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Chapter Text

Steve

—New York City | Monday 29 October 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—

The wind has finally picked up enough that Steve can hardly hear even Hulk’s roar over it, and that, perhaps, is the biggest reason to go back to the Tower in the end. The storm is still two hours off according to JARVIS, but at this point, they can’t communicate clearly and run the risk of injuring themselves or getting themselves killed if they can’t coordinate their rescue efforts. 

They’ll go back to the Tower, dry off, eat a hearty meal, and rest until the storm passes and they can resume their efforts to ensure people in the area are either protected from the storm and flooding where they are or are convinced to shelter in the Tower. 

He sends the message through to the other comms and even Hulk responds affirmatively. They rendezvous without having picked up any civilians on this sweep, and Steve hopes as they board the quinjet that this means there aren’t any more civilians in the area in need of their help. But he’s responsible for this team’s safety, too, and he has to look at the bigger picture and the longer term. They have to stop for the night.

He wonders how things have been for Clint, trying to manage his eager pupil’s desire to launch herself into the storm with her teeth bared on the one hand and Jigsaw’s renewed fame in the midst of the crowds on the second and third floors on the other hand. 

But while it would have been easier to let Kate out into the storm, it would have been a disaster. She’s training with Clint in archery, not in effective field communication or the like. And Kate wouldn’t have been able to keep the peace around Jigsaw if the crowds had grown agitated. Clint was right to stay, even though they’d invited him to come out in Bruce’s place.

As it is, they’ve come out of the storm reasonably unscathed.

Natasha has a gash on her chin, Sam some minor scratches, and Steve a jammed finger that will put itself back into proper working order in a few hours. Bruce sees to Natasha and Sam on the ‘jet rather than needing a trip to the medical stations once they arrive. There’s no sense in risking infection, and with floodwater, there’s always a risk of infection, even for the smallest scrapes.

When the quinjet is anchored down sufficiently—Tony insists even a hurricane couldn’t budge it—and they’re all inside finally, Steve lets himself relax. They’ve done everything they possibly could, and now it’s time to regroup. 

They strip down and dry off, check each other over for any unnoticed injuries, and dress more comfortably for dinner. Last night, they’d eaten with the others in the cafeteria, but Steve is feeling like eating without eyes on him, and the others could use the same, he’s sure. But the civilians… They should eat in the cafeteria for the morale boost, he supposes.

“Sir, I have taken the liberty of arranging for a team meal in the dining room,” JARVIS says, greeting Tony.

Steve feels an odd mixture of gratefulness and guilt. He decides to push the guilt away and focus on the other. Dr Linda is always asking him to look for ways to approach situations without the guilt coming along for the ride, and this seems like one of those times.

“J, any chance Bartonio and the Jigster are coming up for dinner?” Tony asks as they crowd onto the elevator to head down to the Avengers level kitchen and dining area. 

“I have informed them of your imminent arrival, yes. I believe Kate Bishop will join them.”

“Cool, cool. Sure. She can come.”

The meal that’s been spread out on the table is much the same fare as yesterday’s and just as piecemeal, clearly brought up from the cafeteria on the lower levels. And it looks delicious. Smells amazing. Steve cannot wait to get his first bite in.

And he doesn’t have to wait long, because Clint and the others show up within a few minutes of their arrival in the dining room and grab seats right away. 

“Avengers mission report hurricane?” Jigsaw asks before setting his tablet down and piling three of the tofu burritos on his plate. 

“Well, we made it,” Tony says, scooping up a plate full of something thick and gloopy with cubes of turkey, noodles, and vegetables. 

Steve gets some of the casserole as well, since it’s the one dish on the table that’s still steaming hot. He supplements it with some mixed vegetables and a dinner roll. 

“There don’t seem to be any unsheltered civilians left within our radius, Jigsaw,” Steve says. “Everyone is either already evacuated, in a decent situation for weathering the storm, or right here. I’d call it a mission success.”

Jigsaw gives him a thumbs up and then pokes Clint in the side with a metal finger. 

“Oh,” Clint says. “Right. Tower mission report. Everyone has a cot for the night, no one got lost or separated from their family, and no one rioted.”

“Rioted?” Natasha asks. “Was that a risk?”

Clint shrugs. “You never know. People do weird things when they’re under stress, in a crowd, or part of a stressed-out crowd.”

Steve supposes that’s true enough. He looks at Jigsaw. “How’d things go with the public?” he asks.

Jigsaw pulls his tablet into his lap and pokes and taps at it with one hand while eating his second burrito. 

He hopes it went well, that no one crowded him or got into his space, that everyone was comfortable and respectful on both sides. He’s not wearing his gloves or glasses now, which could indicate that he didn’t wear them while helping with the shelter areas, although it could be he just took them off for the evening.

“You know those documentaries about sharks,” Kate says, “where there’s the aerial footage of sharks swimming through schools of fish and they’re surrounded by a bubble of open water as the fish all bunch up to stay away from the sharks? It was like that. But with a few brave fish. By which I mean toddlers interested in kittens.”

Steve supposes that’s better than the alternative, but he waits for whatever Jigsaw is putting together with the tablet. He might have a different impression of things; he usually does.

“Little Alpine little Liho good dog Lucky take turn provide comfort second third floor. Jigsaw give soft blanket warm soft things. Jigsaw want signature but Clint say no signature.”

“Trust me, Jigs,” Clint says, “that is a precedent you do not want to set. The novelty of being asked for an autograph will wear off in no time.”

“Thank you, Clint,” Steve says. 

He doesn’t want Jigsaw to be inundated by people clamoring for his autograph, and he isn’t sure Jigsaw has the real world experience needed to understand the difference between signing an autograph and signing paperwork. The last thing they need is for him to write his name on something official he doesn’t intend to sign thinking it’s just an autograph.  

The conversation turns to how Jigsaw’s pets were able to spend some more time entertaining and comforting people whenever Clint and the others were off duty. Rather than set up along a wall out of the way, Jigsaw and Kate had each held a kitten while Clint had Lucky on leash, and they’d circulated, letting people come up to pet or cuddle whichever animal caught their fancy—once they’d gotten over their fear or awe or whatever else of Jigsaw.

Steve imagines Pepper was grateful for the distraction they’d provided throughout the day. He knows there was some sort of Halloween-themed activity planned for evenings, but the day of waiting around indoors would be hard to fill even with puzzles and board games and books. People would be worried and restless, and that’s often a recipe for disaster if left unchecked. Even just one more activity is a good thing. 

As they work their way through the last of the food on the table and start in on the ice cream in the freezer, with canned peaches for some of them and chocolate sauce for the rest of them, the storm outside lessens dramatically. 

The eye? But it can’t be the eye of the storm this soon. The storm just made landfall while they were starting the team dinner.

Steve looks up from his bowl of ice cream with a frown and finds Jigsaw doing the same with a slice of peach cradled in the bowl of his spoon. 

“What?” Clint asks, looking between them. “What’s wrong?”

A massive roll of thunder shakes the table, setting silverware rattling on plates and drinks rippling in their glasses. 

“If that’s a T-Rex on the roof—” Tony starts, but JARVIS interrupts.

“Sir, there is no dinosaur, but I believe you do have company on the roof.”

“In this storm?” Tony exclaims. “It better be Rhodey in the War Machine armor here to help.”

Jigsaw

—New York City | Monday 29 October 2012 | 8:45 p.m.—

“Oh no,” the auction woman says under her breath after JARVIS has said there is someone on the roof. “She said she wouldn’t send a helicopter for me after all. I thought I talked her down.”

It pats her on the forearm. It will be alright. It is too windy for a helicopter to have landed on the roof, or even to have come close to the hive building. The propellers would be torn off.

It joins the others in getting up to investigate this company, but only some of them will fit inside the elevator to get to the roof where the company is. It does not want to squeeze inside with everyone—that is not defensible if the company is trouble. 

But it does not need to worry about that. The clown man directs most of them to keep eating their ice cream, which it is… which it would be happy to do if it was certain there was no trouble on the roof. The clown man and the hamburger technician go alone to the roof. 

What is on the roof? It is not a helicopter, whatever the auction woman fears. And it is not another quinjet or JARVIS would have said so. A quinjet could contain a STRIKE team or other threat. So the company is not danger and this is not an infiltration like there was during the auction. That much it should be sure of. 

JARVIS would not let the clown man and the hamburger technician go alone to face danger on the roof. Unless JARVIS does not realize the danger. JARVIS said company. There are conflicting meanings for that word. “We’ve got company” is usually a bad thing, though that might just be a HYDRA twist on the word, like fun and celebration.

The hamburger technician said that it could be a road and a war machine. It does not know how roads would get onto the roof of the hive building, or what the hamburger technician means about war machines or how they can help, but it does not think that JARVIS would lead any of them to danger. 

Its curiosity must be shared by the others and seen by JARVIS, because a glowing panel lights up above the table showing the faintly lit up roof and the quinjet and all the horribly dark clouds above, and a man with a red cape and a large hammer, looking a little… lost?

Not lost because he does not know where he is, though. Lost because… of some other reason. It cannot tell.

He is familiar. It has seen this man before, seen images of this man. It cannot remember where, though. The man can fly. It has seen images of the man in the air, flying. It is sure of this. There was white electric fire, too, the kind that clouds make, not the kind that chairs or halos make. And moving images, images of the man with the red cape raising the hammer up and of white electric fire crackling down from the sky to the hammer and from the hammer to—

There is no white electric fire on the roof, though, it reassures itself. Just the man with the red cape, drenched by the storm with long blond hair plastered to the sides of his face and to his neck. He does not look like a threat right now, but if he can fly even in a storm like this and control white electric fire…

The other asset and the ballerina woman make a sign like “hammer” but with a T-shape instead of a fist, and they grin when they both make the same sign at the same time. It does not know this game, but it does not have very long to wait—and worry—before the clown man and the hamburger technician arrive in the glowing panel, safe and dry inside with the door to the hive building open, waving for the man with the red cape to come inside. 

