into— No, back into a sphere.
A sphere is safe, is easily formed into an egg, or a teardrop, or an even oval with neither side any bigger or pointier than the other.
There is something relaxing about gently coaxing the clay into the shape it wants, and the clay does not seem to mind that it changes that desired shape every time, not letting it settle into any one shape for more than a few breaths. It is as though the clay wants to pulled apart and smushed back together.
The clay wants to be rolled up into many tiny spheres and formed into two pointed leaves, and to be combined into a snap pea, so long and plump.
The clay wants to be bent in two and turned into a ball again. It wants a cleft like a peach, and a little leaf coming from the top. It wants a point at the bottom, like a peach, just like a peach, only tiny and light brown and made of clay. A clay peach.
The clay wants to become a baby corn next, but that is too many little kernel balls to keep track of, and too small, and it… It… It gives up making the baby corn. It changes the mind and smushes it again into the shape of potential.
And the clay does not mind the change of plans, the loss of the baby corn shape, the loss of that option for what it could become. Instead, the clay is merely waiting for the next idea to cross the mind, for the opportunity to become something else instead.
“Jigsaw,” Yasmin says as it feels the smooth slide of the clay between the fingers, “what are you feeling at the moment?”
It sighs, lets the air out in a long, silent breath. It is feeling calm, like everything is going according to plan because there is no plan to follow and therefore there can be no deviation from the plan. It is feeling like the clay, is feeling like the clay and this asset have so much in common. Like there is a oneness to the two of them.
It thought that this would be a session where they talked about the things that were so upsetting to it—the other assets in the wolf pen, dead, executed, dead, dead. Or the things it still cannot remember from the mission, but has to trust the other asset about, and the others on the team that is not a cell. Or the nightmares that it has, the terrible sleeping images that sometimes interrupt the much nicer sleeping images of the other asset and kissing and kissing, so many kisses.
It thought that this would be a session where they discussed the way it has been so difficult to be properly sad about the others who could have been friends, could have been fellow assets, could have joined it and the other asset in the hive building, but whose potential was executed and turned into so many skeletons in paper skin and cryo suits.
Or how it sometimes feels the ghost of fingers grasping at the belt when there is no one there at all, feels the phantom pull of rough hands yanking at the belt, hears the faint click sounds of a belt fastener coming undone, and smells B-RUM and burning—not B-RUM burning, but it burning, this asset burning—hair and skin and eyes and flesh and ozone and B-RUM. Smells the bitter bleachy stink of things it cannot think about, tastes the salty slick alongside the acrid bile. Smells the cologne and cigarettes, tastes the sweat and the—
The dog is licking the side of the skin face, and it has crushed the little clay bowl it was making from a coiled up snake. That is alright, though. The clay does not mind. The clay will become a snake again, so long and sinuous, and will curl up on itself again, a spring with a spiral base, like a little cup, almost.
It is feeling calm again.
“Jigsaw?”
It looks up at Yasmin and signs that it is feeling calm. That is not a lie. It is feeling calm right now. It would not lie to Yasmin.
Yasmin nods at it, but they do not go back to silently forming and re-forming the clay they each have in their hands. Instead, Yasmin talks.
“I noticed that you were not always calm between my first asking the question and my asking it again,” Yasmin says. “I’m proud of you that you could channel that less-than-calm feeling into the clay instead of allowing yourself to be overly agitated.”
She is proud of it? For just squishing and smushing clay? That does not seem to warrant pride. But it is Yasmin’s decision what to be proud of, and if she wants to be proud of this asset, then it supposes it should try to accept her pride in it.
“Can you put some of what you were feeling into the clay for me? Some of whatever it is you were thinking about?”
It is not sure how to do that. It does have the rest of the lump of clay to work with, though. It could make shapes out of the clay, little shapes with more pieces of the main clay block, and maybe those shapes would help her know what was going on in the mind, would help her understand what it was thinking.
It makes five more little blobs of clay, pulling just a little of the clay into each blob. These it makes into figures, five figures, just heads with a tube for a body, but figures all the same. They are the assets from the wolf pen, dead and gone. It had been thinking of them, had been thinking of how hard it is think of them when there’s so much loss involved. All of its hopes for a team full of assets like this asset and the other asset, gone.
It crushes the five figures into one bigger blob of clay, makes it shaped like a skull, pokes the fingertips in to make eye holes, uses the fingernails on the right hand to make all the teeth. Dead. A skull. Just like the five skulls wrapped in paper skin and scraps of dried out hair. Dead just like all of the hopes that they could have been friends again. That they would have liked the other asset.
“You’re still feeling sorrowful that the other Winter Soldiers were dead when you arrived?” Yasmin asks.
But she asks in a way that says that she knows the answer is “yes” and that she agrees that the answer is a good one, that it is okay for it to be feeling sadness about them.
“That makes a lot of sense,” she says. “You were looking forward to seeing them, and you wanted them to be your friends. It can be really hard to work through disappointment like that, where you hope for something so positive and it doesn’t come true.”
Yes. It had hoped. It had hoped so hard.
“Is that what you were thinking when you squished your clay so hard between your fingers?”
It wants to nod, wants to make that be the end of the question, wants for that to be the answer to the question. Then it can go back to making shapes at random and simply sitting with the clay working between the fingers. But it knows that it was thinking about something very different when the dog licked the skin face.
It shakes the head and signs that it was thinking about HYDRA. Adds a B to the sign. That is the closest it can bring itself to B-RUM. It does not want to write B-RUM on the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages. Does not want to make snakes of the clay and form them into the letters of B-RUM’s name. Does not know how to put the fingers into all of the letters of B-RUM in order without the hand freezing solid partway through.
“Were you thinking about the man who hurt you?”
Yasmin never says B-RUM’s name. It has written out the B-RUM before, but even then, she did not say his name. Only called him its abuser, its tormentor, the man who hurt it so much. Even when they talked about the chandelier of asset, the meat hooks, the way B-RUM was one of the few strong enough to hoist it up with only a little help.
It nods.
Yasmin reaches up to touch her temple and then her eyebrow. “And the halo, perhaps? The one that burned you and hurt your eyes during your mission.”
It shakes the head. There were burning thoughts, yes, and it is afraid of the halos that fit on operatives’ belts. Afraid that it could be taken back without having the opportunity to fight and struggle while being dragged back to a chair with white electric fire. Afraid that someone could take it all the way back without even needing to fully subdue it first.
But it was not thinking only about that. It was… It was thinking… Was remembering… Was it remembering? B-RUM has to have caught it in order to put the halo on the skin face over the eyes. But it does not remember that. Remembers running and running, stumbling, remembers terror.
It makes the skull of clay into a figure again. Just the one figure this time, despite there being enough of the clay in the lump for all five small figures. This time, there is only one figure.
It uses the fingernails to put a halo on the figure’s eyes. Just the band of it. It does not know what the halo looked like, but it knows the shape of the burns around the front of the head, from the one temple across the eyes to the other temple.
It puts a belt of clay around the middle of the log of clay that forms the figure’s body. It points to the star on the left arm and then to the side of the clay figure.
“That represents you, with the halo on,” Yasmin murmurs, a question that is not a question in her voice. “During your mission in Siberia.”
She is asking for confirmation, then. It nods.
The figure is… the figure is it . Is this asset. The figure is this asset. This asset is the figure. They are one and the same. It is the clay. The clay is it. They are one.
With the halo on it that is not supposed to be there, not ever again. Never going back. Never. Will retire itself first, except that it was not able to do that in the Siberia base after all, and might not be able to do that elsewhere, either. Might have to go back if it is taken, if it cannot manage to retire itself.
And with the belt that is supposed to be there, always, because it is on a mission, it is fully engaged, it has a job to do, targets to dispatch, is not a plaything to be pushed into or subjected to fun for the boys. No dicks out. No zippers unzipping. No hands disappearing inside of tac pants. No leering jeering cheering. No agents shoving other agents, no I’m next, no wait your turn, newb.
But it makes the HYDRA sign.
It adds the letter B.
HYDRA and B.
B-RUM.
B-RUM is dead. The other asset’s voice in the mind. I killed him for you. Shot him twice and slit his throat. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
The figure has the halo on the face. The figure has the belt on the waist. The figure is it. It is the figure. It has the halo on the face. It has the belt on the waist.
But HYDRA. B. B-RUM.
It makes the HYDRA sign. It adds the B. It looks at Yasmin to make sure that she is paying attention.
She is.
It takes. It takes the belt. Off.
It takes the belt off of the figure.
Does it remember? Does it remember this? Does it remember B-RUM taking off the belt and everything that follows? Or is it just afraid? Is it afraid that B-RUM can somehow push into it even when B-RUM is dead? Is it just afraid that B-RUM can reach it beyond the grave?
Does it remember or is it afraid?
It casts the figure onto the coffee table, throws the figure down, wants the figure out of the hands.
It signs “remember” and “remember” and “remember” and “why” and “why” and “why” and “fear” and “fear” and “fear.”
Does it remember or is it afraid?
Yasmin is quiet, but she is looking at it. And not at the figure on the table. The figure whose head has fallen off. The figure that is this asset, headless. Mindless. Stupid. Remembering or making up things to be afraid of?
It does not know. It does not know.
How can it not know?
“Did your abuser take your belt off in Siberia, Jigsaw?” Yasmin asks. “Are you remembering this?”
It does not know. It signs that, signs that the mind cannot remember, but that it is afraid.
Yasmin nods at it but does not speak for a moment.
“It can be difficult to tell what exactly we remember from stressful situations,” Yasmin finally says, “as opposed to what our brains supply as possibilities for what might have happened in those situations.”
There is a silence as it looks at her, looks at the dark smudges that are her eyes, the smudge that is her mouth. It thinks that her smudges should be blurring together now, that the eyes should be filling up with tears—tears of anger, tears of fear, tears of frustration—but the eyes sting and burn, and no tears come.
The eyes are so dry. It… needs the drops.
“I don’t know what happened, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says softly. “I was not there. But someone was there who would want to answer all of your questions. Someone who would not want for you to be distressed by intrusive memories, but who would also never lie to you about what happened to you in Siberia.”
The other asset. The other asset would know. The other asset was there. Shot… Shot B-RUM twice. Slit B-RUM’s throat.
Would know if the belt… Would know about the belt. Would know if B-RUM had…
“Can you ask Clint to tell you more about what happened?” Yasmin asks, and her voice does not say that it has to ask the other asset, does not say that it is homework. Her voice just asks if it feels up to doing it.
It nods.
“Would you like to take the clay with you?”
It nods. It wants to squish the clay so softly, wants to help the clay reach all of its potential again, and not a skull or a headless stupid asset figure that cannot tell whether it is remembering or making up fear thoughts.
Yasmin reaches for the clay on the coffee table, the head and headless figure, the discarded belt, the lump of as-yet unshaped clay, and her own piece of it. She smushes it all together so that none of the clay stands out as being part of the figure or not part of it. She makes it a brick, and she wraps it in the crinkly plastic.
“Here you go, Jigsaw. Keep it wrapped up when you aren’t using it so that it doesn’t dry out.”
It nods and holds out the hand to receive the clay. It is not the clay’s fault that it formed the clay into the things it formed the clay into. It does not want the clay to dry out.
The clay should not be stuck in a shape like that. Should always be free to change.
Notes:
Content Warning: Heavy therapy time again, folks. Some flashback-style recollections of HYDRA trash party events, some existential horror about memories vs. fears, etc.
Chapter 106: Super Soldiers | Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me here now
Notes:
Chapter title from “Thick and Thin” by Faouzia.
I’ll link the title when I have access to my laptop. Currently with my dad in his RV, it’s just the phone. Sorry for the huge spacing. I’ll fix that later, too. (fixed!)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 2:30 p.m.—
The succulent on his windowsill catches his eye every time he looks out the window in his drawing room to get a sense of passing time based on how the light is hitting the building. It’s not something new, taking care of a plant.
He and Bucky had tried and failed to grow apple seeds, orange seeds, and even some chrysanthemum seeds that had spilled from a package in the garden center Bucky had been hauling soil for. It was part wishful thinking for an abundance of fruit and flowers, and part just a curiosity for them. It hadn’t gone well, in any case. The seeds had rotted away along with their dreams of fruit trees and attractive window boxes in their rundown tenement apartment.
They’d had better luck with the ivy that grew with nothing but a glass of water on the windowsill and a few sunny days. Much better luck. That thing had grown all over their apartment, until they had to cut it up and make more little ivy plants and start giving them away to neighbors.
But a succulent is new to him. And it’s the opposite of an ivy in a glass of water. According to Jigsaw’s shakily handwritten instructions, it doesn’t get watered all that often, and the soil should get dry between waterings. But the plant is a pretty one, with fleshy light green leaves that look more like thick flaps than the thin leaves he’s familiar with. Each one is edged with a thin border of red.
Steve just hopes he can keep it alive and healthy. As far as peace offerings go, a living thing is a dangerous one in some ways, with all sorts of potential ramifications if it ceases to thrive in Steve’s care. Maybe this thing is like a friendship barometer for Jigsaw, a representation of the health of their friendship.
Starting out fresh, growing from a little pup cut from the original plant, alike in looks but a different, new plant. He likens it, in some ways, to the way Jigsaw comes from Bucky, looking so similar but a different, new person, nevertheless.
Steve taps his charcoal pencil against his lower lip a few times, and then decides to give in to his wandering attention. He turns to a fresh page and begins blocking out the rough shape of the little jade plant on the windowsill. Maybe he’ll use his oil pastels for this, get some of the colors represented, from the pale green and bright red leaves to the even glossier cobalt blue pot and saucer.
His fingers are thoroughly covered in pastel oils when JARVIS informs him that Sam’s at the door.
“Let him in, please, JARVIS.” Steve wipes the worst of the oils off his fingers to make sure he won’t stain anything of Sam’s, and calls out that he’s at the drafting table when he hears the door close behind Sam.
“Hey there,” Sam says as he enters the drawing room. He puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders and plants a kiss on his cheek. “Did Natasha lend you a plant to draw?”
Steve smiles. “Jigsaw, actually, and it’s not a loan. It’s a thank-you gift. For the shopping trip and all the peaches.”
Sam makes an impressed sound in his throat. “I wouldn’t have thought he had the concept of a thank-you gift down yet. Usually he thanks people in the moment and then moves on. This would have taken some planning.”
“We’re going to be friends,” Steve says. He tips his head back to look up at Sam. “Actual friends.”
“I know. You’re going to get through to him eventually.” Sam smirks playfully. “You’re stubborn like that.”
Steve shakes his head and swivels in the chair to face Sam. “No, I mean, he had a breakthrough. He says he went through the facts again and he used to be Bucky.”
“Wow.” Sam grins. “That’s big.That’s gotta feel great.”
“It does,” Steve agrees. “He’s not Bucky now, he’s Jigsaw. But he knows that HYDRA stole Bucky from everyone, including from Bucky himself. And he asked if we could be friends again the way Bucky was my friend earlier.”
“And then he gave you a plant to take care of?”
Steve laughs. “More or less. And we ate some kiwis before he had to go see Caroline.”
“Hope you didn’t ruin his appetite.”
“Is that possible?” Steve asks with a smile.
“Probably not.”
Steve holds his oil-stained hands out in front of him, palms up. “I want to hug you, but I need to wash this off. I don’t want to get any on you.”
Sam takes his hands and holds them in his own. “I don’t care, hon. They’re just clothes.”
“Still,” Steve says, standing. “Might as well keep the laundry to a minimum.”
Sam follows him to the bathroom, and leans against the doorframe while Steve washes his hands with the blessedly fragrance-free soap JARVIS keeps him supplied with.
“Did you have a good time with your friends?” Steve asks while cleaning beneath his fingernails.
“I did, yeah. We jogged some, played some basketball. Talked a bit about suddenly being famous and not getting a big head.” Sam shrugs. “It was good. I needed to catch up with them. You know, I basically disappeared when you recruited me.”
Steve reaches for the hand towel and pats his hands dry. “Didn’t mean to steal you away.”
“No, no. Things were busy from day one. And there really hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to sneak past the press and go see everyone.” Sam takes the towel from him and pulls him into a hug. “How about you. Have a good day?”
“Mm,” Steve murmurs, relishing the closeness. “Therapy was good. And then Jigsaw came with his news and his plant. And I thought some things through.”
Sam draws him back out of the bathroom and toward the sofa. “Tell me about it?”
Steve sits on the sofa, turning to face Sam with one leg pulled up underneath him. He waits for Sam to get settled.
“We talked about the killing,” he says. “Siberia. All of Rumlow’s shit-talking and how angry it made me. And I do agree, Sam. Killing is bad on principle and we went overboard in Siberia.”
“Way overboard, yeah,” Sam says with a frown before waiting for him to continue, seeming to realize that there’s more coming that he might not enjoy so much.
“I need to work on controlling my strength better,” Steve says. “I’ve let it get out of hand a bit—sparring with the bots and beating on the heavy bags, getting used to just going all out in a rage-fueled flurry of fists and shield. I need to spar with people more. Reteach myself to hold something back.”
Sam nods. “Happy to help. And I’m sure the others would be, too.” He pauses. “Maybe not Jigsaw. I don’t think he really understands sparring.”
Steve is about to insist that Jigsaw can learn to pull punches, but he can tell that will lead to a different conversation than the one he needs to have. It’s not about Jigsaw, after all. It’s about himself and Sam. It’s about what happened in Siberia and how Sam feels about that and about him.
“The thing is,” he says instead, “I can’t bring myself to regret what happened to those HYDRA operatives in Siberia, Sam.” He shakes his head. “Not when I knew what they were all planning to do once they overpowered the team.”
Sam reaches for his hands and holds them in his own. “It was horrible,” he agrees. “What they were going to do.”
“I guess,” Steve says, “that it comes down to… Can you accept that there’s a part of me that relished killing those men? That felt joy at being able to literally cut down the number of active HYDRA agents?”
Sam opens his mouth, but Steve isn’t done yet, and he keeps talking.
“I swore during the War, after I lost Bucky, that I wouldn’t rest until every last member of HYDRA was captured or killed, and I meant it.” Steve pulls one of his hands free from Sam’s. “And they’re out there,” he says with a gesture toward the City outside.
“They’re out there, and I’ll keep working on capture. I’ll try to set a good example. But sometimes I’m going to mess up,” Steve says. “Sometimes I can’t live up to the ideals Captain America stands for, can’t behave like Captain America should. And… Is that okay with you?”
Sam gives him a few beats to continue, and when he doesn’t, Sam puts a hand on his cheek. And Sam’s eyes are such a warm brown that Steve feels like he’s going to fall into them and drown.
“I’m not in love with Captain America,” Sam says softly. “I’m in love with Steve Rogers. And I know that Steve Rogers, however enhanced he may be, is still a man.”
Steve feels something loosen deep inside of himself. The relief curls gently in his stomach and warms him up like a purring cat.
“A man who can make mistakes,” Sam continues. “A man who sometimes doesn’t do the right thing. Or who struggles to find the right thing. We’re all human. Even you, Steve.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Steve says. “I should have known you didn’t see me as just a figurehead.”
“You’re no idiot.” Sam pulls him in for a kiss and then leans back again. “But yeah, you should have known. What got you thinking otherwise?”
Steve shakes his head. “I guess, just… I got in my head a little too deep. I was thinking about how we need to keep our relationship to ourselves, for appearances. And how we have to watch ourselves in the field, for appearances.”
“And because it’s just better not to kill people,” Sam adds.
Steve nods. “Sure. And you were upset by the killing, and I thought maybe I’d let you down, failed to be everything you thought I was. And I know the world only sees Captain America when it looks at me.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t fair to lump you in with them.”
Sam leans forward for another kiss and runs a hand through Steve’s hair until his hand comes to rest at the base of his skull. “The world is missing out on Steve Rogers,” he says. “Doesn’t know what it’s missing, either.”
Steve smiles against Sam’s lips before kissing him again. “What would you think about filling them in?”
Sam pulls back, his hand dropping to Steve’s shoulder, and he looks into Steve’s eyes for a long moment, searching. Then: “You’d have to be really sure. That’s not something you can put back in the bag later. Once your private life is out there, it’s out there.”
“Who says I’d want to put it back?” Steve asks.
“So you’re thinking, what, an announcement? Something official? A tweet from the Avengers Twitter account?”
Steve blinks. “What’s a Twitter?”
“An online platform where people can share short messages and statements with whoever is following them.” Sam waves the idea away. “I’m not even sure the Avengers team has a Twitter account. It was just an example.”
Steve doesn’t know why Sam is being dismissive of that. It sounds like putting an announcement in the paper, only online. Not a full article with all the quotes and explanations, just a quick blurb, an idea, and let people think what they will.
Convenient. Simple. That’s what it sounds like. Not needing all the rigamarole that went into the press release for Jigsaw, which saw so much media attention. No planning sessions, no public relations oversight, no S.H.I.E.L.D. getting in the way. Just whatever’s on his mind, shared with whoever cares enough to listen.
“Maybe we should have a Twitter account,” Steve says. “Or maybe I should get one. That way it’s not the whole team speaking, but just me.”
Sam groans. “I can see it now,” he says. “Captain America tweeting social justice messages that rile up the nation.”
“No, no, it wouldn’t be a Captain America account. It would be my account, Steve Rogers. And I can ‘tweet’ all kinds of things. But also, yes, social justice things. Because a lot of these things have to be said and I might as well say them.”
“I can help you get set up,” Sam says. “Just try to keep the inflammatory statements to a minimum to start. Start off with how bananas taste wrong, that kind of thing. Ease into it. That way you won’t be causing a stir and then vanishing if you decide it’s not for you, after all.”
“Let’s see,” Steve says with a laugh. “‘Back in my day, you’d be jailed for homosexuality, but today we can marry whoever we want. The future is great!’ Something like that?”
Sam looks at him like he’s just now realizing it was a terrible idea to even mention this Twitter thing. “Well, it’s short enough, probably.”
“There’s a word count?”
“Character limit. One hundred forty.”
That is short, yes. He’d have to be very pithy to get his messages across.
“Please don’t come out of the closet on Twitter, Steve.” Sam shakes his head. “There are classier ways to do that.”
Steve laughs. “I’m not even sure yet how I identify,” he says. “Need to nail that down before I do anything as formal as that.”
“That’s fair,” Sam says. “Responsible. Take all the time you need, but know that these things can shift over time. You don’t need a perfect label. You just need to be authentically you.”
“The authentic me wants to hold hands while we walk Lucky instead of keeping our hands to ourselves the moment we get off the elevator.”
Sam nods. “We can do that. I’d like that. We could take him to the dog park and sit on the bench together while he runs around.”
Steve imagines it. They’ve done essentially that many times before, but always leaving a distance between them. But this time, maybe tomorrow morning, he can put an arm around Sam’s shoulders and pull him close. It would be a Saturday morning. Maybe there will be a lot of people at the dog park. Maybe some of them would recognize them.
“It’s a date,” Steve says.
Sam laughs. “If you want to make it that formal, sure. Just— Just be sure you really are ready for the backlash. Because there’ll be one as soon as the wrong person notices.”
“I just don’t want to hide anymore,” Steve says. “That dinner with Tony and Pepper got me thinking about how nice it would be to finally just be a couple without needing to hide anything. To reach out and touch the back of your hand without thinking about the consequences of someone getting the right idea.”
“Alright. If you’re sure, then we’ll do it.” Sam hesitates for a moment. “Maybe give me time to tell my family first? Just so they don’t learn about us in a gossip rag.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“I have a new game for you tonight, Jigsaw,” Zoe says in greeting. “Are you interested, or would you rather work on another crossword puzzle?”
It holds up one finger as it settles into its spot on the sofa with the dog. It would happily work on the crossword puzzle—the one it is partway through is all about animals and has pictures for clues so that it needs to find the animal word and then also the letters for making that word—but a new game… that is tempting. And it is being offered, so it will take her up on the offer.
“Alright,” she says. “I’m glad to hear it. This is a guessing game and a spelling game. It’s similar to a crossword puzzle in that you’ll be filling in letters, but there’s only one word or phrase to fill in, and only one clue.”
It nods. This sounds simpler than the crossword puzzles, but it must be more complicated somehow. All of the games are increasingly complicated.
“I’ve had Tony load the game onto your tablet, since you’re having a hard time seeing things clearly right now.” Zoe picks up her own tablet. “If you’ll go to your homepage and click on the picture of a snowman, we’ll start.”
It does not know what a snow man is, but there is a new icon on the home screen. It is three white balls stacked on top of each other, and a weird hat on top of them. And an orange triangle sticking out of the top ball. And little black spots. A face! There is a face on the top ball, and a line of black spots going down the center of the three white balls.
This must be a snow man. Maybe they are meant to be balls of snow. And if there is a face, maybe it is meant to be a man. A man made of snow. It has never heard of such a thing. Men made out of snow. What will there be next?
It taps a finger on the icon and a new app opens.
It follows Zoe’s instructions, tapping the “Project” button to send its tablet onto the wall, and then the “New Game” button. Zoe has it choose the option with a hand on it, and then the game starts.
There are five empty boxes in a row at the top of the screen, and across the bottom is the word “Fruit.” In the middle is a big empty space.
“Alright,” Zoe says. “You’re looking for a type of fruit that has five letters in its name. You’ll finger sign a letter of the alphabet. And if that letter appears in the word, it will appear in the correct box at the top of the screen. If that letter isn’t in the word, then part of the snowman will be drawn.”
It nods. Like the crossword puzzles, only it will know if the letter it guesses is the right one right away, instead of having to wait until things don’t line up later. But it will have to sign the right letter, not draw it in the boxes. That is the complication, it thinks. Connecting the signed letters to the ones that go into the boxes.
“It’s possible to lose this game, Jigsaw,” Zoe cautions. “If you fill in all the right letters before the snowman is complete, you win. But if you guess wrong too many times, the snowman will be complete before the word is, and you’ll lose the game.”
She waits for a moment, and then asks if it has any questions before they start.
It signs “punishment” and its question sign. That is the most important thing to know. Is there a punishment for losing? A bad reward?
It thinks she smiles, but it cannot be sure until she speaks.
“There isn’t any punishment, Jigsaw,” Zoe says with a smile in her voice but also sadness. “I will never punish you. None of us will ever punish you.”
So it is like the fish game the other asset plays, perhaps. When the game is lost, there is no consequence other than the fish laughing, bloop-bloop, and needing to start over from the beginning. The other asset does not get punished. This asset will not be punished for losing the snow man game.
“Do you understand that?” Zoe asks. “I don’t want to start the game until I know that you understand how safe you are.”
It nods. It is ready. No one will punish it, even if it guesses so many wrong letters.
“Okay. So to reiterate, you’re looking for fruit names that have five letters and only five letters. What is your first guess for a letter that goes in the name?”
It thinks. It likes the letter H that goes into the other asset’s name sign. It is a good letter. It signs an H, and a white circle appears on the screen.
“That was a good guess, but not right. Try again.”
It guesses C and F and S and J—all three circles, and then the top two filled in white—and then it stops guessing to spend some time thinking instead. Guessing letters at random or because it likes them is not working. There must be a strategy it is not seeing.
Maybe it should start with different letters, or work its way through all of the letters from start to finish. But how will it know what the order of the letters should be without the letters written out for it to see? It does not remember which letters come first or second, or even last.
Maybe it should start with a word and then guess letters that appear in that word, like in the crossword puzzles. Five letters. That is a short fruit name, not like “watermelon” or “honeydew” or “strawberry.” What are some short fruit names? It thinks about the furry potato. The clown man—everyone but it, actually—calls it something else. Something short.
Kiwi.
It wonders how that is spelled. Q, maybe? It already guessed C and there was no C. Maybe K.
It has a K in it, it decides, and guesses K.
The third white circle is filled in and it frowns. Not a single right letter yet. The snow man needs a hat and a face, and that is only two more letters! Maybe a third letter to make the dots down the center of the white balls.
“Why don’t you try a vowel?” Zoe asks. “There are only a few vowels, but almost every word has vowels in it. Do you remember which ones are the vowels?”
It shakes the head. There are vowels and constants, it thinks. No, not constants. Con… con… consonants. Yes. Vowels and consonants. Only a few vowels, but lots and lots of the other letters. It does not understand why all of the letters have to be split up like that into two different groups, or why the one letter that fits in both groups has to keep going back and forth.
Zoe slowly and clearly signs A, E, I, O, U, and Y, and then says the letters as well. “Those are the vowels. It can help to start with them when playing this kind of game.”
It signs O and waits for the hat to appear on the snow man, but instead, the last box at the top of the screen gets an O in it. It won a letter!
It looks up at Zoe with a grin. It won a letter.
“That’s great, Jigsaw. Why don’t you try another vowel?”
It tries an A and the second box gets an A inside it. Another letter won! There are three more letters in the fruit word, and only three more guesses. And so many other letters to guess.
It needs to be really careful with the letters it chooses if it wants to win the game.
It tries an N and is surprised when the letter N goes in the middle box, between A and the O in their boxes.
What fruit ends with an O? It frowns down at the tablet. If this were a crossword, there might be a clue to something else that intersected this word, and then it would be able to find the answer. It is better at finding out how words start than how they end.
It signs a T and the hat appears on the snow man. A B causes the orange triangle to appear in the middle of the top circle. Oh, and it looks like a carrot, almost. R gets the eyes added to the face.
But G goes into the box right before O! It knows what the word must be. It must be “mango.” Mangoes are a fruit, and one of them is just a mango. It needs an M.
When it signs the M, the screen of the tablet starts shooting fireworks from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, at angles.
“Congratulations, Jigsaw!” Zoe says. “Did you enjoy playing that game?”
It nods. After it started to win, it liked the game. When it was losing so badly, it was getting frustrated. It needs to start with the vowels, though, and then the rest will come.
“I’d like for you to play this game a few times between now and our next session. The words will get longer, and the categories will shift around.”
Zoe directs it to go back to the “New Game” screen and to choose the ABC option. This time there are letters—all of them, it thinks—across the bottom of the screen.
“With this version, you can play by tapping the letters to guess them. You can play either way, but I think you’ll get more out of it if you play with the sign language option. We haven’t worked on your fingerspelling for a while now. I’d like to see how that’s going and reinforce your learning.”
It nods. The current game says “Friend” for the clue and has two different rows of boxes, the top one four boxes and the next one five. So many letters to guess.
It starts with an A and gets the middle letter in the bottom word, and then an O and gets the second letter of the first word. So many successful guesses, right away.
It is going to win this game!
Chapter 107: Therapists | I’ll be fucked up if you can’t be right here
Notes:
Chapter title from “Stay” by Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI.
Thank you all for your comments (and for your patience in my getting replies out) while I’ve been helping my dad with his chemo. It’s really appreciated. ^_^
Chapter Text
Zoe
—New York City | Friday 12 October 2012 | 10:15 p.m.—
Yasmin had messaged their group chat that Jigsaw’s injuries were more extensive than she had realized when the bandage was still hiding the worst of it, but Zoe had not realized just how badly burned Jigsaw’s face and eyes were.
And the damage is profound.
Given the appearance of his eyes, with the redness, the rawness, the cloudiness, she’s amazed he’s able to see as well as he can. She’s amazed he will heal from this as completely as JARVIS seems to think he will.
Not for the first time, Zoe ponders just what it means to be enhanced. There are the positives, of course. But even a positive like fast healing comes with a drawback—the faster you can heal from damage, the more often you can sustain that damage in a short amount of time, far more often than if you healed at a normal pace and within normal ranges of possibility.
Isn’t that how HYDRA had been able to hurt him as much and as often as they had? They knew the damage would heal and they wouldn’t be left with a less useful weapon. So his enhanced healing just set him up for more misery.
There’s something about the way he didn’t seem to be in an inordinate amount of pain during their session that makes Zoe’s skin crawl. Not because she wants him to be in pain, but because she suspects he is in pain and just doesn’t realize the extent of his pain. To be so conditioned to stoically accept what must be agony… It makes her angry.
How could they? How could they do things like that to someone as gentle and kind as Jigsaw?
She pushes the thoughts aside and takes a moment to straighten up the therapy room for Yasmin’s morning session. The new limestone paper they didn’t have an opportunity to explore tonight, the markers to go with it, the tripod with the pad of paper and thick sharpie they didn’t end up using.
Everything goes into its place, and within a few minutes, Zoe is on her way to her rooms.
She stops by Yasmin’s door, though, and knocks. She doesn’t have much to share that can’t go in their group chat, but she wants to share some personal connection before turning in for the night. Wants a buffer between her thoughts on Jigsaw’s injuries and ill treatment and her sleeping mind.
“I thought you might like to talk,” Yasmin says as she opens the door. “How did your session go?”
Zoe follows Yasmin inside and lets the door close behind her. “Well. We played a couple of rounds of Snowman, working on his fingerspelling. I’m surprised he isn’t still bandaging his eyes, though.”
Yasmin gestures for her to sit and goes to make them some tea in her kitchenette. “My understanding is that his dislike of the ‘blindfold’ outweighs its usefulness in protecting his healing eyes.”
Zoe can see that, yes, but she’d have thought Sam or Bruce, whichever of them is monitoring his healing, would have put his foot down.
“Jigsaw has trauma around being blinded for looking at screens when he wasn’t supposed to,” Yasmin continues, “and he’s sensitive to not being able to perceive his own healing process. The darkness of the bandage was like the worst of his previous eye injuries, and it was a constant instead of gradually getting better.”
Zoe sighs. “So he’d rather risk further injury if he looks at something too bright or if Lucky happens to lick his eyes, than to return to what looks to him like square one of healing.”
Yasmin nods and brings over a pair of mugs with teabags already in place. “That’s what I was able to glean, yes. Even though he doesn’t rely on his vision to sign, he does seem to have a harder time communicating, even with his signs, when he can’t see well.”
“I’m glad you gave him the tactile drawing board when you did, instead of waiting for me to give it to him last night,” Zoe says. “He seems to have gotten a lot of use out of it already. I’ve ordered more of the plastic sheets for him.”
“Some of that might have been Steve,” Yasmin murmurs between dips of her teabag to agitate the water in her mug.
“Oh?”
Zoe isn’t sure how Steve would be using the tactile drawing board. That she’s aware of, Jigsaw doesn’t spend much time with Steve. She’s sure that hurts Steve’s feelings, but it is what it is. So how would Steve have access to Jigsaw’s drawing board?
Yasmin smiles over the rim of her mug. “Jigsaw acknowledged his past as Bucky Barnes this morning, and then proposed a closer friendship with Steve.”
“Wow.” Zoe blinks. “How did that come about?”
That’s a huge move in a direction they haven’t even been working toward. Though it has been on the nice-to-have list as one of several ways to provide an on-ramp to personhood. The more of his history he can own, whether he remembers it or not, the more he can use to support the eventual notion that he is a person, no matter what HYDRA did to him.
Their working theory for this option is that if he acknowledges that he was Bucky at one point, then he should theoretically accept that he was a person at that point. That should make it easier for him to retake that personhood for himself in the present.
And if it helps him bridge the gap between himself and Steve, that’s another friendship that can be developed over time, another connection for Jigsaw, something for him to count on and lean on in times of distress. And of course, it would be good for Steve to regain some friendship with someone who has remained at arm’s length for so long now.
“He came up with the idea on his own, based on his own fact-checking,” Yasmin says. “He’s still adamant that he is not currently Bucky, of course, and I don’t see any reason to challenge that.”
Yasmin takes a swallow of her tea. “I wouldn’t have challenged the other, either. If he wanted to start his life with only the history he remembers, that would have been fine. Limiting, but fine. And in some ways perfectly accurate. He was formed from those experiences he remembers, after all.”
Zoe nods. “I wonder what prompted his fact-checking.”
“He’s coming to terms with the idea that he might have lost everything and had to start over with no memories or sense of self.” Yasmin sighs. “He’ll be working on that for a long time, I think. It was a very close call. But he put together the idea that if Jigsaw can be erased and have to start over, then Bucky can have been erased to give rise to Jigsaw, over time.”
Yasmin pauses. Then: “He’s concerned that if there were no more Jigsaw, there wouldn’t be anyone there for us to help.”
“We would still help in whatever ways we could,” Zoe says. “It would be an enormous setback, but I’m confident we could accomplish some good.”
“And I reassured him of that,” Yasmin says. “But to answer your earlier question, Jigsaw spent some time and several sheets of the plastic film showing Steve his drawing board earlier this afternoon. Steve is very interested in it.”
Zoe can see why he would be. It’s right up his alley—drawing in general, certainly, and possibly also the accessibility element of it. If she remembers her history correctly, Steve had been colorblind before the serum, and had a whole host of illnesses and disabilities. He’d probably be very happy that things like Jigsaw’s tactile drawing board exist in the world today.
“I wonder if Jigsaw would be interested in learning more facts about his past.” Zoe removes her teabag to a saucer. “I’m sure Steve would enjoy providing them, and they could go into a word search or a crossword.”
She’s always looking for more things to use for these games, clues he’ll understand and recognize so that the primary challenge is coming up with the words and letters that form the answer in his mind. JARVIS has been a lifesaver on that front, letting her know about new foods he’s been exposed to outside of Caroline’s sessions, new games he’s played with Clint, or various things that captured his interest in the Lab with Tony and his animal facts.
But if they could open the doors of Jigsaw’s past—the parts that weren’t one continuous atrocity committed against him—that could be a fruitful thing to explore. There are books he could read that recount some of the history of the Howling Commandos, on a reading level he could follow.
“I’ll let you work on the language tools,” Yasmin says with a laugh. “I’m more concerned with the journey to personhood. That’s been a real struggle, but I’m seeing a new potential path forward now. Ideally, it will be his idea. Things always work out better when the idea comes from him.”
“It might help for him to have more similarities with the others on the team, instead of primarily identifying with Clint. I wonder how we can encourage friendship growth with Steve,” Zoe muses. “If he’s accepting the facts of his history, he might see those similarities even without remembering them.”
That would mean common experiences being built in the present. Things they can do together. Hm. Steve might enjoy the crossword puzzles Jigsaw works on. He would recognize the clues, as opposed to many of the mainstream crosswords, where the clues are heavily based on current culture.
She could throw in some clues that Steve would get and Jigsaw would not, and vice versa, and they could do a puzzle together.
Of course, that has the potential to be frustrating for Jigsaw, who might be irritated if Steve solves more than his “fair share” of the clues, while Jigsaw often has trouble finding the words he needs for concepts he’s thinking.
Perhaps a pair of crosswords they could work on side by side would be better. She can make Steve’s more complex so that he doesn’t breeze through it too fast.
And then there’s art. While not specifically geared toward language, art is a form of communication, and it would be something Jigsaw and Steve could enjoy together. Yasmin mentioned she had some clay…
Yasmin
—New York City | Saturday 13 October 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
“I just thought with a month of time to think it over, you’d have changed your mind, Yaz,” her husband says.
Even early in the morning in his time zone, her husband sounds wide awake. She supposes that’s better than having this conversation when he’s half asleep and cranky about being up. But he’s the one who called her, so if he’s tired, that’s on him. He chose the time.
“Frankie,” she starts, “you know—”
“I know, I know. Holidays and crisis times, loyalty to clients. But I’m not asking about Christmas. Just a week in November. Or early in December. Just a week.”
Yasmin sighs. Technically, it’s a compromise between her not leaving until after the new year and her leaving for a week at Christmas. But that’s not where the two ends of the spectrum started out, and she’s not letting him move the goal posts like that.
“Come to New York,” she says. “If you want to spend Christmas together, come for Christmas. Or Thanksgiving. Or both. There’s more than enough room for you, and we can afford the tickets.”
With the fees for this particular client, they can afford to fly her husband anywhere in the world every week until the new year and not break the bank. It’s true her profession doesn’t tend to pull in massive amounts, but things have changed considerably since she took on Jigsaw. They can afford it now.
Frankie is silent on the other end of the line, and she almost thinks the call dropped until she hears the toaster in the background.
“If it’s the weather that’s stopping you,” she adds, “you only have to be out in that weather at the airport. If it’s the City itself, you don’t have to go exploring. You can stay inside the whole time.”
It’s not that he hates flying or thinks the distance is too great for a flight. He flies all over the place for his job, frequently across the country.
“I just hate coming home and not having you here, Yaz. I miss coming home to you.”
“I appreciate that,” she says. “But there’s a very easy solution to that problem.”
“Think about it, at least? About flying home for a week. Your mystery client can handle a week without you. But your husband can’t handle almost half a year without you.”
Yasmin shakes her head. Persistent, for sure. But they can both be stubborn, and she’s offered him the only solution that will work for Jigsaw. Going from three hours a day of therapy every day of the week, every week to suddenly not having that time with her for a solid week, that’s just not going to work. There are too many things that could happen.
He could encounter another HYDRA agent in the wrong place and strike before thinking it through again. He could go on another mission as catastrophic as this last one was. He could run into relationship issues with Clint, where things are moving too fast and he doesn’t know what to do. Or where something triggers his trauma and Clint doesn’t know what to do.
“This won’t last forever, Frankie,” Yasmin says. “And this is an opportunity that I can’t pass up, even if I thought my client was stable enough to leave for a week. You are more than welcome here, and I would love it if you came to visit, or to stay.”
“So you won’t even think about it?”
“I have already thought about it.”
She might as well lead him through the facts again, not that she thinks it will do much good. The fact in the middle of it all is that he’s not respecting a decision of hers now that he’s realizing what it means for him. That fact she’ll leave out. No sense in confronting him to that degree. He knows he’s being unreasonable. He’s admitted to that before.
“You travel for your work all the time,” she says. “Sometimes for months on end. I don’t ask you to pass up a trip or come home early, even though I miss you when you travel. This is an extended business trip for me. It’s no different from your own, except for one thing. On this trip, you are welcome to come along.”
“And that would be fine if this was just a couple of months. But it’s been two months and it’ll be at least two more before you even think you’ll be wrapping up. How is it this important to be there in person for this one client when you’re able to have remote sessions with all your others?”
“You know I can’t discuss this with you.”
He heaves a frustrated sigh. “It always comes back to that. You can’t leave this patient, and you can’t even talk about why not. It’s like you’re trapped there and the kidnappers are standing behind you to keep you from saying the wrong thing.”
Yasmin laughs softly, though she doesn’t necessarily feel it. He’s not trying to make a joke, she knows. But his statement is laughable, all the same.
“I assure you, this isn’t a kidnapping situation,” she says. “I’m free to leave the Tower between sessions. This is about professional responsibility and respecting boundaries. We agreed to this without an end-date.”
“But I thought—”
“Yes,” she interrupts. “You thought it would last until mid-October, or maybe into November. And you weren’t thinking that it could last even longer than that. But your lack of foresight in this doesn’t mean I should pack up and return early. Not even for just a week.”
At this point, if she did fly back for a week, she’d be resentful the entire time. And she would need to be up at 4 a.m. to meet with Jigsaw via laptop conference, and also from noon to 2 p.m. That’s no schedule to keep, and she doesn’t want to disrupt Jigsaw’s schedule to account for the time zone shifts—she isn’t even sure he knows what a time zone is.
Of course if Frankie flew here, he’d likely be resentful as well. The complaints would be endless, even if he didn’t actually mind whatever he was complaining about. It’ll have to become his idea to come to her, or else she’ll need to come home for a week in January.
And she’s confident that by mid-January Jigsaw will be stable enough with his older traumas and in his relationship that she can afford to try remote sessions for a week. Provided nothing new comes up that throws that recovery projection off.
She wishes she could offer up a week in January. But if something were to interrupt her plans, there’d be a fight about it, worse than the argument they’re having now. Best to wait and keep it vague for now.
“Frankie, just give it until the end of the year,” she says. “I’ll feel more comfortable leaving this patient for a week and doing remote sessions for them when we make it through the end of the year without any new traumas.”
“You promise?”
“I promise that I’ll feel more comfortable about it if there aren’t any new traumas,” Yasmin says gently. “You know I can’t promise more than that. But I’ll work with my patient to prepare them for remote sessions and a day off from sessions while I’m traveling there and back.”
“And back?” Frankie asks. “You’re going back there?”
Yasmin closes her eyes. “Maybe. Again, it will all depend on how things go. I can’t anticipate the future, Frankie. I can only deal with what’s presented to me at the moment.”
There’s some wordless grumbling on the other end of the line, and Yasmin sighs.
“We can continue this later,” she says. “I have to get ready for a meeting with my therapist.”
“Alright,” he says. “I know I’m upset, but I do love you, Yaz. I’m upset because I love you and miss you.”
“I know. And I love you. We’ll work through this. Have a good day, Frankie.”
He wishes her a good session and then hangs up, and Yasmin puts her phone away.
She really wishes he would just consider joining her here. He wouldn’t hate the City as much as he swears he would, and there are suburbs and smaller towns within easy commuting distance.
Perhaps in time Jigsaw would be able to go without therapy on weekends, and she could spend the weekends merely being on call in case of an emergency. She and Frankie could spend those weekends together, maybe in a little rental house.
She hasn’t said anything about it to her husband simply because the last few months have been stressful enough, but she’s thinking Jigsaw will never be able to transition to a long-distance therapy practice through videoconferencing. This might end up being a more permanent relocation.
And if it is…
Well, there will be time to think on that later. She has a therapy appointment to log in to.
Chapter 108: Avengers | For no one can fill those of your needs that you won’t let show
Notes:
Chapter title from “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers.
Going back in time a few hours to catch the Avengers POV without splitting up the therapists chapter. ^_^ Posting this pretty hastily, without my usual edit pass just beforehand. Sorry for any mistakes.
Also, heed the content warning on this chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 13 October 2012 | 7:45 a.m.—
It’s not the first time he’s woken up to Lucky licking his hand in greeting on getting back from his morning walkies with Wilson. And it’s not the first time he’s woken up to find that he’s somehow managed to get his blankets tangled around his hips instead of pulled up over his chest.
It is the first time the shark has joined the blankets, though. It’s also the first time he’s had a noticeable erection underneath all of that. Shit.
He doesn’t get this very often now that he’s well past being a teenager, though he knows it’s still normal and not a big deal. Usually he’s in boxers and there’s enough room for company down there, but the yoga pants and briefs make it feel like he’s got on pants that are way too small.
He moves the shark and rolls over, adjusting himself as he rolls, and checks his phone absently. Yeah, he’s got time to take care of this before Jigsaw gets back from therapy, and yeah, it’s probable that Jigsaw was already gone when his dick woke up, and missed the show.
That’s good. It’s something he’s worried about whenever he’s the big spoon at night, but it’s somehow never become an issue. At least, not that he’s aware of. And, that he’s aware of, Jigsaw has neither noticed Clint’s arousal nor experienced the same in Clint’s presence. And Clint would definitely have noticed, given how revealing Jigsaw’s routine attire is—yoga pants don’t hide much.
So all is well, Clint thinks as he gets out of bed and gives Lucky a scratch behind the ears. Morning wood undiscovered, Jigsaw still feeling safe around him, and…
Except there’s the matter of the shark.
What if the shark signifies that Jigsaw did observe his erection and tried to bury it or hide it or something? Get it out of sight? Use the shark as a shield against it?
Not for the first time, Clint wishes he could wake up when Jigsaw does, or at least when he gets out of bed. Because what if the pooled blankets around his hips are also times Clint’s had a morning erection and Jigsaw has put whatever’s close to hand over his crotch as a barrier between the dreaded dick and himself?
What if all those other times were like this time, but this time he put the shark there as well? What if Clint just slept through his erections the other times, because he wasn’t getting up this early and they had time to go back down before he was part of the waking world?
That would be awful. Which means it’s probably true, knowing his luck.
But there’s only one way to know for sure, and that way is awkward as hell. He’s going to have to ask about the shark.
“Hey, so, about the shark,” Clint says once Jigsaw gets back from therapy. “I, uh…”
Shit. He should have rehearsed this or something. Or maybe waited until he could go over it with Natasha, even though it’s a subject he’d rather not discuss with her. Hell, it’s a topic he’d rather not discuss with Jigsaw—or at all. But he’s gotta clear the air somehow. And Natasha would say to talk about it, so here they are.
Jigsaw isn’t looking confused—which is a bad sign, a sign that maybe it’s exactly as Clint fears—but he isn’t looking spooked or uncomfortable, either. If anything, he’s looking shifty. Conspiratorial. Like there’s a plot afoot and he doesn’t want anyone to know what it is.
And that, frankly, is confusing as hell.
But it definitely means that the shark was intentionally placed there over his crotch, which means that his morning wood was definitely noticed. And hidden? Covered up? Kept at bay? What?
Jigsaw pulls his tablet close toward his face and carefully starts tapping out his message. Either there are a lot of words being selected or he’s using the keyboard instead of the AAC app. Whichever it is, it takes a while, and Clint goes to sit on the sofa while he works, wondering what the message will be.
Probably something about keeping his boner to himself. How he’s not interested in that. Maybe how he’s even afraid of it.
When he’s ready to share, Jigsaw doesn’t sit by him and tap Speak or even hand him the tablet to read. Instead, he stands in front of him in a very calculated manner, carefully turns the tablet toward him, and furtively shows him the words WILL NOT TELL.
“Will not tell?” Clint asks him.
Jigsaw puts a finger to his lips and wipes the message clear. He signs “secret” and “asset” and “safe.”
And what Clint puts together from that is that Jigsaw won’t tell anyone about the shark—or about what was under the shark. That it’s a secret between the two assets, and that the secret is safe.
But… why?
What is so secret about morning wood?
And does Clint even want to know?
Probably Jigsaw is remembering some kind of horrible punishment that he received for getting hard in the mornings, or during the night, or… or during the rapes, maybe. And Clint’s no medical specialist, but he is a guy with a dick, and he knows that these things happen. There’s no helping it. It’s just part of being a guy with a dick.
“You know, it’s totally normal, right?” he asks. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Or to, um, hide.”
Except he doesn’t want to discuss it with Natasha, does he? It’s part of being a guy with a dick, but it’s an awkward part of it. He’d definitely try to hide it, himself. He’s just not sure why Jigsaw would try to hide it, and who he’d be trying to hide it from.
“It happens to guys, that’s all. You know that. You’re a guy.”
Jigsaw frowns and shakes his head. He pulls the tablet close again and eventually turns it around with the message NOT TO ASSETS on it.
“It does if those assets have a dick. And you have a dick. So do I. We both do.”
Jigsaw’s frown deepens and he glances up at the ceiling like he’s looking over his shoulder.
Oh. It’s JARVIS. Jigsaw’s worried about JARVIS overhearing or seeing them or something. Maybe he’s worried about JARVIS seeing Clint’s erection for some reason. As though JARVIS would care. As though JARVIS hasn’t seen much, much more in this Tower than a bit of morning wood.
Jigsaw goes back to working on his tablet, and now Clint can see that he’s shielding it from being observed by JARVIS, in addition to holding it close enough that he can see it clearly.
“Hey, JARVIS, could you give us some privacy? Maybe half an hour, no surveillance?”
“Certainly, Agent Barton.”
Clint can’t tell a difference, but after a moment, Jigsaw looks at the corners of the room and his eyes widen. Maybe JARVIS makes some kind of noise that only a super soldier can hear. Who knows. Whatever the change is, Jigsaw can tell, and he comes around to sit beside Clint, turning to face him on the sofa.
What he eventually passes to Clint are words in the AAC app, with one of them typed in all caps because it’s not on any boards yet: “Not happen assets. Assets no. Will not tell. Hide. No punishment. No COPPER stick inside. No white electric fire.”
For a long, long while, Clint stares at the words, his brain not quite working. There’s a lot of words there, and none of them good in context. Some of them don’t even seem to fit together.
“…What?” he finally asks.
The first parts make sense, in a way. The last parts…
“No,” Clint murmurs as a horrifying thought crawls into his brain and takes up residence.
No, no, no, no, no.
He sits stock-still on the sofa, not daring to move a muscle, even though his instincts are screaming at him to cross his legs and protect his dick from the mere thought of what he suspects Jigsaw is saying.
Jigsaw is still looking at him with this earnest look, eagerly ready to reassure him about the lack of punishment despite his saying “no” just now. And yeah, there he goes, nodding and pointing to the words “no punishment” on the tablet.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Clint says slowly, kind of hoping he doesn’t.
Copper sticks… inside? Inside of what? He thinks he knows, but he doesn’t want to be correct. White electric fire is the chair and halo or the stun batons, and that doesn’t bode well, either. What kind of depraved sadist comes up with these things? And then actually does them?
Jigsaw frowns and pulls the tablet over to himself again. He debates something for a moment, and then he closes the AAC app and opens up the drawing app instead. His movements seem reluctant now, not eager, but he draws a thick skewer-looking thing with a rounded tip on one end and a loop on the other.
He looks over at Clint, studies his face, and then draws a very accurate taser baton, one Clint knows from working with the other STRIKE teams before. He adds a drawing of a flaccid dick, and Clint knows then that he was correct.
Horribly, terribly, awfully correct.
But Jigsaw adds arrows to the three parts of his drawing, even so, one from the rounded tip of what Clint know knows for sure is a sounding rod, probably of copper, to the tip of the dick, and then a second arrow from the tip of the stun baton to the loop of that sounding rod. The rod goes inside, and the taser applies electric shock to the rod, all the way down to the base of the dick. Copper would conduct that electricity really well.
Clint closes his eyes and tries to get some control over his emotions. The anger—the rage—is only going to confuse his partner, which he doesn’t want. And then the pity, well, that his partner doesn’t need.
He doesn’t have any idea how much tissue damage that kind of treatment would cause, especially if repeated or sustained for long amounts of time. He does know that he’d black out from it and be spared the worst while Jigsaw has been able to stay conscious through a taser baton to the face and probably wouldn’t have the benefit of passing out.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Clint hears himself saying as if from the other room. “That’s HYDRA torture, and not something that will happen to you in the Tower. Not to anyone. Not people, not assets, no one. Ever. For any reason.”
He did it. He managed that in a calm, level voice. Not an angry growl.
“You’re not going to be punished like that ever again.”
Jigsaw switches back to the tablet’s AAC app. A few minutes later, he shows Clint his message: “It is safe. Jigsaw not get hard. Not ever. Protect other asset.”
“You must have had erections at some point, or why would you think I was going to be… shocked down there?” Clint asks.
“Warning lesson,” comes the eventual response. “Warning to not ever, or more COPPER stick and white electric fire. Bigger. Longer time. Worse. Lesson learned. Order through pain.”
And suddenly, it’s just too much for him to deal with. Suddenly, he needs to talk to someone who hasn’t been poisoned by HYDRA bullshit about order coming through pain, who hasn’t lived through these particular horrors and yet remains matter of fact about them instead of angry about them. Someone who can share his anger.
Because Jigsaw doesn’t seem to be angry about what happened to him, only protective of Clint. But if Clint’s suspicions are correct, this sort of “punishment” has to have been repeated often enough to break Jigsaw’s dick somehow if he never gets hard, ever, despite being an otherwise healthy enhanced super soldier.
And he knows how often the wipes were done in order to inflict the memory loss and language issues on him.
Is this something the bastards did all the time in the States to damage him? Or was the damage done back in the Soviet Union? He has vague but pleasant—if twisted—impressions of the Siberia base back in the day. Surely it couldn’t have been “the handler from before” or any of the staff there.
Jigsaw and Lucky look over at the door and then Clint hears a knock. He takes the opportunity to get away from the conversation, to literally walk away from the very idea of that kind of torture, and opens the door to find Natasha there with a big smile that immediately fades.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing,” Clint lies. He fingerspells that he will tell her later, keeping his hand where Jigsaw won’t see it. “Breakfast time?”
“You know it. You hungry?”
“Famished,” Clint says, hoping he can manage to eat through his horror at what HYDRA has done. “Hey Jigs, let’s go get some breakfast.”
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 13 October 2012 | 10:15 a.m.—
It’s not what he had expected he would be doing this weekend while Sam introduced his family and friends to the idea that he was dating Captain America—or rather, was dating Steve Rogers. But while Steve had sort of expected to come along for that and provide the proof of what Sam was saying, he kind of doesn’t mind being here in the Tower instead.
He love to meet Sam’s family, of course. And his friends. But this is apparently too early in the game for that and Sam’s mother in particular would want time to get used to the idea before being confronted with a new man in her son’s life whose job was just as dangerous as the previous man’s job.
Riley casts quite a shadow, and has some big shoes for Steve to fill. Preferably not all the way to the fiery crash at the end of his life. Unless Steve’s maybe already done that part with the Valkyrie.
Anyway, it’s nice staying here in the Tower’s main common room working on various arts and crafts with Jigsaw and Clint while Natasha distracts Alpine with a shiny new wand toy. The pile of supplies in the middle of the table is even bigger and more diverse than the one Zoe had given them for making the tactile symbols and landmarks.
The table is stacked with papers and ribbons, stickers, shells, and stamps, feathers, and colorful glass baubles that are flat on one side, domed on the other, and about as big as his thumbnail. There are markers, pens, pencils, and at least three kinds of glue. In addition to a hole punch, there are scissors that cut things into different kinds of lines, wavy and zig-zag and straight. And the yarn. So much yarn.
Clint is idly clicking a pair of glass baubles at each other, looking sort of bored. But Jigsaw is very busy sliding some papers with raised lines—sponge paper, from a Zoe session, according to Clint—into airtight sealed bags to be glued onto pages so that he can keep them in pristine condition. And Steve… Steve doesn’t know where to start, there’s so many options on the table.
“So you get to do this often during your sessions with Yasmin?” Steve asks. When Jigsaw nods, he continues. “That’s great. With Dr Linda, I get artistic homework sometimes, but we spend the whole session talking.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and signs that there is talking still, but also making pages. He reaches forward and pulls out a page of creamy white paper with three holes punched in the narrow side, so that it will fit in a notebook oriented as a landscape instead of a portrait. He puts the paper in front of Steve and signs “fire” and “peaches” at him, then points to the paper.
“I’m making a scrapbook page about grilled peaches?” Steve guesses.
Jigsaw grins and nods. He pulls out some colorful papers, some black yarn, and some colored pencils, and then pushes all of that over to Steve.
And yes. Steve can kind of see how it would take shape. He can use the papers to construct peach halves, the yarn to make the grill marks, the colored pencils to add shading. And a recipe off to one side. He wishes he’d thought to take a picture of them. Then he could use a photograph as well.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Jigsaw signs “remember” and “look,” and then pulls one of the tactile drawing boards over to write on—MAKE AGAIN—before adding “never forget” to the communication.
Steve thinks he gets what Jigsaw means. By remembering what things looked like, or re-creating the events, he can fix them in his memory no matter what happens. And that’s a great idea, but Steve already doesn’t forget things. He doesn’t need to fix anything in his memory because everything’s already fixed.
But he doesn’t say that. It would just be rubbing his own memories in Jigsaw’s face, since Jigsaw either doesn’t have many of them after all the wipes or at least fears losing the ones he has due to a future wipe that they all have to admit is possible, even if they don’t like the idea.
“I’ll make these peaches look so good that you’ll practically smell them coming off the page,” Steve promises.
And then he gets to work, cutting out peach shapes in shades of orange and goldenrod, and then taking the time to color each one into the appropriate details.
“You know,” he says after several minutes of industrious silence, “Sam is working on an arts and crafts project, too. In his room. Macrame.”
“Oh, I know what that is,” Clint says. “That’s where you make a hanging basket for plants and stuff out of rope. Right?”
Jigsaw signs “plants” with his question sign, looking keenly interested.
And now it’s Steve’s turn to grin. “You can tie some knots so that a potted plant can hang from the ceiling like it’s resting in a custom built hammock, yeah.”
He sketches that out on a spare piece of paper, then presses some of the lines darker so that Jigsaw can hopefully see the contrast better.
Jigsaw looks at the paper for a second and then back at Steve, and Steve can’t tell if he actually made anything out with his healing eyes or not. He hopes so, but he hasn’t asked how his sight is doing, in case that’s a sore spot for him.
“But Sam’s working on a wall hanging,” Steve adds. “Probably not something we want Alpine getting into, though.”
He paints the back of his first peach half with something called “rubber cement” and sticks it to the scrapbook page. After he gets the rest of the peaches on the page, he’ll add the yarn grill marks.
“A wall hanging?” Clint asks. “Doesn’t this place already have enough stuff hanging on the walls?”
Steve shrugs and gives the peach half a nudge. It’s well stuck already. This rubber cement is pretty neat, and no burned fingers from the glue gun.
“Maybe,” he says. “But this would be a way to mix things up.”
After all, they are living here. Who’s to say that they can’t decorate their rooms the way they see fit? That’s not an insult to Pepper’s decor, just a personalization of a sort.
Sure, most of them are coming from next to nothing—anything from barracks in the Triskelion or a temporary apartment somewhere to literally nothing but a bag of knives. But Sam went from a well-established house to just a bedroom and living room, since his second room in the Tower is filled up with boxes and furnishings from the house. Maybe he’d like some of his own stuff on his walls.
And Jigsaw might like some of his art on the walls, too. Especially if he’s making as much of it as it seems he is. He’s moved on to a third page, this one with artistic zig-zags of yarn around the borders of the page and a small seashell glued periodically in some of the angles made by the yarn. The center is a piece of the sponge paper with two figures on it, one red and one purple, dancing.
“I like the idea of a wall hanging,” Natasha says from the sofa. “Maybe he’ll make me a hanging planter if I ask him nicely.”
“Maybe,” Steve says.
He happens to know that Sam’s already made her not one, but a set of three, and in red and black to match her decor. But that’s for an eventual Christmas present, and Steve won’t give the secret away.
“Where is he, anyway?” Clint asks as he passes a marker across the table to him. “He should bring his rope and stuff in here and set up at the table. There’s room for one more craft thing.”
Steve feels his cheeks warm up a bit. “He’s telling his family and friends all about our relationship,” he says.
“Without you there?” Clint raises an eyebrow. “Might as well rip off the bandaid all at once, right?”
“Some people might not appreciate the media frenzy of Captain America showing up at their door asking to date their son,” Natasha says while enticing Alpine to pounce around the corner of the sofa. “And anyway, meeting the family is an important step to some people. A sign of seriousness.”
Steve nods as he watches Jigsaw add a spider made from red ribbon to the side of the dancing figures, gluing down each leg of ribbon before adding one of the glass pebbles to form the body of the spider.
“That’s how he explained it, yeah,” Steve says. “Not that we aren’t serious,” he adds. “Just that he wanted meeting the family to be a special separate thing.”
Clint doesn’t look too impressed by the idea, but Steve hasn’t gotten the feeling that Clint really has much family. Sam might have more family than any of them in the Tower, actually. The rest of them… Well, the team is a family, of a sort. Just not a traditional one. It’s one they made together, or one they found along the way as they were working with each other to find Jigsaw.
“Aren’t you worried about the news going after you?” Clint asks. “You know, a secret doesn’t last long when more people know it.”
Steve smiles as he puts a few more shaded peach halves on his page.
“We’re not going to hide it. In fact, we’re probably going to hold hands in public tomorrow while we walk Lucky during your meeting with Kate.”
Clint whistles. “Cutting it close on the whole ‘letting family know first’ thing, huh?”
He shrugs. “It seems like a good time, is all. We’ll have Lucky for a few hours that morning. It would be nice not to have to keep our hands to ourselves.”
“Maybe make an appointment to talk with Charlene about things,” Natasha suggests with a swish of the wand toy. “Not that you can’t do what you want when you want, but she might have some tips for keeping the media frenzy to a dull roar.”
Steve laughs.
He’s expecting more than a dull roar, at least from the tabloids like that Honeybadger’s Den. He’s expecting something sharp and critical, but also maybe something supportive from a community he’s always considered himself tangentially a part of even before the War.
And sure, maybe he should talk it over with the Stark Industries PR person. But judging from the meetings they had about Jigsaw’s introduction to the public, Steve suspects that this would become a whole thing, requiring planning and gradual staging, a press release, maybe an interview. And he doesn’t want any of that.
He just wants to hold hands with his partner and not care about the reactions. He doesn’t want to hide behind a press release or have someone in charge of his “publicity.” It’s not about publicity. It’s about him and Sam not hiding their relationship.
“You laugh,” Natasha says, “but it’s something to consider, at least.”
Notes:
Content Warning: The first POV section of this chapter (Clint’s) introduces a new-to-Clint element of the HYDRA Trash Party, a specific punishment which will probably be uncomfortable to read about.
Chapter 109: Natasha | When I think I’m losin’ connection (I see you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Wild Roses” by Of Monsters and Men.
Heed the content warning on this chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Saturday 13 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“So,” Natasha says as Clint opens the door. “What’s wrong?”
Clint had been cagey enough to outright lie to her this morning before breakfast, and the covert signing about telling her later indicates that whatever is wrong involves Jigsaw in such a way that Jigsaw must not find out about it.
Well, Jigsaw is safely in his therapy session, and he’ll be there for the next two hours. There’s no better time to pounce.
Clint sighs and waves her inside. “You know how HYDRA did a number on him?”
Of course she does. And there’s only one person he could be referring to, after all.
Natasha scoops Alpine up off the sofa and sits with the sleepy kitten in her lap. “What did you learn about the torture?”
Something they’ve been finding out more and more often as time goes on is that not all of those so-called punishments were in the Winter Soldier manual. That manual only really features things the Soviet branch of HYDRA did, and the American branch was—and if Rumlow is any indication, still is—more depraved.
“Can I be really, really honest here and—”
“You know you can.”
Clint flops onto the sofa, facing her with his back against the arm of the sofa, and runs a hand through his hair.
“Shit. I don’t even know where to start. My brain is full of stuff and when I try to focus on one thing, another thing pops up like a jumpscare jack-in-the-box.”
She’d say something borderline flippant like “start at the beginning,” just to tease some of his misery away, but the beginning was a very long time ago, and the teasing might backfire, depending on what this is about.
“Is this a last night thing or a this morning thing?” she asks instead.
“This morning. Early. I woke up to a stuffed shark on my crotch and, er, a situation down there.” Clint sighs. “It spooked him, I guess, or he was worried about me, is more accurate.”
Natasha raises an eyebrow. “Worried about you in which way?”
“Worried for me. For my safety. He thought maybe JARVIS would see it and that there’d be a punishment.”
Which means there have been punishments for any erections Jigsaw had, or why would he fear for Clint in this instance? She wonders how long this has been going on without Clint noticing. Because unless Clint has some sexual health issues of his own, this is not the first time Jigsaw’s encountered an erection of Clint’s.
“And I’m not mad at him, I’m not, but it’s maddening that he still thinks some of this shit could happen here. What does it take to convince him once and for all that nothing he does—nothing anyone does—is going to result in that kind of punishment?”
Natasha smiles sadly. “You know how long it took for me to trust. He’s had a lot longer to learn extreme caution than I had, and some very immediate reasons for the caution.”
“I know, I know. I just— I hate that he still worries that someone will hurt him for things, or that they’ll hurt me. Surely by now we’ve shown him that no one will hurt anyone.”
“We have, Clint.” Natasha strokes her fingertips along Alpine’s belly. “But these things take time to really sink in. He has to be ready for the exception to the rule.”
Clint tips his head back and stares at the ceiling. “Even if there is no exception.”
“Exactly,” she says, glad that he can vent with her about this. When he was bringing her in from the cold, he didn’t have anyone to vent to, after all. This is much better. And it offers her a chance to contribute, something that she really wants to do.
“What was the punishment?” Natasha asks. Because Jigsaw must have told him what they’d do in order for Clint to be so riled up about this.
“‘Tasha, they didn’t just electrocute him with the halo and shock him with the batons like we knew. They put—” Clint stops and rubs his hand down his face. “They put copper sounding rods up his dick and electrified them with the taser batons.”
Natasha frowns. That’s… Sounding is such a delicate process, so intimate, done so carefully. How compliant would he have had to be for them to even be able to do that to him? He’d have needed to hold still for that, or else they’d have needed to pin him down, maybe restrain him in that awful chair or strap him to a table.
And the damage from doing something like that roughly, and from electrifying the sounding rod…
She’s half-formulated a thought about whether Jigsaw is capable of an erection when Clint confirms it.
“He doesn’t fear getting an erection, ‘Tasha. He can’t get an erection. And he was surprised that I could. Assets don’t, he says. But he’s been hiding mine from JARVIS so I won’t have the ‘copper stick inside’ and the ‘white electric fire.’ He drew me a picture.”
Natasha makes a commiserating sound in her throat.
“And I don’t know how the evidence isn’t stacking up for him that I’m not actually an asset. I don’t want to lose my same-as connection.”
That, at least, Natasha can reassure him about. “It’ll take a lot more than that to chase him off, you know.”
“Will it?”
She eyes the ceiling briefly. “He loves you, Clint. Even if you weren’t an asset anymore, he’d still love you. So, maybe he makes exception after exception for you in order to keep you in the asset role, yes. The reason for it is that he doesn’t want to lose you, any more than you want to lose him.”
Clint is quiet for a long moment, and Natasha gives him the time and space to think on it. Alpine is still half asleep in her lap, and the tiny white ball of fluff is enough for her to focus on while Clint gathers his thoughts.
He’s got a lot to think about—not just the notion that he’s loved in return, but also the notion of what it might mean for him and for Jigsaw if Jigsaw doesn’t eventually come to terms with erections. They can’t hide from JARVIS every time Clint gets hard. Clint is going to get hard, more and more often the closer he and Jigsaw get.
At least Jigsaw’s concern wasn’t about Clint “pushing into” him. That’s a huge positive Clint doesn’t seem to be acknowledging. If he’d been afraid of Clint’s erection, or afraid of Clint with an erection, that would have been a lot harder to deal with.
In her peripheral vision, Clint uncurls his fingers and presses his palms on the tops of his thighs.
“I hate that that happened to him,” he says. “I hate that he doesn’t even remember a time when he did get morning wood. I hate them for doing that to him.”
“That’s all perfectly natural,” she murmurs. “I’d be surprised if it didn’t make you angry.”
“Oh, it makes me angry, alright.” Clint’s hands ball up again, his fists pressed against his legs. “And it makes me… selfish. It makes me think selfish things.”
She reaches over to rest a hand on his ankle. “You’re allowed to feel selfish, you know. It’s not a crime to think about your own needs and wants.”
He heaves a sigh. “Not like this, though. Not— Not like this.”
Surely he knows that she will follow up on that until he has no choice but to reveal what his oh-so-selfish thoughts are. She doesn’t know why he bothers to stop as if she won’t drag it out of him.
To her surprise, though, she’s only just opened her mouth to prod him into continuing when he does on his own.
“I didn’t think sex was going to be on the menu for a long, long time,” Clint says. “And I thought it would be kind of awkward when it did happen. Really slow going, lots of explanations, probably lots of starts and stops. And nothing like what they used to do to him.”
She nods. That seems reasonable, yes.
“I mean, any positions they used, we’d avoid those. We’d have a safe word signal and I’d watch him like a hawk to make sure he wasn’t distressed. Lots and lots of cuddling before and after. I read that pamphlet Yasmin sent me.”
Clint bites his lip and then visibly pushes himself to continue, his face getting redder as the words tumble out.
“I thought he wouldn’t be the one getting fucked or anything. That’d be me. It would take some effort to get the scarring out of my head, but I’d go down on him, not the other way around. That kind of thing.”
There’s a long enough pause that she turns her head to look at him.
“And the plan has changed?” she asks.
“Now I don’t think anything is going on the menu at any point.” Clint sighs again. “And that’s what’s so selfish of me. I want stuff, ‘Tasha. And he’s afraid of stuff. And in some cases, he just can’t do that stuff.”
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I don’t think that’s selfish. You have certain needs, and he has certain needs. You’ll just have to work toward a compromise where most of those needs are met on both sides. And you might have to compromise a bit more than him at first, but it should even out in time, because he’ll want you to be happy.”
Clint runs his hands through his hair. “What if he wants me to be happy to the point where he’s unhappy, though? What if I traumatize him all over again because he put my needs first?”
“Clint.” Natasha waits for him to look at her. “You’ve been so careful so far. You’ve dragged things out further than I thought you could. You’ve checked in with him at every step. I know you think you’re a fuckup, but you know you’re competent when it really counts. And this really counts. You won’t mess it up.”
Natasha holds up a hand when he opens his mouth to protest—something about failing in Siberia, no doubt, or messing it up with Bobbi years ago.
“Not finished,” she says. “The thing that makes me so sure this will work out? You’re communicating with each other. If something is bothering you, you bring it up with him. Like the erection. And if something is bothering him, he lets you know. Right?”
Clint nods. “He always shares about therapy, and his nightmares. And things.”
Natasha remembers the time when Jigsaw had panicked about the team training and apologized for abandoning Clint to the worst of things down in the gym. Or all the talking they’ve done about killing versus murder, and moral compasses. She’s been privy to most of that through Clint, who shares what’s going on during their talks.
Yes, Jigsaw will communicate something if he’s distressed. It might take the form of a physical reaction instead of a sign, but he’ll let Clint know. And from there, Clint will almost certainly ask him to explain what’s wrong so that Clint can fix it.
“If you keep on as you have been,” she says, “both of you communicating, then it’ll be fine. In fact, I think that in time, it will even be good.”
“It’s already good.” Clint blushes. “It’s really good. I’m just worrying about the future, I guess.”
“And how about the past?” she asks, shifting on the sofa to lie down like she used to for these kinds of talks, with her head in Clint’s lap and her knees pulled up. Alpine makes a few sleepy protests but soon settles down again on her chest.
“The past?”
“The past, yes. Recent past. Are you finally starting to relax a bit after Siberia?” Natasha gently rubs Alpine’s belly to soothe the kitten back to full sleep.
Clint shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, accepting the change of topic. “Every time I think I’m finally settled down, some stray thought about losing him comes along and shoves a boot in my gut and I suddenly can’t breathe.”
Natasha knows the feeling, yes. Her own mind is full of thoughts about losing this family they’ve built around themselves. Mostly she manages to keep them under control, but sometimes… She’s had some sleepless nights since Siberia.
“And not just him,” Clint says. He brushes a strand of hair from her face with a fingertip. “I worry about you, too. About your knee. And… and about leaving you out in the cold.”
She blinks, and then mentally kicks herself for reacting at all. Of course he’s seen her blink, knows that she’s had a reaction to that, possibly suspects that he’s struck a sore spot. And it’s not a sore spot, not really. She’s happy for him. Happy for Jigsaw. Happy for the two of them, together.
But she does miss the closeness she and Clint had before Jigsaw entered the picture. Now she’s not sure where she stands, exactly. Close, yes. And he can and does share things with her that he doesn’t share with anyone else, even Jigsaw. But the physical affection—the playful bumps, the hugs, moments like these when one of them has their head in the other’s lap—she’s missed it.
And she’s not sure they can have that back without communicating with Jigsaw to make sure he understands what’s going on and that she isn’t encroaching on his territory. Because he clearly considers Clint to be his territory.
“I’m not out in the cold,” she says, realizing as the words leave her mouth that she waited too long to say them. Damn, she’s losing her touch. Or maybe she’s just been thrown off her game by their current configuration.
“‘Tasha,” he says. “I’ve been a bad friend.”
She shakes her head. “Just a busy one, and it’s understandable. Jigsaw needs a lot right now. So do you.”
“And so do you,” Clint insists. “You don’t get to wiggle out of a post-mission breakdown session just because you don’t actually need knee replacement surgery this time.”
Natasha gives Alpine’s paws a gentle massage, feeling the prickle of her teeny-tiny claws and using the sensation to ground herself. It just figures that he’s got his perception turned all the way up right now of all times. He couldn’t be utterly dense when she needs him to overlook things; that would be too convenient.
“So how are you doing after Siberia?” he asks.
She sighs. Might as well be honest.
“The halos keep me up at night,” she says softly. “Maybe HYDRA was secretly behind the Red Room, or maybe it’s something completely different, but I—” Natasha takes a breath. “I don’t want to be controlled, ever. Not ever again. Even if it’s a different kind of control.”
Maybe especially if it’s a different kind of control. The halos, they would erase her, in theory. They would take everything she’s built and tear it down. They would leave her empty and open, ready to receive whatever programming HYDRA decided to slip inside her head.
Before, she was manipulated. Raised in the Red Room and taught all manner of horrible garbage, told she was only special because of her skill being put to use by the Red Room, told that if she deviated from her path she would be crushed, but if she stayed the course—through all of the indignities, the surgeries, the training, the missions… If she stayed the course, there’d be glory that was just one more step away.
Always one more step away.
And under a halo, there wouldn’t even be striving for glory. There would be… nothing. Just the missions, and then more missions, and no knowledge of anything outside of those missions. And between missions, HYDRA…
In the Red Room, there’d been missions sometimes that required her to offer herself up to men in high places in order to gleen secrets or steal plans, but the Red Room itself had never abused her or her sisters to the same degree or in the same manner that HYDRA had abused Jigsaw.
Under a halo, that would change. Under HYDRA’s control, she may never encounter the same degree of physical injury as Jigsaw has, because that would break her in a way that Jigsaw could easily heal from but she couldn’t. But there is little to no chance she would escape without the rapes. And maybe she would be taught to think she deserved that, that it was just part of her duties.
“I won’t be unmade again, Clint.” Natasha hates that her voice trembles slightly, but she continues anyway. “I won’t. And I won’t see anyone else unmade and stand idly by. Not you, not Jigsaw, not anyone.”
“I know.” He puts his right hand on her shoulder. “I have the same damn thoughts. It would be different than it was under Loki’s control, but it would be— Hell, it’d be worse. But Stark and Banner are working on a way to track those things down.”
Natasha smiles up at him. “Now you’re just repeating what you say to Jigsaw.”
Clint shakes his head. “Not just Jigsaw. I say it to myself plenty of times, too. Tell myself it’ll all be okay whether I believe it or not. That’s what they say to do, right? Fake it ‘til you make it.”
“That’s not how it works,” she murmurs with a smile.
“No?”
Natasha lets out a short, soft laugh.
She knows full well that he’s got just as many fears whirling around in his mind around those halos, but she appreciates his clowning with her to lighten her mood a little.
Because Clint might only have been controlled for three days, and might have been treated as a valuable tool and resource the whole time, but there was something insidious about the nature of the control. Wanting to please because that was the only thing that mattered.
She doesn’t know whether Jigsaw wanted to please because that was his goal or whether it was all fear-based, fear of failure and what failure would bring. But she knows that her desire to please was based on the path she’d been flung down and the dangers that lurked to either side of the path.
The idea that she might want to please for the sake of pleasing, even to the point of engineering the death by flaming helicarrier crash of all those she knows and treasures… That she could be compromised to that extent…
Natasha knows why Clint has nightmares about it still.
“We’d make quite a trio,” she says after a few minutes. “All three of us have been controlled by different entities, in different ways, for different lengths of time. All three of us are terrified of the prospect of a halo waiting for us. All three of us would do unspeakable things to avoid that fate.”
“I think the things we’d do are pretty speakable, actually,” Clint says. “Except for Jigsaw, of course.”
“Because he wants to tear his opponents into bite-sized pieces while they still breathe, or because he can’t speak?”
“Mostly the latter. Torture to death is speakable, even the way he used to do it.”
Natasha smiles. “If you say so.”
"I’ve waded through the chunks, ‘Tasha, and even then, it was speakable. Gross as hell, but speakable.”
“I waded through them with you a time or two,” she reminds him. “Most people wouldn’t call that speakable.”
Clint shrugs. “We’re not most people.”
Natasha smiles again. She’d missed this. “No, we’re not.”
Notes:
Content Warning: This chapter includes some discussion of the HTP punishment brought up in the prior chapter, which will still probably be uncomfortable to read about. Later on, Natasha has some thoughts about sexual assault and some recollections of missions with the Red Room that required sexual favors of her. She does not seem to realize that this was also a form of sexual assault. (Go figure that even the perceptive ones can be blind about their own issues.)
Chapter 110: Couples | If they ain’t talking we ain’t doing it right
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rumors” by Jake Miller.
Happy (early) 4th to those of you who celebrate that. I'm headed up to take care of my dad for a couple of days, so I figure I'd better post a traveling chapter, haha!
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 14 October 2012 | 9:15 a.m.—
Clint wants nothing more than to stay exactly where he is, which is leaning back against the counter after the breakfast dishes are washed and stacked in the draining rack, with Jigsaw pressed snugly against him kissing along his jawline.
Now that Jigsaw has been shown that kisses could be placed anywhere he likes, he’s had a fascination with Clint’s neck and jawline, his throat in particular. Clint thinks it might be just because of their height difference, but there’s no way to tell for sure without asking Jigsaw and taking the risk that he’ll feel self-conscious about it.
Anyway, whenever Clint’s lips are in easy reach, Jigsaw still starts out there for a while before migrating southward along the side of Clint’s neck. It’s all Clint can do to keep up and try to get a few kisses of his own in once Jigsaw gets started.
In some other life, Clint might find it amusing the way his partner latches onto each new tidbit of physical intimacy Clint doles out. But Clint can’t seem to find it amusing—it’s just a reminder of how starved for this kind of attention Jigsaw must have been for so long, and must still be.
That, and it’s hard to be amused when he’s so turned on.
He’s never had a partner before this who was so eager and yet still took a make-out session at a snail’s pace and so gently that there wasn’t a single love bite left behind. It’s a study in contrasts that sends Clint’s heart going at what feels like triple speed.
Clint runs careful fingers through Jigsaw’s hair, willing his fingers to avoid brushing across any of his burns. The last thing he wants to do is bring any pain into this situation. His burned hand stays where it is, resting lightly at the curve of Jigsaw’s hip.
Everything about this would be perfect, except that he’s aware of the time passing, and the need to get ready to meet with Katie-Kate for their lesson.
He’d gone over the kissing rules—checking if it was okay before more than a kiss on the cheek in greeting, not kissing in front of others, only kissing if both of them want to—and they haven’t broken those rules once. So they can’t have been too obnoxious.
And Yasmin hasn’t objected. That’s big. If the therapist is okay with this, it must be okay. Must not be him taking advantage of Jigsaw’s lack of knowledge in this area. Must not be him taking advantage of Jigsaw, period.
Clint wishes he could shake himself of that feeling of taking, of being a taker in this relationship. He also wishes he didn’t have to interrupt what they’re doing to get ready to see his eager pupil. But he can’t show up unshaven and rumpled with unwashed hair and all that. It’s bad enough he’ll be showing up with a bandaged hand and the traces of scabbing across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose from wearing Jigsaw’s killing face.
He should have canceled this weekend’s appointment, at least until his face finished healing. Oh well. Too late now.
“Mm,” he murmurs as he moves to disengage. “This is great, Jigs, but I need to get a shower in before meeting up with Kate.”
Who thought the day would ever come when Clint Barton sacrificed something he enjoyed for the sake of being responsible? If anyone had told him he was going to be responsible instead of drowning in kisses and running half an hour late to a meeting…
Jigsaw sighs against his neck, his breath hot across Clint’s skin, but he takes a step back and settles for a slight pout instead of an outright complaint.
Clint’s eyes are caught on Jigsaw’s lips, pinker than usual and plump from kissing on him and his stubble, and he can’t help but cup Jigsaw’s face in both hands and kiss those lips. Just once. Or a few times. But he breaks their kisses when his internal clock reminds him that time is still passing.
“I’m sorry,” Clint says against Jigsaw’s lips. “I do need to get ready.”
Jigsaw kisses the side of his mouth once and then takes another step back, tapping a fingertip on the back of his wrist.
“Exactly. Don’t want to be late. Um, are you comfortable with Katie-Kate seeing your injuries? The burns and your eyes and all that?”
Jigsaw blinks up at him—and Clint exercises an inhuman amount of self-control not to close the distance and kiss him—then nods.
“Okay. Just checking. She might ask questions.”
Jigsaw doesn’t seem to mind, and goes to his tablet in its charging stand.
Maybe he’s going to compose some explanations, or maybe he’s going to play that snowman-themed hangman game, or one of the others. Clint doesn’t know, and he guesses it doesn’t really matter. What matters is getting himself into the shower.
Clint starts out with a nice hot shower, but he can’t stop thinking about Jigsaw and how nice it would be if they could share things like nice hot showers. He imagines getting a massage in the shower, kissing Jigsaw up against the tiles, maybe with their fingers twined together, maybe exploring each other a bit…
And he concludes with the water as cold as it will go and still give him decent pressure. Because that is way, way out of range right now. Jigsaw could hardly let him take his boots off, just a handful of days ago, and there’s no way he’d be anything approaching ready to be actually naked in Clint’s presence or in front of anyone else, either.
Jigsaw’d had an absolute frantic conniption about even just the possibility that Rumlow had gotten his tac belt off in Siberia, and had needed a good deal of reassurance that no, Rumlow had made threats—both before and after the halo itself—but he hadn’t been able to do more than paw at Jigsaw’s tac belt before Clint’s arrow found his fucking center mass.
Someone who instinctively sees all forms of undress as a prelude to rape—even when he struggles to consciously divorce the two concepts from each other in the presence of those he trusts—is in no way ready to share a shower.
Clint’s such an idiot for getting himself turned on like that, and right before he has to be somewhere so he can’t even take an extra long shower to take care of things down below and ensure that there’s no chance of an unwelcome visitor making an appearance that could spook Jigsaw or draw Kate’s eye.
The cold water will have to do the trick.
Ugh.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 14 October 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
It brushes the fingertips lightly against the lips, savoring the feel of the other asset’s lips that lingers still. The other asset’s lips are very good lips, warm and inviting, and the faint raised line—a scar left by the tracksuit men—is a very good landmark in the other asset’s very good face.
And the other asset still has the marks from wearing the killing face, a symbol of how the same they are, and of the killing face becoming a life-saving face. The other asset touches the scabs from time to time, tracing fingers along the lines. It does not know what the other asset is thinking at these times. Maybe the other asset is thinking that the killing face—life-saving face—is actually a good thing. Maybe the other asset understands now.
It unhooks the tablet and wakes it up from its sleep—good morning, tablet—and starts a new game with the snow man. That will last until the other asset reappears freshly clean and wearing new soft clothes. It wonders whether the other asset will wear the jeans to meet with the auction woman or whether the other asset will choose soft stretchy pants instead. Probably the jeans. The soft stretchy pants are for inside of the rooms for assets, are just for this asset to look at, maybe.
The clue this time is “Dessert,” and there are five lines of boxes. This will be a hard one. Is it five different desserts, or is it one dessert with a long name? Six letters, then three letters, then three letters, then three letters, then five letters. Hmm.
It has guessed many times before the other asset has completed the shower and reappears wearing the jeans and a light purple t-shirt that shows off the upper arms. It guessed right about the pants, but not about the letters. There are four Es and two As, but no Os or Us. One P and one D, but no Ks or Ls, no Bs or Gs, no Fs. It taps the M and gets only one letter filled in.
It might lose this game.
It does not want to lose the game. There are no punishments if it does, it knows. But it likes the feeling of winning the game, likes the fireworks on the screen, likes the accomplishment and celebration.
The other asset comes over to the chair where it is sitting with the tablet in the hands and the little cat on the shoulder, and looks down at the tablet.
“Try an I and then a C, maybe.”
The other asset might know what the dessert is. How the other asset could possibly have guessed it with so many empty spaces is a mystery. But the other asset does know more desserts than it does.
And no one said it could not accept help while playing the game. It taps the I and there are two of them! And there are three Cs! The other asset is very good at this game.
It still does not know what the first word is, but the second one is “pie” and the fourth is “ice.” It thinks maybe that ice cream is part of the dessert. Some kind of pie and ice cream. Oh! The middle word must be “and.”
It taps the R to be sure it is ice cream, and there are three Rs in the words. The first word must be the kind of pie. It starts with a C and has ERR in the middle. It has only had two kinds of pie so far. There was the cherry pie and the peach pie. There are a lot of different kinds of pies, but it thinks the answer is “cherry pie and ice cream.”
The other letters are easy to fill in, and it stares at the fireworks on the screen wondering how the other asset could possibly have known to try an I and a C. Even with knowledge of desserts that far surpasses its own, that is very impressive.
It thanks the other asset for the assist and closes down the app with the snow man game.
“Yeah, no problem.” The other asset shrugs. “You about ready? Bringing that or not?”
It holds the tablet close for a moment, thinking. If the auction woman asks it questions, the tablet might be good to have. But it can also sign to the other asset and the other asset will tell her what it means to say. That should be just as good, and probably quicker. They will only have a short time.
It gets up and puts the tablet back onto the table by the door. It will leave it. This way its hands will be free to climb up into the rafters like last time. Or maybe it will climb to the top of the rock wall and just sit there like a pigeon on a power pole. It will decide when the time comes.
The little cat is placed carefully on the carpeted tree for cats, and it gives the little cat a fond stroke from the tip of the little cat’s nose to the end of the little cat’s tail. The little cat’s tail is getting fluffier than the rest of the little cat, the fur growing longer there. It wonders what the little cat will look like when she is a big cat.
Sam
—New York City | Sunday 14 October 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
Sam leans further into Steve’s side, his left hand clasped with Steve’s in Steve’s lap while Lucky plays with a few other dogs in the park.
This is nice. Lucky gets to enjoy an hours-long outing in the park, gets to chase leaves and play with his dog friends, gets to come back periodically to check on him and Steve. And he and Steve get to hold hands and be a couple in public, with Steve’s right arm slung over his shoulder and everything.
No one has said anything, no one has even given them a sideways glance on their way past the bench. New Yorkers tend to ignore each other, so there’s that. But it seems like they aren’t being ignored so much as they’re being accepted. And that’s… That’s something he never got to have with Riley. They’d always been too worried about dishonorable discharge to risk being seen together in front of anyone but family and close friends.
And this? This is so, so nice.
He almost doesn’t care if it lands them on the front page of some tabloid or other, or if Carlton Badger writes a piece about how inappropriate it is for teammates to be romantically involved with each other. The point remains that it is their relationship to have and they don’t need the world’s approval to have it.
They’ve been all over the park, both the leashed and unleashed sections, alternating between walking Lucky, throwing a frisbee for Lucky, and sitting to watch Lucky play. And they’ve stopped by a pet-friendly coffee shop for drinks and donuts, which was a treat in itself. Lucky got more attention than they did, and also a free puppuccino, which turns out to be a cup full of whipped cream.
So far, Lucky’s stomach hasn’t rebelled from the treat. Sam hopes it stays that way, and he’s thinking there’s a decent chance of that because Lucky had spent so much time on the streets eating whatever trash Jigsaw could find for the two of them, and seemed to be largely okay despite that.
Sam sighs contentedly and gives Steve’s hand a squeeze. “What do you think we should do for the rest of the morning?”
They have Lucky until Clint and Jigsaw are done meeting with Kate Bishop, which could be anywhere from an hour before noon to noon itself, depending on when she leaves. Lucky hasn’t seemed to run out of energy yet, and the weather is a nice sort of crisp, so they could stay out here for another hour or even two if need be.
“I was thinking we could go to your room and you could show me more of the music I’ve missed out on,” Steve says. “After Lucky comes back to check on us.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I really liked what you played last time. Marvin Gaye. It was good.”
Sam nods. “We can do that. Maybe get a little more comfortable while we listen.”
Not that he isn’t comfortable now, but he’d be even more comfortable on a sofa. And while watching Lucky play is fun, it’s got nothing on necking with Steve. That’s something they definitely can’t do in public. There’s hand holding and light pecks, and then there’s full on make-out sessions, and Sam was raised not to share the latter with just anyone.
And they might end up doing more than just making out, if the music sets the mood right. Sam won’t mind eating lunch a little later if it means getting his mouth all over Steve, and maybe getting the favor returned. Lucky will be fine on his own while they’re otherwise engaged.
“I like the way you’re thinking,” Steve says, caressing his shoulder with his right hand. “Maybe we call Lucky back and get started on that right away.”
Sam smiles.
“Think we’ve been seen by enough people yet?” he asks. “Or do you need another trip around the park to satisfy your newfound exhibitionist tendencies?”
Steve laughs. “I don’t know about exhibitionist tendencies,” he says, “but I think everyone here has seen us already. And this trip was more about spending time with you than showing you off to everyone in the park, Sam.”
“Oh, I know, I know. And I’ve enjoyed it.”
Sam whistles for Lucky and then puts his arms out, parallel to the ground. When he’s sure Lucky sees him, he brings his hands to his chest and watches with satisfaction as Lucky comes trotting over to them.
“Who’s a good boy?” Sam asks when Lucky arrives. “Is it you? Is it you?”
Lucky’s tail wags happily while Steve fastens the leash back on his collar and Sam gives him the thumbs up signal that confirms that he is, indeed, a good boy.
“Let’s go home,” Sam says to the dog, as if Lucky could understand him. But Lucky knows that the leash means they’re headed somewhere, and he heels without even needing the signal.
It’s amazing that Jigsaw was able to train this dog so well without any verbal commands. Amazing, and useful. Sam has seen a good many people try to convince their dogs to come when the dogs are still too wound up. He’s never had a problem with Lucky refusing the signal, and he’s never had to yell for Lucky to hear him. The whistle does the trick of getting his attention. Really, anyone’s whistle. But he’ll only actually come over for Sam or Jigsaw and the right hand signals.
He wonders how Jigsaw is doing with the harness training for Alpine. He’s good enough with the animals in his life to manage it, Sam’s pretty sure.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 14 October 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
The auction woman does not ask too many questions, though she does have things to say. First there are the things about “the news” and how she did not mean to get on the news and is sorry about that. Then there are things about how she didn’t know the other asset was injured and they “totally could have rescheduled” so he had more time to heal up.
The other asset waves aside her concern about both things and gets her set up on the uneven bars, hanging by her knees to shoot upside down again.
It cannot see her fangs on sticks from the top of the rock wall, but it can hear the thwip of them leaving the string and the sounds of them hitting the sparring bots. It does sound like she is improving, even when upside down.
