To All Those Brave and Lovely

The Fate of Evangeline

"You could take these, you know"  When she looks over, Bucky is holding her medicine out to her with his metal hand.  The pills rattle around in the little orange container as he shakes them at her, and he only puts them down when he glares at him.  "They might help."

Bucky was on a babysitting duty, because everyone else had responsibilities to attend to and he was pretty much at Tony's mercy as to where he was assigned.  He was really bad at it, too, worse than the others, because he basically lets her do anything she wants.  The others will come and drag her out when she spends too long in the closet, or force her to eat when she just picks at her food, or pulls the tablet out of her hands when she looks up news reports about her kidnapping.  Bucky just tells her to do what she needs to, and eats all the food out of the fridge. 

He'd never tried to tell her what to do before, so it stung a bit, to have him rattle a bottle of pills at her.  She didn't want them, because she was afraid of what they might do to her, like they were going to take her brain and roll it flat, roll out all the wrinkles where the mistakes might be happening.  Or maybe they would just melt the bad parts down, cage it off, quarantine it where the bad thoughts can't touch her. Either way, she doesn't like handing her mind over to the mercy of a pill.

"How do you know?"  She was always ready for a fight now in a way that she hadn't been before, like everyone was a nuisance ready to be cut down.  "You ever had to take them?"

"No."  He shrugs in a way that was meant to be casual but didn't quite make it there.  "But I've had to do a lot of other stuff to work through what happened to me.  Gets a lot easier once you stop being stubborn."

She hadn't said anything then, but later that night, when she's curled up on her closet floor, she thinks of the response she wanted.  It's different for you, she would have said.  You fell a million feet and had your arm ripped off and a murderous hunk of metal stuck in its place, got stuck in ice and got used as a robot for a bunch of phsychos, and then you woke up in a different century and had to deal with the guilt of crimes you don't even remember, on top of regular wartime PTSD.  You deserve to have to work things through.  I should be able to make it though this on my own.

Nora's fine, really.  Everyone's worried about her, but she's handling it, without any of the therapy sessions or pills or extra help that they wanted to give her.  Except, one traitorous little voice says, even louder than all the other voices.  It must have been waiting for the excuses to stop rolling.  Except for the fact that you're sleeping in the closet.  That's not fine.  That' s crazy.

"It's a nice closet,"  She says out loud, and thats crazy, too, that she's arguing with herself over whether or not she's really okay.  "I could sleep in my bed if I wanted to."

Nora stares at the ceiling for a while longer, then gathers the blankets around her shoulders and moves to her bed, collapsing down on top of the covers.  Just sleep, she tells herself.  Sleep in bed like a normal person, and then you can go tell everyone that you're fine. 

(She closes her eyes but doesn't sleep, and in the morning its a relief when Tony comes down to shake her awake for breakfast.  And when she's done eating, she walks to the cabinet and unscrews the lid on that stupid bottle of pills, tips one of them into her palm and gulps it down, in front of Tony and Bucky and anyone else who might have been watching.)

She finds the file the way she always finds out things no one wants to tell her: from Wanda.

Not that Wanda actually told her what was in it, just that she thought she might want to go down to the workshop and stand by the door and see what Tony was working on.  So Nora did, and when she did she saw Evangeline's face flash across the monitors, along with an agent number and Fury's scrawled signature.