Without even investigating. They must know the man with the red cape. Do they know him the way it does, as a remembered image? Or do they actually know him? They must actually know him if they are inviting him inside, though… They might invite a stranger to come inside. There are hundreds of strangers inside the hive building right now.

Where did it see the man with the red cape before? The missing piece is bothering it. It needs to know everything about the man with the red cape so that it can check all of the facts and get rid of the anxious feeling. Who is he?

“Jane has ‘dumped’ me,” comes a new voice, but one that it can see has a mouth—the man with the red cape is speaking in the glowing panel and that is being played for them by JARVIS, so it must be okay to listen to it just like it is okay to listen to the people in the glowing panel Cake Off show. 

“Which I take to mean that I am no longer welcome in her presence. And I am not to return to Asgard without my brother, who I cannot find though I have traveled the multiverse for many of your Midgardian ‘months’ in search of him.”

The man with the red cape looks dejected in the rain. “Have you also ‘dumped’ me? Or might I find solace in my friends and fellow Avengers?”

“You’re always welcome, you big lug,” the hamburger technician says.

Then the man with the red cape is inside of the hive building and the glowing panel blinks out of existence as the door closes. 

“He hasn’t found Loki,” the other asset mutters, voice catching on the name.

The ballerina woman gives the other asset a commiserating grimace. “That means he’s not here, at least.”

“Y-yeah.”

It reaches out and rests the metal hand on the top of the other asset’s thigh under the table, offering hidden comfort to match the other asset’s poorly hidden anxiety. The Loki alien is still out there, a target that it cannot act on. A target that hurt the other asset. Unacceptable.

The other asset puts a hand on top of the metal hand, accepting its comfort.

“And there hasn’t been any indication that the Tesseract or scepter are on the planet, either,” the curly haired researcher says. “Whether Loki still has them or not.”

“I think Redwing would send an alert if anything even half as concentrated as a Tesseract energy pack came close.” The flying man sounds fond. “We set up a unit by the entrance to make sure nothing like what happened at the auction can happen again now.”

It hears the elevator arrive and then the ding that tells everyone else that the elevator has arrived, and then the hamburger technician is entering the room with the clown man and the man with the red cape.

It has not yet had enough time to check the facts!

“Look who’s back!” the hamburger technician says with a grin. 

The man with the red cape has a silvery and black metal armor shirt with polished circles down the front, it sees now, and thick pants and high boots with silver and black. The man’s hammer is even bigger up close, and has lots of decorations on it that might be letter shapes in another language. He is dripping all over the floor from the bright red cape. 

He feels like the moment before white electric fire.

So dangerous.

“My friends!” the man with the red cape says with a bright grin. “I was telling these two, you were scattered around the city when I meant to come, earlier. Heimdall was not sure where to send me.”

“Hey, Thor,” the other asset says. “Pull up a chair. I’ll get you something to drink. You want some ice cream?”

“I will have coffee, if you have it, and some of this iced cream you speak of.” 

The man with the red cape sets the hammer down—can the hammer cast white electric fire without the man with the red cape? can the man with the red cape call down white electric fire without the hammer?—and takes one of the empty chairs at the table, looking around at those of the team that is not a cell that remain at the table. 

His eyes pause on it—why?—but come to rest finally on the curly haired researcher.

“I had thought you returned to the jungles of Midgard, Dr Banner, but I see you here, instead. Perhaps the storm roused you from the jungle?” the man with the red cape asks, and then says thanks for the drink the other asset hands him. 

“It’s shitty instant coffee, but it’s hot,” the other asset mutters before sitting back down. 

The curly haired researcher shakes his head with a smile. “I was in the jungle,” he says, “but Tony fished me back out for a mission about half a year ago.”

“That is but shortly after my departure! I thought you meant to stay longer.”

The hamburger technician shrugs and scoops more ice cream for himself to replace the melted bowl. “What can I say, we’re irresistible.”

“And who are these three?” the man with the red cape asks. “I would meet your friends and be friends as well.”

The clown man gestures to each of them in turn. “This is Sam Wilson, who joined us in our mission around the time Bruce rejoined us in the summer.”

“Nice to meet you,” the flying man cuts in with a wave.

“And this here is Kate Bishop,” the clown man continues. “She’s learning archery from Clint, and she’s a great shot from what I hear.”

The auction woman looks embarrassed as she waves and it cannot tell why that is. Is there something to be embarrassed about? It has learned from pictures what “embarrassed” looks like on a person, but it is not yet familiar enough with the feeling or its causes to make much sense of it. It does not know how to be embarrassed.

“And over by Clint is Jigsaw. He joined us a bit later this summer.” The clown man smiles. “Though we had to chase him down first.”

Should it wave? The auction woman waved, and the flying man spoke and waved, so which should it do? It glances at the tablet beside it. Speak? Wave? But it does not want to move or to make a single sound with the tablet or otherwise. It feels… it feels… What does it feel? It feels like it does not want to be seen or heard. Not until it knows enough facts to check them. There is danger in the room, and it cannot assess the danger yet.

“Guys,” the clown man continues after a pause, “this is Thor Odinson. Jigsaw, Thor helped us defeat the Chitauri.” 

That is where it has seen the images of the man with the red cape. In the photography books that the team that is not a cell wrote their names in. And the white electric fire coming from the hammer and surrounding the man with the red cape. And the man with the red cape flying. Clinging to a towering hive building and calling the white electric fire and—

The other asset makes the hammer motion with the T-shape again and then points toward the man with the red cape. This is the man with the red cape’s name sign, then. 

It nods, as small a motion as it can make while still being understood by the other asset as having nodded.

The man with the red cape blinks at the two assets but does not say anything. He looks expectant. 

“Don’t expect much from Jigglebells at this point, slugger,” the hamburger technician says to the man with the red cape with a grin. “He’s a quiet one.”

“Tony,” the clown man scolds. “Thor, Jigsaw communicates by sign, mostly—ASL, American Sign Language. He also draws and writes, and has a tablet that says what he wants to say. Clint can translate if—”

“Ah! No need,” says the man with the red cape with a beaming smile, his hands moving to sign as he speaks. “Well met, Sam Wilson, Kate Bishop…” The man with the red cape pauses, looking at the other asset and then at this asset. “May I have your name sign, friend Jigsaw?”

Friend Jigsaw? Does the man with the red cape see it as a friend, and so soon? Is just meeting the man with the red cape enough to be a friend in his eyes? 

…Does being a friend mean that the man with the red cape will not strike it with the white electric fire? 

The other asset makes the Jigsaw name sign, it sees out of the corner of an eye. And that is good. It does not want to be seen, even as the man with the red cape calls it friend and stares at it with that lingering expectation in his blue eyes.

“My thanks,” the man with the red cape says, and then makes the Jigsaw name sign. “Well met, friend Jigsaw,” the man with the red cape signs. 

The man with the red cape accepts a bowl of ice cream from the ballerina woman, and expresses his enjoyment loudly at the first bite. But then his expression turns sad and he pushes the ice cream away and hangs his head. 

“My friends, I do not deserve this iced cream. I have come, not in victory, but to admit my defeat. Though I have chased every mention of my brother across both space and time, I have not been able to bring him to Asgard to account for his crimes.”

The other asset swallows hard. “That—” the other asset’s voice breaks “—that’s okay.”

A lie! The other asset does not think that this is okay. The other asset is thinking fear thoughts and worry thoughts about this. But why would the other asset lie about that to the man with the red cape? Is it to make the man with the red cape feel better, or is it because it could be dangerous to upset the man with the red cape?

It feels as if the hairs all along the right arm would be standing up from the prickle of imminent white electric fire, still, except that it is wearing the long-sleeved shirt and the hairs cannot stand up. Do the others in the team that is not a cell feel this way, also? Is it the only one?

The ballerina woman pushes the ice cream back in front of the man with the red cape. “You don’t have to earn dessert, Thor.” She looks at it and winks. “Food isn’t a reward, right Jigsaw?”

It holds as still as it can, and the ballerina woman continues without comment.

“Please. Just eat and tell us what you can. Did you manage to find out whether he still has the scepter and the Tesseract?”

There are so many things going on in the mind. Tesseract. Scepter. The other asset’s uneasiness and lie. The Loki alien. The red cape, flapping in the air. The man with the red cape flying. The hammer. Flying with the hammer. And the white electric fire everywhere.

The man with the red cape is saying all kinds of things now. The words make sense and are not too fast like the hamburger technician’s words sometimes are, but the meaning is still not there for it. 

There is a universe—it knows from learning about the space that is all around the planets and stars and things—and the man with the red cape has searched all over it. But then there is another universe and another, and there are many of them, and the man with the red cape has searched the ones closest to this universe. And that does not make sense. How is there more than one? How are the extra universes close or far away?

And there is time, and it moves from past to present to future, it knows. And it is arranged by seconds and minutes and hours all the way up to decades and centuries. Zoe taught it all about that and the signs for these things, and how to “read” a paper year clock. But there are other times? Times when something happened differently? That does not make sense!

“…have escaped justice as our Loki has,” the man with the red cape says, and it climbs up out of the whirlpool of thoughts to pay attention.

Escape justice. So the man with the red cape has been trying to find the Loki alien—his brother?—and bring him to face justice. That is a very good sign, a reason to like the man with the red cape. Maybe they can hunt the Loki alien together so that the other asset will never have to worry about the blue light again.

But can it trust the man with the red cape?

Chapter Text

—New York City | Monday 29 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—

So Loki is still loose and Thor has given up. 

That doesn’t feel good at all. 

Clint had been able, mostly, to forget about Loki in the last couple of months. He’d had Jigsaw-related things on his mind instead, often Jigsaw himself. And that had been wonderful, having someone as accepting as Jigsaw sharing his space and cluttering up his mind, even if some of that time had been spent deeply concerned and fearful for Jigsaw’s safety. That Siberia mission with fucking Rumlow and that portable halo still upsets him when he thinks about it.

But now Loki is crowding in where he’s not wanted. Clint is bound to have some spectacular nightmares now that Loki is more “unfinished business” and less “business Thor is taking care of somewhere else.”

It’s hard to be all out-of-sight, out-of-mind about Loki when the greasy bastard could theoretically show up at any time with a mind control scepter and make Clint his eager stooge again. Clint does not want to reprise his role.

At the very least, though, if Thor is here on Earth, then maybe Loki will stay away from Earth indefinitely. Maybe Thor is some form of Loki repellent, and maybe Clint can apply that to his nightmares. Maybe bring Thor in as an extra in his dreams to keep Loki away from them. 

Or maybe he’ll just have to suffer from his nightmares like he did right after the battle against the Chitauri, or right after they’d learned about HYDRA controlling Jigsaw with those trigger words from the red book. Maybe he’ll dream about blue light again, and the chill of the scepter freezing him out of his right mind and re-configuring him to want to please Loki.

Clint remembers several of those dreams. Those nightmares. Him, under Loki’s control and hurting, maiming, killing his fellow Avengers. Betraying them. Betraying Natasha, of all people. His only friends, his newfound family, and he’d pepper them with arrows, slice their ropes on a climb, knife them when they least expected it. Rip out eyeballs.

His nightmares hadn’t expanded to include Jigsaw as a successfully eliminated target. Those few of his nightmares that included Jigsaw as a target had the man continually escape him, dodge his arrows, cling to walls, defeat him despite being stabbed. And then there were the nightmares that ended with Jigsaw’s arrival, the ones where Jigsaw stood between Clint and Loki, between Clint and the blue controlling light, and set him free.

Clint suspects that if Loki were to show up and confront him, Jigsaw really would do that. Really would stand between them and face Loki as a he’d face a dangerous target. That would end in disaster, of course. If Loki had the scepter, he could control Jigsaw as easily as he’d controlled Clint and the rest of the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. crew who’d come in contact with him.

But Jigsaw would still do it. Would still put himself between him and Loki. Clint had killed Rumlow for Jigsaw, and Jigsaw is determined to kill Loki for Clint, if Loki ever does get in range for a hit. 

Curiously, though, Jigsaw had been afraid of Thor, the milder of the two Asgardians. The good one, who meant no harm. 

Clint is fairly sure most of the team took Jigsaw’s reaction to Thor showing up as wariness around a new person. But Clint has seen many a terrified freeze response in his life, has had many a terrified freeze response, too, growing up. And he knows Jigsaw’s mannerisms well enough to have clocked the jerkiness of that tiny nod of his, the way his breathing had turned shallow, the way he’d gone from being fluidity itself to sitting stock still.

That’s not wariness. That’s fear. Jigsaw had frozen when confronted with the memory of Rumlow a few times after Siberia, and that’s when he knew full well Rumlow was dead and gone. And fear of Rumlow had not managed to fade much, despite the man being dead. Just like with Clint and Loki, Jigsaw had more to keep his mind occupied with than Rumlow of late. That’s all. 

He’s not sure why Jigsaw had been afraid of Thor, but he knows that Jigsaw was. And possibly still is. Thor’d had to leave the room with Steve to get some dry clothes to change into before Jigsaw had thawed out enough to slink off to see Zoe for a late session.

Depending on how distracting Zoe manages to be, it’s probable that Jigsaw will have some nightmares, too. Will they have their nightmares at the same time, or will they manage to take turns so there’s always someone on hand for comfort? Clint hopes they manage to take turns. 

Well, he hopes neither of them have nightmares. That just doesn’t seem as reasonable a thing to hope for, that’s all. 

Alpine raises her fluffy white head from Liho’s side and looks toward the door about five seconds before that door opens to let in Lucky and Jigsaw. Lucky immediately comes to put his nose in the kitten puddle and then to greet Clint before circling back to heel Jigsaw. 

“Did you take Lucky up to use the fake grass after your session with Zoe?” Clint asks. If he did, that’s great. If not, though, they can do that before bed. Wilson is probably fast asleep by now. 

Jigsaw shakes his head, a flicker of fear crossing his eyes at the thought. 

Hm. Maybe it was too close to the roof and he was worried about Thor finding him. Even though Thor is probably somewhere in a guest suite rather than on or near the roof.

“That’s okay. We can do that in a bit. How’d your session go?”

Jigsaw brings his tablet over to the sofa with him and sits right up against Clint’s side. He has one of his AAC boards full of word tiles up on the screen, and he gestures for Clint to look down at the grid of tiles.

There are pictures of outer space with words under them—universe, universes, multiverse—and hourglasses with “time” and “timeline” and “time travel” under them. 

Clint nods. That’s something Thor had talked about, that there was more than one universe and that timelines could split and branch off into their own thing. But he’d only really explained what that meant after Jigsaw and Kate left, when Thor came back to join the team wearing some of Steve’s pajamas. Jigsaw wouldn’t have been able to hear all of that—and that’s good, given some of what they had discussed—and Zoe certainly wouldn’t have heard.

Unless they’d asked JARVIS and gotten a brief rundown. He’s pretty sure JARVIS wouldn’t have told them about other timelines in any specific detail, though.

Then Jigsaw is pulling together tiles from several boards into a sentence, and Clint is once again amazed that Jigsaw can keep all of his boards straight with which words are on which boards. So much tapping and swiping.

“Zoe expert not know how multiverse timeline. Space and time search for Loki alien how?”

“Uh,” Clint starts. “Well, there’s something called a bifrost and it can take people like Thor all over the place. Different universes, different times, different dimensions. I think someone has to send him, though, so he might be stuck here for a while.”

Honestly, it had all sounded a bit like a sci-fi movie to him when Thor started explaining it. Banner had gotten in on the action, and then it was just a lot of technobabble that made no sense and used more made-up words than real ones. 

“That’s kind of all I know,” Clint says. “Some guy named Heimdall sent Thor all over the place with the bifrost and that’s how he searched for Loki.”

He doesn’t even know for sure what a bifrost is.

“Is that what you and Zoe worked on tonight?” Clint asks. “That and updating your tablet’s word tiles?”

Jigsaw closes down the AAC app and pulls up a crossword puzzle he’s been working on for the last few days. It’s complete now, with lots of weather-related terms and descriptions in the clues lists to go along with the hurricane. 

“Hey, that’s awesome. Congratulations!” 

Jigsaw probably knows more weather stuff than he does now, though it’s a toss-up as to whether any specific word will come when he calls. 

Jigsaw almost always knows what he wants to say; the words themselves don’t always agree to participate, though. Clint had expected that problem to go away over time—that’s supposed to be what Zoe is working on, he thinks, in addition to all the other language stuff—but it seems to be sticking around. 

Usually if Jigsaw can’t bring up the word he wants, he is able to describe the word or draw it or something, though. Clint knows it frustrates Jigsaw, and he tries not to get frustrated on Jigsaw’s behalf—it only ever gets misinterpreted when he does. 

And speaking of misinterpretations… Maybe he’d better ask about the whole Thor thing, just to make sure he’s on the same page. 

“Hey, I was meaning to ask,” Clint says as he gets up and offers a hand down to help Jigsaw to his feet. “With Thor earlier, what was it that had you so worried?”

Jigsaw accepts his hand but doesn’t use it to pull himself up—he simply shifts his weight until he’s standing, as smoothly as ever. He also doesn’t let go of Clint’s hand right away, instead stroking his thumb along Clint’s fingers. 

Clint gives him a smile and squeezes Jigsaw’s hand briefly before pulling back so they can take Lucky up to do his business.

It’s too late at night for most people to be walking the hallways, and Lucky doesn’t actually need a leash in the personal areas, so Clint lets Lucky lead the way to the elevator while he waits for Jigsaw to compose a reply to his question about Thor. 

It takes Jigsaw the entire time heading up to the patch of fake grass to put his answer together, and it isn’t a sentence or even a jumble of words. It’s a set of pictures. 

There’s a chair with a halo to one side, the halo crackling with electricity. And an arch that is probably meant to be a portable halo, also crackling with electricity. And a baton drawn with more detail that crackles with electricity. And a figure with a hammer and a cape, hammer and figure crackling with electricity. 

In the center, there is Jigsaw, denoted by the star on the figure’s left arm. All four of the smaller images surrounding the Jigsaw figure are zapping lightning toward the central figure. 

Clint gathers that Jigsaw is concerned about Thor calling lightning, then. He generally associates electricity and shocks with HYDRA, either HYDRA torture with those shock sticks or HYDRA wiping his mind with that horrible chair and halo combination. And while Clint doubts Jigsaw thinks Thor is associated with HYDRA—there’d be hatred and not fear if he did—there is definitely fear around Thor and electricity.

Thor had been pretty generous with his hammer and lightning during the battle against the Chitauri, so there were probably loads of pictures of him with lightning all around him or coming out of his hammer to zap an alien in that book of photos Pepper put together. Plenty of opportunity to get to see Thor in battle mode with his primary weapon engaged.

Clint hands the tablet back to Jigsaw.

“I mean, Thor’s a bit sparky like that, with the lightning,” Clint says while Lucky does his thing, “but his lightning isn’t like the halos or the stun batons. It’s more like actual lightning from the sky. He’s supposed to be the god of thunder, you know, and thunder comes right after lightning.”

Jigsaw makes his question sign, and Clint thinks about what he’s most likely asking. 

“Um, in this case, it’s really more of a title than anything else. God of thunder. He’s just an alien from a place called Asgard.”

Jigsaw makes the curling L-shape from his forehead that is Loki’s name sign and then signs “the same as.”

“I think so, yeah. They’re both aliens, anyway. Loki’s title is the god of mischief, but he’s more like the god of greasy manipulative bastards, if you ask me.”

Clint pulls a baggie out of the holder and cleans up after Lucky. If only it were that easy to clean up after Loki barged through and wrecked shit.

“Listen, I know it’s scary to be around someone who can just generate lightning on a whim, but I promise you, Thor’s one of us. He’s one of the good guys, and he won’t hurt you. He just wants to be friends.”

He wanted to be friends enough that he tried signing to Jigsaw instead of just speaking aloud. Clint wonders how he knew the language. Thor might want to be friends, but he doesn’t strike Clint as being in the know about a lot of things having to do with the modern world. Including ASL. Where would he have picked that up, anyway? Jane? The woman who dumped him for—apparently, but Thor wasn’t certain—not visiting her after the Chitauri battle? 

Maybe she’d had a chance to teach him some ASL the first time Thor was here, trying to get his hammer back in New Mexico. It could happen. A lot had happened, so why not that?

If anything, it might be weirder that Hulk knows some ASL. Clint always thought there was a pretty strong dividing line between Banner and Hulk, that the one didn’t necessarily know what the other was doing at any point in time. But if Hulk knows the same amount of ASL Banner knows, then there’s at least some one-sided eavesdropping going on between them.

And to hear it from Jigsaw, Hulk signs more smoothly than he speaks. Jigsaw had been very adamant that Hulk’s signs made perfect sense, that they’d had a lovely—if brief—conversation, and that Hulk was Jigsaw’s friend. He’d also been pretty clear about preferring Hulk to Banner, which is probably something Jigsaw’s alone in doing.

In any case, there’s nothing at all wrong with having two more effective communicators in the Tower. 

“Red cape alien is want friend with Jigsaw? No halo no white electric fire at Jigsaw? No hurt. Promise?”

Clint nods as they make their way back down to their floor. “That’s right. And I promise. Thor doesn’t want to hurt you. Not with lightning or anything else.”

If anything, Clint thinks, Thor is confused by Jigsaw’s refusal to interact with him in the dining room. He’d been looking at Jigsaw longer than at the others during the introductions. He might think Jigsaw doesn’t like him, or that his signing was sub-par and Jigsaw didn’t understand him, or that Jigsaw was upset with him for signing. There’s no telling. But Thor can’t go back home without Loki, and that means he’s staying here for a while. 

So there’s always tomorrow.

They turn in for the night, after Jigsaw makes sure there’s plenty of water for Lucky and the kittens and has a nighttime snack of a hunk of cheddar and a hard boiled egg. 

Jigsaw curls up close to him, burrowing into Clint’s side before Clint has the chance to turn onto his own side and be a fellow spoon. But that’s alright. Clint tends to sleep as well on his back as he does in any other position—which is to say, not well, but not any worse than usual. This way he can wrap an arm around Jigsaw and stare up at the darkness where he knows the ceiling is, and maybe he’ll be able to keep Jigsaw’s sleep nightmare free.

Clint would like that. 

Jigsaw has lived enough nightmares that his sleep should be free of them. 

He thinks back to what they’d discussed in the common room after Kate went to bed and Jigsaw went to see Zoe, all of them with a beverage of choice—coffee for the most part, with Natasha and Banner opting for tea like total weirdos. 

Sitting around with their drinks and everyone in comfortable clothes—and not a cape in sight, though the hammer was still by Thor’s side—they’d talked timelines. 

Multiverse was too big a concept for Clint to pay attention to, so he’d tuned it out. He’s cool with a galaxy far, far away, but he’s not so cool with it being largely the same planet with largely the same people, but some variable changed and now there are differences everywhere. That’s too much variation and not enough variation, all at once. 

Timelines had too much variation, too, frankly, but he’s seen enough science fiction movies to understand how timelines could diverge if a time traveler did something like step on a prehistoric rat. The future changed dramatically—and often traumatically, in the movies—because of this. There was a whole franchise for Back to the Future, also. He’s familiar with changing a timeline.

But apparently, the timeline they’re currently in is… an oddity. Maybe the oddity. Maybe their timeline isn’t even supposed to be a timeline. Because Thor had described visiting other timelines as an observer, just to see where those Lokis went and how they went there, but in those other timelines, Loki didn’t escape. 

And worse, Jigsaw wasn’t rescued. 

Thor had only followed a few weeks apiece from various timelines most closely related to theirs, and the scepter went to S.H.I.E.L.D.—to HYDRA, really—and was used to recapture Jigsaw and return him to the freezer.

In those timelines, without a reason to look into S.H.I.E.L.D. or find a D.C. Slasher who is targeting S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, they wouldn’t have an opportunity to discover HYDRA. They wouldn’t even know about what was happening in the lowest levels of the Triskelion. 

In those timelines… is Jigsaw even possible? It doesn’t seem likely. Jigsaw is a result of very specific experiences and circumstances that can’t happen if HYDRA uses the scepter to drag him back to captivity. 

So in those timelines, even if the Winter Soldier escapes again later, he’d become someone different. And who’s to say he does manage to escape again? 

Clint could see in Steve’s eyes the desire to go timeline hopping and rescue every iteration of his friend they could find, but Thor had managed to quash that desire with a load of logic about how doing that would just create even more timelines, and that each captive they rescued would spawn another that they couldn’t. Clint hadn’t followed the line of reasoning too closely, himself.

He was too busy wondering if it was actually a good thing that Loki escaped. Whether he should be glad about that. 

And as he feels Jigsaw’s even breath against his neck and Jigsaw’s heat pressed against his side, Clint knows that he is glad. 

If he had to choose between Loki safely locked away on Asgard with Jigsaw back on ice under HYDRA’s control on the one hand, or Loki on the run with Jigsaw free on the other hand, Clint knows which he’d choose. 

Hands down, no contest, Loki can run free for the rest of Clint’s life if it means Jigsaw is safely out of HYDRA’s clutches.

Chapter Text

Brandon

—Boise | Monday 29 October 2012 | 10:30 a.m.—

Truly, nothing is safe, nothing is sacred, nothing is solid and stable ground. 

Even events that happened, they can be undone. People who died, they can be resurrected. History that is known can be discovered to be false. Facts themselves can become false, and not in a scientific way with theories being proven and then disproven. There can be objectively true things that suddenly are no longer true—objectively or subjectively, literally or figuratively. 

Truth can just suddenly become untruth.

For instance, his grade school history project on the Howling Commandos, listing out which were alive and what they were doing, which were dead and the how and when of it… It had been based on truth, and now there was a glaring lie in it. Retroactively, history had changed.

And his high school homework and quizzes and exams on American history were graded correctly when his answers indicated which Howling Commando had died first, and when his essay in response to a question about Captain America’s reasoning for his final mission mentioned the death of his childhood friend as a motivating factor… Those were no longer graded correctly. Not really.

Brandon supposes Captain America had been partly motivated by what he thought was a death, but the death itself… was no longer a death. 

Because that childhood friend, Sergeant Bucky Barnes, had not actually died. 

Brandon takes a moment to identify seven red things around himself, then six orange, five yellow, all the way down to a single violet pencil case he keeps on his desk when he’s working because he knows he’ll need something purple for this exercise and generally has a hard time finding anything.

The exercise itself, finding things of every color and telling himself what they are, isn’t calming in and of itself, but it does ground him when he becomes agitated and also gives his brain and the internal anxiety meter it holds time to reset before going back to the source of his anxiety.

The ninja, the one who did not kill him for reasons unknown that had signaled that Brandon wasn’t HYDRA, the one who had ripped the others in the room apart limb from limb and organ from organ with his metal robot hand and his blood-slicked human hand because they were HYDRA, the one who’d then hunted down and flayed Brandon’s therapist alive or whatever he’d done to the man for being HYDRA, the one who followed Brandon westward after Brandon had fled home to take up potato farming…

The ninja… is immortal. 

Unkillable by any force, natural or unnatural. 

Had survived being tortured in a HYDRA prison camp for a month when every other captive taken back to the experiment rooms had been tossed into the incinerator when the mad scientists were done with them.

Had survived a fall down an icy ravine, hitting the sides on his way down and presumably being frozen to death after his broken body was abandoned—and probably, according to conspiracy theorists, devoured by wolves.

Had survived being a prisoner of war for more than sixty years, since 1945, obtaining a robot arm and who knows what other robot pieces, becoming some kind of “operative” in the intelligence community, whatever that means, and remaining a HYDRA prisoner the whole time.

Had survived being actually blown up in a missile launch outside of Bakersfield, with actual plural missiles landing on top of him and exploding and burying him in superheated concrete and flaming rubble.

The ninja is Bucky Barnes. The same body, anyway, as immune to death as death itself. The mind inside that body… 

Brandon is willing to believe that Bucky Barnes was physically changed somehow by that first thing that should have killed him. And that that physical change had enabled him to survive the next thing that should have killed him, and so on.

But Brandon will not believe, cannot believe, that Bucky Barnes would rip a human being up into component parts like breaking down a chicken for frying, HYDRA or otherwise. Whatever physical… changes… were made, there were some other changes made on top of those. Because the mind inside that body can’t possibly have been the mind of Bucky Barnes.

Does it matter what made the change? When the change happened? How or why or where the change happened? Who made the change? No. Not really.

Well, maybe the “who” part. 

If he was a prisoner of war captured and held by HYDRA, then it seems pretty natural to assume that HYDRA made the change. All of the changes. Even the very first one in that prison camp. Brandon can’t remember the name of it, even though he had aced that whole section of his history classes. Started with a K, he thinks. But where doesn’t matter any more than when or how or why or what. 

Who.

If HYDRA made the changes, didn’t that make the ninja a HYDRA ninja? All those changes made by HYDRA for the benefit of HYDRA. Made by terrorists for the benefit of terrorists. And definitely terrifying—Brandon can attest to that. If the ninja is nothing else, he is terrifying.

The special statement, all the news broadcasts announcing the statement, all the pundits arguing about the statement, they all had varying perspectives on things, but Brandon has been learning to make his own mind up instead of jump to conclusions based on fear and anxiety and nightmares. 

The ninja was a HYDRA ninja.

Was.  

Had torn apart human beings who’d been discovered to be HYDRA agents and operatives and spies and leaders. And others, true, but most of the victims identified as being the ninja’s targets had been HYDRA.

So the ninja might have been made by HYDRA, but wasn’t currently under HYDRA’s control or HYDRA’s orders. A rogue agent, maybe. Or truly more robot than man or even monster, and glitching, malfunctioning. The programming all garbled up.

Brandon isn’t sure how much of the ninja is robot and how much is man. It might not matter. It might matter a whole lot.

So he’s read the statement. 

He’s come to terms with the body being a match. He’s not sure how Captain America had failed to recognize the face unless all that robot stuff had altered it, but he doesn’t doubt that the body is largely the same body. Probably a lot of moles are in the same spot, or a birthmark or something gives it away. They didn’t have DNA or anything to match to from before.

And he’s listened—only listened—to the press around that statement. 

He’s made up his own mind, too: Whether a glitching robot or a rebellious agent, the ninja is an escaped prisoner of war who probably dealt as much death to HYDRA in the that string of murderous frenzy as he dealt for HYDRA in all the years he was their captive. 

Fear or no fear, anxiety or no anxiety, Brandon has to admit that logic puts the ninja in a somewhat neutral position. Fearsome and likely to turn Brandon into a gibbering puddle of piss on the floor if there was ever another meeting between them—please let that never happen—but not evil. Decidedly not evil. 

Hard to call him good, though, with the torture and murder and all that. 

So, neutral. Just like before the Bucky Barnes reveal.

Does Brandon dare do more than read a statement and listen to the news? Does he dare watch the news, with its supposed video clips of the ninja in civilian clothes, surrounded by civilians in the Avengers Tower, apparently with small animals and children?

Does he dare take this step forward and confront the sight of the ninja?

Red star pins and pendants and charms and earrings and even a flag now waving from his neighbor’s balcony across the courtyard from his apartment made hints of the ninja increasingly inescapable. But the ninja himself? Does Brandon have it in him to complete his therapy homework and watch the YouTube clips of the sightings in Avengers Tower?

Brandon looks down at his phone. There’s Dr Miller’s contact info pulled up in easy reach. He can call if he needs to. 

He looks at his laptop, with the search term “Jigsaw tower footage” in the search bar, the search set to pull up videos with a click. He can do this. And if he needs to, he can slam down the laptop lid and leave the room.

After a long, long handful of minutes, Brandon clicks the search button.

The footage is there. It’s not great footage. Not really close or clear, not zoomed in like he assumes the press footage had been, so there are lots of milling people around blocking the view or distracting from the view. 

But there’s so many videos to choose from. All show the same limited angle, the same distracted, distanced view. There are minor differences, but not to the important parts.

The ninja is shorter than the Avenger standing next to him. In Brandon’s mind, the ninja loomed large, towered over him, was a massive and omnipotent being. But he’s shorter than some other guy. Brandon doesn’t know how tall either man is, but he doubts it’s possible for the ninja to be as large as Brandon remembers if he’s also shorter than a normal-looking guy.

There are kittens, and a woman in purple who doesn’t look or act afraid. In Brandon’s mind, everyone was spooked by the ninja. Even the STRIKE team that had broken into the room had muttered uneasily on finding the ninja gone, and the Avengers who’d interviewed him after that had seemed tense. But the guy next to him looks… chill to the point of lazy, and the woman doesn’t look intimidated, just frustrated at the people around them, like they’re the problem and not the ninja.

At least a few parents have let their kids near the ninja. Some of them are playing with the kittens, some watching others play with the kittens. That seems really irresponsible of the parents, but no one directly involved seems to be on edge—though some of the video clips catch the person doing the recording muttering about danger.

The ninja uses his hands a lot, gestures a lot, occasionally writes something down and passes the note to the woman. Was the ninja silent in that hotel room because he was being menacing or because he can’t talk? Because there’s a girl in one of his classes who writes notes and uses some app on her phone sometimes to talk, and is generally pretty quiet and hesitant even when she does speak. Maybe the ninja is like her.

None of this pushes the ninja off neutral territory into good or anything, but by the same token, none of it pushes him off into evil. He remains neutral. 

Brandon closes the tab and then the laptop itself, proud of himself for accomplishing his homework. Yes, he’s sweated all the way through his undershirt and his t-shirt and will have to wipe himself down and change, if not just take a second shower before his first class. Yes, his stomach is debating whether to toss up his breakfast. Yes, he’s trembling all over like the last dry leaf on a branch in Fall trying to defy a stiff breeze. 

But there’s his purple pencil case. And there are his two dark blue shoes. The sky outside is light blue, and so is the border on the poster on his roommate’s side of the room, and the t-shirt he’s wearing. Four green things come next, five yellow, six orange, seven red—including the once-terrifying red star pennant across the courtyard. 

He’s not in the Avengers Tower. He’s nowhere near the ninja. He’s safe in his apartment near campus, sitting at his desk, trying to keep from losing his breakfast cereal and wondering if he’s got time to rinse off in the shower or needs to just wipe himself down and change shirts in order to be on time to class. 

“The ninja does not care about me,” Brandon tells himself. “The ninja is not after me. The ninja does not intend to finish the job.”

He repeats the phrases another two times. His mantra. 

He’s still not one hundred percent sure his therapist isn’t HYDRA—the delusion that people around him are HYDRA is hard to shake after what happened to everyone he knew in D.C. and why—but Dr Miller is doing a great job of getting Brandon back into some semblance of normalcy despite that. 

He’s still going to farm potatoes, though. There’s no sense taking chances.

Kate

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—

There’s something very different about the people on the second and third floors of the Tower today. 

There are people focused on a pair of jigsaw puzzles and several board games, just like yesterday. And there are people focused on their own problems, sitting there looking at their hands until Yasmin or the Falcon or Linda comes up to them to chat for a while. And there are people reading books, working on the logic puzzles or crosswords in their welcome bag, or otherwise entertaining themselves.

That’s not different, except there are about the same number of people doing those things, and the total evacuated population has grown. So proportionally, she’d have expected the other groups to grow as well. 

The extra people are busy, kind of. But they’re busy staring, which isn’t great. Staring at them, or more specifically, staring at Jigsaw. They’d arrived with Alpine and Liho in their harnesses and she’d expected a few eyes on them before the kids gravitated toward the fluffy kittens, just like the last time they were down here. 

But while there are kids clamoring to pet the kittens, there are also adults. With phones out. Recording. And some of those adults are bold as brass, coming up and asking questions or requesting autographs—some asking for Jigsaw and some asking for Bucky. 

No one wants Hawkeye’s autograph, which irritates her; he seems pleased by the lack of interest, though.

After the fifth time Hawkeye has to say “he goes by Jigsaw now,” Kate decides it’s up to her to keep them away. 

“No autographs,” she announces, gesturing people away. “And no, no comments, either. Go away unless you’re here for the kittens.”

She glares at a cluster of people with their phones held up. “And stop recording this. You’re going to ruin it for the kids.”

But while many of them sheepishly lower their phones, the bolder ones just move further away and resume filming as though she won’t notice them there. And people still call out questions, even when the older kids get distracted by the barrage of questions. 

Thankfully, most of the questioners phrase things to avoid upsetting the kids. Instead of asking about the serial killing in any detail, they ask about the Red Star Killer, or about the D.C. Slasher, ask if he was Ronin, too. They don’t talk about torture, but they ask how he feels about HYDRA, how he can excuse his actions against them—were they really so bad that that was his only recourse, and isn’t it enough that they face the justice system?

And those questions just wind Jigsaw up even with Hawkeye right there.

But the more she says “no comment” for Jigsaw, the louder the questions get, the more pointed the questions get, and finally, they have to just leave so that the kids don’t get upset by the press of people trying to play reporter.

Kate gives Hawkeye a gentle push to get him going, and Jigsaw follows with a frown, holding Alpine close as though he needs the comfort now as well. She explains to the kids that they’ll be back in the evening before dinner, hoping that Pepper will have a solution to the problem by then. And then she gives the wannabe reporters a glare.

She’d say something like “shame on you” or “get a grip” or whatever, but whatever she says will be recorded, and she knows the drill there very well. No comment means no comment, and saying mean things just gets a soundbite made of you being mean. It never ends well. 

So Kate turns around and catches up with Hawkeye and Jigsaw as the elevator opens to take them back upstairs. 

“I’m sorry, Jigsaw. I know you wanted to stay and let the kids play with the kittens, but it was seriously getting not good in there.”

“We’ll try again tonight,” Hawkeye says. “Maybe in a room set aside for just kids and kittens, or something.”

“Ms Potts is aware of the problem,” JARVIS says from somewhere above, “and will remedy it by the evening.”

Jigsaw signs “thanks”—she’s learning some of this by seeing it used so much—right as Hawkeye says it. 

“Of course. It is my pleasure.”

Kate hopes JARVIS never goes Hal on them. 

“So what are we doing today, then?” she asks as they arrive on the upper level where Hawkeye and Jigsaw’s rooms are. 

Hawkeye sighs. “Well, we never did get your archery lesson in. Why don’t you get changed for that and grab your gear, and we’ll meet you in the gym?”

She grins. “Awesome!”

But it looks like it’s only Hawkeye who meets her in the gym several minutes later. Kate scans the rafters and doesn’t see Jigsaw anywhere. That doesn’t mean he’s not here, but—

“Oh,” Hawkeye says. “Yeah. He wasn’t feeling it. He’s up with the kittens working on a word search about Halloween. Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? If he wants to chill with the kittens, that’s fine.”

Hawkeye shrugs. “Guess ‘cause it means we have to retrieve all our arrows ourselves,” he says ruefully. 

She doesn’t miss the targets that much. As embarrassing as it was to be bragged on by Captain America, she really is a good shot. She hasn’t actually missed a target in the last two lessons, and those targets were moving.

“Thought we’d do the obstacle course today. Work on your parkour a bit, and then have you shoot some moving targets while you’re panting and off-balance. Make you work for it.”

Kate grins. That’s the kind of thing Hawkeye does in battle. He’s training her to be an excellent fighting archer, not just someone who stands around shooting targets in various trick shot challenges. This’ll be great.

Hawkeye sets up the obstacle course and gets her fitted with the sensors that will go off if she gets “shot” by an opponent, and they make sure she’s still able to ready her bow, reach her quiver, and get her full range of movement with the sensors on. And then, oh, then she’s ready to go. 

And this obstacle course is hard. There’s the leaping and rolling and climbing, flinging herself over and around and off of things at high speed. There’s the dodging various opponents that appear as she goes, shooting them nonlethally—that’s the rules—and moving on. There are civilians that she obviously should not shoot. And every time she gets shot or shoots the wrong thing, she has to start over. 

Hawkeye yells encouragement, though, and that makes it worth starting over, even if the course changes slightly between each run so that she can’t perfectly predict what is coming next. It’s not an American Ninja Warrior course or anything, but with the thugs and civilians and the need to ready her bow and stash it back between targets, it might as well be. 

In the hour set aside for her lesson, Kate hasn’t managed to make it through the entire course. She’s gotten close, but even on her best run, she shot an opponent too high up and got dinged for the killshot. 

“This is hard,” Kate says, wiping sweat off her forehead with a hand towel Hawkeye hands her. “How do you do it?”

“It helps if you keep your bow ready while you move through the course. That’s tricky, though. But hey, at least you didn’t shoot any of the civilians.”

“Sure, but I still didn’t make it all the way through.”

Hawkeye shrugs. “Not hurting the civilians is kind of the first priority,” he says. “Better a bad guy gets away than a civilian gets shot.”

Kate smiles. He really is teaching her more than archery now—he’s teaching her how to be a hero with a bow and arrow, just like him. 

She’s going to be a hero!

Monesha

—Washington, D.C. | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—

Her roommates are both out of town and the worst of Sandy should be past by now, even in New York City. Maybe it’s safe to use the link JARVIS sent her on the secret phone to log in to a secure video connection. She downloaded the software—StarkChat—after her last visit, and also the VPN they’d recommended. So she’s ready to have a video call with Jigsaw and Agent Barton, at least technology-wise. 

And she wants to know how things are going up there. 

The mainstream news cycle is still pretty set on Hurricane Sandy and the damage it’s done, but she has also heard that Jigsaw has been identified as having been Bucky. And the Tower is so full of people right now. She’s seen on Twitter that the Avengers are bringing flood victims in and helping people evacuate, and there have been some pictures of Jigsaw, Agent Barton, and a woman named Kate Bishop watching some kids play with kittens.

The Deaf news world is still aflutter with… well, with everything. Agent Barton’s hearing aids and signing is old news after the Chitauri attack in May, but news of the picnic she had with him and Jigsaw in the park still circulates. For all Agent Romanoff was able to keep the news reporters from her door, word travels fast in the Deaf community whenever signing is seen in public. 

People want to know who was signing, whether they’re deaf or hard of hearing, why and how they know sign language if they’re hearing, everything. She really should have expected her instructor to ask her about Agent Barton and Jigsaw after their next class session. Somehow, news had already traveled over Twitter and Reddit and a number of other social media platforms that she was seen signing with them, that Jigsaw used a nonstandard form, that Jigsaw had an AAC device, even a bit of what they had discussed, which had thankfully been Lucky and his favorite toys for the most part.

And so she had explained what she thought it was safe to explain, knowing that news would get all around everywhere nearly the moment she did so. She’s now well known in the local community, possibly a bit more abroad, as one of Jigsaw’s friends, who is learning ASL to communicate more clearly with him. 

So much for anonymity. But strangely, the Deaf community doesn’t hound her the way the hearing community had before Agent Romanoff shut the reporters down. It’s just increasingly common knowledge as information is shared. Sharing information is one of the cornerstones of the Deaf community, after all. Why wouldn’t people spread information around? Getting good access to information is a common struggle the community faces, and they do their best to combat that. 

And so while the mainstream hearing news media doesn’t seem to have caught on, the Deaf community knows that Jigsaw doesn’t speak but hears exceptionally well, and that he uses AAC frequently without hesitation. There are news blogs and personal blogs hotly debating whether this is or should be acceptable, whether he’s a good or bad model, and what exact disabilities he has, and the consensus so far seems to be that more access to language is always better than less and that he might be autistic or have a language processing disorder.

And so she is a not-so-mysterious beginning signer, learning to more effectively communicate with her friends. They know that Jigsaw saved her, back in the summer, and that she had a chance to keep in touch and reached out to do so. And that part is hardly the most interesting bit, so it’s just background information at best. 

And now that there’s been some more signing in the Tower, the news is back to them, wondering if there are any Deaf people among the evacuees.

And showing the kittens, of course, because who doesn’t love kittens?

Two kittens. Maybe Jigsaw got another one, or maybe the little black kitten is Kate’s. Either way, the pictures are pretty low quality but adorable. She’d love to see how the kittens are doing, and how Jigsaw and Agent Barton are doing. And Lucky. They aren’t out in the hurricane, so they’re safe, she knows. But they have to be stressed out.

And JARVIS sent her that link. 

Monesha gets up and heads upstairs to her room. It’s not the tidiest it’s ever been, but it’s not a huge mess. She opens up her laptop and logs in to her VPN, and then in to StarkChat. Camera settings and speaker settings seem to be in good order, and most of her dirty laundry is out of sight. Good. 

She enters the meeting link and joins the conversation. And she waits.

In a few minutes, she’s almost ready to give up, assuming that the link was meant for a specific time that she missed the window on. But then the screen changes from dark to a view of Jigsaw’s living room. He’s on the sofa with a kitten in loaf form on each thigh, and he’s otherwise alone. 

Does he look sad? Maybe, but his expression brightens to a smile when he sees her, and he waves a greeting.

“How are you?” Monesha signs. “I worry.”

Jigsaw see-saws his left hand, but signs OK with his right hand. 

“Are you keeping busy? Helping out?”

He sighs and slowly signs—she thinks—that he was before but is not now, and then something about many people and many questions. That, or he has a lot of questions about time. She thinks it’s the former, though. It takes him a while to put the signs together, and they come in an odd order, so it’s difficult to be sure.

“Are they asking about Bucky?” she asks, fingerspelling the name since she doesn’t know if there’s a name sign for that one. “Bucky,” she says as she fingerspells, because he sometimes has trouble with fingerspelled words.

Jigsaw nods. Then he signs about killing people, saving people, and HYDRA. 

She can hardly make out what exactly his meaning is. Is this a new topic, or were the people asking about those things as well? That would make sense. Though she doesn’t think of him as a killer but as a savior, Monesha is well aware that she’s in the minority there. Even among his fans in the various D.C. Slasher meet-ups, many of them focus more on how he was killing HYDRA terrorists and less on how he was saving people he came across who were in danger.

Valorie, one of the more regular attendees at the meet-ups, is another that Jigsaw saved. She thinks of him much like Monesha does, as a savior in a time of great need. But they’re definitely not the typical fan. Maybe because they actually lived through a bad situation thanks to Jigsaw, where others just followed him on the news as he worked his way through S.H.I.E.L.D. before HYDRA was discovered. 

“I’m sorry,” she signs. “Now is not a good time for them to ask questions about that. You’re trying to help during the hurricane, not answer questions about your past.”

Jigsaw nods vigorously. “Jigsaw helps, not answers,” he signs. “But many, many questions.” He indicates an explosion of questions. “All many. Clint and” —there’s a name sign she doesn’t recognize, a K-shape combined with the sign for archery, which must mean Kate— “and Jigsaw go stay away.”

He pouts.

She’s glad he isn’t on Twitter or Reddit, where the questions and speculation about the Bucky-Jigsaw connection are flying back and forth so rapidly she’s given up following them for now. There are people analyzing the bad photos from the Tower and old photos of Bucky, some of them trying to prove that Jigsaw isn’t Bucky and others trying to demonstrate that he clearly is Bucky.

And that’s just one facet of everything that’s going around. 

There’s behavioral “analysis” being done based on his killing sprees and more speculation about Ronin, the other masked serial killer who’s gone to ground and not resurfaced in months. There have been a couple of calls for a memoir, too. Every once in a while, there’ll be a post calling the kittens cute, but those are few and far between.

“I think the questions won’t go away until there are answers,” she replies. “Not that you need to answer them now. Or even later.”

He’ll eventually have to answer some of them, though. Hopefully Pepper or S.H.I.E.L.D. or someone can put together a written Q&A style press release that answers all of the questions without Jigsaw being put on the spot to answer in real time. 

“Jigsaw answer no cannot use,” he signs, looking frustrated. “Jigsaw kill is OK.” He concentrates on the next part and takes his time with the signs, using the space in front of himself to indicate a line, assigning “time” to the line and placing his signs on the line in a row. “Jigsaw lie no. Not say kill is all before and never now.”

Monesha blinks. 

That’s going to upset a lot of people. Jigsaw’s right—he can’t give them that answer. But should he lie? Can he even maintain a lie that blatant? If he thinks killing is okay, and he obviously does, he’ll slip up eventually and kill whoever he’s fighting as an Avenger. Especially because he’ll be fighting normal people, and he’s enhanced. Holding back just to maintain a lie is not going to work in the long term.

“Maybe you can say it differently?” she asks. 

They’re getting to the point of nuance she can’t really manage with ASL yet, but she’s going to try all the same. She’s learning this language specifically so she can talk with Jigsaw like this. She’s not going to give up on signing just because it’s hard to conceptualize how to sign certain things.

“Maybe, add to it when killing is okay. Killing is okay if they are HYDRA. Or killing is okay if they are hurting someone. Then they will know you won’t kill other people, only those kinds of people.”

“Only targets?” he asks. “HYDRA, evil, targets, Jigsaw kills them. Only them.”

Monesha nods, hoping she’s not making a huge mistake in even talking with him about this. She’s not a marketing expert, and she definitely doesn’t know how to market a person so that that person’s killing is more palatable to the public. This is something Agent Romanoff should be talking with him about, or Pepper should be smudging the wording on so that it sounds nicer.

“Sure,” she adds. “But ask Natasha about it. I don’t know the right answer.”

Jigsaw smiles brightly at her. “Monesha feeds Jigsaw, does not know everything.”

Well, she fed him once. And she brought him those red plum jam tarts from Jenna’s bakery. She supposes she feeds him, then. And she definitely doesn’t know everything. 

Jigsaw looks over to the side, and after a moment, she can hear a door closing.

“Oh!” Agent Barton says off camera. “Hi, Monesha. I didn’t know you could call us up like that. Neat.”

He comes into view and pulls the woman from the photographs over as well. “This is Kate,” he says, and then makes the name sign. “She’s learning archery. Kate, this is Monesha. She’s a friend of Jigsaw’s from D.C.”

Kate waves. “Hi there. Nice to meet you.”

Monesha waves back. “You, too.”

“We’ll get out of the way and let you two talk,” Agent Barton says. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Jigsaw shakes his head and gestures to the sofa to his left and then to his right, then points to them in turn. “Join,” he signs. “More happy.”

“If you’re sure…” Agent Barton starts, coming around to the sofa. “You want to join the call, Katie-Kate, or you want to get cleaned up?”

Kate plucks at her sweaty t-shirt. “Ugh. I think I’ll grab a shower and meet you for lunch.”

“So how are things down in D.C.?” Agent Barton asks after Kate has left. “Did you get hit hard?”

“Not in my area,” she signs. “Just rain and wind. Lost power but just for a while.”

Agent Barton nods and switches to signing. “That’s good. Power’s out all over the place here, and major flooding.”

Jigsaw holds up both hands, and Monesha trains her eyes on him while Agent Barton turns to face him. 

“Monesha hurricane?” Jigsaw signs, concerned. “Safe? Jigsaw did not know.”

“I’m safe,” she signs. “There was a major storm, but we’re okay here.”

“Hurricane so big?” His eyes are wide and his signs expansive in emphasis.

“Hurricanes are massive, yeah,” Agent Barton answers. “And they travel, so they don’t just hit one spot. They hit a bunch of spots in a row until they die down into just a regular storm.”

Jigsaw looks appalled and vaguely disbelieving at that, and Monesha wonders just how much Jigsaw would know about things like hurricanes. Probably not much.

“So are you going back downstairs to the crowd of people later? Bringing the kittens?” she asks. 

Agent Barton nods but doesn’t look all that pleased about it. “Hopefully Pepper can solve the crowd issue. Otherwise, we’re coming back up right away.”

“Jigsaw was telling me about the questions they were asking.”

“Oh yeah? I bet that was interesting.”

She smiles. This is a great opportunity to fill Agent Barton in and maybe get some pointers for Jigsaw’s eventual answer. Now she doesn’t have to worry that Jigsaw will just answer with his earlier statement about killing being just fine in his eyes. 

Agent Barton will have ideas, even if they won’t be as polished as Agent Romanoff’s ideas. And hey, there’s time before any of those questions have to be answered. 

Yeah. There’s time.

Chapter Text

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 1:00 p.m.—

He touches down on the roof of the Tower again, this time lightly and without leaving the unfortunate mark of bifrost travel behind. He does not wish to strain Tony Stark’s generosity by burning patterns in his Tower’s rooftop. 

The floodwaters of this Hurricane Sandy are still high, but Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff decided to wade their way back to the Tower instead of being lifted through the air by Thor and Tony Stark. Thor allows that this is possibly for the best, given the stiff winds still offered up by the storm. His cape had been unruly and insubordinate on his flight to the rooftop, and he had needed to hold it in his free hand to keep the sodden fabric from striking him in the face. 

Humbled by his failure to find his brother and return him to Asgard, and now humbled by a simple wind. It is truly the time of humbleness all over again, though he has retained Mjolnir and his powers that stem from his worthiness to wield it.

“What, were you racing or something?” Tony Stark asks as he alights beside him. “‘Cause I wasn’t racing. If I was racing, I’d have won.”

“I do not doubt it,” Thor says, though he does doubt it somewhat. He has learned that some lies are called little and white on Midgard, and they are as harmless as some other little white things—bunnies, for instance. 

The door to the Tower opens up for them, and Tony Stark leads the way inside once more. And once more, Thor will need to make use of Steve Rogers’s wardrobe to become truly warm and dry. Perhaps when the storm has fully passed, there will be an opportunity to acquire a wardrobe of his own.

“Don’t know about you, Point Break,” Tony Stark says as the Iron Man armor is removed piece by piece and stored away, “but I’m going to my room, where I’m going to order up something from the cafeteria and eat it on a tray in the bath. There might be bubbles. Feels like I haven’t been really warm in days.”

Thor nods his understanding. They are parting ways for the time being, and Tony Stark intends to relax. 

“I will depart for Steve Rogers’s rooms,” Thor says, “where I will dry off and change into dry clothes. And then… the cafeteria?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t go down there yourself. You’ll get swarmed. Maybe find Bartonio and the Jigster and follow their lead.” Tony Stark pads off to the elevator with a wave over his shoulder. “Toodles, big guy.”

Thor does not know “toodles” but it seems to be a form of farewell. “Toodles to you, as well, Tony Stark.”

“Mr Odinson,” says JARVIS, “if you will allow me, I can lead you to Agent Barton and Jigsaw once you have changed your clothing. They will be with Miss Bishop, but they will not have eaten yet. I will ask them to wait.”

“Thank you, friend JARVIS.” 

Thor heads for the elevator and finds it already waiting for him, despite Tony Stark using it just minutes prior. He presses the button for Steve Rogers’s hallway, and soon he’s feeling enormously less chilled in a pair of loose woven pants and a snug shirt named after the letter T. Socks will have to suffice in the absence of appropriate footwear. Donning his sodden boots again would defeat the purpose of changing clothes. 

“Lead on, friend JARVIS,” Thor says, and he rides the elevator upward rather than down, stopping at a landing at the head of a long hallway with one wall lined with glass windows from his waist to the ceiling. 

“This, Mr Odinson, is the range. When you are ready to enter, press the button by the door to let Miss Bishop know to stop shooting arrows. It is a safety precaution.”

Thor nods his understanding, but hesitates before pressing the button once he’s gotten a good look through the windows. JARVIS said to press it when he was ready to enter, but he would appreciate the opportunity to observe before entering. 

Kate Bishop is speed-shooting near the door, launching arrows as quickly as she can until her quiver is empty, and then being happy or disappointed based on her time, it appears. The arrows all hit the target despite the lack of time taken to aim. She must have an excellent familiarity with her weapon and the environment of the range.

Clint Barton is teaching her well, then. 

But the person who most captures Thor’s attention is the shorter, dark-clad man flinging throwing knives at a different target on the other side of the range. Jigsaw.

The Winter Soldier, or the Asset, depending on which timeline he’d been observing, captured with the scepter and transported to a vault underground where, if the comments he’d overheard were any indication, he would be placed in a freezer until needed again. In some of those timelines, there had been other commentary as well—commentary about all the atrocities the men with the scepter would commit upon his person before the freezer.

There is so much to know about this man. In some timelines, where he is called the Asset by the men who capture him, he is treated worse and threatened with worse. In other timelines, where he is called the Winter Soldier, he is treated marginally better, but still promised a thorough ”wiping” and reconditioning before the freezer. In all timelines he’d visited but this one, he is recaptured.

In this one, the scepter is stolen by Loki and cannot be used to pacify him, so he becomes Jigsaw, a free man living in the Tower and apparently very close with Clint Barton.

In all timelines—possibly excepting this one; he has not seen Jigsaw’s bare arms—the man’s left arm is a piece of machinery based on an Asgardian design, crafted with the some of the strongest metals Midgard has to offer, and powered by a chip off of the Tesseract. 

How that is possible remains a mystery to him. 

It’s true those blueprints had been left on Midgard with the Tesseract over two thousand Migardian years ago. And there had been sample metals left with the blueprints against a possible future need. Not enough metal to create the full weapon, but enough to form a core to contain a sliver of the Tesseract, and the better part of a casing to go around the inner workings. 

But what denizen of Midgard but Tony Stark or another of equal intuition for machinery could have crafted something from those plans, not having a translation or any instruction for the order of operations? It would take someone like Tony Stark, who is a rarity, and they would have to have obtained the blueprints somehow.

And what denizen of Midgard but an utter sadist would attach such a thing to a person? 

Bionic prostheses should be integrated to the specific body being restored, rather than the body being altered to fit the prosthesis. And for it to function on its own, as a limb apart from the whole weapon, it would have to be wired into the body. For even an enhanced body like Steve Rogers’s, the weight of the metals would require reconstructing massive portions of the torso, and the presence of the Tesseract chip would require constant healing.

If this man, Jigsaw from this timeline and the Winter Soldier and the Asset from other timelines, has always been fitted with this segment of the weapon, how is it possible that any version of him is sane? Proximity to a power source like the Tesseract, combined with the pain and the energy-drain of continually healing the join between man and machine, should drive most mad.

Yet the timelines all showed a sane man resisting capture until the scepter came into play—with this scepterless timeline deviating but still showing someone sane. Does Jigsaw not have the metal weapon in place of his left arm? Are there other, more profound, deviations in this timeline?

Jigsaw moves like a fluid, his fingers and the knives he twirls difficult to follow in the dimly lit range. He holds himself slightly to one side, countering a greater weight on his left—an indication that he has the Asgardian technology grafted onto his body. His left arm moves as smoothly as his right, whipping back and then forward to release the knives, following through to snatch more knives from a bandolier of them.

Thor has observed Loki at his practice, or possibly an illusion of his brother, and there is similar grace and surety of motion here. Jigsaw flows liquidly from pose to pose, hard on the eye but beautiful to behold, seeming to move without moving. Loki does not have that quality to his movements, but he is quick and moves with minimal effort expended.

He would be hard pressed to select a winner without seeing Jigsaw in full battle, but the fact that he hesitates at all is a sign of Jigsaw’s skill.

It is likely he has the weapon, just as his counterparts in other timelines have had it. It is likely he is enhanced as his counterparts have been, and that he is as sane as any of his counterparts have been. A small miracle.

Thor raises a hand, intending to press the button, but hesitates again. 

He does not want to frighten Jigsaw, and he had the distinct impression last night that the man was afraid of him. Why that should be the case is unclear to him. He had done nothing dangerous, nor had he spoken in such a manner. 

Had he recognized Thor as being Asgardian and feared that he would be modified to support more of the weapon? That is surely the only possible reason for Jigsaw’s fear. Thor is not larger than Hulk, and Steve Rogers is enhanced and of larger stature than Jigsaw. Jigsaw had not been afraid of Steve Rogers, nor of Dr Banner, who contains Hulk.

Well. He can reassure Jigsaw about the weapon. Thor is no sadist, even if he did know the inner workings of the weapon, which he does not. He knows enough to have recognized the design, and he studied enough history to know what was left on Midgard with the Tesseract. That is all.

Ultimately, while caught up in his thoughts, Thor misses the opportunity to press the button. The door swings inward and Clint Barton appears there for a half second before he is replaced by Jigsaw holding a knife and snarling silently, standing defensively between Thor and the other two. 

“Jigs, it’s just Thor!” Clint Barton’s hands come to rest on Jigsaw’s shoulders from behind, squeezing gently. “Remember, he’s a good guy.”

Jigsaw’s snarl disappears into a mere frown, but the knife is not lowered and he does not straighten from his defensive pose.

Thor takes a step back and sets Mjolnir down behind him, careful not to crack the flooring. “Easy, friend Jigsaw,” he says while his hands make the appropriate signs. “I mean you and yours no harm. I was sent by JARVIS to inquire about a cafeteria.”

“Oh, good,” says Kate Bishop from further in the range, seemingly unaffected by the near stabbing. “Because I am hun-gry.”

“Put the knife away?” Clint Barton asks. “Let’s have someone bring us stuff from the cafeteria and go to our rooms, huh? Home field advantage.”

Jigsaw puts the knife away, and Thor can see that his left hand is, indeed, that of the weapon. That confirms it, then. Jigsaw was altered to accept the weapon and possibly fears that an Asgardian will perform further tortures upon him.

How to best allay these fears? If he is wrong about the source of Jigsaw’s fear, and he brings up the weapon, he will introduce a new fear, one that might not have occurred to him. Perhaps over a meal, they will come to a better understanding of one another. 

The inside of Clint Barton and Jigsaw’s rooms is clean enough and reasonably well-ordered, but nowhere near the impeccable tidiness of Steve Rogers’s rooms. Those had been so neat that Thor had felt obligated to fold his wet and dirty things and put them in the bottom of the shower to avoid creating an unsightly mess. These are much more livable.

They are greeted from inside by a chorus of tiny mews, like those of baby cats, only miniature ones that could not pull anything of much weight or be ridden by anything but a doll. And when the door opens, there are two kittens, each not much more than a handful, one fluffy and white and the other sleeker and black. 

The kittens rush out toward them, and Jigsaw quickly, smoothly, scoops both up and carries them back inside where they presumably belong. 

Thor follows Kate Bishop into the front room and softly closes the door behind himself, looking around for signs of a mother cat or more kittens. He will need to watch his step. But while there is a dragon’s hoard of small stuffed things and tiny plastic springs, a carpeted climbing contraption against the wall next to a television, a burbling fountain, and plentiful food bowls in the kitchen, the only signs of cats actively in the area are the kittens themselves. 

There is a third food bowl and a taller fountain in the kitchen that must be for a third animal, but there is no sign of—oh, no, there. A plastic bone, well-chewed. A knotted rope, frayed, that is surely too large for either these kittens or a Midgardian cat. A dog, then? Where is the dog? Thor loves dogs. 

“I did not know you kept animals in your living quarters, Clint.”

“Hm? Oh, the kittens are Jigsaw’s—Alpine is the white one and Liho is the black one. He’s also got a dog named Lucky.” 

“I would pet your kittens, friend Jigsaw,” Thor requests. “May I?”

Jigsaw hesitantly hands the black kitten out to him, and Thor telegraphs his movements as he reaches out to stroke the kitten’s head and rub behind its ears. The mewling is replaced by a throaty purr, and the kitten climbs from Jigsaw’s hand to Thor’s, where it starts to rub its face against his fingers faster than Thor can keep up his petting. 

“See?” Clint Barton says. “He just wants to be friends. He won’t hurt a fly. And he definitely won’t zap you with lightning.”

Is that where the fear has come from? Can Jigsaw somehow feel the potential for electricity that comes from his being in proximity to Mjolnir? Perhaps Thor should put the hammer outside of the room, to reduce that potential and possibly lessen Jigsaw’s fears. He is glad he did not bring attention to Jigsaw’s left arm.

“And where is the dog, Lucky?”

“Lucky’s with Wilson down among the civilians, being a good emotional support for them,” Clint Barton says. “He’ll be back up here tonight, though.”

“And is this typical on Midgard, to bring animals into your home day and night?”

Clint shrugs. “It’s pretty typical in America, but different people handle their pets differently. Us two, though? We don’t sleep well without the dog, and the kittens are a nice addition.”

Liho begins to clamber up his arm, tiny claws digging into skin until finding purchase in the shirt he has borrowed from Steve Rogers. Thor hopes the shirt is not ruined by the use to which it is being put. 

The food from the cafeteria arrives while Thor is attempting to remove the kitten from his back and succeeding in doing nothing more than turning around in place. Clint Barton and Jigsaw take the food to the table in the kitchen and begin arranging plates and things, Jigsaw keeping half an eye on him the whole time, but Kate Bishop comes to his aid and plucks the kitten from his back as though its claws had not been thoroughly embedded in the shirt and his skin.

“Still wish you were able to be down on the second and third floors helping?” Kate Bishop asks as they all four sit at the table.

Jigsaw nods his head while Clint Barton shakes his.

“We’ll get to go back down soon enough,” Clint Barton says. “Maybe we’ll hand out candy or something when they do the trick-or-treat thing we set up. We’ll do something useful, once Pepper clears up the whole problem with nosy people.”

Jigsaw nods enthusiastically, chewing a hearty looking garden salad that crunches with every chew. He holds up a single finger and stabs up a forkful of buttered noodles. 

“You want to do the trick-or-treat thing more than you want to set up with the kittens again?”

Jigsaw thinks about that and then shrugs. 

“That’s fair. We’ll do whichever we’re cleared for. Pepper will let us know.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes before Thor decides that he would like to know about the nosy people problem more than about the nature of the “trick-or-treat thing” being mentioned. He’ll get around to both questions eventually, but the one seems more important than the other. 

“What is the problem you mention, Clint, with the nosy people?”

Kate Bishop snorts into her own salad and mutters “more like nosy assholes” before sticking a forkful of salad in her mouth.

“Well, that’s actually a lot to explain,” Clint Barton says, picking out the last of the peppers and onions from his beef and cheese sandwich. “You mind if I tell it, Jigs?”

Jigsaw shakes his head and spoons egg salad onto a cracker. 

“Okay. The short of it is this. A really long time before he became Jigsaw, Jigsaw was this guy called Bucky. And Bucky was really popular as Steve’s best friend, and everyone thought he died in this really big war.”

“How long a time? Steve is still in his prime.”

“Like seventy years ago. Steve was in an iceberg that whole time, so he’s still fresh.”

Thor nods and motions for him to continue.

“But instead of him dying, HYDRA had nabbed him and turned him into the Winter Soldier. With torture and brainwashing and the metal arm and everything. They made it so he can’t talk, too.”

Thor grimaces over that, but does not interrupt. HYDRA is the team’s current enemy, and also an old enemy, especially for Jigsaw, then. So long to be burdened with the weapon, seven decades of physical suffering, to say nothing of the mental anguish of brainwashing and being rendered incapable of communicating.

“Then Soviet HYDRA gave him to American HYDRA,” Clint Barton continues, “and they turned him into the Asset and did lots of really horrible stuff to him. