I'm Here | ✓

47 - Admissions

"How do you handle stuff like this?"

Steve is sitting cross-legged on the couch, fingers wrapped around a cup of tea, but his eyes are hazy and unfocused. I didn't think seeing that dead guy would cause such a strong reaction in him, but apparently it did. I'm perched on the coffee table, our knees only inches apart. It feels an awful lot like a therapy session, and in terms of emotional availability, I'm probably the worst person to talk to.

I shrug. "Hydra wouldn't let me do things like express emotion other than pure, refined focus. I saw a lot of really sickening stuff, and I was on the wrong end of a lot of it. Over time, I learned to just push it further down until I really didn't feel anything, or at least anything I recognized." That's probably not helpful, but even before the metal arm and the war and all of that, I was never one to be super open and honest about my feelings. Sometimes, that little kid Bucky Barnes will break through and I'll shut down, memories of my time as the Winter Soldier mingling with the innocence I lost long ago, and it's just too much for me to take. Other times, like now, the numbness is overwhelming, and I end up talking about 70 years of torture in the same tone I use to talk about the weather.

"I've seen the kind of violent things people do for self-preservation, but abandoning a dead body in a bathtub... he had pictures of his family hanging up in his apartment."

"The wicked don't care about collateral damage. You and I both know that anyone who wants power is willing to climb the pile to get it." I try not to think about how many hundreds of innocent civilians I killed on various missions throughout the years in my search for a small number of specific people.

"That's what gets me. He wasn't collateral damage, he was a person, a husband, a father..."

"A Hydra agent." I take the now empty mug from his shaking hands. "I find it easier when you don't put a name to the face. Makes it easier to disassociate."

Steve buries his face in his hands. "I don't know why I'm doing this."

"Do you want more tea?"

"No, no, I'm fine. Ugh. I've just never felt this before."

"The emptiness is scary, isn't it?" I fill up the mug with tap water and stick it in the microwave. "Makes you want to fill it with something. Anything."

"Mine is somewhere in between guilt and confusion."

"Been there." I tap the start button on the microwave, and I watch it for a few seconds as it begins to hum. Sometimes deep inside me tells me the mechanical whirring is a threat, but I know I'm just associating the noise with something Hydra did to me and all the machine is doing is heating up my water. "You just gotta make sure you bounce back. Maybe you and I could go see a therapist later. God knows we need it."

"I almost miss the days when we were human."

The microwave beeps, and I set the mug on the counter. "We're still human, at least in the mind. The cells, on the other hand, that's a little harder to explain, but I've never been a fan of biology anyway. I understand. Nobody should've ever had to go through the things we've been through, but somebody had to, and those somebodies just happened to be you and I. We're capable of it, even if we don't do it perfectly every time." I dunk the tea bag in the steaming water, thinking. "That's why we do what we do. The choices we make end up making us. And that's what makes us human; each decision, every day, to do something good, to save as many people as we can, even if it's just ourselves. Even if it's just each other. That's the humanity of this."

After a quiet moment, Steve says, "That was oddly poetic."

"I had two years to think about it." That elicits a small chuckle from the both of us.