The other asset has her trying to shoot two fangs on sticks in quick succession now, how to aim two of them at once, how to hold them so that there is not any time lost going back to the special basket for more.
It wishes it could see more clearly, but there is still a haze over everything it looks at. It is getting fainter every day now, though, and the images it sees through the haze are getting sharper and sharper, with more and more color. Soon there will be no need for the horrible soothing drops to go into the eyes. Soon it will be able to see the fangs on sticks fly.
Soon it will be able to properly appreciate the sight of the other asset demonstrating despite the burn across the other asset’s left hand. Yes, soon.
And even sooner, it will be time to go back to the rooms for assets, where it can ask for more kisses.
Kisses are wonderful things, and it could spend all day kissing with the other asset, kissing all over the other asset’s neck and shoulders, jaw and mouth, even the other asset’s back if the other asset would lie down to let it rub at the other asset’s sore shoulders. The other asset’s shoulders always tense back up, even after it has chased the knots out of the muscles. The default state is tension.
It knows about that. Its default state is also tension. In this, they are the same, the same, the same.
Chapter 111: Civilians | That’s a how a superhero learns to fly
Notes:
Chapter title from “Superheroes” by The Script.
Just a heads up, I may not be able to post a chapter next weekend. It will depend on how things go with some family stuff that's going on.
Chapter Text
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 14 October 2012 | 11:15 a.m.—
Hawkeye might say it’s nothing, just a minor injury from the mission, but she saw how gingerly he held his arrows, how he took a lot of care not to grip anything too tightly with his left hand, how he swung up onto the bars with just his right hand. Which was impressive, but not so impressive that she didn’t realize he was only doing it to favor his bandaged hand.
And Jigsaw wasn’t up on the rafters, either. He was just on top of the rock wall, and there was something wrong with his eyes. It was like there was a reddish strip of skin wrapping around the front of his face like a reverse sunburn from wearing shades without sunscreen for the rest of his face.
She can’t be sure that his eyesight is messed up, but she thinks it might be. He didn’t help them find any arrows this time, and maybe that’s because he couldn’t really tell where they went when she shot them.
And it’s Sunday! They had their mission a whole half a week ago, on Wednesday.
Kate wonders where they went for their mission and what happened; specifically, what went wrong. Last time they were on a mission—that she knows of, anyway—there was that leaked footage from North Carolina. There hasn’t been any leaked footage this time, but that doesn’t mean much.
They thought they might be gone for a couple of days, and they were really only gone for one very, very long day. Does that mean that the mission didn’t go well and they had to bail before they were finished? Does that mean they did really well despite the injuries and came back early because it was all wrapped up early?
It could be either extreme or anything in between. But at least two of the team got injured, and maybe the Black Widow as well. She wasn’t favoring her left leg when she came to get Lucky and Alpine, but she wasn’t not-favoring it, either. It wasn’t a limp, but there was a tightness around her eyes that said maybe it would be a limp if she let it be.
Kate stows her bow and quiver in the trunk of the Stark car that’s waiting for her in the parking garage, and then goes around to get in the backseat. Time to go back to her apartment, already. She hadn’t exactly expected to be invited to hang out after the lesson or anything, but it had been a possibility.
She’s thinking it might have happened if there hadn’t been some injuries to keep largely out of sight. She is the public, in some ways, after all. Even if she’d never tell any of their secrets. Not to anyone. Not even her diary gets to know these things, because her mother used to sneak peeks at her diary, and if there’s anyone she doesn’t want getting an insider look, it’s her mother.
They’re obviously not going to tell her what all happened on the mission. She’s not part of the team or anything. Maybe someday she can be, though. Maybe the reason Hawkeye is challenging her more and more each session is that he’s trying to train her up for the team. That would be amazing.
Kate Bishop, Avenger.
Maybe she’d be able to save people the way Hawkeye saved her. Maybe she could inspire people to be better versions of themselves. She could be a superhero. It beats going into security with her mother, or trying to find a job on her own that actually doesn’t suck. It’s true that she could live off her trust fund, but she would want to have an income of her own making, too, and something worthwhile to do with her days.
She’s had jobs waiting tables, just to “build character,” her mother said, like it was a rite of passage. And she’s done internships in enough places to know that she doesn’t want to work in any of those places. Maybe she could teach people fencing, or work in a gym as a personal trainer. That would help people. But it wouldn’t be the same as being a superhero.
How does someone even get to be a superhero?
The buildings don’t exactly rush by as the car makes its way to her dorm apartment, but Kate watches them pass out the windows all the same, marking the time she has to sit here like a member of the team being driven around, possibly to a mission.
Hawkeye and the Black Widow were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents before they were Avengers. That’s a route, she supposes, since they’re rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D. She could graduate, apply for a job with S.H.I.E.L.D., work her way up to some fancy position, and get transferred out to the Avengers.
But that doesn’t sit well with her. Not only was S.H.I.E.L.D. once infested with HYDRA, but it’s basically like working security with her mom, only for the public sector instead of the private. No thanks.
Iron Man was blown up in the Middle East, and tortured, and made a mecha suit to get revenge. That’s… not an option she wants to pursue. She isn’t in computer science or engineering, so if she was blown up in the Middle East and tortured by the Ten Rings, she wouldn’t be getting out of there in a mecha suit. She’d be dead.
Captain America was a science experiment who went to war and crashed a plane. That’s a no-go. She doesn’t have a pilot license—though probably neither does Captain America—and she doesn’t want to go to war in a military sense. That’s just not her thing. And she has met people in the sciences. She wouldn’t trust them to work on her as a guinea pig, no matter what.
The Hulk, well, is a hulk. That’s probably enough thought on the matter. That’s what can go wrong with science experiments, even when you’re the scientist.
But the Falcon… He flies. He has those really neat wings out of metal with the jet pack on his back. He was recruited to the team because he was pararescue. That’s military again, though, and she doesn’t want to go to boot camp.
Ugh.
Maybe she can find her own way to join the team. A way that doesn’t involve the military, the paramilitary, science experiments, or getting blown up. Preferably no torture, either. She’s not big on torture.
In the meantime, she’ll focus on learning everything she can from Hawkeye, and on keeping her grades up so when she graduates she has the chance to find a job that doesn’t suck too much while she works on becoming a hero.
Because Kate Bishop? Oh, she’s gonna be a hero. That much is certain. She’s decided.
Monesha
—Washington D.C. | Monday 15 October 2012 | 1:15 p.m.—
Hi, Jigsaw!
I hope you’re doing well, and that you are all healed up from whatever happened in North Carolina. I saw on the news that you were injured, and
Monesha sighs and crumbles up the paper. That will never do. For one, it sounds like she’s fishing for information, and she’s not. She just really does hope that he’s all healed up. It’s been weeks now. For another, she’s probably not supposed to even write anything directly to him, just in case her mail is intercepted.
It’s the fifth letter she’s started in the last two weeks, and the fifth one to meet her trash can in a crumpled up ball.
Maybe she should just text Ren and Stimpy and have them convey her message. But she doesn’t want to work with a mediator. She doesn’t want to pass notes through other people in order to reach Jigsaw. She wants to just talk with Jigsaw.
She’s been taking this ASL class at the community college—just auditing the course, since she started too late to actually enroll—and she’s picking up a lot. It helps that she has a clear goal in mind of communicating with someone instead of just taking it for a so-called easy language credit. She has the motivation to practice all the time, even just in her head, and the instructor says she’d be one of the top students in the class if she were taking it for credit.
Surely she can have some small talk with Jigsaw now, without needing the interpretation. She has some new markers for him, these ones with glitter, and a coloring book calendar for the last half of 2012 and all of 2013 with lots of ocean creatures on the pages. She doesn’t know for sure whether he’d like that, but at the very least, the pictures are soothing and the markers should be fun to write with.
And she has a dog bone for Lucky, though she’s sure the dog already has plenty of those.
There was an article in some local paper about the team all going out to the park across the street from Avengers Tower, feeding ducks and playing with Lucky, eating a picnic. So she knows that it’s possible. Maybe if she goes up and visits again, it won’t be too cold to have a picnic and catch up.
Just her and Jigsaw and Lucky… and Agents Romanoff and Barton. Because even if it turns out she doesn’t need a translator to help with understanding Jigsaw, she’ll still need protection from the tabloids, like that horrible Carlton Badger who seems to find fault with everything the Avengers do, and especially with Jigsaw.
And it would be nice if that protection didn’t end in violence. Monesha thinks the world of Jigsaw, and she knows that his violence has saved her life in the past, but she has a feeling he still treats violence as a perfectly acceptable option when it comes to defending or protecting people, to an extent that could be dangerous if they were actually approached by someone who appeared to mean them harm or want to harass them.
Better that one of the other two were there to handle any such situations that came up.
And there might be situations if they go for a picnic in the park. That one reporter saw the pet-sitter—Kate Bishop, she thinks was the name—and tried to get in her face. And there was some kind of mission or travel that they did for there to be a pet-sitter in the first place instead of the Falcon walking Jigsaw’s dog like usual.
She hopes there wasn’t a whole team mission, or that if there was, Jigsaw stayed home. There’s still nothing but speculation on the news about that—no leaked footage—and she knows it’s not her business in the first place, but she can’t help but want Jigsaw to be able to rest and recover and live his life without all that violence and risk for injury.
“Hey, I’m running to the store,” one of her roommates calls from downstairs. “You need anything while I’m out?”
Monesha calls out that she’s good, which is the truth. Everything she needs for dinner tonight is already on the communal grocery list so it’ll get picked up whether she mentions it or not.
After the door closes downstairs, Monesha waits for the sound of her roommate’s car starting up before she pulls out the flip phone that’s been so silent the last few weeks that she has considered putting it back in the drawer of her nightstand instead of keeping it on her person.
Agent Romanoff hasn’t had any texts or calls for her about danger, or about anything else. But she had made the press leave her alone, somehow. And she hadn’t said that Monesha couldn’t contact her. Quite the opposite. She’d said they would send a car for her if she wanted to come visit again, either meeting her at the train station in New York or picking her up here at her apartment in Washington D.C.
Monesha looks at the flip phone. She does want to visit again. And maybe sending a letter is just the wrong idea, anyway. It had taken ages for the first letter to reach them, traveling through Stark Industries. And her second letter seems to have never arrived, or at least to still be on the way through the maze of Stark Industries.
After a few minutes, she opens the phone. It’s been a while since she had to send a text the old fashioned way, but the phone is an old fashioned phone, and she is definitely willing to press buttons several times to get the letters she wants.
It’s better than actually calling. She doesn’t think she could invite herself up to see Jigsaw if she was on the actual phone with Agent Romanoff.
In fact, she directs her text to Agent Barton instead. He’s way more laid back, easier to approach. Even if he’s sometimes infuriatingly laid back about things like Jigsaw getting hurt or showing up on the news.
[I can get this Thursday off of work. Is that a good time to come up and visit?] Monesha looks her text over for a moment, making sure there aren’t any typos, and then adds on to it: [It’s Monesha.]
Because she’s got his contact information on this flip phone, but hasn’t contacted him using it before. He might not remember about the flip phone, or might have forgotten about her having it. It’s been a while.
[I’m learning ASL.] she adds. [Sorry for the last minute request.]
It’s several minutes before there’s a response, but when the response comes, it’s at least a positive one.
[Cook] comes the first response, and then [I mean cool. Thursdays fine. Where you want us to pick you up?]
Monesha stares at the message for a long minute. They would pick her up… meaning, what? Who is “they” in this case? Would it be a Stark car coming to get her, or would Agent Barton and Jigsaw be coming to get her?
She tries to imagine riding in a car with them for three hours to get up to New York. She’s not that confident in her signing to be able to really communicate while sitting down not facing her conversational partner.
Well, she might as well ask. [Who’s picking me up?]
[Probably Happy. There’s some security stuff.]
She doesn’t know who that is. But he didn’t say “we” or “Jigsaw and I” or anything like that. So this Happy person must not be them. She wouldn’t need to sign with a seatbelt keeping her from turning toward the people she’s signing with. She might not even be signing during the car ride. But still…
[I can take the train. Pick me up at the station?]
That way she doesn’t have a three-hour car ride with someone she doesn’t know. It’ll be better to read a book on the train.
[Sweet. See you Thursday. Jigsaw says hi. Hes looking forward to seeing you again]
Monesha smiles. [I’m looking forward to seeing him, too.]
She closes the flip phone and slides it back in her pocket. Now all she has to do is wrap the presents and get her tickets sorted. And confirm that she won’t be coming in to work on Thursday.
Valorie
—Washington D.C. | Tuesday 16 October 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
“D’ja see the news this morning?” Carl asks her as they head across the street for some Chinese food.
“Define news,” Valorie says. The current news cycle is still trying to figure out what mission the Avengers had, and they’ve been on that nearly a week now. It’s not news anymore, strictly speaking.
“I had a glance through my phone while sitting in the parking garage,” she adds.
Carl laughs. “You know, I’d have thought you would know better than to sit there in the parking garage like that. After the summer thing, you know.”
Valorie refrains from rolling her eyes. It’s classic victim blaming, and classic coming from Carl. Of course she deserved to be attacked in the parking garage last May, he probably thinks. Only a fool would sit there in her car scrolling on her phone after hours and presenting a perfect target for whatever that man had wanted with her.
But her guardian angel had dismembered her attacker, and she’s felt a kind of safety ever since, like she’s somehow marked as off limits for any violent intentions that may be directed her way.
It doesn’t stop people in the office from hinting that she asked to be attacked for being alone in a dark parking garage while paying less than perfect attention to her surroundings. If Mr Red Star hadn’t been in the area, it’s true she could have been abducted, robbed, raped or worse, but he had been there, and he did what he did with all the mighty swiftness of an avenging angel.
“How’s your Red Star thing going, anyway?” he asks as they get in line to order. “The earrings and things. T-shirts. That’s what you were looking at on your phone, isn’t it?”
Yes, as a matter of fact, that is what she’d been looking at. Her sales have grown along with her merchandise, which now include red enamel jigsaw puzzle pieces along with the original red enamel star shapes. She has added lapel pins and tie clips, cufflinks, and other menswear items as well. Business is going very, very well.
Now that the connection has been accepted in some circles between Mr Red Star and the Jigsaw Avenger, business is booming with every new article put out about either of the aliases her guardian angel has gone by.
And while she isn’t one hundred percent certain that the two men are one and the same person, she does think it likely now that the dust has settled on Reddit. It’s no longer just BigDongJohn trying to convince them all that Ronin is also tied up in the identity, or that ghosted_machine sharing footage, or the handful of lusty men and women who want to win Mr Red Star’s heart.
Now it’s mostly logic running the circles in the Red Star subreddit, and logic states that the footage showed something that can only be a red star on a metal left arm, which was one of the few identifying traits Mr Red Star ever had. Discounting the haters like the Honey Badger, the connection hasn’t been considered a bad thing.
The story goes that the Avengers realized who Mr Red Star’s targets were and brought him on board to help them take a less lethal approach to getting HYDRA off the streets and out of the shadowy back alleys. And no one can argue that getting HYDRA out of the picture isn’t a good thing, a worthy cause, something that Mr Red Star was after.
The only problem is that, with the Avengers, Mr Red Star can’t actually fulfill his own missions to take out evil wherever he encounters it. Because Valorie doesn’t believe for a minute that it was HYDRA that was after her in the parking garage in May. That was just some other random evil. She has nothing HYDRA would be interested in.
“Business is going well,” she says finally.
Carl probably doesn’t really care about her Etsy shop, anyway. He’s asking to be polite, and because the person taking orders is wearing one of her bright red star-shaped lapel pins. A lot of the people who work in the area wear them, or wear the earrings or a necklace. Some of them have canvas tote bags with embroidery stars in metallic crimson.
It’s like a talisman against what almost happened to her in the parking garage.
And while she doesn’t know that there will ever be a need to use the funds she has gathered for Mr Red Star’s defense—or for Jigsaw’s, she supposes, since that’s the name he’s chosen to use—she has kept those funds in place for the occasion where they are needed. She thinks that is what her customers would want, since she clearly states on every item in her Etsy shop that the proceeds go to the potential need for such a thing.
“I’ll have the beef lo mein lunch special, hot and sour soup, an extra egg roll,” Carl says as he gets to the front of the line. “Add an iced tea.”
Valorie orders the moo goo gai pan with egg drop soup and a coke, and takes her ticket back to the waiting area.
“What’s on the news?” she asks as she takes a seat on the bench.
Carl grins. “Captain America doesn’t like the way bananas taste.”
Valorie blinks. She isn’t sure how that’s newsworthy. Lots of people don’t like bananas. Plenty of other people do. It’s a personal preference, not a news cycle.
“How do you know he doesn’t like bananas?”
Carl holds up his finger like he’s about to make a point that will blow her away. Then: “Captain America,” he says, his grin strong and unfaltering, “is on Twitter.”
Chapter 112: Twitter | You tell me that I should be signing up
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Twitter Song” by Donny Brewer.
They say “write what you know,” and… I have posted exactly two tweets in my entire life, and that was back in 2011. I don’t even remember what those tweets were, or what my handle was. My password, I do remember, but whatever. The point is that I don’t know how “X” works now and don’t really care to, I don’t remember much about how Twitter worked back before the Bad Times, and yet I have made a conscious decision to have this character on Twitter back in 2012. Hubris, what is that? Please forgive my Twitter faux pas, of which there will doubtless be many. ^_^
Posting slightly early since I couldn't post this past weekend. Enjoy~
Oh, and a minor content warning in the end notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Tuesday 16 October 2012 | 7:15 a.m.—
It’s time, he decides. He has his username and his handle, has registered, and Tony has gotten him a blue circle with a checkmark in it that apparently confirms his identity. What’s more, he has things to say, and he’s feeling ready to say them.
After talking it over with Sam—and with Tony, which had been a time-consuming thing but worth every minute—Steve had almost capitulated and combined his personal life with his status as an Avenger.
Too many other Steves out there, too many of them with the Rogers surname as well, and only one Captain America to date. To verify that he is who he says he is and not something called a troll, he considered going with @CapRogersTweets for his handle. But there are other Captain Rogerses out there, and one of them is also a Steve.
Tony insisted he could steal the handle, but Steve won’t do that.
Then Tony had suggested @ManOuttaTime, which was apparently a song and also hinted at his identity without being too on the nose about the Captain America thing. But Steve hadn’t really cared for the lyrics of that song, and anyway, he’s more than just someone who was frozen for decades in the Arctic. Might as well go with @Capsicle if that was where he wanted to focus attention.
What he was, ultimately, down at his core, is a boy from Brooklyn. His life has taken him all over the place, but that’s still who he is. So there he is. @BrooklynBoy. He likes it. It suits him.
And while he can’t get away from Captain America entirely, this is close enough. He’ll be able to make it clear that he’s using this platform as his personal soapbox, and not speaking for the team or anyone on it. He just has to get started.
And while Tony had been all about going hard and fast out of the gate, Steve is going to opt for Sam’s suggestion that he take it slow and make sure he even wants to be on Twitter before he says something that will be all that newsworthy.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Bananas don’t taste like bananas. But banana candy does. That’s the future for you. #GrosMichel
Steve posts the message. Or tweets it, he supposes. There. His very first tweet.
And it’s about bananas.
But that’s okay. Start out small, see how the platform works, get his feet wet before diving head first into what might turn out to be shallow, neck-breaking water.
Anyway, the bananas do taste different, and JARVIS had told him why that was. Monoculture crops are an issue in the future, and had been enough of an issue in the past that now banana candy tastes more like the real thing than the fruit does. Tony’s jibes about “nanerphobia” aside, it’s a serious problem that needs serious solutions if the future is to continue enjoying some of these fruits and vegetables.
Farming and agriculture might not be his strong suit, but he has opinions, and never let it be said that he wasn’t willing and eager to share his opinions with anyone who would listen.
So maybe someone will want to know more about the bananas of the past and how that crop had succumb to Panama disease and gone virtually extinct in so short a time that the people of today hardly even remember how it tasted… except in candy form.
And maybe someone will want to know what he thinks should be done about it. Maybe they’ll think he wants to go back to the old banana. Maybe they’ll think he’s upset about changes in the future. Maybe they’ll think he’s pining for the past. And maybe he’ll have an opportunity to educate people about how adaptable he is, how he’d like for plants they depend on—like bananas—to be able to adapt, too.
It’s low stakes. He might not get anything at all in response. But he’s “verified” already as Steve Rogers, and it says he’s Captain America in his bio. That might get him some attention earlier than he’d otherwise get it.
Either way, it’s time for breakfast. Steve closes his laptop and gets to his feet.
He’s thinking of making a frittata this morning. There’s some spinach in the refrigerator, some cheddar, or maybe some Swiss. Maybe a little of each. And tomatoes, probably. There might even be some leftover asparagus from last night, if Jigsaw didn’t get hungry in the middle of the night and finish it off.
And some plain eggs with cheddar for Clint, bacon on the side.
Sam
—New York City | Tuesday 16 October 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
He’s Steve’s second follower on Twitter, after Tony, whose handle is—perhaps predictably—@TheBetterStark. There’s no rivalry with his dead father there, no. None.
Twitter is something Sam doesn’t spend much time on these days. He really only set up his Twitter account for Riley’s sake, back in the day when they were both in boot camp and needed to touch base with family back home. It had been a way to keep in touch with each other, too, through DMs where the military couldn’t see just how close they were, beyond mere wingmen.
He hasn’t used it to post anything since Riley died, and he’s not planning to start tweeting again. But he does kind of want to check on Steve, make sure he’s doing alright in the Twitterverse.
Steve is in with Linda right now, and Sam has another hour to decide whether he’s going to reveal his dusty Twitter account to the world by responding to Steve’s banana post or whether he’s just going to be a mysterious follower that no one ever hears from.
So far, there have been several responses to Steve’s tweet. All of them are positive ones, which is a little surprising to Sam, knowing what Twitter can be like. Not all of them are original, but some are interesting enough to look into.
Christopher Touger
@Christopheles
Captain America, is that you? #StarSpangledBananaHater?
It’s not a bad first reply. Straightforward, not rude, asking the obvious question. It even has a link to a banana bread recipe that looks pretty good when Sam clicks on it.
Maybe the “future bananas” can be redeemed in Steve’s eyes. It’s likely they won’t have any bananas left to make bread out of the way they go so fast around here, but they could get in some overripe bananas expressly for making bread.
Could be a fun baking experiment. Not as fun as the cherry pie they made, but fun all the same. And less messy by far.
Stacy Addison
@StacyStacyStacy
Is this real?
Sam scrolls past this and another dozen similar replies. A few people have retweeted Steve’s original as well, but the chatter seems to be pretty low key on the retweets that Sam can see. No one’s being overly rude about things.
Even the handful of quippy replies tends to be encouraging, like this one:
Tysen Laufington
@DrLaughs
Out of the ice and into the frying pan. Good luck on Twitter, Cap.
It’s maybe a little snarky, and sure, there’s no need to refer to the Valkyrie in the Arctic, but the whole fire vs. frying pan play on words makes the sentiment more lighthearted and less caustic. And there’s the good luck message. Sam also wishes Steve good luck on Twitter.
Then there’s the host of replies asking for more information, more things he misses or things he’s been surprised by. Things ranging from the innocent open-ended questions to the pointed and leading questions about cultural shifts Steve will presumably find to be detrimental to the state of the country.
Tamara Smythers
@ToSmytherines
What other foods do you miss from the 40s?
And:
Dennis Heike
@EagleScream64
Bananas aren’t the only thing that’s screwed up. Politics, education, culture, you name it. Just appalling. #ReaganWasRight
Sam hopes Steve opts out of replying to that one. There’s a whole library worth of things he’s missed out on well beyond the contents of that notebook he carries around, and Sam doesn’t want him to get in a flame war his first day on Twitter trying to insist on everything good about the future. If someone wants to be negative, let them. It’s not up to Steve to right every social wrong on Twitter.
For one, he’d be there hand-feeding the trolls until the heat death of the universe. For another, that’s not a great way to relax after a mission, a therapy session, or even just a dull day of planning anti-HYDRA actions they can take based on information JARVIS provides them.
More a distresser than a de-stressor.
As he scrolls through the new replies and retweets, something pops up from Steve.
Sam blinks. It doesn’t seem likely that it was set to post at a specific time. Not because he thinks Steve wouldn’t be able to manage that with Tony’s guidance or JARVIS’s help managing his account, but because Steve is with his therapist and not able to monitor the replies he’s getting. Steve would take more of a precaution against inadvertently tweeting something untimely.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Yes this is my real account. :-) These are my personal thoughts, not official Avengers tweets. But I’ll take questions. #CapSpeaks
It’s not a reply to any one particular tweet that mentions him, or a response directed at any of the replies or retweets he’s gotten since he first tweeted. But it has the feel of something that is a general response to how things are going on the whole.
Maybe he’s talking with Linda about the Twitter experiment, and she’s coaching him through answering without giving any one of his new followers more social credit than they deserve. At least he’s not replying to EagleScream64. If he’s talking with Linda about these things, surely she would tell him to ignore the haters and the overly negative users, focus on the positive and well-intentioned users, and try to refrain from getting caught in anything too long and involved.
But, who can say?
All he can do at this point, really, is watch the replies come flooding in.
“How do you like the future?” @PelicansRule wants to know. At least it’s a straightforward question and not too loaded down with expectation.
@ParkerPhotos wants to be sure to welcome “Cap” to Twitter and let him know that “it’s an honor, sir.” And Sam supposes that’s fair, though he’s sure Steve would rather be going by Steve than Cap on Twitter. It’s a battle he suspects Steve will lose.
“How are you okay with a mass murderer on the team?” @StrykerD demands. “It’s not a good look. #JigsawKiller” Sam sighs. It was only a matter of time on that one. It’s still a bone of contention being picked over in the tabloids.
@MagicalMJTokes suggests, “You should do an AMA on Reddit!” Sam is only about one hundred percent certain that Steve doesn’t know what an AMA is, and that he’d be swallowed whole by Reddit if he ever tried such a thing. Twitter is already going to eat him alive at the rate these replies are coming in, if he decides to try to answer even a quarter of the responses he’s getting.
“What are you doing to stop HYDRA in the future, since you failed in the past?” asks @AuntieAntiAnte. “#IceNapOnTheJob” And that’s just insulting. Steve did everything in his power to put HYDRA down with the Valkyrie, and it’s not his fault the people he left behind basically opened the doors to S.H.I.E.L.D. and invited Zola and his ilk inside their bosom like a whole nest of pit vipers in a baby’s cradle.
And it’s not like they’d announce their plans on Twitter, anyway, whatever this idiot thinks.
Oh, no, and then there’s @GoldBoyPeanut who says: “Falcon’s dog is cute. Is he the team mascot? #PreciousPupper”
How did he get dragged into this? First of all, Steve didn’t mention him in either of the two tweets he’s posted so far. And second of all, Lucky isn’t even his dog!
Okay, this is plenty. Steve can handle this or not, but Sam’s not going to keep watching the tweets roll in. He’ll chip in if he’s needed—and asked to—but otherwise, this is not a fire he wants to roll around in. They can leave him out of it.
Valorie
—Washington D.C. | Tuesday 16 October 2012 | 2:30 p.m.—
It’s a slow afternoon at the office—October is one of the worst months for real estate here, so she’s not surprised—so she’s on her phone scrolling through Twitter in between scanning the same old listings looking for some nugget of gold amidst the draff, since that’s apparently the most newsworthy thing going on at the moment.
Captain America isn’t her cup of coffee, but every time another tweet of his comes along, Carl or one of the others stops by the water cooler to share it with whoever is taking a break in the break room. Which is directly across the hall from her office. So she knows there are more tweets to follow the first two, and she has to admit that some of them are interesting.
Apparently, Captain America thinks the future is “nice. Has its ups and downs. The food is way better, with a few exceptions. We boiled things. #FutureThoughts”, which she thinks is a nice way of saying that he isn’t going to get into the details, but thanks for your interest.
It probably gets old really quick having people ask you what you think about something as enormous as the shift between being in the middle of a world war coming off the Great Depression to suddenly being in the middle of a glorious future with food on every shelf far surpassing the needs of those who frequent the stores.
He’s jovial, telling the first dozen or so people who welcomed him to Twitter some variation on “Thanks! It’s good to be here.” Not everyone gets those responses after that, though. Again, it probably gets old really quick. Only people whose welcomes are accompanied by some question or other get replies, and not even all of those.
Oh, there’s a nasty one.
Valorie scowls.
“How are you okay with a mass murderer on the team? It’s not a good look. #JigsawKiller” from someone named Darius Stryker.
First off, Mr Red Star is not a common garden variety mass murderer. He’s much more than that, with his targets precision-selected by a sense of right and wrong and justice that is both highly developed and fine-tuned to only pick off those who aren’t worthy to continue living.
Second off, it is a very good look for the Avengers to have noticed what all of his targets had in common and to look beyond his violent methodology to accept him on their team. The whole “Jigsaw killer” thing is just insulting. He’s chosen the name Jigsaw, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’s referencing some horror movie franchise.
Captain America doesn’t know what an AMA is, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t know what Reddit is. Either way, it’s unlikely he’ll show up on the Red Star subreddit to answer questions about what it’s like to live in the same building with Mr Red Star.
Oh, and here’s an interesting one.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Lucky is Jigsaw’s dog. We just walk him. He also has a cat. Spay and neuter your pets. #BeResponsible
That golden retriever/yellow lab mix looking dog is apparently Mr Red Star’s dog! And he’s got a cat as well?
Valorie heads over to the Avengers subreddit and clicks on the link to their wiki page. Falcon’s dog had never interested her—she’s more a cat person and hadn’t been interested in the Avengers for their own sake beyond the interest everyone had for them after the aliens attacked New York. But here’s the new information, and some pictures of the dog in question, Lucky.
Only one eye, red star tag on the black collar—maybe a merchandizing opportunity to be had there—thick, healthy looking fur. And not Falcon’s dog, but Jigsaw’s.
She wonders where Mr Red Star found the dog, whether the dog was rescued from some abusive owner or just found on the streets. Mr Red Star doesn’t seem like he’d have been in any position to adopt a dog through a shelter or pet store.
As for the cat, she can’t see any references to the cat other than the new blurb stating that there is a cat. Fascinating.
Maybe she could… Hm. Valorie’s mind swirls with thoughts about potential additions to her Etsy shop. If there are pets involved, maybe some star- and puzzle-piece-themed pet supplies would do well.
Anything she can do to help Mr Red Star be ready for whatever legal troubles might come his way. He might have Tony Stark in his corner now to cover many of these things, but it’s never wise to have all your support coming from any one place.
Valorie makes a note on a nearby sticky—pet food bowls? leashes?—and goes back to Twitter. She’d heard the latest exclamations about what’s going on there, so there’s probably something worth taking a look at on the other platform.
Ah, she sees as she opens Twitter back up. Yes, there’s something there about Lucky and how the dog lost his eye. They don’t know, apparently. Mr Red Star found the dog with the eye already missing. And with a limp. Severely malnourished and lonely, in all likelihood, if the dog was a one-eyed, limping stray.
A rescue operation, then, and a successful one if the dog pictured on the Avengers wiki is the same one. That dog is healthy with gleaming fur and a happy expression, and no mention is made of the dog limping.
Truly, Mr Red Star is a force for good in this world, able to dispatch evil with all expediency and also nurture those things that are good.
She’s sure his cat is lovely.
Cindy
—Washington D.C. | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 7:30 a.m.—
So the serial mass murdering vigilante known as the D.C. Slasher, Red Star Killer, and Jigsaw Avenger is also a pet owner. Interesting.
Cindy waits for what is essentially the pop culture hour on the news to be over—not just noise about Captain America on Twitter with a few exemplar tweets to give a picture of the general state of his Twitter contributions, but also an ad hoc update on how the team is doing based on the tweets—and then turns the television off.
She looks over at Paul, who is simmering with some idea or other.
“What’s on your mind?” she asks.
They’ve eaten dinner, washed the dishes and watched the news—such as it was—and now it’s technically time for her to go upstairs and write for an hour or two. She’s got a juicy chapter in progress about, but not actually about because she doesn’t want to be sued, the senator who cheated on his wife and his mistress with some new slip of a thing.
That said, she likes Paul a lot. She doesn’t want to chase him away by not giving him a chance to be vocal about his thoughts and his needs in the relationship. He was so sensitive and supportive during the chaos that last day of May when the killer himself attacked that one congressman and his whole room full of political contacts. Except that one intern who made it without any more injury than a bruised butt from falling.
Yes, Paul was a sensitive soul, and still is. She doesn’t want to lose him.
“I’m just amazed that there’s a pet. Pets, plural,” he says. He shakes his head. “Who could scale a hotel at dawn, brutally dismember some of its occupants, vanish into the morning sunlight without a trace, and then go home to a dog and a cat?”
Cindy thinks there’s something more on his mind than that, that this is just the tip of the actual thought that’s circling his mind right now. But if that’s what he wants to discuss right now, she’s content to let the rest of the thought make itself known in due time.
“I’m sure he cleaned up first,” she says. “It’s not like he would have brought the blood home to them.”
At least, she’d like to think that. Because what kind of guy would come home and track blood all over the carpet where the pets could lick it up? Ugh. Pets get into everything. How could you be sure you didn’t leave something out on a counter that was some sort of poison, like grapes or chocolate? Or lilies.
She had a pet growing up, and then one of her high school boyfriends had left a box of chocolates out on the coffee table while they fooled around in her bedroom, and the dog had gotten into them. She got in so much trouble for that, and that wasn’t even the worst of it—she’d loved that dog way more than the boyfriend. Losing Lambchop had made the grounding seem like nothing.
All she could do for days after school was cry in her bedroom anyway, so what did it matter she wasn’t allowed to go cry somewhere else?
Imagine leaving worse than chocolates around? Imagine you left a bloody knife out and your pet cut itself open with it? Or licked it clean only to cut their poor tongue up? No, she can’t quite imagine how the killer in question kept a pet—dog, cat, or both at once—and avoided hurting them.
That kind of care… Well, it’s humanizing. And she’s read the tabloids and the letters to the editors of the local papers. And she’s heard the pundits yammering on about where this Jigsaw came from and what must have been done to him that he requires so much rehabilitation and all of that. Secret evil science projects—maybe HYDRA—and spooky triggers that can prompt him to go commit murder across the country.
That’s been sort of humanizing. It’s made him more than a killer. Made him someone who needed a bit of sympathy.
But she’s not sure she’s ready to give him “pet owner” sympathy just yet. He did pull people into actual, literal pieces of people in the very same building where she was working at the very same moment, where she still works.
They’ve completely redone that whole part of the hotel and it’s still unlived in months later because no one wants to stay on that part of the fifth floor. She doesn’t blame them. She wouldn’t want to stay there, either. Not to sleep, not to cut a shady deal, not even to make fundraising calls and sign routine paperwork.
“Do you think we’re ready for a pet?” Paul asks after a moment. “I don’t know if you’re more a dog or a cat person, maybe a fish person…”
Cindy laughs. Fish person. Fish tanks are liabilities waiting to flood your living room, destroy your carpet, and get your security deposit stolen away by the greedy landlords when you move out whether you remediated the damage promptly or didn’t.
“It was just a thought,” Paul says as if it didn’t matter. “We don’t need a pet.”
“Oh, no,” Cindy says, putting a hand on his arm. “That was just a laugh about fish. We can get a pet.”
“Yeah?”
She nods. “We’d have to be really sure to keep the place spotless, though. I lost a dog to carelessness when I was younger—a box of chocolates. I couldn’t go through that again.”
“Maybe we’d be better off with a cat, anyway,” Paul says. “We do both work long hours.”
Cindy thinks that would work. She’s never had a cat before. But if a serial mass murdering vigilante on the streets can handle a cat, how hard could it be?
Tony
—New York City | Tuesday 16 October 2012 | 9:30 p.m.—
Tony flicks his fingers at the holo screen in the lab, looking for tweets that catch his eye—either because JARVIS has flagged them or because they have juicy amounts of interaction that indicate mighty flame wars or worse.
When Capsicle had come to him this morning asking to be set up on Twitter instead of going for his morning run or workout or whatever he does before dawn, Tony had known it was a golden opportunity for some truly outrageous social media spectacles.
And while he’d started out the boring way, moaning about bananas of all things, the Twitterverse has definitely lit up during the course of the day.
“‘Why doesn’t Jigsaw walk his own dog?’” Tony reads aloud. “And the hashtag is ‘BeResponsible.’ Just like when Cap told everyone to spay and neuter their pets. ‘BeResponsible.’ Burn.”
Bruce nods but doesn’t look up from his lesson plan. And Tony will allow it. Bruce has that lecture he’s gotta give, and it’s got some really interesting points, but they need to be joined together just so if they aren’t going to bore a less intelligent audience.
“That’s a good point, really,” Tony says. “Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood says to be responsible with your pet ownership in the same tweet as he says Jigster doesn’t walk his own dog, and someone actually calls him on it. Nice.”
Of course, the reason Jigsaw doesn’t walk that dog is that the less he’s out of the Tower the better, and he’s got therapy morning, noon and night every day of the week, anyway, and can’t skip that to walk the dog.
The public doesn’t realize how important it is for Jigsaw to stay inside. Just wait until there’s a HYDRA collection squad out on the street gunning Jigsaw down—or trying to, anyway—and Jigsaw is enraged enough by the prospect of harm coming to his pupper that he paints the street red with the blood of his enemies and the City has to get a powerwashing crew out there for days on end.
That’s reason number one why Junior Birdman gives the dog his walkies, and usually with Oh Captain, My Captain along for the walk these days. It’s just safer. And cleaner. And friendlier for the environment.
But Capsicle’s response—just the two words “time constraints” as a reply—is probably the better explanation. And simpler. The world at large does know that there is some serious rehabilitation going on in the Tower to get Jigsaw on an even keel, but there’s no need for the world to know that the therapy schedule keeps him too busy to walk his dog.
Really, if Stevedore wanted to play it wise, he wouldn’t have answered that question in the first place.
That’s the course he took with the baker’s dozen of tweets and retweets demanding to know why he was “trying to make that killer look soft and approachable,” and claiming that it was “disgusting” and “unworthy of you” and asking “so what if the Jigsaw killer has pets?”
Something tells Tony that his team leader is brilliant on the literal battlefield and a little less brilliant on the social media battlefield. It seems like he wasn’t really expecting to have to deal with all of the trolls, and he doesn’t quite understand the need to keep the troll food in its locked containment box rather than scattering it like corn in a chicken coop.
“Oh, this is—”
Tony shakes his head and reads the tweet again.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Still no flying cars, @TheBetterStark, but I’ll gladly take marriage equality instead. #FutureThoughts #GoodNight
First, good on Steve for @ing him. That’s a fun one, poking at the Stark Industries promise of a flying car that Howard made back in the 40s. Of course, Rogers doesn’t know about Lola. Very few people know about Lola.
But second, he cannot believe Steve Fight-me Rogers lobbed that irradiated can of worms out into the crowd like that and then had the audacity to essentially sign off for the night.
What an absolute shit storm he just kicked up. What a legend.
Actually, he can totally believe it.
Captain America would just come out of the closet on Twitter and then drop the mic and walk away. That’s just about exactly how he’d do it, yeah.
Oh, the media frenzy that will descend upon this fresh carcass of a tweet. And with the speculation of just what he means by that swirling in the Twitterverse like blood in a shark tank, that “good night” tag meaning he won’t respond right away and also maybe that he’s about to have a very good night, possibly in relation to marriage equality…
“Damn, Cap,” Tony murmurs appreciatively. “Forget feeding the trolls. You are the trolls.”
Bruce does look up at that. “Do I want to know?”
Tony laughs. “Oh yeah. Let me tell you all about it.”
Notes:
Content Warning: There is speculation about what kind of dangers a pet could encounter in a serial killer’s home, as well as a brief and vague description of a character having lost a dog to a box of chocolates in the distant past. No animals are actually harmed in the present tense of the story.
Chapter 113: Jigsaw | And I just can’t wait till the day when you knock on my door
Notes:
Chapter title from “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina And The Waves.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
“Good morning, Jigsaw,” Yasmin greets it with a bright smile. “How are you feeling this morning?”
It is feeling… It is feeling…
It tries to push aside the feeling of bubbles inside the stomach, the last fluttery remains of its having spent the last thirty-seven minutes tangled up in the other asset’s arms and legs, snuggling close and sometimes turning the skin face up toward the other asset’s to receive soft and warm kisses against the lips.
That is not what Yasmin is asking it, it knows. Yasmin is asking for the internal feelings, the emotion-feelings, the feelings that happen inside the mind and not inside the rest of the body.
And how it is feeling inside the mind is…
Itchy.
Normally, itchy would be a physical feeling word, like the itch of the eyes when they were still just starting to heal, or the itch from the peeling skin around the eyes and temples as it finished healing, or the itch of when sometimes a tiny creature with a high-pitched whine sound would bite it.
But this is an inside kind of itchy. It is not the body itching, but something deep inside the body that is not physical but is there. Itching.
It mimes scratching at the right forearm with the metal fingers, and then shrugs. Signs “inside” and “everywhere.”
“You’re feeling itchy?” she asks. “Like you need to scratch an insect bite, maybe? Or is it your eyes and burns healing still, perhaps?”
It nods and then shakes the head. See-saws the hand. It cannot find the word for this feeling, but…
It sits down and pulls the tablet over to draw on. Draws a figure with the many braids and the metal club over her shoulder, and a bag in her free hand. Draws a square with squiggles around it—the sandwich with the lettuce and vegetables poking out between the two pieces of bread.
Then it draws a clock, and the arms of the clock are both held upward, pointing up to the top of the circle. It draws a box on wheels followed by a box on wheels followed by a box on wheels, all of them connected and on a line that connects two dots.
Over one dot, it carefully draws out the letter shapes that make the word HERE and then on the other dot, it copies the word—so much easier to just copy the shapes that the mind already put on the tablet—and adds a T in front of it. HERE, the first dot says. THERE, the other dot says, even though the sounds are different. In between the dots, in between HERE and THERE, are the boxes on wheels going from the one dot to the other dot.
Then it puts the feeder with the braids into one of the boxes on wheels and drags a finger from THERE to HERE, showing that the feeder with the braids will be traveling inside of the large boxes with wheels—a train.
She is coming HERE, to the hive building, is THERE right now, in the original hunting grounds. And she will be THERE in the original hunting grounds for another day, and then will get into a box on wheels and be carried HERE. Tomorrow. When the arms of the clocks are all the way up.
“Someone is coming by train at noon?” Yasmin asks. “And you’re excited, is that right?”
It nods. Excited is not the exact word it wants, but excited does apply. It is very excited to see her again, the feeder with the braids.
It wants the feeder with the braids to already be HERE, at the hive building, so that it can see her again and show her all of the wonderful things that it has now, in their treasure boxes with the sea shells and the ribbons and buttons. It wants to show the feeder with the braids the lump of clay it made figures out of with Yasmin, back when the eyes were still healing and it could hardly see anything.
It swipes to a new screen on the tablet and pulls up pictures of the treasure boxes, and the scrap book pages, and even the so-warm fuzzy socks that the other asset gave to it. It has so many pictures on the tablet now, so many that the tablet is like a scrap book of scattered pictures. But it is slowly putting the pictures into order that does not come from pain, putting them into “folders” and “albums” that are just like baskets in the sorting game but looking different.
It signs that it will show the feeder with the braids all of these things, all of the things it has made pictures of.
“That sounds like it will be a lot of fun, showing and telling all about these things.”
It still does not like that word, but it knows that Yasmin means it not the way that HYDRA means it. It is okay. It will not remind her that it does not like the word—after all, it is supposed to be working on accepting the word’s alternate definition, still.
Yasmin smiles. “Is this Monesha who is coming to visit?”
Nod, nod, nod. The feeder with the braids. Yasmin knows about the feeder with the braids, yes. It has told her all about the feeder with the braids from the original hunting grounds, who fed it a sandwich and some fruit and some crunchy orange logs that had the spotted person on the front of the bag. And who gave it a yellow-fuzz-ball. And some chicken that was white for the dog.
The feeder with the braids is on the recovery collage. The freedom collage. Her metal club is there, and the sandwich, and the yellow fuzz ball. And so are the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages, and the many colorful felt pens that it loves to use.
“What are your plans for the day when she gets here?”
Oh, the feeder with the braids will not be here today. It taps the wrist and then moves the fingertip forward toward the other fingertips. Tomorrow. The future. After today.
“I see. So there’s plenty of time still to plan some enjoyable things to do.”
It nods. It wants to show the feeder with the braids everything.
It wants… It wants to feed the feeder with the braids, too, but that is not something that it is allowed to do. Feeders feed assets, but assets do not feed feeders. That is not the correct order of things.
But it has so much inside of the refrigerator in the rooms for assets that it would like to share with the feeder with the braids. It has spiky cherries that are like grapes inside but with such big seeds that cannot be eaten. And green-inside furry potatoes, and another gigantic white carrot. There is a pomegranate, too!
The feeder—Caroline—was very generous in their session yesterday, so it has a lot of things in the rooms for assets. Things the other asset will not want to help it eat, but maybe the feeder with the braids will want to help it eat, if it can find a way to share that is not feeding a feeder.
It wants to show the feeder with the braids all of these things that it can eat now, wants to share the things with the feeder with the braids.
Oh! And— And—
It goes to another new page on the tablet and draws several hands of bananas, with all their curved fingers splaying upward from the wrist where they connect at one end. Then a brick with a rounded top, like a rectangle but soft. A loaf of bread, and an arrow pointing from the piled up hands of bananas to the brick-loaf.
The flying man said this morning that there is a kind of bread made out of bananas, and that they would make some of this bread with a lot of spotty brown and yellow bananas, some with crunchy pieces of cut up brain-nuts inside, and others with tiny pyramids of chocolate inside, instead. Chips. The tiny pyramids are called chips, even though they are not flat and thin and made out of potatoes.
They can make some of the bread from bananas today and maybe it can share some of the bread from bananas with the feeder with the braids. There will be some left over after they eat and eat and eat the bread from bananas, because there are so many spotty brown and yellow bananas that there will be so much of the bread from them.
So much.
That is what they are doing after this session with Yasmin. They are going to go into the kitchen and they are going to make things out of other things. Baking, the flying man calls it. It does not know how spotty brown and yellow bananas will turn into a bread, but it does not know how corn can turn into a bread, either, and it has eaten two different types of bread made from corn. So it trusts the flying man that it can be done.
Yasmin nods, her smile as big as ever. “Wow, you have a lot of things on your mind, Jigsaw. I can see why you might be feeling itchy with anticipation for all of that.”
It nods. It wants everything to happen now, but it knows that things cannot all happen now. If the feeder with the braids came today, there would be no time for making the bread out of bananas, not before she arrived.
“Do you have any concerns or worries about Monesha’s visit tomorrow? Anything you’d like to discuss or get ready for your time together?”
It stares at Yasmin. There is the bread from bananas to get ready, yes, but that is later. And there is the tour of the rooms for assets—and the trees for cats, and the little cat, and all of the toys and things for the little cat to play with—but there is nothing to get ready there. Everything is already in the rooms for assets to be shown to the feeder with the braids.
Eventually, it shakes the head. No, there are no concerns. Why would it be concerned? A visit from the feeder with the braids is an excellent thing, a thing to look forward to without trepidation.
“Alright,” Yasmin says. “And how about everything with Clint? Is that still going well?”
The bubbly feeling in the stomach starts up again. It has not spent every spare waking moment trying to put lips onto the other asset’s lips or neck or jaw or shoulder, but it has spent a lot of waking moments trying, yes, and some sleeping moments, too—not when it is awake and the other asset is asleep, but when it is asleep and the sleeping images play in the mind.
They are not nightmares, not bad or scary sleeping images. They are very good sleeping images. It would be upset to wake up from these sleeping images except that every time it has woken up from them this week, the other asset has been right there beside it, and that has made it feel warm and bubbly inside, like the acid drink that burned the mouth and throat but that made so many fizzy popping sounds in the glass.
It draws the bottle that the acid drink had been in—it knows the shape of the bottle even though it had not been able to see the bottle the night they got back from the mission and had the delicious fajitas with mushrooms and peppers and onions. It got to hold the bottle, and it felt the shape.
It draws a second bottle, this time with a little block above it—the lid of the bottle, untwisted and off—and all of the bubbles inside the bottle that had not been there before.
“Is it a good thing to feel like a soda bottle, Jigsaw?”
It nods. Very, very good. Better than squirming little creatures in the stomach. It draws a stomach filled with worms and then crosses it out. Bad. Stomachs filled with worms are nervous like something could go wrong at any moment. But bottles filled with acid drink are excited and ready to fizz and bubble and make merry noises in the glass.
“Okay. Well, I’m glad it’s going well for you with Clint. Are you still kissing each other?”
The skin face stretches wide in a grin, and it nods happily. There is kissing, which it signs many times—so many kisses for the assets—and also hand holding and cheeks nuzzled into shoulders, and faces nuzzled into the crooks of necks where necks meet shoulders. And spooning—little spoons and big spoons, and even…
It draws two assets facing each other, one with the star on the left shoulder, and the other with plastic crescent behind the ear. The assets are curved—like bananas or like a 5 and a 2—with space in the middle for a little cat to go. And the assets can kiss each other and hold hands and spoon at the same time! There is no big spoon and no little spoon, but just two spoons cupping a little cat in the middle.
It adds the dog at the feet of the two assets.
“That looks like a very enjoyable way to spend time with each other,” Yasmin says. “And you still feel comfortable with everything that’s happening? Nothing is moving too quickly?”
It frowns. Moving too quickly? They did not move much at all. And everything was so deliciously slow. Time seemed to stand still, even though there was the thum-thump, thum-thump of the other asset’s heart that kept time for them.
Maybe that is what Yasmin is asking about. Were the assets’ hearts beating too fast?
It shakes the head. No. There were times when the hearts were beating very fast, yes, but not too fast. Neither asset was in any danger. It knows very well what a heart sounds like that is beating wrong, either out of order or too fast or too slow.
It signs that the hearts were beating just right for the moment, demonstrating the cadence of this asset’s heart and then that of the other asset’s heart, and then smiles. Both assets with their hearts beating so close to each other. It could feel the other asset’s heart through the ribs and muscles of the other asset’s chest, and could feel the pulse in the other asset’s neck under the other asset’s jaw while kissing the other asset.
So good. So strong, so alive.
“That’s good,” Yasmin says softly. “And you’ll tell me if that changes? I want to make sure you’re both enjoying everything and that neither one of you is feeling uncertain or pressured for more than you’re ready for.”
There is no pressure at all, and while it is sometimes uncertain, everything it has been uncertain about has been wonderful. It spent so long face-to-face spooning like the drawing with the other asset yesterday that it was almost late for the session with Caroline.
Which would have been very bad, especially since there were the new spiky cherries to receive and the pomegranate that is “in season now.”
When foods are in season, they taste better than when they are not in season, Caroline had explained. And sometimes when a food is not in season, it is just not available at all. But that is okay, because when it comes back into season, it will be even better than it would have been if it had been available not in season.
It is still not sure about the seasons—it knows that sometimes it is very cold outside and sometimes it is very hot outside and sometimes it is somewhere in between these temperatures outside, and that is what a season is: the temperature outside. But how the temperature would affect whether a food is available, or how that food tastes… That it does not understand.
It is a good thing there are feeders in the world to know and understand these things for everyone else.
Feeders like the feeder with the braids. Monesha.
It sounds that out in the mind, runs the shapes of the letters across the mind over and over again like a coin slipping between the fingers and twirling and catching the light with every flip and slip.
It calls the expert without the words Yasmin in the mind because she asked it to and prefers to be called that. And the expert with the signs is Zoe, because it was asked to call her that. And Caroline, the feeder who comes two times every week with delicious non-reward foods in the box on wheels that is not a train but a cooler.
Maybe it should think of the feeder with the braids as Monesha and not as the feeder with the braids. Maybe she would like that the way the other experts all like it when it thinks of them by their names.
It could try that, and could even make a name tile for her in the AAC app.
That is something that it could do to prepare for her visit.
It will need to draw a picture of the feeder with the braids and color it in so that it is not the only picture of someone that is not colored in, and then make the tiles with the pictures. One to say… One to say “braid feeder,” it thinks. Yes. That will fit under the tile. And the other to say: Monesha. Then it will have tiles for all of the experts, even the one from the original hunting grounds.
It wonders what the— what Monesha’s name sign is. Everyone else has a name sign. She should have one, too. The other asset can help it with that.
The other asset said that she was learning how to make and how to understand all of the shapes and signs for communicating without sounds. Maybe she already has a name sign and it just does not know what that name sign is yet. It can ask her. Yes. It will ask her.
Tomorrow.
Notes:
Time to play "Guess! That! Fruit!" What is it Jigsaw has in his refrigerator? Hmm... Ha!
Chapter 114: Jigsaw | If I knew you were comin’ (I’d’ve baked a cake)
Notes:
Chapter title from “If I Knew You Were Comin' (I'd've Baked a Cake)” by Ethel Merman.
In which Sam, Steve, and Jigsaw spend five thousand words baking banana bread… Maybe don’t read while you’re hungry?
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 9:30 a.m.—
There are so many bananas in the main kitchen. A pile of them.
It has counted. There are thirty-one bananas, in four hand-clusters. Some of the hand-clusters have five or even six banana fingers in them, but there is a hand of bananas with only two banana fingers in it, too. And also a lonely banana without a hand.
Not very even, but then there is no rule saying that bananas have to come with five fingers on a hand the way actual hands tend to do.
The bananas are not new bananas with their light yellow smoothness tinged with pale green at the ends where the fingers connect to the hand. They are spotty bananas in deep yellow with tiny brown spots everywhere all clustered together and with brown streaks and splotches all over them.
New bananas are firm and filled out, but these bananas seem to have shrunken in on themselves a bit. They are rounder, plumper, but less robustly shaped. Some of the brown bits look actually black, even, though that may just be the eyes not seeing them right.
These are very old bananas. It has never seen a banana like these ones outside of a metal box outside of a food store, where food that is still good to eat but not so good to buy goes.
They smell more like bananas than even the medium bananas do, when they are bright yellow—not light and not deep, but just very yellow—with an occasional spray of brown freckles. These bananas make the whole kitchen smell like a very strong banana, making all the other smells recede in the distance.
And there are so many of them. Thirty-one of them.
The flying man said that they would make the bread from bananas after its morning session with Yasmin, and it has been after the morning session with Yasmin for over an hour now. But they had to eat breakfast, of course, and the other asset was so tired and wanted to eat in the rooms for assets instead of coming to the kitchen to eat the stacks and stacks of delicious fluffy pancakes with the softly melting butter and the gently oozing syrup so golden and brown.
So it has been ages since it was officially time to make the bread from bananas and they are only getting ready to do it.
The itch of anticipation shivers through it. It is glad that they are making the bread from bananas today and not tomorrow. If it knew that the feeder with the braids was going to be here soon, and they were still dithering over whether everything was ready to make the bread from bananas, it would not know what to do about this eagerness and sense of time running out.
But how could time be running out? It is a Wednesday, and there is nothing it has to do and nowhere it has to be until the lunch meal and then the afternoon session with Yasmin. There is plenty of time. There is no rush. They can relax and make the bread from bananas whenever the flying man says they are ready.
It pokes a metal fingertip into the side of one of the smaller bananas on the counter. It is a soft banana, giving way easily under the prodding. The banana is ready to turn into bread. It just does not know how to do that.
“I take it you’re ready to make some banana bread, already, huh?” says the flying man, setting two white paper bags full of something heavy on the counter with a twin pair of thumps.
It nods. It has been ready for over an hour now, except that they did need to eat breakfast. That is true. And it enjoyed breakfast. The pancakes, the butter, the syrup. The eggs with the runny yolks and flat white discs around them. The bowl of fruit—apples and pears and grapes and strawberries and baby oranges…
It enjoyed breakfast, yes. But it was still thinking about the banana hoard in the kitchen while eating the breakfast. Not very mindful of it. It should focus on the food it is eating, and not on other things.
“Well, first we need to get all our ingredients set up.” The flying man adds two of the cardstock prisons of eggs to the counter. “That way we know for sure whether we’re missing anything before we get started mixing things up.”
He puts another two white paper bags on the counter, smaller than the first two, but just as heavy sounding. And then still more things. A plastic bottle of thick yellow liquid, a short canister of something called baking soda, a stack of small cans with pictures of smashed up pineapple pieces on the sides, some spices from the cabinet.
“That means we won’t have to stop partway through and risk ruining the banana bread.”
It puts the ingredients into a line along the counter, tapping each one in turn. So many things have to go on the counter before there can be any making of bread from bananas. And not all of it is ingredients.
There are large bowls like for holding faces underwater in when there is no room for a whole bathtub to submerge an entire head and shoulders. And there are glass cups with pointed triangles on the rims and handles and red marks all along the sides. And there are other cups, metal ones, that nest inside of each other and have flat rims and long straight-out handles. And a keyring of nested spoons, all attached to the ring by the end of their handles.
These things cannot go inside of the bread made from bananas, but they must play a role in creating the bread from bananas.
“What do we need the oven set to?” the clown man asks as he enters the kitchen.
“Three fifty,” says the flying man. “So you’re joining us, after all, huh?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” The clown man finishes turning the dial on the front of the oven and then comes over to the lines of ingredients and tools. He kisses the flying man’s cheek without asking first. “I just had to send off a quick tweet,” he adds.
The flying man laughs. “More about the flying cars or more trolling your followers?”
Cars do not fly. Planes fly, and jets, and helicopters, and quinjets, and helicarriers, and all kinds of other transportation vehicles—including spaceships!—but not cars. And it does not know what the rest means. Trolling. Followers. No one is following the clown man right now. They are just standing in the kitchen putting off making bread from bananas.
“I’m not trolling them. Anti-vaxxers are dangerous idiots and scourges on society.” The clown man scowls, but is apparently scowling at these scourges on society, whatever they are, and not at anyone in the kitchen. “Polio was no fun and it didn’t just go away on its own. Whooping cough and measles killed people. People I knew. Almost killed me.”
The flying man nods and continues to get things out of cabinets, like a stack of metal brick molds and a roll of paper. “Right, but—”
The clown man shakes his head and keeps talking. “These people are so afraid of this ‘autism’ thing that they’d rather their kids die than need a little extra love and attention to thrive. And the vaccines don’t even cause it! It’s disgusting. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
“Steve,” the flying man says. “I know. I agree with you. But you’re preaching to the choir and we’re trying to convince you that future bananas aren’t evil imposters.”
The flying man nods at it, and it blinks. It is not sure what it has to do with the preaching or the choir, or even what those things are, and it is not an evil imposter. Why is the flying man nodding his head toward it?
“Think we can keep it calm and have some, uh, some enjoyable baking adventures?”
“Sorry,” the clown man says. “I just get mad at all the progress people are trying to roll back.”
“I know, man. It’s hard. But we’re not Twitter.”
It looks between them. Are they having a fight? An argument? They are not doing the thing the other asset does with the ballerina woman, where they say words that belong in an insult but their voices and faces are full of smiles and laughter. But they don’t sound angry at each other, either.
It pokes the nearest banana with a fingertip and decides to ignore whatever the clown man and flying man are doing right now that is argument-adjacent. It does not involve this asset, and it does not result in bread, so it will just pretend they are not doing whatever it is they are doing.
“No, you’re not,” the clown man says, sounding contrite. “I’ll keep my tweets to myself.”
The flying man is finally finished getting ingredients and tools set out on the kitchen counter, and there is only space on the island of countertop in the middle of the kitchen now for doing anything with all of the ingredients and tools.
“Okay, Jigsaw,” the flying man says. “Ready to get started?”
Is it? It has been ready since the very end of the session with Yasmin! Yes, it is ready.
“‘Kay, so Steve, you’re on the dry ingredients.” The flying man shows the clown man his phone, and the clown man nods. “We need all of that in a large bowl.”
“On it.”
The flying man pulls a bowl from the stack of bowls and hands the bowl to it. “I’m putting you on banana duty, Jigsaw. We need to peel four or five of these bananas and mash up the insides in this bowl.”
It nods. They are making bread from bananas! It is responsible for the most important part of the mission—the bananas themselves. It will achieve perfect mission success.
“Use a fork, not your fingers,” the flying man says, handing it a fork, “and we’ll measure up how much banana mush you get out of them. We need two cups.”
It will do so, so well. It is good at mashing things up, even if it has never used a fork to do so before.
The kitchen is full of sounds, then, while they all work toward the mission completion of a bread made from bananas.
The flying man is cutting out wide strips of paper and is spraying something from an aerosolized can into the brick molds before pressing the paper strips inside with some of the paper hanging on the outside of the molds.
The clown man is lifting up dainty spoonfuls of white powder and placing them in some of the metal cups with the straight-out handles, and then scraping powder off into the bags again when it goes over the top of the metal cups.
And it is pressing the fork into the peeled bananas again and again, smashing and mashing, mashing and smashing, making the soft banana into slimy chunks and oozing slop. It does not look anything at all like bread, but it is definitely what the flying man asked it to do. It does not know how this will turn into bread.
The clown man spoons out a very small amount of salt and some other white powder that comes in the canister, and some cinnamon—it knows what that is, and it smells so good. And there is some sugar that was in the smaller white paper bags but gets spooned into the cups with the straight-out handles as well.
And the flying man is done with the paper and the brick molds, and is cracking eggs into a bowl—happy eggs with bright orange yolks and pale brown shells that come from happy chickens on a range—and pouring the thick yellow liquid into a glass cup with the red markings, and pouring out just two little splashes of something dark from a tiny bottle that smells like vanilla ice cream. These things, plus the clown man’s sugar and a can of the pineapple without any of the juice, he calls the “wet ingredients.”
“You want to drink the pineapple juice, Jigsaw?” the flying man asks, passing along a cup with the juice inside of it.
It does not like pineapple as much as it likes most of the other fruits it knows about, but when the pineapple comes out of a can, it tastes different from when it is a spiky fruit that needs to be cut up. Tastes better. And so yes, it does want to drink the juice. It will not feel so much like the pineapple is trying to eat the insides of the mouth as fresh-from-the-fruit juice feels.
“Those are looking good,” the flying man says after inspecting its mashed up bananas while it downs the juice in just a few gulps. “Let’s see how much we have there.”
They have just a little bit more than the “two cups” that the flying man measures out, and so some of the banana stays in the bowl while the rest is mixed in with the whisked-together wet ingredients. That will mean there is more banana in the next batch it mashes up, but that is fine, the flying man assures it.
Good. It has accomplished the mission, and did so well.
The flying man adds the mixed up wet ingredients to the biggest bowl that the clown man has been stirring with a whisk, and then instructs the clown man to stir until everything is “just” combined.
“If you mix it too much, the bread will be tough,” the flying man says. “So just mix it until there aren’t any obvious lumps of flour anywhere.”
The resulting mixture is like chunky concrete made out of bananas and flowers—that is the white powder, flower, even though it doesn’t resemble any of the flowers it has ever seen—and it does not understand how this is supposed to turn into a bread. But concrete does harden up into something very much like the rocks that form it, so maybe this banana and flowers concrete will… turn into something else?
The clown man pours half of the concrete into each of the brick molds, on top of the paper strips, and then the brick molds go into the oven, where the air is so, so hot now.
“So that’s going to stay in there for an hour,” the flying man says. “Then we’ll take it out and get it cooled down before eating any of it. In the meantime, we have some time to kill before we make the next batch.”
It does not think time is something that can be killed. And it knows how to kill just about everything that can possibly be killed. It would know if time could be killed. It would have had plenty of experience in killing time, if that were the case. It has plenty of experience killing everything else.
But maybe it is just one of those phrase turns that the hamburger technician is still teaching it about, where the words do not mean what they seem to mean, but mean something else that might not even be related to the words themselves.
It taps the wrist and signs “kill” and then the question sign.
“Oh, uh.” The flying man looks uncomfortable, like a thought has occurred to him that he does not like. “Just means that we have an hour before we can do more on the banana bread project. What do you want to do for that hour?”
It wants to make more of the banana and flowers concrete so there will be more than two bricks of bread from bananas. But it did not take nearly an hour to do this first “batch.” It is too soon to start the next one.
It goes to the corner of the kitchen away from all of the mess that the clown man is busily rinsing out in the sink, and brings the tablet over to the flying man. It opens up the snow man game and and starts a new game with the finger spelling.
The clue, it shows the flying man, is “Friend” again, but this time there are a different number of boxes across the top of the screen. Three boxes in the top row and then six in the middle row and another three in the bottom row.
The flying man seems to listen to something, maybe the voice without a mouth, and then he nods. “Okay, so like hangman, but we guess with ASL fingerspelling letters. Got it.”
It frowns. The voice without a mouth must be involved, but it does not know what was said. It asks the question sign.
“Oh,” the flying man says. “Sorry. Snowman. It’s the same basic game, just called something else. I grew up calling it hangman, that’s all.”
The flying man looks uncomfortable again, like he thinks he’s messed something up and doesn’t know how to correct it. But he makes an I shape with his little finger all the same, and the letter I appears near the middle of the middle word in the trio of words at the top of the screen.
“Did I get one?”
It nods. And then it looks at the tablet again, thinking that it will make its own guess now, but instead staring at the pulsing glow around the “Project” tile in the upper left corner of the screen.
They are not in the room where therapy happens and there is not a white space on the wall to project the screen onto. It wonders what will happen when it taps the tile, and then decides that it will tap it and find out.
The front of the refrigerator starts to glow, light coming from the ceiling projecting the tablet’s screen against the door, just like one of those glowing panels that floats in the hamburger technician’s lab.
The voice without a mouth must be involved, must be making it so that everyone can see the tablet without crowding into this asset’s space.
“Neat,” says the clown man at the sink, looking over at the refrigerator door. “Three words, one I. A friend. Hm.”
It sets the tablet down on the island in the center of the kitchen and signs an A. The middle letter of the last word fills in with an A on the tablet and on the refrigerator door.
The clown man dries off his hands on a paper towel and then signs an L for his turn. The second letter of the second word is an L! The flying man and the clown man are very good at this game. They are guessing the right letters.
The flying man stares at the refrigerator door for a moment before guessing a T, and then cheers when the first letter of the first word turns out to have been a T.
The kitchen is smelling even more like bananas now than when there were the piles of bananas on the countertops. It is smelling like bananas and pineapple and sugar and cinnamon. It is smelling so good. It wants to put the head all the way inside of the so-hot oven and smell all of the banana smells coming from the oven. It wants to eat and eat the bread from bananas.
“Your turn, Jigsaw.”
It nods and goes with a vowel, again. Vowels are in almost every word, Zoe says, and there must be a vowel in the first word still. Two letters left in that word, and a good chance one of them is a vowel. It signs an E and is rewarded when the last letter is filled in.
The clown man comes over to stand beside the flying man, wrapping his arm around the flying man’s waist and leaning into the flying man’s space.
“Friend, huh?” the clown man says. “Well, the first word is probably ‘the’ or ‘toe’ or something.” He signs an H. “Alright. The… something.”
It studies the clown man. The clown man is using a different strategy for this game, less about the letters that turn into an answer and more about trying to guess what the whole answer is and then pick the letters based on that.
And the strategy got him the first word. The, not toe. Maybe it is a good strategy, at least for him.
The flying man guesses an R, and the first circle of the snowman appears in the middle of the projection.
It is glad that the first wrong guess was not its own guess. They are what the hamburger technician would call “on a roll,” which is another of those phrase turns that mean something else. There are no rolls in the kitchen, nor any other kind of bread until the hour is up. And no one is rolling anything around, either. But “on a roll” means that they are doing well, are having good luck, success. One success after another, until the flying man’s wrong guess.
It guesses a C and the second circle appears under the first one. Hm. Maybe the clown man’s strategy will save the game and give them the letters they need to win.
But the clown man’s O guess is also wrong and it is time for the flying man to guess again. G, the flying man’s guess, is the last letter of the middle word.
“Oh!” says the clown man with a smile. “I think I know what it is.”
How? How could the clown man know what the words are with so many missing letters still? How does the clown man’s strategy work that the words come to him before the letters do? Don’t the letters need to make up the words?
It is glad they are playing on the same team for this game instead of against each other like in some other games.
The flying man guesses a P and the third circle of the snow man appears. The flying man does not share the clown man’s strategy, but he does have a perfectly signed P. It still struggles with that letter, because the fingers make the K shape but the hand doesn’t remember to rotate the sign forward. The flying man does not have any difficulties at all with the P.
It guesses an S and one of the circles of the snow man fills in with white. It frowns. The way it has played before, the game gets easier with the more letters guessed successfully. But this time, they started out with all of the right letters and then the game got harder when they stopped guessing right.
The clown man does not seem to have any problems, though, since he thinks he knows the words that the letters are still struggling to make up on the projection. He guesses an N and two letters are filled in. Two! The second to last letter in the middle row and the last letter in the last word.
The clown man grins. “Yep. I know it.”
The clown man looks to the side, at the flying man, and his grin widens. He raises his eyebrows as if asking the flying man whether he also knows it.
The flying man frowns and shakes his head. But after a moment, the flying man makes his guess, and it’s right—an M is the first letter of the third word.
The something man. It thinks maybe now it knows what the middle word must be. There are only so many friends who are called like that, with that pattern of words. It must be the clown man or the flying man, and the letters in the middle word do not help make “clown,” so they must make up “flying” instead.
It must be the flying man, who is, indeed, a friend. Just like Tony Stark was the friend the last time that was a clue. The game is not only using names, but also the patterns it uses to call the others in the hive building, the ones in the team that is not a cell.
There are only two letters missing now, an F and… It tries to imagine the word “flying,” tries to focus on just the middle letter. It is a letter with straight lines, it knows. Like a triangle, but upside down, and not like an A. Not a V, but a Y.
It pinches the index fingertip and thumb together into the F-shape, guessing the letter that it knows must be the first one in the middle word. And the F appears, yes. Excellent. It really is “the flying man” that is the trio of the words for this one.
It smiles as the clown man signs Y and they win the game.
The flying man says that there is no time for another game, so they begin making the concrete of bananas and flowers again, this time with it in charge of cutting up brain-nuts into little pieces to go inside of the bread from bananas.
The flying man shows it another way to use the knife, not cutting each brain-nut into pieces but mashing the sharp edge of the knife down on a whole pile of brain-nuts over and over so that the whole pile gets cut up at once. It is not as satisfying as cutting the brain-nuts individually, and the pieces that result are random, with some small and some almost a quarter of a brain-nut big.
But it is a lot quicker, and so it still has time to mash up and smash up and crush five more spotty brown and yellow bananas to go into the bowl. It has more banana mush left over this time than the last time, and the flying man says that they will only use four bananas in the third batch, so that they can “break even,” which is not about breaking things but about not having left over banana mush.
When the smells coming from the oven are just on the cusp of irresistible, the flying man declares that it is time to test the bread from bananas by stabbing each of the brick molds and examining the weapon to make sure that there are no goopy insides caught on the blade. It is a strange choice of test, but it does not know much about bread from bananas and the flying man does. Clearly.
The test passed, the brick molds come out onto racks—the flying man uses a thick, padded mitten to pull out the brick molds, even though it is standing right there with a metal hand that cannot be damaged by the heat—and then two more filled up brick molds are put inside of the oven.
This time, for this batch, the chopped up brain-nuts are inside of the concrete as well as all the rest of the things, which will add a crunch to the resulting bread.
It does not know if bread should be crunchy except for the very outside part, but the flying man knows best. The pyramids of chocolate will go inside of the third batch, and then there will be a fourth batch that has both brain-nuts and chocolate pyramids. So much going on inside of the bread from bananas.
When the bread from bananas is finally “turned out” onto the racks and has cooled some more—this time the clue is “Can be pink or gray” and the answer is “dolphin-fish,” which looks so strange to it with two different ways to make the “fuh” sound with different letter shapes—it is finally time to eat and eat and eat the bread from bananas.
The flying man uses a serrated knife to gently cut thin slices of out of one of the bread bricks, and then smoother knives are used to smear soft butter all over the slices so that it melts into the bread.
“What do you think, Jigsaw?” the flying man asks as it enjoys the first bite of the bread from bananas.
It has the eyes shut as the flavors and textures mix all over the tongue—soft and moist and delicate, sweet and with a hint of spice from the cinnamon, smooth over the tongue with the slight saltiness from the butter that only enhances the sweetness, but without making it sickly. What does it think? It is hard to think at all, with how delicious the bread from bananas is.
And it is so different from the bread from corn, and the regular bread that is just bread. It is not chewy like bread that is just bread, and it is not grainy like the bread from corn, and it is… it is more like the cake that Caroline gave it last week, but somehow denser in a light way. Light and dense, all at the same time.
It nods, keeping the eyes closed so that it can focus on what is happening in the mouth. So many good flavors and textures. It takes another bite and it is just as good as the first bite. The entire slice of bread from bananas is as good as the first bite. It wants more and more of it, too. There is so much more of the bread brick to be eaten, and a whole bread brick that has been set aside as well, maybe for the feeder with the braids to enjoy tomorrow.
There is laughter in the kitchen, from both the clown man and the flying man, but it is soft laughter, laughter without any hard or dangerous edges to watch out for, laughter without mockery.
“Steve?” the flying man asks, then.
The clown man makes an appreciative sound in his throat, and then says that this makes future bananas taste good, but still not like the before bananas.
It does not remember any sort of before bananas that maybe the bucky had eaten with the Steve, but it does not remember most things about the bucky, so it is not a loss.
What it does know is that the bread made from bananas tastes like bananas and so much more, where bananas that are just eaten when they are light yellow-and-green taste like pale reflections of bananas, and bananas that are just eaten when they are fully yellow with brown freckles taste like strong bananas.
It does not know about future bananas or before bananas, but there are many different degrees of banana. The important part is that bread made from bananas is so, so good.
It cannot wait to share with the other asset, with the ballerina woman, with the two in the lab, with the whole team that is not a cell. And with Yasmin and Zoe, maybe. And with Monesha.
It helped make bread from bananas, and a mission has never tasted amazing before like this one does.
Chapter 115: Assets | Now your cell is blowing up like (“Oh my god tell me everything”)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Rumors” by Jake Miller.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 1:00 p.m.—
Jigsaw still hasn’t returned from the kitchen when Clint’s stomach gives its first irritable growl about the lack of lunch or snack.
Clint checks his phone—and yeah, that’s over three hours he’s been playing Sidewalk Brawler without really thinking about much of anything. No wonder he’s feeling a bit hungry. Usually Jigsaw would have managed to convince him to eat a snack by now. Cheese cubes, a boiled egg, maybe even a few grapes. Jigsaw is really convincing when he shares food.
Clint doesn’t bother to save his game, since it’s not really a challenge at this point when playing by himself, and gets up off the sofa with a groan.
Jigsaw is supposed to be with Steve and Wilson making banana bread in the main kitchen. Clint has no idea how long that takes, but it couldn’t take over three hours. Unless maybe there’s a whole rainforest worth of bananas to turn into bread. Do bananas even come from the rainforest? He thinks they might. Jungles, anyway. Somewhere tropical, probably.
There’s a chance Jigsaw’s finished his baking task, though, and is doing something else with the other two. Maybe he’s down in the gym, or maybe they’re playing a board game in one of the common rooms.
But it’s time for lunch, even if the main lunch hasn’t been served yet, and Clint would rather eat lunch with Jigsaw wherever he is than wait around only to find out that he was somehow forgotten about.
Though the likelihood of Jigsaw ever managing to forget about him is somewhere between slim and none. The man’s considerate like that. Probably too considerate. Probably almost subservient levels of considerate, which Clint will just not think about right now so that he can avoid feeling like he’s getting the better deal out of this relationship.
Because it’s not a competition, but a partnership. If one of them “wins” then they are both winning.
“Hey JARVIS,” he says. “Is Jigsaw still in the kitchen?”
“Indeed, Agent Barton. A fourth batch of banana bread is due to leave the oven shortly, after which there will be lunch.”
A fourth batch? How much banana bread do they need to make? They’re not feeding the whole Tower’s worth of occupants. It’s just the team, probably Pepper and the therapists, and maybe some for Monesha tomorrow. Sheesh. It really is a whole rainforest worth of bananas. Jungle. Whatever.
“Cool. Thanks.”
If lunch is happening after this batch of banana bread is out of the oven and that’s supposed to happen soon, then he’ll just wait on lunch. That’s fine. He’s not that hungry despite what his stomach has to say about the matter.
Clint heads on down to the kitchen just to see how operation: banana bread is going. He doesn’t love banana bread, but he doesn’t mind it. Maybe they have some for snacking on before lunch. He can’t imagine there being even one loaf of banana bread on the counter and Jigsaw not going to town on it.
And if it’s Steve and Wilson in there, then maybe if Clint suggests something for lunch, they’ll have it. So maybe pizza. That wouldn’t take long to get there, and it’s already past when most of the team starts on lunch, so…
Yeah, he’s going to go advocate for pizza.
The kitchen itself smells amazing, and the smells that come from it get to him well before he even reaches the place. And yeah, maybe he doesn’t love banana bread, but he definitely likes how it smells.
On the counter, on a handful of metal racks, there are five loaves of banana bread already, and the partial loaf that’s left is nearly gone. So that must be three batches worth, and two more loaves in the oven. Yikes.
“Damn,” he says, “are there any bananas left in the City?”
Jigsaw greets him with a grin and points to a small mound of bananas on the counter beside the bread, definitely overripe, which is apparently the kind you need for bread.
And while Clint doesn’t know how many bananas go into a loaf of banana bread, he’s struck by the notion that this is a whole banana bread bakery here, and they’ll never eat lunch. But… Since he’s hungry and there are a few slices of what used to be a whole loaf just out there on the counter under some loose cling film…
He goes for the sliced up banana bread and gives it an inspection, and he’s about to reach under the cling film and grab a slice when he sees Jigsaw signing “kiss” one-handed in his peripheral vision.
“Sure,” Clint says, despite feeling a little uncomfortable with their audience. He keeps it brief, just a peck, and Jigsaw seems to understand that this is not consent for a kissing session, but just agreement to a greeting kiss.
Whether he understands why is another matter, but he doesn’t object. He just gives Clint a happy little smile and goes back to watching the oven through the window on the door.
“How many loaves are you guys making?” Clint asks as he selects a slice of banana bread. “More after this batch?”
Wilson grimaces. “I overestimated the number of bananas we needed. We’ll put those in the freezer and do this again some other time,” he says. “Not do batches five through seven today.”
“What, you don’t want to become the resident baker?”
Steve laughs. “We kind of already are. Four kinds of banana bread, cherry pie. Who knows, maybe cookies at some point. Or a cake.”
Clint examines his piece of banana bread and then the loaves on the cooling racks. It looks like there might be nuts in one of the pairs of loaves, and something dark and spotty in the other two. Chocolate chips, maybe.
“What’s in the oven?”
“All of the things,” Wilson says. “We’ve got bananas, we’ve got the walnuts, we’ve got the chocolate chips. There’s a recipe variant for adding coconut, too, but that seems like too much bread.”
“That, and coconut is nasty,” Clint says.
He gets out the jar of Nutella and spreads a thick layer on top of his piece of banana bread, and then cuts up one of the less brown bananas in the pile to put some pieces on top of that. He’s aware of Jigsaw’s attention during the process, and so he repeats it on a second slice and offers the first one to his partner.
“Want some?”
Jigsaw nods and accepts the offering, and Clint doesn’t know what his reaction was to the banana bread with just butter on it, but the reaction to this doctored up banana bread is to slide his eyes shut and sigh in silent happiness as he chews.
And yeah, that’s about right. Sure, the presence of bananas makes it technically healthy, but no one ever accused banana bread of being health food. It probably has more sugar in it than cake. Especially with the Nutella on it.
“So what’s for lunch?” Clint asks before licking Nutella off his fingers and reaching for a third slice. He’s got some more banana sliced up, so he’ll just have to put it on some more of this banana bread. With more Nutella. Yum.
“Not sure,” Steve says. “Something delivered, though.”
“Pizza.” Clint nods and cuts his third slice of banana bread in half to offer part to Jigsaw. “Everyone can have their own toppings and it’s quick and hot.”
Steve and Wilson look at each other and shrug.
“Sure you want pizza two days in a row?” Wilson asks.
Clint blinks. Two days in a row? They didn’t have pizza yesterday…
“Last time Monesha was here, you guys did pizza,” Wilson says. “I thought maybe you’d do it again this time.”
Oh, he means today and tomorrow.
“No, we’ll do something else tomorrow,” Clint says, though he personally doesn’t see anything wrong with pizza for several days in a row. Pizza is a versatile workhorse food. It’s good hot and cold and in between. Fresh and even days old. Breakfast to midnight snack and all other times.
Pizza is a perfect food.
He wonders what they’ll end up doing when Monesha is here. Pizza is just such an easy choice. They might do it again. Or maybe Natasha will have some ideas for what they could do.
Hell, maybe they’ll just eat whatever the rest of the team eats, only later. She’ll be getting there around noon, so they’ll start with lunch, probably. She might be hungry when she gets to the station after a three-hour ride on a train.
“You don’t have to do something else,” Steve says. “We can do pizza tomorrow and just get burgers or something today. Tacos. Maybe curry.”
Clint would so much rather do pizza twice in a row. Though burgers wouldn’t be too bad. He can get his hand around a burger just fine, even if he’ll have to get a shorter burger to avoid stretching out his scabbing palm and all that. It’s fine, though. Burgers are supposed to be messy. If his falls apart because he can only hold it properly in one of his hands, that’s normal.
“I say burgers today,” Clint says. “Votes?”
Steve and Wilson agree that burgers sound good, and Clint looks at Jigsaw, who doesn’t seem to feel like he’s involved in the decision process. Getting Jigsaw to make decisions about food—other than the decision that he wants whatever is being offered—is like pulling teeth.
“Jigs? You want burgers or something else?”
He nods, which is typical. More is more. He’d be happy with burgers, happy with something else, and happier still with both.
They opt for burgers. It’s customizable, and JARVIS can get everyone’s orders all lined up with a quick text except Jigsaw’s. For Jigsaw, JARVIS—or Stark, probably—has apparently made an app on his tablet that has a picture-based menu. Jigsaw can tap a finger on each thing he wants, and anything that goes untapped stays out of the order.
He ends up with four garden burgers, each with a full accompaniment of vegetables—seems redundant to Clint, but whatever, it’s not like he has to eat that stuff—and all of the cheese options on the menu, but none of the condiments. And each kind of fry on offer, plus some onion rings and fried pickles.
It’s a lot of food, and probably some of that food is a result of him not wanting to risk leaving anything out, but to be fair, Steve ends up with just as much food, even if he gets a quintet of real burgers—Angus, yum—with just as many fixings. And two large orders of sweet potato fries.
Clint is content with his singular burger and steak fries, and Wilson seems to be doing just fine with a chicken sandwich and fries. Normal people with normal appetites. Clint does not envy the super soldiers the need to chew up all that food.
“So what all do you have planned for Thursday?” Steve asks.
Clint shrugs. “I don’t have plans. We’ll play it by ear.”
He just hopes Monesha doesn’t get on his case about the mission they went on. Natasha had indicated after the leaked footage from the North Carolina mission that Monesha was upset there even were missions. Like Jigsaw should stay home and focus on his recovery without seeing any action. Clint can’t see how that would have gone well, though. That would have just led to another escape—and it would have been an escape, if they were purposely keeping him inside.
And this latest mission is thankfully more mysterious to the general public than the North Carolina mission because all the news stations and gossip rags are saying is that there was a mission. They don’t even know that for sure. Some photographer happened to see the quinjet-shaped hole in the night sky and realized that the thing was in the air blocking out what stars could be seen.
They might have been going anywhere, and they might have been gone for only a few hours. Just long enough for Katie-Kate to have needed to walk Lucky. No one knows.
And he hopes it stays that way.
But also… He kind of knows it can’t stay that way for every member of the public. Kate knows he hurt his hand, but not how. She has to have picked up on Jigsaw’s trouble seeing things on Sunday. Burns all across the top of his face would have clued her in even if everything else was perfectly normal.
And Clint can’t just hide his left hand the whole time Monesha is here, either, even if there weren’t still some blotches on Jigsaw’s face from the halo. At least his eyesight seems to be doing better. Kind of amazing how fast all of that healed up. Clint’ll be holding a bow gingerly for at least another few weeks, and Jigsaw’s practically regrown his eyeballs in a week’s time.
Super soldiers. Go figure.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 2:15 p.m.—
“So how’s Twitter treating you?” the other asset asks the clown man as the last of the potato sticks are swiped through the red tomato gravy on the plate.
It does not know what a Twitter is. Or how a Twitter would be able to treat anyone, whether good or bad. It is just another of the topics that others in the hive building discuss without it knowing enough about the components to follow along.
The clown man laughs. “Tony called me a troll the other day. All I did was say I supported marriage equality.” The clown man shrugs. “And maybe I ranted about vaccines earlier today.”
The other asset looks between the clown man and the flying man for a moment, a red-gravy drip falling back onto the plate from the potato stick in the other asset’s hand.
“You came out on Twitter?”
The clown man laughs again. “I came out in favor of people being able to marry whoever they love. The people following me can’t figure out what it means. Some of them are furious and disappointed, as though I’d care about their opinions. Other people are chanting ‘one of us, gobble gobble,’ though I don’t know what that means other than that Tony says it’s meant to be supportive.”
The other asset doesn’t respond at first, but then says: “Well, I’d say don’t feed the trolls, but it looks like you’re enjoying yourself.”
The flying man shakes his head. “I’m just waiting for the day the reporters flock around the Tower again demanding to know the details without the runaround.”
“I’m not giving them a runaround. I’m just being choosy with who I reply to. And there’s only one hundred forty characters allowed per tweet. There’s a limit to what I can say.”
It knows what tweet is. Tweet is a sound like a bird makes. Tweet and chirp. And cluck and quack. There are other sounds, too, the actual sounds and not just the words that are used to describe the sounds.
Maybe the clown man is talking about birds.
Characters are another way of talking about letter-shapes, and also a way of talking about the people in glowing panels during the other asset’s hospital show. Each of the people in the glowing panel is another character. It is not sure why people need to be called characters just because there are cameras on them, but that is the way of things and it does not question this.
Maybe there is a show about birds. Birds running around. Making tweet-tweet sounds. Bird characters on a bird show, running instead of flying and going tweet-tweet.
It does not sound like a bad show. It must be named Twitter. That is the show name.
But none of that explains what a troll is. Or why no one should be feeding a troll.
It does not know what trolls are, but it thinks they deserve to be fed, even if they are trolls and it turns out trolls are bad things. Food is not supposed to be a reward for accomplishing missions or behaving properly while agents are pushing into it. Food is something that is for nutrition and energy, and everyone deserves to be able to eat food. Even trolls.
And it does not explain why the clown man is involved. How can anyone be involved in a show? Shows are things that happen and are recorded by cameras and then put into the glowing panels, and they are only one-way. They are received from the glowing panel, and there is no input from the ones watching. It is not like on a game where the controlling stick can make things happen in the glowing panel.
“Well, hopefully that won’t happen tomorrow,” the other asset says. “Because I’m hoping we can go to the park without a flock of reporters following us.”
The other asset wants to bring the feeder with the braids to the green park with the dog so that they can use the colorful fuzz balls and the ball-throwing stick and all of that. Maybe they can feed the long chickens that live in the water, too. It is too bad the little cat is not yet fully accustomed to the harness. If the little cat could come with them…
But no. Without the harness, it would be dangerous for the little cat, and it would never put the little cat in danger.
Someday, the little cat can join them when they all go out onto the green grass in the green park and play. But until that day, the little cat will remain safely in the rooms for assets or in the arms where it can make sure that the little cat does not get into too much trouble.
It hopes that the feeder with the braids likes the little cat. It knows that she likes the dog. Surely she will like the little cat as well. Maybe she does not know about the little cat. Maybe the little cat will be a surprise to her. A pleasant surprise.
So will the bread from bananas. They can try all four kinds of bread from bananas and see which one she likes the most, and they can maybe give her a lot of bread from bananas to eat at her home in the original hunting grounds. It will be able to provide for a feeder, even though it does not know whether that is permissible.
This feeder, Monesha, might be okay with it feeding her bread from bananas. Sharing it with her. She should not be angry with it for trying, anyway. Even if it turns out that she cannot accept the gift of bread from bananas.
The feeder with the braids is a good feeder, just like Caroline, and if it is not allowed to give her some of the food it has, she will gently reject the gift instead of punishing it, just like Caroline gently rejects things it sometimes offers her. It knows this.
Chapter 116: Avengers | You shout it out (but I can’t hear a word you say)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxnpFKZowcs
Hey guys—sorry about the lack of comment replies for the last chapter. I’m watching over my dad in hospice, and I’m just too mentally scattered to form coherent responses right now. But I cherish all your comments and thank you for them. I’ll respond when I can.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
Cap’s really done it now. Or Steve has, rather. Because this is definitely Steve Rogers the little shit and not Captain America the responsible paragon. Cap wouldn’t get himself on the news for some tweets about gay marriage and vaccines. Maybe for punching someone’s head in by mistake, but not the social commentary.
Clint’s gotta hand it to him, that’s a hell of a way to come out of the closet as… whatever he’s coming out as. Queer, probably. Nice blanket term, not too specific. Clint doesn’t even know all the terms out there, and he’s actually from this time period. He can’t see Steve getting caught up that fast. Man probably had to battle some internalized homophobia to even see Wilson as a prospective partner.
The pundits rehashing the news for the umpteenth time, like cows chewing eternal political cud, they can’t decide what to make of last night’s tweet about marriage equality, and some of them are staunchly insisting that it’s support for equality that doesn’t involve him personally. Others are citing a weekend sighting of him and Wilson holding hands in the park. Because apparently they went public on Sunday while they had Lucky out for the morning.
There are cries of “but Peggy,” and opposing cries of “but Bucky,” and still more cries suggesting that both is a good option. Including a meme literally asking why they don’t do both. Then there’s the “neither” camp insisting that the man has never been in an actual relationship in all his years before the ice and why not give him space to explore the options available in the current century.
Clint would turn the channel, maybe catch a rerun of his soap, but there’s something like a train wreck about the discussion of Steve’s sex life. He just can’t look away.
Part of it is just a desire to know what all is being said so he can be properly sympathetic. But a good chunk of it is morbid curiosity about what he’s in for, personally. Because there’s not a chance in hell of him hiding a relationship with Jigsaw except by simply never going anywhere with him. Even if it’s unlikely they’ll be touring the shops and getting themselves noticed by the public on long, romantic handheld walks any time soon.
There’s still missions, there are bound to be more trips to grocery stores, there are still occasional trips to the park with Lucky in addition to Wilson’s walkies. There’s a chance someone could put it together just based on the lack of personal space they afford each other. Natasha might have put a “do not disturb” warning on Monesha, but Monesha is a member of the public who has some reasonable expectation of privacy. Clint and Jigsaw? Not so much.
And it’s only a matter of time before someone sees Jigsaw and compares him to Bucky, beyond just seeing him with Clint standing a couple’s distance apart. What do they do, then?
It’s one thing for Jigsaw to agree that he was once the man known as Bucky Barnes, but it’s entirely different for the public to start treating him like they’d treat Bucky. Or asking him a bunch of questions about a history he doesn’t remember. Or making assumptions.
The political cud shifts from the marriage equality stuff back to the vaccine stuff. That, Clint doesn’t care so much about. He’s all for vaccines if you get around to them, but he doesn’t need to listen to these people argue about what sounds like a very straightforward tweet blasting the anti-vax movement.
He turns the TV off. Maybe it won’t be so bad to have people trying to pry into his relationship with Jigsaw.
But it will probably suck. There’ll be people echoing his own thoughts—that Jigsaw deserves better, that Clint is too much of a loser to manage this relationship, that it’s not even proper to have a relationship with someone while they’re working through this much trauma. And there’ll be people complaining about the Avengers being too gay, probably, but they don’t really matter.
What might matter more is the whole question of whether they’re compromised by their relationships, himself and Jigsaw, and also Steve and Wilson. Can they do their jobs as Avengers effectively when they’re worried about partners elsewhere on the field of battle? Can they focus on what they need to focus on? Can they make the right decisions?
And that’s a good point. Not one he wants to think too much about, but a good point. But when he thinks back to the Siberia mission, Wilson made the call to come help him and Jigsaw, even though his partner was buried under concrete. And the Carolina mission before that, Clint and Jigsaw hadn’t even been in the same area of the base for most of that.
If anything, Steve was compromised when Jigsaw got shot, but that didn’t last long before he got back to work and even stayed behind to clean up their mess. So there are examples to demonstrate how they can and do work effectively despite being a bit compromised. They just can’t divulge those details. So no one will believe them.
That’s one of the parts of his job he hates, really. Having to know things he can’t share when sharing the things would get someone off his back. Having the perfect comeback that he can’t use because he’d be breaking infosec.
That’s one of the reasons why it was nice when he and Natasha were STRIKE Delta, just the two of them. They were best friends, and they knew each other’s secrets and all their mission details that mattered. If he really wanted to clear his name of something or prove a point, he knew that at least Natasha believed him.
Now he technically has that many more people who will believe him, but he’s pretty much front and center with the rest of the team instead of insulated by S.H.I.E.L.D. So there are infinitely more people he might have to prove a point to, and that sucks.
Sam
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
“Well, are you satisfied with your tweets?” Sam asks, looking over at Steve on the sofa next to him.
Steve’s got a shit-eating grin on his face listening to the afternoon pundits alternately complain about and celebrate the marriage equality tweet and the lack of further input from Steve. Because Steve had just lobbed that tweet out into the world without backing it up, clarifying, answering any of the hundreds of replies or mentions he’d gotten in response.
“You could tweet something to clarify your earlier tweet, you know.” Sam pokes an elbow into Steve’s side, gently. “Put them out of their misery.”
The whole hour of this political talk show has been focused on Captain America’s sexuality and whether it was right of him to make such a statement. There’s been the “think of the children” commentary, the notion of a tarnished American icon, the question of whether he should be leading the Avengers. But there’s also been the lone voice declaring that it makes sense for Captain America to support all Americans, even the LGBTQ community.
“They have reports of us holding hands in the park, Sam, sitting close together on the benches, being a couple in public. What more do they need?” Steve asks. “Besides, I want to see how long it takes them to come to the ‘unfortunate’ conclusion that I’m not straight.”
Sam shakes his head. “You know there’s a chance they’ll come up with any other conclusion to support their theories unless you spell it out. You’re supporting something as an ally, not a actual member of the community. You’re saying you support them because the PR team told you to. That kind of thing.”
“What, the world isn’t ready for a queer Captain America?” Steve laughs. “They had one the whole time.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t know it,” Sam says. “That tends to make a difference for people.”
Steve just laughs again. “I’ll tweet some more later. Maybe one of those multi-part tweets. I’d have to compose it all beforehand so I’d know how many parts there were going to be. But I’ve seen it done. It looks like you can basically give a whole speech in parts.”
Sam can’t wait to read that. Or he can wait a while, because it’s bound to stir up even more chum in the water for the media sharks. Steve is enjoying this entirely too much. He wonders how much of that is a defense mechanism against the perceived rejection of his announcement.
Behind the bulletproof exterior that’s laughing it up, there might be someone who just wants to belong. He knows that Steve wants to be himself, and not be stuck behind the mantle of Captain America for all time. But there’s also a large part of Steve that doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, whether that be as Steve or as Cap.
Steve’s eventual clarification speech should be interesting. He hopes Steve comes to him to check it over before tweeting it, though. There’s a fine line between clarifying and defending, and Steve will want to clarify so that people in the queer community can feel safe adopting him, but not defend himself. There’s nothing wrong to defend, after all.
Oh, now the pundits have been exchanged for an even more gossipy talk show panel. They’ll have even more to say, no doubt. But they’ll start out by going over the same introductory background, on the off chance that their viewers don’t know about the initial tweet.
“Can we turn this off?” he asks. “They’re just going to rehash the same things from a less angry perspective.”
Steve’s grin turns into a concerned frown. “Is the publicity too much? Do you regret anything?”
“No,” Sam says. “I don’t have any regrets.”
It’s important that Steve knows this, that he really accepts the truth of the words, so Sam reaches for his hand and gives it a squeeze. He absolutely doesn’t regret their Sunday morning tour of the park with Lucky, doesn’t regret the rumors and murmurs that started circulating around the two of them. He doesn’t regret the relationship, or the publicity itself.
“I just don’t know that it’s worth the time to watch everything unfold twice in a row,” Sam adds. “If anything important comes up, JARVIS will let us know.”
“That’s fair,” Steve says. He leans forward to get the remote off the coffee table and turns the TV off. “I don’t want to get too wrapped up in this, anyway. They’re awfully negative.”
“Most of politics is, these days.”
Sam gets up and goes to his kitchenette to get a pair of water bottles.
“Why don’t we put on a movie?” Sam asks. “Snuggle under a blanket and watch something that’s actually interesting. Something you’ve wanted to see.”
Steve has a list of movies he’s heard of that sounded interesting to him or that sounded like cultural must-see films. Maybe they spend the next couple of hours crossing something off that list.
“What about that movie Tony mentioned. Star Wars .” Steve accepts one of the water bottles. “That sounds interesting. Maybe it’s something Jigsaw would enjoy eventually. Sounds like some of the books Bucky liked.”
“It’s a trilogy,” Sam warns him. “You might really want to see parts two and three right away.”
Steve shrugs. “We can watch the first one, then do dinner, and make it a movie night for the other two. I’m up for it if you are.”
Well, they don’t have anything else planned for the evening, and the only thing they need to do in the early morning is walk Lucky. That’s pretty low stakes. They can do it tired.
“Alright, then,” Sam says. “JARVIS, could you show us Episode IV: A New Hope?”
“Certainly, Agent Wilson.”
The TV turns back on and Sam settles in next to Steve.
“Why are we starting with episode four if this is a trilogy?” Steve asks, putting his arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Shouldn’t we start with the first episode?”
“Absolutely not,” Sam says. “We’ll watch them in the order they came out, and if you really want to see some awful prequels, then we’ll watch them later. First, we watch the good stuff.”
Steve
—New York City | Wednesday 17 October 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
“Are you really going to live tweet the movie, Steve?” Sam asks as he settles back onto the sofa with his laptop.
“I’ll regret it if I don’t.” Steve dims the screen as low as it’ll go so that it disturbs Sam as little as possible. “How’s that? Better?”
Sam rolls his eyes. “I’ll live. But you’re going to miss stuff counting characters on your tweets instead of watching the actual movie as it’s happening.”
“I’ll only tweet the really exciting parts, after they happen.”
“Whatever. Don’t ask me what’s happening if you aren’t going to actually watch it and you get lost.”
Steve laughs. Chances are high Sam will be willing to pause the movie to explain anything he does miss, but he’s pretty sure he won’t actually miss important things. He’s gotten used to the character count by now. He knows about how many words he can fit in a tweet.
“Let’s get started.”
Sam pushes the button on the remote and Steve prepares himself for a movie he’s bound to enjoy if Sam and Tony both think he’d like it.
A scant minute in, and he’s got his first tweet composed.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Loving this music, but the scrolling yellow text is hard on the eyes. #ANewHope
It is hard to read, but it sets up the story pretty well. He’s already got sympathy for the main character, this Princess Leia. Very daring to steal the enemy’s plans and make a getaway attempt on what’s sure to be a slower spacecraft.
Though that does raise a question—what is a princess doing raiding an enemy stronghold for plans like this? Surely a princess would be kept to a safer role. Unless this was some sort of diplomacy mission and the plans were merely passed along to her by an insider. Hm.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
The little trash can robot is cute. Sam says its name is R2-D2. Jigsaw would like it. #ANewHope
“Are you sure we should be watching this without Jigsaw?” Steve asks. “He’d like this, I think.”
Sam shakes his head. “You think Jigsaw is ready to see a movie when he still has a hard time with the concept of fiction?”
“Good point,” Steve says. “I just feel like he’s missing out.”
“When it’s Jigsaw’s turn to watch this movie, you can be there to watch it with him. And when he interrupts the movie all the time, you can feel my pain.”
And Steve probably just has to be okay with that. Sam’s right about the fiction thing, anyway. Jigsaw tends to take things very literally, and doesn’t seem to understand the difference between telling stories and telling lies. It’s too soon to introduce him to the idea of star destroyers and death stars.
Though there are aliens, they now know. Maybe there are giant spaceships out there and planet-destroying bases out in the vast blackness of space. It appears that in the movie, anyway, there’s space fascism to combat.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
My mistake. They’re not robots, they’re droids. #ANewHope
And in an escape pod, too. But there can’t possibly have been enough escape pods on that ship for everyone on board, assuming anyone was left alive but the princess. This seems like another Titanic situation, where there aren’t enough lifeboats to go around. Not a good look for a civilization that achieved space flight and interplanetary travel.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
It’s gotta be really hot out there for whoever’s playing the gold droid. #ANewHope
Oh, and they have droid trafficking in this movie. That’s great. Maybe Jigsaw shouldn’t watch it after all. He’d be pretty upset when R2-D2 gets abducted like that. And those inhibitor bolts are bad news, too. The whole electric shock and shutdown element would be pretty upsetting, too.
This whole scene would be upsetting to him, probably. The big transport vehicle, the jostling around, the other droids crammed in there alongside. The hopelessness of being captured and hauled off somewhere, with no idea what the future held.
And here are new characters, then. Buying the droids.
Steve frowns. “Are droids basically people, or are they basically machines? Because these two have personalities like people and the gold one talks like a person, but they’re being sold like they’re just machines.”
Sam pauses the movie.
“They’re droids,” he says. “I would say they start out more like machines with programming, and over time, they develop sentience and personalities.”
“So these two are older droids, then.”
“…Yes,” Sam says carefully after a moment. “They’ve been around for a long time. But I don’t want to spoil things for you.”
“So they aren’t really being purchased after being abducted, then,” Steve says. “Because they’re sentient and have personalities.”
Sam sighs. “The Jawas don’t care about that, Steve. They just want to make some money. And the people buying the droids don’t know they’re actually sentient yet.”
Steve nods, though he still doesn’t like it.
“I really want you to be able to watch this without spoiling things for you,” Sam says with another sigh. “But it’s bothering you, I can tell. So here. Some characters and societies in the galaxy condone and even encourage slavery. Others don’t. Droids or people, it doesn’t matter. That’s just part of the setting. It becomes important later. But I won’t say more.”
Steve holds up his hands. “Okay. Okay. I’ll just watch. I’m sure the good guys are the ones who don’t hold with that.”
“Right,” Sam says and starts the movie back up.
Steve Rogers
@BrooklynBoy
Didn’t think there’d be slavery in this movie. Would have hoped that advanced society was beyond that. #ANewHope
Steve considers tweeting about the blue milk, but it doesn’t seem quite worth it. After all, Sam wants him to enjoy the movie. He should try to watch it more closely.
Then Uncle Owen asks Luke to take R2-D2 off somewhere to get a memory wipe, and Sam preemptively pauses the movie.
“I know, I know,” Sam says. “But it’s not the same as the kind of thing Jigsaw lived through. It’s more like writing over a hard drive. It wouldn’t be painful or anything. And they don’t know he’s sentient yet.”
Steve sighs. “I’m beginning to think this isn’t a movie Jigsaw should see. We’re not even very far into it and the adorable trash can droid is assaulted with electricity, abducted, and sold to strangers who are arranging to wipe its memory.”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t think there are a lot of movies Jigsaw would be up for when every element is broken down like this. Maybe someday. But not someday soon.”
Tony wanted that movie night, Steve knows, but he kind of agrees with Sam. They might not find a good option any time soon, even if they do manage to get beyond the idea of fiction not being the same as lies.
Chapter 117: Tower | Is there a way to find a cure for this
Notes:
Chapter title from “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine” by The White Stripes.
Thanks for your patience on the comments, folks, and for your lovely words of comfort. We did my dad's funeral this past Friday, so he's at peace finally. There's still a fair amount of paperwork and the like, but the crisis mode is over, at least.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 8:30 a.m.—
“It’ll be good for her, Jigsaw,” the ballerina woman says as she pulls a tub of butter and a jar of bright red jam out of the refrigerator to add to the breakfast meal spread out on the table.
It does not know what a vaccination is, but if there is a need to reassure it that vaccination is a good thing for the little cat, then there must be something unpleasant about it. It will not sit by idle this time if an animal researcher tries to push into the little cat with the temperature-taking stick. It will stop the animal researcher from doing that. It knows what is going to happen in time to stop it from happening.
“If she doesn’t get her vaccines in time, Alpine could get really sick and might even die.” The ballerina woman grimaces—it can see that even with the still-slightly-blurry vision because she is so close—but it does not think that it is the taste of a lie that twists her lips.
She must simply not want for the little cat to get sick and die, which it also does not want. But it does not know how or why the little cat would become sick. Injury is a possibility if the little cat were to fall from a tree for cats or were to be stepped on. But no one will feed the little cat chocolate or grapes or any of the things on the poison list. The little cat will not get sick.
The other asset yawns and rips off a trio of paper sheets from the roll of them, and then puts them by each “place setting” on the ballerina woman’s kitchen table.
“There’s some scary stuff out there,” the other asset says. “Rabies. Other stuff. If you want to take Alpine outside of the Tower at any point, she needs her vaccines first.”
“That’s true. She needs the protection that vaccines can offer.” The ballerina woman surveys the table and must find it to be a success because she then sits beside her cup of tea. “Basically, a vaccine tells Alpine’s body how to fight off illnesses so that she won’t get sick from them.”
It frowns as the food is dished out onto the plates.
The little cat will not be fed anything from the poison list, even if the little cat goes outside of the hive building. The little cat will be in the harness, and it will not let anyone feed the little cat a poison. It will kill anyone who tries to hurt the little cat. No one hurts the little cat on its watch. And it will be watching. Closely.
“It’s just a couple of injections,” the other asset says around a salty meat stick. “Like a flu shot, but for cats.”
Injections? The animal researcher will use needles and put poisons and testing drugs into the little cat? Not so. It will not let that happen. It will not let an animal researcher anywhere near the little cat if that is the plan. It cannot believe that the other asset and the ballerina woman would be okay with this idea of the injections and the needles.
“What’s your main concern about it, Jigs?” the other asset asks.
It pushes the plate in front of it, with the yellow and white fried eggs and toast, to the side and puts the tablet there instead, then brings it up closer to the skin face so that it can see it better. It is hungry and wants to eat the eggs and the toast, but this is more important.
It will actually need the Trauma board on the AAC app for this. It is not able to keep the many options from swimming together in the mind, but it does select several things it is concerned about. Things that will not be allowed to happen.
“Researcher push into little Alpine needle pain hurt push into poison medical testing protect little Alpine.”
It draws a needle on the other app, with poison inside it, testing fluid, for a medical test. It draws the temperature-taking stick as well. Writes NO in big letter shapes. Draws the little cat strapped to a table. Draws an animal researcher standing over the little cat with the syringe, with all of the testing equipment, the saws and scalpels.
No, no, no. It will not allow this. No vaccination needles. No.
“But it won’t be like that,” the other asset says. “No one’s tying her down or anything and the needle can’t be that big. And there’s not going to be any surgery. It’s not poison, it’s like medicine. That’s good stuff, not bad stuff.”
The ballerina woman leans forward in her chair, but not so much that her loose hair drags in her plate of fruit and toast. “Jigsaw, do you understand how sickness works?” she asks.
It blinks at her. Sickness is when a researcher poisons the blood and everything hurts and feels terrible just so that the blood that is stolen from it later is different from the blood that it starts out with. Sickness is when the stomach won’t hold a reward—bad or good—and heaves everything back up.
It draws those things, draws an asset with a star on the left arm and a researcher with a syringe, draws the asset with the star on the left arm on its hands and knees, draws the vomit and the licking up—waste not, want not.
“What about something like a cold or a flu?”
It draws a tube where it is so, so cold, draws an asset inside of the tube, the star on the left arm. It draws a bird and a clock.
The ballerina woman studies the picture for a long moment, and then: “Were none of your handlers ever sick? Sneezing, coughing, blowing their noses into tissues? Maybe they had watery red eyes? Maybe they looked nauseated? Maybe they had to go home early and rest.”
It shakes the head. There are sometimes sleeping images of a tiny blond man coughing and feverish, and it used to wonder if the other asset was becoming that way because of reddened cheeks and throat-clearing, but it never understood why they were that way—the tiny blond man and the other asset.
And never a handler. Sometimes a handler would leave, but never in the middle of a mission. Only between missions. Sometimes they would promise to be back for more fun the next day, would promise to do things to it that it did not want but could not refuse, and they would not be there after all.
Is that what sick is? Is sick not showing up for the fun that was promised?
How does that have anything to do with the little cat being fed poison foods?
“Wow, okay,” the other asset mutters around a bite of egg. “So let’s start there, then.” The other asset swallows. “People get sick all the time, Jigs, and so do animals. It must be different for you because you’re enhanced.”
The other asset shrugs.
“But it’s getting to be flu season and I guarantee you I’m going to get sick this winter. It just happens. I’ll be a coughing sneezing snotty mess, a limp rag of a man, weak and pathetic and feverish. I’ll be obnoxiously whiny about it, too.”
The ballerina woman laughs. “You won’t be that bad. But yes. You do get sick every year like clockwork.”
“Every year,” the other asset repeats with a sigh.
“There’s, uh, little germs that make people and animals get sick.” The other asset frowns. “They’re everywhere and they’re way too small to see. But we breathe them in and get sick. And when we’re sick, we’re contagious and can get others sick as well by breathing on them. It’s gross.”
Just the air itself can do that, breathing it in and breathing it out onto others? Little creatures in the air?
“The important thing here,” says the ballerina woman, “is that anyone can get sick and what they need when they do get sick is time, rest, and maybe some medicine. Maybe a trip to a doctor.” The ballerina woman shrugs. “But being sick doesn’t always last a long time, and when we’ve recovered, everything is back to normal again.”
The other asset nods. “Except sometimes, you don’t get better. Sometimes people get sick and die. And animals, too. There are some things you get sick with that there’s just no medicine for it, and no cure. And you die. Like rabies.”
It stares, wide-eyed. Dead from tiny creatures that can’t be seen? Like dead from breathing in the sweet and bitter air in the Siberia base, where the air did not look any different but was very, very different. And this just happens? It looks around, even though they have said that there is no way to see the little creatures that cause sickness and the eyes are not yet healed fully.
“We don’t want Alpine to get sick at all,” the other asset says, “but if she does get sick, we want her to have what she needs to recover instead of getting sicker and dying.”
“And that means getting her vaccinations in time,” the ballerina woman says. “Next week, in fact. That’s why I brought it up today.”
The ballerina woman delicately pokes the orange yolk and lets the ooze pour over her piece of buttered toast. It does not know how she can eat when the subject they are talking about is the potential for the little cat to die.
“That gives you an entire week to get used to the idea, and to ask any questions you have or discuss any fears you have.”
Get used to the idea of the little cat getting sick and dying? How could it ever get used to that idea? And the other asset will get sick this winter? What if the other asset gets so sick that the other asset dies? What if the other asset dies, and it is all because of little creatures that cannot be seen? How can it protect the other asset from a threat that cannot be seen?
Maybe the other asset should be wearing a killing face all winter long to protect the other asset from the little creatures…
“Alpine won’t get rabies or anything if she has her vaccines,” the other asset says. “And Lucky got his vaccines this summer when we brought you two in. He’s fine. Hasn’t gotten sick or anything. Alpine will be fine too.”
It draws an asset on the tablet and puts a crescent behind the asset’s ear. Writes SICK over the other asset’s portrait and then DIE beside that. Then draws a syringe and a researcher holding it.
If there is an animal researcher with a vaccination needle that will save the little cat from getting sick and dying—even though it is still not sure how having the little cat’s blood poisoned by an injection will accomplish that—then is there a way to keep the other asset from getting sick and dying this winter?
“Uh…” The other asset squints at the tablet. “You want me to get a flu shot?”
It does not know. It does not want the other asset to die. Or to get sick breathing in little creatures. It draws the ballerina woman next to the other asset. It does not want any of them to get sick or die.
“I mean, I can get a flu shot if you want me to. But I’m not going to die when I get a cold or whatever. I’ll just complain about it a lot.”
“Why don’t we finish eating breakfast,” the ballerina woman says. “And then we get can get ready for Monesha’s visit today, and we can keep thinking about vaccines later? No one is going to get sick and die. And there’s plenty of time for getting all our vaccinations. We’ll do it as a team.”
It hesitates, but then nods. It puts the tablet to one side and drags the plate with the breakfast meal close to it again. It will eat and then it will get ready, yes. But there will be more discussion of this vaccination needle business. It does not want anyone on the team that is not a cell to get sick, and it especially does not want any of them to die.
Monesha
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—
When the train pulls up to the station, Monesha gives her shoulders a bit of a stretch and heads for the exit.
Someone named Happy is going to be picking her up in a Stark car, and she has no idea what he looks like but she’s pretty sure a Stark car would be kind of conspicuous. She hopes it isn’t a limo or anything. The whole point is not to draw attention to her visiting Avengers Tower and Jigsaw, so maybe… Maybe it’ll just be a car. A regular car. She can hope.
She’s got her big tote bag with the wrapped gifts for Jigsaw and Lucky, and also a box of red plum star tarts from the Greyer Bakery, where the lady who owns the place is always really cheerful and advertises that fifteen percent of the proceeds from this particular pastry go to some kind of defense fund for Jigsaw.
She heard about the bakery on the local news, and the pastries are really good. Good enough that she doesn’t really buy them for the defense fund, though that’s nice, but because everything Jenna makes tastes amazing. Her favorites are these red plum tarts shaped like five-pointed stars with a sweetly tart jam center and big sugar crystals all along the borders.
She hopes Jigsaw likes them, too. She’s brought a baker’s dozen of them, and that’s a lot of pastry to eat if it’s not a hit with him.
And she hopes Agent Barton doesn’t object to the idea of a defense fund. Monesha hasn’t ever really discussed that with Jenna—she’s more in and out about her bakery visits than that—but the news had said there was a partnership between the bakery and some Etsy shop that specializes in Red Star Killer-themed pins and earrings and stuff. Just in case Jigsaw needs a really good lawyer at some point.
Monesha can’t imagine that there’ll be a need for that—either the lawyer or the need to pay for said lawyer. But it’s nice to know that people are thinking these things through and supporting Jigsaw, even from afar and without knowing the situation itself.
Monesha hasn’t been recognized as one of the “survivors” out and about, not since whatever Agent Romanoff did to chase reporters off who had her number, and she hasn’t advertised the facts to anyone who does know. So it’s maybe a little risky to visit the Greyer bakery and buy the red plum tarts, but it should be fine. She can’t be the only survivor who has retained a degree of anonymity.
As soon as she manages to get out from behind the cloud of commuters, she sees a man with a sign that says “Monesha” on it in elegant lettering. He looks trustworthy, but Monesha has a sudden stab of apprehension between her shoulders.
Is that Happy? Is that an imposter? Is that someone who has found out about her and—
No, she tells herself with an internal sigh. If someone was going to do her harm, there are easier ways than by abducting her from a train station when the Avengers of all people are expecting her. It’s fine.
She approaches with a smile despite her unreasonable trepidation, and the man smiles back at her.
“Miss Fowler,” he says in greeting, folding up the sign and tucking it into the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket. “Right on schedule.”
He holds his hand out to take her bag of presents or her box of pastries, maybe both.
Monesha hands him the pastry box and surreptitiously pats the flip phone in her pocket. If this is anything other than what it appears to be, she can at least be tracked by flip phone and maybe she’ll have an opportunity to use it to call for help.
But that won’t happen. She doesn’t know why she’s even thinking these things. She must just get paranoid the closer she gets to interacting with Jigsaw. It’s the presence of the flip phone, the need to avoid using names, all of it. It adds up, is all.
“Have a pleasant train ride?” Happy asks her as they walk to the car.
“About as pleasant as a three-hour train ride can be,” Monesha says. “I read a book on Deaf culture. I’m learning ASL.”
“That’ll come in handy,” he says. “I don’t know any, myself, but I should learn. The whole team is learning.”
That’s nice, and it loosens something up within her. Only an insider would know the significance of ASL or Deaf culture in this situation, and only an insider would know that the whole team is learning ASL to talk with Jigsaw.
Of course, it’s not a secret that Agent Barton has hearing aids, but it’s also not exactly reported on. They’re not little, either. Kind of chunky and in-your-face with the purple. So it’s not hidden but not announced. Maybe this man thinks that’s what she’s talking about and she’s interpreting him as safe when he isn’t.
Monesha would roll her eyes at herself and her brain’s antics if she weren’t aware that it could be misinterpreted.
“How long have you worked with them?” Monesha asks, careful to avoid saying anything that anyone could overhear and shouldn’t.
The car Happy leads her to has STARK4 as the license plate, and the last little bit of tension fades away.
“I’m actually not part of the Avengers,” he says as he opens the car door for her. “I’m Stark Industries. Security head.”
“Oh.” Monesha puts her bag in and then follows it. When Happy has deposited the pastry box on the passenger seat next to him and started the car, she continues.
“How does that work, exactly? I’ve sent letters to Jigsaw care of Stark Industries because there’s no other way to get them there, but they seem to get lost a lot. I thought there were connections between the two, because Tony Stark, but…”
Happy smiles into the rearview mirror at her and then pulls into the street. “I work with Stark Industries, but I’m still one of Mr Stark’s right hand guys. We’re really close. When he needs a favor, he pulls me in. I don’t know much about the mail room, though.”
Monesha nods. So picking her up is a special favor for Tony Stark himself. The team is a lot closer than she thought it was. That’s good, nice. It makes her feel better knowing that the whole team is involved in Jigsaw’s life and he’s not just used for missions or the like.
Like the mission they may or may not have gone on last week, when that photographer inadvertently discovered the quinjet taking off and that girl ended up walking Lucky the next morning.
They chat a little on the drive to the Tower, with Happy asking why she’s bringing presents and pastries and her explaining the thing with the pastries and telling him about how much fun it is to buy things for people and watch them enjoy those things.
“He hasn’t had a lot in life from what I know of him,” she says. “And the things he does have, he’s really enthusiastic about. I just want to contribute. That’s all.”
Happy looks like he’s about to say something and then changes his mind and merely smiles again into the rearview mirror. “Well, we’ll have to see what the holidays bring, in that case. Should be fun, if you like that word. He doesn’t.”
“He doesn’t like fun, or he doesn’t like the word ‘fun?’” she asks.
“Oh I’m sure he’s had lots of fun since May,” Happy says with a slight shudder. “But the word, yeah, we avoid it. I don’t know why. I don’t ask.”
Monesha ponders that for the rest of the drive, and makes a mental note to avoid the word. She can talk around “fun,” she thinks. Enjoyment, pleasure, entertainment, there’s lots of options.
She probably doesn’t really want to know why Jigsaw doesn’t like the word, though. If he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like it. That’s going to have to be good enough for her, she decides. She’s not going to pry.
Notes:
Content Warning: Brief discussion of medical fears Jigsaw has surrounding the notion of Alpine getting her vaccinations.
Chapter 118: Tower | This is gonna be the best day of my life
Notes:
Chapter title from “Best Day of My Life” by American Authors.
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 1:00 p.m.—
She is here! The feeder with the braids, Monesha, is here!
It knows the moment the voice without a mouth tells them so because there is a pause in the fish game and then the other asset looks over at it and grins. Then the other asset is saving the game—there is a fish caught up on the evil-looking hook through the fish’s cheek and the other asset does not want to lose the fish—and getting up off of the sofa.
“You want to go down and meet her in the parking lot,” the other asset asks, “or wait for Happy to bring her up here?”
It holds up one finger and then goes to get the leash for the dog. If the dog leaves the hive building, it needs to be on a leash. No one will be leaving the hive building right now, but they will be going to the garage under the hive building that houses all of the transport vehicles, and that might be close enough to outside of the hive building that the leash is needed.
The dog immediately gets out of the dog bed, abandoning the bacon bone with a happy swish-thump of the dog’s tail and a lolling of the dog’s tongue. The dog is so excited to go for a walk!
“JARVIS, tell them we’ll meet them there. Give us a few minutes to get down there.”
It listens for a response, just to see if it can hear the voice without a mouth, and catches “certainly, Agent Barton” coming from everywhere and nowhere.
When it knows to listen for the voice without a mouth, it can choose to hear what is said. It is trying to get better about doing that, because the voice without a mouth is trying to help it. It should make that easier for the voice without a mouth.
The other asset goes to the other asset’s nesting room and there are sounds of putting shoes onto feet, and one shirt being exchanged for another. The other asset’s shirt had not looked out of place, but if the other asset wants to wear another one, that is okay. There are many good shirts—proper shirts for assets to wear—in the other asset’s closet to choose from, and nothing baggy or sack-like.
It looks at the shirt it is wearing, and decides that it is fine. And it is already wearing shoes, so it does not need to go to the room that is just for it and find anything to add to or change about what it is wearing.
They are on the way down with the dog in minutes, which is good because the other asset only asked for a few minutes and it does not want for Monesha to think that they are “dragging their feet” to come see her. “Dragging feet” is when someone walks extra slow and puts as many delays in place as possible so that something unpleasant or undesirable will happen later and not sooner.
The feeder with the braids is waiting by the elevator in the garage that houses the transport vehicles, standing with the man it sees sometimes in the hallways who is always afraid of it and freezes when it is around as though it cannot see the man if the man does not move.
The feeder with the braids has a large bag again! Maybe there are gifts inside of the bag like there were the first time she visited it. Feeders must always come with things to give to it, at least the good ones. The feeder with the box on wheels always has something for it to eat, and the feeder with the braids always has the blue and yellow bag with the gifts inside.
And the man who is always freezing when he sees it is holding a white box like a cube made out of stiff paper. It smells sweet and tart, faintly. Maybe he is holding it for the feeder with the braids and the white paper box is filled with something tasty!
The feeder with the braids smiles bright and wide when the two assets and the dog step off the elevator, and the man who is always freezing when he sees it does as he always does and freezes with an uneasy smile on his face.
“Hey Monesha,” the other asset says in greeting while the dog tugs at the leash to go smell the feeder and her bag.
It lets the dog pull it closer to the feeder and gives her a smile and a wave in greeting of its own. She is finally here!
“Hi, Agent Barton, Jigsaw,” she says.
“Just Clint is fine, thanks.”
“Okay,” the feeder with the braids says. “I missed you, Jigsaw.”
It missed her, too. It has been ages since the feeder with the braids came to see it last. It still has all of the wrappings of the gifts in their own treasure box, and it is still using the notebook with the stars on the tops of the pages, and the felt-tipped marker pens in so many colors. It thinks of her often when using them.
“Dessert, huh?” The other asset reaches out to take the white paper box from the man who is always freezing when he sees it. “We’re going to have dessert coming out our ears between this and the banana bread.”
Monesha looks up from petting the dog behind the ears. “Should I have—”
“No, no, more is better. These’ll be gone by dinner, whatever they are. What are they? Donuts? Cupcakes?”
They all four go back into the elevator with the dog, and the man who freezes keeps far away from it. It does not know what the man is afraid of, since it would never hurt him without being hurt first, but that is for the man who freezes to know, and not for this asset to know.
“Red plum tarts,” she says. “From this bakery in D.C. that is very pro-Jigsaw.”
The other asset raises an eyebrow and holds the white paper box on one extended palm while opening it up to peek with the other hand. The smell is even more tart than sweet when the box lid opens, just for a second, before closing again.
“Yum,” says the other asset.
“They really are good, yeah.”
The elevator zips upward smoothly until it stops, and the man who freezes all the time inches gratefully off into a hallway before they get to the hallway that the rooms for assets are on. Then the elevator is moving again, and there is no need to worry about what the man who freezes will do.
“So how do you mean ‘very pro-Jigsaw,’ anyway?” the other asset asks. “It’s a bakery. Those aren’t exactly known for being pro-anything except pastries.”
It would also like to know. It does not know what “pro-Jigsaw” means but it has heard of “bakery” as a special kind of food store that sells breads and desserts and things, all of which are very good. And Jigsaw is this asset’s name. It is in favor of being connected to a bakery. Maybe that will mean more breads and more desserts.
“Oh, you hadn’t heard?” The feeder with the braids follows the other asset down the hallway to the rooms for assets, and it trails after them both with the dog at its heels.
“The owner got together with this woman running an Etsy shop, and they agreed that a percentage of the proceeds from these tarts would go to…” she looks over her shoulder at it with an expression that it cannot entirely make out, but that it thinks is almost a little worried. Almost.
The other asset laughs. “What, they’re going to be paying for Jigsaw’s therapy or something? Not likely, with Stark around.”
“More like a defense fund. In case there’s legal trouble.”
Oh, it knows a little about that. The flying man explained about it one time while trying to convince it that killing was bad.
Legal trouble means when people want to take it to a place called a court where there are judges and juries who make decisions about whether what it did was right or wrong, and then decide on a punishment for it or a reward for it—never a bad reward, though, or a good punishment.
But no one can take it anywhere it does not want to go—it will fight and kill to avoid being taken back—and there is a group named after a glittering long fang that says that as long as it does not kill outside of a battle with the team that is not a cell, then the judges and juries cannot say anything about what it does or has done.
The other asset has also explained to it, back when it killed the target with the hammer, that it could get in trouble for things like that.
It did not get in trouble, though. Yasmin was worried about it, but not upset at it. And there was no trouble with the court place or the judges or the juries, and there was no trouble with the group that is named after a glittering long fang, either. No trouble at all, not even with the man with the eye patch or the strict woman with the bun who still sends it a folder of potential targets to mark every week.
“I think we’re going to avoid any legal trouble,” the other asset says as the door to the rooms for assets is opened. “S.W.O.R.D. has a deal and we’re following the terms pretty well.”
“Just in case,” the feeder says. “If it does come up, there’s something there if you need it, Jigsaw.”
It thanks her with a smile and unhooks the leash. It does not know what would come up, or what it is that is “there,” exactly, if it needs it. That is a conversation that sounds boring and pointless—there is nothing about desserts connecting to it, after all.
Monesha
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
Jigsaw does have a cat now.
From Captain America’s tweets, it had sounded like a full grown cat, maybe a rescue, but this little ball of white fluff looks like she’s five weeks old, maybe six. She might still be a rescue, though.
Monesha considers that Jigsaw did not have a kitten when she was last here, and given the kitten’s likely age and clearly well-established presence in the suite, it’s possible that Alpine is what Jigsaw was clutching to his chest in the North Carolina footage.
Alpine is adorable, even for a kitten, and is easily roused from a state of bliss on top of a cat tree into an energetic and feisty manic state at Monesha’s arrival, only to be calmed down by an intense round of wand toy play with Jigsaw.
Monesha can’t wait to play some more with the kitten when they get back from the park. She wishes she’d had the forethought to bring a toy for the kitten as well as the bone for Lucky.
But Jigsaw had shown her all three cat trees in the suite, and there are also shorter cat perches in the living room and near the windows in the kitchen. And the box of toys on the lower shelf of the console table by the door, filled almost to overflowing with an assortment of cat toys. She’s not really sure there’s room for more things for Alpine.
Still, she’s thinking as they leave the Tower with Lucky and not Alpine that she’ll look into maybe getting a laser pointer for the kitten. Something to help tire her out quickly.
There’s a redhead with a mic in her hand and a large man with a camera on his shoulder as they cross the street with Lucky on their way to the park, and Agent Barton must have said something about leaving them alone, because the pair don’t approach, and don’t even get the camera trained on them—or maybe it’s Agent Romanoff who said something, since she seems much scarier than Agent Barton.
She thinks she recognizes the redhead from one of the news reports about the Avengers’ midweek mission last week, but she hopes she’s wrong about that. The reporter had revealed some girl’s name to the whole world as the Avengers’ pet-sitter, and that just seems irresponsible.
Monesha hopes she isn’t going to end up on the news. That would defeat Agent Romanoff’s efforts to keep her free from the reporter menace that had started plaguing her again after the leaked footage of the North Carolina mission and the subsequent press release about Jigsaw joining the Avengers.
She doesn’t want to be famous, especially for having traveled all this way to be seen with Jigsaw. That’s the way to get on HYDRA’s radar, maybe. Or some other enemy’s list of people who can be hurt to get to Jigsaw. It definitely defeats the purpose of having been picked up at the train station, of having the code names in her secret flip phone, of having a secret flip phone in the first place.
She doesn’t want to be in danger, and she doesn’t want to put Jigsaw or anyone else at risk, either.
Maybe they should have stayed in Avengers Tower. Had food brought to them. Something low-key and indoors, out of sight. But Agent Barton had made the suggestion, and Jigsaw had seemed to approve of it. And the reporter had definitely seen them and not made any attempt to report on them. Maybe it’ll be fine.
The three of them walk Lucky along the edge of the park toward a food stand, in broad daylight, in public. No efforts made to disguise themselves. It must be okay or Agent Romanoff would have told them not to do it.
Jigsaw holds Lucky’s leash but doesn’t really need to—the dog stays by his side as though the leash wasn’t there. And Agent Barton has a bag over his shoulder with a frisbee and a couple of the balls she brought last time, so they can play with Lucky further into the park. Neither of them look ill at ease or worried in the slightest about being seen.
Monesha tries to let that put her at ease as well.
When they get to the food stand—a sandwich shop, which is a welcome surprise, as she’d thought there’d be hot dogs or something instead—Agent Barton orders something with pretty much all of the meats on the menu, plus cheese and minus the sauteed bell peppers that come with it.
He then indicates that he’ll be paying for the three of them and moves aside so she can order the first thing that catches her eye—a turkey club, simple, light, hopefully not too prone to falling apart if they have to eat on a bench in the park.
Jigsaw takes his time ordering, though. A lot of thought goes into the sandwich selection, and the man running the stand looks borderline impatient about the process until he realizes that Jigsaw alone is going to order multiple sandwiches and probably end up spending a lot of money.
Agent Barton clarifies the menu where needed, verifying what has meat and what doesn’t, and confirming that Jigsaw’s choices are vegetarian. But Jigsaw does the actual ordering by pointing to things on the paper menu and building his sandwiches up with painstaking care. There’s something odd about the way he holds the menu, though. It’s almost as if he’s having trouble reading it.
One of Jigsaw’s sandwiches ends up being sauteed eggplant with broccoli rabe and some bell peppers, one has probably a whole avocado on it in great big hunks, and a third has thick slabs of sliced falafel and yogurt with cucumber and olives.
The whole thing takes long enough that there’s a line formed behind them when they’re finished ordering, but no one seems to mind once it becomes clear what’s actually happening is not someone being picky but someone ordering in a less traditional manner.
That’s either because Lucky is such a well-behaved and good dog, sitting politely by Jigsaw’s side and looking around at the others in so charming a fashion, or because Agent Barton is sending surreptitious glares at the one person who had started to make a stink about the ordering taking too long.
Either way, they get their sandwiches and remove themselves from the area to eat elsewhere, before there’s more than a mild murmur of “Jigsaw” and “only one eye” and “Hawkeye” and “who’s that with them.”
Oh, she hopes she doesn’t end up on the news.
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—
Monesha is really coming along with the ASL. In a very short time, she’s picked up enough get her point across, and her grammar is pretty good, too. She’s expressive and precise with her signing, and while she struggles to pick up Jigsaw’s meaning on a lot of things, she doesn’t seem to be feeling too frustrated or dejected about not understanding his signing.
It can be hard to follow Jigsaw’s signing sometimes, even for him. And he is very, very used to the signing style by now. Jigsaw has a way of combining signs together in a blur of too-smooth motion—just one of the drawbacks of the way he moves fluidly—and leaving off pieces of signs as he tries to remember how the entire sign phrase goes. And there is usually a disconnect between his expression and his signs.
Plus all the signs that are unique to them—HYDRA, for one, but there are a lot of things that would usually be fingerspelled and can’t be due to Jigsaw not being able to easily read or sign with fingerspelling.
It’s still nice that there’s a tablet they can use for some things, though, and Monesha seems very surprised to hear the voice Jigsaw chose for himself. And that probably makes sense. Clint doesn’t think very many people know that Jigsaw’s secret history with the intelligence community was as a scary Soviet assassin and boogieman. So why would anyone expect the Russian accent?
But Monesha’s pretty good at rolling with the punches. She doesn’t even ask about that, just answers his questions and moves on.
And she hasn’t gotten on Clint’s case about his bandaged hand, either, or about the remaining traces of burn marks along Jigsaw’s face and temples, or the fact that when Jigsaw tucks his hair behind his ears the burned off ends are visible. She hasn’t even commented on how close to his face he holds his tablet to pick the words he wants.
Clint has seen her looking, though, while trying to help him color in his fully assembled black and white Christmas cookie puzzle, and he’s seen the way her lips get all pinched up in disapproval or concern or something when Jigsaw isn’t looking. Hard to tell. But she’s definitely noticed.
She’s just not saying anything about it, for which he’s thankful. That’s a conversation he’d rather Natasha field, and she’s spending the afternoon working on a new level of dancing with Steve down in the gym.
And that’s okay. Natasha can dance all day, as long as Clint doesn’t have to try to make a case to Monesha about how Jigsaw is better off in the field than kept from it. And he’ll listen to Monesha talk about her work for however long she wants to share.
Apparently, Monesha used to work in the Women’s section of that department store, which Clint vaguely recalls from the time he and Natasha tracked her down in D.C. using a purchased leather jacket to get in touch with her. Now she’s been transferred to Menswear for some reason and while there’s some overlap—the shoe section, somehow?—she’s had to learn all new clothing lines and figure out how to ingratiate herself to a whole new type of customer.
It all sounds complicated for a clothing store. That’s the kind of place where he’d hope there wasn’t a lot of need to work with customers at all short of the checkout area, but it’s not like he’s ever shopped extensively at a department store. He just kind of relies on bulk shopping done by others and passed along to him. Clothes appear; they aren’t something he goes out to find.
In between coloring in puzzle pieces with the new glitter markers Monesha brought him, Jigsaw wants to know all about the department store where different clothes live in their rooms, though, each kind of clothing in its own special place. And he wants to know what kinds of shoes there are, and are there fuzzy socks, and what about sleeves? Are there shirts that are so-snug and also have zippers and no sleeves? Maybe something for assets to wear.
“Assets?” Monesha asks as she caps her current marker—cookie complete, no need for more of that color. She shakes her head. “What’s an asset?”
Jigsaw indicates himself and Clint. “This asset and the other asset,” he says after a few taps on his tablet. “Assets.”
“You mean like Avengers?” she asks. “Superheroes?”
Clint can see this going downhill pretty fast. If Jigsaw tries to explain that assets aren’t like people, that’ll upset her. They’re working on that, the personhood thing, and they’ll get there—they will. But it’s not a struggle Monesha needs to know about.
And he doesn’t want to interrupt Jigsaw or speak for him, but…
Jigsaw solves the problem by drawing on the tablet. It’s an asset that’s not actually a graceful stick figure, but is fleshed out and wearing those suits the skeletonized Winter Soldiers were wearing in those tanks in Siberia. Snug—probably—sleeveless, with zig-zagged zippers and whatever all over the torso and upper legs. He points at the figure and signs that assets wear this.
Monesha takes a moment, but she finally says, “We have some athletic wear that’s like a sleeveless vest. And some fleece-lined vests for winter. I don’t think I’ve seen anything come in with that kind of zipper pattern, though.”
Jigsaw nods. Then points at the sleeveless figure again and gives a thumbs up.
Clint wonders if that’s a way of requesting something, like if he wants Clint’s sleeves to disappear, or wants sleeveless stuff to wear himself. Lord knows that they already have tight pants covered. Jigsaw’s a downright distracting figure some days in his yoga pants. Clint tries not to stare, but his partner is hot.
“It’s definitely a look,” Monesha says with a diplomatic air of not agreeing that it’s a good look.
Clint kind of agrees—the cryo suit looks very restrictive and indicates that being flash frozen is an imminent option—but he could see how sleeveless tops would look pretty good on Jigsaw. Everything does. But it’s winter soon and they should be breaking out warmer stuff than sleeveless.
“Maybe in the spring we can get some sleeveless stuff, Jigs,” Clint says. “You know, March, April.”
Jigsaw points to his new calendar and makes his question sign.
“It’s October now. We’re in fall and winter weather. We have the rest of this month and then five or six more before it’s spring time.”
Jigsaw’s eyes widen and he taps his wrist several times. Then, on the tablet: “Is so long.”
Clint laughs. “Yeah, I guess.”
Monesha smiles. “There are always ways to make a sleeveless look more comfortable in the winter, and you can wear sweaters over them when you go outside. Or jackets. Coats. Anyway, inside the building it’ll be warm enough.”
Clint can see her crafty look, and he wonders if the next time Monesha visits there will be some nice winter clothes in Jigsaw’s size in the IKEA bag waiting to be unwrapped. She does work in menswear now…
Chapter 119: Assassins | No limits, just epiphanies
Notes:
Chapter title from “Best Day of My Life” by American Authors.
Thanks for your patience with the comment replies! Being the executor of my dad's estate means I am spending all my free time taking care of business stuff. Ugh. Your comments have been a delightful respite from that. ^_^
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—
The feeder with the braids enjoys the bread from bananas and is very happy to take two whole loaves of it home with her! One with the brain-nuts and one with the tiny pyramids of chocolate. It did so well mashing up bananas and chopping up brain-nuts.
It has provided food to a feeder. And the gift of food was received well. That does not make it a kind of feeder, just an asset that is blurring boundaries. But it feels so good to share and to provide.
She has shared and provided this paper year clock with the pretty fishes to color in, and new pens that sparkle in addition to being so, so colorful. And she has provided a white paper box of red plum tarts that are so sweet and tart—possibly why they are called tarts—with crunchy sugar on the outside rim, the tart crust, and silky smooth red jam in the center that is what tastes so tart.
And all of it in a star shape!
It has colored in some of the puzzle with the new pens, and the feeder helped, and it has admired all of the fishes and other water creatures in the paper year clock, holding it close enough to see all the details.
There are even some dolphin-fishes. It will color those in using pinks and grays, and it will show the results to the hamburger technician when it is done coloring them. There are so many teeny-tiny spaces to color inside. It will take a long time.
And it has eaten delicious sandwiches outside of the hive building—it has eaten a kind of broccoli that is almost all stem and leaf! It cannot wait to tell the other feeder all about it. Three different kinds of bread, and so many vegetables and something called a falafel that is made out of beans, and all the different textures and flavors were so good.
And it has eaten delicious red plum tarts inside the hive building, and there are still red plum tarts to share with Yasmin for their session later—their session today is later than usual so that it can spend time with the feeder with the braids before she has to go back to the original hunting grounds—and with Zoe even later still.
And maybe it can save a red plum tart to give to the other feeder, Caroline, tomorrow.
It never could have anticipated that there would be such wonderful feeders, and so many of them in the circle of people surrounding it. Good experts, good feeders, good technicians, even a good researcher, though it sometimes forgets that the curly haired researcher is a good one.
And no handlers at all, or operators, or even trainers.
It feels a sigh building up inside of the body and so it takes in a deep breath and lets it all out at once with a fall of the shoulders. That feels good.
“Something wrong?” the other asset asks it as the two assets walk the feeder with the braids down to the garage that houses all of the transport vehicles under the hive building.
It shakes the head and signs that it is happy, makes the sign very large because it is very happy.
“I’ll try to come visit more often,” the feeder says. “This has been a lot of— I mean that I enjoyed our time together.”
It nods and gives her a large smile and an even bigger thank-you.
“You know,” the other asset says, “we’re having some kind of Halloween party next week. I forget the date. Saturday or Sunday or something. If you wanted, and you had the time off and stuff, you could probably come. It’s for the team, but I bet I could pull a few strings, ask if there’s room for friends to come.”
The feeder with the braids appears to be considering this.
It hopes that she will decide to come to the party. It has not thought about the party in a long time, mostly because it does not know anything about it and there is therefore nothing to think about. But if there are ways to bring the feeder with the braids to the party, that would be good, it is sure. The party is supposed to be enjoyable for everyone there and not fun at all, not like other parties it has been made to attend and to… participate in.
“Let me check my work schedule and get back to you with my availability,” the feeder says, “if you’re sure it’s a good idea. It sounds nice, but I know we’re trying to keep things kind of quiet on the news front.”
The other asset frowns. “I think Natasha told the reporters to leave you alone, so you should be fine there. But yeah, let me know when you’re free and I’ll let you know if I’m even allowed to invite you.”
“Is it dangerous at all? My knowing you guys and spending time here.”
Dangerous? Why would it be dangerous for the feeder with the braids to know them? Though it is not there in the original hunting grounds to dispatch anyone who comes after the feeder with the braids. So if it is dangerous, there is nothing it can do.
“Dangerous for who?” the other asset asks.
The feeder with the braids hesitates. “Well, for Jigsaw, I guess, and for me. I know Agent Romanoff has cautioned me to keep a low profile and all, and she said that she might have to send me a warning on the flip phone if anything comes up.”
It does not think that spending time with it would be dangerous for either of them, not for this asset or for the feeder with the braids. How would it be dangerous? If there were any danger, it would go to the original hunting grounds and dispatch that danger in such a way that the feeder with the braids could never be hurt by it.
But if the ballerina woman thinks there might be danger, thinks there might need to be a warning…
“I mean, it’s dangerous knowing any famous people who have enemies out there,” the other asset says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. We’ll work something out. Maybe video conferencing. You can work on your signing that way and avoid spending six hours on a train.”
She smiles. “That would be great. I’m still learning, and I’ll take all the practice I can get.”
It is still learning, too. They are the same as in this.
The man who freezes when it is around is waiting for them when they get off the elevator, and so they have to say goodbye to the feeder with the braids. She has to get back onto the boxes on wheels and go back to the original hunting grounds. It reminds her to keep her metal club handy and and to lock her doors, and she laughs and nods.
That is all the safety it knows how to provide her without being right there to tear apart anything or anyone that would harm her. But if the ballerina woman is involved, maybe she will be able to more thoroughly protect the feeder with the braids from a distance. She is cunning like that, the ballerina woman. A spider.
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
“So how’d things go with Monesha?” she asks as Clint settles into the chair across from her and gives the puzzle box on her coffee table a cursory inspection and shake.
Clint nods. “Pretty good, I think,” he says. “Jigsaw got some new glitter markers and a wall calendar to color in. He’s pretty excited about them.”
Natasha wonders if Monesha will bring gifts for him every time she visits, or if she’ll eventually realize that it isn’t necessary to thank him any further for saving her in that alley—Jigsaw is content enough just to see her and know that she’s doing well; he doesn’t need the gifts to accept her.
But it’s possible that Monesha can’t get over the enormity of the gift that is her continued life and safety. The gifts might be purely to satisfy a need on her part, rather than an attempt to ingratiate herself to him.
And she does choose thoughtful gifts. Her understanding of him deepens every time they interact, and all of his excited show-and-tell the last time must have given her the idea that he doesn’t just like to draw and write on notepads but also enjoys the bright colors and artistic elements of filling in line drawings.
The calendar might just be the thing she chose to give him this time that needed filling in, as opposed to a coloring book. Or maybe Monesha recognized on some level that Jigsaw lives a timeless existence, with a set schedule that nevertheless doesn’t take into consideration any pictures bigger than the pattern of a week. What is a month to him? Just a series of weeks.
And he only bothers with the weeks because he knows the count of days between visits by Caroline and Kate. Ask him to think about things in terms of months? Or multiple-week stretches? You won’t get far. He’ll lose track.
The calendar might be just the thing he needs to wrap his mind around longer stretches of time. They can pencil in things like Alpine’s vaccines coming up, or her spay procedure whenever that gets scheduled, and they won’t have this morning’s problem of him having forgotten about the looming appointment—it’ll be marked on his calendar and he can visualize the time between now and then, can see the time passing with every marked off square on the calendar.
Honestly, Natasha’s kind of miffed they didn’t think to get him a calendar before this point.
“They didn’t color in the calendar, though,” Clint says as he rattles the puzzle box another time, turning it over in his hands, giving it little prods with his fingers as he looks for ways to open it. “The markers got used on that jigsaw puzzle with all the Christmas cookies on it. He managed to finish that thing after the mission despite hardly being able to see it.”
Natasha smiles. Jigsaw’s black and white puzzles are ones she’s glad he’s content to assemble on his own. She’s okay with edge pieces on those, but there’s little joy in matching shapes without color, at least in her book. She prefers her puzzles to be enjoyable first, and challenging second.
“I’m glad he had someone to help color those in,” she says. “Someone who knows what a decorated Christmas cookie looks like.”
Because Jigsaw certainly wouldn’t, if Natasha’s guess is right. If he’s seen them at all since he was Bucky, he’s probably forgotten them or wasn’t sure what he was seeing at the time if he does remember seeing them.
Just one more thing they all have to look forward to, seeing what Jigsaw thinks about the bundle of holidays coming up. He won’t have been allowed to celebrate any of them in genuine ways, and any holiday celebrations he did attend, he was probably part of the festivities in a way he did not enjoy and likely carries trauma over.
She remembers her first time truly celebrating a holiday after the Red Room’s calculated dismissal of holidays as weaknesses to be exploited. It had been Valentine’s Day, and Clint had been the one to teach her how to celebrate it by carefully waiting until the point in time when it was logistically too late for any amount of balloons or chocolate to save a romantic partner who’d failed to plan ahead for the holiday…
And how to then strike—raiding the grocery stores for huge deals on cheap picked-over chocolates.
She’s since learned the more traditional ways to celebrate a variety of holidays, but Valentine’s Day chocolate sales still hold a special place in her heart. They’re somehow a more genuine way to celebrate to her. The celebration resonates with her. It’s a mission, it requires planning and cunning, it has concrete results in the form of shopping carts full of cheap chocolate.
Easter and Halloween present similar celebrations, the same pattern of behavior but with slightly more varied forms of chocolate and candy as a result of mission success. It hadn’t occurred to her for years that Clint had a skewed idea of what celebration looked like, a result of his own childhood’s more miserable moments.
And now Halloween is the first holiday Jigsaw will be presented with, courtesy of Pepper’s party—at least, the first holiday she’s seen celebrated in the Tower to date. He won’t have the experience of descending on a grocery store and hoovering up all the candy sales, but he’ll probably get to participate in more traditional celebrations. Pumpkin carving, perhaps. Costumes.
And he’ll definitely be confronted with the bounty that is Thanksgiving. So many different dishes to eat, so much food on one table, and the presence of a turkey, possibly. He’s seen fried chicken the one time they ordered that for a team meal, back when he was discovering the true nature of meat. That she knows of, though, he hasn’t encountered a whole animal still in its basic shape, being artfully arranged on a platter.
There are others, and she can’t be sure which will be celebrated in the Tower other than Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The rest might not get their chance to shine, overshadowed as they are by the “big ones,” and this year at least, maybe that’s for the best. Three major holiday celebration months in a row is going to be a lot for Jigsaw to process—hell, it’s a lot for many people who are used to holidays to process.
“This thing is a pain in the ass,” Clint grouses before tossing the puzzle box he’s failed to open onto the coffee table. “Is there anything in it? Something worth the hassle of trying to open it?”
Natasha laughs. “It’s got something in it. It’s a surprise for whoever sticks with it long enough to get it open.”
There are a few buttons in there, just pretty baubles, and she’s not about to tell him that the prize for opening the puzzle box is something that probably only Jigsaw would be happy to get.
Clint glares at the little puzzle box but does not reach for it again. Clearly, the surprise is not enticing enough for him.
“So what else did you do with Monesha today?” she asks. “JARVIS told me you went to the park. Anything exciting happen?”
“Thankfully not. Jigsaw ate some sandwiches with vegetables I’ve never even heard of on them, but the rest of us had good sandwiches that didn’t need to be explained to us.” Clint shrugs. “Oh, and I invited her to Pepper’s Halloween party. Not sure if that was a good call, though. She’s going to let us know if she’s even available.”
Natasha doesn’t know that it’s a bad idea from a Jigsaw perspective, but it would definitely put a limit on what they were able to discuss at the party, having a civilian in the room with them. And who’s to say Monesha would be comfortable around so many of them at once? Or that Jigsaw would be able to handle the extra numbers himself? Even if he’s comfortable with two groups of people, putting those two groups together in one place might be overwhelming numbers for him.
Though it might be a moot point, since the party is only a week away and Monesha likely needs more time than that to arrange her work schedule. If Monesha can’t come because of work, that would solve the problem of having invited her unofficially but not being prepared for her presence.
Though maybe the party should be a strictly no shop talk kind of party, anyway. Pepper is read in by default, but she might not want to hear about missions and the like in a party setting. Natasha has a feeling the purpose of the party is more than team building, and possibly has something to do with getting used to Jigsaw’s presence so she doesn’t feel she has to sneak around the common areas of the Tower.
Missions and shop talk wouldn’t exactly be likely to make her feel more comfortable around Jigsaw. Particularly given his self-appointed mission to violently dispatch all of HYDRA, even if he doesn’t act on that mission requirement at the moment.
“I can tell by your silence that you think I shouldn’t have said anything about the party,” Clint says with a rueful laugh.
“Not necessarily. It could be fun to have a party with all of Jigsaw’s civilian friends gathered together. I’m just not sure that adding those civilians to an Avengers party is the right way to do it. The two groups probably shouldn’t mix.”
“Think Pepper can swing two parties?”
Natasha laughs. “Pepper could plan a party for every afternoon that’s left in the year and not break a sweat.”
No, she’s more concerned about whether Jigsaw can “swing two parties.” Just the one party on its own might be more than enough stimulation and new experience for him.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
“And how was your afternoon with Monesha, Jigsaw?” Yasmin asks.
It smiles its excitement and holds out the pair of glitter markers it brought along for Yasmin to see. One of them is purple with silver flecks of glitter, and the other is red with gold flecks of glitter. These are its favorite two markers of the set.
While Yasmin is admiring the markers, it taps and swipes on the tablet, pulling up pictures of the puzzle with some of the pieces colored in, and the rest of the markers, and the paper year clock with all of the ocean creatures to color in.
There are also pictures of the sandwiches they ate in the green park—the other asset made the pictures with a phone and then sent the pictures to the tablet. And of the feeder with the braids and this asset, shoulder-to-shoulder and smiling so wide and bright. There is the feeder with the braids throwing the ball for the dog, and getting licks from the dog, and scratching behind the dog’s ears.
The other asset made many pictures with the phone, many more than it could have made with the camera that spits out the photographs that need to be shaken so much before they appear on the paper.
It exchanges the favorite two markers for the tablet, with all of the pictures arranged in what is called an album, which is just a picture that opens up all of the other pictures to be looked at with the swipe of a finger. Like a scrap book, but all inside of the tablet and not as appealing as a book with ribbons and stamps and stickers.
“It looks like you were very busy,” Yasmin says, handing the tablet back after a minute to look through the pictures. “What was your very favorite thing about the time you had together?”
Its favorite thing? It looks down at the markers for a moment, thinking. There were so many things, and all of them so good. Now it must pick just one thing?
Oh, it knows what that thing must be. It has already given some of the bread from bananas to the experts, to Yasmin and to Zoe, but today it was able to give some of the bread from bananas to the feeder with the braids, to Monesha. That is the favorite thing. It was able to provide for a feeder!
It draws the large, soft brick of bread from bananas—and a banana, as well, to be clear—and then adds an asset with a star on the left arm and a feeder with many braids, the former handing the bread brick over to the latter, and the latter with a big smile.
“What is it about giving Monesha some banana bread that makes it your favorite moment?”
It switches from the drawing app to the AAC app, hunts across the boards to find the words it wants, and arranges them like puzzle pieces into the idea it wants. It is difficult, because there are many parts to the idea, and it is not sure how to connect them best to get meaning across to Yasmin.
“Order,” comes the voice when it finally has the words lined up. “First second third. Jigsaw protect Monesha. Monesha provide Jigsaw, feeder, sandwich, chips, yellow-fuzz-ball, color pens, books, shiny pens, year clock. Jigsaw provide Monesha, bread banana. Provide each other.”
Yasmin smiles. “You’re pleased that you were able to give Monesha something after everything she’s given you over the months since you saved her life. It feels good to exchange things instead of only receiving them.”
It nods and finds more words on the boards. “Feed feeder, provide. Bread banana is mission success. Jigsaw make bread banana, give bread banana.”
“I see,” Yasmin says. “It means that much more because you helped make the banana bread, and did well in the kitchen with Sam and Steve.”
Yes. “Share mission success.”
“I wonder,” Yasmin says. “Is there anything else you can share with Monesha that will last longer than the banana bread? Something she can look at and remember how much fun you all had today?”
It scowls. There was no fun today.
“Yes, fun, Jigsaw. In the traditional sense, not the warped and cruel sense that HYDRA tried to ruin the word with.” Yasmin raises an eyebrow. “Remember that we’re working on accepting nuance and multiple meanings for words.”
It does not want to think about the nuances of fun. It does not want fun to touch the feeder with the braids or the other asset or this asset—not ever again. But it nods all the same. It is working on accepting that others think of different things when that word is used. It is part of the homework it has from Zoe.
“So is there anything else you might share with Monesha? Anything you might make for her?”
It wants to give her more pictures, like the first one that it drew for her when her letter arrived. But all of the pictures are stuck inside of the tablet or in the other asset’s phone, and it cannot cut them out and put them in a scrap book for the feeder with the braids. It supposes it can draw some of the pictures, make a scrap book with drawings of the pictures. That will not be the same thing, though.
It finds some words to say: “Scrap book, but pictures are trap inside Jigsaw tablet and other asset phone. Have to draw.”
Yasmin smiles again. “We can print out the pictures you want, Jigsaw. Why don’t you select your favorite pictures from the album, all the ones you want to put into a scrapbook, and we’ll have JARVIS print them out.”
It stares at the tablet and then at Yasmin. It does not know how the pictures will come out of the tablet, since there is nowhere for paper to go inside of the tablet. But if the other asset’s phone can make the pictures and then they get sent to the tablet, then the tablet must be able to send the pictures to something that does have paper inside of it.
After a minute, it decides that it does not need to know how exactly this will work. It is enough that it does work, and so it begins to go back through the pictures, using the red star app to mark the pictures it likes best.
This will be a good session. Yasmin is already getting out the papers and ribbons and stamps and things that will be needed to make scrap book pages for the feeder with the braids. It will be able to give the feeder with the braids something that she can look at and remember everything, no matter what happens or how much time passes.
That is what it likes about scrap book pages. It can pull them out and remember everything that is in a scrap book page—all of the things, down to the last detail about how it felt and what it thought—even if there are other things crowding the brain or if it did not start out remembering all of the details.
It thinks that if it had a scrap book page for something, it would be able to remember everything on the page once it saw the page, even if it had been wiped.
The hamburger technician talked once about backing up a thing, which is not like moving backward but is about having extra copies of things in case one copy is destroyed. It thinks scrap book pages are a way to back up memories, so that even if the copy inside the head is destroyed, it will still have a copy it can use to remember things.
It has many scrap books now, filled with scrap book pages, memories that it cannot forget because they are stored safely in treasure boxes and can be restored whenever it needs to do so.
Important things go into scrap books, things like what makes it happy, and the other asset, and the dog and the little cat. Things like the plants and the others on the team that is not a cell. Things like favorite foods it has eaten, and things that interest it, like outer space and cake and animals.
And now it can make a scrap book—maybe two scrap books, one for the feeder with the braids and one for this asset—so that all of the good things from today can be remembered, no matter what.
Chapter 120: Tower | Eight days a week
Notes:
Chapter title from “8 Days a Week” by The Beatles.
Chapter Text
Zoe
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“That’s a nice-looking wall calendar, Jigsaw,” Zoe says as Jigsaw gets settled in with Lucky and Clint.
And she isn’t just saying that. It’s made of nice thick paper that won’t bleed through, matte enough that it’s going to hold ink well or provide a pleasant surface for colored pencils, and covered with intricate line drawings of sea creatures complete with strands of detailed seaweed, treasure chests overflowing with tiny gemstones, and little bubbles.
He holds it out for her to inspect more closely, smiling wide and eager as he does so, and Zoe accepts the calendar to flip through. It’s not just a calendar for 2013, as she’d thought it might be, but has all of that year and the last half of the current year, bound in a spiral. That’s nice. And the images are beautiful and varied.
There are turtles, an octopus, several squid, a dolphin, a great many pictures of different kinds of fish, a whale, a sea floor covered with starfish and urchins, a SCUBA diver, a pair of frolicking seals, a narwhal, a mermaid, a shark with some remora attached to its underbelly, whole gardens and forests of kelps and sea grass, a manatee…
Zoe pauses on the October 2012 page and takes a look at the current month’s drawing. This month it’s a pumpkin-shape filled with intricate crustaceans, fish, strands of seaweed, bubbles, starfish, clams, and a treasure chest. Some of the starfish have already been colored in with rich reds and magentas, peppered with orange highlights.
“I see you’re starting to color your calendar in,” she says as she hands it back to him. “Have you thought about adding special dates to your calendar so you can keep track of them?”
Jigsaw blinks at her.
“You could put your Sunday meetings with Kate in your calendar, and your Tuesday and Friday sessions with Caroline,” Zoe suggests.
She consults her phone. She knows that his kitten is due for her vaccines soon. Ah, yes. Very soon, she sees.
“And Alpine’s vaccines are on the 25th, with the Halloween party on that Saturday, the 27th,” she says. “You could put those important dates in the calendar and not forget them.”
Jigsaw frowns and signs that the calendar—literally, the “year clock,” which she suspects he will always prefer to the actual sign—is empty. Then he asks if that’s a problem.
Zoe shakes her head. “That isn’t a problem, no. All calendars start out a little empty until we put things in them.”
“Most people write stuff in the little squares so they can see the dates approaching,” Clint says. “Just important stuff so they don’t forget it.”
Jigsaw runs a fingertip along the grid portion of the calendar, looking pensive. After a moment, he makes her name sign and Yasmin’s and asks his question sign.
“You can add our sessions as well, if you’d like,” Zoe says. “Though we meet with you every day and not just some days of the week. You can add each of us with a different color to keep us all lined up. Special things that don’t happen repeatedly, like the party or Alpine’s vaccines, you can use a really bright color for so they stand out.”
Jigsaw signs “red” with a smile.
“That would work, yes.”
Clint looks like he’s holding some idea back, and Zoe wonders what it is. He couldn’t be objecting to the colors, she thinks. It must be something else.
Is he worried about cluttering the calendar up? She supposes it’s possible that Jigsaw could put so many things in his calendar that it’s impossible to find the important things, even if they are red. But if they fill it out one month at a time, he can discover this for himself and make whatever adjustments he sees fit.
“We can spend some time filling out the rest of your October if you’d like. We’re about halfway through that month.”
Jigsaw nods before he begins to page through the calendar until he gets back to the first of the Octobers. He ponders the grid of days, then runs a fingertip along the names of the days of the week at the top, before locating the 18th.
They haven’t gone over the signs for the months or days of the week in a long while. They did those just after colors, and Jigsaw had shown so little interest that she didn’t linger there. But maybe that’s changing. It might be time to reintroduce those signs, and to set up a board on his AAC app that is just for time and dates.
Part of the reason those signs had proven unpopular with Jigsaw had been the fact that many of them involved fingerspelling the initial portion of a month or the initial letter of a day. But before, he’d had little reason to know the months and not much need to know the days themselves so much as the pattern of days in a given week. Maybe now, that’s different.
“Let’s refresh our vocabulary around days and months, Jigsaw,” Zoe says. “Then we can add a new board on your tablet that has all of them on it before we start filling your calendar in. First, let’s talk about the sign for ‘calendar.’”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 18 October 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
The head is so full of signs for all of the times as it follows the dog back to the rooms for assets, with the other asset at its side.
Signs for the years all the way through to the seconds. There are weeks and months, hours and minutes, even some for decades, which means ten years. There are ten years in a decade. And all of the months have names, just like the days, except there are twelve of the months and only the seven days.
It knew about the seven days, but not about there being twelve months. A year is twelve months, and a decade must be one hundred and twenty months. It has been in the hive building—except for the days it escaped—for only four months, the other asset says, since the missiles and the Bakersfield mission. Before that, it was free for two months.
It has been free from HYDRA captivity for one half of one year.
It was captive for over six decades. That is sixty whole years. More than.
It does not like to think about that. There is so little time that has been free, and so much time that has been captivity. Such a short time for it to have the dog, and the other asset, and the little plant that is not so little anymore, and the little cat that is still so little. So short a time. Almost no time at all.
But it has done so much, and seen so much, and gathered up so many soft things. How can it only have been so short a time?
If it is free for much longer, how will it remember everything that happens to it? How will it remember all of these good things? So much more happens to it now than before. Before it was a lot of the same things happening to it, and none of them good things. It did not want to remember them, and it is sure that it has not remembered each instance of each bad thing. Just the bad things all lumped together by category of bad thing.
All of the chandeliers of asset, together. All of the pushing into it, together. All of the cutting open and taking blood out and putting other things in, together. The technicians, blurred. The researchers, blurred. Not handlers or operators—those are too dangerous to lose track of. But the rest, blurred together into categories of bad thing.
It does not want to lump good things into a category. It wants to remember every trip to the green park, every chance to feed a duck, every gardening session with the ballerina woman, every trip to the range to watch the other asset show off. It wants to remember all of the times the hamburger technician has shown it a new animal, and all of the therapy sessions and sessions with Caroline. Every time the feeder with the braids has visited it.
Maybe the only reason it can remember all of these good things now is that there have not been very many of them. What if it is free for a whole year? What will it forget? What if it is free for a decade? How will it remember everything?
It clutches the paper year clock close to the chest. It will have to write everything down in the paper year clock. All of the good things that happen—and yes, even the bad ones, like the animal researchers putting things into the little cat with syringes. And it will have to make lots and lots of scrap books.
It wants to remember.
“Something wrong, Jigs? You just went from deep in thought to deep in worry.”
It holds out the paper year clock—it can trust the other asset to hold onto it, of course—and signs that it has not been free for very long, just a short time, just half of a year, and it does not want to forget anything.
“Yeah, that’s really something, isn’t it?” the other asset says. “Not even a whole year since… Since the Chitauri for me. But freedom for you. What makes you think you’ll forget things?”
It mimes putting things into categories in the basket game, even though it is not holding the tablet, and then signs “bad things” so that the other asset will know what it is sorting into categories.
It adds “many” and repeats itself, over and over. Many, many bad things get sorted into only a few categories. And it remembers the categories and everything together.
The other asset does not seem to understand, but patiently nods. “I’m getting that you remember all of the horrible shit HYDRA did to you, and you put it in different piles based on what kind of shit it was.”
It nods. That is close enough. And it remembers the piles, yes. And not the individual pieces of shit inside of the piles. It keeps signing until they get to the rooms for assets, and by the time they arrive, the other asset is no longer frowning.
“So you worry that all of the good stuff will get muddled up like the piles of shit,” the other asset says. “And you want to remember each good thing, not just the pile of good things.”
Yes. Exactly. The other asset knows it so well, and understands it so well. They are so much the same as.
“I think, I mean, I don’t know or anything, but I think in the history books it says Cap, er, Steve, has a really good memory because of the serum,” the other asset says. “So maybe he remembers all of the individual things and not just general piles. Maybe that means you will, too.”
But it does not remember everything. It has forgotten so much. Did not even remember the other assets in the wolf pen.
“You were getting wiped a lot, Jigs. Now you’re not, not any more. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen ever again. Stark’ll find a way. So you should be able to remember better going forward.”
Maybe that is right. Maybe it will remember everything really clearly now that it had not been able to remember before.
It does remember its many missions in the original hunting grounds, and its travels to the Bakersfield base. Not the base itself, but that was because of the missiles. And it remembers most of its time in the hive building, and rescuing the other asset.
And it remembers their mission where it found the little cat—though not all of the time on the quinjet with the researcher with the curly hair—and most of the mission to the home that was not a real home, Siberia. And it does not remember the parts of that mission that it has forgotten because there was a halo.
It wonders how the hamburger technician will manage to ensure that there are never any more wipes. During the debrief, when it could not yet see, they said that he was going to work on that. Maybe it is time to revisit the lab and see for sure that there are no halos or parts of halos in there. It should be safe. The hamburger technician would not hurt it.
Tony
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 1:00 a.m.—
“Jigglypuff!” he calls out in greeting as the man himself squints into the lab.
Tony wonders for a half second why Jigsaw’s squinting, but then figures it’s probably that the bright light is bothering his eyes. They were all melted like Raiders of the Lost Arc only a little over a week ago, so that’s probably it. Hell, it’s a super soldier miracle the guy can even see at all.
The lights dim—JARVIS’s doing, not his—and Tony figures the answer is yes, his eyes are still bothering him.
“Come on in, pull up a stool, have I got a critter for you!”
Jigsaw does come in, and he does pull out a stool to sit on, but he shakes his head afterward, so Tony doesn’t have JARVIS cue up the video about strawberry dart frogs.
“Okay, no critter for you. What’s on your mind?”
Tony’s gotten pretty good at ASL and charades, but he doesn’t need any of that to interpret Jigsaw’s current round of miming. He’s talking about the halo, and that means he can only be asking a few questions.
Where is the halo that was used on him? Are there any others? Why didn’t it work? How can he detect them in the future and mercilessly slaughter the agent who has it?
But Tony’s learned more than ASL and charades in the time he’s been showing animals to the Jigster in his lab late nights. JARVIS has suggested that it’s important to let Jigsaw finish his thoughts, even if Tony already figured out what he wants to talk about.
So Tony waits him out instead of jumping in with answers to the most likely questions.
And it actually pays off, because it seems like he’s asking more than just those questions. Though… what the additional bits mean, he’s not sure at all. Something about the ceiling and flashing lights. And that he knows of, there are no flickering lights in the Tower. JARVIS would not allow that to go on for more than a few seconds before he had someone scurrying off to replace the bulb.
“Sir,” comes JARVIS’s voice into the lab, “if I may provide some insight, it would appear Jigsaw is asking you… about me.”
“Oh,” Tony says. “Oh, I think I get it now. Thanks, J.”
“Of course, Sir.”
Tony rubs his hands together. “Okay, Jigglebells, I think we have two agenda items here. First up, you want to know more about this halo business and how to avoid them in the future. Second, you’re finally curious about JARVIS. And maybe third, you can’t wait to hear about this bright red frog I have pictures of for you.”
Jigsaw nods with a smile, seeming relieved that he was understood.
Tony once again sends up silent thanks for the interpretation. Without JARVIS, he would definitely not be anywhere close to Jigsaw’s same-as list, and not on the friend list, either. Big scary technician in a big scary lab, and all that. But by some combination of luck and bribery, Jigsaw labels him the hamburger technician—so what if Tony’s been snooping in his tablet—and has declared him not a threat.
“I don’t have any halos here in the lab,” Tony starts out with. “I have pieces of two halos in a different area of the Tower, just in case I need the actual parts to rig up a sensor for them. For detection, so we can see ‘em coming. Not to use, ever.”
He gestures for the holographic diagram of the halo to come up—and it’s dimmer than usual, but that’s because of Jigsaw’s eyes—and watches his current lab partner study the image.
“That’s what they look like, basically, but these are see-through. Here’s all the parts exploded out,” Tony says as the pieces separate from each other. “And here’s where the Tesseract bits would go.”
One of the parts expands to show the slot for the thin tube of a power pack to fit in.
“There’s a kind of deflector on the other side of the arch that sends the power across the ends instead of back around the arch—which is how you get the brain scrambling effects if it’s done right.”
Tony points out the settings dial.
“Low power allows a longer continuous loop, lots of brain stuff Bruce would have to explain to you, etc.,” Tony says. He’s a genius, but not a brain guy. Leave the medical stuff to the guy who knows about it.
“But high power is going to burn everything up,” Tony says, “including the power source, way more than it’ll deflect through a skull. So that’s what you got. Really high power, lotta burning, not much wiping.”
Jigsaw, Tony notices, is not looking at the holographic image anymore, but is studying him, now. Tony wonders how long that’s been going on. He also wonders what exactly it means. The guy has about a hundred different kinds of stare, and it’s pretty dim in here. Not bright enough to pick out the full nuance of his stare.
“Questions?” Tony asks, hopeful that there’ll be some. “No? Okay, so we’re working on a way to detect two things—this is the part where we know how to kill the bastard who has the halo.”
Jigsaw’s stare turns into a grin.
Jackpot. Now how to put it in layman’s terms? Jigsaw doesn’t know or care about different kinds of metal, only that something is metal. So…
“That deflector bit is a really specific kind of metal, and we can pick up on its presence with the right equipment. And Bruce is working on a way to detect the Tesseract energy signature without having this really cool spear thing that we don’t have.”
That’s simple enough. He shoots, he scores!
“So when we work out how to get these detectors in place, we can pinpoint a halo device, and a Tesseract power pack. We can zero in on the asshole with the halo, and also the jackass who’s carrying the charges needed for it.”
Jigsaw signs “kill” with a vicious smile and Tony grins back at him.
“Exactly.” Tony holds up his arm as though frying someone with a repulsor blast. “Repulsor beam, meet asshole. We’re going to wipe them out.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 3:00 a.m.—
So the voice without a mouth is a creation of the hamburger technician. He made the voice without a mouth, and he put the voice without a mouth all over the inside of the hive building. It is not just a voice without a mouth, but a voice without a body.
There is no body. And there never has been a body.
But the voice without a mouth or body was based on a person. Patterned after a person. Even named after a person. Was built as a way to honor that person.
There was once a person named Jarvis, and this person was very knowledgeable and kind to the hamburger technician. A person to be looked up to, which is about admiring and not about actually looking upward.
And the hamburger technician wanted to try to bring some of that person’s—some of Jarvis’s—attributes to life again after the person had died. He wanted to have reminders of that person around, and wanted to be reminded of that person.
But the voice without a mouth is not actually that person. Is not actually Jarvis the person, but is JARVIS the voice without a mouth.
It is not at all the way the first researcher became the green letters on the black screen. The first researcher turned into a computer, but the voice without a mouth has always been… not a computer, exactly, but like a computer.
An artificial intelligence. It does not know how intelligence can be artificial—that’s just bad intel, planted or poorly gathered from the field. Artificial means not real, and real intelligence is useful for planning missions and carrying them out. Intelligence that is not real is where missions go sideways and everything goes wrong.
But somehow artificial intelligence also means the voice without a mouth.
Except that, from what it has seen, the voice without a mouth is always full of actual, real intel. Helpful things that help the ones who contact the voice without a mouth, who call on the voice without a mouth or listen to the voice without a mouth.
The voice without a mouth has even helped it, even though it does not listen. There were the blue glowing lights that led it to the meeting after the therapy session with Yasmin. Led it down the hall and to the elevator, and then down another hall and right to the meeting where the other asset was.
That was helpful, and it was good, real intelligence. Not bad, false, artificial intelligence.
But even though it does not understand about the artificial intelligence, it does understand this much: The voice without a mouth means to help and not harm, even thought that it was helpful to keep it trapped in the hive building before the auction and its escape. The voice without a mouth has been looking out for it and for the others in the team that is not a cell.
Is, maybe, something to be depended on. Possibly even listened to. It will have to think about this.
Chapter 121: Avengers | Let’s eat nutritiously
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Macronutrients Song” by JunyTony.
I’m still here, I promise—just struggling with irl stuff and energy levels. Also, it took forever to find a chapter title for this one—and fair warning, the song itself is super annoying, so I don’t recommend listening to it. Thanks for your patience. I'll work on comment replies over the next week.
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 8:30 a.m.—
No sooner has Jigsaw finished his oatmeal with peaches and cream than he has moved the bowl aside and brought his new wall calendar out, flipped open to the October 2012 page. The 18th is very delicately crossed out, Natasha sees, and there are a few names written in the rest of the month’s squares.
Yasmin, every day. Caroline on Tuesdays and Fridays. Yasmin again, every day. Zoe every day. And Auction is written instead of Kate Bishop’s name on Sundays. Yasmin, Zoe and Caroline are in green, and Auction is in purple. Then on the 25th, Alpine is written in red. And there is Party in red as well, on the 27th.
So he has his calendar neatly labeled, if his handwriting can be considered neat with its shaky all-caps. It’s orderly, in any case, and should help him tell time on a larger scale than day to day.
Jigsaw stares at his calendar for several minutes while she finishes her own bowl of oatmeal and Clint works on his breakfast sausage. Finally, though, he looks up at her and points a finger at Alpine’s name on the 25th. He asks his question sign.
Natasha is about to answer that yes, he has the date right, when it occurs to her that he might be asking something more complicated than that. Maybe they need to have the conversation about vaccines again and how the “animal researcher” won’t be harming Alpine, but instead will be helping her.
Jigsaw looks over at Clint, who shrugs, and then taps the date again before moving his finger to the following week.
“You want to put it off another week?” Clint asks around a mouthful of sausage.
Jigsaw nods.
“They might not be able to see her then,” Natasha says, though she’s positive Stark is paying them enough to have them on retainer and available within a day of them asking for an appointment. If not sooner.
But it’s still better that they get it over with. Because what’s to keep Jigsaw from asking to put it off another week after the 2nd?
“It won’t even take long,” Clint says. “It’ll be over before you know it. And then you’ll have the party to look forward to.”
Jigsaw doesn’t look too thrilled about the party either, Natasha notes. And that’s not entirely surprising. The party used to be some unknown event out in a nebulous future time, and now it’s only a week away. And he still might not know what a party really entails. For that matter, HYDRA might have called all kinds of things parties that were really, really not parties for him.
“The only people who will be there are the team and Pepper. You know Pepper.”
But that might not be enough to set him at ease. He knew his abusers, too. Natasha pulls out her phone and searches for some decorated gingerbread houses to show him.
“Here,” she says, tilting her phone so he can see. “Pepper says we’ll be decorating haunted houses. Making little houses and sticking candy on top of them.”
Natasha can’t initially see how that would be much fun, but then she remembers just last weekend Jigsaw and Rogers had spend hours decorating paper with more paper. And before that, she’d had fun making all the tactile symbols with Rogers. Maybe it’s even more fun to work in candy and frosting than in hot glue and various bits and bobs.
“Really?” Clint asks. “Like gingerbread stuff for Christmas, but haunted?”
“That’s my understanding,” she says. Natasha hands Jigsaw the phone to keep looking at. “So less snow frosting and more cobwebs. I don’t know what you’d make those out of.”
“Maybe cotton candy?”
Natasha smiles. “Could be.”
“I think I’d rather just eat the cotton candy.”
Jigsaw looks up and picks at his shirt before signing “eat” and a question.
So he’s learned about different fabrics, maybe, or that cotton is something fabric can be made of. She wonders which therapist has taught him that. It’s not an animal fact, so it wouldn’t have been Stark.
“It’s basically just spun sugar,” Clint explains. “But it’s so fluffy and light, it looks like a big ball of cotton on a stick. And it dissolves in your mouth. And it’s super sweet.”
Jigsaw nods and signs “eat” again with a grin.
“I probably ate my weight in cotton candy every year at the circus,” Clint says with a chuckle. “It’s kind of amazing I still have all my teeth.”
“And not just because of your chosen occupation,” Natasha adds.
“True.”
Jigsaw puts her phone down on the table and then taps the appointment on the 25th again. This time he doesn’t try to move the appointment to another day, but asks if it is necessary—literally, via miming, if they can skip over it.
“‘Fraid not, Jigs.” Clint sops up a bit of gravy with a fragment of biscuit. “Alpine needs those shots. They’re good for her.”
Jigsaw sighs and then flips the calendar closed, apparently giving up for the day.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
“Cotton candy?” Caroline asks. She smiles. “I have a tile for that, yes. Are you thinking about the party next weekend?”
It nods. It is thinking about the party and about what the other asset said that morning about the circus and the cotton candy.
It does not know exactly what a circus is, but it has vague impressions of colorfully costumed people performing tricks together, and hot afternoons, and towering machines that spin around, around, around, and someone walking next to it, and games of skill to win prizes in.
And while it has a vague impression of a circus as a large place that can be explored, there is nothing there for cotton candy—a thing that is apparently common at circuses. It has not eaten cotton candy, not that it remembers, but the other asset has. And they are the same, the same, the same.
So it can have a food tile for cotton candy.
Caroline reaches into her briefcase and takes out a large notebook with the pages full of all the little food tiles, not in plastic holders but in sheets with many of the tiles missing from the sheets. It watches as she flips through to one of the pages and gently frees a tile from the sheet and slides it across the table to it.
“There you go. It would go under C, for cotton candy.” She mimes twisting her index finger like a screwdriver into her smiling cheek—the sign for candy, it knows—and then mimics a fluffy cloud swirling around on a stick held in her opposite hand.
And that is what the cotton candy on the tile looks like, too, a fluffy pink cloud on a stick.
It is not sure why the spiderwebs on the candy houses they will make at the party next weekend will be pink. Maybe cotton candy can be many different colors, and there will be white cotton candy at the party. Because if all cotton candy is pink, it would make a very strange set of spiderwebs.
She reaches over and lifts the lid on the box on wheels and brings out two containers of something white and goopy, and then two containers of bright green broccoli.
“Today, we’re going to be eating a pasta dish called fettuccine alfredo, and we’ll have some steamed broccoli to go along with it.”
That is the goopy white food. Fettuccine alfredo. It cannot wait to eat it. The smell is so good, even before the lids of the containers are lifted.
Caroline passes one of each of the containers across the table to it. “Fettuccine is the name of the shape of pasta in this dish. Alfredo refers to the sauce, because it’s white. Why don’t you pick it up to get a better look.”
It nods and does so. The smell is almost overwhelmingly rich and creamy. And the fettuccine is a kind of noodle that is like if spaghetti were smushed until it was flat. It squints to try to see it more clearly, but that just hurts the skin face around the eyes, so it stops. It will have to live with the blurry, faded, dim image of the food. Maybe there will be more fettuccine alfredo when the vision has healed more, and it can see it then.
“This is one of my favorite foods,” Caroline says with a smile in her voice. “I hope you like it, too.”
It likes all foods, except maybe the brown paste on its own. It is sure it will like this, too. It picks up the fork she passes over the table, and then hesitates. Is it time, or does it need to learn something more about the meal before it eats?
“Go ahead,” she says, and then does the twirling thing with her fork to pull up a small bite of the noodles.
It has tried the twirling thing with the fork when eating noodles before, and it always ends up with a very big bite of noodles and has to choose between a huge mouthful and biting the noodles into a smaller mouthful. It tries again. The food will taste like garlic, it knows. There is a powerful garlic smell alongside the cream smell and the smell of delicious cheeses.
The first bite is wonderful hot noodles, tender between the teeth, and thick, creamy sauce that rushes throughout the mouth to coat the mouth in the best way possible. It is thick sauce, almost like the tomato sauce that goes with spaghetti, but this isn’t as watery as the tomato sauce. It is smoother on the tongue, and it lingers even after the bite is chewed and swallowed.
So good.
“I want to introduce a new concept to you today, Jigsaw,” Caroline says between bites of broccoli. When she finishes her second bite of broccoli, she continues. “Everything we eat, whether it’s a piece of cake or a piece of kale, has nutrients inside of it.”
It nods, feeling an itch of discomfort in the back of the mind. Are they going to discuss nutritional slurry? Are they going to talk about formulas and calories and—
“There are two kinds of nutrients,” she says. “Big kinds of nutrients called macronutrients, and little kinds of nutrients called micronutrients. We’re going to talk about macronutrients.”
The itch does not go away. But Caroline is a good feeder. Would never introduce bad-tasting slurries of nutrients to be delivered through a hose.
“I’m sensing discomfort, Jigsaw. Is this something HYDRA ‘feeders’ discussed in front of you before?”
It swallows and see-saws the hand. It signs “familiar” and then not the same as. Adds “trust” and points to her.
“Thank you for trusting me. While they had the worst of intentions, the HYDRA ‘feeders’ still had to balance your nutritional intake to keep you functioning. So there will be some similarities in the words we use. But I am focused entirely on delicious, wholesome foods that make you feel good to eat them.”
It nods. Signs “trust” again.
“Alright. There are three macronutrients, and that is where I want to focus today. There are fats, which we can get from meats if we’re eating them, or cheeses, or oils and butters, nuts, and more. We need to eat fats because our bodies need that to be healthy.”
It does not eat innocent creatures, but it does eat the rest of these things. So it is getting fats. It is doing a good job of keeping the body healthy, so far.
“We also need proteins. You likely need more protein than most because of your enhancements. We can get protein from meats, but we can also get it from a lot of other sources. There’s tofu, which I know you like, and beans. And there are vegetables like broccoli that have a lot of protein as well.”
It is eating broccoli right now! Such a good job staying healthy. And the broccoli is delicious. Crisp-tender, with just a hint of salt and lemon, and more garlic. It loves garlic.
“Last, we have carbohydrates.”
This will be the nutritional slurry. It frowns.
“Did the HYDRA ‘feeders’ say bad things about carbohydrates?”
It shakes the head and makes the sign for HYDRA.
There’s a pause, but then Caroline says: “I see. No, carbohydrates are not related to HYDRA, but to water. Carbo is for carbon, which makes up part of the carbohydrates, and hydrate for the water part. For short, we call them ‘carbs.’ That might be a more comfortable name for them, too.”
It nods. It does not know how HYDRA is related to water, unless it’s by poisoning water or drowning assets. But this macronutrient is related to water, and not to HYDRA. Both are related to water, but not to each other.
“Right.” Caroline pauses to eat some of the fettuccine alfredo. “We need to eat carbs because that’s one of the places our bodies get their energy. Pasta is an excellent source for carbs. So are breads, potatoes, rice, and more.”
Pasta… like the fettuccine it is eating! This is a meal that has all of the macronutrients in it. It is a good meal, with all three of the things it needs to eat to keep the body healthy.
“I see you putting together the pieces, Jigsaw,” Caroline says. “Yes, this is a nicely balanced meal with all of the macronutrients you need. I’ve been working with Bruce to provide recipes and meal ideas that have enough protein for you, and enough fat. Carbs are actually very easy to eat a lot of, especially when you cut meat out of your eating plan.”
The researcher with the curly hair is working with the feeder, still. And works with the hamburger technician, too. A very connected researcher.
“After we eat, I’ll go over some more details about what foods are higher or lower in various macronutrients. For your homework, I want you to focus on identifying the macronutrients you eat and making sure you’re getting a bit of all three. We’ll talk more about balancing them later.”
A homework assignment. It loves those! Maybe the other asset will want to help with it, too.
Clint
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 2:30 p.m.—
It’s been over an hour since he started explaining his homework assignment, and Jigsaw is still flipping through his food books pointing out examples of vegetables that have a lot of protein in them, and which ones have a lot of carbs, and what kinds of nuts and cheeses have really good fats in them.
And it’s kind of Twilight Zone, if Clint’s going to be honest with himself. Because on the one hand, it’s always really great when Jigsaw is excited about his therapy stuff, and Clint doesn’t want to squish that. But on the other hand, this is one of Clint’s nightmares come true—he’s dating a health food nut.
The murder-as-hobby thing is understandable, but the focus on nutritious food…
But at least Jigsaw’s not doing the thing where anything is bad for you. Hell, he and the food lady ate fettuccine alfredo for lunch, and there’s no way that’s health food, even if they paired it with the broccoli. And somehow broccoli has loads of protein? But whatever.
Point is that apparently none of the foods in Jigsaw’s books are bad foods. None of them need to be avoided, or “eaten sparingly,” which is one of the ways those health food nuts tell you not to eat something.
Instead, ice cream is full of good things and can be eaten without an issue. And so is cake. And cotton candy—a new food tile that Jigsaw is proud to show him the sign for.
Jigsaw is insistent that all three of the “big nutritions” should be eaten, proteins, fats, and carbs. Carbs, he seems to be explaining right now, are a kind of “car water,” which doesn’t make sense and seems to be a misunderstanding of something Caroline actually said. But they aren’t related to HYDRA.
And Clint believes that last part, anyway.
HYDRA is evil; carbs are tasty and good. So it makes sense that HYDRA dietitians like Terry Debenham were against pizza, which is one of the best carbs out there. Jigsaw’s food lady thinks pizza is a good way to consume a variety of toppings, which is kind of surprising to Clint, but he’s not about to argue.
Jigsaw pulls his vegetable book away again and flips to a new page, then shows him the spinach tile. Another vegetable with lots of protein. One of the worst vegetables, too. There’s nothing redeeming about spinach. Broccoli can get tossed in sauce with some beef and rice and it’s okay to eat. Spinach… There’s no saving spinach. Spinach ruins everything it touches.
Maybe he should ask Jigsaw for a kiss. It’s only been a week since that was on their roster of things they can do with each other, and Clint still gets flutters in his stomach at the thought—and more importantly, Jigsaw always gets such bright eyes when the topic of kissing comes up in discussion.
It’s something they both enjoy, anyway, instead of the vegetables that Jigsaw enjoys and Clint is tolerating only because of Jigsaw’s excitement to share his newfound knowledge about the three “big nutritions.”
Or maybe Lucky or Alpine will wake up from their pile on the dog bed by the reading chair. They can play with the kitten, or else Jigsaw can work on training Alpine with treats, maybe get her in her harness again. Clint can play tug of war with Lucky, or they can go out into the hallway and toss a ball for the dog.
Or, hell, maybe they can go dancing again, or Jigsaw can skitter all over the rock wall showing off his climbing skills, or Natasha can come over and listen to the food stuff while Clint tries to catch a fish, or… Or something.
Something that could maybe rescue him from Jigsaw’s enthusiasm for trying to come up with food combinations that are high in protein, fat, and carbs all at once. Banana and broccoli might both start with the same sound, but they do not go together. One of them is delicious, and the other is merely passable in brown sauce. And speaking of brown sauce…
“You want to get chinese food for dinner?” Clint asks. “You can get some tofu and vegetables and things, and I can get some noodles and meat. Everyone’s happy and no one goes hungry.”
Jigsaw nods with a big smile. Someday, maybe he’ll have a food book that’s dedicated solely to sauces and condiments, but for now he seems to like all of the flavors these things come in, so it’s all good. They can just pick the veggies he wants and get whatever dishes have those veggies in them. And some noodles or rice.
And a bunch of meat and eggrolls for Clint and the rest. Yeah. That’ll be a way to salvage this afternoon.
Chapter 122: Assets | Can’t remember my own name, inside a timeless cage (I never wanted to sleep)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Momento Mori” by A Fish in a Birdcage.
Please, please, please heed the content warnings in this chapter. They are not messing around.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Friday 19 October 2012 | 11:30 p.m.—
The scrap book is a thick one. There are many pages, hundreds of pages, thousands of pages, so many pages.
The pages are bound in ribbon red and slick as blood. The lines of ribbon are open wounds, slashes, deep. Seventeen of them, five and five and five and two loops of ribbon to bind the scrap book.
The cover of the scrap book is red, weathered, soft with age. There is a black star on the cover, a black star, a big black star.
The scrap book opens, and inside is a page, one of the hundreds—thousands—of pages. The picture at the center of the page is— is— is B-RUM, kneeling. Is C-BAR, kneeling. Is— is— is— there is an asset between them, an asset, on hands, on knees, between them as they push and push and push into it, and it remembers—
This is a scrap book, it captures the memories so that they cannot ever be forgotten.
It remembers the thickness slamming past the throat, catching on the tonsils, dragging back and slamming forward, dragging and slamming and dragging and slamming, pushing pushing pushing into it. B-RUM, the taste of the sweaty skin that the tongue does not even try to keep out.
Comply, comply, comply and it will be over faster.
It remembers the ache and sharp stab of C-BAR, behind it, the hands hard and digging into the skin, the fingernails cutting crescents into it, the slick slide of skin on skin as the blood from the inner thighs drips and smears from the carvings in the skin.
Comply. Comply. Comply.
B-RUM, with his veins and the salt of his skin and the bitterness of his—
C-BAR, pressing down and pushing in and pushing in and slapping the skin and pushing in and—
B-RUM, with his fingers fisting into the hair, pulling and shoving, twisting until the scalp burns and aches and—
C-BAR, jeering and cheering, slamming into it again and again, opening it wide and wide and wider and so wide and tearing it open and—
B-RUM, with his laughter and the wiry curls of his hair against the nose and lips, the wet slop of the drool bubbling and dribbling down the chin, the struggle to breathe, the stars clouding the vision, the twitch and flex of B-RUM’s dick as—
C-BAR, with the stun baton, with the white electric fire racing up the spine, racing down the legs, tightening every muscle to the point of shaking, trembling with the agony of convulsions and the digging-in metal in the mouth as the jaw clenches down on the choking face and the rest of the body clenches down on—
B-RUM, with his grunting, deep and guttural, the rhythm and the pattern, the speed of the dick slamming home, pushing and pushing and pushing in until it cannot push further and the throat convulses against the thickness of it, struggles to find a scrap of air as the throbbing mass fills it up—fills the throat, fills the mouth, fills it and fills it, while the mouth drools and drools and the lungs burn with the need for air and the throat closes desperately against the blockage and—
C-BAR, groaning and thrusting and pushing so deep inside of it, inside of it, inside of it!
And the page turns, and there is a bucket on the ground with water inside of it and also an asset’s head inside of it—an asset with a right arm of flesh and bone twisted behind the asset’s back and a left stump of metal and wires flailing loosely as—
And there is D-TOL behind the asset, pushing and pushing into the asset while the asset splashes and splutters in the water and tries to control the half-limb of metal, the useless heavy stump that cannot move the bucket and restore air to the asset or reach the operative behind the asset to stop what is happening and—
And it should not stop anything, the asset, should comply so that D-TOL will finish with it faster and pull it up out of the bucket by the hair so that it can gasp and suck in the air it needs to withstand the next and the next and the next while—
While the crowd cheers the operatives on and places bets on the outcomes and timing, the choking and drowning and reviving if an operative pushes in for too long, or the choking and coughing up of water and gasping as—
As the next operative and the next and the next move into place, grab the twisted right arm for leverage, wipe away the slickness the previous operatives left behind and then push in and push in and push in and—
And the page turns again and again, the page turns again. More and more that cannot be forgotten, page after page, every one of them filled with memories that are trapped inside, memories of the razors and the scalpels and the fiery brands and the knives and the cigarettes and the—
The—
The pages are perfumed with the cologne of A-PIE, of B-RUM, of C-BAR, of D-TOL, of G-MAT, of A-ZOL, of V-SMI, of of of all of the agents without names, too, the nameless ones who are just so many faces in the crowd, so many dicks out, so many hands in pants, so many voices joining together in the encouragement and insults.
There are so many pages, hundreds, thousands of pages, all of the pages, and—
Page after page, and all of the memories so sharp and cutting like razors in the brain.
There is the chair with the white electric fire, the manacles open to receive an asset’s arms, the medical technicians ready with the IVs, with the drugs, with the needles and tubing, ready to put the chair with the white electric fire into motion, once an asset is trapped in the shackles and cannot escape starting over again.
An asset cannot help but comply when the chair with the white electric fire is activated, the halo coming down, and coming down, and so slowly but surely coming down over the head and—
And without a chair, too. A new page in the scrap book, one it cannot see, cannot make out clearly, but which it… remembers? It is in a scrap book, so it cannot be forgotten, but it cannot see it clearly and so cannot experience it. Can only wonder at—
“Goodbye, Jigsaw,” croons B-RUM’s voice, and the white electric—no, blue electric!—fire ignites the searing heat racing through the head, through the inside of it, destroying everything, destroying Jigsaw, destroying—
But that is not right.
B-RUM has never called it that, and why would B-RUM call it that? It does not have a name, is only an asset, and assets do not need names. Only need to be called things like shit smear and asshole and fuck rag and cock-sucker and—
Does it have a name?
Goodbye, Jigsaw. Goodbye… Jigsaw?
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 12:30 a.m.—
There’s a tongue in his mouth and it is not Jigsaw’s. Not his, either. It takes him a moment, but Clint opens his eyes and finds that Lucky has decided to lick his face and open mouth. Which is weird as hell, because Lucky usually licks his cheek or hand if he’s resorted to licking to get his attention.
Clint wasn’t even having a nightmare. He doesn’t remember if he was dreaming, but he does know it wasn’t anything bad. If it was bad, his teeth would have been clenched and Lucky couldn’t have gotten his tongue in there.
Oh, gross, dog tongue.
Clint wipes his mouth with a grimace and resolves to get up and rinse his mouth out, and then the other part of the situation hits him.
Lucky woke him up. Something is wrong. Nothing’s wrong with him except a bit of dog saliva, but Jigsaw—
Shit! Clint rolls over toward his bed partner and finds that Jigsaw is curled up into the smallest ball possible, which is a lot smaller than Clint would have imagined, facing away from him.
If Lucky woke Clint up it’s because he couldn’t wake Jigsaw up. And if he wants to wake Jigsaw up, it’s because Jigsaw is having a nightmare. And it has to be a damn bad one or Lucky would have been able to wake him up with a lick or a whine.
“JARVIS, lights please, dim,” Clint says, and the bedside lamp turns on along with the overhead light in the lowest setting.
Light will help him see anything Jigsaw has to communicate and yeah, Jigsaw’s face is pinched and miserable looking.
Clint hesitates with his hand hovering over Jigsaw’s shoulder. This is probably the stupidest way to wake him up, coming from behind when whatever nightmare he’s having has him curled up protectively.
Clint slips out of the bed and goes around to Jigsaw’s side, kneels down to be eye level with him.
“Jigs,” he says softly. “Jigsaw. It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare. I’m going to try to wake you up. Please don’t break my nose.”
Clint starts with some gentle caresses of Jigsaw’s metal arm, things he knows that Jigsaw likes, that he knows, that are familiar in a good way.
“Jigsaw,” Clint says a bit more loudly. “Hey. Wake up, Jigs. It’s just a nightmare. It’s not real.”
His partner’s breathing shifts, a sharp hitch as though he was startled, and Clint gives his right shoulder a squeeze.
“It’s just me,” Clint says. “It’s okay. You were having a nightmare and Lucky couldn’t get you awake.”
Jigsaw opens his eyes hesitantly, as though he isn’t sure it’s true and is waiting for his nightmare to greet his waking self. And then he immediately swallows and reaches for Clint with both arms, the rest of him remaining in his tight protective ball.
“I’ve got you.” Clint lets Jigsaw hold his right hand in both of his own, and uses his bandaged left hand to brush a bit of hair out of Jigsaw’s face. “It’s okay.”
They stay there for several minutes, with Lucky propping his head on Jigsaw’s neck and licking his cheek.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Clint finally asks. “Want to get out of bed, maybe, take a walk down the hall? Go to the gym to work it out a bit? What do you need?”
Jigsaw pulls a hand free and makes his name sign one-handed, the J-shape followed by sawing across where the other hand would be. He asks a question.
“Yeah,” Clint says. “That’s you. Jigsaw. You chose that name and we all started calling you that. It’s a good name. Wasn’t sure it was fitting at first, or maybe thought it was too fitting, but it’s just right. That’s who you are. Jigsaw.”
Jigsaw pulls his other hand free from Clint’s and makes a swiping motion across his palm, and Clint nods.
“It’s right here,” he says, handing Jigsaw the tablet from the nightstand.
Then it’s a waiting game while Jigsaw assembles all the words he wants and arranges them in the order he wants.
“Nightmare no name. Just asset. No Jigsaw,” comes the accented voice after several minutes and lots of tapping and swiping. It’s not quite loud enough for Clint to make out every word without his hearing aids, but it helps that Jigsaw turns the board around to face him.
There are lots of symbols under the words in the top bar, but it’s easy enough to understand every time Jigsaw turns the tablet around to face him. Clint could get used to it.
“Pushing into asset, laughing, pushing pushing pushing into, deep into,” Jigsaw continues. “Drown asset while pushing into. Cutting up asset. Burning asset. Stick with white electric fire. Chair with white electric fire. Halo and no chair. Goodbye Jigsaw. B-RUM.”
Clint nods, trying to maintain an external calm that he does not feel. Drowning him while raping him? What the fuck.
“Scrap book to remember. Cannot forget because scrap book. Nightmare scrap book.”
Clint blinks. There’d been a lot of scrapbooking in his afternoon therapy session, but…
“But you didn’t make a HYDRA scrapbook in yesterday’s afternoon session. You were making one for Monesha about the visit Thursday. Right?”
Clint’s going to march up to Yasmin’s rooms and bang on her door and chew her out if she had him make an artsy scrapbook of his rapes. That’s not okay.
Jigsaw nods, though, and then makes Monesha’s name sign the best he can scrunched up into a ball with his legs pulled up.
Then: “No scrap book HYDRA but all of memories like in scrap book. Cannot forget. Stuck in the head.”
Clint nods. “That’s gotta suck, Jigs. I’m sorry you can’t forget all of what they did to you. Do you, uh. Do you want to talk about all of that, or do you want to be distracted from it?”
Clint kind of hopes he wants to be distracted. There are loads of things they can do to distract him from that stuff, but Clint isn’t sure he’s the right person to hear all the details.
For one, he probably can’t hear about that without getting really angry, and that might be misinterpreted as being directed at Jigsaw. For another, he doesn’t want more nightmares of his own, which he’ll definitely get if there’s too many details involved in talking about it.
But he’ll hear Jigsaw out if the man wants to talk, especially since Jigsaw’s so upset while tapping and swiping on the tablet.
“Can hear smell taste feel see all of everything. All of pushing into, all laughing, all hurting. So much fun.” Jigsaw reaches up to wipe at his eye. “Do not want remember. Want forget. Very want forget.”
Clint wants to pull him into a hug, even though his knees are starting to seriously complain about kneeling for this long. And he almost does it, but the tablet is in the way, and Jigsaw can’t exactly communicate clearly while Clint hugs him. Clint won’t take away his communication for the sake of a hug, even if the hug would help.
“I’m so sorry, Jigs. I wish you could forget it, too. I wish it never happened.” Clint rests a hand lightly on Jigsaw’s right forearm. “Can we move this to the living room? It might feel good to stretch your legs out.”
Jigsaw nods and unfolds slightly.
Clint waits him out, getting to his feet with a little groan and then going around to the other side of the bed to get his hearing aids in while Jigsaw gradually moves out of his tucked fetal position. This way Jigsaw won’t have to show him the screen every time he wants to use the tablet to say something.
With the hearing aids in, Clint can hear Lucky’s soft whining, and Jigsaw’s sniffling. He might not be full-blown crying, but he’s definitely upset. Maybe he would be crying if his eyes were fully healed.
Clint wonders if eyedrops would help him. Clint is very familiar with the sting of eyes that are just too dry to cry even though they want to, and Jigsaw is rubbing at his eyes as he gets out of the bed with Lucky on his heels.
Clint looks around for Alpine, hoping the kitten wasn’t somehow crushed in all the rolling over and movement, and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees her curled up in the “condo” part of the cat tree in the corner. She’s looking at them, but hasn’t yet decided to join them. That’s for the best. He hopes she stays there.
Jigsaw comes up beside him and slides his left arm around Clint’s waist, pulls himself flush against Clint’s side, and just clings there with his tablet hugged to his chest.
“Let’s maybe get a snack,” Clint says. “There should be some leftovers in the kitchen, or we can make nachos or something. Sandwiches.” Clint pauses, searching for something else his partner might like. “Salad. There’s always salad.”
If he had to pick between nachos and salad, it would be no contest. But if he needs to chop up some green garbage so that Jigsaw can eat a salad, he’ll do it, and he won’t even grimace about it.
Jigsaw nods against his chest.
“Alright,” Clint says. “To the kitchen. You want to hang onto me, or are you good to navigate with the wall stuff?”
In response, Jigsaw clutches him more tightly, and Clint takes the hint. His eyes are bothering him, clearly, and the hallway lights might be too bright for him. Sure, he could feel along the walls like Zoe taught him—all his landmarks and things are still up. But if he wants to be a massive barnacle attached to Clint’s side, more power to him.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
The other asset is a soft, solid presence it can smush up against, with muscles and flesh moving powerfully underneath smooth skin and the cotton of a t-shirt. The other asset killed B-RUM for it. The other asset shot B-RUM twice with the fangs on sticks, and then used one of its very own fangs to finish the job by slicing across B-RUM’s neck.
The other asset saved it from the sleeping images, the sleeping scrap book with its thousands of pages, all of them with the photographs that moved like a glowing panel, that were decorated with ribbons and stickers and fancy papers.
That had quotes.
So many quotes, voices of now-dead targets, either operatives aged out of the organization or operatives it removed. And some voices of living targets, the ones it did not get to before… before the missiles, yes. In Bakersfield.
The quotes echo in the brain, but the loudest ones of all say “Goodbye, Jigsaw” to it, over and over again, and “Hello, sweetheart,” and other things it cannot stop hearing even though it is awake and the sounds of grunting and moaning and cheering and laughing and slapping of skin and leather and skin and skin are all from the past, from the past, from the nightmare images, and from the past.
“You doing okay there?” the other asset asks as the elevator comes to a stop.
It nods against the other asset’s bicep, even though it suspects that it is not doing okay. Okay would be if it did not hear all of the things it is hearing. Okay would be if it did not have stabbing pains in the eyes all the way to the inside of the head. Okay would be if it did not feel like the other asset was a rope in a storm, something to hold onto so that the bad things cannot sweep it away.
The other asset does not respond to that, and maybe that is because the other asset also suspects that it is not really doing okay.
What is “okay,” anyway?
Goodbye, Jigsaw.
The other asset does not turn on the lights in the kitchen, or maybe it is the voice without a mouth that does not turn them on, but there is a soft glow coming from under the cabinets so that the other asset can see properly.
It closes the eyes again and reminds itself not to rub at them. They are still healing. The itching and aching is from new eye flesh forming and scar tissue being dissolved and reused. It is from blood flowing to the right areas to bring all of the nutrients so that the body can repair itself. It is better not to rub and disrupt the healing.
They look normal enough now, the eyes, but there is still healing to be done in the eye itself, deeper in, maybe, and too much pressure will slow that down. It does not know how it knows this, but it does.
“You want some toast and nutella?” the other asset asks. “Or vegetables?”
It gives the asset’s arm a single squeeze. It likes nutella. That is a very dark brown paste that is not as sticky as the other brown paste, and it does not taste like a mistake at all. But the dog cannot have any of the nutella.
After the other asset gets it settled on a stool at the kitchen island, it works at the tablet while the other asset works at making the bread into toast and digging through the pantry for the right kind of brown paste.
“Hearing,” it has the tablet say. “Still hearing goodbye Jigsaw. Other thing. Laughing, grunt. Do not want hear anymore.”
The other asset breathes hard through the nose, an exhalation that is not a sigh, but is harder than a sigh.
“That bastard,” the other asset grumbles. “He’s dead and gone and still giving you grief.”
It nods. Yes. B-RUM is dead, gone.
The other asset puts a plate in front of it, a piece of toast, with lots of thick nutella on it.
“Want anything else on it?”
It nods and asks for raspberries. They are very good to eat with other sweet things. The tart and juicy taste brings balance so that it is not just sweet.
“Let me see if we have some.” The other asset opens the fridge and brings out a block of cheese and a carton of raspberries. “You’re in luck.”
It puts the raspberries onto the toast with the nutella, spaced so that each bite will have a berry in it. Delicious. So crunchy and smooth and juicy and creamy.
The other asset puts some slices of cheese on another piece of bread and puts that in the toasting box. When the toasting box makes its noise, what comes out smells very good. The other asset puts that piece of toast on the plate in front of it as well, right where the first piece of toast had been.
“It’s not a grilled cheese sandwich, but it’s close.”
It finishes the nutella and toast and raspberries, and then takes a bite of the cheese toast. So crunchy! Crunchier than the earlier toast and also gooey with cheese stretching out a bit from the toast as it bites and pulls. Cheddar. So sharp tasting and creamy at the same time.
“When I was little, before the circus,” the other asset says, “my mom used to make me cheesy toast when I had a nightmare. Only sometimes. Sometimes my dad was home, and he’d yell and throw things at me for waking them up. But sometimes he was still out drinking and I would sit in the kitchen and eat cheesy toast while my mom ran her fingers through my hair and told me it was alright.”
It suspects that the other asset’s “dad” is not a viable target, is already dead and not able to be hurt. But it would like to explain to the other asset’s dad that yelling and throwing things at a child is the wrong thing to do. Using extreme violence. The other asset’s dad would not throw things ever again. And would only yell until his lungs were removed and there was no more breath to yell with.
“Is sad unfair wrong bad. Throw things at innocent. Wrong.”
The other asset nods. “Yeah, I know. But not much to do about it now, except make some cheesy toast for you. Maybe I can brush your hair when we get back to our rooms.”
It nods. It would like that.
Notes:
Content Warnings: Jigsaw has a horrible nightmare in this chapter that is brutal, immediate, and heavily HTP in nature. The Trash Party activities are far more on-the-page than usual, and considerably more graphic than usual. Might want to take care while reading (or even skip) the first section of this chapter if that’s going to be triggering. Also, Clint briefly and vaguely describes some of his childhood abuse in the last section of the chapter.
Chapter 123: Assets | Crawl from the wreckage one more time (horrific memory twists the mind)
Notes:
Chapter title from “All Nightmare Long” by Metallica.
I'm actually making some progress on comment replies finally. Thank you all for your patience and understanding. Life has been really tough of late, and I might not be able to post a chapter next weekend. But know that I am still here and am not going anywhere.
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 3:00 a.m.—
Clint keeps his sigh of relief soft as he successfully manages to shift his foot a crucial half inch so that Jigsaw’s metal arm isn’t resting directly on his ankle bone. That is so, so much better.
Sure, he could have moved his foot earlier, before the pressure became excruciating. But earlier, he might have woken Jigsaw up with such a movement, and that’s something Clint is keen on avoiding.
It took effort—and lots of hair brushing—to get Jigsaw to allow himself to settle back into Clint’s arms, and even more effort to convince him that it was okay to sleep on the sofa with his head in Clint’s lap, that it wouldn’t be an imposition, that Clint wouldn’t mind, that Clint wanted to watch over his sleep like this and not relocate to the bedroom.
And the last thing Clint wants to do is let on that he is in any way less than perfectly comfortable with Jigsaw curled up on his side with his head resting on Clint’s crossed calves.
So if his legs fall asleep along with Jigsaw, that’s fine. And if Clint worries that he’ll break all of Jigsaw’s hair off if he keeps brushing it, that’s fine, too. And if Clint can’t get rid of the hairbrush without making a noise that will wake his partner up, that’s less fine but still manageable.
The important bit is that his partner is sleeping soundly and easily under Clint’s watchful eyes, and that Lucky doesn’t seem concerned anymore but is merely lying in a loose circle beside the sofa with Alpine tucked between his front paws under his chin.
It would be a cozy situation if it weren’t for the wretched nightmare that prompted it.
Jigsaw had told him a bit about it in between getting a snack and getting his hair brushed. Some kind of weird scrapbook of some of the rapes he’s survived, mostly featuring Rumlow and Barkholt. But with some of the others mixed in. Some Clint recognizes—like A-PIE, or Alexander fucking Pierce—and some he doesn’t.
Clint hates those HYDRA bastards so much. They just can’t disappear now that they’re dead. Have to keep showing up again in nightmares. And now the scrapbooking stuff is joining the scene.
Clint’s seen a lot of Jigsaw’s scrapbook pages. They’re bright and colorful, with all kinds of ribbons and stickers, occasionally some words in and among the photographs. Even the ones that are pretty straightforward have a cheerful air to them. Clearly, Jigsaw has enjoyed the events being captured on the pages, and really likes the people and animals featured on each page.
Which means those rapes and the monsters that did them have no business showing up on any sort of scrapbook page. Let alone a whole book of them.
He hopes the nightmare hasn’t ruined scrapbooking for Jigsaw.
Scrapbooking, and all of the other arts and crafts stuff, that’s where his whole therapy thing had started—filling out food books with little squares of foods, pasting together construction paper pizzas; all of that stuff that seemed pointless to Clint at the time, it clearly had a point. It got Jigsaw to a pretty good place, all told.
And HYDRA shouldn’t be able to ruin any of that or hurt any of the progress by turning all that crafting stuff into nightmare fuel.
There’s a buzz from the coffee table, and Clint looks over at his phone with a frown. This time of night, it’s probably an emergency. But can he get the phone without waking Jigsaw up? Debatable. Ugh. But if it’s a real emergency, then whoever it is would be contacting Natasha, not him. And if it’s Natasha, well, she would come fetch him, not text him.
The phone buzzes again and Clint shakes his head. Now he’s just plain curious, on top of it maybe being an emergency.
Oh, and hey, he’s got Jigsaw’s hairbrush still, so that means his arm is that much longer, and maybe…
He reaches out with the brush, and between the extra few inches and a bit of leaning, he manages to coax the phone to a place closer to him on the coffee table, where he can grab it.
[You left the cheese out by the toaster oven.]
It’s Natasha. So maybe she would text him instead of fetching him. But cheese by the toaster isn’t an emergency.
[Your nightmare or his?]
Clint considers what to text her in response. She must know he’s still awake or she wouldn’t have texted and risked waking up Jigsaw. Which means she’s asked JARVIS if he was still awake. Or maybe the toaster was somehow still warm. Or the cheese was still cold. Who knows exactly what secret formula she might have used if JARVIS wasn’t a cheat code for her.
Finally he opts for the simple truth. It’s not anything Jigsaw would object to him sharing with her, he’s pretty sure.
[Jigs had a nightmare about a rape scrapbook], he texts her, leaving off the part where the scrapbook was bound by bloody strips of skin or whatever he’d been trying to describe. No one needs that image at this time of night.
He adds: [Seemed like a cheesy toast moment, y’know?]
[Is he still awake?] There’s a pause. [I could come over.]
So she didn’t ask JARVIS. Must be her preternatural perception skills.
He wonders why she’s awake. Maybe she had a nightmare, too. Maybe she went down for more tea or more jam to put in her tea. Maybe she’s just up for some random reason. Maybe they made a lot more noise than he thought they made going down the hall.
And if she’s asking to come over… Or is she asking? Maybe she’s just offering. If Jigsaw was awake, she could come over and keep them company, and they could keep her company. Maybe that’s what she’s hoping for.
Either way, he’s asleep, and that’s what the answer ought to be. Maybe Natasha will still ask to come over. Maybe she can manage to sneak in. Jigsaw managed to sleep through Clint’s foot shifting, the phone buzzing, and the leaning over he did to get to the phone. Maybe he’s fast asleep again and Natasha can slink in and settle down in the chair.
[He’s asleep. We’re on the sofa. Why aren’t you asleep?]
He’s not sure what her answer is going to be—whether it will be straight up truth or something meant to misdirect from the truth—and he’s also not sure he’ll be able to tell which one it is if she’s feeling sneaky.
[I was. Not sure what woke me up.] There’s a pause, and then another text. [I’ll put in an extra indulgent breakfast request. Good night.]
Clint stares at his phone. Lie or misdirection? Did she have a nightmare? Heartburn? Knee aching? Just randomly woke up and went down to the kitchen?
Does he take her at her word? Does he invite her over?
Ultimately, Clint doubts Jigsaw will mind if Natasha comes over. He’s comfortable, he’s surrounded by soft things and Clint and Lucky, and he knows Natasha really well. And there’s not really any good reason for her to be awake right now. But there are a few bad reasons. And he’d hate to leave her high and dry if she’s had a nightmare bad enough for her to seek out company after.
[Why don’t you come over?] he texts.
[Sure it wouldn’t impede?]
No, he isn’t. But that’s what friends are for.
[Jigs won’t mind]
Worst case, he’ll be startled and they’ll all three be awake for a while. Best case, he’ll sleep through her visit. And somewhere in between is where things’ll probably land. He can take those odds.
[Be over in a few.]
Then it was almost definitely a nightmare. Or maybe her knee. He hopes it isn’t her knee bothering her.
And it’s about ten minutes later that there’s a quiet knock at the door—so she’s not even trying to sneak, which is probably for the best—and Natasha slides into the room in her nightgown and a pair of slippers.
Jigsaw takes a deeper indrawn breath and then briefly opens his eyes to follow her progress across the living room, but ultimately sighs and shuts his eyes again.
Clint runs his fingers through Jigsaw’s hair, hoping to soothe him back to sleep.
After Natasha has wrapped herself up in a blanket and curled up in the chair, Clint gives her a smile. “Nightmare?” he signs.
This time, she merely nods rather than try to deflect. “I don’t remember what it was about,” she signs back. “Those ones always bother me worse.”
He nods, remembering. When she first came in, first agreed to let him tag along with her rather than risk a fight either of them might have lost, there were plenty of nightmares. And the ones that always kept her up the rest of the night were the ones where she wasn’t lying when she said she couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed.
He’d only been privy to the nightmares at all because they’d been sharing shitty motel rooms and rundown safehouses while chasing down certain of her handlers. He’d hear the handcuff clinking—at the start, she’d always felt safer with one wrist handcuffed to something at night, even though she could slip out of the cuff without half a moment’s notice—and he’d know she was trembling.
And he’d only ever hear the damn cuff because they trusted each other so little that he’d kept his hearing aids in the whole time no matter how bad the headache from wearing them all the time. Man, those were some shitty weeks at the very start. Before he’d gathered up the Ronin gear and proven himself to her once and for all, in blood.
“Sorry,” he signs. “Wish those days were over for you.”
“Me, too,” she replies. “But that’s what I have you for, isn’t it?” Natasha smiles at him.
“Always,” he signs.
“White or black?” she asks.
“Aw, ‘Tasha. You know I suck at air chess.”
Natasha laughs softly, glancing at Jigsaw as if to make sure not to disturb him. “You suck at all chess,” she signs.
Oh, it is so on. He’ll lose every game of chess to her, but not without a fight. He’ll never understand why she actually likes this game. More to the point, he’ll never understand how she manages to remember where all the pieces are once things get going. But it calms her nerves, and he doesn’t mind getting trounced.
“Alright, white,” he signs. “King’s pawn to E4.” It’s at least a popular opening move, so it’ll be easier to remember where his pieces are before she decimates him.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 5:00 a.m.—
There is a light weight on the hip as it wakes up, and a support behind it that is not the other asset. But it can smell that the other asset is close. Right under the nose, even.
And when it opens the eyes, these things all make sense. It is curled up on the sofa, and the back cushion of the sofa is pressing into the back. The head is resting in the other asset’s lap, on the other asset’s crossed calves, draped in soft pants that are the best for assets to wear. The little cat is the light weight on the hip, balanced there in what the other asset calls a “cat loaf,” with all of her tiny paws tucked in.
And, very strangely, the ballerina woman is fast asleep in the chair, her legs over one arm of the chair with soft shoes on her feet and her body loosely curled with arms held close to her chest and her head drooping to one side. There is the red and black fleece blanket draped over her legs and pooled at her waist.
It wonders what she is doing there still. It remembers that she came into the rooms for assets while it was sleeping, but surely she would have left again. Except she did not. She fell asleep instead.
And the other asset fell asleep.
The other asset is slumped to the side, resting against the back of the sofa with the crossed legs that have been its pillow. The other asset’s mouth is slightly open, and the other asset is breathing slow and deep.
Slow enough and deep enough that it can sit up without waking the other asset up. So it does so, scooping up the little cat from the hip and noting the dog on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table. It will avoid stepping on the dog. And the little cat can resume being a cat loaf in the other asset’s lap until it is time for food in her dish. Yes.
But what to do about the ballerina woman? She does not belong in the rooms for assets, but it does not mind her being there. She is… what did she call it when the assets first ate the breakfast meal in her rooms? She was the hostess and they were the guests. So now it is the hostess and she is the guest.
And that means that it should get her something to eat, something to drink, maybe pull the blanket up over her torso to make it warmer for her. It is very cold in the rooms for assets in the mornings, according to the flying man, anyway.
It will pull the blanket up, and then it will get the morning snack in order and feed the dog and the little cat before the flying man comes to take the dog for the walk. That is what a hostess would do, and it is a hostess right now.
And so it goes over to the chair with the ballerina woman in it, and it reaches for the blanket to pull it up—to “tuck her in,” though it is not sure where the phrase comes from or what it means.
But the ballerina woman’s eyes pop open, wide and alert, and her hand grabs the metal wrist when it has only pulled the blanket up a few inches.
The ballerina woman stares at it, and it stares at the ballerina woman. They stare at one another, this asset and the ballerina woman, until finally the dog gets up and comes around the coffee table to put a nose right between them.
The ballerina woman lets go of the metal wrist, instead uses that hand to sign that she is sorry, and then adds that she was startled, is all. Her eyes are no longer wide and staring, but just open like they would normally be. Still a little spooked looking, but thinking again.
It lets go of the blanket and signs that it is sorry, too. That it should not have entered her space.
That is a thing that everyone has, even assets. The hamburger technician had mentioned it earlier, and then Yasmin had confirmed it later. Personal space is like a bubble around someone, and it is rude to enter someone’s bubble without permission. It entered her bubble, and she was asleep, so could not give it permission.
It is okay to be in the other asset’s bubble, because they are the same as. They share a bigger bubble together.
It knows the sign for tea, but it does not know how to make tea. It does know how to make the disgusting coffee that the other asset loves so much and depends on. But the coffee comes in black grains in a canister, and the tea comes in delicate little pouches with a string on top. One goes in a cup and the other goes into the machine. It does not know if they even have the delicate little tea pouches.
But it does know they have some orange juice and water in the little refrigerator, along with some cheese cubes and some peeled boiled eggs and a few apples. And it is not sure what she would like, but it goes to put some of everything onto the coffee table where the ballerina woman can reach it if she shifts around in the chair to face forward.
Then it is time for some food for the dog, and some food on the kitchen table for the little cat, and when everyone has their food, then it can go sit on the floor at the coffee table and join the ballerina woman in the breakfast snack. This way they can both sign to each other and not wake up the other asset.
The ballerina woman does shift in the chair, and she selects an apple slice to eat before signing her thanks for welcoming her to eat with it.
It nods and eats a cheese cube. It gestures to the room and then to the chair and asks why. Why did she come here last night?
Was it to play the game with the other asset? Lots and lots of letters and numbers, it saw when it did open the eyes, and lots of quiet laughter from the ballerina woman and sighs from the other asset. It does not know what game it was, or anything about the game, but they seemed to enjoy it enough for it to fall back asleep.
The ballerina woman signs that she had a nightmare she does not remember, and it makes the “same as” sign, only it remembers the nightmare it had. Either way, though, there were bad night images all around. But then nutella toast with raspberries, and cheese toast, and hair brushing.
Maybe she would like it if the other asset brushed her hair and fed her delicious toasts? Or maybe it was the mysterious game that she liked after a nightmare.
“I heard about your nightmare,” the ballerina woman signs before reaching for one of the bottles of water it put on the coffee table. “Terrible.”
It nods. It does not want to have that nightmare again, where the scrap books turn against it and help it remember all of the details it does not want to remember.
They eat for a few minutes without any signs, each of them choosing the pieces they want to eat out of the stockpile it has brought out of the refrigerator. The cheese cubes are nearly gone and it has devoured three boiled eggs and twelve apple slices when the dog rushes toward the door at the sound of the flying man in the hallway.
The flying man never knocks on the door before coming in, because knocking on the door makes the lights in the other asset’s nest room go on and off, on and off, on and off, and that would wake up the other asset. So he comes in silently, and then looks around the room with a raised eyebrow.
“Didn’t know there’d be a slumber party,” he says as he gives the dog a greeting rub behind the ears. “Morning, Natasha, Jigsaw.”
The ballerina woman smiles at him and says “good morning” back to him, and then returns her attention to her boiled egg.
“Be back in about half an hour, maybe an hour if Steve joins us,” says the flying man as he hooks the leash onto the dog’s collar.
It gives the flying man a thumbs up. It is good for the dog to get to go outside for so long in the mornings and evenings. The dog loves to be outside.
Because it is being a hostess right now, it offers the last of everything to the ballerina woman one more time before finishing it up. She declines every offer, but thanks it anyway.
And then it is time to get ready for the morning session with Yasmin. It should put on new clothes and see if the hair needs to be brushed again, and maybe even put on some socks. The other asset keeps saying that the floor is so cold and that it should wear shoes. But socks will do. It now has socks with little grippy bits on the bottom so that it has even surer footing in the hallways.
It does not want to just leave the ballerina woman there while it goes to put on new clothes. That does not seem like the right thing to do. But it does not want to tell her to leave, either. So it mimes pulling off the shirt and then putting on another, and signs Yasmin’s name, and taps at the wrist.
“Of course,” the ballerina woman signs back. “I need to go get ready for the day, too. Thanks for your hospitality this morning.”
It gives her a thumbs up.
As she heads for the door, it picks up the red and black fleece blanket from the chair and puts it around the other asset’s body, making sure the other asset will be nice and warm, will be “tucked in,” and can sleep soundly.
The other asset needs a lot of sleep to make up for being so awake last night, after all. And they can share space, so it can tuck the other asset in without waking the other asset up to ask first.
Ideal.
Chapter 124: Yasmin | The picture they’re painting is one of the heart
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Red Strokes” by Garth Brooks.
Hey folks—still treading water over here with the real life issues. Updates are probably going to remain slow through the end of the year, but I’m going to try to post every 2-3 weeks or so. Haven’t been able to write on this in ages, but I do still have some buffer chapters left that should cover us for a while.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. I miss y’all!
Posting tonight instead of waiting till Sunday because I figure a lot of us could use the distraction from the US election process. Take care of yourselves out there!
Chapter Text
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
“I’m sorry to hear you had a nightmare,” she says when Jigsaw is finished describing it to her. “That sounds really frightening and disturbing. How was your sleep afterward?”
Jigsaw signs that it was good, which is surprising to her, and then he draws and labels a piece of toast with nutella and raspberries on it, and another piece of toast with cheese on it, and a hairbrush. He runs his fingers through his hair several times as well, and then draws a figure sitting cross-legged on one end of a sofa and another figure curled up with its head in the first figure’s lap.
This, Yasmin assumes, is the order of events after the nightmare—a nighttime snack, Clint brushing his hair, and then Jigsaw curling up with his head in Clint’s lap. With that sort of buffer from the nightmare, it’s little wonder he slept well.
Then, to her surprise, Jigsaw adds a third figure in a chair and draws a simple spider next to it.
“Did Natasha come to keep you and Clint company?” Yasmin asks.
He signs “nightmare” and points to the figure in the chair.
“So she had a nightmare, too, and you all kept each other company.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and points to the curled up figure, then puts his hand under his cheek as though it were a pillow he was resting on.
Yasmin blinks. Did Jigsaw actually sleep with another person in the room? Does he trust Natasha enough sleep with her there? That’s wonderful if it’s the case. It’s a sign that he’s expanding his circle of trusted people, deepening his trust in those around him, perhaps—just perhaps—not relying solely on Clint anymore.
“You slept while Clint and Natasha kept each other company,” Yasmin suggests, and she smiles when he nods.
“That’s great, Jigsaw. I’m so happy that you were able to get some good sleep after that nightmare, and that you were able to trust Natasha so much. I’m sure she appreciated the trust as well.”
Now, she has a choice.
She can work with him to discover his feelings about the nightmare, what elements in the waking world might have caused it, how it’s often the case that nightmares come even when people feel safe, as a way to process what has happened when they felt unsafe.
Or she can introduce a new type of craft—making something with all of his emotions, with the goal being solely to express those emotions, to get them out into an artform of some sort. They could paint, use oil pastels, even just markers. They could even destroy the art afterward if he feels it would be cathartic.
Or she can allow the nightmare to be just a passing thing and instead introduce the Legos Zoe’d requested she get started with during their sessions today, something Zoe planned to build on in the evening with a discussion of communication modes and the legitimacy of all of his options.
Ultimately, she thinks she’d rather discuss the nightmare further, not to dwell on the negative, but to make sure Jigsaw isn’t burying his fears and anger with toast and hair brushing. That’s fine in the moment just after a nightmare, but processing is important to do as well. The Legos will wait.
“Jigsaw,” she starts, “I’d like to tell you about a kind of craft that I do sometimes, when I’m feeling a lot of something that I don’t know how to move past.”
He nods, leaning forward eagerly. Now that he’s mostly able to see well again, crafts are something he very much enjoys once more, without the hesitation he’d felt at the thought of ruining something.
“Sometimes it’s very simple. I take a piece of paper, and I scribble all over it, thinking about all the pent up emotion that I’m struggling with, or about a fear or worry thought that won’t go away, or my frustration with a situation.”
He frowns, but it’s just a small frown, a frown of confusion as he listens.
“I channel my emotions,” Yasmin says. “I imagine them moving through my body, down my arm, through the pencil or marker, and out onto the page, where they’re trapped. When I take the pencil or marker away from the page, those emotions can’t get back inside.”
Yasmin takes a moment to mime doing so, making sure that her expression matches the action—frustration, anger, unhappiness. All out onto the imaginary page.
“Then, sometimes, when I have filled the page with my emotion, I burn it.”
Jigsaw’s eyes widen. He signs “fire” and “why,” and she gets the feeling that he’s more repeating her with a sense of wonder than questioning the burning.
Yasmin nods her head. “I burn it. I imagine all my frustration going into the paper, and I burn up the frustration so that it’s gone. Or, I can make a painting, and I can destroy the painting and all of the emotional turmoil that went into the painting.”
She pauses before continuing.
“If I don’t want to destroy it, if it’s something that turns out pretty in a way and I feel bad destroying it, then I give it away to someone so that it’s still gone. You might want to make a special treasure box for emotional artwork.”
Yasmin watches as Jigsaw thinks about this.
After a minute, he brings up his AAC app and begins to assemble his response: “Push into scrap book, and burn?”
“We could make a scrapbook like in your nightmare, yes. I’d like to keep scrapbooking as something we do with the positive memories we have, though, so that they’re safe and can be revisited with joy. What if we instead made a painting that represents how you feel about your tormentors?”
She’s not sure whether he would prefer to burn something like that, slash at it with his favorite knives, or just put it somewhere he can’t see it anymore. On the one hand, the obvious thing for him to choose is to attack it with a knife. But it will be something he’s created, and she has seen how much he cares for those creations of his. Whatever happens, the creation process itself should be somewhat cathartic.
“Jigsaw PAINT like the clown man? PAINT anger fear pain. Destroy?”
Yasmin smiles. “Like Steve paints, yes. I can have all the materials ready for our afternoon session if you are interested in trying this.”
He nods and turns his attention to his tablet for a long moment. “Clown man join Jigsaw?”
Yasmin blinks. “You’d like to have Steve join you for our afternoon session today?”
“Friend,” Jigsaw signs.
“Alright.”
This is somewhat irregular, but she’s reasonably sure she can manage to lead them both in some of the exercises she has in mind, and she can keep the more sensitive things in reserve for when she’s alone with Jigsaw.
“If Steve wants to join us,” she says, “he’s welcome to. If you’d like, we can open the painting session to whoever you want.”
She hopes she won’t end up leading the entire Avengers team in a two-hour catharsis painting marathon this afternoon. That’s far too many clients.
They may have the physical supplies on hand for that many painters and space in a conference room, but there’s no way she can hold space for that many people and maintain the necessary focus on Jigsaw. And it seems downright irresponsible to guide that many people through something that may raise up emotions for them that they could need help processing.
Steve, as it happens, is more than willing to join Jigsaw for the afternoon session. He’s downright eager when he arrives just five minutes into the session, after Jigsaw has gone through explaining that he’s feeling excited.
And Steve isn’t alone.
Either Jigsaw took her at her word and invited everyone on the team, or he misunderstood her and thought he was required to bring everyone on the team. Whichever it was, the only people on the team who aren’t gathered in the hallway outside the therapy room within the span of ten minutes are Sam and Tony.
She’s going to need a conference room after all.
“JARVIS,” Yasmin says faintly. “Would you select an adequate and appropriate conference room for us to paint in, and have everyone wait there for us?”
“Certainly, ma’am,” JARVIS replies, and then directs Steve and the rest toward the elevator.
“Jigsaw,” Yasmin starts once everyone is making their way down the hall. “Are you sure you want everyone to join us while we paint? It’s okay if you do, I just want you to be sure.”
Jigsaw nods and signs that he asked Steve before lunch, and that they discussed it over tacos with the team, and that the others had been interested, one by one, so he invited them, too.
From the order of his signs, Yasmin determines that Bruce had been interested, and then Natasha had joined the interested parties and dragged Clint along, which makes more sense to her than if Clint had volunteered to spend time in her presence. Tony and Sam are apparently working on a robot bird together instead.
“Alright. Would you help me gather up materials and load up a cart? We’ll need a lot more supplies than if it was just you and Steve.”
Thankfully, the room next to this one has been gradually converted to a storage area for the many crafting supplies she and Zoe have used in their time in the Tower so far, and there are enough painting supplies for everyone who’s interested. And the mail room cart she borrowed to ferry all the supplies up here is still in the room. Perfect.
It’s only a few minutes until she and Jigsaw manage to roll the cart into the conference room JARVIS has selected, and she sets everyone up with some butcher paper to tape over the conference table to protect it, paper plates to use as palettes for their paints, cups with water for their brushes, and a few different sized brushes for each of them.
It’s been years since she last led a group session, and this is not quite a group session—or if it is, it’s the first time this particular group has met with her, though she’s interacted briefly with each of the people sitting around the table.
“Emotions can be really hard to talk about,” she starts, more for the benefit of those she hasn’t worked with than for Jigsaw. “But sometimes we can express them through art. And when we let ourselves explore our creative sides fully, we sometimes stumble onto our emotional sides.”
Clint, she notices, looks like he’d really appreciate an exit, but he’s sitting between Jigsaw and Natasha, and probably feels stuck. Hopefully he will get something out of the session. The others seem to be following along without any particular concerns.
“Today, we’re going to paint some emotions,” Yasmin says. “There’s no right or wrong way to do this, and there’s no right or wrong answer to the questions of how you feel and how you portray those feelings. And—” Yasmin holds up a finger “—there is no requirement to talk about your art today.”
Well, that failed to settle Clint’s shoulders, but Bruce and Natasha seem calmer. Steve just looks even more eager.
“Alright. Let’s take our first mini canvas and set it on the table in front of us. This is for our warm-up scribble.”
Yasmin places one of the little square canvases in front of herself. They’re all three inches by three inches, much less daunting for starting out than a larger canvas would be. Someday, maybe she and Jigsaw will explore full sized canvases. But for now—and especially with a crowd—she doesn’t want to use anything larger.
“For the next five or so minutes, I’d like you to explore the medium. You can do whatever you would like. Paint it all one color, mix your colors on the canvas, make a blurry mess on the canvas. The only thing I’d like you to avoid is anything that’s a recognizable scene or subject.”
“What’s that mean?” Clint asks. “Scene or subject.”
Yasmin nods. “Good question. If I was trying to convey Halloween in my scribble, I might use orange or red, black, purple, jagged shapes. But I would avoid subjects like pumpkins or ghosts, and I’d avoid scenes like spooky forests or full moons. We’re trying to be abstract.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
She nods again and starts her own warm-up scribble, dipping her brush in the yellow and painting her entire canvas square to start, and then adding orange around the yellow and red further out at the edges. She’s feeling warm, so that’s what she’ll do for her scribble.
Across from her, she sees that Jigsaw is painting red stars on a black background, which doesn’t surprise her at all. It’s not as abstract as she would like, but he sometimes has trouble with abstractions and representations of things. The important part is that he’s getting used to the medium, the way the paints work, how the brushes feel in his hand, the size of the canvas and how much paint it takes to fill that canvas.
Around the table, she sees various zigzags, polka dots, and blotches of color. Some of Jigsaw’s guests are taking pains to avoid getting paint on their fingers by avoiding painting the edges. Steve, though, has abandoned all caution and has painted the sides of his canvas. Clint, somehow, has more paint on his cheek than on the canvas.
“Take another minute or so to wrap up your scribbles,” Yasmin says, waiting for everyone to gradually stop painting.
Once they are all looking at her again, Yasmin puts her canvas square off to one side, still on the butcher paper. They all follow suit without having to be instructed.
“Now we’re going to spend ten minutes on our next canvas,” she says. “On this canvas, we’re going to paint happiness. Think about what colors you associate with happiness, how you feel when you’re happy. Are there any shapes that are happy shapes in your mind, or that feel happy?”
Yasmin reminds them to avoid painting objects that make them feel happy, to avoid faces or people or pets. They are drawing the emotion, the feeling, the sensation of happiness, not the cause or result of happiness.
There are some frowns around the table, but also lots of brushes dabbing at canvases and splashing in water cups before being wiped across blotting towels. Most of the frowns are clearly frowns of concentration, except Clint, who is frowning at the paintbrush he just nibbled on and painted his lips with.
She thinks she hears a faint “aw, brush” but can’t be sure. How he got paint on the end of the brush and not the bit with the bristles is beyond her. His canvas is flooded with pink and yellow, though, and a purple chevron shape in the middle, so he’s getting into the activity at least.
Jigsaw’s happiness canvas is pure red all the way out to the edges, with thick paint application in lots of layers. She knows that red is his favorite color, so it might be that he doesn’t know what to add to that to encapsulate happiness, or it might be that he feels happiest with all that red. It will be difficult to tell without discussing with him, which she won’t do here with the crowd of his teammates.
When they have all finished with the happiness painting, she guides them through the next, which is anger. For anger, she gives them the same ten minutes they got for happiness, and she reiterates the need to think about the emotion itself and paint in the abstract.
Her own canvas, when she’s done painting, is covered with jagged concentric starbursts of green and red with thick but uneven black borders between the colors. When she looks at it after her brush is clean and dry, it reminds her of Christmas, but in an angry way. Which makes sense, given her own current frustration with her husband over their now-perpetual argument about her travel plans.
Clint’s canvas looks a lot like Mardi Gras with the purples, reds, and greens in bold swaths across the canvas. Natasha’s, she sees, is a series of bold Xs in red over an otherwise black and white canvas. And Jigsaw’s—the one she’s most interested in—looks like gray and red squiggles on black. Maybe it’s a depiction of turmoil and confusion that go along with his anger, or maybe it’s meant to represent a brain or intestines. Some part of a target’s insides.
She’ll ask him later to discuss his paintings with her, when they’re alone.
Anxiety and fear are next on the roster, one or the other, or a combination of both emotions in one. They spend another ten minutes on this canvas, and the colors she’s seeing around the table are not as bold as the anger colors. They’re more queasy looking, with blurred lines and more greens and yellows and browns.
And the sadness and depression canvas that comes next is similarly different, with more subdued blues and blacks from most of the painters at the table. Jigsaw’s is just black the way his happiness painting is just red. But instead of straight lines to cover the canvas, his brush strokes are shorter, more dabs than strokes like he’s dotting the canvas with deeper and deeper shadows.
The last canvas they paint is bigger, five inches across instead of three.
“For this last painting,” Yasmin says, “I want you to take twenty or thirty minutes to explore how you are feeling today.”
She looks around the table at the painters with their fresh canvases, each surrounded by the smaller canvases that they’ve filled with emotions.
“This could be very similar to one of the paintings we did earlier, if you are feeling that emotion. It might be many things at once, even, or something we haven’t explored at all. You can divide your canvas up into quadrants or halves, or you can build from the inside out or the outside in. You don’t even have to divide it at all.”
Yasmin smiles. “You have complete freedom to paint your current emotions today—so long as it’s abstract.”
The room is filled with the industrious sounds of brushes dabbing at paper plate palettes and canvases, the occasional squirt of fresh paint from a tube, and two separate “aw, paint” mutters from Clint—whose hair, face and hands are now dappled in a rainbow of color—as the team takes the time to express their current emotional state in paint.
True to her word, she invites them to take their canvases with them undiscussed, arranged on pieces of cardboard while they dry so that there won’t be any messes made outside of the conference room.
“I hope you got something out of this,” she says as they put their paintings on the cardboard pieces. “Ideally, we would discuss the differences between our depictions of each emotion—how our anger differs from our sadness, our anxiety from our happiness, and so on. Or we might discuss what our depictions represent to us, as well.”
Yasmin begins capping the tubes of paint and returning them to the cart, and stacking the paper plate palettes to be bundled up in butcher paper and discarded.
“I’d encourage you to think about these things later, if you have the desire to do so,” she says. “We can learn a lot about ourselves by examining our emotions.”
Bruce thanks her as he leaves with his paintings, and Natasha does as well. Clint mumbles his thanks and tells Jigsaw that he’ll meet up with him in Natasha’s rooms. And Steve stays to help clean up while Jigsaw arranges the paints and remaining canvases in the order he finds most pleasing.
“This was a lot of fun,” Steve says as he rolls up a sheet of paint-smeared butcher paper. “I got a lot out of it, including some ideas for paintings I’d like to tackle in a bigger format.”
Yasmin smiles. “I’m glad you found the session useful, Steve. Thanks for coming.”
She puts her own paintings on a piece of cardboard and rolls up the butcher paper she’d been working on top of, adding it to the trashcan.
“Jigsaw, would you please bring your paintings to our session tomorrow morning? We can discuss them in depth.”
He nods and points to the cart before signing “help” and his question sign.
“I’ve got it,” she says. “You and Steve can go on ahead. Thank you for your offer, and for your efforts during our session this afternoon. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, okay?”
Jigsaw nods and picks up his cardboard with the paintings arrayed across it, and Yasmin watches him and Steve head down the hall before sitting back in one of the conference chairs with a sigh.
It wasn’t exactly what she’d intended for this afternoon session. But she thinks it went well enough for all of that. No one seems to have experienced any emotions too strong to handle, she doubts anyone will be disturbed or emotionally tender after this and in need of aftercare she can’t provide.
And she did get a handful of paintings to discuss with Jigsaw tomorrow morning.
She wonders if he will want to destroy any of the paintings, or if he’d like to display them instead. Maybe they will end up making a treasure box for his emotion paintings later on, and he can keep them all in there.
Yasmin gets up after a few minutes and finishes cleaning up, dabbing some paint spots up with some paint remover wipes from where Clint was sitting. She’s honestly not sure how he got paint on the table beneath the butcher paper with the butcher paper intact, but he did end up wearing half of his paint, so she supposes it’s just a skill of his.
So. She has her session tomorrow morning planned out for herself, and then tomorrow afternoon they can hopefully start work on the Legos Zoe requested she incorporate into her sessions.
Chapter 125: Sam | But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
Notes:
Chapter title from “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Saturday 20 October 2012 | 4:45 p.m.—
“And there you have it,” Tony says, tapping the cherry-red metal carapace of the latest Redwing unit with a fingertip and then hastily buffing the metal to a shine with a cloth.
“Redwing 5.3, ready for takeoff.” Tony beams.
Sam’s armband with the Redwing controls is still a mass of wires and partly connected to a computer terminal, but Redwing himself is apparently complete already with the upgrades they’d been working on.
“And with the detectors on board,” Sam confirms, “we’ll be able to ask him to find the halo fragments. Right?”
“That’s the plan, Icarus. We’ve got all the firmware in place, the detector chips themselves, and all the programming is solid. I tested the chips in the room we’ve got the halo bits in, and everything lit up like the Fourth of July. But not in an explosion way,” Tony adds.
“No explosions, just the indicator lights for a successful detection of the deflector discs and the Tesseract power pack.”
Sam nods, scooping up Redwing and holding the little drone in his arms. Redwing isn’t much heavier than before, even with more things on board. He can’t wait to go back out in the field with Redwing and see what he’s got. Maybe tighter turns or more stability along his flight path. Who knows?
But for right now, the important bit is testing whether Redwing can find the halos in that other room. They’re disassembled, and the one Rumlow had used is a burnt-out wreck on top of the disassembly. But that shouldn’t matter. Tony designed the chips and firmware such that the components of the halo are what Redwing will search for, not a complete halo. That way they can detect more options.
And Redwing is the perfect way to test long range, since he’s mobile and capable of following complex search missions.
Sam gives Redwing a fond pat, and then walks over to the armband on its table with all its wires. The control panel itself is still reachable, and Sam switches it on and links it up with the Redwing unit in his arms.
“Alright, Redwing,” he says. “Let’s give you a trial run.”
He puts in the commands and instructs it to find the Tesseract energy pack, first. That one should be much easier to find than the bits of metal, since it’s actually emitting energy for Redwing to pick up.
Redwing lifts up into the air, turns around a few times, and then flies off through the open lab door.
If all goes according to plan, Redwing will navigate the Tower in search of the Tesseract energy signature, JARVIS will open doors as needed for the drone, and then when the energy pack is located, Redwing will let them know.
Tony brings up the Redwing footage on the monitor for them to follow Redwing’s progress through the Tower.
“Wish I thought to make some popcorn,” Tony says.
The halos are a few floors away, and down some hallways, but Redwing seems to be headed instead to the personal quarters. JARVIS still opens every door Redwing hovers in front of as the drone makes its way down stairwells and through hallways.
And there’s a completion beep on the armband as Redwing approaches Steve and Jigsaw coming out of the elevator on Steve and Sam’s own floor, each of them holding a piece of cardboard on which are several tiny abstract paintings.
That must have been what Jigsaw’s art session was all about, painting abstract things. Probably emotions? But the thing that makes Sam look over at Tony with a frown isn’t the array of paintings, but the fact that Redwing didn’t find a Tesseract energy pack; he found Steve and Jigsaw.
On the monitor, Jigsaw grins and reaches for Redwing to let the drone land on his hand while he holds the paintings in his other hand. Steve looks a little confused on the monitor, but he waves hello to them and then opens the door to his room.
Sam calls Redwing back to the lab.
“I don’t understand,” Sam says. “And I don’t like any of the ideas I do have about what just happened.”
Tony begins moving things away from the armband.
“The question is,” he says with a gesture, “did Redwing go to Capsicle because he was by the actual Tesseract while on the Valkyrie ? Is Steve-o a Tesseract-flavored patriotic popsicle?”
Tony brings over a stool on wheels and sits in front of the armband. “Or is Redwing going to Jigglypuff because he was zapped by a Tesseract-energy-powered halo recently? Is there some kind of invisible Tesseract tattoo over his eyes or in his brain from the partial wipe?”
Sam frowns. “Those are some of the ideas I have that I don’t like,” he says. “Are Steve and Jigsaw combined somehow more of an energy signature than the active, live Tesseract energy pack several floors away?”
Sam gestures for the footage to play back.
It looks like Redwing went straight for Jigsaw, circling him before landing on his outstretched hand. But is that because of Jigsaw’s friendliness toward Redwing during the Siberia mission? His tendency to give pets and carapace scritches when able? Redwing does have a personality, and he’s fond of Jigsaw.
Or is Tony right and it’s some artifact left over from the halo?
Redwing arrives back at the lab with Bruce, whose fingers have a bit of paint on them but who seems otherwise unaffected by the painting session and its emotional exploration.
Tony rapidly fills Bruce in on what’s just happened while checking over all of Redwing’s controller hardware.
Bruce frowns. “I doubt it’s Steve,” he says. “When we used Loki’s scepter to detect the Tesseract, Steve didn’t show up on the radar as even a faint blip, despite being right there on the helicarrier. And Natasha was close to the Tesseract as well.”
“So it’s Jigglesby,” Tony says. “Maybe his sweet, sweet cybernetic arm, maybe halo imprints from Siberia, maybe both.”
Tony closes up the armband and scoots away from it. “Give it another go, and this time have Redwing interact with the specific energy source until recalled.”
Sam nods and gets the commands keyed in and committed.
Redwing takes off much as he had before, spinning to orient himself and then leaving the lab.
And he goes to the personal quarters again, but this time he goes to Natasha’s floor where now Clint and Jigsaw live as well. Redwing stops at Natasha’s door, which still has its little stuffed spider hanging from the door handle, and after she responds to JARVIS’s request, makes a beeline for Jigsaw.
Lucky doesn’t react to Redwing, but Alpine fluffs up to twice her size and spits and hisses and swipes at the drone while Natasha and Clint laugh.
Jigsaw, for all his kitten is not a fan of Redwing, is delighted to be visited once more by Redwing, grinning and holding out his left hand for Redwing to land on like a metal butterfly on a metal flower stem.
But, Sam notes, Redwing doesn’t try to circle Jigsaw’s head, or get near his eyes. Redwing just wants to perch on the prosthesis. After several minutes, Sam decides that that’s pretty conclusive evidence.
He ought to recall Redwing, but Jigsaw looks like he’s having a good time alternating between petting Redwing and reassuring Alpine that it’s okay. He figures it’s okay to leave Redwing there for the time being.
“So it’s the arm itself,” Sam says, not sure whether to feel relieved, “and not an effect of the halo.”
On the one hand, that’s excellent news. The halo only had the effects they know about, and not any lingering tricks up HYDRA’s sleeve. On the other hand, maybe literally…
“Ugh,” Tony groans. “I’ll probably never get to take that thing apart to find out how the Tesseract energy is making it tick. And now it’s actually important, for more than therapeutic pain relief reasons.”
“There must be a relay system in place,” Bruce says, ignoring Tony’s antics. “Like where the halo reflected the Tesseract energy rather than let it leave the closed system. So the Tesseract energy is trapped within the arm, very possibly never interacting with the rest of Jigsaw’s body.”
Bruce looks grim. “Any interaction would likely take the form of internal burns that would incapacitate him over time. Even enhanced, he must have his limits for what he can heal and for how long. And he’s had that arm for a very long time without being overcome with pain or damage.”
Except that they know he’s suffering from chronic pain from the anchor points and the uneven weight on his spine, Sam thinks bitterly. What’s a bit more chronic pain? He’s had to heal near-continually from the damage HYDRA agents inflicted, whether from their version of fun, from the wipes, or from the cryo storage. What’s one more thing to heal?
What if there are burns internally that he’s just perpetually healing? He does run hot, after all. Clint keeps the AC turned to a ridiculous level to keep it cold in their suite so he doesn’t sweat to death when Jigsaw joins him at night. At least, that’s what Clint said was the reason when Sam asked.
And sure, Jigsaw doesn’t move like he’s in pain, but is that any indicator? Steve didn’t seem to be in pain back in Bakersfield when his thigh was gouged by rebar and Jigsaw slashed his face open. Or when Jigsaw broke his hand. Steve carried on because there were important things to focus on.
For all they know, that’s what Jigsaw thinks—that pain is normal and other things are more important—and he doesn’t actually know that he can stop doing things that cause increased pain. He can take a rest day. Or five. Or a rest month. He can get treatment for his pain, whether that’s a medicine someone concocts or heat therapy, cold compresses or massage, or any number of other treatments.
“What are the chances the relays themselves are causing burns by getting overheated?” Tony asks.
He’s got a holo screen up with a diagram of the prosthetic arm, courtesy of the Winter Soldier manual, and he’s looking at it with a frown.
“I can see some points that looked almost decorative at first glance that might be energy relays to keep the power source in place so it doesn’t fry his whole body, but I can’t see any energy source itself.”
Tony looks back at them. “There’s no Tesseract energy pack in that diagram. You know that, Mean Green, you studied the connection points and nerve pathways for days. It wasn’t just me obsessed with this thing.”
Sam looks at the diagram. It means nothing to him, with all the labels for mystery parts in Cyrillic.
“How did you think the arm was powered?” Sam asks.
Bruce and Tony share a glance before Bruce answers: “By Jigsaw’s own energy. He eats more than Steve does. Part of that is that he’s healing from HYDRA damage—the wipes and all that—and needs more fuel. But we thought it might be that he was also powering his prosthesis.”
“And now we know it’s Tesseract energy,” Sam says. “But we can’t see it in the diagrams made by the people who made the prosthesis itself.”
“But what if they didn’t make it?” Tony asks. “What if Zola made it, or at least supplied the instructions for it and a few parts?”
Bruce shakes his head. “Zola was in the US by then. In S.H.I.E.L.D. Project Paperclip, remember?”
“Being in S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t mean much,” Sam mutters. “Or not anything good. How many scientists could he have had working on one little part of the project, not knowing what it would be used for?”
“Or even big parts of the project.” Tony grimaces. “Dear old Dad was in the thick of it. He’d have eaten a project like this up and asked for seconds.”
And the power source wouldn’t have mattered because it was all just hypothetical anyway, just a thought experiment. Just to see if they could build it. Just to see if they could connect machinery to a human, thread the nerves where they need to go, attach the muscles, all of that.
It would have been too inhumane to test it on an actual person, with the anchor points as they are, the weight of the prosthesis, the lack of a power source. And what human would happen along with exactly this sort of amputation at exactly the right time, anyway?
Except there’d been Barnes, and anything Zola—and possibly Howard and others—made in the States could be replicated by others, and then fitted with a power source later, when Zola was cleared to visit other countries, perhaps, and could put it in place then.
“It’s not in the diagrams or the descriptions in the Winter Soldier manual because Zola didn’t want the Soviets to know his secrets,” Sam guesses. “So he did that part himself, later. He must have had the opportunity to work on Barnes after the fall, after he had the arm prototype and the power source to put inside it secretly.”
Bruce shakes his head, grim. “And depending on how long that took, Barnes was being tortured and brainwashed while he was recovering from at least one amputation.”
Tony blinks. “At least one? Bucky Build-a-Bear still has all his other limbs.”
“But where did the fall off of that train break his arm?” Bruce asks. “Did they amputate because it was infected, or did it break off in the fall? Did they have to keep cutting higher and higher up his arm as infection set in? Did they try various prototypes at each length? Was the infection due to the prosthetics not attaching properly?”
“And,” Sam adds, “was he already basically immune to anesthesia, like he was on the Bus after Bakersfield?”
Tony shudders. “They might not have bothered, either way,” he mutters.
Sam wonders if he’s remembering his own time in captivity, where they almost certainly didn’t have a full medical facility in place to put in the arc reactor, let alone the car battery hook-up that came before.
“Well, of the three of us,” Tony tells him with an air of moving on, “you have the best bedside manner, so I nominate you to be the one to bring it up with Jigglesworth and see if he’s up to getting some scans done so we can see what’s going on in there. Maybe find a way to cut back on the pain. Something.”
Of course it’s falling to him, Sam thinks. He sees Jigsaw every morning before his therapy session with Yasmin, so it makes sense that he can have a little chat without having to arrange a time and meeting point.
And while Jigsaw may know that his prosthesis is powered by Tesseract energy, he might not—and he should be informed. If it was Sam, Sam would want to know everything there was to know about a prosthetic device attached to himself.
Sam nods. “I’ll talk with him.”
“Sweet. Now we have to work on Redwing.”
Bruce nods. “If our halo detection detects Jigsaw instead of a halo, that’s not very helpful. We need to specify that organic material like Jigsaw doesn’t count, or that a specific shape or quantity of energy doesn’t count, so that the detection still picks up halos.”
“I’ll start training Redwing to classify organic and inorganic substances and to ignore anything that combines the two,” Tony says. “In the meantime, let’s run one more test. Wilson, have Redwing find the next biggest Tesseract energy signature, excluding Jigsaw entirely.”
Sam punches in the programming commands on the armband and watches on the monitor as Redwing wiggles its goodbye to Jigsaw—spooking Alpine in the process—and heads to the door, which JARVIS opens for him.
“So we know now that we need to exclude Jigsaw from Redwing’s search results so if the AI fails on us the underlying commands will still exclude him. Fun times ahead,” Tony adds, rubbing his hands together.
“Did you have a good time with Redwing?” Steve asks as Sam comes in to get him for dinner preparations.
Sam sighs and flops down into one of Steve’s chairs. He feels heavy all over, and he knows it’s just the weight of the discoveries earlier in the afternoon. And part of him feels like Jigsaw should maybe be the first to know, but Steve is here now, and Sam needs to unburden himself. Steve will understand.
“We were looking for Tesseract energy signatures,” Sam says. “We ran two tests with just that instruction—Find the Tesseract energy signature, and then go to and interact with that energy signature.”
Steve comes around to where he’s sitting and urges him to sit up, leaning forward a bit so that Steve can access his shoulders, and Sam groans thankfully as Steve begins a massage.
“Well the first test must have been a failure,” Steve says after a moment. “Unless the halo left some kind of signature on Jigsaw?”
Sam sighs again. “Redwing found him twice. Both times we sent him out. And he interacted extensively with Jigsaw’s left arm.”
Steve’s hands, while still blissfully warm weights on Sam’s shoulders, stop moving.
“Jigsaw’s prosthesis is powered by the Tesseract,” Steve says, his voice flat. “An energy pack or something else, inside the arm.”
Sam nods. “That’s what we’re thinking.”
After a moment, Steve resumes rubbing his shoulders.
“Does he know?”
“We aren’t sure. It’s not in the manual. We think Zola might have used S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel, maybe even Howard, to build parts of the project and then put them all together with his own part, the energy source, later.”
Steve hmms his understanding of the statement, but doesn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Then: “How is Tony taking it? Howard’s probable involvement?”
“He seems more upset by the multiple-amputations theory and the surgery without anesthesia parts.”
Sam wonders if this is really something he should be talking with Steve about. Not that he needs to keep it a secret or protect Steve from the knowledge. But he’s talking about things that were done to Barnes, to Steve’s Bucky, and not to Jigsaw as he is now. It might raise more issues for him than it otherwise would.
“How are you feeling about it?” Sam asks.
“…By multiple amputations, you mean they might have kept cutting off progressively more and more of his arm?”
Sam nods. “Either due to infection or as part of the torture. I don’t know. It’s just a theory.”
“It doesn’t make me happy, Sam.”
And isn’t that an understatement?
“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Sam says.
“I would want to know,” Steve replies as he kneads at a knot in Sam’s right shoulder. “I want to know everything there is to know so that I can be the best friend I can be to him.”
Sometimes, knowledge of someone’s history isn’t something that makes a better friendship, but Sam leaves that statement unspoken. Steve doesn’t need to hear that.
“And I think Jigsaw should know,” Sam says instead. “About the Tesseract energy. We think it might be burning him where the arm connects. I’ve noticed you’re a bit toasty at night, but it’s nothing that needs the AC turned way up for in October. Jigsaw runs a lot hotter, so maybe he’s constantly using up fuel to heal internal burns.”
Steve sighs. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Not sure.”
Sam rolls his neck as Steve moves on from the knot. It feels much better now.
“I’m going to ask him about getting scanned tomorrow morning,” he continues. “Let him know about the Tesseract thing, try to convince him to let us take a closer look. Then we can see if there’s something we can do for him.”
“Let me know how it goes?”
Sam huffs out a laugh. “You’ll be the second to know, probably after Yasmin.”
Chapter 126: Jigsaw | I think I wrote my own pain
Notes:
Chapter title from “Wild Roses” by Of Monsters and Men.
It’s not Sunday, but I figured people might appreciate a chapter to keep them company if they’re lonely this Thanksgiving or to distract from the occasionally dreadful family relations that this holiday in the US tends to involve. And if you’re outside of the US, enjoy a chapter somewhat earlier than I intended to post it. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 5:45 a.m.—
The dog is gobbling up the food from the can, so excited to eat the mush in the bowl, licking and smacking with the tail wagging back and forth with so much energy. The dog loves this food the best of all of the kinds of food that is for dogs, but they cannot feed this food all of the time.
There must be variety, Caroline says. And that lesson—that there must be variety—applies to the dog as well as to the little cat as well as to assets and people. If the dog or the little cat get so used to eating just one thing, they may not want to eat anything else that is offered later, or their stomachs might be upset by different food later.
Assets and people need variety, too, so that they can get all of the nutrients they need out of the food that they eat. All of the different big nutritions, the carbs and the fats and the proteins, in different amounts, but balanced.
It knows so much about food now. Before there was only one lesson about food: waste not, want not. It must eat everything that was offered as fast as possible or it would be taken away again, and it must earn everything, too. All of it wrapped up in waste not, want not, though.
But now there are so many foods, and nutritions and nutrients, and portions and servings. And there must be variety. And it must eat whenever it is hungry and it should try to honor fullness cues when it feels them.
It likes the new food lessons much better than the old ones.
The little cat sends up the most pitiful of all the mews, a thin and brittle wail, and climbs up the side of the body onto the table as it is getting the last bits of gravy out of the pouch and into the little cat’s bowl.
It is good that the other asset cannot hear well without the purple crescents behind the ears, or the little cat would wake the other asset up every morning with her squeaks and chirps and occasional screams for attention and food.
The little cat is very loud in the mornings.
And so hungry. There the little cat goes into the food bowl, the shallow dish with the lip so that the little cat does not get her whiskers out of sorts. Her little stubby tail trembles from the effort of getting as much food into her mouth as possible, as quickly as possible, and it strokes a metal fingertip along her back as she eats, admiring her soft fur.
So fluffy.
And now it is time for it to gobble up food as well. The dog is almost finished eating, the little cat is partway through her meal, and now Jigsaw will eat… What will it eat this morning?
It selects and opens a can of cut up peaches in juice, and peels off a slice of sandwich cheese, and washes a rib of celery, and then dumps the last of the fingerling carrots into a bowl before sitting at the table so it can eat and watch the little cat finish her meal.
The little cat no longer needs to be bounced after eating, but it enjoys watching the little cat lick and lick and lick the bowl clean.
It remembers what it is like to lick bowls clean. It does not think it was adorable when it did that, but the little cat is licking because she enjoyed the meal so much, not because there is danger in leaving a scrap or because there is so much hunger that it is inconceivable to leave a scrap. It is a lot more adorable when the little cat does it.
And it can feed her a tiny piece of the cheese, as a treat, when she is done.
It is halfway through the can of peaches and the carrots when the flying man comes into the rooms for assets to bring the dog out for the morning walk.
But instead of stopping at the long table by the door and picking up the leash out of its bowl, the flying man comes further into the room—all the way past the sofa and into the kitchen area, where he sits at the table across from it.
It pushes the bowl with the few remaining carrots across the table to him, a silent offer.
“Thanks, man,” the flying man says, and then takes a carrot. “Do you have time for a little talk?”
The flying man knows what time it is. The flying man knows what time it needs to leave to be on time to the morning session with Yasmin. The flying man, therefore, knows whether there is time for talking. Why is he asking?
Why does the flying man make “a little talk” sound ominous?
It warily nods the head. Surely the flying man would not ask if there were no time for talking. Maybe the flying man is asking if it wants to have some talking. It does not mind talking with the flying man. So yes. Yes, there is time for a little talk.
“Good, good.” The flying man pauses, perhaps to find a good thing to say to start the little talk.
“So,” the flying man finally continues, “I’m guessing you’re wondering why Redwing came to visit you yesterday.”
It has not been wondering, no. It shakes the head. The little red and white metal bird visited it and that is that. Why would it wonder?
“Oh.” The flying man looks stumped, but not for long. “Well, anyway, we’ve loaded up the Tesseract halo detection capabilities into Redwing, and we ran a few tests to see if he could find the halo parts.”
Ah, yes, the halo detection so that they can find the agents with the halo and the agents with the Tesseract energy packs for powering a halo, and kill them.
“And he did, eventually,” the flying man says. “But first, he found you. Twice.”
That is because the little red and white metal bird likes it. It gives the little red and white metal bird metal-to-metal scritches with the left hand, and pets it with the right hand, also. No one else but the flying man ever pets the little red and white metal bird.
“After he found you the second time, we adjusted the search parameters, and he was able to find the parts of the halo.”
It flashes the flying man a thumbs up. Good job. They have found a way to find the halos, so they can kill, kill, kill the operatives who have them.
“Thanks. But before that, Redwing was looking for the strongest Tesseract energy imprint in the Tower, and that was you.”
What?
“Or more specifically, your prosthesis.”
What is that word? It has heard that word before, but it cannot place it into a category right now. It is lacking a meaning. And why does the flying man look like this is bad news and not just news?
It asks why, hoping that the flying man will be able find the right question when it does not know exactly what to ask.
“We think that your arm might be powered by Tesseract energy,” the flying man says. “And more than that—”
It holds up both hands, fingertips up, palms out. Wait. Stop. Let it think.
The flying man nods and is silent, taking the opportunity to pet the little cat now that she is done eating.
The Tesseract is a blue cube with an evil glow. All of the weapons that disappear a target shoot blue Tesseract energy. The monitoring devices in the tube where it is so, so cold have sensors that shine blue Tesseract energy. The halo that can be carried around is fitted with a Tesseract energy pack, probably blue.
The other asset is afraid of the Tesseract, and afraid of that specific blue light.
If all of those horrible things are powered by the Tesseract, and if the other asset is afraid of the Tesseract, and if the metal arm is powered by the Tesseract, then is the metal arm a horrible thing, and a thing for the other asset to be afraid of?
It does not want the other asset to be afraid of any part of it.
And the metal arm does not glow. It is not blue inside. It has seen inside the metal arm, when it made the wiring change to allow cameras to see it, in Bakersfield. It was not blue. There was no Tesseract glow.
And it has seen the inside of the metal arm when the technicians were working on it, and the only glow had been the red and white glow of the soldering iron and the torch and various tools—never blue.
Did it just miss the glow? Has it forgotten the glow? But how could it miss something that glows so bright and so vivid and so blue?
“Can I continue?” the flying man asks.
It does not want to hear more, but the flying man has more to say. It is starting to wish it had not had time for a little talk. But it nods. The flying man has more to say, after all.
“Okay. We think your prosthetic arm might be hurting you. Burning you, inside, because of the Tesseract energy. We think you might be constantly healing from burns inside your shoulder where the arm attaches.”
Burning it? Inside? It knows what inside burns feel like. There have been taser batons with the white electric fire inside of it, burning and burning. It knows what that is like, and that is not what the shoulder feels. But the shoulder does hurt, when it stops to take notice of the body during meditation sessions with Yasmin.
When it breathes in and out, so slow and so deep, and counting, and focuses on each part of the body, from the tips of the toes up the legs, through the torso, down to the fingertips, and then back up to the top of the head. The shoulder hurts. But so does the whole back, all the bits and pieces of it that are soft tissue. And parts of the lower back down into the butt. And the upper back up into the neck and back of the skull.
It thought that was because of the metal parts running all through the torso to anchor the weight of the metal arm and all of its internal workings. It thought that was because of the reinforced bones and the synthetic muscle fibers.
It is a natural result of having the metal arm. Have a metal arm, have pain that goes with it, that means that everything is in working order. Order comes through pain.
“Jigsaw,” the flying man says, and it puts its attention back on him. The little cat seems to have gone off to play now that her food is all gone, so it is just the flying man and a bit of celery left at the table.
“Would you be willing to get scanned by JARVIS—”
Scanned? No, not scanned. No scans, no technicians working on the metal arm again, no, no—
“—pletely noninvasive,” the flying man says, “not even touching you.”
It is not sure it believes. How can a technician work on the metal arm without touching?
“That way we can see what’s happening inside of you and maybe try to make things less painful?”
But scans lead to work on the metal arm, and that is more pain, not less pain. That is so much pain, and while it is always in better order afterward because of the pain, it does not think it is out of order now. The metal arm does not need maintenance, is not malfunctioning. Is already in order and kept in order through all of the ordinary pain. That is the balance. That is is how it works.
“We figure you must be in a lot of pain, all the time, and we want to try to relieve some of that pain if we can,” the flying man says.
It frowns and signs that order comes through pain. That it is normal. That this asset is used to it. That this asset is already in order, because of the pain. Because it can feel all of the inner workings, all the twinges and aches and stabs of things in working order, it knows that everything is in order. If it did not have the pain, if the metal arm and the torso were numb and it could not feel everything, that would be horrible.
So it needs the pain. It has to know that everything is in order. Order through pain. That is the way of it. Order comes through pain.
“But it doesn’t have to, right?”
The flying man must not have understood all of its signs, because he only responds to that part, and not all of the rest.
“Order can come through something else, can’t it? Sometimes pain is the sign that something’s wrong. All those aches and pains mean something isn’t right, and when we make everything right again, the pain goes away. ”
It thinks about hair brushing that does not hurt but puts the hair into very good order.
“Just think about it,” the flying man says. “It’s your call. Timing is up to you, and everything. But we want to help if you’re up for it.”
The hamburger technician can be trusted, has not hurt it ever, even when he was inside the robot and could have hurt it. And it has been able to hear the voice without a mouth sometimes, and the voice without a mouth wants to help it.
“Will you think about it?”
It nods and the flying man nods back. The flying man gets up and goes to the door and picks up the leash to take the dog for the morning walk.
And it sits there with the rib of celery, the only part of the morning snack that it has not yet eaten. It is not really hungry for the celery right now, even though it is crispy and juicy and delicious. So refreshing. And it needs refreshing after all this talk of scanning and order and pain.
Is there Tesseract energy that close to it? A part of it?
What will the other asset think?
Will the other asset be afraid of it? Will the other asset stop running fingernails along the grooves between the plates, stop holding the metal hand, stop caressing the smooth metal, stop sitting on the left side? Will the other asset no longer welcome it into the nest, or spoon with it, or kiss it?
Will it have to move out of the rooms for assets and move into a room that is just for this asset?
It does not want to leave the other asset.
But it has to, at least for a little while, so that it can be on time to the morning session with Yasmin. It does not want to be late.
It also does not want to eat the celery, anymore. But it cannot leave the celery on the table. It will put it in the refrigerator to get cold again, and will eat it later. The celery will not go to waste.
It might be an old lesson and not a new lesson, but waste not, want not.
Notes:
Shorter chapter, but don't worry, next one is another Jigsaw POV for his therapy, and she'll help. ^_^
You might have noticed that I’m going through my old unanswered comments and such. I’m very far behind, so if you get a reply to something from 50+ days ago, that’s just me catching up. I’m enjoying re-reading all your comforting, caring, uplifting words and your reactions to the last handful of chapters. You guys absolutely rock! <3
Chapter 127: Jigsaw | Let’s watch the flowers grow
Notes:
Chapter title from “Flowers in the Window” by Travis.
Anachronism alert: Legos botanical sets were not out in 2012. Not by a long shot. But we’re ignoring that and pretending that they were available then. ^_^
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
“Nervous,” Yasmin repeats, concern all over her face. “What are you feeling nervous about?”
How does it tell her everything? Where does it start?
It decides that it will use the tablet for this, and not signs. That way it can rearrange everything before pressing Speak so that it is not a jumble like in the mind. There is the Tesseract, the metal arm, the other asset, a scan, technicians, so much to say.
Yasmin waits patiently for it to make all of the words and line them up, and so that is one less thing to worry about. Yasmin is always so patient. She understands.
“Tesseract inside metal arm and the flying man want SCAN metal arm find Tesseract,” it says with the tap of a button. “Voice without a mouth SCAN and the hamburger technician work on metal arm? The other asset afraid Jigsaw metal arm with Tesseract? Jigsaw need leave the other asset nest? Jigsaw need leave the other asset?”
“That’s a lot of things to be nervous about,” Yasmin says. “Let’s try to unpack some of that, okay?”
It nods. Unpacking is good, helpful.
“I understand that the Tesseract is a powerful blue cube, and that its energy can power weapons.” Yasmin waits for it to nod. “So just to be clear, the Tesseract energy can power your left arm as well as weapons? Or is there a fragment of the Tesseract inside your arm?”
It… It does not know. The flying man said powered by Tesseract energy. Does that mean sliver of Tesseract? Does that mean energy pack?
It shrugs and signs that it does not know. Then it looks down at the tablet and starts to find the words it wants.
“Metal bird search out biggest Tesseract and find Jigsaw. Then metal bird search again find Jigsaw again. Jigsaw metal arm.”
Yasmin does not know about the little red and white metal bird, but maybe she will understand still. She understands a lot. She is an expert.
“Is the metal bird a drone?” Yasmin asks. “A small flying machine that can be controlled remotely and carry out tasks as needed?”
That sounds right, though it does not know about remotely controlling the little red and white metal bird. It thinks the little red and white metal bird makes its own decisions sometimes. But it nods, anyway. That is close enough.
“Thanks for explaining that, Jigsaw.” Yasmin pauses. “So either a small piece of the Tesseract is inside of your left arm, or there is some energy source based on the Tesseract inside your arm. My understanding now is that Sam and Tony want to run a scan to find out more.”
It nods vigorously. They want the voice without a mouth to scan it! It does not want to be scanned. Scanning leads to horrible things. Things that it was starting to be so sure would never happen here in the hive building, with the team that is not a cell.
“The very idea of a scan is frightening, isn’t it?” Yasmin asks. “Scans have been bad things in the past, and you’re worried about those bad things happening now?”
Yes.
“Okay. Did Sam and Tony say anything about the kind of scan?”
It nods, tries to find the words that the flying man used. The words squirm around and escape its grasp, though, so it finds new words to use.
“Look inside Jigsaw arm but not touching Jigsaw.”
It does not want to be immobilized in a tube while all of the banging noises and whirring machinery surround it. It does not even want the static buzzing of the machines that send all of the buzzing through it and make a picture of the bones and all the bright white metal bits. Or the rods that can scan it. No scanning.
“I’ve been scanned a lot of times,” Yasmin says quietly. “I’ve been scanned at the airport before getting on a plane to fly here. I’ve been scanned by doctors when I broke my leg skiing. I’ve been scanned by dentists who needed to see all of my teeth in detail.”
It did not know that experts got scanned. Why would they scan an expert?
“I had a scan done inside a tube before, too,” Yasmin says. “They needed to see something inside of me to make sure I could be as healthy as possible. It was a little frightening and very loud, but it didn’t hurt at all.”
Yasmin smiles at it. “Scanning itself, done right, can be perfectly safe and comfortable. Especially if it’s non-invasive and there won’t even be a need to touch you.”
It wonders what they needed to see inside of Yasmin. If she went into a tube where it is too small and very loud, something must have been very wrong. There would have been a need for pain to put her back into order, but she says there was no pain, that it did not hurt at all.
“Yasmin healthy now?”
She smiles again, wider. “I’m healthy, yes. The scan showed the doctors what they needed to see, and everything went well with the surgery afterward.”
Yasmin had a surgery? They did that to an expert ?
“It’s the potential for surgery that worries you more than the scan itself, isn’t it?” Yasmin asks.
It does a quick check of the facts. Scans sometimes hurt and are always unpleasant. Sometimes they assault the senses, and other times it can feel energy being shot all through the body. And always there is a technician or a medical researcher afterward, waiting to take it apart. Gather data. Change something about it or take something away from it.
Or put something inside of it.
It nods. That is what it is most afraid of about the scanning. What comes after the scanning.
“The hamburger technician show Jigsaw animals tell Jigsaw stories explain Jigsaw weird words. But after scan the hamburger technician take Jigsaw apart? Jigsaw not want.”
“Has Tony ever indicated that he would take you apart or open up your left arm?”
It shakes the head.
“Has Tony ever treated a piece of machinery badly? Been cruel or hurtful toward one of the pieces of technology he’s worked on?”
The hamburger technician sometimes says mean things to some of the little robots in the lab, but it feels like when the ballerina woman says a mean thing to the other asset and the other asset laughs or says a mean thing back, and everyone is smiling. Like the mean things aren’t really mean, they just sound mean.
But he has never thrown anything at them, or hit them, and they have always been powered off when he works on them, so that they do not feel the soldering iron or the invasion of being opened up and changed .
It shakes the head. No, the hamburger technician has never been cruel or hurtful in the lab. Not that it has seen. And all of the little robots are friendly and cheerful, and none of them are afraid.
“So if Tony were to work on your left arm—and I do mean if, not when, because you can always tell him no—would he hurt you?”
It slowly shakes the head and then puts the words together that it wants to say: “Jigsaw tell the hamburger technician no?”
“That’s right. You are in control of your body, Jigsaw. All of your body, every single part of you. If you don’t consent to have Tony work on your arm, then he won’t do it. And if you do consent and then change your mind, Tony will stop what he’s doing.”
It knows all about consent. Yasmin told it all of the things about consent. That is like it having to ask to enter someone else’s room, or their personal space bubble. That is like everyone deciding what they want and what they do not want.
And it only gained consent ability when it escaped HYDRA, when it stole will from the operator, pulled will out from him tiny pebble tooth by tiny pebble tooth, and then the tongue in the milk. Do you want some milk? Ha. Ha.
Before that, it did not have will, could not consent, was not able to decide what happened to it. Now it has will, can consent, is able to decide what happens to it. But it is an asset still, and the hamburger technician is a technician. Technicians work on assets. It is what they do. And assets are worked on. That is what they do.
But the flying man had said that it was all up to it. To think about it. Had asked if they could do scans, not said they were going to do scans. If it does not consent to the scanning… then there might not be any scans. It would be safe, then, from any of what comes after a scan.
“Do you understand about being in control of the situation?” Yasmin asks. “Do you accept the truth that you can give your consent and also take it back?”
It nods. “Jigsaw not consent SCAN then no SCAN and no surgery no hamburger technician work on metal arm.”
“Do you know why they want to scan you?” she asks. “What it is they want to accomplish? Is it just to find out for sure how your left arm is powered?”
Ugh.
“Jigsaw hurt every time. All of it. The flying man and the hamburger technician want change. Take away pain. Order come through pain. Jigsaw need pain to know Jigsaw in working order.”
Yasmin is quiet for a long, long time. Minutes. Maybe she is having trouble finding the words, just like it so often is unable to grab the words it wants before they squirm away.
Then: “I would like to encourage you to consent to being scanned, Jigsaw.”
Her voice is soft and gentle, but there is something inside of it that it cannot quite place.
“If you get scanned, you can still withhold consent to being worked on. The one does not have to lead to the other,” she says. “But I feel very sad and helpless when I think about you being in pain all the time. I don’t want you to hurt all the time. I don’t want you to ever hurt.”
It is about to sign that order comes through pain, to remind her, but she holds a hand up and it nods to show her that it will listen.
“I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this. No one here in the Tower wants you to be in pain. Clint doesn’t want you to be in pain. And while it is your choice and will always be your choice, remember that order does not have to come through pain. Order can come from all kinds of things.”
Like when the other asset brushes the hair.
“I wanted to introduce something to you this morning that will help illustrate that, where we will put something very chaotic into order, and there will be no pain at all involved in doing so. We might still do that, this afternoon.”
It wants to do that, yes. That sounds like it will be enjoyable, like sorting things into different basket categories.
“But in the meantime,” Yasmin says, “I want you to check the facts about order and pain, and I want you to ask for more information about the scanning. Is that something Clint can hold your hand through? Is that something you can bring your shark for? What will the scanning be like? Close to you or farther away? Do you have to lie down, or can you sit or stand?”
So much to ask about. And then there is the other asset. It has to tell the other asset about the scanning, and so it will have to tell the other asset about the Tesseract energy in the metal arm. And so it will have to ask whether the other asset will still kiss it with the Tesseract energy there, will still cuddle with it and spoon with it, and allow it to touch the other asset with the metal arm.
“Does that worry you, Jigsaw? Asking for these details?”
It blinks and shakes the head. No, it can ask the hamburger technician about the scan. It can still say no to the scan afterward and then no to taking the metal arm apart.
“You seem worried just now. What is on your mind that worries you?”
“The other asset afraid of Tesseract. Tesseract inside metal arm. Will the other asset be afraid Jigsaw? Reject, say no Jigsaw?”
Yasmin’s expression goes from concern and a frown to warmth and a smile. “You’re worried that Clint will feel differently about you and about your left arm once he knows about the Tesseract,” Yasmin repeats.
It nods. That is what is worrying it.
“On that front, I have some very good news,” Yasmin says. “I doubt very much that Clint will reject you for this. I would be extremely surprised if Clint did anything but accept you as you are. Tesseract and all.”
Yasmin understands it very well. But does she understand the other asset very well? Or is she guessing? What if she is wrong about the other asset and the other asset does reject it? How could they be the same as when the metal arm has the Tesseract energy inside it and the other asset’s ear crescents do not?
That they both have augmentations makes them more the same as, but the Tesseract energy… The other asset is afraid of that. Would not want to be the same as that.
“Will you tell Clint about the Tesseract in your left arm, and about the scans?”
It nods. It wants to be the one to tell the other asset so that it can see whether it will be rejected. It does not want the others to tell the other asset and then it comes back from a therapy session to find that there is no longer a room for it in the rooms for assets.
“Good. I’m sure his hearing it from you directly will be good for both of you.” Yasmin taps her phone and looks down at it briefly. “We still have a few minutes in our session this morning, and I don’t have anyone scheduled afterward. Do you want to start working on some Legos?”
Is Legos what Yasmin said they would work on to experience order coming through no pain at all? It nods. That must be what Legos is.
“Alright. JARVIS, would you let us know when breakfast is ready so that Jigsaw can go eat with Clint and Natasha?”
It listens for the response, and hears the voice without a mouth say “certainly ma’am,” but it still cannot place exactly where in the ceiling the voice without a mouth must be located.
“Thank you, JARVIS.”
Yasmin reaches into her bag and pulls out a small box made out of cardstock with a picture of flowers on it. There are two flowers, bright orange ones with brown centers, and all the orange petals coming out of the center in a big circle. There are green stems and boxy green leaves as well.
“Legos are a kind of plastic building block,” Yasmin says. “Each piece can snap together with other pieces in a variety of ways. This particular collection of pieces can make two sunflowers if the pieces are put together in the right way, in the right order.”
They will be putting things into order and creating flowers! Flowers that are made of plastic and do not stink like the woman in white’s flowers had stunk up the whole hallway back when she was living in the hive building.
Yasmin hands it the box and also a fabric glove. It feels like cotton and is white with three raised lines on one side.
“The pieces are very small and the plastic can be slippery,” she says. “I’d like for you to try wearing this cotton glove on your left hand so that you can grip the pieces more easily than with your metal fingertips.”
It can do that. It is more used to leather gloves, but it can wear cotton. It has never seen anyone wear cotton gloves. It did not know gloves even came in cotton. Only leather gloves for good activities and rubber or latex gloves for bad activities. Cotton must be for everything else.
At Yasmin’s urging, it opens up the box and finds a clear plastic bag full of a colorful jumble of parts. There is another clear plastic bag inside also, and the parts inside of it are much, much smaller. It would have a very hard time picking them up with the metal fingers. The glove is a good idea.
Of course it is, since it is Yasmin’s idea. She is an expert. Experts know all sorts of things.
There is also a little paper book inside the box, with a picture of the flowers on the front of it.
“The booklet is an instruction set,” Yasmin says. “If you follow the instructions, step by step, you can build the flowers. Let’s take a moment to examine the instructions.”
It wants to examine the teeny tiny plastic pieces, but if the instructions should come first, then they can do that. It prepares itself to read many, many words, and then opens up the instructions—the booklet, she called it.
But there are no words!
There are pictures. Pictures of the pieces, and some numbers, and some arrows showing how the pieces fit together. It turns the pages, and page after page has numbered steps and numbers of pieces, and pictures—no words.
With the pictures, it can see exactly how the pieces will all fit together, and there is the flower slowly coming along as the pages go. When it gets to the end of the booklet, it knows how to put the flower together. And it did not have to read a single word!
“Now let’s open up the bags and explore the pieces themselves, so that we can envision how they will go together to form the petals and everything else.”
It carefully tears open the bag with the bigger pieces in it, all the green log pieces and black log pieces, the leaves, the strange steering-wheel looking pieces and the rest. So many pieces, and it can see in the mind how they will go together.
Then the second bag, the smaller pieces, all of the tiny paddle-looking pieces—the petals—and the wrench-looking pieces that will attach the petals to the steering wheels. There are so many pieces, and they are so small. Some of them not even the size of a pinky fingernail.
It runs a fingertip through the piles of pieces, stirring them around and starting to sort the pieces into categories—colors, shapes, sizes, so many possible categories.
“You’re beginning to put the pieces into order,” Yasmin says. “And is there any pain involved?”
It shakes the head. There is no pain. Only brightly colored bits of plastic that will become a pair of flowers.
“And this is just one kind of order,” Yasmin continues. “Once you start putting the pieces together, they will be in a different order. And once you have the flowers, there will be an opportunity to arrange those flowers into an order you find visually pleasing.”
It blinks. Wow, that is so many kinds of order for these pieces to be in. And none of that sounds like it would be painful at all.
Chapter 128: Clint | Nothing you confess, could make me love you less
Notes:
Chapter title from “I’ll Stand by You” by The Pretenders.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 8:30 a.m.—
Clint isn’t sure whether to be concerned about the morning session taking so long. Most of the time, if an afternoon session runs long, it’s because of some heavy, dark stuff getting dug up and aired out. Jigsaw comes back looking terrible, on edge at best and tearful the rest of the time.
But a morning session… That should be okay, right? Yasmin doesn’t have time to unpack too much of the garbage HYDRA instilled or the horrors they inflicted in just the one hour. That, and who wants to start their day with that?
“JARVIS will let him know when it’s time to eat,” Natasha says. “You worry too much.”
“But he doesn’t listen to JARVIS,” Clint says. “At least, not until a few days ago. What if he doesn’t hear it?”
“Then Yasmin will tell him.”
Clint sighs. That’s true, he knows. He just doesn’t like it when therapy runs long. It always ends with him on the sofa consoling Jigsaw, and while he doesn’t mind doing that and would gladly spend hours cuddling him into a better headspace, Clint doesn’t like Jigsaw needing the consolation.
Why can’t it all stay buried? Why can’t they heap more dirt on top of it? Encase it in fucking lead and concrete, like Chernobyl? That’s doing a great job of keeping the bad stuff at bay, right?
It’s doing alright for Clint, anyway. Burying his bullshit baggage and proceeding to ignore it hasn’t done too much damage, and it’s helped him pass hundreds of post-mission psych evals.
He doesn’t want to think about all of that stuff, and so he doesn’t. So what if his little paintings featured the closest to Tesseract blue he could get for the anxiety-fear thing. And so what if the anger picture was a bunch of his old circus colors? That doesn’t have to mean anything. Why assign meaning where there doesn’t have to be any meaning?
Jigsaw’s paintings are prettier than his, anyway. They’re more artistic, with layers of paint and thick brush strokes. Clint still has paint in his hair after shampooing twice, but Jigsaw managed to avoid getting paint anywhere but the canvas.
And Jigsaw seemed to really enjoy the painting, though not as much as Steve was. No one could enjoy painting as much as Steve does. Maybe he should suggest that Jigsaw and Steve spend part of a day painting together sometime. Bigger things than the ones that are just a few inches across.
“Are you coming?” Natasha asks.
“Oh, um, yeah,” Clint says, hurriedly joining her at the door. “Sorry, ‘Tasha. I spaced there for a bit.”
“Thinking about…?” she prompts as they head for the elevator.
“Therapy,” Clint mutters. “Why can’t Jigsaw bury his trauma like the rest of us? Then he wouldn’t come back from his therapy sessions needing a hug and a good crying jag on the sofa.”
Natasha sighs. “It’s doing him a lot of good, Clint. Surely you see that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I see it. I just worry when he’s late like this. It always means something went really dark in his session.”
And he’ll cancel breakfast if he needs to comfort Jigsaw. Hell, he’ll cancel on Katie-Kate at the last minute if Jigsaw needs him. She can go up to the range and have a practice session, on the house.
“I don’t think Yasmin would bring up anything really heavy in a short session,” Natasha says. “There isn’t time to level-set again afterward.”
“It’s been ninety minutes. It’s a long session now.”
Natasha merely shakes her head.
“I know, I’m being grumpy,” he says. “But it is practically a long session now. They probably struck a trauma landmine and she’s trying to patch him up for breakfast. I just hate it, that’s all. Him being so upset when he doesn’t have to be.”
Natasha shrugs. “Maybe he does have to be. I’m not saying that I would sign up for therapy any time soon, but it does seem to be helping him. It might not be for everyone, but it does look like it’s for him.”
“But does it have to be so upsetting?” Clint asks as they enter the kitchen. “Couldn’t it— Whoa, someone went overboard on the waffles today.”
There are stacks upon stacks of waffles and half a dozen different flavors of syrup. And a platter of scrambled eggs, too. Plus lots of strawberries and blueberries in a bowl. He hopes Jigsaw had a light morning snack, because there’s a lot of food here.
Natasha asks JARVIS to let Jigsaw know they’ll eat in the kitchen this time, and starts getting plates out.
“Clint, I know you don’t like seeing him upset,” she says. “But the fact is that he’s opened up to everyone since he started therapy. In a big, big way. It’s a good fit for him. You’re not doing anyone any good by questioning it.”
He sighs and picks a waffle off the stack nearest him. Still hot and crunchy from the waffle iron. Damn. Someone’s pampering them this morning. He stuffs half the waffle into his mouth and savors the taste and crunch.
And he’s got the waffle almost entirely swallowed by the time Jigsaw shows up in the kitchen holding a daisy-looking flower in orangey-yellow with a brown center. Maybe it’s supposed to be a sunflower. Clint always thought sunflowers were huge, though, and this is smaller.
And made out of plastic, he sees when Jigsaw presents the flower to him with a grin.
“Wait,” Clint says as he inspects the flower. “Are these Legos?”
Jigsaw nods proudly and sets his tablet down on the kitchen island, away from the food. He signs that this is the first flower, and that there is a another one that he will build later today.
“I thought Legos were just the square bricks and things.”
Clearly, Legos have diversified since he last encountered them.
Natasha comes around the island and holds out her hand for the flower.
“I’ve never seen actual Legos,” she says as she turns it around in her hands. “Just pictures of them. Commercials advertising them.”
Jigsaw beams, clearly thrilled that they are both enjoying the flower he made.
“So there’ll be a second one just like this?” Natasha asks. When Jigsaw nods, she smiles. “We’ll have to find a vase to put them in. Just like real flowers.”
Natasha hands the flower back to Jigsaw, who puts it on the tablet out of the way of anything sticky.
Breakfast is a quiet one, with Jigsaw mostly focused on putting as many waffles in his stomach as possible, along with eggs and fruit. He tries all of the syrups and settles on one that’s a bright reddish purple—boysenberry, it says on the label.
Clint sticks to the tried and true maple syrup, because why change a good thing and risk ruining a perfectly good stack of waffles with a subpar syrup?
Natasha goes for the raspberry syrup, and is as focused on the food as Clint and Jigsaw are.
And when there are just enough waffles left for a regular person to have a healthy stack of them, Jigsaw carefully licks any trace of syrup off his fingers, and pulls his tablet over to work at it for a while.
Clint wonders what is worth pausing in the waffle devouring process. Is Jigsaw still concerned about Alpine’s upcoming vaccines? Is he wondering about the party this upcoming Saturday? Maybe he’s got some pressing homework assignment from Yasmin?
“The little metal bird find Jigsaw metal arm when look for Tesseract energy,” comes the Russian-accented voice from the tablet. “Tesseract inside of Jigsaw metal arm. Is okay?”
Clint’s waffles turn to concrete in his gut, a heavy, solid mass that feels like it will pull him right through the floor itself. But the floor isn’t opening up, and the wave of nausea and vertigo quickly passes.
“There’s a Tesseract energy pack in your arm?” Clint asks.
Jigsaw raises his shoulders briefly and signs that he doesn’t know.
“Yes, it’s okay,” Natasha says, getting the important bit out of the way. “It doesn’t change anything between us.”
And Clint wants to kick himself for not going there immediately. Of course it’s okay. At least, it’s okay if that isn’t hurting him or anything. If the stupid blue cube is actually good for something, then Clint can get behind that. Sure.
“Yeah,” he says. “I love you, whatever your arm is made out of.”
Oh shit, he said that out loud. What a way to confess his love. Over a syrup-soaked waffle. With company who probably feels like a cross between a third wheel and a spy-cam. While trying to reassure him about Tesseract technology.
“I do,” he says, because if he’s in it, he might as well be really, really in it. Natasha probably won’t mind.
“I love you. It doesn’t matter to me whether your left arm is metal, made out of Tesseract technology, or missing entirely. You’re still you.”
“Jigsaw not must leave rooms for assets? Jigsaw stay with other asset? The same as together?”
“Yes,” Clint says. “Nothing is going to change that for me.”
He tries to ignore Natasha’s wide, happy smile off to the right. She may still be there in the room, but this is between him and Jigsaw. And he has to make absolutely sure that Jigsaw knows how he feels.
“You’re it,” he adds. “You’re the one. We’re the same as each other, together, partners.”
Jigsaw’s reaction takes the form of a huge grin and relaxed tension that Clint hadn’t even realized he was carrying.
“Jigsaw happy relieved warm inside. Fizzy like soda. The same as together. All time.”
Clint feels his whole face flush hot. If Natasha wasn’t there, if there weren’t a kitchen island full of breakfast leftovers between them, Clint would be kissing him right this very moment.
But there are breakfast leftovers. And Natasha is there. And Clint doesn’t want to confuse the kissing rules for Jigsaw.
“Good,” he says. “Great. That makes me really happy, too.”
They look at each other, smiling, for a moment that must end up being too long for comfort, because Natasha interrupts them.
“So,” she says, “Redwing found you instead of the halo pieces. What does that mean for finding halos? And more importantly, what does that mean when it comes to your arm? Are you okay, or is the Tesseract energy pack inside causing problems?”
Jigsaw looks away with a frown and then gathers up his tablet again.
Clint is betting that the Tesseract, however it is powering Jigsaw’s arm, is definitely causing problems. Because it’s the Tesseract, and that’s what the Tesseract does: cause problems. But Jigsaw has seemed fine where the arm is concerned. Backaches probably, and bone-deep pain where the connectors are. The anchor points, Stark had called them.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with the Tesseract or with whatever else might be powering it. That is just how the arm was designed. They’d maybe have to redesign the arm to change that. And doing so, well, in a way it would be pointless if Jigsaw didn’t feel like getting this current arm taken off somehow and replaced by a new model.
And Clint kind of can’t see Jigsaw going in on that sort of thing. Sure, he spends an hour or so every few days learning about animals in the lab after midnight, but that’s a far cry from undergoing surgery to take out the current model.
The only surgery Jigsaw would even be familiar with is unanesthetized patchwork done on the Bus that one time by Bruce and the baby agents, and whatever horrors he remembers from his time under HYDRA’s control. None of that screams “dying to go under the knife again.”
“Tesseract burn Jigsaw inside of shoulder,” comes the eventual answer. “But Jigsaw say no SCAN so no working on metal arm. Jigsaw safe.”
Clint shares a look with Natasha while Jigsaw is lining up the next communication.
“Did Stark offer to do a scan and find out what was happening?” Clint asks. “Because that might help.”
Jigsaw looks at him and then deliberately deletes all of his words to start over.
Clint hopes he doesn’t mind starting over too much. He should have let Jigsaw finish. He was just excited about an opportunity to do some research into how exactly everything is fitting together so maybe he can feel like giving Jigsaw a massage won’t mess anything up for his arm or back.
“The flying man and the hamburger technician want take pain away Jigsaw. Then Jigsaw cannot feel. Then Jigsaw how will know if broken?”
Clint is about to ask him about that, to challenge the idea that feeling pain is a good thing, but he knows the old adage that will rear its ugly HYDRA heads in response: order comes through pain.
“Maybe pain is a sign that something’s wrong and needs to be put in order,” Natasha says, “and once it’s been put in order, there is no more pain?”
“Yeah,” Clint adds, “what if order comes from removing pain? And pain is just a heads up telling you to fix something?”
Jigsaw looks at each of them in turn and then sighs.
“I would at least go ahead and accept the scan Stark’s offering,” Clint says. “I can go in with you. Hold your hand or something. Make sure nothing bad happens. And after that, you don’t have to do anything. If you want to explore options, great. If you want to be done, also great. Your call.”
“Go with Jigsaw?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what kind of scan it is, but it can’t be an MRI or anything because the magnets would ri—”
Natasha kicks him in the calf.
“—uh, really mess with your arm,” Clint finishes. “Is all. You’re not supposed to have metal in those things. They made me take my hearing aids out every time.”
Not that he’d want to hear all the whooping and beeping and crap that an MRI tube has to offer.
Clint wonders what kind of scan it would be, exactly. Maybe like an x-ray instead of an MRI. That he knows of, the Tower doesn’t have its own MRI. There’s a kind of medical area, sure, but that’s not the same.
Anyway, what matters is that he’d be there.
He’ll play whatever supporting role is needed.
The role he ends up playing after breakfast is that of solo mentor, though, as Jigsaw heads off to the lab to ask his homework questions about the scanning. Apparently, Yasmin told him he has to ask questions, but doesn’t have to do the scan itself.
And that’s good, because Clint wants to be there for a scan, and he can’t be in two places at once. So if this was Jigsaw going in for the scan itself, that wouldn’t be okay.
If all he’s doing is checking things out, though, that’s fine.
And Stark wouldn’t scan him without his permission because if it could be done sneakily like that, there’s a ten thousand percent chance that Stark would already have scanned every inch of Jigsaw a hundred times over by now.
And would have already found the Tesseract juice lurking in his left arm long before now. And whatever burns there may be.
Damn Tesseract. As if there wasn’t already enough pain involved in Jigsaw’s life.
“Hi Clint,” Kate chirps as she bounds into the gym. “What are we working on today?”
Clint chases thoughts of the Tesseract out of his mind. Archery demands his full attention for the next hour. He turns to face Kate and blinks.
“What are you wearing ?” he asks.
She’s got on some kind of skin tight nylon vest in bright purple with a high collar and a thick black zipper up the center, and is that a chevron in lighter purple centered on her sternum? Mesh long sleeves? Drooping off her left shoulder to reveal leather? What?
“I had the LARPers at our school make me some practice tac gear, for when I’m good enough to be a superhero.”
She frowns. “And after I finish school,” she adds. “If I don’t finish school, my mother will kill me, and I can’t save anyone if I’m dead.”
Clint isn’t sure he wants to know what a— Larper? What one of those is. But the tac gear is definitely not battle-ready. Not with mesh. Not with that loose, off-the-shoulder sleeve that could get caught on something.
Not with his purple chevron.
At least not until after she graduates and even then, there’s probably a PR or a branding issue with it.
“LARP is live action role play,” Kate informs him. “It’s like cosplaying medieval knights and fantasy characters and everything in between, and fighting each other in the park with padded weapons.”
Well now he knows.
“I guess we’ll see how you can move around in that getup, then,” Clint says. “But you don’t want anything loose and grabbable in your eventual tac gear.” He wiggles his finger where her left sleeve is drooping. “Looks cool, but you don’t want anything catching it.”
Kate nods. “No capes,” she says, doing a passable impression of Edna Mode.
“No capes,” Clint repeats with a grin. “Though you have a great color scheme,” he adds.
“I learned from the best.” Kate taps the chevron over her chest and grins. “Maybe someday I can be Lady Hawkeye.”
“Let’s work on your follow through before you go picking out call signs.” Clint leads her further into the gym. “Last week you were struggling with getting the full follow through while speed shooting.”
It’s something a lot of people don’t pay much attention to, but the follow through matters, and he wants to make sure she’s got great technique to go along with great aim. She’s his protegee, after all. Her skill reflects on him. If he has his way, she’s going to be the best archer in the world when he’s through with her.
Notes:
Next chapter will go out on the 25th, and then we'll have one on the 31st, since those seem like days people might need the distraction of a new chapter. After that, I'll try to keep a posting schedule of every other Sunday. ^_^
Chapter 129: Avengers | I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me
Notes:
Chapter title from “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten.
Hello and happy Christmas Eve to everyone who celebrates that. I know it's a time of year that can be lonely and/or hectic and/or stressful whether you celebrate a holiday or are just surrounded by people who do. So here's a little something to hopefully boost your spirits a bit and provide a distraction. Be well out there!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 11:15 a.m.—
Bartonio shows up as the last of the frog montage flows across the screen, holding Cuddles McFin and looking kind of relieved to find Jigsaw sitting on a stool paying rapt attention to the holoscreen with the poison dart frogs.
“Hey Jigs,” Barton says, and gets a smile and a come hither wave in response. “Frogs, huh?”
Jigsaw nods and signs something about how the frogs can kill people even though they are so tiny and the people are so big.
“Killer frogs?”
“I mean, they don’t go out of their way to kill anything but the bugs they eat,” Tony says. “But they’re poisonous, so touching them is a ticket to nope-town, and the ride is pretty bumpy.”
Barton goes over to Jigsaw’s side and looks at the holoscreen as the picture montage starts again.
This’ll be the third time it plays, but Tony doesn’t mind. He’s had the poison dart frogs on tap since the last time Jigsaw came over, and he didn’t get to tell him about them that time. If a bit of amphibian repetition gets him calmed down from all those questions about the scanning, it’ll be a montage well worth its weight in frogs.
“So these little guys are all these colors because they’re venomous?”
“Poisonous. Venomous is when they inject you with venom, like a snakebite or whatever. Poisonous is everything else.”
“Right.”
Tony’s pretty sure Barton will push the entire thought out of his mind and not remember the difference next time it comes up. But that’s fine. Tony can’t help but remember these sorts of things but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to be fascinated.
“Poison skin,” comes the absolutely awesome Russian accent that Jigs-a-lot chose. “Rub tiny fang of fang on stick on poison frog skin and kill with fang on stick.”
“Yeah, you’d like that, Cupid,” Tony adds, although he only knows what Jigsaw meant because he’s the one who explained it to Jigsaw in the first place. “Rub your arrow tips on the frog and bam—poison arrow.”
“Huh,” Barton says. “I guess that’s one way to do it. Kind of not my style, though.”
Jigsaw nods, signs “HYDRA,” and mimes being shot with a tranquilizer dart.
And yeah, that’s definitely HYDRA through and through, at least when they’re trying to capture a super soldier. Who knows what the plan is for badass normals.
“Speaking of style,” Barton says, “you missed Katie-Kate’s ensemble. She got a bunch of, what were they called, live action players—”
“LARPers?”
“Yeah, LARPers. She got a bunch of them to make her some tac gear to train in. She’s hoping to be a superhero when she graduates from college.”
Tony can’t wait to see this. He gestures for another holoscreen and is not disappointed. The girl is dressed like the president of the Hawkeye fan club, which is normal for her because she’s probably his only civilian fan, and therefore already heads up the fan club of one.
Well. Maybe fan club of two. Jigsby sometimes wears Barton’s purple stuff and spent the first month or so he was here in one or another of Robin Hood’s chevron hoodies. He might be the other member. But Bishop was the founding member from what he knows.
“How many more years before she tries to join up?” he asks. “And are you going to let her steal your trademark? The purple, the chevron. It’s very you.”
“She’s already a very good archer and it’s only been, um. I forget. Not a whole eight sessions yet, though. Nine. She got another session for petsitting.”
“Wait, so you are going to let her steal your trademark? Barton, buddy, pal. You only have three distinguishing traits out there—bow and arrows, purple chevrons, can’t hear worth shit without the hearing aids. She’s going to have two of the three, and you’re okay with that?”
He just shrugs. “She’ll be one of the best archers out there when I’m done. And she’s young. The student might surpass the master eventually.”
Tony shakes his head. Where’s the pride? Where’s the brand protection? Tony wouldn’t let anyone go out there in his colors with a sleek and beautiful exo suit calling themselves Iron Woman or whatever. Rhodey can be War Machine in a different sleek and beautiful exo suit, as a treat, because he’s Tony’s closest friend. But he doesn’t wear the red and gold while he’s at it.
“Well, Hawkeye 1.0, you’re here with a stuffed shark. Why is that?”
Jigsaw looks away from the Bishop girl’s outfit and reaches for Cuddles McFin, squeezing the shark close once Barton hands it to him.
“I didn’t know if—” he looks incredibly uncomfortable for about two thirds of a second “—if you were going to be scanning things. And I didn’t want to be late, but I promised a shark.”
“We’re doing the scan?” Tony asks, perking up.
Jigsby hadn’t decided on the scan, even when shown an image of what the room with the scanning equipment looks like. But he’d asked questions. So many questions.
How does the scan work? Lasers. How does JARVIS see inside of him without opening him up? The lasers—particle beams, really—will pass through him without him even feeling a thing. How big is the tube he’ll have to go into? There is no tube. So how do the lasers know when they have done their job if there is not a tube to trap them? It doesn’t work like that. So how does it work?
And finally, Tony had resorted to his normal cadence and vocabulary, which had confused Jigsaw and made him not want to go down to the lab with all the scanning equipment. Thus the frogs, to get back on steady ground after the tumble through jargon that had upset him.
If they’re doing the scan, though, that’s excellent. And Bartonio being there—along with the shark—that’ll help keep Jigglypuff calm, cool and collected, no matter how many beeps the machinery makes while passing the particles through him.
“Well, I don’t know…” Barton trails off, looking at Jigsaw with his shark. “It’s up to Jigs if he wants it or not. I just thought on the off chance that he did, I’d show up with the shark.”
“What about it, Jigster?” Tony asks. “No touching, no clothes off, no lying down. You get to sit on a rolling stool same as this one you like so much. I’ll play the frogs for you, or maybe you’d like to see the penguins again?”
Jigsaw buries his face in the top of his stuffed shark and is still for a minute, and Tony hopes that he’s going to agree to the scan after all.
They need to see for sure what the makeup of the arm is, how the connection points work, where they all are, which muscles are synthetic and which are original… Bruce needs to see the inflammation in real time instead of the drawn diagrams that leave it out. Tony needs to see what kind of metal those maybe-decorative caps are and whether they are actually reflectors for Tesseract energy.
And they need to get a solid, accurate reading on just how much Tesseract energy that cybernetic arm is holding, and what it’s releasing that Redwing picked up on.
“Jigs?” Barton asks, after another minute of indecision, just about when Tony is giving up hope of a scan.
And wonders will never cease, Jigsaw nods into his shark, and Tony has to contain his whoop of victory.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 12:00 p.m.—
The hamburger technician is very happy that it has agreed to get scanned. Consented. That it has consented to a scan.
And it does trust him. It does.
And the other asset and the fish-looking soft thing are here.
The hamburger technician has not ever hurt it. The hamburger technician has not ever touched it, even, and did not retaliate the time it touched him. The hamburger technician has not ever asked to see the metal arm, has not ever asked it to open the plates for him or anything.
It can and does trust the hamburger technician.
The other asset will protect it if there is any need for that. The other asset has a lot of influence and can use that influence to stop anything that needs to be stopped. The other asset brought the fish-looking soft thing to squeeze, which can be squeezed as hard as it needs without being hurt.
The other asset cannot be safely wiped.
So if the scan is a kind of wipe, the hamburger technician will not let the two assets be together for it, holding hands.
The hamburger technician will try to separate them, and that will be a sign that it should withdraw its consent.
Yasmin said it could withdraw consent at any time and the hamburger technician would stop.
The facts keep lining up that it will be safe getting scanned. But it cannot help but run through them, checking each one as they build up the truth of the situation. Each brick in the hive building of truth checks out. It is safe. It is safe. It is safe.
But it is still so afraid.
The shirt clings to the back in a way it had not before. The hair clings to the back of the neck. It feels horrible inside of the torso, like it may lose the breakfast meal and have to slurp it back up off of the floor. The twisting and heaving of the gut joins the churning feeling of all of the blood racing through the ears, like the blood is a fast-moving river pouring over rocks and becoming white froth.
It trusts, but it can feel the flesh hand trembling as they get out of the elevator car on a new level it has not explored.
How has it not explored this level? It thought it had explored all of the Avengers levels of the hive building, and several of the levels that the public civilians populate. It used the stairwells and it used the elevators, and neither one opened up onto this level.
It has not explored this level. It does not know what is on this level, other than scanning equipment.
It does its best to breathe in and out as though nothing was wrong and squeezes the fish-looking soft thing closer still.
The facts are still the facts. The hamburger technician and the clown man and the other asset and the ballerina woman and the flying man and even the researcher with the curly hair all assured it at some point that there is not and never will be a chair with white electric fire in the hive building. And the halos that are in the hive building are broken down into pieces, so they will not work.
The hamburger technician is saying many, many words very quickly, and it only picks out a few of them. But from what it can pick out, it sounds like the hamburger technician had the voice without a mouth chase away all of the other technicians on this floor so that he could have it to himself right now.
And that makes sense, because there are lots and lots of lab spaces with lots and lots of machinery and floating glowing panels and regular glowing panels. Lots and lots of stools with wheels, and lots and lots of chairs with wheels. And everything is empty.
It did not know there were this many technicians in the hive building. It does not know how to feel about this many technicians in the hive building.
But it feels clammy and damp all over, and every lab space they pass only makes the feeling worse and worse.
“You doing alright?” the other asset asks. “Want to turn around and go back to our rooms?”
It is okay. It does very much want to turn around and get back onto the elevator and go to the rooms for assets and pretend that this floor with the technicians and their stations does not exist. But the facts say that it is safe, and so far everyone it has asked has wanted it to get scanned. It… It should be scanned.
It reaches out and verifies that the other asset is really there, that it is not just seeing and hearing things that are not real, that it is not back. It will not go back.
The hamburger technician stops by a lab with a big sideways arch of sleek silver metal in the middle of the room and lots and lots of dark panels around the edges of the room, each with a chair on wheels or stool on wheels in front of it.
“This won’t take long, Jigs,” the other asset says. “And I’ll be there with you the whole time.”
The hamburger technician goes into the lab with the sideways arch and moves a table off of a raised platform inside of the arch, right where the two ends of the arch are one over the other. In the table’s place, the hamburger technician places a stool with wheels. He pats the stool encouragingly.
It is not encouraged.
“Come have a seat, Jigglypuff. Cupid can stand next to you. Hold your hand. Whatever you want. The right hand, that is. Not the left. We need to scan the left.”
There is room for it to sit on the stool and for the other asset to stand next to it. It does not want to.
“Why don’t you give us a tour of the place, first?” the other asset asks. “Help calm some nerves.”
There is a tour, then. Each of the workstations is explained, and each of the projects that are being worked on is explained, and the sideways arch is explained, and the lasers are explained, and everything in the room down to the chairs on wheels and stools on wheels is explained…
And it hears a rush of words flowing over it, each one a droplet of water in an ocean’s worth of waterfall being dumped on it. The hamburger technician waves and flails and picks up bits of things as he talks, but none of his words make any sense at all. They are not words. They are bullets trying to pierce through the fear, but the fear is too strong.
“—ny questions?”
The other asset nods. “What exactly happens during this scan thing? We’re there on the platform, and then what?”
The hamburger technician sighs but goes ahead and explains what he had explained to it before: The arch will slowly spin around and send out particles that will look like red lasers tracing over them. The particles that look like red lasers will go through them, recording everything as they go.
Then later, the voice without a mouth will “parse” the data, meaning figure out which part of the recording is this asset, and which is the other asset.
And, now, which part is the fish-looking soft thing. Because it does not think it will be able to let go of the fish-looking soft thing. It is so soft and so squishy and so comforting. And it has never been worked on while it held something soft and squishy and comforting.
When the voice without a mouth is done, the hamburger technician and the researcher with the curly hair will be able to see all of the layers of it, and what all of the layers are made out of.
It might not be able to understand the hamburger technician right now because it is not able to focus on the words very well, but that is what the hamburger technician had explained before.
“So it’s like an x-ray,” the other asset says when the hamburger technician stops talking.
It concentrates on the hamburger technician’s words again now that there has been a stop to the barrage. Maybe it will be able to keep up now.
“But cooler and much less dangerous. Not dangerous at all, even. You don’t have to wear a lead bib or anything. I’ll even stay in the room.”
Of course the hamburger technician would stay in the room. How else is the scan going to happen? A technician must run the scan.
“Okay,” the other asset says. “So we just go up on the platform and this big arch thing rotates around us. And takes pictures of our insides without x-rays.”
It wonders what an x-ray is. Something not very cool and more dangerous than the scan they are doing. It is glad, then, that they are not doing an x-ray scan. It would not want the other asset to be in danger at all. It is certain that it could be scanned with x-rays safely—it must have been scanned that way before and there was no harm—but the other asset should be kept safe.
The hamburger technician pats the stool with wheels on the platform again. “I know you like these stools,” he says. “But if you want to stand, instead, then the stool goes away. Easy-peasy. Anything to get you up here. You can sit cross-legged on the platform itself for all I care.”
If it sits on the stool with wheels, then the head will be much farther away from the arch of silvery metal than if it stands. But the other asset’s head would still be really close to the arch. This is a scan and not a wipe, and this is an arch and not a halo, and there are no paddles for the skin face, and it is sleek and silvery and not chunky and black. But it still looms close if the other asset stands.
It points to the stool with wheels and gives it a thumbs up, and then points to another one and asks the question sign. Can there be two stools? Can the other asset sit, too, safely away from the arch?
“You want two stools?” the hamburger technician asks. “Alright. That’s cool. Bring up another stool when you get over here. Cupid can sit right next to you. Just don’t roll around a lot. If you fall off the platform, I’m going to laugh.”
“Ready, Jigs?” the other asset asks, already grabbing a nearby stool with wheels.
It nods, even though it does not feel ready—will never feel ready, not for a scan—and holds the fish-looking soft thing in the metal arm and the other asset’s arm in the flesh arm. They walk further into the room, around the massive crescent of metal, like a moon just before it is dark in the sky. They climb up onto the platform.
It takes a deep breath and sits down on the stool with wheels. Right beside the other asset on the second stool with wheels. It leans to the side, toward the other asset, and lets the head tilt to rest against the other asset’s shoulder.
“That’s really sweet, but I need you to sit up straight, Jiggy-boo.”
It complies, reluctantly pulling away from the other asset and settling for holding onto the other asset’s hand with the flesh hand.
“Any way you can have Cuddles McFin in your lap instead of holding him?” the hamburger technician asks. “Ideally, I’m going to have you move Leftie around a bit so we can get a better idea of how the inner parts move together.”
But it wants to squeeze the fish-looking soft thing.
Then there are many, many fish-looking soft things on a glowing panel in front of the assets. They are so graceful and sleek in the water, and yet so different from the dolphin-fish and whale-fish it has seen moving pictures of. Those move their tails up and down, but the fish-looking things like the soft thing in the metal arm move their tails side to side.
“Thanks, J— good idea.”
“Certainly, Sir,” says the voice without a mouth.
It lowers the fish-looking soft thing to the lap, with its tail spilling over into the other asset’s lap, and then points to the glowing panel before asking the question: what are these ones called? Are they sharks like the team that is not a cell calls the fish-looking soft thing?
“Sharks,” the other asset confirms as the arch begins to move. “I’m not sure what kind. I only know great whites and hammerheads.”
“These are tiger sharks,” the hamburger technician says. “Because of the stripes. Going to start the scan now.”
And there is a high-pitched clicking noise along with the mechanical whirring of the arch moving slowly around the two assets on the platform. High-pitched enough—almost a scream but with different tones like singing, a scream-song—that the other asset and the hamburger technician will not hear, it knows. They are unenhanced, and do not hear everything that it hears. And sometimes the other asset does not even hear what others on the team that is not a cell hear.
“I know these ones,” the other asset says when the glowing panel shows a new group of shark-fish, these ones with their eyes not in their heads where they belong but on long stalks out to each side of their heads.
“These are hammerheads,” the other asset continues. “I like these ones a lot. Natasha and I had a mission in Costa Rica ages ago, and when we got some downtime, we went diving with the sharks there. Didn’t get to touch one, but we saw a whole bunch of them.”
Hammerhead shark-fish.
It tries to ignore the red laser lines racing across it as the arch spins, tries to ignore the clicking scream-song and the whirring, tries to focus on the other asset’s voice, tries to listen for any instructions from the hamburger technician.
But it is being scanned, and it is very, very hard to focus on anything else.
Then there is a bigger shark-fish than any of the others it has seen pictures of, and this one is even stripier than the tiger shark-fish. It has a wide, flat mouth that opens up and pulls on a net that is partially in the water.
“Oh yeah,” the other asset says. “Whale sharks. I saw one of those in an aquarium in Georgia.”
…whale shark-fish? Different from whale-fish, but called the same as them?
“Hey Jigsby, hold your metal arm out for me? Just out straight to the side for now. Good.”
The hamburger technician has it move the metal arm forward and backward, up and down, in circles tight and wide, bent, out straight, everything. Even has it rotate just the shoulder up and back and around, then up and forward and down, while the arm itself is hanging down at its side.
In between all of this, there are more and more shark-fish. When the other asset does not know what they are called, the voice without a mouth tells the assets about the shark-fish and their “distinguishing traits.” It is not as easy to listen to the voice without a mouth as it is to listen to the hamburger technician, but it tries. It wants to know all about the shark-fish.
And then, just when it is starting to believe that the scan will never end, the arch stops whirring and clicking-screaming-singing and moving, and the red lines go away, and the hamburger technician says that he has all of the data he needs now.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it, Jigs?” the other asset asks. “And we learned about tons of sharks.”
The hamburger technician just said that he has all of the data he needs. All of it. So there is not more data that needs to be collected—that needs to be cut out of it or drained out of it or broken out of it. They are done here.
They are really done.
Without working on the metal arm.
It lets out a shaky breath and clings to the fish-looking soft thing, buries the skin face in the softness of its belly, letting the fish-looking soft thing soak up the tears that pour out. Tears of relief. It has made it.
They are done. It can go home now, with the other asset, to the rooms for assets, where the dog and the little cat are waiting to welcome it.
Notes:
I haven't triple checked for typos and the like, so if you see anything wonky, let me know and I can fix! Thank you all for reading. ^_^
Chapter 130: Avengers | St Anger around my neck
Notes:
Chapter title from “St. Anger” by Metallica. << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80xgvSCwjAY
Hoping everyone has a successful and healthy 2025, despite any and all odds that may be working against us. Take care out there—I wish you all the best!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Natasha
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 12:30 p.m.—
“Agent Romanoff,” comes JARVIS’s voice from somewhere above her. “You had asked to be informed when Agent Barton and Jigsaw were on their way back.”
“Thanks, JARVIS,” Natasha says.
She checks how many pages are left in her current chapter. Seven. She’d rather meet Clint and Jigsaw and see what enchilada casserole is like with them than finish the chapter and risk missing them for lunch.
She slides a bookmark between the pages and sets the book on her coffee table.
Natasha had planned to go down the hall after Clint’s archery session earlier to see how everything went with the Bishop girl, since it was just Clint and Kate this morning. But he had apparently stopped in his room just long enough to grab the stuffed shark before heading to the lab, and from there to a research level of the Tower to get scanned.
He was long gone by the time she’d finished her chapter. She won’t make the same mistake a second time. This chapter will remain unfinished for now.
Natasha opens her door just as Clint and Jigsaw are getting off the elevator—sheer luck, but also a case of brilliant timing.
“—head to the kitchen after we drop off your shark, see what’s for lunch?”
Natasha shuts her door behind her and gives them a wave while she waits for them to come down the hall.
Jigsaw doesn’t look like he’s having a great time. He’s hugging the shark close to his chest with his left arm, clinging to Clint with his right arm, and the redness of his eyes says he has recently been crying.
Tears of relief that the scan went well? Tears during the scan because it wasn’t going well? Tears for some reason entirely or partly unrelated to the scan?
“I can’t read your mind, Jigs,” Clint says, giving Natasha a nod in response to her wave. “Lunch in the kitchen?”
Jigsaw shakes his head.
“How did the scan go?” Natasha asks as they reach her.
Jigsaw hugs his shark even closer somehow, but Clint gives her a thumbs up.
“We got to see lots of sharks on the screen while we got scanned. And it didn’t even make any noise. I was expecting a noise. It was—”
Jigsaw shakes his head again and holds up two fingers on his right hand, with his arm still looped with Clint’s.
“It did make noise?” Clint asks. “Huh. Guess my hearing aids just didn’t pick up on it.”
Jigsaw urges Clint to continue toward their room, and Natasha falls into step with them.
“It was…?” Natasha prompts. “It was what?”
“Oh, it was like a laser beam that traced over us, only Stark said there were also particles that went through us. But not like an x-ray.”
“Hopefully they weren’t gamma rays,” Natasha jokes.
Clint makes a face. “The world doesn’t need more than one Hulk, no matter what the Army might think.”
Jigsaw perks up at mention of Hulk, making a motion similar to his question sign with his arm still looped through Clint’s.
“Bruce was shot through with gamma radiation a long time ago,” Natasha says, “and that’s why he becomes the Hulk when he’s angry. He’s enhanced like you and Rogers, but it only shows when he’s like that.”
She knows that Jigsaw doesn’t accept the fact of Banner’s transformation, or at least that he hasn’t yet seen the transformation itself and therefore has his doubts. But he looks like he’s considering the possibility as they enter his and Clint’s rooms and get settled in the front room.
“So not lunch in the kitchen,” Clint says as Jigsaw practically squishes him against the arm of the sofa, shark still firmly held close and Lucky closing in on them. “But yes lunch, right?”
Clint’s stomach growls, and Jigsaw nods.
“I can get it and bring it up,” Natasha says. “It’s supposed to be a casserole. Well,” she corrects, “it was supposed to be cheese enchiladas, but it turned into a casserole because the corn tortillas kept tearing, according to Rogers.”
She’ll probably need a cart to get it all, actually. Even as a casserole, enchiladas will be joined by beans and rice, chips, salsa, all the fixings.
“And when I get back, you can tell us how things went with Kate,” Natasha says. “I saw she had a duffel bag along with her archery equipment this morning.”
“You saw her come in?” Clint asks, finally disengaging his arm from Jigsaw’s so that he can reach out across Jigsaw’s shoulders and get some breathing room for both of them. “Thought you were reading some book.”
“I was scanning the lobby for a package that hasn’t arrived yet.”
Clint nods. “Right. What’d’ja buy?”
“Why don’t I get lunch first?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. That’s good.” Clint looks at Jigsaw, pressed against his side with Lucky’s head in his lap and his shark in both arms. “I’d go with you, but…”
“It’s fine, Clint. I’ll use a cart.”
Natasha sees herself out before Clint can try dislodging Jigsaw or arguing that she shouldn’t have to get it all for them.
Apparently, the scanning was stressful. Far more so than she had anticipated, even with a shark-themed entertainment feature and two of his comfort sources right there with him. But she’s happy he agreed to the scan, and that it’s already over. Now maybe Stark and Bruce can figure out a way to reduce Jigsaw’s pain levels, preferably something non-invasive.
Maybe long hot soaks would help, and she and Clint can convince him to join them in a hot tub. Maybe massage would help, and Clint can get an extra nudge to go ahead and start reciprocating that. Maybe just a heating pad, or a salve to rub into his skin. Maybe he’d be helped by some yoga poses, even, and he could get to see the zen side of Bruce.
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 3:00 p.m.—
“Have you been looking at that this whole time?” Clint asks as he slips into the lab where Stark and Banner are each studying the same scan output on different holographic screens at different angles.
“It’s the newest craze,” Stark says. “All the cool kids are looking at it.”
Clint hopes they’re getting somewhere close to the answers they wanted. Like where is the Tesseract energy coming from, and how can they stop Jigsaw’s metal arm from hurting him? Those are probably the most important questions, even for the science types. At least he hopes that second one is high on their list.
Natasha had a few ideas for things like massage and jacuzzis—spa stuff—but that kind of thing could backfire spectacularly. Jigsaw’s been drowned before, lots of times. On purpose. He probably isn’t going to relax in a hot tub. And there’s only one option for massaging him. What if Clint ends up pressing on some internal sore spot in a way that doesn’t loosen a knot but instead just hurts?
He comes around to the other side of the holo screens and takes a look at Stark’s. Somehow, they’ve managed to make it look like Jigsaw was standing during the scan. Probably JARVIS doing computer magic. And there’s a lot more detail than Clint would have thought possible.
In the skeleton view, some of Jigsaw’s bones look metallic in a way that makes Clint’s skin crawl. That better not be what he thinks it might be. But it’s all along his left ribcage, some of his vertebrae, his collarbone and shoulder blade. Places that might need to be stronger than regular bone to support all the joist-looking things that connect the arm internally.
And in the muscle view, some of the muscles are red like Clint would expect from a color-coded muscles chart, but a lot of them along the left side of his back are yellow. He might have a suspicion about the metallic bones, but he doesn’t have a clue what yellow muscles would mean. Muscles are muscles. Are these ones damaged from all the weight Jigsaw’s carrying on his left side?
“What’s yellow mean?” Clint asks, hoping for an answer that won’t piss him off.
“Synthetic muscle tissue,” Banner murmurs from the side. “It’s fascinating, if gruesome, that such a thing was possible. I can’t help but wonder if that was an ‘upgrade’ somewhere along the way as HYDRA’s technological prowess advanced.”
“Can’t get a feel for what it’s made of without taking a sample,” Stark says, “which we won’t be doing. But it’s how he can rip a window out of a wall instead of ripping his arm out of its socket.”
Okay, yeah, count him as pissed off.
“They replaced his muscles?” Clint asks. “Let me guess, the metallic bones are actually metal, too.”
“Just metal plating in most places,” Stark says. “So the synthetic bits have something to grab onto that will actually stay put.”
Just. Clint grits his teeth as anger floods through him trailing nausea in its wake. Just metal plating.
Maybe he shouldn’t have come here. Maybe he would have been better off not knowing. Maybe Natasha could have come in his place and relayed the information to him.
“You look a bit green around the gills, Clint,” Banner says.
“And he’d know from green,” Stark adds.
“Maybe you would like a seat.”
Clint shakes his head. “I’m fine. Angry, but fine. Before I go shoot some arrows, is there anything I can do for him? Rub his back or something? Or will that screw something up inside?”
Banner looks pointedly at Clint’s left hand. “Should you be shooting arrows this soon with your burn still healing?”
No, he shouldn’t. But he has to. Has to get it all out somehow.
“It’ll be fine,” Clint says. “I’ll take it easy. Wear a glove. Promise.”
Banner makes a disapproving sound in his throat but doesn’t challenge him. “I would suggest concentrating your efforts on his right side and sticking to light pressure on his left. The synthetic structures don’t appear to behave differently than his natural muscles, but we should be cautious until we know.”
Clint nods. “Okay. Back rubs are fine, don’t dig around for knots, though.”
“Exactly.”
“Great. Well this has been horrible, but thanks for letting me crash the science party for a bit.”
“Any time, Cupid. It’s good practice for when Spangles comes looking for details.”
Clint gives the scan results one last glare and stalks off toward the elevator. He’s going to the range, and he’s going to… He’s probably going to set his left hand’s healing back a few days with all the arrows he plans on shooting, but he will wear a glove. He promised that much, and it should at least help his healing skin stay put instead of tearing.
It’ll hurt, but that’s fine. It’ll be nothing compared to how much Jigsaw’s gotta be hurting every day just by breathing with a metal-reinforced ribcage and whatever else.
He’ll just channel his pain into his archery, alongside his anger.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 21 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“Something seems to be bothering you, Jigsaw,” Yasmin murmurs after a pause. “Would you like to set aside your paintings and discuss something else?”
It does not want to set aside the paintings—it enjoyed making the paintings, even if not all of the things it painted represent things it wants to feel. But it cannot focus on the little paintings for some reason.
All the mind wants to do is go back to the glowing panel with all of the shark-fish, and the red lines that passed over it, itching as they went. The so-high singing, almost shrieking, of the machinery arch spinning around it and the other asset, sending the particles through them both.
No one else heard the arch’s scream-song, or the way the room vibrated like heat shimmering off asphalt in the dead summer afternoon, when everything is trying to get away from the sun. Maybe the clown man would have heard it, or would have felt it. But the other asset did not, and neither did the hamburger technician.
It reaches over to pet the dog for a moment, taking comfort in the dog’s soft warm fur. The dog accepts three pets before licking the hand, and it smiles. The dog loves to lick the hand that pets it. The dog’s tongue is soft and warm like the dog’s fur, but wet. There is comfort in the dog licking the hand as well, just like there is comfort in the dog’s fur and soft thick ears. There is comfort in all of the dog.
Yasmin waits while it pets the dog and accepts the licking of the dog’s tongue. Yasmin always waits patiently while the dog comforts it.
“I’m proud of you,” Yasmin says when it is finished petting the dog, “for realizing that you needed a bit of comfort and grounding, without my suggesting it. You’re making great progress at knowing how you are feeling and acting on those feelings appropriately.”
Yasmin is proud of it! It did a good thing, petting the dog when it needed comfort. That is why the dog is in the afternoon sessions with it, for comfort and reassurance of safety, and it went to the dog for help when it needed help, and Yasmin is proud of it!
She smiles at it, her eyes smiling just as much as her mouth. And then she asks again about what is bothering it.
It brings the tablet over onto the lap and begins to draw.
There is the asset with the star on the arm, and there is the asset with the crescents behind the ears. It draws them standing because that is easier and faster than trying to draw them on the stools with wheels. And there is the fish-looking soft thing—a shark—and there is the glowing panel with more of them, with many shark-fish.
And then, around the assets, there is the sleek metal arch, like a C shape of metal, curled menacingly around the assets.
It shows Yasmin the drawing, and then begins to explain the parts of it. The assets were on stools with wheels, sitting so that the sleek metal arch would not be so close to their heads. The glowing panel had many, many shark-fish, not just the ones it was able to draw in the space available to it. It was squeezing the fish-looking soft thing so hard.
And the sleek metal arch, it went around and around the assets, spinning and spinning, slow but without pause. And as it went, there were—it does not know the sign for laser, so there were red lines that came out of the sleek metal arch. And where the lines touched against the skin, it was warmer, and even where there were protective clothes, the red lines itched and ached all the way through it.
It takes the time to write PARTICLES on the tablet. The particles that went with the red laser lines were what itched, were what ached. Going through it all the way and itch-itch-itching, aching like something was forcing its way through it without cutting it to do so. That is what the hamburger technician said was happening, too—the particles were going through the assets.
And worst of all, the sleek metal arch made such a high, piercing tone, like the opera singers but higher, so much higher, and so loud like a scream. It made the ears ring like a siren might, and made the whole head ache with the noise of it.
Yasmin nods during the explanation, the story it tells her about the scan, occasionally repeating what it says to make sure that she understands it. Her face reads sympathy and she frowns with concern as it finishes.
“I’m sorry the scan was so unpleasant, Jigsaw. But I’m really proud of you for doing that. Your homework was only to ask for more information, and you were really brave to go above and beyond what I asked you to do.”
Another thing that Yasmin is proud of it for. It is “on a roll” today. That means that it has done well again and again, a string of successes.
“Let’s talk a bit more about the scan. Did it remind you of the chair with the halo above it?”
It nods.
There was no white electric fire, and the moving metal did not come any closer to the assets or clamp down against the skin face, and it was not trapped in a chair with manacles around forearm and bicep.
Instead there was a red laser line running slowly across and through it. And the sleek metal arch stayed away from the assets. And it was on a stool with wheels. No restraints. It could have gotten up. It could have left, could have fled the scan and the room and the floor with all of the empty technician stations.
But the high whining clicking scream-song. It was not the same sound, not exactly. Not exactly, but close. Too close.
“I’m sorry that you had to face that reminder, Jigsaw, but I’m so happy that you were able to do that with Clint’s help. That’s very brave of you, and I’m so proud of you.”
Yasmin smiles at it again.
“I want you to know that and take it to heart. I also want you to know that you might have nightmares about the scan and the halo in the coming nights, just because of how much this reminded you of the chair and halo.” She pauses. “And that’s okay. That’s natural, and it doesn’t mean you are any less brave or that I’m any less proud of you and your progress.”
It does not want to have nightmares.
Maybe it can stay awake for a few nights and avoid them. Maybe the other asset will kiss it all night and distract it from the memories it does not want to think about. Maybe… maybe if the other asset falls asleep and it is feeling tired, it can go to the training room and run through some routines to stay awake, or even visit the hamburger technician now that there is no scan to be had.
Yes. Yes, it can stay awake and not have any nightmares.
Notes:
Content Warning: Discussion of some of the scientific “progress” that HYDRA made when it comes to Jigsaw’s metal prosthesis and all the scaffolding that is necessary to make that work out as well as it does.
Chapter 131: Super Soldiers | Give me somethin’ to break
Notes:
Chapter title from “Break Stuff” by Limp Bizkit.
Mild content warning in the end notes!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 1:30 a.m.—
Steve hangs up another triple-lined kevlar heavy bag, his third tonight—or this morning, by now—and shakes out his arms before launching himself at the heavy bag, doing his level best to destroy it with the force of his anger.
He knew from the wretched red Winter Soldier book that Jigsaw had some anchor points for the arm that would be hurting him. Places inside his body where he’d be healing from the rub of muscle on metal attachments. Places where bone-deep ache would set in if he didn’t rest enough or eat enough to fuel the healing process.
He hadn’t known the arm was powered by the Tesseract somehow and that the Tesseract energy was burning Jigsaw, searing flesh inside his shoulder. He hadn’t known that several of Jigsaw’s bones were wrapped with metal sheeting, that the bone had been chafed enough to grow into the metal that surrounded it as it healed. He hadn’t known that whole muscle groups had been torn out and replaced with some kind of lab-grown tissue, that the tendons and ligaments were hand-crafted by some HYDRA monster of a scientist.
Steve knew from the book that there’d been multiple surgeries on Jigsaw’s throat to strip him of his voice despite the serum’s healing properties. That the surgeries were repeated until the serum gave up and accepted that scarred and voiceless state as the baseline to which it would return after injury.
But his back. His torso. His whole left side. The bones, the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments. How many surgeries to accomplish that so that Jigsaw’s body didn’t reject the additions or grow back what had been removed?
How many times did they cut him open and sand down his bones and hammer metal into place? How many times did they cut him open and rip out growing muscle tissue, suture in their replacements? How many times?
They mutilated his throat fifty-one times to make their results stick. According to the book, it took about a year. A surgery a week, more or less. They let him heal partly and then before the healing was complete, they went back in for more.
Were they tearing his torso apart and redesigning it as they saw fit every week for a year? Were they doing it at the same time as his throat? Were they cutting away his ability to scream because of the results of the surgeries on his torso? Did Jigsaw’s screaming—or would it have been Bucky’s at that point?—become so irritating that they tore out his throat?
The book has several formulas for drugs to ensure compliance, drugs that sharpen the senses and flood an enhanced body with energy long after the super soldier in question should have collapsed from exhaustion. The only drug in the book that comes close to anesthesia is one that has a tranquilizing effect, drugging the “subject” into a stupor.
There is not a single one dedicated to reducing pain.
Even if they somehow knocked his friend out for the surgeries themselves, the most they’d have done for him afterward would been a cot instead of the concrete floor and tranquilizers to keep him dazed. They’d probably have needed to restrain him so he didn’t tear at his injuries with his right hand.
Just the thought of him, strapped to a table, bleeding and in agony from the latest of many weekly surgeries, voiceless and unable to so much as plead for relief, drugged only to keep him docile and still—not to take away pain or let him sleep through what recovery they’d allow him…
Steve feels the bag give under his fists and keeps punching it anyway. It has lots of layers in it, and he’s not through with this bag until it falls apart.
Those fucking assholes. Those monsters.
How could anyone do that to another human being? Once, let alone what might have been fifty-one times?
And the book doesn’t mention so much of this. If the book had mentioned it, he might have been prepared for Tony’s report this afternoon when he stopped by to see how work on the halo-location was going and what they could do for Jigsaw’s apparently Tesseract-fueled prosthesis.
Sam had mentioned all of that, and Steve had been upset, but nothing could have prepared him for learning the truth about what was going on in Jigsaw’s torso and just how much pain he’d have needed to endure in the past for the “privilege” of having all the aches and pains he currently must have.
At least Bruce was working on something for pain relief.
The I.C.E.R. rounds the S.H.I.E.L.D. team on the Bus had used during the surgeries after Bakersfield and the missiles was one starting place, since it had temporarily put Jigsaw out. It was effective, but they don’t want to knock Jigsaw out. The goal is for him to be able to live his life, just without what would probably be crippling pain for anyone unenhanced.
And there are the formulas in the Winter Soldier book to examine as well. They don’t want the effects those drugs achieved, but there could be ways to look at them that reveal other substances that might work.
In the meantime, Steve remembers how ineffective pain killers were for his hand when Jigsaw broke it a few months back. But they’d taken the edge off, even if they’d been unsustainable for long term use. Maybe Jigsaw could use those temporarily while Bruce works out a better alternative.
Steve will gladly injure himself to test whatever formula Bruce comes up with, and—
Movement from the corner of his eye distracts him just as the heavy bag finally bursts.
Steve uncurls from his fighting stance and turns to watch Jigsaw walking up to him. He unhooks the heavy bag and drags it to the side where the others are spilling out their sand in a pile.
“You’re up late,” Steve says, though he knows he has no room to talk. “Can’t sleep?”
Jigsaw shakes his head and signs that he doesn’t want to sleep.
“Do you want the gym to yourself?”
Jigsaw hesitates on the answer and then finally shakes his head again. He signs “share” and “why,” which Steve interprets as a desire to share the space and a question as to whether Steve is willing to share with him.
Steve nods. “Sure. I’ve got, um. I’m really angry, so I’m going to be beating the hell out of some more of these punching bags.”
Jigsaw tilts his head and asks why.
Does he mean why is he angry? Or why is his response to take it out on the heavy bags? Steve takes a guess.
“I learned this afternoon more about what HYDRA did to you while they had you captive in the Soviet Union. They hurt you, and it makes me very mad. I wish they hadn’t hurt you.”
Jigsaw studies him for a moment and then beckons for Steve to follow him to the parallel bars.
Steve’s seen him on these before, just for a moment before Jigsaw had realized he had company and had scrambled up for the rafters. Other than that, he’s never actually seen them used. They’re too flexible for effective pull-ups, and Steve’s never really examined them beyond that.
Jigsaw pulls on a leather glove for his left hand and begins chalking up the bars and his hands and then directs Steve to also chalk up his hands, despite his having wrapped them for boxing.
“Should I take the wraps off?”
Jigsaw shakes his head and then stands between the bars. He gets a good grip on them—that must be what the chalk was for, and the glove—and slowly pulls himself off the ground and into a handstand on the bars. He looks at Steve to make sure he’s watching and then he swings around once with his legs spread to avoid the bars and a second time with his legs going between the bars. He returns to a handstand on the bars and holds it before swinging off of the bars.
He gestures toward the bars and then points at Steve.
Is… Is Jigsaw trying to teach him?
Steve’s sure he can do what Jigsaw just showed him, though he’s never done it before.
He recalls what grips Jigsaw had used on the bars as he swung around, how and where Jigsaw had placed his center of gravity. Jigsaw’s center of gravity is different from his own, though, due to the heavier weight on his left side. Steve will have to correct that for his own center of gravity.
Steve steps between the bars and raises his hands up to grip them as Jigsaw had. He tests his grip on them, and when he’s ready he pulls himself up and uses the momentum to lift his legs up over his head. Now to shift his grip and swing around…
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 5:00 a.m.—
The clown man is not as flexible or smooth in his movements as the two assets are, not on the parallel bars and not on the horizontal bar and not on the uneven bars. He is strong, though, and has endurance far beyond what the other asset has. And he is a very quick learner.
Soon, if he continues to practice, he will be as flexible and smooth in his movements. Right now, the clown man is merely following instructions and is not certain yet how those instructions will play out for him when it is time to demonstrate them.
It has shown the clown man all of the beginning moves, and many advanced moves as well. It has shown the clown man how to combine some of these moves, how to go from one position to another, how to shift his grip and how to know when it is time to apply more chalk to his hands.
And he has followed all of the instructions very well. There were questions about whether their heavier weight would break the bars, and some hesitation at the flexibility of the bars. But those fears have been chased away and now the clown man is following the routine it showed him how to do.
It wonders if it is time to show the clown man how to take to the air instead of remaining connected to the bars or merely leaping from one bar to another. It is not yet time for the flying man to come to the rooms for assets to collect the dog for the morning walk. It is not yet time for the morning snack, though it can feel the hunger for that snack gnawing away at the stomach.
Hmm. It will show the clown man another routine instead. It is harder to do the routines slowly so that the clown man can see all of the moves and put them in the order for this particular routine, but watching the clown man follow the routine is rewarding enough to be worth the extra strain on the muscles.
They can go faster later, after the basics are down and they have practiced them well. By now, the clown man has gone through each of the moves several times, on their own and as part of a routine, but there is more to learn before it is time to speed up.
Besides, the clown man is angry. Is trying to put his anger into bags of sand. But that is only making a mess in the training room, with sand everywhere. Instead, he can work more of his muscles until the anger bleeds out of him… and only get chalk dust everywhere.
Maybe this is not making less of a mess, but it is easier to wipe off the bars and rinse the hands than it is to sweep up all of the sand piling up where the bags are lying on their sides spilling out their insides all over the floor.
No bags to repair, either.
There is the sound of the elevator approaching, and the clown man joins it in looking that direction.
Who is coming? How many? Does it need to retreat?
But it is only the flying man, not the flying man plus many others, and it will be safe with the clown man and the flying man. It knows that now as it did not know months ago.
“Have you two been—” The flying man stops and stares. “Huh. JARVIS said you were down here, and I assumed you were going after the heavy bags again, Steve.”
The clown man grins and shows off his chalk-dust hands. “Jigsaw’s teaching me some gymnastics.”
“That so?” The flying man comes over toward them, looking impressed. “Care to show off?”
The clown man laughs and re-chalks his hands. “Which do you want? Parallel bars, horizontal bars, uneven bars?”
The flying man raises his eyebrows and looks at it and then at the clown man. “You two really have been down here this whole time. Aren’t you exhausted?”
It is tired, yes. Not exhausted. Just tired. It could sleep, easily, but then it would be asleep and the sleeping images might turn into nightmares about the chair with the white electric fire, or halos that can fit on an agent’s belt, or B-RUM. So it will not sleep. Not yet.
It would rather watch the clown man show off what it has taught him.
And so they watch, this asset and the flying man, as the clown man goes through a routine full of holds and swings that demonstrate his strength and sense of balance, both of which are very satisfying to see put together in a new set of routines.
The clown man has taken what it taught him and is combining the parts in different ways—being creative with his learning, applying the skills to achieve new ends. It feels very glowing and warm inside. It taught the clown man how to do this!
The flying man looks very impressed now, not just a little impressed. He looks… appreciative, and maybe a little hungry. It is nearly time for the breakfast meal, so that makes sense. It is feeling hungry as well. And soon it will be time to obey the hunger cue and go get a morning snack.
Maybe they will all three get a morning snack, since the flying man and this asset are both hungry and the clown man should eat after all this exertion.
When the clown man has finished showing off on all three of the sets that it showed him how to use, he lands and strikes a pose. It did not teach him the pose. But that is fine. His form on the bars was very good. Neat and controlled and just like it had taught him.
The clown man is a good student.
And the clown man’s stomach rumbles quietly as he walks over to the flying man and gives him a sweaty hug.
“I’m famished,” he says. “Don’t know if you heard that.”
It nods. It did hear the clown man’s stomach rumbling. It signs that it also wants to eat the morning snack. Can they all three go to the kitchen and get something to eat?
Maybe it would be like with the bread from bananas, where they were able to eat together and nothing terrible happened. Or like the team meals they sometimes have for the dinner meal, where they are all gathered there and nothing terrible happens.
It is too early to wake up the other asset to join them, and having both the clown man and the flying man in the rooms for assets will probably wake up the other asset. So it is better to eat in the kitchen.
“Sure,” the flying man says. “Let’s go get something quick to tide you two over until breakfast.”
What the flying man said was “something quick.”
And it is surprising how quickly an egg can cook when it is all mixed up in a skillet. But it thought there would be cheese and maybe a little fruit, and instead of that, there is toast with butter and jam and there are eggs and there is orange juice.
It is very tasty, but it feels guilty not sharing this with the other asset and the ballerina woman. This is not a morning snack, but a small breakfast meal.
It could eat a lot more than is served, but there is the promise of much more later—more eggs, and pancakes and all sorts of things to put on top of the pancakes. Also sausage, which is ground up pig that it will not eat. Poor pigs with their wiggly bouncy tails. Who could grind up a little pig? But there will be fruit to put on pancakes or eat in a bowl, and that is good.
“You want anything else, while we’re talking breakfast?” the clown man asks.
It does, it wants the thick oatmeal that all of the good things can go into—the fruits and the cream, or the syrups and the butter, or even the jams. It can have bowl after bowl of it, and each bowl can be different.
But does it… does it ask for the oatmeal? It was asked if wanted something, so it should be okay if answers truthfully. It dredges up the courage it needs and tamps down the fear of getting nothing at all if it dares to ask for more, and signs “oatmeal,” the O-shape coming down into the palm and then up to the mouth.
“Sure, we can add that.” The flying man smiles at it. “Thanks for asking.”
It nods, not sure what it is being thanked for, really. It answered the question, but that made more work for the ones who will be making the breakfast meal. They should be irritated that it made the request instead of being satisfied with what was offered, right?
But they are not. They are both pleased with it. Strange. But… nice.
It likes when the others on the team that is not a cell are pleased with it. And it is finding more and more ways to achieve that. So different from the before times, when pleasing a handler was hard to accomplish no matter how hard it tried or what it did, or even the early days it was here in the hive building and could not please them no matter what. The team that is not a cell has no handlers, and it has learned how to please those around it.
Pleasing the others, it has discovered, comes at little cost to itself and often at no cost at all.
Notes:
Content Warning: Steve’s turn to speculate on what happened to Jigsaw at the hands of HYDRA surgeons. He briefly entertains the notion of self-injury for the cause of rendering himself a trial patient for any super-soldier painkillers Bruce may come up with, as well.
Chapter 132: Tower | I give you all of me (and you give me all of you)
Notes:
Chapter title from “All Of Me” by John Legend.
Posting this weekend, even though I shouldn’t be, because some folks might need a pick-me-up around now and Monday. Stay safe out there, y’all!
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 6:30 a.m.—
He has no idea why he’s awake right now, but his phone says he can still catch Jigsaw before he leaves for therapy if he actually gets out of bed. Or he can wait for breakfast and get another ninety minutes of sleep.
It’s a testament to his love that Clint chooses to face the day instead of rolling over.
He slides his hearing aids in and gives his left hand a flex. Yeah, still really sore from all the archery he did yesterday afternoon, after finding out about all of Jigsaw’s inside bits that didn’t belong there and all the other inside bits that were missing.
Jigsaw had come to find him after his afternoon session and watch for an hour, before Natasha called the whole thing off and scolded him for messing up his hand, even before he’d gotten the archery glove off to reveal red fingers that had seen happier days before he’d gone and put them through three hours of nocking arrows.
It was stupid of him, he knows. But he’s never claimed not to be stupid, so there.
He’d at least taken it easy the rest of the day. Today is a new day, though, and while he’s not feeling up to more archery at the moment, he does think he might try rubbing a certain super soldier’s back. It would be nice to be able to do that with both hands.
Alpine’s chirping and chittering are the first things that reach his ears once he’s got his aids in. She’s making quite a ruckus in there, probably chasing after a wand toy. It’s too dedicated to be a spring.
Clint gets out of bed and makes his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth and pee real quick, and then washes his hands before heading out to greet Jigsaw and Alpine.
Surprisingly there is no morning snack laid out on the table for Jigsaw to nibble on, though his wet hair says he’s had a shower and therefore should be eating something now if he’s going to make it to Yasmin’s session in time.
“No snack?” Clint says, coming around to plant a kiss on Jigsaw’s wet hair. “Or did you already eat?”
Jigsaw holds up two fingers—he already ate, Clint’s guessing—and tips his head back against the sofa, looking up at Clint behind him. He signs his request for a kiss and Clint obliges him with an upside down kiss before vaulting over the back of the sofa to sit beside him.
“How long have you been up? I didn’t notice you leaving.”
Jigsaw tucks the end of the wand toy under his thigh and signs that he left after Clint fell asleep, after guarding his dreams for a while before entrusting him to Lucky.
Damn. There’s a sleepless night that Jigsaw didn’t need. Maybe he can convince his partner to take a nap later today, maybe repay him for the massages he’s gotten with a back rub then. There probably won’t be time now before Jigsaw has to leave.
“It’s the scan, isn’t it?” Clint asks. “You were afraid of nightmares and so you figured you just wouldn’t sleep and that would solve the problem.”
Jigsaw nods while Alpine worries the wand toy free, and makes no move to grab it when she finally succeeds.
“I tried that for two months straight before we really met, and it doesn’t work. All it does is make you cranky and dull your reflexes. How do you think the tracksuit mafia got me back in July? I went back to not sleeping and I didn’t watch my back.”
Jigsaw frowns at him.
“Why don’t we take a nap, later on, and I’ll rub your back. Nothing hard like a massage, just rubbing my hands over your back.”
Jigsaw nods and asks for more kisses, and hell, who is Clint to refuse him when his lips are right there and he’s convinced Jigsaw to take a nap without a struggle? He thought he’d need to wheedle and bargain to get a nap out of Jigsaw if he was set on not sleeping. Apparently he isn’t set at all on the issue.
Clint cups Jigsaw’s cheek and draws him closer for a series of kisses, and smiles against Jigsaw’s lips as his partner moves closer still.
“I love you, you know,” Clint murmurs between kisses.
He doesn’t expect a response, not really, not when the most natural thing is to keep seeking out more kisses. The part of his mind not focused on the feel of Jigsaw’s lips against his own—an admittedly small part—wonders whether Jigsaw really knows what the words mean. They’d touched on it at breakfast yesterday, but Jigsaw had been fixed on their sameness and togetherness.
Maybe that’s his version of love, being the same as someone. And so if he and Clint are more the same as than he and anyone else in the Tower, he must love Clint. He left the tracksuit mafia alive—mostly alive—for him, came home to the Tower for him, shared his killing face with him when they were gassed in Siberia.
The signs are all there. That’s what matters. The actual words used are just extras. Nice-to-haves. Powdered sugar on the cake doughnut of life.
Yasmin
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 6:45 a.m.—
Yasmin settles into the chair where she will spend the majority of her working day and wonders what her client will have to discuss this morning.
She tries to leave the mornings for him to bring up topics that are of interest to him, or things he’s concerned about, saving the more intentionally directed sessions for the afternoons when they have more time together.
She happens to know one of the things he might bring up this morning, courtesy of Steve’s tweet about learning gymnastics moves with Jigsaw “all night.” She knows it can’t have been all night, simply because Steve must have slept at some point. But she does worry that Jigsaw went without sleep, and likely on purpose.
It’s good that he felt confident enough to spend the time with Steve in the gym, actually interacting rather than each man keeping to himself. And to teach Steve, well that’s wonderful. But not in lieu of sleep.
If she asks him how his night was, he is likely to divulge his entire evening’s activities, from leaving Zoe’s session to arriving here for their morning session. But she might wait and let him talk about the specifics he was interested in first.
She doesn’t want him to think that JARVIS or Steve tattled on him, or that he’s in trouble for not getting a few hours of sleep last night. But she does want to talk with him about his night.
Steve’s tweets… she might not bring that up at all.
Most of the Twitter storm surrounding Steve of late is drama around his relationship with Sam, all of which drama is unnecessary and uninvited. Last night some pundit or other directed his followers to unleash a new flurry of hate about Captain America “leading the youth astray” when he should be “an upright God-fearing man” who found himself a woman to love.
Thankfully, that’s something Linda has to worry about and not her.
If Jigsaw’s relationship with Clint is revealed, they’ll have far more trouble on their hands finding out who leaked the information than they will with the press. Clint is one of the lesser known Avengers, and while Jigsaw was a minor mysterious celebrity for a few weeks after the North Carolina footage was leaked, that’s largely subsided.
Of course, it would probably come bubbling back up to the surface again with more pressure placed on the team to reveal more of his identity. She hopes it doesn’t come to that. He might have accepted a past as Bucky Barnes, but that’s a far cry from accepting a barrage of attention heaped on him as Bucky Barnes in the present. He is Jigsaw now.
The door opens the rest of the way—she leaves it ajar so that the door’s motion will catch her eye when Jigsaw enters, rather than being spooked by a sudden appearance—and Jigsaw slips into the room, closing the door behind himself.
“Good morning, Jigsaw.” Yasmin smiles at him. He doesn’t look entirely unrested, so maybe he did get a few hours of sleep when Steve went to bed. “How are you feeling this morning?”
The response is a string of signs rather than one sign with an explanation: He’s feeling accomplished, he’s looking forward to something, he’s feeling fluttery inside, and he’s feeling… like cotton candy.
Like cotton candy?
Yasmin makes note of the list and nods. “Is your accomplishment related to getting the scan done yesterday? Because that was a great accomplishment.”
Jigsaw shakes his head. He makes Steve’s namesign and indicates the gym by miming someone lifting dumbbells, and then he flips to a new page in his notebook—not the tablet today, she notes—and draws a blue figure doing a handstand on a pair of bars. He adds the signs for “fast” and “lesson.”
“You taught Steve a quick lesson or two about gymnastics in the gym last night?”
Surprisingly, that gets a head shake from him. He repeats “Steve,” “fast,” and “lesson,” and then draws a clock in one corner of the notebook and an arrow from the 2 to the 5. He signs “long” and nods with a smile.
“…You worked with Steve on the gymnastics for three hours this morning?” Yasmin can hardly believe it, except that Jigsaw seems to have a hard time lying in addition to simply not bothering to do it with her.
“That’s a long time. But Steve is a fast learner. He picked up the skills you were teaching him quickly, then?” Yasmin asks. When he nods again, she continues. “And so you feel accomplished because you taught him so well.”
She smiles, though she’s concerned about his apparent lack of sleep.
“That really is an accomplishment,” she says. “I’m really happy you got to spend that time with Steve, doing something you both enjoyed.”
Because Steve must have enjoyed that to spend three hours at it. She can see Steve tolerating even an hour of an activity he didn’t like simply because it got him time with Jigsaw, but not three hours, and not those specific early morning hours when even Steve must have needed sleep.
Jigsaw beams at her words, and she can’t help but smile again. He’s come so far to be able to feel this accomplished and proud, and to share it with her.
“What is it you’re looking forward to?” she asks.
And the answer to that is breakfast, specifically the oatmeal. He lists off a variety of fruits, butter, sugar, syrup, and even jam before miming adding things to a bowl of food and eating it.
“I’m sure you worked up an appetite in the gym with Steve,” Yasmin says. “Did you eat your morning snack before coming here?”
If he was working with Steve until 5 doing gymnastics, that does leave enough time for him to wash up and eat a snack, and she hopes he did both things and not just the shower.
Jigsaw see-saws his hand and then reveals that there was a small breakfast with Steve and Sam after the gym.
Another accomplishment, even if he doesn’t see it as such. There have been more dinners with the team since the first non-mission meal with the grilled peaches, but breakfasts have been solely a Clint and Natasha thing, and lunches as well, when he’s not eating with Caroline. For him to eat with others for breakfast is something Caroline will be pleased to hear in their weekly meeting, if he doesn’t tell her himself tomorrow.
“I’m proud of you for eating with Steve and Sam. I’m sure Caroline will be, too. Do you feel good about eating with them?”
There’s the see-sawed hand again. He turns a page in the notebook and writes for a minute before showing her: GUILT NOT WITH THE OTHER ASSET
“I see. You feel bad, guilty, because you ate without Clint. Does Clint usually share your morning snack with you?”
He shakes his head.
“And this was your morning snack, even if it was much bigger than your usual morning snack, right?”
Jigsaw nods.
“Would Clint feel like you left him out?”
Yasmin is pleased to see that he’s thinking about the answer instead of automatically nodding because he feels like he left Clint out. It can be hard to put oneself in another’s position and try to see things their way, but Jigsaw dutifully does so whenever she asks.
Eventually, he shakes his head and signs that it was too early for Clint to feel left out. That Clint would have preferred to sleep more.
“So how do you feel about eating with Steve and Sam now, after you’ve thought about what Clint would like?”
Jigsaw gives her a thumbs up.
“I’m glad,” she says. “Why were you feeling fluttery when I first asked you how you were feeling?”
Jigsaw grins and signs “kiss” at her several times.
“You and Clint spent some time kissing before you came here,” Yasmin says with a knowing smile. “That’s still an activity you enjoy a lot, isn’t it?”
His continued grin tells her that it is. He puts his pen to the paper again and draws a cat pouncing on a wand toy and a pair of figures with their heads together sitting on a sofa, the one with hearing aids taller and the one with the star shorter. The figures are holding hands, she sees, and the wand toy has been forgotten.
So they started out playing with Alpine and got distracted.
“I’m sure Alpine didn’t mind that you were distracted from playing with her. There’s always time for more play later.”
Jigsaw nods, and then frowns. He writes over the figures on the sofa: I LOVE YOU and underneath that: YOU KNOW. He adds a line from the words to the figure of Clint.
Yasmin reads the words. She knows that Jigsaw only rarely uses punctuation when he writes the words out, and guesses that Clint said something along the lines of “I love you, you know,” perhaps casually enough or quietly enough that it’s become an afterthought for Jigsaw that he said it at all.
“Did Clint say that he loves you?”
Jigsaw nods and asks why. Then he writes in his notebook: IT IS NOT FOOD
Yasmin ponders that for a moment.
“We often use the word ‘love’ to mean that we enjoy something. For instance, I love to go swimming and surfing in the ocean. I love to go to beaches with my friends and family. I love popcorn and M&Ms together.” Yasmin pauses to give him time to examine the statements.
“M&Ms are a kind of chocolate candy,” she adds. “And popcorn is when kernels of corn have been exploded by heat so that they puff up into a light and crunchy snack.”
She smiles at his interest in the latter food item.
“When we say that we love certain foods or activities, like you love peaches and throwing a ball for Lucky, we mean one kind of love. But there are lots of ways to love. And one of those ways is to love another person—or another asset.”
Jigsaw points to the words on the page again, where Clint said he loved him.
“Exactly. Clint was telling you that he loved you. That means that he cares for you very deeply, that he’s very fond of you, that he feels a lot of affection toward you, that he is devoted to you. Everything about how he feels for you is intense. We call that love.”
She watches him ponder the words on the page again for a moment. Then he points at the words again and mimes plucking them off the page and putting them in his mouth.
“…Do you want to say that to Clint?” she guesses after a minute.
Jigsaw nods and signs “the same as” and “together” before pointing at the words on the page.
“Here is one way to say that, a single sign that means ‘I love you,’ Jigsaw.” Yasmin holds up her hand, palm facing Jigsaw, and her thumb, index finger and pinky extended while her middle and ring fingers remain tucked down toward her palm.
“Is that what you mean when you talk about how you and Clint are the same as each other? That you care for him more deeply than you can express?”
He signs “together” again and nods.
“When you say you’re the same as each other and together, then that’s what you mean,” Yasmin confirms. “That you love him.”
Jigsaw nods and makes the “I love you” sign with one hand and then with the other. He turns the page and writes along the top of it: THE MISSION THE OTHER ASSET THE DOG THE LITTLE CAT
Then beneath that: TEAM THAT IS NOT A CELL and YASMIN ZOE CAROLINE
Next come: FOOD and LITTLE PLANTS
“Is this a hierarchy of what you care the most about?” Yasmin asks. “A way of ranking them so that the most important things are at the top and the less important things are further down?”
He nods.
“Is the mission really up there with Clint, Lucky and Alpine?” she asks.
After looking at the page for a minute, Jigsaw shakes his head and draws an arrow putting it in the space between the second line and the third.
“The mission is more important than food and your plant, but not as important as the people you interact with in the Tower.”
When he nods, he looks troubled.
“Did you expect that, or does that come as a surprise for you?”
Jigsaw holds up two fingers.
“A surprise, then.” Yasmin nods. “I feel happy that you’re putting people you care about before your mission. And I’m sure they would feel happy about that, too. Do you feel happy about it?”
He raises his shoulders briefly, but the shrug is one of not knowing rather than anything flippant.
“Why don’t you take that as a homework assignment, Jigsaw. Ponder how you feel about the current ranking in your notebook, and when we meet back up again this afternoon, we can talk about it.”
Chapter 133: Assets | What’s goin’ on in that beautiful mind?
Notes:
Chapter title from “All Of Me” by John Legend.
Brief content warning for this chapter in the end notes.
We made it through January, folks--congrats! Also, the Flamingo household is moving, at long last. For real this time--in two weeks. My goal is to keep the posting schedule the same, so you'll be getting the next update mid-move. Ambitious, but I think possible. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 8:00 a.m.—
It is supposed to be thinking about the ranking that it did just now with Yasmin. Is supposed to find out how it feels about the mission not being the most important thing, not even alongside the other asset and the dog and the little cat, not even just below the other asset and the dog and the little cat.
Even lower on the list. Lower than all of the team that is not a cell, even the researcher with the curly hair. Lower than all of the experts that are helping it.
Not lower than food. And the poor little plant and all the other plants, too. At the bottom of the list.
It is hard to believe that food has ranked so low. It remembers how important its own post-mission feasts out of the metal boxes had been, how much it looked forward to digging through the boxes and plucking out the treasures within.
But food was never the most important thing. That was always the mission. And then the mission and the dog. And then the mission and the dog and the other asset.
Things came up the list to join the mission, and then what happened? Did the other asset and the dog and now the little cat surpass the mission as the most important things, becoming even more important than the mission? Or did the mission sink lower down, become less important?
And how did the team that is not a cell surpass the mission? Did the mission really sink so low?
And Yasmin is happy to hear about that. She knows how important the mission is, but she is happy that it is not as important now. Or is the mission exactly as important as it has always been, but the others have become so much more important?
It wants to think that the mission stayed put on the list and the others on the list moved up. It just didn’t have space in the notebook with the stars at the top of the pages to move the other things up, so it moved the mission down. Only on the paper. Not actually.
The mission is where it always was. Yes.
But they cannot resume the mission with the other asset not yet ready for the field. So because the other asset is more important than the mission, the mission will have to wait.
It wishes it could give the other asset some of its own healing ability. Then the other asset’s hand would be fully healed and shooting the fangs on sticks like the other asset did yesterday would not hurt the other asset’s fingers.
The other asset had needed the ointment for burns last night, to relieve the throbbing ache in the other asset’s fingers from all of the archery.
And it had thought the other asset was almost fully healed.
But it knows how injuries can seem to be healed before they are actually healed. And doing the simple things that should not hurt can then hurt and reinjure. And for the other asset, shooting the fangs on sticks is one of the simple things—easy, natural, smooth as breathing.
It has not been a full two weeks since the other asset was burned grabbing the halo. The blisters and torn flesh have healed, but the new flesh is still tender. Too tender for the archery. It regrets watching the other asset for so long when the other asset was hurting and it did not realize.
The ballerina woman had realized, though, had known. Did she see something in the other asset that it missed? Or did she just know more about how long the other asset takes to heal?
Maybe it will remember to ask. If there was a clue it missed, then it wants to know what it should be looking for. It might not always have the ballerina woman right there to see the clue.
Or…
Or maybe it will. The ballerina woman has shown herself to be dependable, a solid and steady presence in the other asset’s life and therefore in this asset’s life. She is not there for everything, but then, it cannot be there for everything, either. The ballerina woman might be able to fill the gaps it leaves.
Gaps like the therapy sessions and time with the feeder, Caroline.
It cannot stop spending the time with the experts and feeder, and it does not want to. It learns so much from them, and there are questions it has that no one else can answer. Also there are games to learn about and plastic pieces to put together and scrap books to make and all sorts of other things.
Just today, it learned about love. Surely if it has put anything as high above the mission as the other asset, the dog, and the little cat, then they must be the ones it loves. But it feels differently about the other asset than about the dog and the little cat. Feels differently about the other asset than it feels about anyone else.
But Yasmin said there are different kinds of love. Not just the one it is used to, where it really enjoys something, but also the kind where it is devoted, where it cares so so deeply, where it is so so fond, where it is so so affectionate, where everything it feels is so so intense.
And it feels those things for the dog and the little cat, would kill for them without hesitation, but would it die for them? Would it allow itself to be taken back if that was what it took to save them?
It does not think that it would. Not for the dog and the little cat. It would fight until the end for them, but it would not go peaceful and compliant into the hands of HYDRA to be wiped and reconditioned and made to start over.
For the other asset, though? It would do anything.
Clint
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 8:15 a.m.—
When Jigsaw returns from his therapy session, he goes straight to the tablet and unplugs it, and brings it over to the sofa to sit beside him with it in his lap.
He’s working at the words for a while, petting Lucky with one hand and swiping across the screen and tapping here and there with the other, and he’s so dedicated to his message that Clint doesn’t interrupt him to ask him how therapy went.
Jigsaw’s probably in the process of telling him, anyway.
“Jigsaw go back for the other asset if need to. Go back HYDRA. Jigsaw save the other asset.”
Clint blinks. What? Where did this come from? “I don’t want you to go back to HYDRA. No one wants you to do that. You don’t have to save me. I’m right here.”
A few more taps on the tablet, then: “If need to.”
“You don’t need to.”
“If.”
Clint is about to insist that there isn’t a need again, but he stops. They are coming at this from two different places, clearly, and it’s important to Jigsaw that he understand that he would go back for Clint.
It’s just, there’s no need for it. Clint is right here, so why would he need to go back and save him?
“…Is this about the Siberia mission?” Clint asks. “I’m not following. Meaning, I don’t understand.”
Jigsaw sighs and starts tapping on the tablet again.
“Jigsaw not go back save Lucky Alpine. Not go back HYDRA. Not there. Jigsaw kill and kill and kill for Lucky Alpine. Jigsaw kill and kill and kill. For the other asset, Jigsaw stop kill and go back.”
Clint takes a moment to just breathe. Is Jigsaw telling him what he thinks he’s hearing? He’d kill for his pets, which is not a surprise. But he’d stop killing for Clint. Which is also not quite a surprise since he did leave the tracksuit mafia men mostly alive. But going back?
Jigsaw would let himself be taken by HYDRA, wouldn’t fight them off, if that was what it took to save him?
“I think I understand now,” Clint says faintly. “And I don’t like it. I mean,” he quickly adds, “I’m touched. I appreciate your hypothetical self-sacrifice. But… Don’t. Don’t ever go back, not for me, not for anyone.”
Jigsaw’s momentary hurt expression shifts to confusion, and Clint keeps talking to try to explain.
“I love you. I would rather die a horrible death than see you back under their control. If that’s ever a situation we’re in, where they have me and they’re going to do awful things to me if you don’t come back peacefully, I hope you’d kill them all and save me, but I wouldn’t want you to give yourself up to save me.”
Not that giving himself up would actually save Clint. In that sort of situation, HYDRA would just incapacitate Jigsaw somehow to keep him compliant and then off Clint anyway. On some level, he’s sure Jigsaw knows that. It’s just the sentiment, really, not the intention.
“Everyone in this whole Tower who knows you would rather you fight for us than give yourself up for us,” Clint says. “No exceptions.”
Jigsaw sighs and goes back to his tablet.
“Jigsaw not know how explain. For the other asset, Jigsaw do anything. Even worst thing.”
And then he signs that they are the same as, together, and…
Clint’s stomach does things no stomach should do as Jigsaw signs “I love you” and leaves his hand up.
“I get it,” Clint says. “Same here.” He returns the sign and then moves to hold Jigsaw’s raised hand in his own. “Same here.”
Clint traces Jigsaw’s lips with the thumb of his left hand and feels them curve in a smile. And he knows the kissing rules dictate that they ask first, but the way Jigsaw’s looking at his lips says that the answer is yes. Clint wants to just move closer, doesn’t want to break the mood by asking, but for now, so early in this new world with Jigsaw, Clint doesn’t want to risk confusing the issue.
“Can I—”
He doesn’t get very far with his question before Jigsaw has moved, shifting onto his knees on the sofa so that he is actually taller than Clint for once and leaning down to kiss him. And Clint didn’t realize this was one of his turn-ons until it was happening. It’s intoxicating the way Jigsaw moves warm metal fingers along the side of his neck, his thumb sliding down across Clint’s throat to the dip between his collarbones and back up.
None of his partners has ever had the strength needed to choke him out with one hand, and the fact that Jigsaw does… it does things to Clint’s insides that should be reserved for things that are hotter and heavier than a slow but passionate series of kisses. It’s just a hand at his neck, after all. That’s happened before, lots of times. But this is a metal hand that could crush a marble statue with ease, and it’s just resting there at his neck, gentle as anything.
Clint isn’t sure how long they’re at it before there’s a knock at the door, but he knows his hair is mussed and his heart is racing like he’s run a mile at a sprinter’s pace, and as Jigsaw gets up to answer the door, Clint tries to catch his breath.
He can still feel the weight of Jigsaw’s hand on his neck, the press of Jigsaw against his side as they kissed. And Natasha’s voice seems to be coming from another room entirely as she greets them.
The tablet, Clint thinks. The tablet is nowhere in sight, where did— oh, it fell on the floor. Clint reaches down to pick it up and put it on the coffee table. He doesn’t want to be the one to step on it, and knowing his luck, he would be.
“—at a bad time?” Natasha is asking with a huge grin as she looks down at him with a hand on her hip.
“No,” Clint lies. “We were just talking about, about things.”
Jigsaw adds that they were kissing, and Natasha laughs.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “Did you want to get breakfast? JARVIS says there’s a lot of it, so I thought we’d go down to the kitchen.”
Clint runs his hand through his hair to put it more or less in decent shape and and then gets up. “Sure. Jigs, the kitchen okay?”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 10:15 a.m.—
“So how about that nap?” the other asset asks as they head back to the rooms for assets.
It thought that the nap would be later, but… It is so tired, yes. It could easily fall sleep if it allowed itself to do so. Whether it would stay asleep, and how restful that sleep would be, how many nightmares that sleep would hold, that is unknown.
But it should try. The other asset is concerned for it.
“I’ll wake you for lunch,” the ballerina woman says, her tone reassuring and a little playful. “If you can manage to stuff anything else into your stomach. Breakfast was huge.”
It had three bowls of oatmeal and so many eggs. Also a few of the pancakes. And after eating so much, it would be so easy to crawl into the nest and curl up in the pillows and blankets, maybe spoon with the other asset, or kiss some more, and fall asleep.
“But it sounds like it needed to be,” she continues, “if you were awake all night and working in the gym for three hours.”
It nods. Caroline would want it to eat a bigger breakfast after being awake all night. And the bigger morning snack, too. And it did eat three bowls of the oatmeal, but it adhered to the variety request and put different things inside of each bowl. Bananas and maple syrup in one, mangoes and pineapple in one, and raspberries and blackberries and blueberries in one.
When they get to the hallway they all live on, the two assets and the ballerina woman, the ballerina woman peels off at her own door with a murmured “enjoy your nap.”
And when they get into the rooms for assets, the other asset asks which nest it wants to nap in, only the other asset does not say nest but bed. It is the same thing, though, it knows. They have different words for things but they are still the same as, together. They love each other.
And so it is a very short time before they are all cuddled close in this asset’s very own nest—the two assets and the dog and the little cat, too.
It sighs and stretches out, pointing the toes and reaching the arms up and up so that the muscles can shift and move about before it turns to face the other asset, just sitting there in the nest and not lying down. It pats the pillows next to it invitingly. They are going to nap, so the other asset should lie down. Maybe the other asset has knots to press out so that blood can flow freely.
“I’m going to give you a back rub, remember?” the other asset asks. “Why don’t you turn over onto your stomach so I can do that?”
Oh. That is right. The other asset has asked to do this and it has agreed. It does not understand what the other asset will get out of the back rub, but maybe it will feel good and that is what the other asset will get. The same way it feels accomplished when it makes the other asset feel good.
It rolls over onto its stomach, and there is a twinge of fear prickling up the spine—things are never good when it is lying down with another kneeling above it—but the other asset would never hurt it, would never pin it down and push into it, would never tangle fingers in the hair and pull back on the head and jam a stick with white electric fire between the teeth.
It chases away the fear thoughts—there is not even a need to really check the facts, because it knows that it is safe—and instead focuses on how close the other asset’s thighs are as the other asset sits there. The other asset has very good thighs, so strong.
Then the other asset is doing what was agreed on—is placing hands on the back and not pressing down hard, not seeking out a knot, not kneading into it, but is simply running the hands along the back. The touch is light but does not tickle, and the other asset’s hands are warm and gentle along the back.
“I saw the scan results yesterday,” the other asset murmurs. “HYDRA really tore you up, and not just your throat. The whole left side of your torso is messed up.”
The other asset’s hands maintain their steady caress, working up the spine with thumbs tracing the vertebrae and then out to the shoulders and down. Around and around in twin ovals, pressing lightly with fingers and palms.
The other asset knows now that it is part machine, made up of metal and wires instead of flesh and blood. But the other asset said that it did not matter what it is made of, that the other asset loves all of it. So it is okay that the other asset knows.
“Thing is, we’re pretty sure you hurt all the time,” the other asset says, “and you don’t show it because it’s your normal. But it shouldn’t be your normal. And we want to make it normal not to hurt. Or not to hurt as much, anyway.”
But if it cannot feel what is going on inside of it, how will it know that everything is working appropriately? How will it keep things in working order so that it does not need to submit to a technician to get back into working order… through more pain?
“I know you have a thing about pain and order,” the other asset continues, “but for everyone who hasn’t been brainwashed by HYDRA, pain is a sign that something’s wrong, not a way to make things right. Order doesn’t come from pain. Order comes from relieving pain.”
The other asset’s hands keep moving slowly and surely in their patterns, and the pressure increases just a little, adding to the friction of the other asset’s hands on the soft fabric of this asset’s shirt, adding more heat to the back rub.
“Is this okay? What I’m doing?”
It gives the other asset a thumbs up. Not only is the answer yes, it is okay, but the answer is also good because it is very, very good. It feels wonderful. It feels relaxing. It feels warm and close and satisfying.
The other asset has hands all over it, all over the back, and it knows how it feels to finally get hands on the other asset. The other asset is maybe feeling something like that, and knowing that the other asset enjoys this makes it enjoy it even more.
“Good. Let me know if anything gets to be too much.”
It nods.
“And feel free to close your eyes. You’re supposed to be napping, remember?”
And lose its awareness of the other asset’s hands easing the back into relaxation? But it is supposed to be napping. The other asset is right about that. It agreed to a nap as well as the back rub.
It closes the eyes. In this instance, “feel free” means “please do this,” and it will do as the other asset has asked.
“You don’t have to be in pain. That’s the thing. I wish you didn’t hurt everywhere, and this kind of thing is the only thing I can do about it.” The other asset sighs. “For a long time, I was afraid that if I gave you a massage, or even a back rub like this one, I would press on something that would hurt deep inside. Like a bolt through your shoulder blade or something.”
There are no bolts there, it thinks. Just attachment points.
“But maybe heat will help. Maybe just gentle back rubs will help. Maybe, if you can work your way up to it, we could soak in a hot tub.”
…a hot tub?
“I figure, if you wanted, we could sit in my bathtub for a while, just with it empty, and then when you were comfortable with that, we could turn the water on and let it drain out. Then let it fill up a little, and just sit there. And work our way up to something where it actually does you good to soak in it.”
That does not sound bad or dangerous. There is no one here who will drown it.
“And we’d keep our clothes on if you wanted,” the other asset says. “Or you could keep your clothes on while I was in swim trunks. Those are like the boxers I usually wear to bed, only they’re made for swimming.”
If the other asset was in these swim trunks, then the rest of the other asset’s body would be available for it to see without any clothes on. It likes that idea. If the bathtub is a way to get more time with the other asset in just the swim trunks… And especially if it can remain safely dressed…
It gives the other asset a thumbs up. That is a good idea. It does not know about the soaking, whether that would do anything at all besides make it wet like a really long shower would. But it sounds like it would make the other asset happy, and it does not sound objectionable.
“Awesome. We’ll go as slow as you like. And there’s some heating stuff we can try in the meantime. Like a small blanket, but heated, or like an ice pack but full of hot water instead of frozen water.”
It is still not sure it wants to remove the pain that lets it know everything is working the way it is supposed to. But the back rub feels really good. If these other things feel as good as this does, and if the other asset can be there with it helping it like now, then it is willing to try.
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw thinks about some HTP things in this chapter, but it’s pretty mild.
Chapter 134: Jigsaw | All day long I can hear people talking out loud
Notes:
Chapter title from “When You Say Nothing At All” by Alison Krauss.
The move is upon us over in the Flamingo household, starting tomorrow afternoon and wrapping up Monday afternoon. (And then unwrapping for the rest of the week.) In light of that, I'm posting tonight instead of Sunday because I have no idea how stressed I'll be, or whether I'll remember to post. ^_^
Also, fun note, I'm moving in the day before extended sub-freezing weather hits my new area--not a moment too soon! I do not want to be moving while it's snowing, for sure.
Chapter Text
—New York City | Monday 22 October 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“Hi Jigsaw, Clint,” Zoe greets them as the two assets come into the room for therapy. “How are you feeling tonight?”
It gives her a thumbs up while the other asset mumbles that “it’s going alright,” which it supposes is the same thing as a thumbs up.
“Great. I’m excited tonight, because I have something new for you to try.”
It smiles and sits on the sofa, leaning forward. It does not see anything new, but there is the bag on the floor by Zoe that might hold something small. It will not be another kind of paper—they have explored all of the papers now except the metal paper, including paper made of crushed up rocks.
“I can see you’re excited, now,” Zoe says with a smile. “And I’m glad you came tonight, Clint. There’s enough for two to work with at once.”
“Okay. But just kick me out if that changes or anything.”
Zoe would never kick the other asset. Even if there was only enough to do for one asset, she would let the other asset watch without kicking.
Just as it thought she would, Zoe reaches into the bag at her side and pulls out a box that rattles. On one side of the box, there is a picture of three flowers, a big pink one, a small pink one, and a big white one. It is the same size and shape of box as the sunflowers out of plastic pieces was—it is more of the “Legos” for it to put together!
“Yasmin introduced these to you earlier, but I wanted to talk about these as well. Did you enjoy the sunflowers?”
It nods. They were very exciting to make, coming together bit by bit, and they are in a treasure box now.
“I’m glad. These flowers are a little different to make, and you and Clint can assemble the two larger flowers together by following the instructions at the same time.”
She opens up the box and puts a clear plastic bag with colorful parts—greens and pinks and whites, mostly—in front of each of them, along with the instruction booklet. The third clear plastic bag goes back into the box to wait for later.
It waits for the signal to begin assembling the flowers, the fingers itching to reach for the instruction booklet.
“While you put these together, I’d like for you to focus on the instructions and how they tell you what to do without using words. Go ahead and get started sorting the pieces. Here’s your glove, Jigsaw,” Zoe says, handing it the cotton glove to make the pieces easier to grip with the metal fingertips.
It puts the glove on and then joins the other asset in putting the pieces into their colored piles of different shapes.
“There’s no words in the instructions?” the other asset asks as it flips through the instruction booklet to get an idea for how the flower will come together.
“Just illustrations,” Zoe confirms. “There are many reasons to work with the Legos, including noticing the way the same pieces can be put to different uses depending on the overall design and the desire of the builder. But tonight, I want to focus on images as a form of communication.”
It uses drawings to communicate. That is sometimes easier than the other kinds of communication it can do. It can see the images in the head when it thinks, and when it draws them on the pages or on the tablet, then others can see the images as well.
But a lot of people need to describe the images back to it before they understand what it means. For them, the picture is not enough. They have to have the words to go with it. Even Yasmin often needs to make sure she understands what it draws, even if she is almost always correct.
“Think about your food books, Jigsaw.” Zoe puts a drawing of a meal onto the coffee table. Spaghetti with bread and a bowl of ice cream, with a clock set to dinner time. “You can point to foods as a way to ask for them, without needing words. Or you can answer someone who asks you what you had for dinner.”
She puts another picture on the coffee table—two figures throwing a ball for a figure of a dog.
“This picture can ask a question. ‘Do you want to go out to the park and throw the ball for Lucky?’ Or it can answer a question. ‘We went to the park and threw the ball for Lucky.’ Or it can be a statement. ‘I want for us to to go the park and throw the ball for Lucky.’”
It nods as it reaches for the next piece it needs. It can see all of those in the drawing, yes. And if it added a spider to one figure, that would make the figure the ballerina woman. Or crescents behind the ears to make the other asset. Or a star on the left arm to make this asset. A shield or wings for the clown man and the flying man. A circle in the chest for the hamburger technician or curly hair for the researcher.
So many ways to say exactly what it means.
“I want to emphasize that this is a perfectly valid form of communication.” She puts another picture on the coffee table—a figure holding a drawing and a checkmark hovering at one side. “This picture is a way I could have said that.”
It points to the checkmark and asks what it is there for.
“A checkmark in many people’s minds means that something is good or right. Accomplished. Checked off the list.” She puts a piece of paper on the coffee table that has checkmarks, smiley faces, golden stars, and a hand making the thumbs up shape on it.
“These are some of the ways we can communicate that concept of something we approve of or have taken care of. Something we’ve done well at, even.” Another paper has Xs on it, and frowning faces, a circle with a diagonal line through it, a thumbs down shape. “And here are some ways to communicate the opposite of that.”
She pauses so that it can examine the shapes.
“We could put a question mark on a picture to make the picture a question. Just like the shape you use in the AAC app.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to use words, though?” the other asset asks. “More people would understand words, I think.”
Zoe shakes her head. “There is no better. Everything depends on the situation.”
She points at the pieces of plastic on the coffee table.
“Each of those shapes has a part number. If I told you to fasten part number 7382 to part number 89001 using only the first two pips, that wouldn’t help you assemble the flower. But the pictures do a great job.”
The other asset frowns but doesn’t argue back. That is good. An expert should not be argued with.
“In some instances,” Zoe continues, “words will work best. If and only if they are available at the moment they are needed. If a picture is available and words are not, a picture does a very good job. A picture is better than not communicating if we want to communicate. And it is no less valid.”
It is nice to hear that one of its favorite ways to communicate a lot of ideas or a complicated idea is a valid way to do that.
“So what you’re saying is that Jigsaw can use anything available to communicate, and as long as he can get his ideas across to us, it’s all good.”
Zoe nods. “Any tool in the toolbox is a good tool. Some tools work better in some situations, but if you don’t have a can opener, a hammer and a screwdriver can do the job. As long as the can is opened in the end, the job is accomplished.”
She lists things off on her fingers.
“Jigsaw, you have drawings, sign language, written words, typed words. Your AAC app can help you speak aloud or be read by others. You could play a specific song to convey your mood to someone, or use your food books to plan a whole meal.”
It does have all of those things. And when it came here, was brought here, it did not have anything. Not that it could choose easily. It could draw hamburgers and fried potato sticks. It could type slowly on a target’s typewriter, or it could write even more slowly on a handy piece of paper. But the effort was not worth it most of the time.
Now it has so many ways to communicate so many things to so many people, and it is getting better and better at using these ways. The words still squirm around in the brain when it reaches for them, but the AAC app makes it easier to pick from a list of words, and the signs make it easier to make the word it wants with the hands even if the brain cannot supply the word as so many letter shapes.
“And,” Zoe says, “it’s true that others can use their voices to speak without needing an AAC app to make those sounds, but that is not in any way superior to your own tools.”
It wonders about that. Everyone around it uses their voices to communicate first, and only uses signs if they must be quiet. No one else needs to put words into a tablet and have the tablet speak for them. No one else draws pictures.
“You aren’t doing anything wrong, Jigsaw.” Zoe pauses there, waiting for it to look up from the plastic building block flower that is emerging in the hands. “I just want to emphasize that your communication tools aren’t lesser in any way.”
It nods and signs that it understands.
“In fact,” Zoe says, “the Legos are only the start of tonight’s lesson.”
The other asset shifts on the sofa to check the time on the other asset’s phone.
“Only the start?”
Zoe laughs. Zoe has a pretty laugh, not at all ugly and mean like so many experts’ laughs are. She is a good expert, like Yasmin.
“This won’t take long, but it opens up a world of communication for the team.” She pulls her tablet out of her bag and turns it on.
Should it have brought its tablet along with it? It left the tablet in the rooms for assets.
Zoe turns the screen to projection mode and stands to point to one of the little square pictures—the icons, it remembers—that each open up an app when tapped.
“This one here is a camera, just like your current camera, but it doesn’t need paper to work. With your tablet, you can take hundreds of photos without running out of room,” she says. “And instead of looking through the viewfinder to frame your photograph, you can see what the picture will look like on the screen.”
It is just like the other asset’s phone making photographs in the park of the day out with the feeder with the braids. The other asset made many photographs and they all went into a folder inside of the tablet. An album.
It has nearly finished with the scrap book to send to the feeder with the braids made out of printed photographs from that album.
“One of the ways we can communicate through pictures is photography,” Zoe says. “We can take pictures of our environment or those around us, and we can go out looking for specific things to take pictures of. And how we frame the picture—what we choose to capture versus what we choose to leave out—can help us tell a story.”
“Something tells me we’re going to be making more scrapbooks,” the other asset says with a laugh. “Hundreds of photos to pick from.”
Zoe smiles. “Not quite. Yasmin will explain more tomorrow. But this way you can send select images from your tablet to a computer in the Tower that will let the team look at them.”
Like a scrap book for the team that is not a cell. Or an album for them to look at.
“This way you can share your pictures with the team, and the team can share pictures of their own, learning to communicate with you in one of the ways they don’t use currently.”
It watches intently, flower forgotten for the moment, as Zoe taps the camera app picture and suddenly the whole screen of the tablet is a picture of Zoe, part of her torso, like it is seeing through the tablet to what is behind the tablet.
“When you want to take the picture, you can press this button on the side of your tablet, or you can tap this button at the bottom center of your tablet, the same one you use to go back to your home screen.”
Zoe turns the tablet around to face herself, and she presses the button on the side of the tablet. When she turns the tablet around again, there is a picture of the two assets and their plastic building block flowers in the process of being finished.
“See how easy that is?” Zoe asks. “I’d like for you to try it with your tablet tonight or in the morning before you go to see Yasmin. Can you take a few pictures for her to see tomorrow morning?”
It nods. This will be easy homework. It already knows how to make photographs with the camera that Yasmin gave it with the paper that gets wiggled until the picture appears on it. Now it can make more photographs with the tablet.
It is going to make photographs of the dog and the little cat, and photographs of the nighttime snack, and so many photographs!
The little cat seems to know that something is different and is not being cute for the photographs.
It is stretched out on the floor holding the tablet on its edge with one hand while wiggling a toy with the other hand, and the little cat will be cute and bat at the toy with her wide blue eyes until it tries to make a photograph of the little cat and then it turns out that the little cat somehow has managed to close her eyes or look away from the tablet every time.
It has discovered that if it moves the flesh fingers together while touching the screen of the tablet, the image will shrink so that more of it will fit on the screen, as if it had moved away from the thing it is making photographs of. And if it moves the flesh fingers apart while touching the screen of the tablet, the opposite happens and it is like it moved closer.
The other asset calls this “zooming,” even though it is not going anywhere, and says that this is a “gesture” that works on the phones, too. “Pinching,” the other asset says it is also called. And that makes sense, because it is bringing fingers together as though pinching the picture to make it smaller.
So it has “zoomed in” to get the little cat in a photograph, but whenever the little cat is actually looking at the tablet, or at it behind the tablet, it has to move the tablet to push any of the buttons, and it only gets a small part of the little cat in the resulting photograph.
Very frustrating.
The little cat is always cute when it is not trying to make a photograph of the little cat being cute. The little cat is a fuzzy white cotton ball, is a cloud on four legs with two round circles of sky for eyes and a soft pink triangle for a nose. Always very cute.
But not now.
It sighs and gets up off of the floor. The little cat must not want to have a photograph made. It does not understand why this camera is not something the little cat likes, when the other camera has never bothered her.
She must not understand about the photographs, and must think that it is doing something else with the tablet.
“Giving up, huh?” the other asset asks from the sofa. “Let me see what you got. Maybe there’s something good in there.”
It does not think there are any good photographs in there, but it sits down next to the other asset and places the tablet in the other asset’s lap.
The other asset swipes each photograph to the side, smiling the whole time. There are a lot more photographs than it thought there were. It must have forgotten many of its attempts.
“Wow.” The other asset scoots the tablet back over toward it. “Alpine has never been less captivating.”
It sighs again. Maybe if it sends all of these to the computer that will show them to the others on the team that is not a cell, that will be a kind of communication all on its own. It will not communicate “Alpine is a cute little cat,” but it will communicate that the little cat did not cooperate.
Maybe it should only send the worst ten to the computer so that it emphasizes just how uncooperative the little cat has been.
It wonders how to get the photographs to the computer, but that must be something Yasmin will tell it all about tomorrow morning. In the meantime, it can put little red stars in the corners of the worst photographs, and then it will be ready in the morning.
And it can make photographs of the other asset’s progress in the fishing game… except that would just be photograph after photograph of the laughing fish and the bloop-bloop bubbles every time a fish escaped.
Maybe it will make photographs of all of the foods inside the little refrigerator in the kitchen that is for assets.
Yes, it will do that. And then when it feeds the little cat her dinner meal, she will be too focused on eating her pouch of food so she will not object to the photographs. It can make photographs of the little cat then.
And maybe they will be good ones.
Chapter 135: Assassins | I’ve got a nightmare to remember (I’ll never be the same)
Notes:
Chapter title from “A Nightmare to Remember” by Dream Theater.
Please heed the content warnings in the endnotes for this chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 4:30 a.m.—
There is a stool with wheels—no, a stool that should have wheels but that is fixed to the floor with heavy bolts at each of the stool’s legs where the wheels should be.
It is sitting on the stool without wheels, and the other asset is there on a second stool, also without wheels.
The assets are sitting on the stools without wheels, waiting for the process to begin, for the gigantic halo to spin around them. They could get up off of the stools, but they don’t. They don’t know what is coming.
It is supposed to scan them, sending particles through them to make pictures of their insides without having to cut them apart to do so. It is something they have agreed to, something they have willingly acquiesced to, something they were talked into, not coerced into.
And the gigantic halo is so far above their heads, so far out to the side, blocked by the stools without wheels. What is the worst that can happen, the assets think.
But the halo begins to move, begins to spin, rotating around the assets on the stools without wheels so slowly, easy to escape. And then it speeds up. There are red laser lines racing across the assets, burning into them, shooting particles at them—so small that they are invisible, like sickness and germs and the death that comes from them.
The gigantic halo screams around them, so high pitched that it is like knives in the ears, like a scalpel carving out the eardrums and slicing slicing slicing but it can still hear the sounds, can still hear the singing shrieking of the gigantic halo as it whirls around the assets on the stools without wheels.
The red laser lines burn and burn, and the assets cannot escape now because the gigantic halo is moving too fast, is a blur of movement, and the burning starts to be like the burning that comes from fire—from regular fire and white electric fire—not merely the burning of overused muscles.
The assets burn and burn, gradually taken apart by the gigantic halo with the red laser fire, with the particles. There are pictures made by the red laser fire and the particles, and the pictures are of fire and agony and screams—because the other asset can still scream, even if this asset cannot.
The other asset’s screams begin to match the screaming of the gigantic halo, one high pitched, the other low, and the assets are burning, they are on fire, they are lit up with red electric fire and burning in regular fire now, and the other asset will not survive this!
The other asset will not survive being set on fire the way this asset has survived it. The other asset will die from this, will not have the opportunity to start over as a new asset, wiped clean like melting metal to take away the impurities that have snuck into it, the personality that grew like a mold on what was meant to be a pure asset.
The desires and preferences, the independent thoughts, the thing that makes an asset this asset or that asset and not merely an asset.
All gone, so that a pure asset can emerge from the flames, but the other asset will not emerge from these flames, will be burned through the skin and muscle, into the bone, until nothing is left but a pile of ashes. The other asset will die. The other asset will die. The other asset will die.
Unacceptable.
“Jigsaw!”
It is being shaken. The other asset is burning, is dying, is being killed, and the platform with the stools without wheels is shaking beneath the assets and—
“Jigsaw!”
Not a scream. Just a loud whisper, sharp but gentle. And a wet thing on the skin face. Weight on top of it even though it is sitting on a stool without—
No, it—
It opens the eyes and there is the dog on top of it licking and licking the skin face. It opens the eyes and there is the other asset, not on fire, looking tired and relieved. It opens the eyes and can clearly see the dog and the other asset because there is a light, just a lamp and not a fire, making it easier to see.
A nightmare, then. Terrible sleeping images, chased away by the other asset and the dog.
It reaches up with the flesh arm to pet the dog. To feel that the dog is real like the gigantic halo with the red laser fire is not. To feel the soft fur, the warm fur, the thick fur at the dog’s neck and the shorter fur over the dog’s head and ears. It pets the side of the dog’s face, gets the hand licked and licked and licked.
Real. Here in the other asset’s nest, tangled up in the soft things, with the dog on top of it and the other asset beside it.
Unburned.
“Sorry” it signs, and “thank you” it signs, and it tries to make the skin face smile, but does not succeed. It is still too fresh from the terrible sleeping images, the nightmare, the burning and screaming.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” the other asset says and leans back against the headboard. “Just glad I was able to help.”
It is too. Glad the other asset was able to help.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
It gently urges the dog to get off of it so that it can sit up, too, and when the dog moves, it reaches for the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages and flips to the page with the drawing of the two assets and the sleek metal arch—not a halo—and shows the other asset.
“It was about the scan, then. I thought it might be. What happened in the nightmare?”
It turns to a new page and writes out FIRE and WIPE and then draws the other asset with the crescents behind the ears inside of a fire. The other asset’s mouth is wide open, is a small circle in the face. It writes SCREAM and then DEAD.
This takes a while, but the other asset is quiet and waits for what it has to communicate. The other asset is good at waiting like this.
The other asset is quiet for a moment when it shows the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages. Then, after a long pause, the other asset speaks so softly: “I died, huh?”
It nods.
“And you burned up, too, but didn’t die. You survived, but you were wiped.”
It nods.
“That sounds awful.” The other asset swallows. “Did you get burned like that by HYDRA? Set on fire?”
It nods. Then it draws a hose and a stream of water coming out of it onto a small figure with a star on its arm.
“Oh, well at least they put the fire out,” the other asset says with a voice twisted by bitterness. “And we can make sure you won’t get burned like that ever again.”
It writes on the paper, in a corner that is still full of space: B-RUM
“He’s dead, though. And we won’t let anyone else use a halo. We’ll stop them in their tracks, and the people with the Tesseract energy packs, too.”
It happened once, though. It was burned badly by a halo, lost the vision for many days while the eyes healed. Still has to squint when the lights are too bright. It happened once, and anything that has happened once could always happen again.
“You want to get a snack? Show off in the gym? Just go cuddle on the sofa?”
It wants to do all of those things. It holds up one finger and then three fingers. Those are the things they will do. They will get a nighttime snack in the kitchen and then they will come back here and cuddle on the sofa. It can show off later.
“Right. Let’s go.”
Natasha
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—
She thought they’d be gardening today.
They’re in the room Pepper set aside for it, with all the tables of plants and the work table and the pots stacked up in the corner. It’s brightly sunny outside, which paints the gardening room in a warm glow from the wall of windows and casts gentle shadows throughout the room.
All of that should equal gardening. But instead, Jigsaw has his tablet with him and is arranging plants and various gardening implements again and again, until he’s satisfied with them, and then using his tablet to take pictures.
So far, every table in the room has gotten at least a few before pictures, and he’s halfway through arranging every plant in the room for a set of after pictures.
Natasha herself, and her current project, have been the subject of many pictures as well.
In some of them, she’s looked up and smiled for the camera. In some of them, she’s held up her current plant—not a succulent but an African violet—in all stages of getting it out of the nursery pot it came in and into a beautifully glazed black pot with a simple red ring around the top. And in some of them, she’s merely kept working while he takes picture after picture.
According to Clint at breakfast, there is going to be an Avengers (and therapists) photo album on one of Tony’s personal servers, and they are all welcome to upload photos to it and look at others’ photos. There’s a caption available if they want it, but it isn’t necessary to add anything but the photo itself.
Apparently they should be learning to communicate more with Jigsaw using Jigsaw’s own methods. Drawing and pictures, maybe, or signing more than speaking. Maybe writing things out for him to read.
And Natasha can see how that would be beneficial. Having others use some of the same communication methods could make him feel more like his own methods matter. But she’s never seen him look uncertain about his methods of communication. He’s never appeared to feel like his communication is inferior to theirs. It’s just slower a lot of the time, and a bit hard to decipher at other times.
Clint doesn’t seem to have any difficulties understanding him, but Clint doesn’t go everywhere with Jigsaw, even if it seems like it. Today, for instance, after lunch, Clint stayed in their rooms looking up ways to use hot rocks to massage someone. And possibly other things. It’s been a while since they started in the gardening room and Clint still hasn’t shown up.
The rest of them do sometimes struggle, though, when it comes to understanding Jigsaw. There are just so many gaps in his signing, so many ways to interpret his meaning. It’s easier when he uses the AAC app on his tablet, but even then, if he’s trying to say something complex, it’s easy to get it wrong.
Still, she’s not sure that if the rest of them start drawing pictures or writing things out or signing, it would get easier to understand Jigsaw. It would just make conversations last that much longer since it would take both parties a long time to get their message across instead of just taking one party that long.
But if the speech language pathologist says it will be helpful, she’s willing to take some pictures and upload them to this server of Tony’s.
Natasha looks up to see what Jigsaw’s taking a picture of now. Instead of moving on to the next table, he’s taking pictures of Lucky curled up in a relatively uncluttered part of the room in a giant sunspot.
She smiles. It’s a great subject for a photograph. And his arrangements of the plants, well, she supposes she’ll find out how they came out when he uploads them. Yasmin has shown him how to do it, and they’ll go over it again this afternoon to help him decide what photos he wants to upload. There will probably be hundreds of them that he’s taken, and that’s a lot of photos to look at.
At breakfast alone, he might have taken fifty pictures. He’s bound to have taken at least one hundred of his kitten. And possibly even more of Clint and Lucky.
“Are you going to do any gardening,” she asks, “or just take pictures today?”
He holds up two fingers and grins. Then he comes over and sets the tablet down on the work table. He switches from camera to drawing app and then draws a series of boxes with tiny pictures inside them and numbers beneath them.
From what she can tell, it’s a depiction of each stage of getting the African violet repotted. Beneath all of his numbered boxes, he enters the typed word, INSTRUCTION and smiles.
“That’s a great idea,” Natasha says. “We could make an instruction set for all sorts of things in here. How to pick the right pot, how to repot something, how to trim the roots, how to propagate from cuttings or prune things.”
Jigsaw nods and then draws a sunflower and what looks like a water lily. BRICKS goes next to these two flowers, along with a book.
“Like the instructions for the Legos flowers,” Natasha says.
Jigsaw picks up the tablet and works at it for a while, and Natasha takes the time to finish sweeping up potting soil that spilled beyond the reach of the newspaper spread out beneath her work.
“No words only pictures. Make like scrap book with ribbon and sticker and pretty. Scrap book for Natasha.”
“For—” Natasha swallows her surprise and hopes not too much of it showed. “For me?”
“For Natasha,” Jigsaw confirms with a tap of the Speak tile.
“…Thank you. No one’s ever made a scrapbook for me.”
“Jigsaw first give Natasha scrap book.”
She smiles. Yeah, it is a first. Someone handmaking something for her. Just for her. Specifically for her, and featuring something she’s come to love.
“Thank you,” she says again. And damn it, her voice shakes a little when she says it. She should have switched over to signing to avoid letting emotion sneak into her words.
Jigsaw smiles and gently pets one of the African violet’s velvety leaves. “Beautiful,” he signs. “Soft.”
Natasha is about to respond in kind, to tell him how excited she is to try raising a new type of plant with such pretty pink flowers, when her phone alerts her to a team-wide text. Those are rarely good news, and are frequently urgent, so she brushes her hand off on her gardening smock and reaches for the phone.
It’s from Pepper.
[There’s a extratropical storm due to reach us this weekend. I’m moving our party to tomorrow. More to come on how we can help during the storm.]
Natasha reads the message again. A extratropical storm. Not a hurricane. Just a really windy rainstorm, basically. She thinks. She’s not exactly sure. And it might be something Jigsaw has never encountered. Plus, while the Tower wouldn’t lose power during a bad storm because it’s on its own clean energy grid, the surrounding areas might lose power, and it would be best for the team to be on alert in case there was a need to help evacuate anyone if the storm got bad.
Pepper’s idea of moving the party up makes a lot of sense to her. She wonders how Jigsaw will handle that, though. He’s got the party in red on his calendar for this weekend, Saturday.
“You know the Halloween party we’re having this weekend?”
Jigsaw nods and makes the sign for “calendar.”
“There’s a bad storm coming, maybe as early as this weekend,” she says. “Instead of canceling the party or having it during stormy weather, Pepper is moving the party to tomorrow.”
Jigsaw’s eyes widen.
“Now,” he signs, and then shakes his head with a frown.
Before she can ask for clarification, he’s looking down at his tablet and assembling his words.
“Not now. Wrong word. Soon. So soon. Jigsaw not prepare.”
“What do you need to prepare for?” Natasha asks. “It’s not a costume party or a potluck. You don’t have to dress up as someone else or bring anything but yourself.”
She smiles, but she’s got the sense that nothing she says or does will be comforting.
“Talk Yasmin,” he replies after a minute. “So many operative. Party. Dangerous. Need talk Yasmin, check facts.”
“There should be plenty of time to talk with your therapist.” She hopes that soothes his worry a bit. “You have today’s afternoon session and both of tomorrow’s sessions. The party is in the evening.”
Though, speaking of today’s afternoon session, it’s getting close to three o’clock, and they should probably finish cleaning up and head back to their hallway so he can get ready for that.
“Want to help me clean up and then get to your therapy session?” she asks. “That way you can talk to Yasmin when everything is still fresh.”
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw has a terrible nightmare at the start of this chapter wherein Clint dies and there is a lot of burning and fire. But rest assured, it is just a nightmare.
Chapter 136: Jigsaw | Looks like we’re in for nasty weather
Notes:
Chapter title from “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Please heed the content warnings for this chapter, found in the end notes. Also pardon typos, pls--it's been a rough weekend and I haven't been able to proof this chapter very well between computer issues and other things.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“I can understand why a party might be a frightening concept for you, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says, after it has confessed its many worry thoughts.
There have been parties before, in the captivity times.
There have been drinks—so much alcohol that the operatives’ breath had stung in the eyes, and glass bottles that had been broken and pushed into it, and the boozy breath screaming directions it did not want to follow… act like you like it, you know you like it, spread your legs, don’t make me tell you twice. Like I care if it’s bleeding, that just makes it slicker. Who’s next?
There have been snacks—salty crunchy things pressed into cuts and also foods that could be eaten if it dared to hope that it would be fed… c hex mix is for winners and you’re a loser, eyes on the floor, eyes on me, stop staring at the buffet, you freak, all you’re getting is a stomach full of cum. Who’s next?
There have been activities—it, mostly, pushing into it and beating it and pushing the head into a bucket of water with an apple inside that it does not dare to eat, stringing it up and hitting it with thick sticks, and blindfolding each other and trying to stick knives in it… pin the knife in the asset, haha, pinata of asset, haha, fuck it while it bobs for apples, bonus points if it drowns itself. Who’s next?
So many horrible unpleasant things at parties. Who’s next, who’s next, who’s next?
It has not had to be truly afraid of the party this weekend until now, when the party is suddenly not this weekend anymore, is suddenly so much closer, is tomorrow, is right on top of it. The paper year clock was supposed tell it when to be afraid and when it did not need to be afraid, and it did not lie, but the party moved.
Moved like a living thing, like a threat that comes at it instead of staying still.
“Many of the parties you’ve been to have been opportunities for your abusers to hurt you for hours on end.” Yasmin sounds sad and a little angry—but not at it. “This party, I promise you, is a safe party for you to be at. It is a good party that you should be able to enjoy.”
She does not say that it will be fun, and it appreciates that. It knows that it is meant to be redefining “fun” to mean what everyone in the hive building thinks it means, but if the party was a fun party, regardless of the definition being used, it would refuse to go.
It might still refuse to go. It doesn’t think it will be punished for not going. The hive building is not a place where punishments are doled out. But it knows that the other asset will be disappointed if it does not go to the party.
“Zoe and Caroline and I have all helped Pepper plan the party,” Yasmin says. “There won’t be anything dangerous of frightening there.”
It draws one of the grass people nailed to sticks. It is a “halloween” party, and the grass people nailed to sticks are supposed to be “decorations” for this halloween thing. All of halloween must be awful if people celebrate it by nailing grass people to sticks.
“Those are called ‘scarecrows,’ Jigsaw. They’re meant to be put in gardens to frighten away birds that will eat the corn. And no, there will not be a single scarecrow at the party. Clint and Caroline were insistent that scarecrows were something to avoid entirely.”
Why would anyone want to frighten away birds? Birds are beautiful and make such pretty noises, and are so smart and playful. It stole a bag of seeds for the birds in the original hunting grounds as a reward simply to encourage the pigeons to come to it. It would never want to chase birds away.
Yasmin smiles, unaware of its confusion. “There will be tables of delicious food that you can eat as much of as you want. There will be some new foods there, too—new types of cookie, and muffins, and cupcakes. And lots of candy.”
Food… that it can look at and, more than merely hope for, can actually eat. And as much of it as it wants. But still a table of food.
“There will also be activities, yes, but not a single one of the activities you’ve described to me over the past months, and you will not be the focal point of any of the activities. These are going to be activities for the whole group—including yourself—to participate in as they wish to.”
…Activities… Maybe activities like pass the asset or—
“One thing I know that you will enjoy is making gingerbread houses and decorating them,” Yasmin says. “You really enjoy arts and crafts. I know one of the things I like to do in the winter time is make gingerbread houses. I’ve done it every winter for years. I know you will like it, too.”
It does not know what gingerbread is—maybe a bread made out of ginger, except ginger does not mash the way a banana does—but houses are very big. How will they make a house inside of the hive building? And houses—more than one house. How? And why make a house out of bread? Bread seems like a bad choice for building material, even if it is made out of hard things like ginger.
“And,” Yasmin continues, “you’ll get to take lots and lots of pictures at the party. Pictures of the activities that are planned, and of the foods that are there. There will be many pictures that you can upload to the server, and then the whole team will be able to see them and have fond memories of the party.”
That… that is a good idea. It will have the tablet, and can make many photographs. And if it is making the photographs, it will be busy, occupied, unable to be pushed into because it is not available to be pushed into. It will be too busy making photographs.
Not that it truly believes anyone in the hive building would push into it. No one in the hive building would ever push into anyone—the team that is not a cell is filled with operatives of a different nature than the ones it knew in the captivity times. These operatives do not push into anyone, ever, period.
But it helps to know that it will be too busy to be hurt, even if being hurt is not on the activity list in the first place.
“And if you really want to leave the party at any point, you’ll be able to do so.” Yasmin smiles. “This party is something to help everyone finish winding down after the mission in Siberia, to be relaxing and a way to build friendships in the team. And you’re part of the team. You deserve to relax and build friendships.”
It… It does deserve to relax. An expert said so, just now. But how will a party help it relax if the party itself is so stressful?
“Sometimes,” Yasmin continues, “Halloween parties are what we call ‘costume’ parties. At a costume party, everyone who attends dresses up as someone or something that they aren’t. It can be as simple as wearing a headband with cat ears on it, or as elaborate as sewing the tac gear of your favorite superhero.”
It frowns. Why would someone pretend to be someone they aren’t for a party?
“I like costume parties,” Yasmin says. “There’s a competition to see whose costume is best, and whoever is wearing the best costume—like a kind of disguise—wins a prize. There can be all sorts of categories of prize, too. Best historical figure, most easily recognized costume, best DIY… That’s ‘do it yourself,’ instead of buying a costume.”
It still does not understand. If someone went to a party pretending to be someone else, wouldn’t that cause confusion? What if two people pretended to be the same other person? What if a disguise was so good that no one knew who was who?
Yasmin smiles reassuringly. “This party won’t be a costume party,” she says. “Though there might be some things to wear at the party, like pointy hats or themed shirts that can go on over your other shirt.”
…Pointy hats? The party will be inside, though. Why would they wear hats? Why would the hats be pointy? What is a pointy hat, anyway? Yasmin sounds like she is describing something it should know, but it has never seen a hat that was pointy. And what is a themed shirt? Is that like a hood shirt or a t-shirt or a long-sleeved shirt or a sleeveless shirt? A shirt to wear on top of another shirt… maybe that is what themed means, that it is worn on top of another shirt.
It points at her, and then makes the name signs for the other experts, one by one. On the tablet, it types out the word PARTY and then makes the name signs all go to the tablet, specifically, to the PARTY on the tablet. It asks the question sign.
Yasmin shakes her head, no.
“No, Jigsaw. We won’t be at the party. The party is for you and the rest of the Avengers, not for your support team.”
But it will be able to relax better if Yasmin and Zoe and Caroline are there. It will know for sure that everything is happening the way it is supposed to if it can check in with them during the party.
“We can have a small party later, if you enjoy this bigger party and want to do more activities. I’m sure Caroline could select some nice foods to bring, and Zoe can bring a new game to play. I would be happy to set something like this up for us, if you wanted.”
It… It wishes there could be a small party now, and the big party was later instead. It could practice being at a party that was not horrible. Could learn how to relax at a party. Could build the skills it needs to survive a party before it had to survive a party.
But the party had to move because of a bad storm. Bad weather. But weather happens outside, and the party happens inside, and so that still does not make sense to it. Why would a storm outside mean that anything had to change inside?
It draws on the tablet, a figure under a cloud, rain coming down, even jagged forked lines inside the cloud to make it really clear that this is a storm, this is bad weather, not just wet weather. Then it draws next to that a figure inside of a box with a triangle on top—a house, like the other asset had shown it how to draw. The one figure is outside, in the weather. And the other figure is inside, out of the weather.
It brings the word PARTY over from the previous drawing. It adds the word in between the two figures. The party suddenly pounced on it, moving forward multiple days at once, because of weather, but the weather should not impact the party. It does not like this. It does not understand.
“You want to know why the party had to move?”
It nods. The ballerina woman said there was a storm, but that still does not make sense to it.
“Well, my understanding is there is an extratropical storm due to make landfall this weekend or near to it. Those can be very dangerous, and Pepper wanted to make sure the party wasn’t going to be dangerous.”
It points to the figure inside of the house, safe from the weather.
“Even people inside can be negatively impacted by storms, Jigsaw. Especially severe storms. There could be power outages, broken windows, flooding, fires…”
It does not disbelieve her—she is an expert, and experts know all kinds of things—but there have been lots of storms that it has been outside for, sometimes tied to a tree in a yard like a dog, and it has never been hurt by any of those things.
“Also,” Yasmin says, “we might be perfectly fine inside the Tower, but there are many, many people who won’t be fine this weekend who might need help. If the team is too busy at a party to help people who need it, that wouldn’t be very good.”
…Oh. That actually does make sense to it. The team that is not a cell could help, maybe, somehow. A mission to protect the innocents in the area instead of a mission specifically to eliminate the threats themselves. It likes the sound of that.
Maybe they can skip the party entirely and help the innocents instead.
“This particular kind of storm is one we call a hurricane when it becomes big enough. There will be heavy, heavy rain and incredibly high wind speeds. A lot of people will lose their electricity, and won’t have any lights to see by or any way to keep their food cold or to heat their food up. If they need electricity to survive, they will be in a lot of danger without that electricity.”
It nods. It does not know why or how anyone would need electricity to survive—electricity is painful and dangerous, not life-saving. But this is all coming from an expert, after all. Yasmin would know.
“And some people will lose their access to clean water to drink and bathe with. To cook with. Without clean water, they can get sick and dehydrated. Hurricanes, and even extratropical storms, are very bad news when they make landfall.”
No clean water? But it is supposed to be very, very rainy. That is clean water directly from the sky. People can go outside without their clothes and take showers in the rain like a giant sprinkler in a lawn. They can open their mouths and drink the clean water. They can hold out cups to collect it.
Rain is very clean water. So much cleaner than puddles that have been splashed in or driven through, or the swimming pools with their chemical water that burns the eyes. Rain might even be cleaner than the water that comes out of faucets and things inside of a building.
It must look more interested and less confused, because Yasmin does not pause to address this business of clean water falling out of the sky. Instead, she moves on to tell it more about these hurricane storms. And that is okay. It can find out about the clean water from the sky when the storm is here.
“These hurricanes are caused way out in the ocean,” she says, “when a storm gets big enough that it starts to spin like a pinwheel around itself. In the middle of the swirl, there’s a calm spot we call the eye of the storm.”
A storm with eyes?
Yasmin passes her phone across the coffee table to it, and there is a picture on it of a white swirl with a— with must be a calm spot in the middle of it. An eye. It does kind of look like if there was a pupil or an iris or both inside of the sclera of a storm. If the sclera was jagged around the edges.
It is a pretty storm. It wonders what that looks like for real. Because this can’t be a picture someone made with a camera. No one could get on top of a storm like that and make a picture of the storm from above with water around it—an ocean. Storms are things that happen above, not things that happen below.
Yasmin holds out a hand for the phone, taps and swipes on the phone, and then gives it back with a new picture on it, this one showing a green and blue background with a different swirl on top of it. Still a hurricane, then, and still from above, but still not a real picture.
Are there so many people who want to draw or paint what they imagine a hurricane looks like from above?
“We aren’t due for an actual hurricane,” Yasmin says. “Just a strong storm that comes from the same place as a hurricane. But this may be an ideal time for you to learn about these storms so that you know what to expect.”
It nods. It would like to learn more about them—would like to see one for real, from below. It wants to learn about all kinds of things, especially if Yasmin thinks it would be good to know the information.
There are so many things in the world that it does not know anything about.
Everyone in the hive building knows so much more than it knows. HYDRA made sure that it did not know anything but how to obey and how to kill, how to please its captors when they were willing to be pleased. HYDRA wiped away all of the other things every time it learned them, with the chair with the white electric fire.
That is not fair. HYDRA should not have done that. It did not deserve that. It deserved to keep all of what it learned. HYDRA stole everything from it, even knowledge.
“You’re thinking something interesting, from the looks of it, Jigsaw. Would you like to share?”
It nods and switches to the AAC app on the tablet.
What to say? Does it share its frustration at not knowing things ever when everyone else knows them, even the ones who are not experts? Does it share how that makes it feel, that this is the case?
“HYDRA stole all things,” the tablet says for it. “Wipe it and start over. Jigsaw feel like know nothing. Angry frustrated sad.”
Yasmin nods. “That’s very perceptive of you, Jigsaw. HYDRA took everything they could from you, including any knowledge you gained over the years. I understand why you feel those things. I feel angry for you and sad for you, too. But not frustrated.”
It asks why.
Not why she feels angry and sad for it. Yasmin is a very caring expert. It has learned that she has what is called empathy, where she can feel things that others are feeling even when she does not experience what they are experiencing.
“I don’t feel frustrated, though I understand why you would feel that.” Yasmin smiles. “Instead, I am trying to see it as an opportunity for you to learn all of these things again, but without the danger to yourself, or the expectation of punishment.”
An opportunity?
“One of my favorite things to do is learn. I went to school for a long time learning everything I could. It was one of the best things I’ve done with my life. And here in the Tower, you have the perfect opportunity to learn about anything that interests you.”
It still does not understand exactly. Why is the hive building the perfect place to learn things?
But Yasmin is still speaking.
“Everyone around you knows that you might not have the foundational information about something that interests you, that HYDRA might have stolen that information from you. So everyone takes the time to really explain things to you when you ask. It’s a way they can show you how much they care about you.”
It had not thought of it that way. The hamburger technician’s animal facts and all of the other things that it is learning from the rest of the team that is not a cell… those things mean that they care about it?
“And I promise you, no one thinks that you’re stupid for not knowing something. Even something that is what many would call ‘common knowledge,’” she says.
“Things like where meat comes from, which I understand came as a terrible shock to you. Or that big storms can be dangerous. Many, many people know these kinds of things because they learned them growing up and no one stole the knowledge from them.”
But it does not know them, or did not know them, because HYDRA stole from it.
“Jigsaw grateful experts help Jigsaw learn. But no pain lesson. Only learn.”
Yasmin smiles. “And I’m grateful that you’re so interested in the world around you, and that I have an opportunity to share all of this information with you. Thank you for trusting me, Jigsaw.”
Notes:
Content Warning: Here be recollections of HYDRA Trash Parties, literally. Jigsaw is remembering some very bad things in the beginning of this chapter, and they are more explicitly spelled out than in a lot of previous instances of HTP memories and references. Reader beware.
Chapter 137: Tower | I been doin’ a good job of makin’ ‘em think I’m quite alright
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—
“And you’re sure this thing isn’t a secret costume party?” he asks.
Natasha looks up from her book. “A what?”
“Secret costume party,” he says. “You know, where everyone else knows it’s a costume party and dresses up but no one told you and so you show up without a costume like a loser and everyone in your friend group mocks you for it for years afterward.”
She just stares at him.
Clint can’t tell if the stare is a “no one would do that” stare or a “you poor thing” stare or some other kind of stare. Hell, maybe it’s a worried stare like it’s just now occurred to her that people can be jerks in this specific manner.
But he can hear his community college friends laughing still, calling him “no-costume Clint,” egging him on about how stupid he was not to realize that any party in October was obviously going to have a costume element to it.
And he can hear the laughter the next year, too, when he was the only one to dress up for a party in early October and everyone got on his case for it not being Halloween yet.
Fuck costume parties, and fake costume parties, and parties in October.
It’s not his fault he didn’t go to any parties when he was a little kid and had parents who wouldn’t bring him, or that he didn’t go to any parties when he was with the circus and had to work or grift or train with Trickshot, or that he was too old to really fit into the party culture at the community college after that when parties finally became something he could go to.
The only good party is a pizza party, and even then, the entire focus of the party has to be on the pizza or it’s still no good. He can’t believe he agreed to this Halloween party of Pepper’s. He can’t believe he has to go to it. He’s too old to go to parties. They all are.
And he can’t believe it’s only occurring to him now that the damn party is twenty-four hours away, that he hates parties after all, and doesn’t want to go to this one.
“Are you okay, Clint?” Natasha finally asks, putting a piece of paper in her book and setting the book aside. “This is a far cry from your earlier tune about the party.”
“Earlier, it was further away.” He shrugs. “I just don’t have a lot of good party experiences, is all. People laughed at me a lot, and not because I was being funny.”
“Well you know it won’t be like that, though,” she says. “For one, everyone knows each other pretty well and gets along even better. For another, everyone’s going to be trying to make sure it’s a good party for Jigsaw.”
That’s true. It’ll be Jigsaw’s first party, at least that he remembers. Though actually, given the whole Great Depression and WWII thing, it might actually just be the first party he’s ever, ever been to. Did they even have parties in the Great Depression, or were people too greatly depressed?
“And there aren’t going to be costumes,” Natasha adds. “Pepper said so. Whether or not Stark dresses up won’t change the fact that the rest of us won’t be dressing up.”
Oh, and he might. Stark would actually enjoy being the focus of the party as the only one to dress up, though, so it’s not like that would make for a less enjoyable party.
“No costumes,” Clint says. “No weird games that no one understands the point of but where everyone gets mad at you anyway for having great aim. Just all of us hanging out and doing something with gingerbread houses.”
“That’s right. And there’ll be lots of good food. If you want to just sit in a corner and eat pizza all night, I’m sure no one would mind. Except Jigsaw.”
Oh, right, “except Jigsaw.” Way to make it vitally important that he not just sit in a corner and eat pizza all night.
“I’m sorry, ‘Tasha,” he says. “I’m just getting all weird about it now and it didn’t bother me before. I don’t even know why. We have a good group here. Pepper’s great at planning things. The public isn’t involved, so no one can come blow a hole in our roof again or take JARVIS and the power offline with a Tesseract bomb thing.”
She smiles. “To be honest, I haven’t been to many parties as myself. It’ll be interesting to see what this one is like. And you know, Jigsaw had similar jitters earlier in the gardening room when I told him that the party was moved up.”
“We’re the same as like that,” Clint mutters. “Neurotic about having fun.”
But he needs to focus now. It’s nearly the time when Jigsaw is due back to their rooms from his therapy appointment, and if he was jittery about the party just two hours ago, Clint doesn’t want to risk undoing whatever calming measures Yasmin put in place. If he’s calmly looking forward to the party, chances are high but not guaranteed that Jigsaw will pick that up and go with it.
But if he’s visibly or vocally upset about the party… Well, Jigsaw will definitely pick that up. Clint isn’t going to be the one who ruins this party for his partner.
Hopefully, he also won’t be the one who ruins the party for himself.
And double hopefully, there just plain won’t be any ruining of the party. How bad could it be?
Natasha
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
Thankfully, Clint is over his pre-party freakout about costumes and being the butt of the party-goers’ jokes by the time Jigsaw shows up after his therapy session.
And thankfully, talking it over with Yasmin seems to have put Jigsaw in a better mood than the borderline panic he’d been experiencing in the gardening room on learning that the party was moving up to tomorrow evening.
Not for the first time, Natasha wonders how much better off Clint would be if he would agree to see a therapist for things. And not even the Loki thing anymore. Clint has a lot of baggage from the decades he’s been alive, ranging from dead pets and parents, to abusive parental figures and a childhood life of crime, all the way to—yes—the assorted S.H.I.E.L.D. missions and the mind control by Loki.
Natasha’s already tackled her own traumas via an assortment of self-help books and books on trauma, so she doesn’t need therapy. But Clint has avoided his trauma this whole time, and therapy would do him good.
And no, she’s not just being hypocritical and self-unaware about that. Maybe an actual therapist like Yasmin would disagree with her, but she’s fine.
But her exploration of trauma for her own sake has given her a few tools that she can use to help Clint through his own issues, and that in turn has helped her hone her trauma skills. Having someone to practice on makes her that much more capable of helping herself.
“Feeling better about the party?” Natasha asks after Jigsaw has finished greeting Alpine and cuddling the kitten to his face.
He nods and comes to sit close to Clint on the sofa before drawing a spiral on the tablet with an eye in the middle of it, complete with eyelids and eyelashes. Then he shows her and Clint the image and signs that HYDRA stole it from him.
Natasha is about to ask what it was that HYDRA stole from him when Clint does that for her.
“How did HYDRA steal hurricanes from you?” Clint asks. “That’s a hurricane, right? With the whole eye of the storm thing?”
Jigsaw nods. Then he shows them both images that must be from his therapy session. A figure in a rainstorm with lightning, a figure in a house, and then a calendar with a red X at the end of a week and a red circle around Wednesday in the middle of that week.
“You talked with Yasmin about the storm that’s coming and how the party needed to move up, and…” Clint shrugs. “I’m still not getting how HYDRA is involved. They don’t control the weather last I checked. At least I hope not.”
Jigsaw shakes his head and switches to the AAC app. After a few minutes, he has his words lined up: “Common knowledge. HYDRA steal common knowledge Jigsaw. Jigsaw no common knowledge now. Jigsaw need learn again.”
She’s glad he’s been referring to himself by name more often. It bodes well for the eventual push into personhood that surely Yasmin is counting down the days on.
“I’m not sure how common that knowledge is. I didn’t know about hurricanes,” Natasha says. “When I was in the Red Room, I’d never heard of a hurricane. That was something I learned about when I came to the States and lived where they happened.”
“I knew about them growing up, kind of,” Clint says with a shrug. “I used to wish a hurricane would come land a house on my dad because I knew about tornadoes and thought hurricanes sounded even meaner.”
Well, so much for common knowledge, Natasha thinks. It turns out common knowledge depends entirely on what is common in the surroundings and how creative the child is. And she knows full well that there are very few who know more about how to kill people than the three of them in this room. The ins and outs of murder aren’t common knowledge except where they are common knowledge.
“No one would argue that HYDRA didn’t steal a lot of knowledge from you, Jigsaw,” Natasha says. “But that doesn’t mean you would automatically have known about extratropical storms without HYDRA’s interference.”
Which sounds suspiciously like “HYDRA is bad but you can’t blame them for everything,” which has a connotation she definitely doesn’t mean to convey even if it’s a factually correct statement.
“After all, Clint and I hadn’t known about them—not really—when we were younger. And HYDRA didn’t screw us over until we were older and in S.H.I.E.L.D.”
Jigsaw nods thoughtfully and then spends a bit more time at his tablet. Then: “HYDRA steal all of things but not this thing.”
“Right.”
“Red Room steal Natasha?” Jigsaw asks.
Natasha smiles, though it isn’t a happy smile. “The Red Room stole me from my family when I was a little girl and denied me a childhood. They trained me to be a killer and a spy, and they withheld warmth and kindness. So yes, they stole things. But not my memories.”
Jigsaw considers that for a moment. Maybe he’s seeing the similarities there, or maybe he’s thinking something else. Natasha can’t always read him clearly, so she can’t be sure.
“Red Room target. After HYDRA, kill all Red Room.”
Now her smile is a full and genuine one. “I’m not sure how much of the Red Room is still in operation. Clint and I took out all of my handlers.”
Jigsaw’s eyes light up with impressed glee, and Natasha realizes that he has probably gotten the wrong impression, might think that they tore the handlers up into pieces or otherwise brutally slaughtered the lot of them.
“We made their lives miserable,” she continues, hoping to correct the misunderstanding. “Some of them ended up in prison for the rest of their lives. Some of them lost everything they’d made for themselves and were disgraced and outcast. And yes, some of them died horribly, but indirectly.”
He frowns and taps a few times on his tablet. “Last word?”
“Meaning, we might have set the building on fire,” Clint says, “but we didn’t block off all the escape routes. He could have gotten out if he’d been awake or any less panicked by the fire. That kind of thing.”
Natasha nods. “Setting up a situation in which the handler would die, but not killing the handler with our own hands and weapons. It’s not a great distinction, and the ledger still runs red. But it’s a step removed from carving them up with knives.”
“No more Red Room?”
“I’m sure there are still some vestiges of the Red Room left that we didn’t get to,” she says. “Parts of the organization I didn’t know about when I escaped and went rogue. But the branches I was familiar with have been cut away.”
Jigsaw flashes her a smile and a thumbs up.
“Thanks.”
Natasha wonders why a simple thumbs up from Jigsaw makes her insides feel so warm and accomplished. It isn’t like she sought out his approval, after all. If anything, she’d spent the decade or so after defecting being actively afraid that he was dogging her steps and would appear from the shadows to end her.
But the approval is nice, and the warm feeling inside is there all the same. She might as well enjoy it.
Pepper
—New York City | Tuesday 23 October 2012 | 10:15 p.m.—
Pepper finishes her chamomile tea and sets the teacup aside to take to the kitchen tomorrow. It’s not the entirety of her sleep routine, the chamomile. But it’s an integral part of things. A hot beverage, not too big, to help settle her down and send her body and mind the signal that it is time to begin wrapping up for the evening.
No new projects started, no complicated thoughts entertained, and certainly no rumination allowed.
And ideally, no screens. JARVIS will wake her in the morning in plenty of time to start her day if she does not wake up on her own. There is no need to check her email one last time because JARVIS will tell her if anything critical has happened that must be addressed before the morning.
Just as she can relax about anything that comes up in the middle of the night—JARVIS will monitor the situation and alert her if needed. If he doesn’t deem it worth the interrupted sleep, then it probably isn’t. She trusts his judgment.
So, really, all should be well for the evening. She’s had her evening shower, her evening tea, her evening snack to keep her blood sugar stable through the night and ensure that she doesn’t wake up ravenous and cranky in the morning.
She needs everything to line up perfectly tonight so that she can have an ideal day tomorrow. She can’t afford for things to go sideways. She needs to be on top of her game in all ways, including well-rested.
Because tomorrow… Tomorrow she will spend time around Jigsaw for the first time since the man brutally murdered a HYDRA construction worker by slamming a hammer into his head and torso until there was blood on every surface including the ceiling. And what’s more, she’ll be spending up to five hours around Jigsaw, which is a lot of time, even without the hammer business that came before.
She’s been avoiding him for months now, talking with her therapist about the murder and about the murderer in oblique terms, and spending time with Jigsaw’s therapists to get a sense of the way someone can know about all of this violence and still be a well-adjusted person.
Yasmin and Zoe are definitely in the know. They’re aware of what Jigsaw has done over the years in captivity and the months out of it. They’re aware of what has been done to Jigsaw in all that time, too. And they are perfectly pleasant to be around, without holding any fringe views that might make them more tolerant of the whole horrible situation.
Pepper knows only some of the picture, and what she knows is enough to give her the occasional nightmare. But she’s determined to make this work. So Jigsaw killed a man in front of her. A man she’d been thinking of as a contractor and not as a terrorist. If anything, Jigsaw is the one who sparked terror in that situation.
But this party will be different. There won’t be any HYDRA agents at the party for Jigsaw to violently dispatch. It will just be the Avengers themselves and her. Catering will be setting up the food and then leaving the area before any of the Avengers arrive. And the activity list has been carefully curated to avoid weapons—there won’t even be pumpkin carving despite the theme of the party and Tony’s many complaints in the last few weeks about the lack of proper holiday spirit.
There won’t be scarecrows, either, which she’s been informed are frightening to Jigsaw. Imagine being such a fearsome and capable killer and being afraid of a scarecrow. She’s glad, in a way, that he’s afraid of them. It makes him more human to her, less of a fearsome bloodstained figure with a hammer in his hand and rage in his eyes.
And that’s what this party is about. Not about finding things for him to be afraid of or anything cruel like that, but about humanizing him. When he first arrived, she’d been able to see past his demeanor and actions as the D.C. Slasher and Red Star Killer because she’d known he was Bucky Barnes, that he’d been tortured for decades, that he needed help, not fear.
And she is determined to find that place again. Not the Bucky Barnes place, since he has chosen to be Jigsaw instead, but the place where she has the ability to support him and not fear him.
Because the truth of his circumstances hasn’t changed just because she saw him murder someone. He isn’t any less tortured, he isn’t any less kind to animals, he isn’t any less in need of help and support. Understanding.
The only thing that has changed is her own perception of him.
And after months of planning, she’s finally on the cusp of a party where she will be able—she hopes—to see the man himself, to observe the kindness and curiosity that Tony has told her about, to get to know him a little, to interact and share some of herself and her interests so that they can move forward.
Or so that she can move forward.
She suspects he’s already well past the hammer incident. He might not even remember the hammer incident.
Pepper opens the closet to get her nightgown out, and is confronted with the Batman costume of Tony’s that she’d hidden in the bottom of a dresser drawer where she’d hoped Tony wouldn’t be able to find it.
She sighs.
Tony is convinced that no Halloween party can be without a costume element, despite her explaining the need for this to be a mild party without anything that would confuse or potentially upset Jigsaw. Even if he’s the only one there dressing up, he wants to do it.
On the one hand, he’s not trying to dress up as the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz. So it could be much worse. On the other hand, she’s tired of this argument and it’s probably not the hill to die on.
But still, she takes the costume down off the hanger and bundles it up to stash it back out of sight.
“Ma’am,” JARVIS murmurs into the room, “this is Sir’s second Batman costume. I’m afraid Sir has several more, were this costume to disappear.”
Oh for—
“Thanks for letting me know, JARVIS.”
“Certainly, Ma’am.”
She hangs the costume back up. Fine. He’ll win this battle. Let him come to the party as Batman, and let him explain Batman to Jigsaw.
But if she gives up on this battle, she is winning the other major point of contention he has about the party: there will be no alcohol at this party.
Tony is welcome to pregame all he likes. She won’t stop him from drinking before the party. Couldn’t stop him if she tried. And she’s not a hypocrite to that extent, anyway—she’ll be pregaming, too, only with a bit of Xanax. She has no room to talk about needing a little something to handle a social engagement like this one.
But while he can pregame to his heart’s content, she draws the line at him bringing booze to the party. The absolute last thing this party needs is for Tony to arrive tipsy for the social lubrication and then proceed to get utterly sloshed over the course of the evening. A drunk Tony is something no one should have to put up with, least of all Jigsaw.
Tony is at his best when he’s completely sober and able to make use of his intelligence to make snap decisions that are actually sound and kind. And Jigsaw will probably need him to be at his kindest and most accommodating if he’s also going to be Batman for the event.
Notes:
AO3 apparently thinks I'm a spam bot when I try to answer comments (🤪), so apologies to those of you who don't have replies yet. I can only do a few at a time before I get blocked. But know that I love and appreciate each and every comment that comes my way.
Chapter 138: Tower | Jack-o-lantern, jack-o-lantern, shining bright
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Jack-o-lantern Song” by Little Blue Globe Band.
Have a slightly early chapter! Note that I haven't given this a proper, thorough edit before posting, because it's after 2 AM and I can hardly keep my eyes open. So please excuse any typos and the like. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Pepper
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—
The catering is just getting set up when she gets out of her last meeting of the day and heads up to the common room they’ve set aside for the party. And that’s good. They should be finished and out of the area by the time Jigsaw arrives. It’s fine if someone else happens to encounter the catering staff, but she doesn’t want Jigsaw to see anyone who isn’t a familiar face—in a good way.
No hammer incidents today. Or ladle incidents, as the case may be. She doesn’t doubt for a second that Jigsaw could brutally murder someone with a ladle swiped from a punch bowl. And she’s not tempting fate.
JARVIS has been watching the entire process and all of the catering staff were vetted carefully. They prepared all of the food and beverages in Stark Industries kitchens under JARVIS’s keen eyes, and Stark Industries grocery runners they trust brought the ingredients in. Short of having a taster on hand to check for poison, things have been done as cautiously as she can manage.
Pepper does a quick glance through the checklist to ensure that everything is as fully prepared as it can be for this party. All of the gingerbread panels are in order, all of the bowls of royal icing for assembly and assorted candies for decoration are in place.
The decorations for the common room itself are nearly complete as well.
A cluster of tables for the haunted gingerbread houses is decked out in orange and purple tablecloths with adorable ghost, jack-o-lantern, and candy corn coasters scattered about to make it more festive. These should be safe. The ghosts are smiling and happy, the jack-o-lanterns silly and goofy rather than fearsome, the candy corn just candy corn.
There is a fog machine in a corner of the room opposite from the buffet setup that isn’t turned on yet but will lend a spooky atmosphere without being frightening—she hopes. No one said anything about fog being a trigger for Jigsaw.
There will be spooky music playing, but kid-friendly spooky music. She has listened to the music several times over the past month or so, curating a playlist that is more lighthearted than truly spooky. And while she would ordinarily play such classics as the Monster Mash, there’s a chance Jigsaw won’t understand the lyrics in the light they’re meant to be understood—graveyard smash, indeed.
Plus, she has to admit to a certain amount of unknowns here. What if he’s heard a song before in an unpleasant or triggering situation? What if the song brings up awful memories for him? She’s reasonably sure HYDRA wouldn’t have played wordless children’s Halloween music around him, but can she be so sure he wouldn’t have heard actual songs?
Unless they made him shoot up a child’s Halloween party in the last few years, she supposes. But even then, she’s assuming ambient music without lyrics will be far harder to remember from a “mission” than something with words he could recall.
Far safer than even the children’s Halloween music, though, are the plush Halloween-themed cushions she’s picked out for the sofas and chairs, the finger foods that are being set up, the beverages on the beverage table, the desserts on the dessert table. There are sandwiches, fruit and vegetable platters, nuts and cheeses, chips, sweet breads and rolls, bowls of candy corn and other Halloween staples, muffins, cookies…
And she’s particularly proud of the haunted gingerbread house stations with their stacks of gingerbread panels in all the standard sizes and shapes they’ll need. Festive bowls are scattered around the cluster of tables in orange and black, holding a variety of candies and sprinkles ideal for use as roof shingles, cobblestones, window treatments, latticework, shrubberies, signs—anything at all one could imagine for a gingerbread house, but in Halloween colors. She’s even got wads of cotton candy for cobwebs.
There are tweezers for those who want to carefully place each sprinkle and spoons for those who want to just dump things on. And empty bowls for mixing food coloring with the royal icing. Miniature piping bags with a variety of miniature nozzles. Spatulas large and small. Toothpicks. No knives. Really, the spatulas themselves are enough of a risk in the bladed weapon department, and Jigsaw could probably kill someone with a single toothpick, too.
Pepper takes a deep breath and lets it out for a count of seven. Her Xanax is taking a while to kick in.
It has taken almost as much planning and been almost as much of a logistical nightmare putting this party together as it has been putting the finishing touches on last year’s New Year gala, but Pepper has not come this far in life by being a quitter.
And there is no danger here. It’s not even a guarantee that Jigsaw, so aptly named, will be here for the party. It’s not mandatory, after all. No one will drag him here against his will. And if he is here, he’ll be here with the rest of the team.
Clint has a way with him that should ensure that nothing turns bloody or frightening, that Jigsaw doesn’t spook at the decorations or get the wrong idea about anything. And Natasha will be here. If anyone could turn a bowl of sprinkles into a weapon to keep Jigsaw from killing anyone, Natasha is that person. And Steve is just as strong and fast as Jigsaw, except when caught by surprise in a construction zone.
But ultimately, there should be nothing to worry about.
This is a party for a team that’s been incredibly stressed out in the last month or so—really, in the last several months, since they first became a team—and they need this to help relax and recharge.
That, and they need this for other reasons, for personal reasons.
She doubts Natasha or Clint have had much opportunity to build gingerbread houses, though they’ve definitely seen them around Christmas time. Thor isn’t here, but if he was, well, he’s probably never heard of a gingerbread house. Steve, coming out of the Great Depression and then a World War, has he ever seen one of these and thought it would be nice if he could participate? He’s such an artistic soul; surely he’d enjoy this activity.
So few of them have had something like this to look forward to in their lives.
Even Tony. Lord knows Tony hasn’t had much by way of cheerful holiday tradition that didn’t involve a full press junket in attendance trying to corner him on some subject or other. His parents might have thrown parties, but they’d have been almost political in nature. And he had been an outcast trying to fit in by drinking excessively at all the parties he’s been at since his parents died.
And since these Avengers—these friends of circumstance become friends indeed—have gathered and remained a team after the Chitauri attack… Well, family traditions have to start somewhere, and this is a good tradition for what is increasingly becoming a good family.
Maybe she can get over her unease around Jigsaw and rejoin that family, coming to meals with the team, enjoying time with Natasha again without the fear that Jigsaw will join them, even gardening in her gardening room with Natasha—and yes, maybe also with Jigsaw.
Anything is possible, after all. Once she can reorient herself where Jigsaw is concerned, she might enjoy his company quite a bit.
She hopes so.
She’d like very much to be able to spend time with all of the team, together and individually. She presents such an unflappable, well-assembled face to the world, but the truth is she’s lonely. And this is a group of interesting people. What’s more, none of them are beholden to her or coworkers with her. So there can be actual friendships without the specter of employment issues hanging overhead.
Yasmin
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 4:45 p.m.—
Jigsaw has been remarkably calm about the Halloween party taking place right after their session concludes. Particularly given how anxious he’d been about it yesterday afternoon.
She attributes a good deal of the calmness to the fact that she’s set him up with a crafting experience that can take up his entire attention and get him into the spirit of the occasion—Jigsaw has carved two jack-o-lanterns in the therapy room this afternoon.
Yasmin has carved one as well, which will stay in the therapy room. Jigsaw’s two will go with him to his room and to Natasha’s room, respectively.
And the seeds are something that she’s hoping the team might roast. Not tonight, certainly, but perhaps tomorrow. She’s explained how they are edible and delicious when roasted, and how they can be seasoned in all kinds of ways to make them unique.
Yasmin puts one of the electric tealight candles inside of her jack-o-lantern. She’d carved a very simple, very traditional design for hers, just a pair of triangle eyes and a toothy grin. So she’s been done with hers for a while now, and has been watching Jigsaw put the finishing touches on his two.
The first is a tall pumpkin, and he had chosen a traditional design for it from the samples she’d shown him. His first pumpkin’s eyes are oval shapes with intact irises at the bottom and just the sclera cut out above them. There’s a nose as well, just a cut-out triangle, and a mouth that has three teeth, no more.
And after he’d gotten the taste for carving pumpkins, he’d chosen a much more intricate pattern for his second pumpkin, one of a witch on a broom with a cat behind her flying in front of a full moon. This one he’s still working on, using the crafting tools she’d provided and referencing the pattern on her laptop screen with the notes about where to cut in which order and what to leave intact.
She is almost certain he chose this pattern because of the cat on the back of the witch’s broom, because he had not understood anything else about the image.
Yasmin watches as he works, smiling at the sight of Jigsaw sitting cross-legged on the ground with his pumpkin in his lap, industriously picking away slivers of pumpkin with the thinnest of the crafting knives, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.
Lucky is on the sofa behind him, curled up comfortably and half asleep with his head on his paws, tail flicking idly back and forth.
She does understand why this wasn’t an activity Pepper felt comfortable including in her party this evening. The party is only partly for the team and Jigsaw, after all, and the original intent of the party was to find a way to reconnect with the idea of Jigsaw as a non-threat—handing the man a set of carving knives and sending him out to hack up pumpkins would have defeated the purpose in Pepper’s eyes.
But at the same time, Yasmin has enjoyed every minute of this session, from presenting Jigsaw with the half-dozen pumpkins to choose from, to explaining the concept and showing him pictures of various finished products, to helping him select the right design for the right shape and size of pumpkin, to sitting on the floor with him and actually carving the pumpkins.
She imagines the entire team would have enjoyed pumpkin carving as well if it had been on the party activities list. Even Clint, who strikes her as not wanting to acknowledge his artistic side.
And she’s sure there’d be a lot of variety in the resulting jack-o-lanterns. It would make for an ideal photo shoot, matching Avenger with jack-o-lantern and humanizing the team that way. Steve does have other ways to humanize the team on his Twitter account, but what could be more natural or fun—or timely—than carving pumpkins as a team?
But Yasmin doesn’t have anything to do or say about Steve’s foray onto Twitter. As long as it doesn’t impact Jigsaw, Steve can post whatever he’d like to Twitter. She just thinks that it would be a good idea to have an official Avengers page somewhere with a bit of the human element of the team on display.
This party would be an ideal opportunity to get some of that human element out there, but she knows that isn’t the party’s actual purpose. And there is plenty of time for advertising the team’s heart to the public, if that’s even something that the team decides it wants to do.
Jigsaw turns his second pumpkin around to face her, and he beams happily, clearly satisfied with his results.
“That’s amazing, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says. “So many details, and all carved in such a short amount of time.”
She flips the switch on the third of the electric tealight candles and hands it to him to put inside of his second pumpkin.
“Are you ready to see them glow?” she asks.
Jigsaw nods excitedly and gently deposits the tealight inside his pumpkin before gingerly putting the top back on the pumpkin.
“I am, too. I’m really looking forward to this. It’s one of my favorite things about this holiday.”
Yasmin sets the jack-o-lantern beside the other two on the coffee table, and then asks JARVIS to turn off the lights so that neither she nor Jigsaw have to get up off the floor where they’ve settled.
The lights don’t turn off suddenly, but instead slowly dim until she and Jigsaw are left in near-complete darkness, courtesy of the blackout curtains she’d pulled earlier in their session in preparation for this moment.
And there in the darkness, on the coffee table, the electric tealights flicker merrily inside their jack-o-lanterns, and the designs they’ve chosen for the three pumpkins light up the room in stark contrast to the darkness around the pumpkins.
Yasmin takes a picture of the three jack-o-lanterns together, and then of each one by itself. Then she takes a picture of Jigsaw holding each of his jack-o-lanterns, once with the lights off and once with the lights on.
And she obliges him when he wants to take a picture of her with her own jack-o-lantern, too. He’s become familiar with the camera app on his tablet, she sees, just in time for the party where he might take many pictures to be uploaded to the Avengers photo album on Tony’s server.
She hopes some of the pictures they’re taking now manage to make their way onto the server as well.
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
“Wow,” Clint says as he opens the door to find Jigsaw standing there in the hallways with his arms full of jack-o-lanterns and his tablet, with Lucky at his heels.
He stands back so that his partner can come in, careful to leave enough room for Lucky to do his customary entry without bumping Jigsaw. Clint is betting that Jigsaw enjoys carving pretty much everything up enough that he wouldn’t mind having to recreate one of the jack-o-lanterns if it got bumped out of his arms and shattered on the floor, but he doesn’t want it to come to that.
Clint watches as Jigsaw deposits the pumpkins one after the other onto the coffee table, careful not to let the tablet pinned under an arm fall to the floor in the process.
Alpine shimmies down the cat tree to investigate, even though she can’t get onto the coffee table to actually see what it is that smells. The inaccessibility of the jack-o-lanterns doesn’t stop her little pink nose from twitching inquisitively, though, and she stands on her hind legs, trying in vain to get a glimpse.
The one jack-o-lantern is a tall, goofy one, simplistic but still more complicated than Clint is willing to bet he could accomplish, himself. The other one… that one is like a work of art. A silhouette of a witch on a broom in front of a moon, with a little cat on the end of her broom, and little carved-out bats around the moon, too. Clint’s not even sure how to make a cut that small in a pumpkin.
“So I guess you and Yasmin were busy this afternoon,” Clint says. “Is this hers and yours, or are these both yours?”
Jigsaw holds up two fingers, and then beams at him. He turns the lights off in the living room, which doesn’t do much to cast the place in darkness at this time of day, but does dim the light enough that the glow of a pair of flickering tealight candles can be seen.
Then the lights go back up and Clint finds himself sitting on the sofa beside Jigsaw looking at a slideshow on Jigsaw’s tablet while Jigsaw holds Alpine up to each of the pumpkins in turn to sniff them to her heart’s content.
There are six pumpkins in the therapy room on the tablet, all different sizes and shapes. Then there are big knives for cutting open lids on the top of the pumpkins that were selected for carving, and heavy-duty ice cream scoops for scraping out seeds. A massive communal pile of pumpkin guts on newspapers on the floor.
More knives, these ones looking more like a scalpel set than anything else. And there are pictures of Yasmin carving a pumpkin with a medium knife, and of Jigsaw carving the tall pumpkin, also with a medium knife. Then it’s all Jigsaw for a while, looking… Looking so invested in the carving that he doesn’t seem to notice Yasmin taking pictures of him hard at work.
Clint finds his cheeks warming up as he watches the rest of the slideshow. There’s an earnest intensity to Jigsaw’s expression, and also an innocence to it that seems at odds with the fact of his using a scalpel to carve something up.
He wonders… is this kind of what Jigsaw looked like when he was slicing his targets up? Carving stars and not witches on brooms with their cats in front of the moon. Did he have this kind of eager and attentive gleam in his eye when he was torturing HYDRA scum? Did he stick his tongue out in concentration to ensure that his victims were cut just right?
Probably not. Clint hopes not, in any case. He’d like to think that carving a pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern is a purely creative process and not tarnished by destruction the way the other carving actions would have been. Both are artistic endeavors, sure, but not overly similar beyond that.
And there are the three jack-o-lanterns in a fully dark room, lit up in all their glory, followed by individual portraits and closeups.
Clint is suitably impressed by the time the slide show comes back around to the uncarved pumpkins waiting to be chosen.
“Wow, again. And all that in just the two hours.”
He’s pretty sure it would take him two whole hours to carve just one jack-o-lantern, and that it would be a shitty jack-o-lantern at that, and that he’d manage to cut himself no fewer than four times in the process. But he’d gladly spend hours watching Jigsaw carve some pumpkins if he got to just sit back and enjoy the show.
“So did you talk about anything while carving pumpkins, or was it just a relaxing time making jack-o-lanterns?”
Jigsaw trades him kitten for tablet and opens up the AAC app to compose an answer.
“Yasmin say all about pumpkin into face. Favorite part Halloween is pumpkin face. Can eat seed inside pumpkin too. Roast oven. Save seed inside pumpkin and roast tomorrow. Ask Sam because Sam know. Bread from pumpkin too. So many bread. Everything bread.”
“So you’re thinking Wilson will help you roast up some of the pumpkin seeds, huh?” Clint asks.
Better to focus on the pumpkin seeds, because he’s not putting pumpkin bread in his mouth, no way, no how. There is a limit on the healthiness of the bread he eats, and “made out of vegetables” is his limit.
Jigsaw merely nods. “Sam know all of things in kitchen. Will help roast seed inside pumpkin.”
Clint nods. “Well, more power to you guys. I’m sure it’ll taste great.”
There’s a knock at the door, and he calls that it’s open just as Natasha is in fact opening the door. She’s changed into leggings and a loose orange top with a picture of a black cat on it, and she’s put her hair up in a high ponytail.
Clint wonders if he should change for this thing, too, or if his current jeans and a t-shirt look is good enough. He’s probably fine. He’s a guy. Guys don’t have to look cute to go to parties. And Jigsaw isn’t going to change from his yoga pants in all likelihood.
“Cute shirt,” Clint says. “Didn’t know you had that one.”
“It’s the package I was waiting for the other day,” she says. “Just in case anyone takes pictures at the party. It’s not a costume, but it’s festive.”
Jigsaw excitedly waves her closer to see his pumpkins and points to the cat on the back of the witch’s broom and then to her shirt.
“You made that jack-o-lantern?” Natasha asks. “It’s really impressive.”
Jigsaw signs that Natasha’s shirt and the pumpkin are the same as, and then adds “cat” for clarity.
“Yep,” Natasha says. “Two cats, just like Alpine, except one’s a pumpkin and one’s a shirt. Are you ready to go to the party?”
Jigsaw hesitates, but then nods. He signs that it will be safe with them there at the party with him, that the party is neither fun nor dangerous.
Then he looks at Lucky and Alpine and adds that the animals will be safer here in the room than at the party.
“I don’t know about safe versus unsafe,” Clint says. “I just figure they probably shouldn’t be at the party. People might drop chocolate or grapes or things on the floor by accident and stuff.”
Jigsaw nods. He gives his witch-and-cat jack-o-lantern a fond pat on its lid and then squares his shoulders, not entirely unlike getting ready to face a firing squad.
“It’ll be good,” Natasha reassures him. “You’ll see.”
Notes:
I just now noticed--the story has finally reached the 500k-word range. ^_^
Chapter 139: Tower | I’m comin’ up, so you better get this party started
Notes:
Chapter title from “Get The Party Started” by P!nk.
I've fallen behind in my comment replies again, but I'll try to catch up soon! Thank you for all of them. I read your comments when I feel down and they pick me back up. ^_^
Chapter Text
Tony
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
“Sir, I suggest strongly that your bat belt not contain a flask of Everclear.”
Tony scoffs and slides the flask into the perfect booze holster on the costume’s belt.
Did he redesign the bat belt on this costume to fit better, look better, and hold some fun things to help make this party manageable? Yes. But then, he also redesigned the cowl itself, so that it was more comfortable and looked more like actual Batman and less like a store bought cosplay costume.
It’s not a waste of resources if it makes him look good and feel comfortable.
“I’m not going to spike everyone’s punch, J,” Tony insists. “Just my own.”
He doesn’t want to see Jigsaw with fewer inhibitions than usual, if Jigsaw can even feel the effects of alcohol—legend has it Rogers doesn’t, so the booze might be wasted on Jigsaw, too. But if it wasn’t wasted on him, if it loosened anything up for Jigglypuff, Tony’s kind of worried about what that would look like.
And he doesn’t want to waste the booze on Spangles or his science buddy, so that leaves only Nit-Nat (probably scarier when drunk), Bartonio (no sense in making the Jigsaw whisperer less capable), Junior Birdman (no sense in pissing off Redwing’s guardian and risking that relationship), and Pepper (who would kill him if he spiked the communal punch).
Yeah, of all of them, he’s the only one who’d benefit from a splash of Everclear in their punch, and he’s not going to pour out a drop for anyone else.
“Might I remind you that Ms Potts specifically forbade alcoholic beverages at this event, Sir?”
Tony scoffs again. “Please. She also said no costumes, but we all know it’s a Halloween party, and that means costumes. Anyway, what kind of party doesn’t have anything alcoholic on the menu? Even fundraising galas have champagne.”
“I believe her reasoning is related to Jigsaw’s prior experiences and a desire to avoid triggering any trauma responses,” JARVIS says.
And that, Tony doesn’t have an answer to. On the one hand, what parties would the Jigster even have been to in his remembered history? How’s he going to have a trauma response to a bit of boozy punch if he’s never had punch or booze or boozy punch? On the other hand, if there is a trauma response, Tony’s going to feel horrible if his boozy punch is the trigger for it.
Tony fingers the flask on his belt. It’s not a lot of alcohol, though it’s Everclear and a little of that goes a long way. It’s definitely enough to get him through a party with whatever stupid party activities there are. There won’t be dancing and drinking games, he knows. That leaves… talking, maybe. Games that don’t involve drinking, which sounds boring. Five hours of that when he could be in his lab tinkering around with things.
Alcohol will make the time fly. It always does. Alcohol is dependable like that.
But what if it does trigger the Great Jigsby?
What would that look like? Would Jigglesworth need to leave the party and miss out on something that might be very, very enjoyable for him? Would he be afraid in the midst of people who mean him no harm and possibly learn a fear response to the team or to Tony specifically? Tony’s done a lot of work to get on the safe-friend list, and he doesn’t want to ruin that for the sake of some boozy punch.
And he doesn’t want Jigsaw to be afraid, period.
Maybe he should take a shot or two before going down to the party and leave the punch alone, just hope that the pregaming does the trick and lasts the whole five hours. But his breath would smell if he did that, same as if he spiked his own punch at the party. And the man’s enhanced. He could smell the Everclear on his breath from across the room, probably.
Ugh. What a bummer. He’s going to have to do this party entirely sober.
Tony takes the Everclear flask off of the bat belt and tosses it onto the dresser.
“Fine, fine. Pepper wins. Don’t want to freak Jigsaw out. It’s baby’s first party, after all. Let’s let the guy get used to them before we make them more bearable with a bit of booze.”
But he’s keeping the costume. He’ll just have a bat belt that doesn’t have anything truly useful on it.
“I’m sure everyone will appreciate your sacrifice, Sir.”
“They’d better. I’m going in sober, giving up my social lifeline, and consigning myself to the boredom. I’m a damn martyr right now.”
There’s no response, but he can feel JARVIS smiling in the silence. If JARVIS had a face to smile with, anyway. Maybe he should design a face for JARVIS. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Jigsaw only recently started paying attention to JARVIS—he didn’t have a face to look at.
It’s a thought. Maybe even a good thought. He could base it off of Jarvis from before, same as he based the voice off of Jarvis’s voice and accent. Or he could go entirely left field with it, make it something futuristic, robotic, something that’s not human or even human-adjacent, but is more abstract.
What would Jigsaw prefer to interact with? And for that matter, what would the rest of them prefer to interact with? Because while the Jigster’s comfort is important, the rest of them matter, too.
Tony could come up with a few prototypes, maybe half a dozen potential design options, and do some A/B testing, get some feedback, refine the designs, do this democratically. Get the therapists in on it, too, for a wider sample pool and some insight from the brain doctors onsite. Probably Zoe would have a lot of input.
“Sir, are you going to the party?”
“What? Yes. Of course I am.”
“It has already started. Your presence would be appreciated.”
Oh. Right. He’s not stalling for time, but he is getting distracted by other things that are more interesting than a party.
Tony reaches for the cowl with the cape attachment, gets it settled around his head properly, and gives himself another look in the mirror. Perfect. He could be Batman. His costume is movie prop quality and doesn’t have bat nipples on it. Bat nipples were distracting on a bat suit, and he’s not interested in being ogled for his fake plastic nipples when he could be ogled for other things.
Though the cape does hide his entirely ogleable ass.
Oh well.
“Alright,” Tony says, pitching his voice low and scratchy and striking a pose in the mirror. “Let’s get this party started.”
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
“Oh, great, a costume.” Clint sighs as Stark enters the room. He knew it. Halloween parties are all traps.
He’s got to hand it to Stark, though, the Batman costume is a very, very good costume. The cape billows perfectly, the cowl fits perfectly, the bat belt is perfectly loaded with batarangs and stuff that Jigsaw would probably be itching to get his hands on… And no weird bat nipples. Good choice.
“Batman is here,” Stark says to the room at large. “You may commence partying.”
Clint rolls his eyes. He turns to Jigsaw to explain just what the hell a Batman is, and finds that his partner is no longer at his side staring at the various streamers and party decorations with childlike wonder.
Instead, Jigsaw is behind him, warily eying Stark up and down and probably a hot second away from drawing a knife. Clint knows he’s got at least three of them on his person.
“That’s just Stark,” Clint says, aiming for reassuring and hopefully hitting that tone instead of irritated. Jigsaw doesn’t need for him to be irritated.
But damn it, this was supposed to be costume-free and here’s Stark not only dressed up, but dressed up in a way that hides pretty much all of himself including most of his face. Did Stark not learn anything from the fact that Jigsaw didn’t know for months that he was inside the “robot” that is the Iron Man armor?
Jigsaw can’t see half of Stark’s face, and the costume is padded enough that Stark’s body shape is that little bit different, and just…
Okay, so Clint is irritated.
Jigsaw makes Stark’s name sign, the T-shape tapped to his chest, and then shakes his head and taps his ear.
“I promise you, that’s Stark. He’s just dressed up weird for the party.” Clint waves Stark over. “Come on, man. Take off the mask, just for a few minutes.”
“But I am Batman,” Stark says. “Lighten up, Barton.”
It’s hard to make out Stark’s full expression because of the mask, another reason he shouldn’t be wearing one in the first place, but Clint can see his eyes drift over Clint’s shoulder to where Jigsaw is keeping Clint between them and no doubt looking suspicious.
“Hey Jigsaw,” Stark says. “It’s just me. See?” He takes the cowl off and holds it out for Jigsaw to inspect. “It’s not even a spooky costume. Just a cool one.”
Clint rolls his eyes. It looks like tac gear, complete with a mask. The sight of it probably made Jigsaw think about missions and whether there was one coming up he should be prepared for but isn’t.
“Batman is a comic book superhero,” Clint says. “He beats up bad guys but never ever kills them, and almost no one knows who he is because he wears that mask over his face. You’d probably like him, if he was a little more lethal.”
Jigsaw finishes his inspection of the costume and sets it down on a nearby table for Stark to pick back up.
And that just makes Clint even more irritable. Because Jigsaw can remember and respect that Stark doesn’t like being handed things, but Stark can’t think it through that maybe showing up as Batman would throw an already unsettled and skittish Jigsaw for an uncomfortable loop?
Stark picks up the cowl and cape and puts it back on, clearly deciding that his costume’s completeness is worth more than the side-eye Jigsaw gives him and his utility belt.
Jigsaw signs “bat” and “book” and points to Stark with a question in his eyes.
“Yep, straight out of a comic book,” Stark says. “And from movies, too. Maybe we can watch some Batman at this party after everyone gets tired of whatever Pepper has planned.”
Clint doubts it’s a good idea to watch any movie no matter how boring the party might become, but instead of arguing it out with Stark, he’s going to investigate the buffet more closely. He’s probably just irritable because he needs a snack.
“You want to come look at the food, Jigs?”
That gets a very happy smile. Good.
Clint follows Jigsaw over to the first of the tables set up with snacks, which happens to be essentially a huge fruit and veggie platter. If it were up to Clint, he’d have skipped this table and gone straight for the meats and cheeses, but this isn’t a party for him. Not really. It’s a party for Jigsaw, to show him what parties are, what fun can and should be like.
So Clint holds a sturdy plastic plate while Jigsaw piles on a small mountain of gross stuff, and then they move to the next table, where Jigsaw holds a separate plate for him to pile the good stuff onto. Clint adds more cheese than meat, is careful not to let the meat touch anything else on the plate, and adds some olives, pickles, and even some deviled eggs to the plate.
Is he going to eat a deviled egg? Hell no. That’s just a mouthful of squish that he can do without. But Jigsaw might like them. Jigsaw likes pretty much everything.
They go join Natasha and Steve, who are sitting on one of the sofas with their own much more lightly filled plates of food.
“Where’s Wilson?” Clint asks.
Steve smiles. “He’s going to get some of his macrame stuff to show Natasha. He’ll be back in a bit.”
Clint nods. That’s good. Another activity to fill the time with. Yarn and knots and knotting yarn. Probably a good thing Alpine isn’t here.
And really, Alpine not being here is a safety thing. There’s about a foot of mist covering the floor, and Alpine would be impossible to see in here. Clint can’t even see his feet or tell if he’s dropped any food. But it’s nice and spooky, he guesses. Jigsaw didn’t mind it after being assured that it was not a dangerous gas and that no one needed to wear his killing face.
Jigsaw points a carrot at Stark, who is now arguing with Pepper over whether his costume is appropriate. He crosses his arms in the sign for “bat” and then eats the carrot.
“I actually knew what his costume was!” Steve says. “I had no idea that was still popular these days.”
“Comics, or Batman himself?” Clint asks around a piece of salami. “Because both. They both are.”
Steve looks thoughtful. “I’ll have to add that to my reading list and see what the current issues are like. Jigsaw, would you like to read some comic books with me when they come in? They’re mostly pictures with some dialogue.”
Jigsaw nods and asks why. Then he signs “last word” and asks the question again.
“Oh, dialogue, where people are speaking to each other. Instead of words that describe what a character is doing, it’s words that are exactly what the character is saying.”
Jigsaw mimes putting things together and then signs “flowers” and “book,” followed by “the same as.”
And Steve just frowns. But then, Steve might not know about the Lego flowers yet. Or the instruction sets without a single word in them, that are just pictures of what blocks go where.
Clint lets Natasha do the explaining on that one. She’s only got a few chips and some salsa left, but he has a huge plate of stuff to eat.
While the other three talk about comic books and Legos, Clint looks around at the decorations. The lights are dimmer than usual but not so dim that he can’t make out the details. Streamers in black and orange, fake spiderwebs with little plastic spiders in them, dangling bats and spiders on strings from the ceiling.
And not a single scarecrow, he’s happy to see.
But also no witches or goblins or ghosts or zombies or anything. There are some pumpkins, but none of them are carved up. And he doesn’t see any tools for carving jack-o-lanterns, so that’s probably purely decoration and not an activity.
The activity seems to be across the room from the buffet tables, where there are stacks of panels and bowls of things on a cluster of tables. Clint has never made a house of any sort, and especially not out of gingerbread. He’s pretty confident that he’ll have a full head of whatever that frosting glue stuff is called by the time he emerges semi-victorious with a condemned gingerbread building, though.
Still, if Jigsaw enjoys himself, Clint will make every attempt to enjoy himself, too. For his partner’s sake.
Sam
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 5:45 p.m.—
It might be an exaggeration to call this party a Halloween party, but he’s fine with that. If it ends up being just a social gathering for the team and Pepper, that’s enough. It doesn’t have to have pumpkin carving or costume contests or any of the other hallmarks of a Halloween party to be fun.
And it’s probably a good idea for Jigsaw’s first party to be somewhat mild.
He gathers up his first macrame project—a set of coasters in cream colored cotton—and heads back to the party to show Natasha. He can’t show her the plant holders he made for her in red and black, but the coasters are a safe bet. They were simple to make and kind of fun as well. Watching something go from a pile of strings to a useful object with just a few knots is really rewarding.
Maybe Natasha would find it rewarding as well. There’s no telling. He wouldn’t have thought she’d be interested in gardening, but she’s got a green thumb and enjoys putting it to use in Pepper’s gardening room. Who’s to say what other interests she might develop.
Bruce joins him on the elevator on the way back to the party. “Did you make those?”
Sam shows him the coasters. “Yeah. Macrame. It’s a new hobby I’m trying out. Pretty relaxing, and you get something out of it at the end of a project.”
“They’re neat.”
“Thanks.”
When they arrive in the party room, Bruce splits off to talk to Stark, who is apparently ignoring the fact that it should be a costume-free party. He’s Batman. Sam half expects his utility belt to be filled with alcohol of some variety, just because rules are made to be broken in Stark’s world.
Jigsaw and Clint have joined Steve and Natasha, but there’s still room for him on the sofa, so he sits next to Steve and passes the coasters around for them to look at.
“It’s actually really easy,” he says. “All the knots look complicated, but it’s just half-hitch all the way around.”
Natasha turns her coaster over in her hands. “This is really neat, Sam.”
He smiles.
Jigsaw mimes tying a knot and points at the coaster before asking “why.”
“Yep,” Sam says. “It’s just string with a lot of knots in it. It’s pretty cool, right?”
Jigsaw nods and pets the fringe on the outer edge of the coaster. Then he brings the coaster up to his cheek and rubs it lightly against his skin. “Soft,” he signs.
“Uh, yeah, they’re pretty soft. I used a softer string. Single strand twisted. I’ve got a few that I made with regular cordage that are stiffer. But I prefer the softer ones.”
“Why’s that?” Natasha asks.
Sam shrugs. “I guess I just like working with the softer string. It feels better in my hands.”
“Are we really going to spend five hours admiring coasters?” Stark says from over Steve’s shoulder. “Let’s actually do something. Or watch a movie.”
“There’s the gingerbread houses,” Bruce suggests. “Pepper is getting everything set up for that.”
“Those are supposed to be for Christmas,” Stark grumbles.
Natasha smiles. “They’re haunted, though, so they work for Halloween.”
Sam wonders if Jigsaw even knows what haunted means, or whether it’s a good idea to explain the concept. Restless spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, it all sounds like something that runs the risk of upsetting him. He’s killed a lot of people who would have had unfinished business, after all. What if he starts believing that they are still around, but just not in corporeal form?
Or worse, what if he thinks they want revenge?
“Haunted means there’s a ghost in there,” Clint says. “Ghosts are like if dead people were still around even after being dead, but they aren’t there physically. It’s just their, uh, help me out here.”
“Spirit?” Steve suggests. “Their essence, their soul, their— The consciousness that was inside their body but now exists outside of their body.”
“Because their body is dead, but their mind lives on as a ghost.” Clint looks really proud of that explanation.
Jigsaw looks between Steve and Clint and then puts his plate of food on the coffee table so he can use the tablet he has on a new shoulder strap. He starts working on his comment, using the AAC app.
“Hauntings aren’t real,” Bruce says. “It’s just a fun concept people like to—”
“Oh, no,” Stark interrupts. “Ghosts are totally real. Buildings can be haunted. I once stayed at a haunted hotel in New Orleans, just for kicks and giggles, and I saw a little girl in old-timey clothes walk through a wall and disappear. Because she was a ghost.”
“And how drunk were you?” Clint asks.
“Less drunk, more on a coffee high. Downright jittery. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Jigsaw holds up a hand and then taps the Speak tile on his tablet. “Like Zola and JARVIS?”
“What’s like them?” Stark asks.
“Their minds living on as ghosts,” Steve says. “Once their bodies died.”
Sam shakes his head. Maybe that kind of applies to Zola, since he literally put his consciousness into a machine. But JARVIS is a program more than a once-living person.
“Zola’s a ghost, sure,” Stark says. “But I designed JARVIS from the ground up. There was an actual person named Jarvis, but he’s not still around as a ghost. I just named my AI after him.”
Jigsaw asks him why.
“Because I really liked Jarvis. He practically raised me, and I wanted to be reminded of him all the time.”
Sam tries to hide his surprise. That’s actually a real and honest answer, and not a snarky quip or a bit of misdirection. What if that’s the kind of conversation Jigsaw and Stark have in the lab when Jigsaw visits? What if Stark isn’t actually a jerk around Jigsaw?
Sam might have to change his opinion a bit. He’s always thought that Stark didn’t have it in him to be genuine about anything but his technology, and here he is expressing something personal. The things you learn about people.
“That’s cool, man,” Sam says. “Who was Jarvis?”
Stark shrugs. “Sort of a butler, sort of a personal assistant. He kept the place running and was always around when my parents weren’t. Anyway, I guess let’s go make gingerbread houses or whatever.”
Jigsaw looks pensive, but he brings his plate of vegetables and follows the group of them over to the gingerbread house station.
Each seat has a stack of gingerbread panels and a bowl of royal icing, plus an assortment of candies in little bowls. There are cups of toothpicks, spoons, forks, and tiny spatulas instead of knives for spreading frosting and royal icing. Guess Pepper doesn’t want any potential weaponry at the party.
And she probably doesn’t realize that Jigsaw brings at least one knife with him everywhere.
Sam decides he’ll just roll with it and not mention that to her. Part of the party’s purpose, he’s betting, is to help Pepper see Jigsaw differently. She’s been avoiding him since the hammer incident, after all. And that’s pretty easy to do if you stay away from the kitchen around meal times and stay away from the therapy areas.
“Anyone else never done this before and have no idea where to start?” Clint asks.
Pepper, now sitting across the table cluster from Jigsaw, smiles. “The white icing to your right is like an edible glue, and you’ll use it to stick your gingerbread panels together into a house. Then when it’s sturdy enough, the decoration begins.”
JARVIS helpfully supplies a diagram of the process on the TV on the wall over Pepper’s shoulder.
“Oh good,” Clint mutters. “More Lego-style building.”
Sam can’t help but wonder if Clint has a creative bone in his body. Given his tendency to get injured on missions and the number of missions he’s been on, if he has a creative bone, it has been broken several times. So maybe it makes sense that he wouldn’t particularly enjoy this. He hadn’t really enjoyed the painting session, after all.
Well, even if Clint isn’t enthusiastic about this, Sam hasn’t made a gingerbread house in ages, and he’s already feeling a bit of nostalgia for it, despite the oddity of doing this in late October instead of December. What sort of house is he going to make, other than a haunted one?
After a bit of deliberation, Sam decides to use all whole panels to make his house—a birdhouse—and he’ll use frosting to decorate a circular entry for the birds instead of a rectangular door. Yeah. This will be a lot of fun.
Chapter 140: Jigsaw | I got a feeling everything is gonna be alright
Notes:
Chapter title from “Party All Night (Sleep All Day)” by Sean Kingston.
Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—
“Oh, great, a costume.”
It shifts the gaze downward from the shimmery black bat cutouts hanging so enticingly from the ceiling—it could take just one of them, a toy for little Alpine, perhaps—and directs it the same direction the other asset is looking.
A costume. Dressing up to be something one is not.
There are not supposed to be costumes at the Halloween party. Other parties have costumes, but not this one. That is how it is supposed to be. But if there is a costume here, what else is here that is not supposed to be here?
A man is in the room now in tac gear and a... cape-thing. The cape-thing seems like it would negate all the benefits of wearing tac gear, but the man has a belt full of mysterious weaponry and a killing face on, and—
“Batman is here,” the man says, and the voice sounds like a familiar one, but different. Like someone is trying to disguise themselves. “You may commence partying.”
It slips behind the other asset. Commence partying. Then this other was not a party yet, and now the true party will begin. And there is only one true kind of party. A kind of party that it will not idly allow to happen, not now. It will protect itself, and will protect the other asset. But first, it must make itself move to stand between the other asset and the danger.
If this is danger.
The experts said that this was not going to be that sort of party. The experts do not lie to it, not these ones. Is the man here not supposed to be here?
The other asset turns toward it, and says, “That’s just Stark.” The other asset sounds irritated, with a voice that is tightly annoyed. Trying not to be irritated. For its sake, perhaps?
It makes the T-shape and taps it to the chest, the name-sign for the hamburger technician, and then shakes the head and taps the ear. That does not sound like the hamburger technician, though the man’s voice is close.
“I promise you, that’s Stark. He’s just dressed up weird for the party.” The other asset waves the man over. “Come on, man. Take off the mask, just for a few minutes.”
“But I am Batman,” the man says in the low scratchy voice. “Lighten up, Barton.”
The man is looking at it now, and the eyes are the hamburger technician’s eyes, the chin is the hamburger technician’s chin, but the body does not look right. The proportions are all wrong. And it cannot read the man’s skin face with the killing face on.
“Hey Jigsaw,” the man says with the hamburger technician’s voice. “It’s just me. See?” He takes the killing face off and holds it out for inspection. “It’s not even a spooky costume. Just a cool one.”
It accepts the killing face—no one has offered it a killing face that would cover so much at once, like the clown man’s blue killing face that has the A on the forehead and covers up his hair and everything from his eyes up. The only killing faces it has been offered come in two parts and only cover up the mouth and the eyes of the skin face.
“Batman is a comic book superhero,” the other asset says. “He beats up bad guys but never ever kills them, and almost no one knows who he is because he wears that mask over his face. You’d probably like him, if he was a little more lethal.”
It probably would like him if he were a little more lethal. To have and wear a killing face and then not do the killing, even when the opponents are “bad guys,” evil that needs to be cleared out from this world… That is a waste, that is negligence, that is allowing the evil to repopulate the world the moment the back is turned.
It sets the killing face down on a nearby table. The hamburger technician does not like to be handed things except for when the little robots in the lab hand him things. It has sometimes wondered if maybe the hamburger technician would be willing to be handed things by Jigsaw, because of the metal arm. It is part robot, in a away.
But a party is not the place to try new things out. A party is a place to “play it safe.” Meaning “do not rock the boat.” Meaning nothing about boats at all, but just to be cautious and not do anything that could lead to disaster. It has learned so much from the hamburger technician. It does not understand why the hamburger technician would break the rules and wear a costume to the party, though.
The hamburger technician reaches over to pick up the killing face and slides it back on, becoming the bat man again to a casual observer. But it knows the truth now. The hamburger technician inside the bat man costume will definitely kill when inside the robot. Will help it root out evil. Is lethal enough.
But it is curious about this “comic book” thing. Book is clear enough. But comic is like when something is “funny” or amusing. People laugh. But while it is pathetic that the bat man is not making proper use of his killing face in these comic books, it is not amusing.
It makes the signs for “bat” and “book” and points to the hamburger technician.
“Yep, straight out of a comic book,” the hamburger technician says. “And from movies, too. Maybe we can watch some Batman at this party after everyone gets tired of whatever Pepper has planned.”
It has not watched a movie, though it did once stalk the researcher in the original hunting grounds to a movie theater, where many, many people had gone inside to watch a movie. Can a movie be watched outside of a movie theater, then? Even here in the hive building?
It once again wonders vaguely what a movie is. Something to be watched, so perhaps something like the glowing panel that the cake show is inside of, where the people make fantastic objects out of cake every week. It would watch the hamburger technician’s bat man movie if it was like that.
“You want to come look at the food, Jigs?”
Oh! Yes, there is food here, and it is allowed to eat some of it. Not just food for people, but food for everyone here. It must remember to leave enough behind for the others to eat.
It leads the way toward the three tables at the far side of the room. The first is full of plump, juicy grapes, and strawberries, and segments of baby oranges called mandarins, and pale green honeydew melon, and bright orange cantaloupe, and even some plum slices in rich dark red and pale orange. No peaches, but there cannot be all of the good things at once. It would get overwhelmed.
There are so many vegetables, too. All of them prepared for snacking on, or for dipping into the vegetable sauce that is in a bowl with a spoon in it off to the side. It can put the vegetable sauce onto the plate the other asset is holding for it, but it decides not to. It wants to taste the vegetables themselves.
At the next table, it is this asset’s turn to hold a plate, and the other asset picks out enough cheese for three whole assets to eat—the other asset must mean to share, which it is very happy about—and then some of the thin-sliced meats, which it is less happy about. It does not want to eat that. Poor innocent meat.
But as the other asset builds the plate up, it is pleased to see that the small pile of meat is off to the side, and all of the delicious things that it will eat are on the other side, not touching.
There are pickles, and olives and half-eggs with some sort of tangy-smelling yellow cream inside instead of yolks, and the other asset puts some of all of these onto the plate.
The third table has a large bowl of something red and opaque, with ice and frozen fruit floating in it. There is a ladle and some plastic cups, but the cups are not the red ones that have been at other parties. These are clear plastic. And unlike other parties, there is not any alcohol smell or bottles of beer to be shoved inside of it or anything of the sort.
A bit of tension that it was still carrying about the party begins to dissolve and flow out of it. This is the real party, already. Nothing horrible will be happening. It is safe here with the other asset and with a team of people who care about it and want what is actually best for it, instead of what is fun for them.
After admiring the so-soft circle of knots the flying man made out of just string—it had not known that knots could be so beautiful and so harmless—it is time to make the houses for ghosts to live in once the people they used to be are dead.
It is not sure how the ghosts from dead people will come to the hive building to live inside of the houses, but it is now sure how there can be room to build whole houses out of gingerbread. They are very small houses. Tiny houses.
It has seen targets’ children’s houses for their dolls that are much bigger than these houses for ghosts. Ghosts must be very small.
And how will they select only the right kinds of ghosts? It does not want evil ghosts inside the tiny gingerbread houses in the hive building. It hopes that none of the targets it has chosen after becoming free have stayed around as ghosts. Their bodies were destroyed utterly, but their minds are where the evil was truly stored.
That is plain to see in Zola, the first researcher, whose mind and all its evil is floating in a cloud now according to the hamburger technician and can be all over the place in every computer that is not protected.
How clouds and computers are related is still not clear to it, but it trusts that the hamburger technician has told it the truth. Maybe someday it will understand.
At the cluster of tables covered in the waxy shiny paper that Yasmin used for the emotion painting session, there are large flat cookies in a variety of shapes, most of them squares, triangles, or combined squares-topped-with-triangles. Some of them have little cut out rectangles at one edge, and others have little square cut-outs near the middle of the cookie.
The cookies smell delicious. It wonders what they taste like. If they are the gingerbread, it is a very different kind of bread. Not bread-like at all, but a flat, hard cookie. It wonders why they call it bread when it is clearly not a bread. These did not come out of any loaf pan.
And around the table are many bowls of white sauce, just a little translucent almost, and colors of sauces as well—orange and brown and black and purple and red, mostly. But there are some smaller greens and blues, it sees. Not every spot at the tables has green and blue sauce. Only some. Everyone will have the other colors, though, and a lot of the white sauce.
The sauce and the cookies aren’t even all of it. There so many little things in bowls that it does not recognize, and a few that it does. There are the em and ems that it recognizes, and there are tiny chocolate pyramids like what went in some of the bread from bananas. And many different colors and shapes of sprinkle. But what are the others?
“Anyone else never done this before and have no idea where to start?” the other asset asks.
Across the tables from it, the woman with the long red hair smiles. “The white icing to your right is like an edible glue, and you’ll use it to stick your gingerbread panels together into a house. Then when it’s sturdy enough, the decoration begins.”
A glowing panel lights up with a picture on it, a picture of many pictures. The first of the small pictures is like the tables with all of the things on them. Then there are pictures of the cookies—gingerbread panels—being arranged to look like a tiny house, and glued together with the white sauce—icing. The cookie house on the glowing panel is a free-standing house in the second to last picture inside the bigger picture, and in the last small picture, the cookie house has lots of little things on it.
This is the voice without a mouth being helpful without being asked to be helpful. The voice without a mouth did not even say anything into the room—it was listening carefully—and does not draw attention to itself or to the glowing panel.
JARVIS, it tries out in the mind. The voice without a mouth has a name, JARVIS, and is an expert in making cookie houses. Just look at the pictures inside the picture on the glowing panel. The— JARVIS knows everything about cookie houses. And it has observed as JARVIS has helped the hamburger technician with animal facts, and has helped the other asset and the ballerina woman and the clown man, and the flying man, too.
JARVIS is an expert, maybe in everything. And the experts in the hive building, the ones during the freedom portion of its life, like to go by their names.
“Oh good,” the other asset mutters beside it. “More Lego-style building.”
It grins. Yes! More Lego-style building.
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw has some stray thoughts about the sorts of parties he's been involved with before, and they might be a bit jarring to read.
Chapter 141: Pepper | Party, like you’re ready for so much more
Notes:
Chapter title from “The Party’s Just Begun” by The Cheetah Girls.
It's been a while since I posted an early chapter, hasn't it? But here you go! ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—
The party is going well. Really well. Surprisingly well.
Not only has everyone eventually come over to make a haunted gingerbread house, but no one has spooked Jigsaw, and Tony even put away his Batman cowl and cape after seeing that Jigsaw didn’t like it when he wore them. And Tony didn’t even pregame. She hasn’t caught a whiff of alcohol on his breath, which has probably contributed to Jigsaw feeling safe during the party.
Pepper takes a sip of punch to hide her wince at the crunching sound coming from near Clint. There are plenty of gingerbread panels. Far more than they could possibly need, provided all the panels are used in construction. Possibly barely enough given that many of the panels will not see a house at all, but instead be devoured by the one occupant of this room she does not yet feel is family, though she’s trying.
She really does wish she could look at him and not imagine him—remember him, more accurately—hunched over a contractor with a stolen hammer, flinging bits and pieces of flesh this way and that like a modern-day velociraptor. Aside from that one incident, after all, he has been an odd but harmless houseguest this second time around.
And the victim had been a HYDRA infiltrator.
Certainly Jigsaw can—should—be excused for that behavior, given his unfortunate history with HYDRA. Logically, she knows this. And she does try. But the blood. The bit of skull that was embedded in the ceiling. The carpet that was soaked through and splattered with brain matter. The dreams and nightmares she’s had since then.
“Aw, Jiggy, I was going to build with that piece.” Clint doesn’t sound upset, though he does sigh. “Nat, would you slide another— Thanks.”
There’s more crunching, but not another sigh, and Pepper cheats her eyes over to that side of the table cluster, where Clint is messily spreading royal icing along the edge of his third wall. He’s wearing an absurd amount of royal icing in his hair and on his cheek. Surely this level of messiness is intentional.
And there’s Sam neatly frosting his own gingerbread panels with purple and gold royal icing to make a… Pepper can’t be sure yet. But he’s one of the only Avengers decorating before assembly. And there’s a round door being created in frosting. A hobbit-hole? A birdhouse?
And there’s Jigsaw standing between Clint and Sam holding a piece of gingerbread up to his mouth with one hand while drawing spiders on the gingerbread panel in front of him with a small piping bag, taking his time and with a steady hand, but pausing to look up at her.
As usual, Pepper gets the sense that he has been looking at her for the exact amount of time she has been looking at him. It isn’t that she feels as though he’s been studying her, or staring, or even just mildly observing her. It’s just that, somehow, her timing is such that their eyes happen to meet every single time she looks at him directly.
It isn’t the case, she knows. She’s watched him on many occasions without him watching back. But those times when he does return her attention are just unnerving enough that they crowd out all the other times. His eyes are so, so loud. And she doesn’t speak the language of silence that pours out of them.
Pepper looks away first.
She always does.
About ninety minutes into their activity, it turns out that only Sam and Natasha have elected to prime their gingerbread with frosting before construction—Jigsaw’s is less a construction and more a painted panel, so she isn’t counting that as priming.
Sam’s house—a birdhouse, after all, with bird motifs around the edges of the eaves—is getting a thatchwork nest on top of the chimney to make it a bird nest on a birdhouse. Natasha’s red house is more completely flooded with icing, and she’s left the edges of each panel bare to better take the decorations that will follow.
Tony, predictably, has designed a gingerbread Tower, with elaborate internal support structures to ensure that his building is the tallest and grandest of them all and will therefore warrant pride of place in the resulting village. He hasn’t gotten around to doing anything to the exterior, yet. Pepper can’t help but wonder how he’s going to fashion a clear glass equivalent out of the candy available on the table.
Bruce, who’d come to the table a bit later and set up next to her, has hardly gotten two walls in place yet. But he’s made some sketches with a handy pencil on the butcher paper protecting the tables. It looks like he’s going to try for something with six or even eight shorter wall panels to form a hut of some sort rather than a house.
Steve has the most modest and traditional of the houses, a little cottage with carved panels that have openings for windows and doors, rather than relying on candy pasted on at the end. He’s already selected his intended decorations, and everything is arranged in perfect, sensible order for use. Pepper can see the beginnings of a garden, too. With a picket fence of chicklets.
And Clint… Well, she’s impressed he has a house at all, given who’s helping him with the construction. It’s lopsided, and there’s a corner of one wall that broke off and was swiftly disposed of before it could be glued back on with royal icing, leaving a hole that is never going to look like a window. Clint himself is wearing more icing than his house is. And somehow has a gumdrop stuck in his hair.
Pepper looks back to her own house, as traditional as Steve’s, if nowhere near as precisely and artistically put together. This was an excellent idea, and she’s glad she spent the time putting it together. In fact, this is the longest they have all been in the same room doing the same thing, and it’s actually far more relaxing than she’d anticipated.
She dips her little spatula into her royal icing, only to find it’s managed to harden past usefulness. Well, that was the nature of royal icing, and she had needed to slip out and take a call briefly. More than enough time for an uncovered bowl to crust up.
When she was a girl, this bowl would go into the sink with some hot soapy water, and they’d simply mix up a fresh bowl to use in its place. Here, of course, there are spare bowls covered with plastic film to keep them ready to swap in. There’s no need at all to mix a new batch, and…
Pepper keeps her head tilted toward her house, but looks up through her lashes at Clint and his helper across the table. There’s actually no reason to throw out the hardened royal icing, either. She can just put this bowl aside and wait for unattended edibles to catch a certain someone’s eye.
Or…
Pepper stands and makes her way around the cluster of tables, bowl in hand. She comes to a stop behind Sam, hoping to avoid causing a defensive response or a startle reaction from Jigsaw even though she knows that he was tracking her approach and could not possibly be surprised by her proximity.
She holds the bowl out toward him. “This is too hard to use now,” she says. “If you wanted to… You could…”
Jigsaw goes from holding a Twizzler in each hand to holding two Twizzlers and the bowl of royal icing in one hand while the other moves from his chin in signed gratitude, all without seeming to have juggled the various things he’s holding at all. It’s as unnerving as ever, even when he seems to be thankful for the offering.
“You’re welcome,” Pepper says with a smile. She takes his acceptance of the bowl as the conclusion of their exchange, and returns to her gingerbread house, trying not to feel his eyes on her the entire way there.
Practice. That’s all she needs. Practice, and more nonviolent encounters like this one. Perhaps more offers of food. She can fold him into this family as thoroughly as she has the others, even if he’s much less predictable and doesn’t appear to have any qualms about cold-blooded slaughter. She just needs to practice it.
As the team works to put together and decorate their gingerbread houses, Jigsaw makes quick work of the royal icing, using one of the smaller spatulas to chisel out the harder bits and deliver them directly to his mouth. Between mouthfuls of icing and bites of Twizzler, he sends darting fingers out to snatch up any candies that get lost on their way to Clint or Sam’s gingerbread constructions.
“Good job with that, Pep,” Tony murmurs to her right. “That’s the way to Jigglepuff’s heart—right through the stomach. By way of sweet tooth, preferably.”
“He can hear you, Tony,” she hisses.
“But he doesn’t care , so…” Tony shrugs and adds a bit more cotton candy cobwebs to his spider-infested rooftop cornices, courtesy of chocolate sprinkles, tweezers and a steady hand. “Fair game, I figure. It’d be different if he minded. Not that that would change anything, but it’d be different.”
Pepper opts not to make a thing of it. It might very well be true that Jigsaw doesn't care about being discussed like that. And Tony being mildly offensive is just Tony being Tony. Pick your battles.
She surveys the overall construction progress around the room. Their little village is really coming together. It’s a thing of… well, chaos. The city planners clearly didn’t confer with one another. None of the houses match in the slightest.
The closest two are hers and Steve’s, and they still use entirely different sets of candy. He has actually trimmed his house with orange and chocolate sprinkles in an intricate pattern, where she’s merely put Halloween-themed M&Ms on the walls.
Bruce’s does end up looking more like a hut than a cottage, like it belongs in an actual jungle village, or maybe somewhere on a tropical island. He’s used orange food coloring to make the coconut into dark straw and has thatched his hut with that.
Sam’s birdhouse is coming along with little jellybean eggs in the chimney nest and a pathway out from the front made from crushed Lifesavers. He’s currently making a design out of red and white sprinkles that he is calling Redwing as he talks softly to Jigsaw. Jigsaw is maybe listening and maybe not; he’s got eyes only for the candy Clint is ferrying from bowl to rooftop.
Natasha has built an ornate red cube of a gingerbread house, with careful details in white piping and sprinkle tapestries on the internal walls, visible through a carved opening in the back. Pepper can’t read the Cyrillic lettering along the eaves, but she suspects she is happier not knowing what it says.
Tony’s Tower will do as it’s named and tower over the others, even if he has had to make due with icing windows onto the sides instead of having properly clear candies to apply. Pepper is secure in her decision to do without blow torches for melting candies into stained glass. There’s no telling what Tony might have engineered with flame and Jolly Ranchers.
Clint has constructed something that looks like a dilapidated apartment block, making use of the jagged hole in one wall to really sell the idea that the landlord is down on his luck, or is perhaps more slumlord than anything else. He’s yet to finish the roof, though he has a few boxy HVACs and air returns on top and a low wall around the edge and has decided chocolate chips are the way to go for roofing.
Pepper would look back to her own gingerbread house, which still needs some finishing touches, or would get more punch or possibly some hot cocoa with little ghost marshmallows, but she can’t help but let her eyes linger on the scene across the table, where Clint has somehow mistaken Jigsaw’s attention for interest in helping.
“You want to put part of the roof together?” Clint asks, handing a chocolate chip over to Jigsaw. “You can start on that side, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
Jigsaw puts the chocolate chip in his mouth and looks expectantly at Clint.
“Yeah, but put it on the roof, instead of eating it.”
A second chocolate chip is handed out and then eaten in quick succession, and Clint nudges a bowl of Milk Duds and Raisinets over instead. “Okay, sure. My bad. Here. No one’s using these. Go to town, Jigs. Meaning, eat all you want.”
Jigsaw picks up the bowl and then, instead of digging in as she’d expect him to, Jigsaw holds the bowl protectively and walks it over to her, eeling his way around the table in that jarringly smooth way he has of moving where his joints all seem liquid.
He places the bowl on the table beside her, and then before she can react with a smile, let alone say thank you, he melts away again. And if she hadn’t just seen him deliver a bowl of candy, she might find it hard to believe that he’d done it.
“Awww,” Tony croons under his breath. “He likes you! I told you so. He wouldn’t stop hacking up a HYDRA goon for just anyone’s frantic screaming. Our guy’s thorough . Dedicated.”
He digs around in the gum drops for a blue one as he talks. “You should have seen the mess he made out of that one lady’s garden. Fox in a henhouse doesn’t even begin to cover the carnage. It was brutal . I’ve never seen anything like it. Like someone put her in a huge blender and poured out the chunks that were left. They had to rake her up.”
“…thanks, Tony. Thanks for that image.” Pepper picks up a handful of candies from the bowl and eats them one piece at a time, despite her twisting stomach. When someone as dedicated to eating everything in sight as Jigsaw hands you food instead of eating it himself, you eat it as way of saying thank you.
And you try not to think about them turning a woman into mulch.
It takes them nearly three hours to get their haunted gingerbread village complete, and almost the moment he’s finished with his gingerbread Tower, Tony is trying to take bets on when their village will meet its demise. That is, how long it will stand before Jigsaw eats it all.
“Tony,” Pepper says. “While it’s okay if anyone eats these, since they’re entirely edible, I think we’d all like to enjoy them for a day or two. Right, Jigsaw?”
Jigsaw smiles and holds out the driest of his gingerbread artwork, a series of panels spread out on the table with startlingly neat piping depicting the party itself, with cobwebs gracefully connecting the top corners of the gingerbread slideshow and spiders hanging down from the tops of the panels, along with bats—just like the streamers overhead.
Pepper stares. How had she not seen him doing all of this while they worked? How had she thought he was just eating gingerbread panels and candy while everyone else made confectionary art pieces?
“This is wonderful,” Pepper says, accepting the gingerbread panel.
She immediately regrets the surprise in her voice, but it’s too late to rein that in. And it would be dishonest, too. She is surprised.
So his artistry extends far beyond creating bloody messes. Pepper had heard about scrapbooking through the grapevine, probably starting with Steve or Clint, along with vague statements about it being an activity Jigsaw really enjoys. But enjoying an activity is not the same as being artistically talented in that activity or outside of it.
She wonders if she should encourage Steve to paint with Jigsaw. Maybe they could do something collaborative, a joint collection with a theme they both paint toward or even a joint painting where they work on it together. It would be great to exhibit such a collection, particularly for the PR boost. Steve’s clout and the addition of Jigsaw’s talents…
Maybe it would be an Avengers-wide collection. Tony would enjoy painting if he gave it a chance, and the others would as well, she’s sure, even Clint. It’s definitely something to think about, just as soon as they weather this storm that’s coming in.
Jigsaw smiles and signs his thanks, and then mimes taking a photograph before pointing to the clustered tables and the haunted gingerbread village that has risen up during the party.
“I’m definitely going to take pictures of all of these,” Pepper says. “And with some paperwork, perhaps we can start an Avengers social media account and share all of this art so that everyone can see it.”
She’s already gotten the domain cleared and purchased for an official website, and the official accounts set up—though hidden—with an appropriate official username. It’s just a matter of time, and she has so many ideas how to continue building up goodwill for the team… and for each of its members, no matter how difficult they may prove to be.
Jigsaw, for instance, will need to understand the paperwork he signs, and that will be a challenge in and of itself, beyond the reception his presence might get. Steve might want some of his things to be personal and others to be Captain America-branded. Then there’s the ones who will be difficult to cajole into participating at all—most of the rest of them, honestly. Though Natasha would likely contribute some.
Yes. After the storm. In the meantime, there’s just too much to be done to prepare for that.
Notes:
Aw, Pepper, don't go planning to pimp out the team again. Just let them have a party without making it an instagram moment, haha! PR can wait...
Chapter 142: Assets | Some things are meant to be
Notes:
Chapter title from “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti, and Luigi Creatore, sung by Elvis Presley.
What is this? Surprise chapter? With total chapter count? ^_^ (Don't worry, I'm already writing part 3!)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 10:45 p.m.—
The obvious thing to do when you come home from a party with three dozen impeccably and creatively iced sugar cookies is to eat them. But he’s not sure he could handle eating even one more of them than he’s already eaten in a night, and he doesn’t want the horrible stomach ache that would follow if he did start eating cookies once they got back to the room.
Jigsaw and Steve had been the only people at the party to feel like decorating anything after the haunted gingerbread houses. Those two spent the rest of the party decorating cookies while the rest of them basically sat around watching them and chatting about things, occasionally calling out suggestions for how to decorate the next cookie.
And if Jigsaw’s design choices make zero sense, it’s only because he can’t tell what a ghost should be from the shape of the cookie, or a bat, or a pumpkin. And his color scheme is not quite traditional, either, but neither is Steve’s. The super soldiers went a bit off the rails in their cookie decorating endeavors. And that was before Pepper showed them how to “flood” a cookie with icing and then make designs in the icing while it was still wet.
Things got downright psychedelic on top of those cookies at that point and all bets were off.
Also psychedelic are the icing smears all over Clint’s arms and hands. And he’s wearing half a gingerbread house’s decor in his hair, he’s sure. How, he doesn’t know. These things just happen to him.
“I’m going to hop in the shower, Jigs.”
Clint waits for the thumbs up before heading for his bedroom to get clean again.
He doesn’t need to announce things like this, but it somehow feels like the right thing to do. He could just go do his thing, but it feels… impolite? Sure, it feels impolite to just vanish while his partner is stashing a tub of cookies in their little freezer and finding counter or cabinet space for the rest of them.
Clint hopes his coffee doesn’t end up displaced by cookies the way it was once traded out for a dozen dinner rolls. It probably won’t be. Jigsaw knows now how important the coffee is to a functional Clint Barton.
It’s also vital to the function of Clint Barton that they don’t get ants, so he’ll have to shampoo twice to be sure all the icing is out of his hair. The last thing he needs is to have to argue for the extermination of ants with a partner who would insist on finding and rehoming every last ant.
Could they even get ants in the Tower? Eh, probably not. But he is willing to bet the average person off the street would have to make concerted efforts to wear this much icing after making a gingerbread house. These things just happen to him. Ants? Ants could happen to him. Sure.
Ah, nice hot water, and great water pressure. With any luck, Jigsaw knows to take full advantage of this in his own bathroom, to ease the aches in his back somewhat. But Clint purposely shoves all thoughts of Jigsaw in the shower out of his mind. Instead, he’ll… He’ll… What will he ponder that isn’t his partner’s naked body in a shower with him?
Yes. That.
Clint wonders what kind of excited conversation waits for him after this shower. He knows Jigsaw enjoyed the party, especially after everyone got really serious about the gingerbread houses. And he had really enjoyed the cookie decorating afterward, with Steve. Clint can still picture him hunched over a plate of cookies applying carefully selected sprinkles with his tweezers to form the feathers of a bird on a branch of chocolate icing.
And Clint will admit to himself that, yeah, the gingerbread thing was fun. Sure, he got messy, but he could have gotten messy from across the room. And no one complained that his dilapidated slumlord mansion was bringing down the property values in the village. And pretty much none of the panels went to waste because Jigsaw ate the broken ones and decorated the others.
Jigsaw spent way longer decorating stuff than Clint did, and even toward the end, his hands were steady as ever on the piping bag, fingers squeezing with just the right amount of pressure to let out a thin stream of icing that seemed so fragile but somehow didn’t break until he wanted it to. Clint doesn’t know what the mechanism was that signaled for the icing to break, but after Pepper did it a few times to show them, both super soldiers quickly picked up the knack.
And that’s good, that’s good, focus on the cookies and not on Jigsaw’s steady fingers or the way his tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth when he’s really intensely focused on a task, or the way his hair falls into his face sometimes and needs to be brushed back and tucked behind an ear. The cookies, man, Clint thinks. Not that other stuff. Cookies.
They have three dozen cookies.
Clint rinses shampoo out of his hair a second time and gives his arms a brisk once-over and the rest of himself as well. Cookies. Cookies. What are they going to do with three dozen cookies?
Pepper had been really pleased with how the cookies turned out, even though it hadn’t started as anything but an activity for the team. Clint’s half sure she’s got some PR thing in mind the way she kept the most attractive and unique cookies to take photos of while Steve and Jigsaw got to split the remaining decorated cookies however they wanted.
Maybe Jigsaw even won her over with the cookies. Who knew a hammer could be countered by a piping bag?
Jigsaw could have won him over with some cookies back in the day. Not even the beautiful ones. The practice rounds were tasty and Clint is easy to please.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Wednesday 24 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—
The other asset smells like fake apples from the bright green shampoo bottle after the showering. It does not care too much for the fake apples, but it can smell the other asset and clean skin beneath the fake smell, and the fake smell never lasts very long. Once the wet hair dries, the fake apples all but go away.
Anyway, if the other asset’s smell comes with fake apples, then it will inhale a whole orchard of fake apples to smell more of the other asset. Orchards are when rows and rows of trees are grown for fruit and nuts. Apples grow on trees. An orchard of apples must have so many apples in it.
It saw pictures of an orchard when Zoe introduced a new level in the basket game earlier in the week. It had looked like a lot of trees, but not like a forest. The basket game is getting very complicated with all the new things it learns. The orchard it saw was full of peaches, though, not apples.
The other asset does not seem to smell the fake apples, or does not seem to mind them, and comes to sit on the sofa above where it is playing with the little cat and a bit of crinkly plastic fluff on the end of a stick.
“Can I brush your hair?”
It tips the head back against the sofa seat cushion between the other asset’s knees. Looks up at the other asset from upside down. The other asset has a brush! It grins and nods, and then holds the head still to receive the brushing.
The other asset knows how to brush hair so that it does not hurt even a small amount. Order without pain. Order that has nothing to do with pain. The first example it was ever given of such a thing that it can remember. And since then, there have been so many times when the other asset will brush the hair so gently and smoothly, picking out little knots—tangles are knots in hair—and brushing every one of them out of the hair.
The other asset is very good at brushing hair.
It tries to imagine the other asset with hair like the ballerina woman’s hair—long and wavy, but still blond. Or maybe like its own hair, shorter than the ballerina woman’s hair but still much longer than the other asset’s current hair. Would the knowledge and skill still remain? Would the other asset get to experience this every morning?
It likes to think so. The other asset deserves such good things as the other asset’s hair being brushed out every morning, the light sectioning out of hair into different locks, the faint pressure on the scalp of each lock being picked for knots starting at the tip and working up into the root and then being brushed so smooth.
The eyes drift shut as the other asset works, and this time, the hair brushing is a little different. There is still the sectioning, the picking for knots, tips first and roots last. The brushing smooth and combining with other smooth locks. But as it sighs happily, the other asset sets the brush aside on the sofa cushion and instead runs fingers though the hair.
This is nice, also, and it is even nicer when the other asset puts a hair tie into the hair, holding the hair up off of the neck loosely, and then nicer still when the fingers return—but on the neck and not in the hair.
It recognizes this from earlier, from before. The other asset is giving it a neck rub, just like the back rub from before. It feels so good. The other asset’s fingers don’t dig or poke or prod. They caress and stroke and tap little patterns of slight pressure into the skin of the neck, like the pressure of water droplets from the shower, light, almost more vibration than pressure.
It can feel the calluses on the other asset’s fingers, the slightly rougher skin running along the smoother skin of this asset’s neck, and then the other asset is rubbing at the right shoulder, a little more pressure, still not digging, but just lightly exploring, testing the muscles underneath the skin to see if they have any knots as well.
Like the other asset is trying to pick out knots in the muscles the way the other asset picks out knots in the hair—so gentle, order without pain.
It tips the head to the side to give the other asset better access to the right shoulder and neck, and the little cat steals the teaser wand toy and scampers off with it under the sofa to kick and kick at the crinkly plastic fluff on the end.
But the most of its focus remains on the other asset and this half-massage, half-neck rub. It is feeling warmth that is caused by the friction of the other asset’s fingers running along the fabric of the shirt it wears, and it wants more of that warmth. More pressure, even, would be nice. Or…
Or if it could feel the calluses of the other asset’s fingers against the skin of its right shoulder the same as it could feel them on the skin of the neck.
The thought of such a thing takes the stomach inside of it and turns it over and over again. It is not nauseated, but the sensation is similar in some ways. Only some. Instead of wanting to stop the sensation, it wants more of it. It is excited and warm and fizzy. All from a thought! It will have to ask Yasmin if that is normal.
In the meantime, it will keep thinking the thought. The other asset’s hands, the other asset’s strong and nimble fingers, trailing along the skin of this asset’s shoulder. The neck, the shoulder… further down? Along the back? What would the earlier back rub be like if there were just skin touching skin?
It swallows.
“Everything okay, Jigs?”
It nods. Everything is more than okay. Everything is so good the mind is starting to fizz just like the inside of the torso.
The sleeves are so long on the shirt it wears, and the collar is not wide enough to let the other asset’s hands inside. If it wanted to get the other asset’s hands on the skin of its own back, it would have to remove the shirt. Could it… Does it dare to remove the shirt?
Would the other asset object? The other asset put the hair up in a hair tie. Pulling the shirt off over the head would mess that up because the hair tie is loose in the hair instead of holding tight. Is just enough to keep the hair out of the way of the neck and shoulder rub.
But if the shirt were off, the other asset could put the hair back up again, after. If the other asset wanted the hair up still. Maybe the other asset would not care about that. Maybe the other asset would care more about other things.
It wishes the collar of the shirt was loose, or that this shirt had the buttons that could be undone all up the front and then the shirt could move to allow the other asset to caress the skin of its shoulder. That would be acceptable, it knows. But the whole shirt off…
That might not be something that this asset can do. It has seen the other asset without a shirt, and has admired without touching. And it has touched the other asset with a shirt in the way. And has slept snuggled up against the other asset’s bare chest. But this other. Is it okay if the skin-touching is not for sleeping?
Yasmin would want it to check the facts, but it does not think it has any facts to use here. What can it check, if not facts? It can ask for facts, maybe.
It hates to interrupt the other asset during such a good thing as this shoulder rub, but there are potentially even better things to obtain, and it thinks that even if the answer is that no, the shirt should stay on, the other asset will still resume the shoulder rub instead of holding the question against it.
So it sighs again, long and happy, opens the eyes to the room around the two assets, and then stands and turns in a single move, as simple as untwisting the legs that are crossed, but still something that makes the other asset’s eyes widen and the other asset’s cheeks flush a little.
“Jigs?”
It wants to kiss the other asset before asking the question about the shirt, and so it asks for kisses and smiles when the other asset looks at the lips and nods. Now how to get those kisses so that the other asset does not have to move? There is a hairbrush in the way, but it is easily scooted aside to make room for it kneeling on the sofa beside the other asset.
And the kisses are exactly the right thing at the right time. It did not know that it needed the kisses. It runs hands along the other asset’s shoulders as the other asset’s hands come up to hug it close around the waist.
Since they first kissed, it has learned some of what the other asset likes most in a kiss, and so it rests the metal hand along the other asset’s neck, thumb stroking the skin over the other asset’s throat, and draws the other asset’s lower lip between its own lips to suck lightly. And it smiles against the other asset’s lips when the other asset makes delicious sounds of enjoyment.
The other asset’s pulse picks up under its hand, and its smile widens briefly before it kisses the corner of the other asset’s mouth. It is not the right angle for kissing its way down the other asset’s jawline to the other asset’s neck, but that is okay. Maybe later it can do that. Maybe it can nuzzle into the crook of the other asset’s neck and shoulder and plant a garden of kisses there before falling asleep.
The other asset’s hands at the small of the back begin to circle the lower back, fingers crooked to lightly scratch at the fabric of the shirt as though the other asset wants to grab or maybe… maybe wants the shirt to not be in the way?
Could the other asset want to touch this asset’s skin as much as this asset wants to be touched?
It draws back from the other asset—again, to have to break off doing what is so good in order to possibly achieve even better, it’s almost painful—and mimes pulling the shirt over the head, pinching at the hem of its shirt to indicate the shirt itself, and then its arms crossed in front of it and uncrossing as they rise. As if it had actually done so. Then it asks the question sign.
Is that okay? Can it do that? Would the other asset still be willing to kiss it and rub hands all over the neck and bare shoulder?
The other asset’s adam’s apple bobs under its metal thumb as the other asset swallows, and the other asset’s cheeks flush a bright pink, intensifying from before just like the other asset’s pulse. A good sign?
“You, uh,” the other asset says, looking up at it and then swallowing again. “You want me to take my shirt off?”
It had not considered that there could be two assets without shirts. That is a prospect almost too heady to consider. It feels its own pulse flutter wildly at the thought of being able to touch and be touched, all skin, just assets, no pain, no order, no pushing into or hurting it, no cutting letters and tallies into it, just the other asset’s skin and scars against this asset’s skin and scars.
It shakes the head and points to itself, asks again. It is not ready for that, for them to be both without clothes. Does not know how they would both be safe if they were both unclothed and vulnerable.
“You want to take my shirt off?” the other asset asks.
It shakes the head again. It’s about to try again when the other asset’s hands come off of the small of its back and reach up to take the skin face between them.
The other asset looks up at it and the other asset’s blue eyes are so earnest and somehow heated inside.
“Jigsaw,” the other asset says, “you can do anything you want and I will be grateful for it.”
It darts the tongue out to wet the lips again, suddenly feeling nervous and almost glad that the other asset had misunderstood. Does it… Are they… Is it… safe? To be where someone could come in, and not have a shirt on? Anyone could storm down the hallways, could kick in the door, could—
But no, the hive building is safe as long as the voice without a mouth is active, and it can hear the faint electrical sounds of the voice without a mouth under the heavy breathing from the two assets on the sofa.
It is safe. They are safe. And it does want the other asset’s hands on its skin.
But to be without a shirt is so… unprotected by the fact of it being fully dressed. It has done so before, has been less than fully dressed before. When they were alone in the training room that first time—but it had been surprised by the flying man and the clown man, it recalls. Not an ambush, but it had felt like one.
And it was without a shirt after the mission where it found the little cat—but it was injured and that was different. And after Siberia… when it could not see and the clavicle was broken, and the other asset helped it out of tac gear and into soft clothes to wear to sleep in comfort. Again, though, different.
This is just because it wants to feel the other asset against the skin. Those other times were all necessary or had been intruded on. This is unnecessary, but still could be intruded on.
“Jigs?” the other asset asks. “You kind of froze on me. Everything okay?”
It takes the other asset by the wrists and puts the other asset’s hands flat against the abdomen, palms against the shirt, fingers splayed upward. It covers the hands with one of its own and then—before it can change the mind—pulls the shirt up between the other asset’s hands and this asset’s skin, so that they are touching skin-to-skin, this asset and the other asset.
The heart almost stops for a moment, and the breathing does stop, until it pulls the shirt back down over the other asset’s hands, keeping them close against the skin under the shirt.
“Oh,” the other asset breathes out.
It asks if this is okay. Just those letter signs—the O, the K—and the question sign.
The other asset smiles and works large, warm, callused hands—beautiful hands, it knows—around the abdomen until they rest against the small of the back, fingers trailing little circles to the sides of the spine, all of it under the shirt, all of it skin-on-skin, all of it perfect.
“This is better than okay, Jigs,” the other asset says, lightly pulling it forward to hug it snugly. “This is better than okay.”
Chapter 143: Tower | But just because it burns doesn’t mean you’re gonna die
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Thursday 25 October 2012 | 4:45 a.m.—
Today is the day the animal researchers are returning to the hive building to inject the little cat with vaccines. It has been told that a vaccine is not a poison, is not used as a test drug, will not harm the little cat or hurt beyond the sting of the needle and the injection itself.
The ballerina woman acted as a researcher but on a computer instead of in a lab, and found these things out. And Yasmin has explained that vaccines are good and helpful, and will protect the little cat. And Zoe, too, has reassured it about what will happen and why it is a good thing.
And it wants the little cat to be protected. There are terrible things in the air itself that could make the little cat very sick. Could kill the little cat. And the vaccines can protect the little cat from these things. Not from everything, Yasmin says. Only from specific things. So the little cat could still get sick from other things, but there are medicines for the other things that will help the little cat.
It snuggles the little cat closer to the face, rubs the nose against the little cat’s belly. It wants to protect little Alpine. And to protect little Alpine, it has to let the animal researchers poke her with needles and inject strange things.
It hates this. And they come after the session with Yasmin is over in the morning, after breakfast. Nine. And then there will be lots of watching the little cat to make sure the vaccine didn’t hurt her at all.
Because sometimes, there is a reaction. Sometimes, it can go wrong. Sometimes.
And there is no way to tell until the first vaccine is given. Then, if everything goes right, they will know that there wasn’t a reaction and that the little cat will be fine. Or—
It does not want to think about the alternative. The little cat will be fine. It is not making a mistake letting the animal researchers do this. It is being “proactive” about “infectious disease” and is doing the right thing.
Unless—
No. There will not be an unless, there will not be an or, there will not be a reaction. The little cat will be okay. Will be better than okay. Will be protected against things that can make her sick.
All it has to do is wait until the animal researchers come and then watch the little cat after the animal researchers leave. The little cat will be sleepy and sore, and that is all that the little cat will be. It will take the little cat with it everywhere it goes to make sure.
It is not sure what it is supposed to do if there is an unless or an or, a reaction of some kind. The animal researchers will know. Last time they came, they had a lot of information, and they shared it freely. This time, it will ask them questions and they will answer them just like last time.
So now it waits in the dark, lying beside the other asset in the other asset’s nest, holding the little cat and worrying.
It is almost time for the morning snack and the flying man taking the dog out to walk on the soft green grass. It is not hungry, though. It is feeling very not hungry. It does not want to eat a morning snack. The stomach is not feeling right at all, has not felt like this in so long.
It gets up out of the nest, anyway, pulls the soft things up around the other asset’s neck, and goes with the little cat to the kitchen. Even if it is feeling like this, Caroline would want it to eat. And it remembers sometimes feeling like this and eating a little and feeling better. Maybe it will feel better.
Physically, it feels better after eating an egg, a piece of cheese, and an apple. But the mind is still swarming with ways the little cat could be hurt. Without the vaccine, there are so, so many ways the little cat could get sick and die. But with the vaccine, there is still a chance of the little cat getting sick and dying.
It gives the little cat and the dog each a small piece of cheese—as a treat; it is allowed—and fetches a wand toy. When the flying man comes for the dog, it sees them off before continuing to play with the little cat, just for a little while, maybe a few minutes, before it needs to go to the morning session with Yasmin.
It signs that it is worried and thinking in circles when Yasmin asks, and they spend the session talking about those—the worry thoughts, she calls them. And spiraling, she calls it. She reassures it that this is natural, and that it is okay. And then she tells it about the animals she grew up with—three cats and a small dog—and how they all got their vaccines every single year without any problem.
Every single year, she says.
There were vaccines every year! It will have to have these worry thoughts, will have to spiral like this, every year.
That sounds terrible. How much of the little cat’s blood will be made out of vaccine by the time the little cat is no longer so little? If they keep putting vaccine in every year, the little cat will be so full of vaccine. Where will the blood go?
Yasmin tells it that the injections—shots, like from a gun—go under the skin and not into the blood. She even taps and swipes at her phone until there is a little moving slide show of a vaccine happening, and the cat that is getting the vaccine is held like a loaf by one of the animal researchers, while the other one pulls up the skin and puts the needle inside. The cat makes a very unhappy sound but only once.
What unhappy sound will little Alpine make?
It does not want little Alpine to be unhappy. Not even for a moment.
It goes from the session with Yasmin to the ballerina woman’s rooms for breakfast, and the meal is a blur. It is still not hungry, but it eats. Eggs. Pancakes. Fruit. The ballerina woman and the other asset talk while it eats, but it cannot pay proper attention to the conversation and does not join in.
Any minute now, they will go to the rooms for assets and the animal researchers will come to inject the little cat with the vaccines.
Every muscle it has is tense and it aches all over from this. But it will be strong for little Alpine. This is to protect little Alpine.
It wants to protect little Alpine.
Natasha
—New York City | Thursday 25 October 2012 | 8:45 a.m.—
She’s early getting down to the lobby for her meetup with Dr Jennifer Sandoval. And she’s still not sure it was a great idea to leave Clint and Jigsaw in charge of cleaning up after breakfast in her kitchen. She should at least be supervising.
But Jigsaw, at least, knows how to wash dishes properly—she taught him however long ago after catching him using hand soap on a mug with just his fingers. So in theory, at least one of them should be on top of things.
And normally that would be the case, but Jigsaw is clearly not himself today. Eating his food without enthusiasm, just one item on his plate and then the other and then the next, no joyful selection of the ripest fruits first or the choicest pancake slice. He didn’t even make a point to offer the last of anything to her or Clint. Just methodically kept serving himself more until it was gone.
She hopes that washing and putting away breakfast dishes will help distract him from whatever is eating at him. Whatever. No, not whatever. Natasha knows full well that it’s the impending vaccination appointment with the mobile vet that has him moving through the morning in an unhappy fog.
Natasha has done what she could to reassure him, and so have others in the Tower. But given his history with medical agents within HYDRA, it’s little wonder that something as beneficial as vaccination would cause considerable worry for him. Hopefully, when it all goes smoothly and Alpine continues to be her rambunctious self, Jigsaw will relax—not just about vaccines but also about the vet herself.
Because eventually, Alpine is going to need to be spayed, and that is not something they can let him watch. She’s certain that they can arrange to have Jennifer perform the operation in the Tower’s medical wing. With Tony’s funding, it seems as though anything is possible. And if this particular veterinarian doesn’t do this, she can recommend a colleague and be present for the surgery.
If Jigsaw can get to the point of trusting Alpine’s vet through the rounds of vaccinations and boosters Alpine needs over the next several weeks, the spay will go so much better.
She’s doubtful they can put Alpine in a carrier and bring her to an actual vet clinic. Jigsaw wouldn’t handle the setting well at all. And they can’t just take her from him in a carrier and bring her back with stitches, a shaved belly, and a cone of shame.
So it’s imperative that this visit go well, not just for Jigsaw’s sake in the present but for the future. Because even if there are no tomcats in the Tower, from what Natasha has read, it’s still far better to spay Alpine so that she doesn’t go into heat and make herself and everyone else miserable with her yowling.
Natasha supposes that’ll make two spayed ladies on their hallway.
At least Alpine will be thoroughly sedated for her eventual spay procedure. Natasha hadn’t been.
Thankfully, Jennifer comes through the door with the same vet tech as before, interrupting Natasha’s thought process before it can get too dark and possibly interfere with her projection of happiness and calmness that Jigsaw will need here.
And she’s definitely glad the vet brought the same tech with her. This way Jigsaw won’t have to extend his trust to a new and unproven face on top of the shots themselves.
She waves at them as they check in at the front desk and waits for them to get their guest badges before greeting them.
“Jennifer, Thomas.” Natasha puts on a bright smile. “It’s great to see you again.”
“And you,” Jennifer says. “I trust Alpine has been a bundle of fuzzy joy since we last saw her?”
She shakes Natasha’s hand and then follows her to the elevator with Thomas just a step behind.
Natasha grins, this one genuine. “She’s definitely brought a lot of joy to the Tower, and specifically to Jigsaw. Who is agitated about this whole thing,” she adds more seriously. “We tried to teach him a bit about vaccines, but we aren’t the science types, so it might not be clear to him, yet.”
Jennifer nods. “I thought he might be a bit anxious. A lot of people are, even when they know all about vaccines and how necessary they are. They just see their pet getting shots and everything they know goes right out the window in the face of their pet in pain.”
“Is there anything you can do to settle a little of that anxiety down?”
“We’ll play a bit first so that Alpine is easy and comfortable with us,” Jennifer says as the elevator heads up. “And Alpine is old enough for treats after each injection, so that will help. I’ll be sure to explain everything.”
Thomas shifts his equipment satchel to his other hand. “A lot of pets respond to their owners’ nerves with nerves of their own,” he says. “So if you and Clint can remain calm, Alpine might not get the idea that anything is upsetting, and so she won’t be upset.”
Natasha grimaces. “I can vouch for Clint and myself. But Jigsaw’s a real mess over this.”
“If you think he’d be okay waiting in another room, we could try that.”
“He wouldn’t go for that.”
“Ah. Well, we’ll do what we can and work with what we have.”
Clint
—New York City | Thursday 25 October 2012 | 9:15 a.m.—
“Nothing is ever a guarantee,” the vet says, cuddling Alpine close and smiling when the kitten licks her cheek. “Every action we take has hoped for benefits and the risks we have to accept.”
Jigsaw nods beside him on the sofa, still tense as ever.
“With vaccines, there are risks involved, and it’s just a matter of what is the bigger risk. We want to take the path that has the biggest benefits and the smallest risks. And that path is getting your kitten vaccinated.”
Jigsaw nods again, but doesn’t relax.
Clint isn’t sure why the vet is even talking about risks, or why she’s drawing this out. Sure, Alpine is cute and it’s nice to play with her. But the vet sees lots of cute animals all day long. Why not just get the shots over with?
“So you’re on board,” the vet says. “That’s great. We wouldn’t do anything without your permission, even now that we’re at the appointment. What concerns do you have, Jigsaw?”
Good, good, asking Jigsaw and not Clint or Natasha. But Clint still can’t see why they’re dwelling on the concerns and not doing this quickly so that the worst part is over? Rip the bandaid off, that kind of thing.
Jigsaw takes his time working on his tablet, looking up from time to time to observe the vet and make sure Alpine is still happy. After several minutes, there’s a response: “Reaction bad reaction hurt little Alpine? Little Alpine die reaction? Jigsaw protect little Alpine. Reaction time? All time? Some time? Little time? How time reaction? How help reaction little Alpine?”
The vet tech looks a bit thrown by the barrage of words, but the vet herself merely nods and takes her time making sense of it all.
“You’re concerned about the possibility of a bad reaction,” she says after a minute. “You’d like to know how often that happens and how you can help her if there is a bad reaction. Do I have it right?”
Jigsaw brightens and nods, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.
Clint makes a mental note to rub his shoulders after this.
“The most common reactions are a bit of soreness and stiffness at the injection sites, and a bit of sleepiness. These are perfectly normal and not harmful at all.” She places a kiss against the side of Alpine’s head. “That’s most likely what will happen, and it’s nothing to worry about. It could last a couple of days.”
The vet tucks Alpine into her arms like a baby, belly up, and tickles Alpine’s tummy. In stark contrast to the gentle tummy tickling, her voice is clear but serious.
“Very, very rarely,” she says, “there could be a more severe reaction. You’ll know that she’s having a bad reaction because she’ll be vomiting or having diarrhea, having trouble breathing or standing, and her face might swell up. If these things are going to happen, they’ll happen within an hour or so, and we’ll be here in the building to help.”
Clint cheats his eyes over to catch Jigsaw’s expression and is surprised when it’s grim but not panicked or fearful. Maybe it was the right call to explain everything and go over details before the injecting starts. Huh.
But the vet must do this same conversation at least once a week, so it figures that she’d know how to handle it. And she probably knew some of Jigsaw’s concerns going into this because of how common those concerns probably are.
Clint sure is glad they have this vet. Her couchside manner is pretty good, and she doesn’t freak Jigsaw out once she’s actually in the room with him. It’s the anticipation that is worse than the actual visit.
“Any other questions?”
Jigsaw thinks for a moment and then begins gathering up another string of words, which emerge from the tablet a few minutes later: “Vaccine inside little Alpine. Where inside? Little Alpine outside grass safe?”
“These will be subcutaneous injections, or right under her skin. Not in her muscles or in her veins.” The vet shakes her head. “And no, she won’t be safe to go outside just yet. She will need more vaccines after this set, called booster shots. Those ones will be just like these ones, to make sure she’s really immune—or safe—from the diseases we’re vaccinating against.”
“Reaction? When more?”
Another head shake from the vet.
“If there aren’t any bad reactions this time, there most likely won’t be any next time, either. Or the time after that. And then, after she’s had all her boosters, she’ll be safe to go outside. But—” and the vet holds up a finger “—I still don’t recommend her going outside without a leash and harness. It’s dangerous outside, and if she got lost, she could be hurt or killed before you find her.”
Jigsaw frowns. “No outside, why vaccine?”
The vet smiles. “If you ever got a second cat, or if Alpine did happen to get outside somehow, she’d need her vaccines. So the risk of not vaccinating far outweighs the risk of any reactions she might have.”
“And we’ll be in a common room for two hours after this,” the vet tech adds. “So if there are any reactions, we can swing back by here or you can take her to us and we can make sure she’s okay.”
“Little Alpine safe even reaction?”
“To the the very best of our abilities,” the vet says. “Are you ready for us to get started?”
He’s hesitant about it, but Jigsaw does nod, much to Clint’s relief. Maybe now they can get the hard part over with, chill out a couple of hours, and then be done with the vet for the day. For the month, really. That’d be nice.
“Alright,” the vet says, handing Alpine to her assistant. “Thomas is going to hold Alpine steady for me, and I’m going to give the injections. To do that, I’ll lift up a very gentle pinch of Alpine’s skin so that I can be sure the vaccine is going to the right place. She might make some uncomfortable noises, but that’s because getting shots is uncomfortable.”
The actual shots themselves would be over in a minute, except that there are treats and petting after each one. On the one hand, way to prolong the whole thing. On the other hand, getting a lollipop after a shot worked on him as a kid, and it seems that cat treats work just as well on Alpine. The kitten hardly squirms away before a treat is presented, and has forgotten the shot by the time the next is ready.
“And that’s that,” the vet says as Alpine crunches down on her last treat. “She’ll be a little bit sleepy and low-energy, and she might be a bit sore, so it could be uncomfortable for her to be picked up. But we’ll be here in the Tower for a while, so if you see anything worrying, just let us know.”
And in a handful of minutes, thank yous have been conveyed, goodbyes have been given to the kitten, and Natasha is headed out to show them where to hang out. Clint hopes they get snacks or something wherever it is. Or a movie to watch. Two hours to just chill with a coworker is a lot. But hey, two paid hours to chill with a coworker is pretty nice.
“Not so bad, huh?” Clint says while Jigsaw inspects Alpine to reassure himself that she’s fine.
Jigsaw signs “wait” and taps his wrist, then goes back to stroking the kitten’s back and side while she curls up in his lap.
Right. Two hours. Jigsaw will be watching his kitten like a hawk to be sure she’s not swelling up or anything. And yeah, if Clint was as attached to Alpine as Jigsaw is and as prone to worrying about things like this, maybe he’d do the same.
As it is, he’ll focus on Jigsaw while Jigsaw focuses on the kitten.
“Can I give you a shoulder rub?” Clint asks. “You were really tense for a while there, and it might feel nice.”
Jigsaw nods and turns on the sofa to put his back to Clint, disturbing Alpine but not enough for the kitten to jump off his lap, and Clint gets to work.
Notes:
Content Warning: Very brief mention of Natasha's unwanted hysterectomy (Red Room graduation ceremony, grr) in here, treated by Natasha as a joke. Also discussion of injections for vaccines. If you’re squeamish about needles, this warning is for you. Also, vaccinate your pets, your kids, yourselves. ^_^
Chapter 144: Super Soldiers | I fear rivers overflowin’
Notes:
A lot of us can use the pick-me-up today, and I know I can do with a bit of dopamine considering all things, so have an early chapter. Happy Father's Day to those who celebrate, also. Stay safe out there, y'all.
Chapter title from “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Oh, also, just a note that we’re skipping ahead from Thursday morning in the last chapter to Saturday morning in this chapter. In case it seems a little choppy.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Steve
—New York City | Saturday 27 October 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—
Steve has lived through bad storms before. There was the hurricane in ‘38, and that was the worst he can recall. The newspapers were full of death counts all through the area, not just the City. He hadn’t been able to help anyone, being stuck in bed with an early season cold, but his ma had gone out to care for people in the wake of the storm.
So while he wishes this storm weren’t approaching, wishes it was less intense as it had been originally forecast to be, wishes people weren’t going to be in harm’s way… He also can’t help but feel a tiny bit giddy that he can help this time.
He’d discussed that with Dr Linda the day before, just as the City called for evacuation planning. Not only could he help on the ground during the hurricane and before, helping people get to safety, but he could help by spreading the word about Pepper’s arrangements and planning, and could help lighten spirits afterward.
Pepper has been busy nearly nonstop since the Halloween party organizing shipments of supplies to the Tower, getting staff to clear out large portions of the second and third floors of the Tower—mostly conference rooms that won’t be needed during the hurricane—seeing to the placement of supplies and cots and blankets… They’ve got water filtration systems and they’re powered by the main arc reactor rather than the City’s power grid, so they’ll be in good shape.
All the more reason to open the Tower’s doors to serve as a shelter during and immediately after the storm.
They’ll be able to provide food, water, electrical charging stations, places to sleep safely. They’ll also be able to provide some counseling services, because Dr Linda has accepted a room at the Tower for the duration of the storm, Yasmin is here, and Sam can help as well. Zoe might not be that kind of therapist or have any training in that direction the way Sam does, but she can still help.
The staff can even provide a bit of child care in the aftermath, since there’s an onsite daycare in the Tower for Stark Industries employees. It might not be possible to get enough qualified staff to help the kids during the storm, but after the worst has passed, they should be able to handle things.
Steve is in the middle of a flurry of activity all throughout the Tower to prepare for this storm—and specifically, not to batten down the hatches and ride it out, but to open the doors and help whoever they can.
And he has a massive platform to get the word out with. He’s probably sent a dozen tweets out already about the preparations, about how the Tower is going to serve as a shelter, about some of the things they will be able to offer.
And that’s just while the storm is still approaching. Pepper has them in contact with various rescue crews forming in the area so that high-danger evacuation situations can be triaged so that the Avengers can be the most helpful where most needed.
Really, he’s not sure there’s anything Pepper hasn’t thought of. She is possibly the most prepared woman on the face of the planet.
She’s even got a set of photos he can add to his tweets, showing people hard at work assembling all of this, from activity bags for the kids to supply kits for the adults, from getting tables removed to getting cots in place, from stacks of blankets to stacks of folding chairs.
And yes, he’s gotten a number of retweets and comments from people asking why they can’t do as much for the homeless on a regular basis, calling them out for perceived hypocrisy, accusing them of doing this just for the publicity. And there have been murmurs of how self-serving Stark Industries is for only helping local people in need when there are many others who need such help all the time all over the coast during hurricane season.
Following Sam’s advice—and Dr Linda’s—Steve is ignoring that in stead of responding. He doesn’t want his helpful tweets to get buried in a pile of back and forth. So he just keeps tweeting his news every few hours and hopes for the best.
Aside from that, it’s a matter of going through various low-income neighborhoods helping people haul and stack sandbags and plastic sheeting, working alongside Sam and Clint with Tony flying in pallets of additional supplies to keep their work going.
Steve had suggested at a team dinner the night before that Bruce and Jigsaw could join them, that Natasha’s knee was up to the task if she wore the knee brace she’d worn during the Siberia mission.
Bruce had merely smiled and said that the City could wait for the storm to flatten it instead of calling in the Other Guy to do the job. And it’s true enough that Hulk might not be ideally suited to the sandbag crew, but Bruce is stronger than he looks. Still, he’d opted to help assemble things in the Tower.
And Pepper had raised a valid point that Jigsaw might pull in a more “diverse” gathering than Steve and the others, by which she must be referring to people protesting Jigsaw’s presence outside of a prison. Steve doesn’t like the thought that anyone would cause a stink about the “Jigsaw Avenger” at the expense of helping protect people from flooding. But if it did happen, it wouldn’t be great PR and it wouldn’t be an ideal first truly public outing for Jigsaw.
Pepper still wants to manage that to ensure a peaceful and controlled exposure of those elements. There are still too many nay-sayers like Carlton Badger out there, and there’s no sense stirring them up at this point. Especially when Jigsaw can be directed to help arrange things inside the Tower alongside Bruce.
Jigsaw himself had been too interested in managing his recently vaccinated kitten—at the dinner table, which Steve could tell had distressed Pepper—and eating three stuffed butternut squash boats to care much about being volunteered for inside duty instead of outside duty. If anything, Clint had objected more to being volunteered.
And Natasha had opted to help manage the inside operations alongside the other two rather than risk her knee to the hazards of manual labor and repetitive stress, when she can do more good on the ground during the storm itself as part of the rescue crew managing hazardous evacuations.
Steve hopes the three of them are enjoying being directed by Pepper in assembling things or rearranging things, whatever they happen to be doing to help the storm relief efforts. He also hopes there are enough supplies to go around, both for inside and outside efforts.
From the images Pepper keeps sending him to tweet out during transport to other areas in need of sandbagging, there appears to be enough for their own relief efforts. And he trusts Pepper will get any overflow supplies to where they are needed.
“You’re way too invested in Twitter, Steve.” In the backseat, Clint is wearing his seatbelt, technically, but he’s sitting at the edge of his seat and looking over Steve’s shoulder in the front passenger seat.
Sam huffs out a laugh and puts on the indicator light to make a turn. “You’re the one on the edge of your seat trying to see what he’s tweeting now.”
Clint settles back with a grumble. “Like I can help it if this is boring without better conversationalists in the car.” He sighs and draws a star on the condensation on the window with a squeak. “Are we there yet?”
“And sent,” Steve says. “I’m only invested because it’s a way I can make an even bigger difference, Clint. Having a storm shelter and supplies doesn’t help anyone if no one knows about it.”
“Don’t they all know about it already?”
Steve shrugs. “I’m not the most popular tweeter out there. I can only keep trying to get the word out.”
“And we are there yet,” Sam says as they pull up near the next gathering of people in need of supplies—which Stark has arranged to arrive soon—and help applying them to the neighborhood.
Steve gets ready to get back to work. They can’t reach everyone, can’t help everywhere, but he’s doing what he can, and he’s trying to help those most in need. He’s sure his ma would be proud.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 27 October 2012 | 11:30 a.m.—
“Of course we can,” the ballerina woman says into her phone. “Just bring her by. I’ll come down to collect her and find out any special needs. Of course. No, I understand. Alright, see you soon.”
It looks over from where it is putting coloring books—full of pictures to be filled in—and little wax sticks in all sorts of colors into bags along with soft things in many shapes. Each bag gets a coloring book, a box of wax sticks, and a hand-selected soft thing, plus a little bottle of water and a paper full of stickers to put on things.
It has filled many, many bags, and has not found a book or a paper of stickers or a soft thing that it does not like. There will be so many tiny innocents to comfort during the storm and some of them will need soft things to cling to, just like it has the fish-looking soft thing. And they can color things in with the wax sticks, and put stickers on things. And if they are thirsty, there is the water.
If it was choosing all of the things to go into the bags, it would include a snack, too. But the ballerina woman had explained that sometimes snacks that are good to eat for one person might not be tasty to another person, or could even hurt them if they had something called an allergy. So there are no snacks. But there are still other good things in the bags.
At a different table, the curly haired researcher is putting different things into other bags. Books that are puzzles like the cross word puzzles and word searches that it does with Zoe, or something with lots of numbers that it did not get a good look at. Or things called logic puzzles that only use the brain to solve them.
There are still little soft things for those bags, though. And that is good. Because everyone can use a little soft thing to hold when they are scared.
“So, Jigsaw. What do you think about taking care of a second kitten for a little while?”
It widens the eyes. Another little cat?
“Jennifer, the vet from Thursday, needs to clear out some space in the clinic she’s affiliated with so they’ll be able to board more animals during the storm. She needs a foster parent for one last kitten and thought of us.”
It signs “bored” and the question sign. It does not understand. The other part, “foster,” it does not even know the sign for, so cannot ask about.
“Not that kind of board,” the ballerina woman says with a smile. “It means giving a temporary home to. So her clinic needs the space to provide homes to lots of animals during the storm, and they have a kitten who won’t fit. We would take care of the kitten for a while.”
It nods and signs “parent.” It knows that one.
The ballerina woman stands up to put the latest set of filled bags in a bin on wheels with a range of numbers on the side and returns to the table.
“Parents in this case take care of animals, like you and Clint are Alpine and Lucky’s parents. Foster parents take care of animals for just a little while.”
It wonders how long they will be parents for the second little cat. They will find out soon, according to the ballerina woman’s call just now. It hopes they can be parents for a long time.
It signs that it is happy to be a parent to another little cat.
“I figured you would be. But I’m sorry I didn’t ask before agreeing. I should have asked.”
It shakes the head. She figured correctly.
Everything is going well today. The little cat is back to her full playfulness and appetite. It is getting to see all of these coloring books and stickers and soft things. It is getting to spend time with the ballerina woman. And all the things they’ve done will be helping people.
They are going to give all of these bags to tiny innocents—the ultimate innocent humans—and make sure that the storm isn’t too frightening for them. And there are older innocents who will get other bags, and younger baby innocents who will get more bags. Even adults have bags, and their bags have some of the same things inside—including small soft things.
The woman with the long red hair, the one who hosted the party with all the cookies, has bags for everyone. And there are so many piled up soft blankets and pillows—it felt them to make sure they were soft enough, and they are. There will be food for all of the people who need help in the storm, too. Soft things, and food, and safety.
It is working to protect people it does not know or even see, and now there is a little cat that it can protect, too.
Yes, everything is going very, very well today. It just wishes the other asset could be here, too.
The other little cat arrives after the lunchtime meal, and in a small plastic prison with lots of little holes along the sides and back and a metal grate over the front.
The ballerina woman assures it that this is a normal thing, that cats are usually transported in such handheld prisons. It does not think that this makes it right, but there is no time to argue. Instead, they will just take the other little cat in its plastic prison box and bring it upstairs where they can release it.
The animal researcher—this time only the woman, who the ballerina woman called Jennifer—hands over the other little cat’s prison and also a folder with some papers inside. It lets the ballerina woman deal with the papers and instead holds the prison up to its face, where it can see through the grate that the other little cat is just as black as little Alpine is white, with wide greenish brown eyes.
There is a plaintive, almost mournful mew from inside the prison, and it is tempted to open the prison right there. But it must wait until they are in the rooms for assets before doing that. It would like to reassure the other little cat that they will waste no time in freeing it, but it does not know how to do that.
The other little cat is curled up at the back of the prison, and it has been there, curled in a cell, as far away from the door as it can get, wide-eyed and wild-eyed, terrified. It hates that this little cat is in such a state.
But there must be talk about things, apparently, reassurances given that this little cat can eat little Alpine’s food safely and that this little cat has had vaccines. That they can share a litter box and play together. Instructions to observe at first to be sure introductions go well.
And then, finally, after a bit more thanks, they can go back to the rooms for assets. The elevator car seems to creep upward, but it knows that is just its own impatience to free the little cat from the prison.
“Did you hear the part about introductions?” the ballerina woman asks. “We shouldn’t just open the carrier up and let her out. She needs some time to decompress from the drive over and to get used to the new smells.”
But. But they will be in the rooms for assets. There will be no need for the prison.
“Why don’t we put the carrier in your room with the spare litter box and some food and water?” The ballerina woman flips through the papers. “Then we can open up the carrier and sit in the room with her until she’s feeling comfortable. By then, Alpine will be super curious, and we can introduce them.”
It sighs. That is so long. But if that will help this little cat feel safe and comfortable, then they will do it that way.
And it does not take long to set up all of the things on one side of the room that is for this asset—the closet and window side, opposite the door—and to drag the nest with its hoard of fluffy pillows and soft blankets over to the other side of the room, close to the door, so that they can curl up, this asset and the ballerina woman, and watch the other little cat until it is time for introductions.
“Could I sit on your bed, Jigsaw?” the ballerina woman asks after going over to open the grate door on the prison. “Or maybe borrow a pillow?”
It pats the nest next to it, closer to the door so that she will not feel trapped in the room, and signs for her to sit. Why would it not let her sit on the nest? The ballerina woman is welcome here. Of course she is welcome.
“Thanks,” she says, easing down to sit with her legs stretched out across the nest and her back against the wall. “This is really cozy. I can see why you like it so much.”
It does like it, yes, though it will still choose the other asset’s nest if the other asset is sleeping there.
And then there is silent waiting.
The little black cat does not come out of the prison immediately when the door is opened up. It takes several minutes for the little black cat to poke a nose out into the room, and then a hesitant paw, and gradually a head and second paw.
It watches the caution and feels the heart inside of the ribs hurting for the little black cat. It has been the little black cat, it has known that pain and injury were on the other side of the prison door, it has been tempted out by food and fresh water only to be ambushed by enemies time and time again, until the prison feels safer than the outside. But they are no enemies of the little black cat. How to explain that without frightening the little black cat?
“This is just like you were at first, from what Clint told me,” the ballerina woman says with a smile, as though she can read what is inside of the head. “Let’s hope that this kitten doesn’t take a month to come around to trusting us.”
There will not need to be a month, it is sure. The little black cat was with the animal researchers, yes, but they are not like the researchers who hurt it so often in the captivity days. The animal researchers it knows mean well and do their best not to hurt animals.
And it is proven correct when the little black cat emerges fully from the prison finally, and goes over to eat some of the wet food—chicken and rice, one of little Alpine’s favorites—and drink some of the water. The little black cat sniffs around the corner with the food and water bowls, sniffs at the wall, and the carpet, and the little mat that they put down under the bowls. Then the little black cat scratches around in the litter box in the other corner, before hopping out and looking at them warily.
The ballerina woman makes what are called kissy noises but which don’t sound anything like when it and the other asset kiss. But the little black cat ignores her, instead going to the cat tree and clawing furiously at the one of the sisal-wrapped support legs.
Little Alpine chirps from outside of the closed door, sneaks a tiny white paw under the door. And the other little cat comes over to investigate, paws under the door back at little Alpine.
It looks at the ballerina woman sitting up in its nest beside it and gives her the thumbs up sign and the question sign. This is good, right? The two little cats are introducing themselves.
“I think it’s a good sign, yeah.”
After a moment, the ballerina woman continues. “You know, her name is supposed to be ‘Inky.’ I don’t like that name.”
The little black cat is black like ink. That must be where the name comes from. But it has pens in many different colors of ink, some with gel instead of ink, some with glitter. So ink does not always mean black.
It nods and asks what she would call the little black cat instead of Inky.
“Hm. I guess, maybe Liho?” the ballerina woman says like asking a question. “It’s an old Slavic mythical creature bringing misfortune, which is sort of the surrounding for how she came to us. But in other languages, it means ‘beautiful,’ which she is.”
It likes that name better than Inky. Liho. It is a name that would go well with Lucky, and with Alpine. Even if they cannot be parents to the little black cat for very long, the little black cat will fit in nicely.
“I’ve always thought if I had a pet, that I would name it Liho, too. The earlier parts of my life were all pretty unfortunate, but there’s beauty in it, too.”
It nods. The ballerina woman has explained about the Red Room, about how she was stolen from her family as an innocent and raised to be a killer, instead. About the lies and threats, the beatings and the praise. But also, it has seen her eyes shine when she talks about ballet and how she hopes to be able take that back up soon.
“I think she might be ready to meet Alpine nose to nose,” the ballerina woman says after a few minutes, shifting to her knees slowly and reaching up to open the door a crack.
There is a great deal of sniffing on both sides of the door, and more paws batting back and forth through the opening. Even some mrrps of curiosity and excitement from little Alpine. There is also some sniffing from higher up, where the dog wants to know what is in the room that is being hidden away.
“Jennifer said this kitten has been around dogs, so she should be fine to be around Lucky, but just in case, let’s let Alpine in and then play a while before we get Lucky involved, okay?”
It nods. The ballerina woman listened to the animal researcher and read all of the papers. It did not. So she will know how to introduce the little black kitten—Liho, for now—to little Alpine.
“First, I’ll text Yasmin, and let her know you might be late for a happy kitten thing,” the ballerina woman says, pulling out her phone. “Then we can take lots of pictures as these two play. Maybe you can make a scrapbook.”
It could. And it would be a scrap book that contains only the happy parts of little Liho’s homecoming and none of the plastic prison that she started inside of.
Scrap books are for good things, not bad.
Notes:
Content Warning: Jigsaw compares a cat carrier and a skittish kitten's experience of it to his own captivity under HYDRA, but it shouldn't be too bad to read.
Chapter 145: Assets | ‘Cause I can’t do nothing right
Notes:
Chapter title from “Don’t Let Me Get Me” by P!nk.
Tomorrow may be a busy day for me, so I'm posting early to ensure you get your Sunday chapter. ^_^
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 27 October 2012 | 9:00 p.m.—
“Um,” Clint says, very intelligently, when he finally arrives home.
The door to his suite with Jigsaw shuts behind him, and Lucky performs his greeting dance, twirling in a few circles while Clint tries to pet him and then settling down to lick Clint’s hands a few times.
“Did… Alpine change colors?”
That’s stupid, he knows. A real stupid thing to say. But he’s tired. Surely it’s excusable to be this stupid when he’s this tired.
He’s spent the entire day stacking sandbags with the tireless Captain America and the only slightly less tireless Sam Wilson, and he sure as hell didn’t lift with his legs. His arms hurt, his back hurts, his legs hurt. Hell, his feet hurt. His toes. It was a full body workout that lasted for hours with short breaks for travel. He lost count of how many reps he did at the gym of sandbags and tarps.
But most importantly of all, he’s utterly exhausted in the brain as well as the body. So maybe he’s seeing things.
Because there is a jet black kitten, only a little bit bigger and slightly less fluffy than the white kitten he’s used to seeing, on the back of the sofa chasing a bit of feathery fluff on the end of a stick while Natasha laughs—either at the kitten’s antics or at him. Hard to be sure.
Then a white kitten—the Alpine he expected—scrambles up the back of the sofa to join the feather hunt. There are two kittens. There was only one kitten when he left. He’s sure of that much.
“When did we get a second kitten?”
Natasha sends both kittens racing to the floor after the wand toy. “This afternoon. We’re fostering this one during the storm.”
Fostering… Oh. So they didn’t get a second kitten. They’re kind of borrowing it until it’s okay to be adopted somewhere. He’s heard of fostering kittens and puppies and things.
“It took a little bit of time to introduce everyone and chase away the ‘new is scary’ feelings for Liho, but they’ve been playing together, sleeping all curled up together in the cat condo on the tree, even eating together without a problem.”
“Liho is the black kitten.” Clint is feeling so intelligent tonight. It’s like his brain fell out of his skull while he was working and got smooshed under one of the sandbags earlier today.
Natasha’s smile is gentle, not teasing. “That’s right. They were calling her Inky, but that’s a terrible name.”
Clint comes around to sit on the sofa next to her, and the black kitten—Liho, he supposes, at least for her stay with them—stops going for the wand toy in order to come sniff his shoe.
“How did we get Liho, exactly?” he asks. That he knows of, there isn’t a kitten drop-box outside the Tower where people surrender their unwanted bundles of fluff. If there was, the Tower would be overrun by rescues because Jigsaw wouldn’t turn any of them away.
“The vet called and asked if we could foster her, and I said yes.” Natasha hides the wand toy between the sofa cushions. “I think it was probably because she was out of her usual options and already knew she could trust us. You know how black cats can get treated around Halloween.”
Yeah. He does. Or at least he thinks he does, and it isn’t pretty. Maybe on the non-“strapped to a rocket” side of things, they’re some kind of temporary pet and get returned when the season is over. Like bunnies after Easter. Hard to say. Harder to hear, though, so he just nods.
If it’s worse than he suspects, he doesn’t want to know.
“Well,” he says, “at least everyone gets along.”
Clint winces as Liho claws her way up his jeans to reach his lap, and then pets her. She’s just as soft as Alpine, but a bit less fuzzy. He wonders if that means Alpine is fuzzier than the average kitten or if Liho is less fuzzy than average. Maybe it’s a sign of long fur and short fur. He hopes Alpine doesn’t balloon out into that smush-nosed long-haired cat in the Fancy Feast commercials. That’s a lot of fur to keep sorted.
Regardless, he’s pretty sure Jigsaw is thrilled with the two-kitten development and will be reluctant to let Liho go back to the vet. They are probably not just fostering this kitten. They’ve probably borrowed this kitten the same way Jigsaw used to borrow his hoodies and Banner’s yoga pants, which have still not been returned and show no signs of eventually going back to their rightful owners.
“So,” Natasha asks after several minutes of lap time, “what are you going to do about your lesson with Kate tomorrow?”
Ugh. That’s right. Tomorrow is Sunday. Does he cancel on Katie-Kate so she can do whatever storm prep she needs to do and avoid—or join—evacuation traffic? Does he tell her to pack a bag and encourage her to stay with them through the storm? Maybe something in between? Just how bad is the storm supposed to be, anyway? How long does a hurricane last?
“I don’t know,” Clint says. “They’re shutting things down tomorrow, so no subway, no buses. Would the taxies be running? Hm. Maybe, but if they are it’ll be slow getting one.”
“If traffic is the issue, we can just send one of Stark’s cars for her.” Natasha leans back on the sofa and props her legs up on the coffee table so Alpine has a bigger place to curl up. “The real question is whether you want her here or not here. For the lesson, and also for the storm.”
Clint rubs at his eyes. He’s too tired for this. “What do you think I should do? That’s what I’ll do.”
She laughs. “Well, Kate would want to be here for her lesson, and she’d want to help with sandbagging if that’s what you need to do next. And she’d want to help with all the rest, as well.”
“So, what, I invite her to pack a few days’ clothes and things, send a car for her tomorrow morning, and let her tag along?”
“That’s what she’d want. I don’t think it would be bad publicity for her to help, at least before the storm hits. It’s already public knowledge that she’s your student.”
Clint sighs and digs his phone out of his back pocket, causing Liho to abandon his lap for Natasha’s, where the two kittens jockey for position for a few seconds before curling up like a yin-yang symbol.
“I’ll let her know. But she’s not coming with us while there’s a storm out there,” Clint adds. “She can stay inside and follow Pepper’s orders, like a civilian.”
He fires off a text that probably doesn’t make complete sense, but that’s not total nonsense, either. [Probable bring bag for storm would be smart. You can stay here, help out?]
“She may want to be a hero,” Clint says, “but she isn’t an Avenger and we aren’t putting her in harm’s way.”
Natasha nods. “Good call.”
The text he gets in response is near-immediate and full of excited emojis.
“She’s pretty happy about coming over tomorrow.” Clint shows Natasha the phone and she shakes her head.
“Ah, to be so young and enthusiastic,” she says.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Saturday 27 October 2012 | 10:00 p.m.—
There is excitement inside that makes it almost bouncy on the feet as it returns to the rooms for assets after the session with Zoe.
There will be two little cats waiting for it in the rooms for assets, little Alpine and little Liho. Two little cats, and a very good dog, and a ballerina woman. Oh, and maybe by now the other asset will be back, too. It hopes so. It has missed the other asset all day.
Yasmin said it was good to spend time apart, even though they love each other. According to Yasmin, everyone should spend some time away from the ones they spend the most time with. It is not sure it agrees. If there hadn’t been little Liho and the ballerina woman to distract it, it would have been spending the entire day focused on how much it missed the other asset.
If the other asset is back, finally, then it will be a very full room with everyone there waiting for it. But that is okay, because it wants to be near all of them. It even has a new tile on its Names board for little Liho. It had to ask Zoe to look up the name and see how it is spelled so that the tile could be correct. JARVIS helped.
That turned the entire session into an explanation about how words could have completely different meanings in different languages, and then a game about connotation and denotation in the language it is using. Denotation is what the word means, but connotation is more about how the word feels. It is not sure it will remember that, but for now it knows the difference.
The first words they’d discussed were murder and kill. That had made it so happy. Zoe has not forgotten the mission.
Kill and murder, according to Zoe, have the same basic denotation, that someone is making someone else die. But kill apparently has a milder connotation, where it could be an accident—sloppy work, then—or something where a fight escalated into something “spur of the moment,” which means unplanned. But murder has a more serious connotation, definitely intentional, and probably planned out.
It did not want to argue with an expert, but it is not sure about those connotations. Murder is what happens when someone evil makes someone innocent die. Kill is just meeting a mission objective and eliminating a target. It is not ever an accident.
It has killed thousands or more. But it is not sure it has ever murdered someone. The closest it has gotten to murder is going after HYDRA operatives and killing them without an externally imposed mission objective. But even then, it had will and could make its own mission objectives. So those were still killings and not murders. Certainly no one it killed under its own mission objectives was an innocent.
But they had also discussed house and home, and also nest. It liked that nest was included. House was somewhere someone could live, home was somewhere warm and secure and inviting where someone could live, and nest, oh, nest, was the heart of a home, where everything was soft and welcoming and even more secure than a home—somewhere actively protected instead of somewhere that happened to be safe.
And they had talked about smell and aroma and odor and scent. There had been lots of examples, and there was even a level of the basket game on the tablet for putting smelly things into different baskets for all of those words. Peaches go in the aroma basket because it likes the smell. And the other asset’s coffee goes in the smell basket because it doesn’t like the coffee smell but associates it with the other asset and doesn’t want to put it in the odor basket. Flowers go in the odor basket, though. They are stinky.
But what it smells in the hallway closer to the door to the rooms for assets is not stinky. It would go into the scent basket because it smells good to it, but also isn’t as pervasive a smell as an aroma. Aromas get all over the place, in a good way. Scents are more focused. At least, that is the connotation it has.
Connotations can vary depending on who is thinking about a word.
The other asset is back from the sandbag mission, and the other asset worked so hard for so long that it can smell the hard work lingering in the hallway. And still pretty fresh, so it smells the exertion and the power of the other asset’s muscles at work, but not the days-old acrid smell—the odor—of sweat that hasn’t been washed away. That kind of smell signals deprivation, lost opportunity or ability to clean up after hard work.
Everyone should be able to clean up after hard work, whether that’s a car wash or a pool, a hose someone left connected, a sprinkler system, or a shower. No one should be deprived.
Oh, and if the other asset was so hard at work for so long, then the other asset must be in need of a massage to complete the relaxation that is so thoroughly earned. It can send the other asset into the shower—or maybe can observe the other asset in the bath!—and then it can rub and knead all over, seeking the knots and forcing them to loosen so that the blood can flow smoothly through all of the muscles.
The skin face is getting so warm thinking these thoughts, and it pauses in the hallway, feeling the cheeks. Yes, warmer than they should be. Should it not be thinking these thoughts?
Watching the other asset in the bath would be… maybe too much. It has only seen the other asset in a towel before, and then in the soft snug pants that define everything. Never all the way unclothed. Maybe the other asset would be uncomfortable with that. Maybe this asset would be unable to handle the view.
And maybe massaging the other asset skin to skin is too much as well.
It wants, though. And the other asset did say that it could do whatever it wanted. But that can’t be true in every situation. There are kissing rules, after all, to help it know when kissing is appropriate. Sometimes it is not. If there are other people around. If one of them is working on something and cannot be distracted. If one of them—either of them—does not want to kiss right then.
And killing—it still wants to go out and kill HYDRA evil, but the team that is not a cell does not want to do that. And it is part of the team that is not a cell. So there must be a compromise—where everyone loses what they want but is equally unhappy with the results and therefore it is fair. It will try so hard not to kill the HYDRA evil, but there will be more missions and going after targets.
But maybe there can be something that’s only like a compromise, something where both assets get what they want. It could get to sit by the other asset’s bathtub and keep the other asset company in the bath that way. And the other asset could get… It is not sure what the other asset wants that the other asset is not getting right now. But the other asset could choose something, maybe.
It will think on this. There will be time. Right now, though, there are two little cats, a very good dog, a ballerina woman, and the other asset waiting in the rooms for assets. And what it wants most right now is to bury the skin face in little Alpine’s belly and breathe in the little cat’s scent. Definitely scent.
Clint
—New York City | Saturday 27 October 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
Jigsaw is a bit late in getting back from his session with Zoe, but he’s not upset or anything when he does slip in the door and greet Lucky, so it must have been a positive session despite going long.
And strangely, his cheeks are flushed. It couldn’t be from exertion, just walking back from the session. Jigsaw hasn’t been flushed from exertion even when performing a heavy workout in the gym. Maybe Jigsaw has been thinking embarrassing things, though that hasn’t ever happened before and Clint can’t think of anything that would embarrass him if nothing has so far.
Natasha’s smile says she suspects it’s something juicy. A secret she’ll share later, maybe. Clint can’t tell what is juicy that Jigsaw would be thinking, though. He isn’t embarrassed by a make-out session getting interrupted, so what else?
“Hey, Jigs,” Clint greets him once his attention is off of Lucky for a moment. “Anything exciting happen while I was out hauling and stacking sandbags?”
Jigsaw grins and points to the new kitten. His signs—once he’s put his tablet down on the console table—are a jumble, all over the place in his eagerness to get them out, and in no particular order. It kind of reminds Clint of their early days with ASL, before the tablet and the practice with putting thoughts into order before sharing them.
Clint grins in return and pats the sofa next to himself.
Jigsaw’s excited about the new kitten, and from what Clint puts together from the signs and his knowledge from Natasha, he’s explaining the introduction process, the hatred for the “cat prison,” his decision that they will not put the new kitten in the prison again, ever, and his happiness that the kittens get along with each other and Lucky. It’s a happy family.
He’s also excited about giving innocents—children, in specific—some stuffed animals to comfort them during the oncoming storm. He’s happy that adult innocents get stuffed animals, too, because everyone should have something soft to squeeze when afraid or stressed out. Apparently there are coloring books for the kids, and crayons. But sadly no snacks. Jigsaw is unhappy they don’t get snacks, even though someone explained about foods making people sick.
But he’s most excited to see Clint again, and to smell him. According to Jigsaw, his sweat smells really good, which might be the reason his cheeks are flushed still, and might be what Natasha is now grinning about.
Clint doesn’t quite get it—sweat is not a great smell—but if it turns his partner on, he’s not going to complain. He might even aim to get extra sweaty during his own workouts and not clean up down in the gym showers. He can wait until Jigsaw gets a whiff of him after his therapy before getting a shower and some new clothes.
Or maybe he can hold off on his workouts until Jigsaw can watch, or better yet, participate. Clint would say they could spot each other, but he’s pretty sure Jigsaw doesn’t need a spotter for the kind of weight Clint generally lifts, and that if he was going to get anything out of the workout, he’d need to be lifting amounts Clint couldn’t help much with if there was a need for a spotter.
It takes a long time to get through all of the signing, and longer still to assemble the signing into three logical categories of excitement. By the time Jigsaw’s finished, he has a pair of kittens in his lap, which he occupies himself with until Clint can process it all.
“You had a busy day,” Clint says. “All I did was mess around with sandbags.”
“No,” Natasha says. “You spent the whole day helping people who will be most impacted by the storm. That’s not nothing.”
Jigsaw nods enthusiastically.
Clint supposes they’re right, to some degree. And he might feel some of that sense of having been so helpful and altruistic if he’d come up with the idea. Or if he’d willingly volunteered rather than being dragged along. Or if he’d complained less throughout the day. Or if he’d been enthusiastic about the work. If he had been more Steve and Sam.
Lots of ways he might feel better about his involvement in the sandbag brigade.
He nods as if accepting their praise, but really all he feels is tired.
Notes:
Content Warning: Brief references to animal abuse that does not happen on the page.
Chapter 146: Archers | Long as I remember, the rain been comin’ down
Notes:
Chapter title from “Who’ll Stop the Rain” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Chapter Text
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—
She is so, so glad she didn’t go with her roommate to Vermont. If she’d evacuated ahead of the storm, she wouldn’t be packed and ready at the building’s entrance wearing a raincoat that only partly keeps her dry in the driving rain and waiting for a Stark car to come fetch her to the Tower, where her hero and her hero’s boyfriend and all the rest of the Avengers are waiting. She wouldn’t have this opportunity to help people by their side during the storm, which she’s determined to do.
They say you should try to get an internship somewhere before jumping into a career path, after all.
What is this storm but an internship in heroism?
Kate imagines pulling kids and the elderly off of rooftops and bundling them into helicopters. She imagines helping people into boats to haul them to safety during the flooding. She imagines reuniting families with their lost pets. There are lots of ways to help people during a storm like this one. And she’ll be with the Avengers, and they’ll be helping people during the storm.
Already, she knows Hawkeye was helping. It was on the news—Captain America had tweeted about neighborhoods getting sandbagged up for flood reduction that the City itself had ignored despite them being in very floodable areas. And Hawkeye and the Falcon had been there with him. There was even some footage, shot by people in the houses who were being helped.
She’s pretty sure that’s the reason they hadn’t brought Jigsaw along. There’s a lot of footage potential before a storm when people aren’t fearing for their lives yet, and the Avengers have done their best to keep him out of sight so far, except for a single picnic outing with Hawkeye and a Black woman with long braids.
That hadn’t made the news somehow, but it did make a very specific tabloid—whatever silence the team ordered from the news outlets would never silence the wretched Honey Badger’s Den.
That Carlton Badger had written up a whole thing about how serial killers were apparently welcome in the park as long as they had a chaperone, and how no one was brave enough to arrest Jigsaw because he was armed with a sandwich. Three sandwiches, even, which the tabloid article harped on as well. So what if Jigsaw ate a lot? He’s a super soldier. They eat a lot. It’s a thing, Kate’s sure.
But there probably won’t be a lot of people filming their own rescues, though, so maybe it’ll be okay for Jigsaw to help during the worst of things. Even Carlton Badger couldn’t get mad about a guy helping rescue people during a storm.
Or maybe Jigsaw will be stuck inside for the storm, after all, just in case the tabloid writer can get mad about that. But that seems like a huge waste of heroism right there. He’d be way better in the storm than out of it, she’s guessing. If he’s as strong as Captain America, he could haul loads more people to safety than she could. He could lift up a roof to save people trapped inside.
That’s not the kind of hero she can be, though. She’ll have to make due with her skills rather than her strength. With enough of Hawkeye’s training, she could shoot trick arrows with floatation devices, or grappling arrows to swing to someone’s aid. She could shoot the glass out of a window so that someone could escape from inside, perhaps, or help tether something in place.
But most of all, she can be there. She can help someone into a life jacket, hold someone’s hand and lead them to safety, put pressure on bandages. The little things that still need to be done and that add up.
And all because she decided to stay in the City and weather the storm on the off chance that her lesson wouldn’t be canceled and she’d get to help someone.
Her mother might be upset if she sees Kate on the news helping during the storm when she’s supposed to have evacuated with her roommate, but Kate can deal with that. She thinks. She can say they had a huge fight and couldn’t evacuate together, and… Better cross that bridge when she gets to it. She might not even make the news. She’s not an Avenger, after all.
Not yet.
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 10:00 a.m.—
Katie-Kate arrives right on time, soaked through despite her raincoat. And her archery equipment might have been contained in waterproof casings, but her duffle bag of clothes and stuff sure wasn’t.
“Hey, uh,” Clint says, “why don’t you get a warm shower in to chase the cold away, and then borrow some clothes if yours are wet. We can do our archery stuff later, after you’re warm and dry.”
She seems to notice just then that she is as cold and wet as she looks, and starts shivering. He can sympathize. He usually forgets he’s miserable when he’s looking forward to something.
“Okay.” She waits for JARVIS to tell her where she’s staying, and then trots off toward the elevator.
“Just you and me for a while, Jigs. What do you feel like doing?”
Jigsaw drops from the rafters and lands on his feet hard enough that Clint’s knees feel sympathy pain. But the man straightens his legs and walks over to his side without any indication that the landing shock hurt in the slightest. Ouch. If Jigsaw won’t acknowledge it, Clint will. Ouch.
Jigsaw makes the sign for dance and then a W, before looking at the ceiling expectantly.
“You want to waltz? On the… ceiling?
JARVIS begins playing a waltz over the speakers, and Jigsaw grins and holds a hand out.
“Okay,” Clint says, accepting his hand and getting into position. “We’re waltzing.”
As usual those times when they join Natasha in dancing, Jigsaw is pure energy, every movement sure and strong, his body seeming to glide through the steps like he isn’t even taking them but is just there, wherever he needs to be as Clint leads him around the gym.
Clint feels heavy by comparison, clumsy, a stomping oaf who has just learned that the point of dancing is not “crush your partner’s toes.”
But as they make a second turn around the gym, Clint feels himself starting to loosen up, starting to get into and forget the concentration on his steps and the count. Even when not in the leading position, Jigsaw guides him along so smoothly that even Clint can just feel the music and step where he’s supposed to.
It’s the same kind of rhythm he and Natasha sometimes found when they’d go dancing or to the clubs, what seems like ages ago. Once he loosens up about it and stops overthinking it, Clint becomes a decent dancer. He won’t lay claim to being a good dancer, but he’s decent enough to keep a partner entertained.
And unlike with Natasha, Clint feels the strength in his partner as they dance and wants to do something about it. Wants to move his hands to places they should be going for a waltz. Wants to maybe try a tango, except that he doesn’t know how to teach that dance and Natasha hasn’t gotten there with Jigsaw yet. They’re working on the foxtrot if he remembers right.
“Want to work on your foxtrot after this turn?” Clint asks.
Jigsaw shakes his head and pulls Clint closer so that they’re practically hugging rather than dancing.
And Clint is going to get himself in trouble dancing this close to Jigsaw, dancing up against him so that he can feel the heat of his partner radiating into his own torso, sparking new heat deep in Clint’s gut. He wonders if kissing Jigsaw while they dance would be possible, or whether the height difference would interfere.
He probably shouldn’t be kissing Jigsaw in the gym when Katie-Kate is due back soon, anyway. Don’t want her to walk in on that. And he probably should have worn jeans to this and not the tighter, thinner, softer pants Jigsaw likes so much. The pants that hide nothing.
But Jigsaw is looking at his lips now instead of keeping eye contact with him, and he’s got part of his bottom lip caught between his teeth, and there’s a light flush on his cheeks… All signs point toward kissing, and Clint knows he shouldn’t, not here and now, but he wants to so badly, and he knows Jigsaw will nod eagerly if Clint asks him, and they’re hardly moving anymore now, each of them probably thinking similar thoughts…
Against his better judgment, Clint trails his hand along Jigsaw’s outstretched arm and asks him with a “kiss” sign and Jigsaw’s own question sign—the Y that stands for a question mark, almost, for how ubiquitously it gets used.
Jigsaw clearly agrees, the way he reaches out with both arms to wrap around Clint’s waist and pull him fully flush against himself, the way he goes up on his tip-toes to reach Clint’s mouth more easily, the way he smiles only long enough for his lips to meet Clint’s.
Clint sighs into the kiss, letting a hand rest across Jigsaw’s shoulder and trailing the other up the nape of Jigsaw’s neck to sink through the silky locks of his hair.
It’s a slow kiss, open-mouthed but not greedy, not seeking. Just a kiss to be enjoyed in the moment, a kiss that doesn’t have to lead up to anything. But after several of these kisses, Clint moves to nibble on Jigsaw’s lower lip, gently, more suction than teeth, and Jigsaw’s hands move lower on the small of Clint’s back, fingers playing with the hem of Clint’s t-shirt.
Jigsaw breaks their kiss long enough to ask his question sign—meaning, Clint thinks, can he lift the shirt up or put his hands under the shirt—and Clint just nods before leaning in for more kisses. If Jigsaw wants to touch his skin, well, Clint wants his skin to be touched. And since he’s clearly not listening to the voice of reason he’s gagged and locked in a closet for now, this will be fine.
And he’d guessed right, because Jigsaw does slide his fingers against Clint’s skin, right at the hemline of his shirt, as if exploring a newly discovered territory, or maybe savoring some treat. Clint doesn’t know which, and it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is the sensation of Jigsaw’s hands along his skin, one calloused and the other smooth.
Clint loses track of time as their kissing picks up its pace, as those hands gradually slip up under his shirt all the way to the small of his back, hiking up the shirt as they go. Clint wants to break free of their embrace and just drag his shirt up over his head and throw it off into a corner of the room, to help Jigsaw out of his shirt next, to clutch Jigsaw back to his chest, skin to skin. To feel Jigsaw’s heat directly, the way the man always runs hot. Wants to crawl into Jigsaw’s arms and feel everything about Jigsaw pressed up against himself.
“Excuse me, sirs,” comes JARVIS’s voice, the tone mild and the volume low. “Ms. Potts would like to see you to coordinate for hurricane relief.”
Clint groans into Jigsaw’s mouth, and he isn’t sure whether that’s a groan of dismay that they have to stop making out, or a groan of dismay that they’ve been caught making out. He pulls away from Jigsaw, feeling those hands slide away from his skin and already missing them.
“Where do we need to go?” he asks. Then a thought lurches into existence and he groans again, this time in mortification. “And did, uh, Katie-Kate get an eyeful of… You know?”
“You’ll find Ms Potts and Miss Bishop in conference room fifteen.” There’s a tiny pause, and then: “I directed Miss Bishop to Ms Potts directly from her guest room, as I believed you would not welcome an audience.”
Relief floods through him. The only audience they had was the AI that is sentient but not interested in taking over the world.
“Thanks, JARVIS.” Clint reaches for Jigsaw’s left hand. “Shall we?”
Kate
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 10:45 a.m.—
She’s still not sure why she got a request from Pepper to help organize a bunch of Halloween costume accessories instead of getting to go back down to the gym for her lesson. But at least it’s fun poking around all these headbands and scarves, capes and screen-printed t-shirts, and various tiny swords and shields and wands and things.
Kate has no idea what the big cardboard bins are for, since they don’t have watermelons or pumpkins inside like these kinds of bins usually do, and they do have wheels at the bottom like these kinds of bins usually don’t. But there’s a lot of them, lined up along the wall, most of them stuffed with painted cardboard. Maybe she’ll be tasked with doing something with those next, after the costumes.
She kind of hopes not. The costumes are enough, thanks.
Pepper wants them organized by size where applicable, and then by age and type. The smallest things, little bumblebee antennae on an elastic band that would fit a baby head, are the cutest. There are some baby sized ruby slippers, too, and a few baggy costumes for babies that would make them look like pumpkins, jack o’lanterns, pineapples, and a variety of other things.
There are a few things for older kids, tweens maybe, like the printed t-shirts made to look like the torso of a uniformed superhero, some of which come with plastic face masks. And capes that would be too long for the younger kids to wear. Some generic princessy things, too, and fairy wings and butterfly wings, and wizard hats, and various occupations, and monsters that are all a little goofy looking instead of scary. Ghosts, zombies, witches, vampires, Frankenstein’s monsters, and all of that.
Then there’s the pile of assorted carriable costume props, some of which can go on their own and some of which kind of need a costume to go with them. Link’s sword and shield kind of need the green cap to go with them, and Thor’s hammer needs a red cape, but someone carrying a magic wand with a glittery star at the end can be mostly recognized by just the wand.
There aren’t a huge number of costumes, but there are enough costumes that Kate sort of wonders where Pepper had them all stashed—is there a room just filled with kids’ costumes, or what?—and more importantly, why she had them all.
Kate is almost done sorting them, and is hoping to go down to the gym soon to have her lesson. She doesn’t like keeping Hawkeye waiting, even if he and Jigsaw could easily entertain themselves by climbing the rock wall or lifting weights or even just shooting arrows without her. But still, this detour of hers to work on Pepper’s project is kind of taking up time for other stuff.
She is about to announce that she’s finished when Hawkeye and Jigsaw appear in the door. Kate feels her cheeks flush in embarrassment. Had they needed to come get her? Had they gotten so tired of waiting for her that they actually came to find her?
“Hey, Katie-Kate, Pepper.” Hawkeye comes in first, followed by Jigsaw, who looks around curiously. “JARVIS said you wanted us for something?”
Pepper does a double take and then visibly shifts into take-charge mode. Had she not known they were coming? Is this just JARVIS’s way to eventually get Kate out of organizing costumes?
“Ah, yes,” Pepper says. “I need you two to take these bins of cardboard stalls and this other bin full of treats down to the second floor. JARVIS will direct you. Then please assemble everything around the perimeter of the room and in a cluster in the middle—like a donut with stalls facing each other.”
“Whuh?” Hawkeye asks. He peers into the first bin of folded up cardboard. “How do we assemble these? Are there instructions in there?”
“It should be fairly straightforward, but yes, there are instructions.” Pepper smiles brightly. “Thank you for helping.”
“Uh, yeah.” Hawkeye grips the side of one of the bins and starts pushing it toward the door. “Jigs, you want to get the next one, and we’ll do two per trip? There’s a service elevator we can use that should fit two of these with a little room to spare.”
Jigsaw nods and follows him out with another bin.
“If you’d like, I can help them assemble stuff,” Kate offers. “I’m done with the costumes.”
Pepper surveys the conference table with the costume elements spread out as she’d requested. “That would be great, thank you, Kate.”
Maybe if she hurries, she can get in the elevator with the others!
Kate dashes around the corner after Hawkeye and Jigsaw and catches up just in time to squeeze into the elevator with them.
“Sorry I ended up missing our lesson today, Clint,” she says. “JARVIS told me to go to Pepper and help, and I just thought… Well, sorry, anyway.”
Hawkeye’s face turns red in a fierce blush, and he looks down for a moment, steeling himself, before meeting her eyes. “It wasn’t a problem. We can shoot some arrows later.”
Kate would ask what has him blushing like that, but Jigsaw’s serene smile as he leans against Hawkeye’s shoulder kind of gives it away. Maybe they were fooling around in the gym to pass the time, and that’s why JARVIS interrupted her scheduled lesson. That would make sense, and it would explain why Jigsaw’s lower lip looks a little swollen, why his hair is a bit tousled, why Hawkeye can’t meet her eyes and flushes even deeper red when he tries.
Well, good for them, if they were making out. With all the hurricane prep work going on, they probably don’t have loads of time for doing that. Kate remembers her last boyfriend, and how they were making out all the time. And they didn’t get in trouble for it, either. But her last girlfriend and her, they’d needed to keep a low profile and only make out when they were definitely alone and couldn’t be walked in on or overheard.
The double standard still bothers her. But her mother would have been upset, and that would have been more trouble than it was worth, let alone then trying to come out and all of that. She has to at least keep her mother placated long enough to get her degree. And it would be nice to have her trust fund available. She’s pretty sure that can’t get taken away, but no sense in risking it.
Chapter 147: Assets | They say it’s your birthday (we’re gonna have a good time)
Notes:
Chapter title from “Birthday” by The Beatles.
Please heed the content warnings on this one.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 3:15 p.m.—
“I’m glad you and Clint got to dance for a while before helping Pepper,” Yasmin says. “Do you understand what you were helping her prepare for?”
It shakes the head. The storm, yes. Hurricane, with an eye in the middle of it, seeing everything. But it can tell Yasmin means something else. And other than the storm, it does not know what else would be prepared for.
It draws on the tablet, massive cardboard baskets with wheels filled with more cardboard, and then the stalls the cardboard inside the baskets unfolds into, a circle of them around the room, and a smaller circle inside of that one. And each cardboard stall with a bowl of brightly wrapped candies inside.
It shows her the tablet. There is the other asset frowning while assembling a stall and there is the auction woman laughing. There is this asset, filling bowls with candies from another massive cardboard basket full of them.
“You three got a lot done,” Yasmin says. She sounds impressed, maybe even proud of the work they accomplished together. “Do you know what is going to happen in that room?”
It shakes the head again.
“The people who are sheltering from the storm in the Tower will be able to go trick-or-treating while they’re here. Pepper has arranged for this as well as the comfort bags you helped pack earlier, with the stuffed animals and puzzle books.”
She pauses only for a moment before going back to fill in the gaps.
“Trick-or-treating is when people, usually little kids, dress up in costumes and walk around their neighborhoods knocking on doors and asking for candy. They say ‘trick or treat,’ and the people who open the doors admire their costumes and hand them candies.”
It sees now how the stalls will be used. There will be people pretending they are inside of houses instead of inside stalls, and there will be tiny innocents who walk around the cardboard neighborhood saying the passphrase and being rewarded with candies from the bowls.
It still does not know why this is happening, though, and so it asks. Yasmin will have the answer. Yasmin always has the answers, even when the answers are things like making it check the facts and find the answers while she is there to guide it.
“You remember your Halloween party with the team? This is another thing that some people do at the end of October, a celebration of Halloween. It’s a special day called a holiday, where a large number of people decide that they want to celebrate or remember something and they decide on a day when they will all do that. Or when something important happens on a day and every year on the anniversary of that event, people remember that event.”
It blinks. It knows something about that. Many years, but not all of them, the handlers would all gather around it with something it now knows is a cake, but one with candles lit on it. And they would sing it a song wishing it a happy birthday. And then they would take turns eating cake and pushing into it until there was no more cake, and then it would be hosed off and put back in its cell. Sometimes one of the agents would put sweet frosting on his dick as a treat before pushing into the mouth.
It hesitates, not sure if this is the same thing as a holiday, but then it decides it will never know if it does not ask. It draws the cake, a large rectangle with candles inside the top of it, sticking out of the cake. It draws agents with their mouths open and their dicks out, agents eating the cake, agents holding an asset down, agents pushing into the asset, agents hosing the asset off. The cell.
And then, because it is feeling sad and angry, it draws a little cockroach friend in the cell, to keep the asset on the tablet company and try to comfort the little asset on the tablet.
It shows Yasmin the picture and signs “every year” and its question.
She’s quiet for a moment, and then: “I’m so sorry you went through that, Jigsaw. That wasn’t right. That was wrong, what they did to you.”
It points to the first picture on the tablet, the room full of cardboard houses with bowls of candy, and then to the second picture of all the agents and the asset and the cake. It signs “the same as” with a question.
Yasmin shakes her head. “That’s not the same at all. A birthday is a personal holiday where someone celebrates the day they were born. Often friends and family gather to make it a special day every year. What happened to you with the cake and candles was a mockery of such a thing. They were hurting you and making fun of you, and they probably did it in the spring, when Bucky was born.”
That is… mean, it decides. To celebrate the bucky by pushing into the asset. It must be the wrong kind of celebrate, too. A messed up HYDRA version of celebrate, just like the wrong HYDRA version of fun.
“Do you want to talk about Halloween, the hurricane, and what to expect tomorrow, or do you want to talk about how HYDRA made it a point to hurt you on Bucky’s birthday?”
It thinks. It would like to know what a birthday is supposed to be, how a birthday is actually celebrated. But it can learn that at any time. There is not as much time left to know what will happen tomorrow.
It holds up one finger.
Yasmin nods her head. “Alright. We’ll talk about birthdays another time. Right now, there is a hurricane that will arrive tomorrow night. And Halloween will happen just a couple of days after that.”
It nods. It knows that now. It points to the picture of the cardboard neighborhood and then taps the wrist where a wrist clock would go and asks the question sign. When does this happen, and for how long, and how many tiny innocents will come to the cardboard neighborhood?
“I’m not sure, exactly. Pepper has the schedule for that, and I think the first round might be as early as tonight.”
The eyes widen. So soon?
“People have already started arriving to shelter from the hurricane in the safety of the Tower. And more will be arriving as the storm gets closer. Some people might even arrive during the storm, or afterward.”
Yasmin pauses, and it thinks that she is trying to find the right thing to say. It will let her think of the thing to say instead of asking how many people will be coming to live in the hive building. There might be only a dozen or there could be hundreds. How will it be able to keep HYDRA out if there are that many people coming to live in the hive building? And with tiny innocent children to protect, it will have to find all of the HYDRA agents that could be infiltrating. Will have to dispose of them.
“Jigsaw, there are two things I’d like to discuss with you about the people coming here for shelter.”
It drags the attention away from HYDRA and focuses on Yasmin instead. She has discovered what exactly to say, and it will listen.
“One of them is this—tomorrow and Tuesday, I will be offering counseling services for those who have evacuated here and need to talk to someone. Linda, Sam and I will be rotating around the rooms set aside on the second and third floors for people displaced by the storm.”
But it has to make sure all of those people are safe people for Yasmin to be around. What if there is a HYDRA operative hidden among the innocents?
“And,” she continues, “that means that we won’t have our sessions on Monday or Tuesday. We’ll meet again on Wednesday morning and return to our regular schedule after that. Okay?”
It… It won’t have the therapy sessions on Monday? Or any sessions on Tuesday? It will not see Yasmin at all on those days? Not even once? It is not sure that is okay. It will not see any experts except for Zoe. The feeder is helping people at another shelter and will see it next on Thursday.
Almost all of the experts are going away, and it depends on them. What will it do without the schedule? Without the sessions? Without the routine of its days and weeks? It has them written in the paper year clock.
“I know that you’re going to miss your sessions on Monday, and that you’ll miss Caroline and me on Tuesday, but you’ll have Zoe in the evenings still, and that should help with continuity. I believe you can hold onto everything until Wednesday. We can have an extra long session.”
It frowns, but nods. It is not a nod of agreement, but one saying that it will try. There could be a lot of things to hold onto.
It signs that it needs to search for HYDRA, because then it will at least know that Yasmin will be safe, and Linda, the clown man’s expert. She is important, too. Cannot be risked.
“You want to look at all of the people sheltering here and make sure none of them are HYDRA,” Yasmin says, and when it nods, she sighs. “That’s the other thing I wanted to discuss with you.”
Oh, good. So she already knows what it has in mind and why it must do this. That will make it much easier to accomplish the mission. She can explain to the others who might try to stop it. She can tell them that it is okay, that the search is necessary and good. That it will protect everyone.
“Jigsaw, I know that you want to protect everyone from HYDRA, and that’s a fantastic thing to want. It’s very admirable of you. But these people are coming to the Tower to shelter from the storm because they have been told that the Tower is safe.”
But the hive building will only be safe if it can inspect the people and weed out the evil ones from their midst. It will be making the hive building safe.
“They need to feel secure here, even more than they need to be secure.”
That does not make sense. How would they feel safe unless they were actually safe?
“I can see that’s a bit confusing,” Yasmin says. “Many people don’t always feel safe when they are safe. Think about some of the times you have felt unsafe here in the Tower, surrounded by good people who want the best for you. Until you check all the facts, it can feel very unsafe.”
It nods. Yes, it knows all about that. So many times feeling unsafe, feeling like it will be hurt when the facts say that it will not be hurt at all.
“The illusion of safety can be just as powerful as the illusion of unsafety. It’s possible to feel perfectly safe and secure in a situation that is dangerous, simply because you don’t know that it’s dangerous or trust that people will protect you through the danger. Most of the people coming to stay in the Tower know that the storm is dangerous, and that the Tower is safe from the storm. To them, that’s all that matters.”
But what about—
“They might not even know about HYDRA,” Yasmin continues, answering the question before it even finished thinking it. “The world of crime and evil like HYDRA or gangs isn’t something they know much about and they feel safe because they don’t know about the dangers out there. And for the next several days, it’s important for them to feel safe.”
It frowns, but nods.
“If you were to tell them that the Tower is at risk, they wouldn’t feel safe anymore. And looking around for HYDRA in their midst would be telling them that they aren’t safe here. They’re fleeing to us for the safety we offer. Please let them feel safe and secure in their decision to come to us.”
But how is it going to actually keep them safe if it doesn’t find any HYDRA agents that might have snuck in among them?
“I’m going to ask that you follow the same rules during this storm as you followed when going to the grocery store with Caroline and Clint,” she continues. “If you see someone you think is HYDRA, or someone you feel is evil, even if they aren’t HYDRA, I need for you to let JARVIS know and then trust that someone else will take care of it.”
It blinks. So it can look, after all? As long as it does not look like it is looking. It signs that, to make sure it has the right of it.
“If you end up spending time on the second and third floors, which you might do to help out, you can casually glance at people from a distance,” Yasmin says. “But no, you cannot stare at people or do anything similar that would make them uncomfortable.”
It sighs. That will not be enough if there is evil hidden with the ones who are innocent.
Yasmin smiles. “I know it will be hard, Jigsaw. You want to protect everyone so much. But know that JARVIS is keeping track of everyone who enters the Tower, and that he will be able to identify anyone who comes in. So you will be able to point out trouble and have it dealt with in a way that doesn’t compromise anyone’s perception of the Tower as a safe haven in the storm.”
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 5:15 p.m.—
Jigsaw’s upset when he comes back from therapy. Or maybe troubled is more accurate. There’s something on his mind that he doesn’t like, and Clint can’t be sure what it is without opening up the gates to let whatever through.
And he’d like to do that, but Katie-Kate is playing with the kittens and she probably shouldn’t hear anything that might be upsetting Jigsaw. Even if it’s just something as simple as being upset about the storm, there’s a high likelihood that an afternoon session with Yasmin spent talking that through will have ended on a traumatic note somewhere along the line.
Best that anything like that remain with as few people as possible to keep Jigsaw’s private history private unless he makes a conscious decision to share it with others. Kate’s signed an NDA, and he’s got the sense she doesn’t even need that to keep their secrets, but still. No sense tempting fate.
“How was therapy?” Clint signs, adding a request that Jigsaw sign back.
Jigsaw points at his ear and then signs “hurt” and his question sign.
Clint shakes his head, signs that his ears don’t hurt, but that therapy is private, secret, not something Kate should hear.
Jigsaw frowns but sets the tablet down on the long table by the door instead of bringing it over to use to retell the story of the last two hours. He does bring a marker—purple felt tip—and a pad of paper to the sofa, though.
From what Clint gathers from the signs, the sketches and the written all-caps, Jigsaw has learned about holidays, about Halloween, about trick-or-treating, and about birthdays. He’s also learned that “the bucky birthday” is when HYDRA agents would drag him out of his cell or out of the ice, so that they could sing “happy birthday” to him and then eat cake and rape him until the cake ran out.
Yeah, definitely not something Kate needs to hear about. When she gets up from the floor to get some water, Clint covers up the notebook page with the infuriating birthday scene and then when she’s in the kitchen gestures for Jigsaw to turn to the next page.
“Angry?” Jigsaw signs after doing so.
Clint nods. “They hurt you,” he signs, “and it makes me very angry at them.”
Jigsaw takes some time to draw on the new page, and what emerges is a picture of Jigsaw—the figure has a star on its left arm—scanning a crowd of people while a cloud with an eyeball inside it comes closer, as depicted by an arrow and movement lines. That’ll be the hurricane, Clint thinks. Eye of the storm and all that.
And that figures. As the people start coming in, Jigsaw’s going to become more and more antsy about checking them out, looking them over, and possibly taking whatever hammer equivalent he finds lying around to the heads of any of them who don’t pass the HYDRA sniff test.
But Jigsaw is drawing a big circle around the entire page and then a line diagonally across the circle. He crosses his arms and frowns.
“Yasmin told you not to inspect the people sheltering here?” Clint asks. When Jigsaw nods, Clint gives him a consolation pat on the arm. “Sorry,” he signs. “Would you rather just pretend they aren’t here, or would you rather we sneak a peek?”
Before Jigsaw has time to fully process the question and come up with an answer, there’s a knock at the door, and Wilson pokes his head in just as Kate is calling that she’ll get that.
“Hey, guys—uh, hi, Kate—Jigsaw, do you mind if I borrow Lucky for the rest of the evening? People are going to start to get nervous as the wind picks up, and cafeteria service won’t start for another couple of hours. I thought he could be a nice distraction, and you know how good he is with people under stress.”
Jigsaw blinks and asks if Lucky will help people, and then when Sam nods, he asks if Sam will keep Lucky safe.
“Of course,” Sam says, looking confused. “No one’s going to hurt him, or even think about hurting him. And he’ll be by my side the whole time.”
Jigsaw nods, then, as though he had thought there would be dangers downstairs and is now entrusting his dog to Sam on the condition that Sam watch out for those dangers and bring Lucky back safely.
“Thanks, man. I’m going to use his leash if that’s alright. He’s good at heeling, but it might make people feel more comfortable if he’s got his leash on.”
As Sam ducks back into the hall with Lucky in tow, Clint wonders if a kitten or two would be any help down there. Jigsaw has Alpine used to her harness now, and they have a spare that should fit Liho if the straps were tightened a bit. But Liho might not go for the harness. And they’d absolutely need a way to keep a kitten from getting lost in the crowd.
Above all, though, Jigsaw would have to sign off on it, and probably would insist on being present. So that’s two hurdles right there. Jigsaw might not be allowed in the shelter areas.
Pepper might have seen him in party mode, enjoying the whole process of icing cookies and whatever else, and there might have been that weird exchange of theirs with the bowl of sugar paste and the bowl of candy, but that’s hardly going to change her mind about the safety of Jigsaw being around a bunch of civilians.
Even if there are no hammers involved.
Still, he could see if Jigsaw is interested. That might be a nice first step. And he’s pretty sure the answer will be yes, because Jigsaw wants to see all the people.
“Hey Jigs,” he asks aloud, for Kate’s benefit. “How would you feel about going down there with Alpine and Liho? We could get a big area penned off and little kids can go sit inside with the kittens and play. We could all keep an eye on things.”
Jigsaw ponders for a moment, and then brightens up. He signs that he can look for HYDRA while they are down there, and smiles. There’s no question sign. It’s a statement.
“Uh,” Clint starts, but then switches to signing. “What are you going to do if you see anyone?” he asks.
Jigsaw grins at him and signs “kill” and then adds “joke laugh” to the phrase after a pause. “Tell,” Jigsaw signs, and then points at the ceiling.
“You’ll tell JARVIS?” Clint asks. Man, JARVIS needs a name sign. Jigsaw can’t fingerspell the name like the rest of them do.
Jigsaw nods.
Clint makes a J shape and turns it into an index finger pointing upward. That should work. It’s unique enough to be remembered, it has the first initial, it includes a bit about JARVIS’s perceived location… Yeah.
“How’s that for a name sign, JARVIS? Any objections?”
“It is an honor, Agent Barton,” JARVIS says. “Thank you.”
“Oh, cool,” Kate says, holding both kittens now, her water abandoned. “You guys were signing so fast I couldn’t pick out what you were saying. I’m trying to learn.” She pauses. “And actually, I’m so bad at it so far that I couldn’t have picked up much more than ‘my name is’ and ‘please have a seat’ unless you fingerspelled it really slowly.”
Clint is torn between being glad she’s learning and being glad she’s still so much of a beginner that she can’t follow a signed conversation. Oh well. Better that she’s learning. They only needed the therapy conversation to be private, anyway. How often will Katie-Kate be there to potentially and unintentionally eavesdrop on Jigsaw oversharing his therapy business, anyway?
Jigsaw waves to get his attention and then signs that yes, he would like to go down with the kittens before dinner.
Clint’s about to ask JARVIS if that would be okay, but JARVIS beats him to it.
“Protocol dictates that the three of you would be welcome to go down to the third floor with Alpine and Liho, provided Jigsaw wear the appropriate accessories to disguise his appearance and refrain from any rash decisions regarding suspected individuals he may happen to see. I will tell Ms Potts to expect you.”
“Awesome.”
And it is awesome. Jigsaw will wear his glasses, maybe change into a turtleneck to hide the scars on his throat, add some gloves, and they’ll be set.
Kate gives each kitten a kiss on the head and then hands them over, Alpine to Jigsaw and Liho to Clint.
“I should probably get changed back into my own clothes,” she says. “They’re all bound to be dry by now. Are you guys going to dress in your Avengers uniforms so people know you’re safe to be around?”
Clint grins. “Why, you have a set of Lurping tac gear you’re itching to show off?”
“LARPing,” she corrects with a laugh. “And yes I have some for when we rescue people from the storm, but I wouldn’t wear that just around the Tower.”
Clint knew it. But now’s probably not the time to tell her she’s not going out in the hurricane. Better she’s cheerful and not miffed when watching over the kitten corral.
“Well, we’re not going to change into tac gear,” he says. “Though I should probably put on a purple bulls-eye shirt so people know who I am.” He hands Liho to Kate. “I’ll go do that. But Katie-Kate, you can wear what you have on. The outfit is cute.”
“Really?” she squeaks.
“Uh, yeah. Jigsaw? You think it’s cute?”
Jigsaw nods and holds up a single finger. Then he gives her a thumbs up.
“There, see? He doesn’t bother lying about stuff.” Clint gets up and stretches. “Why don’t you gather up some wand toys for the kids to play with so they don’t get scratched, and Jigsaw and I will change shirts real quick.”
He catches her excited look as he’s turning around, and heads for his bedroom closet. This should go well. It’s a pair of kittens and however many children—or adults, sure—want to play with them. These two kittens are particularly high energy. They’ll be good for an hour or two playing with strangers, and it’ll help socialize them.
Yeah. Worst case, they pack up and come back up here early because the kittens need a break.
Notes:
Content Warning: Some more recollections of HYDRA Trash Party atrocities here, but kind of glossed over because Jigsaw hasn’t really come to understand how much of an atrocity it was.
(And yes, Clint, we all know that the kittens needing a break is the worst thing that can happen here. M-hm.)
Chapter 148: Tower | My weakness is that I care too much
Notes:
*dashes in, drops early chapter, and dashes back out*
Chapter title from “Scars” by Papa Roach.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Pepper
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 5:45 p.m.—
The petting station where Clint, Kate and Jigsaw will be sitting is set up, positioned so that Jigsaw and Clint will have a wall at their back instead of people. That is important for people in their line of work, and especially important to prevent anyone from surprising Jigsaw and getting a violent response.
Which is probably impossible, anyway, with his hearing. But Clint will also appreciate a wall there. Plus an escape route back to the rest of the Tower that doesn’t involve wading through a crowd.
It’s excellent that Clint and Kate will be there monitoring the situation carefully, and hopefully keeping Jigsaw calm throughout despite the crowd. That’s one worry off her shoulders. Their party did help, but this is too similar a situation to earlier, and too soon. But Clint is even better with Jigsaw than Steve, and Yasmin was going to talk to Jigsaw as well. Jigsaw respects Yasmin. It will be fine.
What she needs to worry about is logistics and coordination. Keeping people calm while the cafeteria gets ready to begin service, and keeping people organized so that no one loses a loved one in the crowd of others.
So far, the bags with the puzzle books and coloring books, the stuffed animals for everyone to hold onto if needed for comfort, the bottles of water to keep people hydrated as they settle in… The supply bags have been a tremendous success. She’s seen a few adults clutching stuffed animals in their hands like stress balls, and she has to applaud Jigsaw’s reasoning that everyone needed to get a stuffed animal, not just the kids.
It’s just a good thing they had enough to fill all of the bags with one. Someday she’ll need to ask JARVIS where the extra stuffed animals came from, because she knows she hadn’t ordered that many. But she’s far from upset that there were so many extras.
Pepper walks through checking up on things, clipboard in hand and checklist on the top.
There are plenty of options at the snack table on the third floor. Nothing is too depleted or in need of reorganization. The staffers manning the station are cheerful and sympathetic as needed from what she can see. They’re due to change over in two more hours, when the next shift arrives. Excellent. Check.
The blankets are neatly folded on all of the unclaimed cots on this floor, and extra blankets are available at the welcome station. Welcome station staffers are in good form, due for rotation in four hours, so that no one works more than a six-hour shift at a time, with staggered breaks partway in. This is stressful for everyone involved, and she doesn’t want to put undue pressure on anyone. Excellent. Check.
Water station is in order, with plenty of bottled water, some in a cooler and some out on the table at room temperature. Juice boxes for the kids, mostly apple but also some fruit punch. No need to monitor or keep track there—it’s all the same thing and none of it has potential allergens, so no one needs to help here other than making sure there’s enough water. Excellent. Check.
And as she makes the last of her rounds on the third floor, she approaches the kitten enclosure, where there are already three kids letting the kittens climb and clamber all over their laps while their harried-looking parents watch and have small talk with Clint and Kate. Pepper watches Jigsaw as he scans the room, but he isn’t doing what he did on the Tower tour. There’s no intensity in his gaze. He’s almost relaxed, as far as she can tell.
Not on the hunt.
Excellent. Check.
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—
There are two hours until everyone goes and has the dinner meal in the cafeteria. And two hours before it is time for them to bring the little cats back upstairs and eat their own dinner meal before the session with Zoe.
In the meantime, there are two hours for watching people and watching tiny innocents and watching the little cats.
There are many, many people to watch. The room they are in is full of people and rows of cots for the people to sleep on, with soft blankets, it is pleased to see. And there were other rooms, as well, filled with people, cots, and soft blankets. And there is another floor below this one that has no people yet but that has all of the cots with soft blankets, waiting for people to arrive and fill up the rooms.
So many people. And any one of them could be HYDRA. And how will it tell if it cannot properly inspect them? But the voice without a mouth, with the J name sign now, like its own J name sign, is watching as well. The voice without a mouth, JARVIS, can be trusted to keep watch—JARVIS watches everything, always. They are working together to keep HYDRA out, Jigsaw and JARVIS.
The other asset and the auction woman are chattering with the adults while the tiny innocents play with the little cats. The auction woman is good at chattering. Upbeat and friendly. The other asset is less good at chattering. The other asset is friendly but doesn’t add much to the conversation. It is a good thing they have the auction woman there.
Another tiny innocent, this one with a book in his hands, comes up to watch the little cats play, but does not go inside to play with them. Instead, the tiny innocent opens up the book and pages through it—it is a small book filled with photographs of people in black and white and in some kind of pale brown. The book’s pages are thick, like cardstock, and the tiny innocent turns them with ease.
Stopping on a particular page, one with a photograph of the bucky wearing a hat, the tiny innocent looks up at… at it. At this asset. And grins a bright, excited grin full of happiness, joy.
“It is you! I knew it,” the tiny innocent says, right before the other asset chokes on nothing and a very stressed woman in a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants comes up in a rush and pulls the tiny innocent away with an apologetic smile for it.
“I’m so sorry,” she says once she has a hand on the tiny innocent’s shoulder. “I told him not to bother you, but—”
“But it’s Bucky!” the tiny innocent insists, pushing the open book up so that the woman has to see the page it’s open to.
The other asset swears so softly that only it can hear. Then the other asset crouches down to be eye level with the tiny innocent.
Will the other asset tell a lie to the tiny innocent, insist that it merely looks like the bucky and that it was not ever at any point the bucky? Probably that is what the other asset is supposed to do, because there are so many people here. The disguise of the glasses and the high-neck turtle-shirt and the gloves is supposed to keep anyone from making the connection. Maybe it should also have worn the hat.
“He goes by Jigsaw these days,” the other asset says, saying the truth that none of them are supposed to say yet without a “PR statement” about that. “It’s supposed to be a secret that he’s here. Can you keep a secret?”
Perhaps because the other asset did not deny anything, and perhaps because the tiny innocent’s book is open to a photograph of the bucky’s face, the woman’s eyes widen as she looks up at this asset’s skin face with the glasses perched on the nose.
“Oh my god,” she murmurs, “he’s right. Timmy’s right.”
“I told you,” the tiny innocent—Timmy—says. “Hi, Bucky! I mean Jigsaw.”
It smiles down at the tiny innocent and waves a greeting to him.
The other adults all stop chattering, despite the auction woman’s attempts to keep their attention, and start staring at it. Maybe the other asset should have insisted that it did not used to be the bucky. That it just looked like the picture. That this skin face is not the same skin face as the one showing in the tiny innocent’s book.
But it is somehow very happy that the other asset did not lie. It would have been wrong to lie to the tiny innocent.
“You know, without the glasses…” one of them says, hesitation on her face and in her voice.
“I can see it,” another says. He sounds more confident.
The other asset looks up at all of them. “Can, uh, can you all keep a secret?”
“The Jigsaw Avenger is Bucky Barnes,” the first one breathes out softly, amazed. “How is that even possible? Didn’t he die?”
“Bucky never would have killed all those people,” the third one protests. “It can’t be.”
“Can you sign my book?” the tiny innocent asks, holding the book up to it, turned to another page.
The page the book is open to is one of the black and white photographs, with the clown man and the bucky standing together in front of a military vehicle. It accepts the book and turns it around to read the cover: The Howling Commandos. And there under the photograph the book is open to, it says “Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, inseparable heroes, Fall, 1941.”
The other asset groans and drags a hand through blond hair before standing again. “This is becoming a PR disaster. Please, please just let us get a press release out before you tell anyone. Okay?”
It ignores whatever is going on with the “PR disaster.” It cannot see a disaster, only a tiny innocent wanting a star drawn in his book. It can draw a star in the book. It still has the purple marker for the pad of paper in the back pocket of the jeans it is wearing. Not red, but that should be fine. It is not a mission completion star, after all, but a signature.
It points to the bottom of the photograph and asks the question sign, and the auction woman, having given up on distracting the four adults, asks the tiny innocent where he wants the signature.
“In my book,” the tiny innocent says with all the confidence in the world.
It feels a flood of… of something it feels when it looks at the little cat, when it is thinking about how cute and adorable the little cat is, even while it is exasperated by something the little cat has done. Perhaps this tiny innocent is adorable, too. That must be the reason for the flood of feeling that tugs an easy smile onto the skin face.
It decides that the photograph of the bucky and the clown man is where the star should go, so it draws a clean, neat star across the bucky’s legs, and then, after some thought, it begins to write the name it has chosen as well. JIGSAW, it writes after the star. Then, after more consideration, it decides there is space to write THE BUCKY underneath that—that is the name the tiny innocent associates with it, after all, even if it is the wrong name.
It is glad writing in the paper year clock has helped it draw smaller letters.
It hands the book back to the tiny innocent, who stares wondering at the words on the page, and then closes the book and holds it tight to his little chest like it’s a treasure. Maybe it is a treasure to him. Maybe the tiny innocent has a beautifully decorated treasure box to put the book into.
“You’re my hero,” the tiny innocent says. “I like you best. I’m glad you didn’t die.”
It smiles more widely at the tiny innocent and drops to a squat like the other asset had done. It likes this tiny innocent. Adorable and insistent—the tiny innocent will surely go far in life with those two qualities.
“Were you in the ice, like Captain America?”
It nods. That is the easiest way to say what happened to the bucky. There was a lot of ice involved, so it is not a lie. But the tiny innocent should stay innocent and not be frightened. Yasmin said not to frighten anyone. And if it tells the tiny innocent about HYDRA and torture and all the rest of it, that would certainly frighten him.
“Jigsaw was in the ice a lot longer than Captain America,” the auction woman lies, “and so he was just found a few months ago. He’s happy to be here, though, right?”
It nods again. It will overlook her lie. It is a well-meaning lie, designed to explain its absence without scaring the tiny innocent.
“Why don’t you talk?” the tiny innocent asks, his head cocked to the side and his eyes still wide with curiosity.
What to say? It pulls down the neck of the turtle-shirt it is wearing and shows the tiny innocent the scar on the throat, the LI. Then it pulls out the pad of paper and writes HURT on it.
“So you can’t talk anymore?” the tiny innocent asks after reading the word.
It shakes the head.
“That’s really sad. I wish you could talk. Then you could talk to me.” The tiny innocent smiles.
It smiles back.
And then the woman in the baggy t-shirt and sweatpants is pulling the tiny innocent away with more apologies for taking up its attention and time, for bothering it.
It signs the O and the K—it is okay that the tiny innocent was talking to it and it was not bothered—and then gives the tiny innocent another smile and a thumbs up.
The other three adults are still there, staring at it now as it rises to a standing position. The tiny innocents playing with the little cats are still doing so, and have been joined by a fourth who is trying to pull a wand toy away from little Liho. The auction woman looks dazed almost, and it cannot think of why that could be.
And the other asset looks like stress and disaster, but nothing happened. It was only being talked to by a tiny innocent with a book of photographs. Timmy. Little Timmy. It is glad that it was able to put the star in little Timmy’s book, and to write the names in it as well. Little Timmy looked so happy.
It enjoyed making the tiny innocent look happy, especially since so many of the people in the room don’t look happy at all. It thinks it understands why the people in the room are so unhappy, though. They have left their homes because they are afraid of a big storm that could hurt them, and now all they have is a little bed, a soft blanket, a bag with some things in it, and each other.
And they are not assets. These things would be so much for an asset like it remembers being in the place where it was always cold. A thick, soft, warm blanket would have been everything to it then, in that place. But these are people who are used to having an entire home all around them, filled with the things they enjoy.
It would be like if it lost the fish-looking soft thing and did not have the dog or the little cats or the little plant. If it only had the soft clothes it could carry, and no more nest piled high with pillows and other soft things. It would not be happy. It has become soft and dependent on these things for its comfort.
But it has already made sure everyone has a soft thing to squeeze close. It filled so many bags. And all it can do beyond that is let the people play with the little cats and be licked by the dog—the flying man is bringing the dog around and around with him as he finds the most miserable of the people and offers support.
It cannot do more than it is doing. Not really. It cannot go to people to comfort them because it cannot talk to them and does not know how to comfort them more than it has with the soft things. It only has the tools it has to offer comfort.
But at least it has made one tiny innocent so happy.
Pepper
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 6:45 p.m.—
Why can nothing go right, ever, in this Tower? Why does there always have to be a catastrophe involved in everything she organizes? Or not everything—the Halloween party went well—but everything the public is involved with.
It’s not an explosion, at least, and the power is still on, the people inside are still safe. But it is a kind of explosion, an explosion in the plan to gradually unveil Jigsaw to the public, bit by bit, and in carefully crafted exposures. The plan certainly didn’t call for him to be discovered, and worse, recognized as Bucky, during a natural disaster.
She’s glad Clint sent Kate to fetch her—better informed than not—but it’s way too soon for this to be happening, and she cannot believe she didn’t think of this as a possibility to be planned for. Of course he’d be recognized, even with the glasses and the longer hair and the fact that he isn’t even supposed to be alive.
How could that have slipped her mind when all the other things were on her checklist, neat and orderly, ready to be put into action? And how could JARVIS have let this happen?
Though perhaps it’s unfair to lay this at JARVIS’s feet. Clint is the one who wanted to do this, and JARVIS is just following protocol, which stipulates that Jigsaw can go anywhere in the Tower outside of the Avengers areas so long as he’s disguised such that no one will immediately clock him as Bucky. JARVIS isn’t supposed to police his comings and goings, and he did tell her that they were intending to come down and set up a kitten petting zoo of a sort.
She’s the one who heard that and thought it was a perfectly acceptable thing to do and not likely to wreck everything. If only she’d told them not to come down. But she didn’t. And so now she has to go find Charlene, the head of PR for Stark Industries, and get together some kind of press release or statement, and she has to get the Avengers—and Jigsaw—to sign off on it.
But Steve, Natasha, and Tony are out helping people get to the Tower, and Bruce is busy at the intake station. Sam is making rounds comforting people who are near their breaking point with the stress of it all, and Clint… Clint is the reason for this emergency, bringing Jigsaw down to a crowded shelter situation.
How she’s going to get a statement prepared and ready for them all to sign off on, and how she’s even going to get it to them for sign-off with them all scattered hither and yon— She does not need this.
But she will find a way.
She knows what was said, she knows who among the people on the third floor were there when it was leaked—if you could call it a leak and not just poor decision making on Clint’s part—and she knows the gist of what Jigsaw has accepted of his past. She also knows what prior statements have said.
All she needs is something short and possibly snappy, and she’ll be set.
Something short and snappy, and for Jigsaw to go back upstairs as soon as possible and just stay there. It isn’t that she doesn’t want the kittens available to distract stressed out kids and parents alike, and she does appreciate that he is willing and able to help.
But the social jury is still out on whether Jigsaw is a force for good despite his methods or if his methods leave no room for acceptance however well-motivated. The fewer people who are reminded that Jigsaw is around, the better. It’s one thing for it to be generally known—and forgotten—that Jigsaw is here in the Tower. That news cycle has passed for everyone but Carlton Badger and his following. But it’s another to see him in the same room, and another still for him to be recognized as Bucky.
Though maybe the Bucky part will help tip the jury toward accepting him. It can be so hard to tell with the public.
And even if leaning into the Bucky discovery were to get him accepted by more people, she can’t actually lean into it all that much. Jigsaw has accepted that he was that person, but he doesn’t accept that he’s that person now. And Steve and the others are right. It would be wrong to push him into that role, and wrong to encourage the public to treat him as Bucky and put those expectations on him.
Yes, the statement they come up with will need to walk a fine line there.
Notes:
That's some great (derogatory) thinking on your feet there, Clint.
This chapter might just as well have been titled "Pepper and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day," haha!
Chapter 149: Civilians | A little something to talk about
Notes:
Chapter title from “Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Valorie
—Washington, D.C. | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 7:15 p.m.—
Her phone goes off just as she’s packaging the latest order of red star pendants—fifteen in one order, to be worn by a Jigsaw support group—and Valorie quickly puts the last touches into the box before sealing and labeling it. It will go in the mail as soon as the post office opens back up after this hurricane passes by, and it’ll head all the way out to Las Vegas.
There’s a group out there, she knows, that’s composed of bankers who were spared when Mr Red Star blew up the bank in the night instead of during working hours, and a few others who consider their city to have been saved from HYDRA. They’re on Reddit, and they have a Facebook group.
She wonders if this order is going to them. It might be. She’s gotten many orders for this pendant, and for charms and earrings and lapel pins and t-shirts for men and for women, that go to Las Vegas. Even a baby’s onesie, which was a one-off special print by request.
It makes her happy to know that there’s a ton of support out West, even if she’s yet to get an order for Bakersfield or Cleveland or other places where Mr Red Star took out the HYDRA trash. Maybe those were too bloody for people’s tastes. Maybe there’s just not a lot of jewelry-wearing people in those areas.
Who knows.
But she knows supporters are scattered all across the country from her customer list, and that there are some pockets that are particularly supportive, with repeat orders and orders clustered together in the same city.
Package prepped, Valorie reaches for her phone to see what the alert is for. She’s subscribed to a number of news alerts—Hurricane Sandy is the latest one in the list for obvious reasons—and she hopes this alert isn’t something about the destruction of Avengers Tower. They’re right in line for Sandy, too, and that tower is made of glass.
It’s not a destruction alert. It’s a special statement sent out by Pepper Potts on behalf of the Avengers, and it says…
Valorie blinks. Reads it again.
Sunday, 28 October 2012
New York City—The Avengers have established that new member Jigsaw’s previous identity was James Buchanan (Bucky) Barnes.
This identification comes after months spent reconciling what records exist around the time of Barnes’s disappearance and presumed death in February of 1945 with information obtained on Jigsaw’s existence within the intelligence community.
Importantly, Jigsaw does not remember the majority of his life prior to being a prisoner of war, and has not lived as Barnes for more than 60 years now. He currently has no desire to reclaim this identity in his present life, and will continue to be known and addressed as Jigsaw.
We thank him for his previous service.
Jigsaw continues to serve his community and the world as an Avenger, with the continued support of his fellow Avengers and a qualified team of professionals engaged in ongoing deprogramming and rehabilitation efforts.
We thank the public for helping Jigsaw maintain his privacy during this time.
For inquiries, please reach out to Pepper Pots .
Jigsaw is… Bucky Barnes? Mr Red Star, the very much alive and avengingly violent Mr Red Star, is Bucky Barnes? Out of the history books? She can’t be reading that right.
She reads a third time.
Okay, not is, but was. The statement says he was a prisoner of war for over sixty years and has forgotten his life before that. That would account for the dramatic change from sniper to up close and personal. They’re acknowledging his past and his origins, but not forcing that onto his present. He still answers to Jigsaw, and only Jigsaw.
Well, Valorie is certain that he wouldn’t mind Mr Red Star as a nickname from his admirers.
Wow, though. Valorie sits back on her sofa and ponders the statement.
It doesn’t actually change anything, does it? A man—an avenging, protective warrior angel of a man—saved her life in that parking garage, and she’s devoted considerable time and money into trying to help him if he should ever need funds for the best defense attorneys or to launch a campaign to secure public opinion in his favor. And also just to spread the support around so that people can show that they’re in favor of him.
If his name sixty years ago was Bucky Barnes, he still saved her life in that parking garage. If he was a POW for all that time, he still saved her life in that parking garage. Just like his stint as the D.C. Slasher and Red Star Killer—and maybe Ronin, too, sure—it doesn’t matter; he still saved her life in that parking garage.
He still only targeted really evil people, terrorists and rapists and the like, and he still protected people whenever possible. Mr Red Star, Jigsaw now, is a force for good in this world, and the more she thinks about it, doesn’t it make sense that he could have been Bucky Barnes?
Didn’t Bucky Barnes protect Steve Rogers when they were young and Steve was small and asthmatic? Didn’t he teach Steve how to fight? Didn’t he bring the Rogers family food during some of the toughest times during the Great Depression? Didn’t he go on the really dangerous missions during WWII, along with the rest of the Howling Commandos? A black ops mission is a black ops mission whether now or then.
So Jigsaw was once Bucky Barnes. She can fit that into her worldview.
But what about everyone else?
Jenna
—Washington, D.C. | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 7:30 p.m.—
Her pizza bagel nearly falls out of her hands and she hurriedly sets it down before it ends up staining the carpet. That’s hard enough to clean up with the power still on, but scrubbing carpet by flashlight is not something she wants to try.
The car wash fairy was Bucky Barnes? Bucky Barnes stole a car wash for her?
Jenna frowns down at her bagel and then carefully picks it up and takes another bite. She tries to imagine the face from the history books, and only comes up with Captain America’s face. There were more pictures of him in the books than of the other Howling Commandos, after all. And it was dark at the car wash, despite the feeble street lights nearby and the green and red flashing lights of the car wash itself.
It could have been that same face. She only saw part of it, anyway. He’d had that muzzle-like metal mask over the bottom half of his face. But Barnes’s eyes were blue, and her car wash fairy’s eyes were so blue she had nearly lost the plot looking at them.
So blue and wide and utterly without animosity or serial killer glee. Jenna remembers being so confused, and then so afraid. But he’d done her no harm, had in fact helped her clean her tuck, and now that he’s been safely announced as Jigsaw, an Avenger, she doesn’t even have to worry about anyone accusing her of being an accomplice of any sort.
And now Jigsaw has another name. D.C. Slasher, Red Star Killer, Mr Red Star, Jigsaw, Bucky… The man has a lot of names. But the special statement says that he goes by Jigsaw still, so hey—her puzzle piece pastries are still appropriate. Excellent. Those and the red plum jam tarts are some of her most popular bakes.
Suzanne
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 7:45 p.m.—
The rumor has spread all across the third floor—at least in the shelter areas—by the time she has convinced Timmy to give his book to her for safekeeping and not tell anyone about it. The last thing she needs on top of this hurricane is for something like that to be stolen.
Not only would it break her son’s heart, but this is possibly the first signed object by Bucky Barnes— Bucky Barnes! —in over half a century. It’s invaluable.
She’s tempted to find something else for the man to sign that Timmy can keep and look at, and then to put this Howling Commandos book in a safe deposit box somewhere. Once this hurricane has passed and it’s safe to go back home. But she doesn’t want to bother the man with a request like that. It feels… greedy, almost, to ask for a second signature.
Murmurs of “Bucky Barnes” and “Jigsaw” and “serial killer” float through the room in various flavors of disbelief, amazement and fear.
And if she hadn’t been right there and seen how the man had interacted with her son, Suzanne might have been among those fearful murmurers. But he’d been gentle and kind, had smiled, had signed without minding the intrusion at all. He’d even written a message to explain why he wasn’t talking. Timmy says that his throat is hurt and he can’t talk anymore.
She feels for him, really. Laryngitis is awful. She hates losing her voice every time she gets a bad cold.
“Can I go play with the kittens?” Timmy asks, his eyes still on the book tucked protectively under her arm.
“Don’t bother him, but yes.”
Suzanne stands up and follows Timmy with her eyes before there are too many people between them for her to see him weaving his path through the cots. Somehow, she feels like he’ll be perfectly safe. In any other crowd of milling strangers, she’d keep a firm hand on his shoulder, at the very least. Is it the Tower? Is it Bucky? Is it that the cots are all neatly lined up and the crowd isn’t tight-packed in the slightest?
Whatever it is, she’s not entirely alone in feeling relaxed. There are more relaxed and curious people than fearful ones. But there are some pockets of people who have been muttering about moving their cots away from “Jigsaw” on the grounds that they would feel better if he wasn’t so near them.
She doesn’t know why they sought shelter at Avengers Tower if they didn’t want to be anywhere near Jigsaw, because it’s well known that he’s one of the Avengers and that he lives here—and now that they know he’s Bucky Barnes, it makes so much more sense why and how he became an Avenger so soon.
All that killing before was just… It was… She doesn’t have a reason for it or an explanation or an excuse. She’s not sure that matters, though. She’s not the one who has to reason it out, explain it away, or excuse it. And she hopes Timmy doesn’t find out about it any time soon. He’s too young, and she doesn’t want his image of his hero to be tarnished.
Suzanne makes her way over to the area with the kittens—and with Bucky Barnes—and watches as her son laughs at a little white ball of fluff licking his cheek. Bucky is sitting cross-legged on the floor now, with the other two—the Avenger with all the purple whose name escapes her and the young woman with him—sitting in the chairs.
She smiles, and thinks about the earlier encounter. The purple Avenger had said that Bucky “goes by Jigsaw now.” Maybe she should stop thinking about him as Bucky. Some people prefer to go by nicknames, after all. He can be Bucky Barnes and also be called Jigsaw. Sure.
Has she heard of stranger things than the current situation? No, actually, she hasn’t. Famously dead war heroes turning up alive nearly seventy years later after a killing spree across the country is not something one hears about very often.
But he’s the one with the kittens and also the dog making the rounds somewhere, if she recalls correctly. Captain America had tweeted about it. The pets are Jigsaw’s. So he’s doing his part to help, donating his pets to the cause. And it’s working to keep the kids calm, even if it’s putting some of the adults on edge.
One of the counselors on this floor weaves through the cots to the seated trio and makes several motions with her hands and arms. Buc—Jigsaw responds in kind, his whole face lighting up at the sight of her.
Suzanne finds herself entranced by that face. The blue eyes with the brightness in them, the joy. The happy smile on lips she has to admit are pleasing to the eye. The enthusiasm. They clearly know each other well. This counselor is one of the Tower counselors if she remembers right; she lives here. Maybe she’s his therapist or something.
Well, if so, she’s doing something right to get that kind of a response out of him.
And if they communicate in sign language, then it’s probably not a simple case of laryngitis, but something more permanent.
She wonders what that could be. But she’s hardly going to go ask. It’s not her business. What is her business is that her son is enjoying some playtime with a pair of kittens under the watchful eyes of a pair of Avengers and their friend.
Despite the coming storm and the risk to her home and her craft shop, this little bubble of the world feels safe.
Paul
—Washington, D.C. | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 7:45 p.m.—
Cynthia will be home soon after a late shift at the hotel—because of course the hotel wouldn’t close for a literal hurricane blowing past—and Paul knows exactly what they’ll talk about over dinner because Cynthia normally reads the news on the bus home, and will be trying to read the news during her uber ride, too, while the buses aren’t running.
And there’s one particular bit of news that will capture her attention: The D.C Slasher that has been her obsession since that awful morning with the killings in the hotel—the Jigsaw Avenger, he supposes—and Bucky Barnes.
Apparently the same person.
He’s not sure he believes it, himself, even though it comes straight from Pepper Potts, who he thinks lives in the same building and probably knows the guy really well. And it’s not like they can just lie about something like that. Eventually, people are going to get a clear look at his face from up close, and Paul doubts even plastic surgery could pull that off if it wasn’t the truth.
Or can it? There’s lots of instances of stuff like that in the thrillers he reads. Deep undercover agents, sleepers, carefully crafted to infiltrate the target without the possibility of being recognized, even by facial recognition software, throwing their lives and pasts away for the cause, fully inhabiting their roles and their new identities.
Those are books, though, and occasionally movies if the books are popular enough.
He’s having trouble reconciling reality and the special statement Potts released. Aren’t they using Avengers Tower as a hurricane shelter? Did they release this statement to help calm down people fleeing to safety and reassure them that the place really is safe despite Jigsaw being there? The timing would seem to indicate that.
The hurricane hasn’t fully hit up there, yet, though it’s awful enough up there that people are mostly sheltering in place and hoping at this point. But reporters and weather people are still out in some areas. And there’s been lots of tweeting from people sheltering at Avengers Tower. Mostly that they’ve safely arrived and there’s still space and supplies for more people, or that they’ve met an Avenger or been rescued by one and brought to the shelter.
Paul wipes the ham juices off his fingers and picks up his phone to check and see what Twitter is up to now.
He’s #BuckyBarnes. The #Jigsaw Avenger is Bucky. Now I’m blown away by more than #Sandy!
#Jigsaw unmasked: #Bucky Barnes. Some kid got his autograph. #SandyShelter
Stop deadnaming him! He goes by #Jigsaw, not Bucky.
Thought they’d keep their pet serial killer away from us, but nope. He’s right next to the kids. Real bright idea. #Sandy #Jigsaw #killer
Sign language confirmed. #Jigsaw uses #ASL with Tower counselor. Talked about the kittens being a good idea.
And dozens more. Many of them have pictures of three people sitting in front of a pen with kids and kittens in it. All of the pictures are terrible quality. But apparently, according to a linked Reddit post, the woman is Kate Bishop, Hawkeye’s archery student. And the guy with the purple is Hawkeye himself. And then sitting on the floor and mostly obscured by the kids and kittens, is Jigsaw.
The D.C. Slasher.
Unmasked entirely, and wearing glasses.
Paul frowns. Does he need glasses? Had he just been wearing contact lenses while slaughtering people across the country? Had he just squinted a lot? Is this the reason his kills were almost always up close?
It’s definitely not the point he’s supposed to take from these tweets and the pictures.
He wouldn’t want his kid near someone who’d killed like that, if he ever has a kid, which he might not. Cindy isn’t into kids, and he likes to think this is his forever relationship.
So he would try to keep his hypothetical kid away from a mass murderer, whether he was an Avenger now or not. But he isn’t in a shelter situation with nothing for his hypothetical kid to do. And there’s a real Avenger right next to the Jigsaw one. And kittens. So it’s probably safe enough. If you’re a kitten.
And if the slasher is Bucky, or was Bucky… Well, it just goes to show how people can change, doesn’t it?
Jeremy
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—
He wasn’t sure he’d have the chance to see the so-called Jigsaw Avenger while sheltering here.
He’d known it was a possibility, which is why he chose the place to shelter in instead of finding another option or trying to hole up in his home. The man’s been hidden for so long, only coming out for missions and a few trips to the park, and the footage has always been blurry or nonexistent. But given a chance to see the man with his own eyes, how could Jeremy pass it up?
The Jigsaw Avenger lives in Avengers Tower, after all, and while he should have been confined to certain areas of the Tower for the safety of everyone else, it was always going to be a toss-up whether the Avengers would prioritize the safety of the people they were supposedly protecting or the territorial range of the serial killer they’d adopted.
And they’d prioritized the serial killer, setting him down with a pair of kittens like a man in an unmarked van offering candy to lure the kids in.
He hadn’t had the metal arm on display with its red star, and he obviously hadn’t killed anyone while he was down on this floor. But the opportunity was there, and the disguise was flimsy at best. Glasses. A glove. They could at least have put him in a ball cap.
Jeremy hadn’t know what the Jigsaw Avenger looked like other than piercing blue eyes and the metal arm—rumors going around about the Red Star Killer said he had long brown hair, but that could have been changed easily so that he could blend in better.
Now, though, Jeremy does know what he looks like. Has seen him with his own eyes. The Red Star Killer. The D.C. Slasher. The Jigsaw Avenger.
He’d known the moment the other Avenger—Hawk Guy or whatever—had shown up with him where the staff had set up an area like a petting zoo with three chairs behind it. It’s the white kitten that gave it away for sure. Alpine. Jeremy knows his stuff. The Jigsaw Avenger has a white kitten named Alpine. And he’s almost never seen out of the presence of Hawk Guy. The college-aged girl would be Kate Bishop, hoping to become Hawk Girl, probably.
They’d set the kittens down over there—now the Jigsaw Avenger has two kittens, apparently—and had actually encouraged small children to go over within striking range of a rabid and unleashed serial killer. And for nearly two hours, they’d stayed right there. The Jigsaw Avenger penned a note in one child’s book, used sign language with one of the counselors on this floor, spent a few minutes with the dog, Lucky. His dog, but the Falcon was walking it around the shelter areas.
Like any good reporter, Jeremy had watched. He’d watched everything.
And the only thing he found hard to imagine once the Jigsaw Avenger—ha! Jigsaw Killer more like it—had shown up was that there hadn’t been a bloody murder done on someone.
Maybe the Avengers do have him trained up finally, so he can sit and stay and heel, just like his dog. Like a police dog, trained to bite on command, to watch for threats, to sniff out bombs or drugs. The Jigsaw Avenger, there to monitor the people seeking shelter, under the guise of comforting them? Just like the other dog, Lucky, patrolling the assembled civilians looking for trouble while appearing to offer comfort.
Still a tremendous risk, letting him out among civilians like this.
But Jeremy is glad they did it. He saw the autograph being signed, heard what that kid had said. Bucky Barnes. He’d doubted it at first. Of course he had! To be honest, he still doubts it even after the trio had picked up Jigsaw’s kittens and headed back into some off limits portion of the floor. After Pepper Potts’s little announcement online. Even after he got a better look at his face and compared it to the photo of Bucky he pulled up on his phone.
There’d never have been a whiff of any of this if the man hadn’t been brought out and shown off like this. There’s still not enough transparency here. No explanation of how it’s possible for the Jigsaw Avenger to be Bucky, and no explanation of how Steve Rogers of all people hadn’t recognized him immediately. All signs point to more secrecy.
And his boss is right. The whole country deserves transparency on all of this. There needs to be a whole press conference, not just a little statement snuck in among hurricane news or a stilted press release. And if they need to get someone to interpret for the Jigsaw Avenger, fine. But if he’s “rehabilitated” enough that they trust him around civilians, then he’s been rehabbed long enough to answer to the public.
This will make such a good article for the Honeybadger’s Den.
Charlene
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
“You did what you could, Pepper,” Charlene says from their corner out of the way in the cafeteria, watching people line up to get dinner and gradually filtering through with their trays to the tables in clumps of family or individually.
The people all seem relatively calm. No one is wailing about anything, not one child has been separated from their parents, there hasn’t been a riot. Given the thing she was last summoned for where Jigsaw was involved, that is all progress. If the man had hammered someone’s whole head and shoulders in this time, there’d have been plenty of wailing, lots of milling about and lost children, and eventually a riot.
No, this time was a scramble of a different sort.
“Did I, though? Surely there’s more I could have done.”
“Rogers has been able to tour a Target with only a ballcap, and not be recognized, despite being far more famous than Barnes ever was. There was no way to know that glasses and the rest wouldn’t do the trick.”
And wearing a ballcap indoors in his own home would have only drawn people’s eyes to him, made some of them wonder. They don’t need people wondering what Jigsaw is hiding, or what he’s actually like under the hat. Too many people have gotten too blurry a glimpse of him in various footage clips for something as obscuring as a hat to go unnoticed.
Glasses allow them to see his face—so it’s clear he and the Avengers in general aren’t hiding anything—and should have been enough to show people Jigsaw, rather than Barnes.
That it didn’t work is hardly Pepper’s fault.
“Thank you for your help with the statement.”
Well, that’s just her job, isn’t it? As head of the PR department, it’s up to her to step in when the others are unable to get something done, and most of the others were busy with other volunteer work or with their families. Plus, something that might sour so easily as this news deserved her attention.
“Of course. I’m just glad we had something to hand that we could cobble together quickly. And that you let me know as soon as you did.”
Charlene’s also glad she had the foresight to set up in the Tower for the storm instead of trying to manage things from a distance. This is, after all, where most of the disasters could happen when it comes to Stark Industries and her side project of keeping the Avengers on the public’s good side.
Some days, she almost misses the days when Stark Industries was transitioning from weapons into clean energy and similar. It had been a lot of work, a lot of late nights at the office, but no one had been murdered. Not… directly, anyway. And Stane’s attempts at murder had been thwarted, on all counts.
Watching the company shift gears almost on a dime under Pepper’s guidance after the infamous cheeseburger press conference and being able to steer public opinion about that shift had been exhilarating.
Trying to manage Jigsaw and all of the nuances that need to go into his gradual reveal to the public, that’s not exhilarating. Especially not when she doesn’t have all the information she needs to look far into the future and make plans for what else might come up. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Maria Hill could be more forthcoming about the background and baggage Jigsaw drags with him.
But regardless of the unknowns on the HYDRA and related missions front, Charlene has a whole folder of potential statement fragments should other things come to light about Jigsaw’s ill treatment under HYDRA, all of it very heavily encrypted.
Really, she can’t blame the man for hammering that spy’s face in. The real surprise is it took so long to happen, and that it hasn’t happened again since then.
There’s a whole subfolder of statement fragments ready in case it does happen again, though. Not every murder in the Tower can be attributed to a suicide, after all.
Just most of them.
Notes:
Please forgive any spelling/grammar errors; I'm posting way late on Saturday in case I get swamped with real life stuff Sunday. ^_^ Enjoy!
Chapter 150: Assets | Some people care about what other people think (worry about what they say)
Notes:
Chapter title from “What Do Ya Think About That” by Colt Ford and Montgomery Gentry.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 7:45 p.m.—
Okay, when he first read Pepper’s group text about it, he panicked a little, but reading the statement she went with now that they’re all safely back in the Avengers-only part of the Tower, Clint has to admit, it’s not bad. Covers the bases without revealing personal details. Reiterates that Jigsaw is Jigsaw now.
It’s almost like she had that in a back pocket ready to send out in a moment’s notice. It had taken her half an hour, of course, but Clint still calls that a moment’s notice for something like this.
And just like that, Jigsaw is no longer a secret. They probably don’t even need to bother with a disguise now. Gloves aren’t needed if they all know he’s got a metal arm. Glasses aren’t needed. He can wear regular shirts out and about without worrying about hiding the scarring on his throat. It won’t matter if someone recognizes him now because Pepper let the cat out of the bag.
“Here you go, Jigsaw,” Katie-Kate says as she hands Liho to Jigsaw, who nestles the black kitten up against Alpine in the top nest of the cat tree to sleep.
The kittens are all played out, all cuddled out, totally exhausted after two hours of being played with and held and petted gently. Clint anticipates they’ll be rambunctious again by bedtime.
“Well that was interesting, wasn’t it?” Clint asks. “Didn’t have that on my bingo card, but I probably should have.”
He wonders if Steve is going to kill him for blowing Jigsaw’s cover by bringing him out on the third floor where the first wave of civilians are sheltering. Probably not.
“Pepper sent something out to explain, though, right?”
“Yep.” Clint waves his phone. “It’s pretty good, too.”
Jigsaw points to the phone and makes a “gimme” gesture, then signs that he wants to read it.
“Oh, sure. Let me pull it up again.” Clint does just that and holds the phone out. “Scroll with your right hand, Jigs. That’s not like your tablet’s screen.”
Jigsaw bites the tip of the glove on his right hand and tugs it off so he can scroll through the statement.
“I guess there’s not really any need for the glasses anymore, is there?” Kate asks. “They look kind of cool, though. Hipster but in a good way. You could keep them as a fashion statement, Jigsaw.”
Clint laughs. “Something tells me they’re too annoying to keep just for the fashion statement, Katie-Kate.”
He collapses into a slump on the sofa, legs sprawling open and arms falling where they will. “I didn’t do anything but stand there and then sit there. And talk. But man, I am tired .”
Jigsaw lifts one of Clint’s arms up and curls up under it at his side, still working through Pepper’s statement on the phone, and Clint rests his arm over his partner’s shoulders.
Kate claims the chair and the remote, starts flipping through channels and asking for a yay/nay vote on each thing she decides to pause on. Their options are a little limited by what might upset Jigsaw, but there’s still plenty to watch.
“You about finished with the phone, Jigs?” Clint asks after he and Kate have decided on something to watch—some show about restoring antiques.
Jigsaw looks up at him with a frown and puts the phone in Clint’s lap to free up his hands. Then he’s signing quite a lot, in a bit of a jumble due to his obvious upset, but the gist is that they are mean, and that they say that Pepper is lying, and that Jigsaw isn’t a real Avenger, and that Bucky died for real, and a couple of things Clint can’t quite make out.
Clint feels like smacking his forehead. The damn comments on the website. Of course Jigsaw would keep scrolling until there were no more words to read. This is why Jigsaw doesn’t have a phone or access to the internet without supervision. Clint should have at least chosen the official Avengers website and not one of the news sites that published the statement. There isn’t a comments section on the Avengers website.
“They’re just being mean because they can get away with it, Jigs,” he says as he puts his phone on the side table. “People in the comments section almost never mean well. They’re trolls. We ignore them.”
Jigsaw is still frowning at the phone, even while nodding.
“They shouldn’t say those things, but they only say them to upset us. That’s what internet trolls do. They say mean things to upset people for no reason other than to upset them. So we ignore them and they don’t get their way.”
Jigsaw gets up and fetches his tablet, and Clint takes the opportunity to sit up straighter for his back’s sake before Jigsaw reclaims his place at his side.
“What do you think about Pepper’s statement, Jigsaw?” Clint asks. “Not the comments. We ignore those.”
“Early soon to see Jigsaw?”
The words come from the tablet after the restoration crew on the show has finished locating the old rusted antiques they want to restore. And they aren’t alone.
“Bad go down little Alpine little Liho many many innocents? Jigsaw wrong? Trouble?”
“You’re not in trouble, Jigsaw,” Clint says right off the bat. That’s the primary thing to get across. “And you didn’t do anything wrong. If anything, I’m in trouble for even suggesting we head down with the kittens. Not that I’m in trouble-trouble.”
Katie-Kate shifts in the chair a bit looking at her phone instead of the TV, and Clint wonders if she feels uncomfortable, like she shouldn’t be hearing this. But he doesn’t think it’s anything top secret. He’s just talking with Jigsaw about something all three of them were actually there for.
“It was probably too early for the public to know that you used to be Bucky, yeah. We weren’t really prepared for that. That’s why it was a PR disaster. But Pepper is quick on her feet. She got ahead of it with her statement.”
Jigsaw clears his tablet and starts assembling new words.
“Oh my god, my phone’s just about exploding right now,” Kate mutters. “I’ve got it on silent, but—”
She holds out the screen toward him to show the notifications coming in almost too fast to read.
“Your mom?”
“Some of them, yeah. But my roommate, some of my school friends, my LARPing circle, lots of unknown numbers… Apparently, there are lots of photos of the three of us on Twitter.”
Kate continues dismissing notifications and frowning at her phone, answering the occasional text among the barrage.
“They all want to know if it’s true,” she says. “And my mother is furious that I didn’t evacuate. And my friends want to know if I can get them some autographs. They wanted Captain America and Iron Man autographs, too, and I told them no. Not sure why they think Jigsaw’s any different.”
“Maybe because that one kid got one?” Clint guesses. “Anyway, you should be okay to tell them whatever is already public.”
“Oh geez, my mother is threatening to send in a helicopter to get me out of here before the hurricane proper makes landfall.”
Kate gets to her feet and taps her phone, holding it up to her ear as she heads to the kitchen for a little bit of privacy.
“Jigsaw top secret leak bad.”
Clint shifts focus back to Jigsaw.
“Jigsaw sad leak and Jigsaw happy see tiny innocent TIMMY happy star in book. Jigsaw star purple. Jigsaw draw name like Avenger draw name many many book in pile ago. Jigsaw is Avenger like Clint, like Natasha, draw name in book. Jigsaw happy draw name.”
Clint blinks. “Give me a second,” he requests.
Many many book pile, ago, drawing their names—oh. That horrible Battle of New York photography book they had to sign hundreds of copies of for the auction that went to crap. With all the pictures of ugly aliens, Loki included, the greasy bastard.
“You’re really happy to sign someone’s book the way we all signed those books for the auction this past summer, because that’s what Avengers do, huh? And yeah, you made that kid’s whole year by signing his book.”
Jigsaw smiles, clearing his tablet and setting it aside. Then: “Kate helicopter?” he signs.
“Man, I hope not, for the pilot’s sake. Because she’s not going anywhere she doesn’t want to go, and woe on that pilot if they return empty-handed, from what I’ve heard of her mother.”
Jigsaw
—New York City | Sunday 28 October 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—
There is still time for the assets and the auction woman to go down and eat the dinner meal with the many many people gathered up to eat in the cafeteria room. It had smelled delicious smells in the air, faint but present, before they scooped up the little cats and returned to the rooms for assets.
The auction woman has finally stopped talking into her phone, and she is not leaving to pack up and get into a helicopter, so that is good. She can eat with the assets, then, before it goes to have a session with Zoe.
The others from the team that is not a cell are eating with the many many people gathered up downstairs and then they will sleep well so that they can do all of the rescuing again in the morning when it is light out and even earlier. But the man who always freezes when he sees it brings up a cart from the cafeteria room so that they can eat in the rooms for assets.
“Pepper recommends you eat up here so that no one sees, uh, how much food is involved,” the man says, looking wide-eyed at it but from the corner of his eyes while speaking to the other asset. “And you could use the privacy, after that announcement. Let people settle for the night.”
“Yeah, we get it, Happy. It’s okay.”
The other asset agrees to bring the cart back to the Avengers level kitchen so that the man who always freezes when he sees it can go back to security things. And then they are able to eat!
There is a plate with rolled up packages made of gigantic tortillas, five of the packages for the three of them. Two of them have red-topped toothpicks sticking out of the top, and three of them have green-topped toothpicks sticking out of the top. And potato pieces crispy and dark from the skillet, in a large bowl.
And another bowl filled up with delicious pieces of romaine hearts and studded with bright colored vegetables. And a bowl with curly noodles tossed in glistening butter with a smaller bowl of gray balls of meat with more red-topped toothpicks in them. And a medium bowl with delicious vegetables sauteed and soft.
“I’m going to assume red is for meat and green is for gross,” the other asset says with a grin. “I’ll cut one of these burritos in half to make sure, though. Don’t want anyone to have an unpleasant surprise.”
It puts some of the noodles into a bowl while the other asset does that, and spoons sauteed vegetables on top—onions and zucchinis and yellow squash and tomatoes and sweet peppers and mushrooms. Then it puts some of the salad on a plate and accepts a green-topped toothpick burrito package. There is no room for the crispy potato pieces, but it will get some once there is room. It can wait. The crispy potato pieces will still be there.
The other asset and the auction woman each take a red-topped toothpick burrito package, and then some noodles and the balls of meat. The auction woman adds salad, and the other asset adds potatoes.
There is no talking while the three of them put the delicious food into their mouths and eat and eat. It does not know about the red-topped toothpick burrito packages, but the one it has is filled up with black beans and tiny pieces of tofu and corn and tiny pieces of zucchini, with a brightly tangy sauce. Very good, and it happily eats a second one before getting more of the salad, and then more of the sauteed vegetables and some potato pieces.
“Oh my god, is this what Pepper is serving people?” the auction woman says after cleaning her plate. “I thought it would be sandwiches and pasta salad or something. Soup. Stuff that’s cheap to supply, easy to make, and decently filling, with like a sad vegetarian option. This stuff is so good.”
The other asset shrugs and stabs another ball of meat.
“Pepper probably does have that stuff down there. And french fries and tater tots, burgers, chicken nuggets, peanut butter and jelly… You know, for kids and pickier eaters. She’s just also got this other stuff.”
It points to the third green-topped toothpick burrito package and then mimes tearing it in half and sharing half with the auction woman. It knows that the other asset would not eat it, but if the auction woman wants to try it, then it will not take the last one.
“Sure, I’ll take half,” she says. “Thanks, Jigsaw.”
It smiles at her and cuts the burrito package in half, bringing half of it to its own plate and allowing the auction woman to take the other half to hers. It offers her some potatoes, and some noodles, and more of the salad, and some of the sauteed vegetables, but she shakes her head each time.
“I’m going to be stuffed after this veggie burrito, Jigsaw. I don’t know where you put it all.”
“I’ll take some more potatoes,” the other asset offers, lifting a plate that still has a few stray buttered noodles on it.
It adds more of the noodles and the last of the potato pieces to the plate and passes it back to the other asset. The other asset will need the noodles to help finish off the balls of meat. It can finish the rest of the meal, but the other asset will need to finish the innocent meats.
“I can’t believe we ate all of that,” the auction woman says with a moan and a hand across her belly. “Probably better no one saw us gorging ourselves down there.”
Gorging? There was enough food for all of them, and they ate all of the food without wasting any of it. That is not gorging. That is eating responsibly. Though… it realizes that it did not check in with the body to see if there was a fullness cue. There is now, but there might have been a fullness cue earlier, too.
It will do better next time. Caroline would want it to check in, but she would not want it to be upset with itself for forgetting to check in. Whenever it makes a mistake, it is supposed to acknowledge the mistake and then keep doing its best. That is what she said during their Thursday session last week. That the storm would be stressful, and that it is to do its best but not be upset if something goes wrong.
The other asset pulls the phone out to look at the front where the numbers say the time. “It’s probably about time for Zoe, Jigs. You want me to come along?”
It always wants the other asset to join it, always wants to spend more time with the other asset. Would spend all of the time with the other asset if that were possible. But the auction woman needs company, and the other asset does not always like to go to the sessions with Zoe.
It signs that the other asset can stay, and then waves a goodbye to both of them before slipping out the door and into the hall.
A few minutes later, it is signing that it feels satisfied right now in response to Zoe’s daily question. Really, the experts’ daily question. They all start their sessions asking how it is feeling at the moment. That annoyed it at first, but it has gotten better and better at identifying the feelings they are asking about, and so it is a small triumph to announce those feelings, little victories three times a day.
“I hear your past has been connected with you in public now,” Zoe asks. “It’s more Yasmin’s territory to ask this, but are you okay with everything that happened earlier on the third floor?”
It takes a moment to think about that. It does not mind that people know it was once the bucky. That is just a fact about it, like the metal arm is a fact about it, or the blue eyes, or the little creatures it cares for—Lucky, little Alpine, now little Liho. It does not see why facts should be secrets.
There. That is what it wants to say. Wants to ask about, really. Why keep facts a secret?
It signs about facts, giving Zoe a few examples of facts about it, including the past as the bucky. Signs that these are all facts. All true things. Then it puts them off to the right and signs about secrets and asks why all of the true things off to the right should be secrets.
“I see,” Zoe says. Then she signs that some things are secret to protect it, because if people knew the entire truth, they might be afraid of it, or they might adore it as the bucky come back, or they might be upset that it is not the bucky come back.
But it does not need protection. It protects others.
“There could be consequences to your being recognized as having been Bucky, Jigsaw,” Zoe says. “I see from your frown that you don’t agree. Is that right?”
It shakes the head, and signs that it will protect.
“I know that you’ll do your best to protect everyone, but you have some vulnerabilities as well. Pepper and the others are trying to shield those vulnerabilities, to protect you. Will you let them?”
It hesitates, but then nods. It would be very upset if it were not allowed to protect someone. It does not want them to be upset because they cannot protect it. So it will let them. Even though it does not need that protection.
“Thank you, Jigsaw.”
Zoe pulls a book out of her bag and opens it up at the front, to the very first page. “I thought, since you’ve given your first autograph, that we might try to develop a signature for you.”
She hands it the book, and it looks at the front page. There is a loopy scrawl at the bottom of the first page, and some more loopy lines above it. Is this a signature? Loopy lines? It can make loopy lines.
“This is my name, written in print.” She hands it a notebook with lines across the page with Zoe Braxton drawn several times on the page it is open to. “If you turn the page, you’ll see my name written in something called cursive.”
It turns the page, and there are small loopy lines all over the page, drawn mostly in between the blue lines across the page. It recognizes none of the loops as letter shapes. Some of the loops are bigger than other loops, but none of them are letter shapes.
Is… Is “cursive” another language? With a different set of letter shapes? Or a code, perhaps? The same language spelled with letter shapes from a different language, or a made up language?
“If you turn the page again, you’ll see my signature. Pay attention to the similarities between the cursive and the signature.”
It turns the page, and the loopy lines are sloppier, going outside of the lines across the page and bunching together weirdly. Written more quickly, it thinks. It is not sure how it can tell. It always takes time to form each letter shape, but maybe when a letter shape is drawn quickly, it looks different. There are still two higher bumps of loops, but they extend over the smaller loops so that everything is blended together.
This is a signature? It has to learn how to draw one of these?
“The next page is your name in print at the top, in cursive in the middle, with some blank space at the bottom. I don’t intend to introduce cursive extensively unless you’re interested. People don’t use it as often these days, so you should not need to read it. But it’s the first step to a signature, so I thought we’d practice just your name in cursive and then as a signature.”
And there they are on the next page. The name, Jigsaw, in the capital letter shapes it writes with. The loops, one of them dipping low into the space below the name, and the first bit dipping both low and high. And the space at the bottom.
They spend the rest of the session drawing loops. The letter shapes in cursive are loopy versions of the letter shapes in print.
And they are so much more complicated to draw. The J of its name is not a curving line and a straight line on top. It is a single long looping curved line that goes all over the place up and down and around. It follows Zoe’s motions over and over as they both write Js all over a pair of notebooks. Up to the top of the line above, down into the space below the starting line, back up, and around and around. The J takes up so much space.
Then the other letters, all of them like the print letters but needlessly swirly, except for the G, which does not look at all like the letter to it. It is more like an 8.
But by the end of the session, it has written Jigsaw in loopy cursive, all on its own, on a fresh page of the notebook with the lines across the pages. And it managed to stay between the lines except where it is not supposed to stay between the lines. The cursive name is so small.
“This is excellent, Jigsaw,” Zoe says with a beaming smile. “You picked that up so quickly and worked so hard on it. This is a great start on a signature. If you have time for homework, I’d like for you to write your name in cursive some more, to really set the muscle memory. We can work on making that into a signature tomorrow night.”
It grins. Zoe is proud of it, and she likes the way its cursive looks. It cannot wait to show the other asset.
Notes:
We're nearing the end of part two, but don't worry--part three will pick up where part two leaves off, so you won't be left hanging. ^_^
Chapter 151: Tower | I hear hurricanes a-blowin’
Notes:
Chapter title from “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
😢 Guess this is the end of part two. It had to happen, but I will still miss part two. So much happened and so much progress was made by all. Part three is coming, though, so it will be well.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jigsaw
—New York City | Monday 29 October 2012 | 7:00 a.m.—
It sits at the kitchen table in the rooms for assets and waits and waits. It is time to be in the therapy room for a morning session with Yasmin, but there is no morning session with Yasmin today. There is no afternoon session with Yasmin today, either.
The feet want to walk to the therapy room, though. The body wants to sit on the soft sofa with the soft, cream throw blanket. It wants to tell Yasmin all about everything that’s happened. Wants to talk to Yasmin about drawing the name in the tiny innocent’s book. Wants to talk to Yasmin about the little cat petting area and the tiny innocents who gathered to shower the little cats with affection.
Wants to talk to Yasmin about the bucky and how that is “out in the open” now.
For some reason, the other asset is feeling guilty about that, and the auction woman had been vaguely upset at first on the third floor as well, once the tiny innocent said that other name. Zoe had been concerned about it, too, but she at least tried to explain that it was about protecting it.
But protecting it from what? Where is the harm in someone knowing that Jigsaw used to be the bucky? That it knows of, there is nothing the bucky is in trouble for. The bucky was a hero, and a very good man, according to the clown man, who would know. The bucky did the scouting and the killing and the sniping so that the clown man could have a good public image. Protecting the clown man from people being upset at him.
Maybe that is why everyone seems on edge about the secret being “out.”
That does not seem fair, though. In the war, the bucky was killing evil people, not innocents. And in a war, killing is okay, even to the team that is not a cell. That is how they were able to kill the Chitauri aliens who came to capture all of the people on the planet and kill everyone who resisted. It was a war, and the team that is not a cell was protecting everyone.
In a war, the rules are different. It does not understand why this should be the case when the rules are not considered different for a mission, but it believes the clown man about it.
There is a knock at the door, and it goes quickly to the door to open it before the lights begin to flash in the other asset’s nesting chamber. The other asset needs sleep.
The clown man is there, wearing the tac gear that is like a flag, like a circus, with the bright “shoot me” colors.
“Hey, Jigsaw,” the clown man says, following it into the room and sitting where Jigsaw points, at the sofa. “I meant to come by and talk last night, but you were with Zoe, and I didn’t want to keep you up too late.”
It signs that it is no problem and sits on the other end of the sofa, facing the clown man. They are going to talk now. It wonders what about.
“I’m sorry you got recognized yesterday,” the clown man says. “We were hoping to have more time to work out a strategy before the public got to know about your past.”
It makes the question sign.
The other asset had not been able to explain last night, and rather than get frustrated about that, it had asked for kisses and the entire conversation had gone away. Only after the auction woman was gone, though. It knows the kissing rules.
“Being in the spotlight is not always pleasant,” the clown man says. “People assume things and make judgments based on those assumptions. People expect things all the time, like they think you owe them something by being famous. People are nosy, they butt into private things and take pictures of you without permission. They crowd your space, try to touch you anywhere they can reach… There’s a lot of unpleasant things.”
It does not want those things. But it is sure a glare will keep people from touching it. The man who freezes around it would probably fall over trying to get away from it if it were to glare at him. And he knows that it means no harm. The public… They might not know that.
What if the public is afraid of it?
Monesha was not afraid of it. Maybe she is not alone. Maybe there are more people who are not afraid. But would those not-afraid people try to touch it? Is that the choice it has to make? Have people be afraid of it, which it does not want, or have people try to touch it, which it also does not want?
It has only been protecting them from evil, HYDRA, and HYDRA evil. But it remembers that woman with the phone, who called emergency services, with the tiny innocent hiding in the closet. The man who thought he could beat, could push into the woman when it could hear the leather slapping skin. She had been terrified of it, even as it had carved into the man who had intended to continue hurting her.
And that boy in the room with all the HYDRA government targets, when the STRIKE team came to the hotel. The boy had been an innocent, surrounded by HYDRA and slowly being trapped in their web. But the boy had been terrified of it, all the same, even as it severed the web around him and set him free from HYDRA’s tentacles.
Most of the innocents it has saved, the ones who saw it, have been afraid of it. Only, Monesha had not been when she saw it again behind her home.
“Jigsaw?” the clown man asks. “What are you thinking?”
It reaches for the low coffee table, the tablet it left there when the kissing sitting down turned into kissing standing up, and kissing walking to the other asset’s nest to kissing lying down. The tablet has enough energy to use it. Good.
After several minutes, it taps Speak.
“Jigsaw not want touching not want afraid of Jigsaw. Why owe touching? What other owe things? Touch Steve? Touch all over? No.”
“Well, first off, people do not touch me all over. They mostly want handshakes, and they touch my hands, arms and shoulders. Sometimes, very rarely, someone will pat my butt or try to touch my chest. I move away from them, and that’s that.”
People should not touch the clown man’s butt. If it saw people doing that, it would break their fingers and hands so that they could not touch anyone’s butt at all.
“Second, you do not owe anyone anything, especially not touching. It can be made abundantly clear that you do not appreciate touching and will not even shake hands with people. These are just things people think you owe them, but you don’t.”
The clown man is very serious about this. There is a frown on the clown man’s face and he even makes cutting gestures for emphasis when he says that Jigsaw does not owe anyone anything.
“And I think there will be some people who are always going to be afraid of you, Jigsaw. But you can’t do anything about that. They don’t owe you their being unafraid. The majority of people…” The clown man sighs. “The majority will call you Bucky and try to help you remember things, or treat you like they would treat Bucky returning from the dead.”
He looks down at his hands and then back up at it. “The way I treated you for way too long.”
It signs the O and the K, signs that it is not mad.
“I know you’ve forgiven me that, but it does still make me mad at myself for doing it. And it’ll make me mad when others do it, too. Just remember that you don’t owe them Bucky Barnes. You are who you are, and you answer to your name. Jigsaw.”
The clown man makes its name sign while saying its name, and it smiles at him. Then it gets up and retrieves the notebook with the lines across the pages, opens it up, and shows the clown man the latest page of its practice, with the cursive letters Jigsaw drawn all over it.
“That’s great, Jigsaw,” the clown man says. “Are you learning cursive?”
It shakes the head, and makes the tablet say “Signature” for it because it cannot remember the signs from last night.
“That’s right. You signed someone’s book last night.”
It smiles and works at the tablet for a few minutes. “Draw name in book like Avengers draw name in many many book in pile. Chitauri.”
The clown man smiles back. “That cramped my hand up so bad,” he says. “It felt like I was signing forever. Be careful what you wish for.”
“It is real Avenger.” That is quick to arrange because it remembers where the tiles are from last night.
“I know. Are people saying you aren’t?”
It nods. “Comment. TROLL.”
“Yeah, I rarely read the comments on my tweets. There are some gems in there that JARVIS picks out for me, but most of them are just people being mean or arguing with each other in the comments. I do have a lot of questions to answer on Twitter about you, though. I’m putting it off.”
“Steve save many many people hurricane?”
The clown man smiles. “We did get a lot of people to the Tower safely, yes. It was a cold, wet and miserable several hours, but I’m geared up to go do it again. The storm is supposed to make landfall today, and places are already flooding. So it’ll be more dangerous today, but that’s why we need to be out there helping.”
“Jigsaw help?”
“I’d love to have your help out there, but Pepper needs you and Clint in here. Bruce is coming out with us today in case we need a hulk, and that leaves room for you to help check people in and make sure they have a comfort bag and get situated in the shelter areas on the second floor.”
The second floor? Where they set up all of the little fake houses for the trick-or-treating?
“The third floor is all filled up and so we’re directing people to the second now. We should have enough room for everyone, even if we have to expand up to the fourth floor and things get a little tight.”
And they will greet people, the assets and the auction woman. Make them feel safe and get them a place to stay safe from the hurricane.
Okay. That is still helping. But…
“Bruce Hulk the same as? Really?”
“They really are. Do you want to come see him?”
It nods, and they go up to the rooms where it was originally trapped in the hive building, where it saw the big green monster and was treated like a little creature to be protected.
“Hey, Bruce. Are you about ready to head out?”
“I am.” The curly haired researcher, holding a shirt but not wearing it, looks at it briefly, gives it a wave of greeting, and looks back at the clown man. “Is he? He doesn’t look ready.”
Of course it is not ready. It is not going outside into the storm, but is staying inside to help people feel as safe as they are even in the storm and the crowd.
“Jigsaw just wanted to come say hi to Hulk before we set out.”
The curly haired researcher nods and then smiles. “I think we can manage that. The Other Guy will appreciate seeing Jigsaw safe and sound.”
And then the curly haired researcher is stepping back, and is… is… is turning green! There are veins of green popping up along his bare arms where the veins would be, and he is growing taller and taller, broader and broader, and the green from the veins is spreading to the capillaries, all through his skin, and there is the big green monster!
It grins as the big green monster sits down in his stretchy pants, and it waves hello before using the big green monster’s name sign, an open hand hovering over its chest and then pulling away into a fist. It makes its own name sign next and sits down as well.
“Hulk friend Jigsaw all better. Hulk worried in Siberia. Mad. Hulk friend Jigsaw hurt so bad, Hulk had carry him. Now all better.”
The big— no. Hulk grins so wide his face seems to split apart, and his voice is a rumble in the room, not a roar. There is nothing to roar about now, after all.
“Thank you, Hulk,” it signs. “Jigsaw friend Hulk. Treat like little creature. Protect.”
Hulk signs back that he will always protect, his large green fingers and hands moving smoothly through the signs.
Now it is Jigsaw’s turn to grin. Hulk can sign like it can! Better than it can, even!
It asks where Hulk goes, and what Hulk does there. Why Hulk has to go there. It uses the space in front of it and movement and gesture to ask the questions, so that its questions will make sense and not just be why, why, why questions.
It would rather there be Hulk than the curly haired researcher, but it does not sign that part.
Hulk says that he goes inside where “puny Banner” is most angry, and that he watches and waits, ready to spring out— and there’s some sign about cake, then, that it does not understand —and protect puny Banner and anyone else who needs it. Hulk says that he fights bad guys, that he smashes them. He says that he will smash the hurricane, too, and save all the puny humans.
And all of it in the signs! No one ever talks to it this much in signs when they can talk with their mouths.
It nods excitedly and signs back, using the same motions Hulk had made for puny humans—that must be Hulk’s way of saying innocents, because Hulk had called Jigsaw puny, too, when protecting it like a little creature, like an innocent to be protected. It says that they must be protected, that it will be protecting them inside, sharing space with them so that they can be safe from the hurricane. It signs that it will make them feel safe, and that Yasmin said it was important for the people to feel safe.
Hulk agrees, and then gets to his feet again, offering a hand to help it up.
It does not need the help, but it accepts the help. If Hulk wants to help it, then it will let Hulk help it. It is like agents in the field helping each other up. One of them going on a mission to protect people outside in the storm, and one of them going on a mission to protect people coming inside from the storm.
Two missions, but the same as each other.
Kate
—New York City | Monday 29 October 2012 | 8:00 a.m.—
By the time she’s downed a mug of coffee and pulled on something more appropriate than her pajamas, brushed the coffee breath away and bounded down the hallways to Hawkeye and Jigsaw’s room, Kate is feeling pumped up and ready for anything. Today’s the day the hurricane makes landfall. This is it. She’s going to be a hero.
She knocks on the door and is half surprised when the Falcon emerges from the room dressed in tac gear complete with wing pack and the little red and white droid, Redwing. She thought he was staying inside doing counseling with Lucky. If he’s going out, that means the rest of the team must be going out—she should have dressed in her new tac gear instead of in regular civilian clothes.
“Kate, good morning,” the Falcon says and then turns back to the room inside. “Remember, Clint, not the roof but the next floor down.”
“I got it. Hey, Katie-Kate,” Hawkeye says brightly as she watches the Falcon leave.
Kate comes in and is relieved but a bit confused to see Hawkeye still in a t-shirt and wrinkled jeans. Are they not heading out? And what’s that about the floor under the roof level?
She gestures toward the hallway. “What was that about?”
“Oh, Stark made a patch of fake grass for Lucky so he doesn’t have to go outside in the hurricane and get all wet and maybe hurt. Since Wilson’s probably going to be gone most of the day, it’ll be up to me to make sure Lucky is okay for bathroom breaks.”
Hawkeye pulls down a mug and waves it at her. “Coffee?”
“I just had some.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, because you can never have too much coffee.” He fills the mug and sets it on the counter for her before getting a second down for himself.
“Are we taking shifts?” Kate asks as she picks up the coffee and blows on it.
Hawkeye stares at her, takes a slurp of his coffee and then immediately grimaces. “Aw, coffee, why?” He blows on the mug a bit and then blinks at her. “Shifts?”
Kate nods. “Part of the team goes out in the morning, and part of the team goes out later in the day. To rescue people.”
“Ooh, yeah.” Hawkeye shakes his head. “No, we’re the inside crew. Jigsaw would be a good one to have out there, but communication would be a huge problem in low visibility and all that howling wind. So he and I are helping Pepper. Once he gets back from wherever he went off to.”
Kate looks into the depths of her coffee. The inside crew. So the plan is for her to babysit Jigsaw with Hawkeye while the other Avengers are out being heroes. She doesn’t know how Hawkeye is putting on such a calm face about being left behind. Pepper could stay with Jigsaw, or Jigsaw could stay with Bruce, or he could… watch television, or read, or work on a puzzle, or something.
“You’re upset we’re being left here to keep an eye on things in the Tower.”
She looks up. “Well, yes! Why aren’t you upset? You’re an Avenger, you should be out there saving people! And Jigsaw should be out there. He’s an Avenger. And I thought maybe I could help, even.”
“Kate, we are helping. There are hundreds of people sheltering in this place, not including the Stark Institute staffers Pepper arranged to stay or the volunteers who signed on to help from the various Tower restaurants. These people are hiding from a massive hurricane in a building that’s lined with glass, even if it’s fancy StarkGlass or whatever. They’re going to be terrified.”
Hawkeye sets his coffee down on the counter, his face as serious as she’s ever seen it. “And there will be more coming today, people who thought they could shelter in place but who are being flooded out of their homes and have nowhere to go. These are people who have been through some shit as the water level rises and the wind roars through their broken windows and they see their mortality in plain black and white.”
Kate swallows, her hands clasped tightly around her coffee mug.
“You can’t just pick people up out of that and toss them in the Tower and wish them luck. These people need support and kindness and a human touch. There are going to be some people who are traumatized by this storm. There are going to be children who need to see a smiling face because they can feel their parents’ distress and don’t know what to do.”
Hawkeye looks over her shoulder and lifts his chin in greeting. “Hey, Jigs,” he says.
“Kate, our marching orders from Pepper are to man the welcome station, helping make sure the people who come in get what they need to feel safe here, and to be safe here. They are going to be cold and wet, and they may be injured. They need us in here. They need compassion. This is just a different kind of being a hero. It’s not a worse way to be a hero. Just different.”
Kate looks back down at her coffee, mumbling that she understands while Jigsaw passes her and Hawkeye to at least put some shoes on for the day.
“I just…” Kate stops. “I didn’t think it through. I was too focused on pulling people out of flooding houses to think about where they’d go next or what they’d need next.”
“Believe me, I get it.” Hawkeye slides an arm over her shoulders. “I’m the least cool of the whole team. I’m the pathetic Avenger who hasn’t got a scrap of super power or anything like assassin training from toddlerhood.”
“You’re not pathetic!”
“Eh, I’m doing shit with a stick and some string, and none of that is worth a damn in a hurricane. Does it kind of make me feel useless to be on door duty? Sure. But someone’s gotta do it, and I don’t know about you, but I was pretty drained after just two hours with the kittens yesterday. I think I’ll be worn out after a day of seeing all these people coming in all drenched and shellshocked. But I have a duty, as a hero and a human being, to help where I can and how I can. And right now, today, that means I get to be kind to people who need that desperately.”
She nods, feeling determined all over again, just pointed in a different direction. Hawkeye is right. This is going to be heroic, too, just not flashy. She can be someone's hero without the tac gear and slick moves. Yeah.
“When do we start?”
Notes:
Did this story just end on a cliffhanger? I prefer to think of it as having ended on an aspirational “let’s go, team” kind of note, myself. But it seemed like the best place in the span of chapters to cut things off so that the next story, Hooked on a Feeling, can focus on the dangling threads of this story—the repercussions of Jigsaw’s new publicity, the progression of Jigsaw and Clint’s relationship, Clint’s climb upward to better self-esteem, etc. So stay tuned for the start of Part Three of this saga.
(Schedule-wise, I’m not sure whether I’ll be starting the next story on Sunday the 10th or the Sunday after. That weekend is the first anniversary of my dad’s death, and I honestly have no idea how that’ll go. But if I do miss that week, I’ll be back the week after with Hooked on a Feeling.)
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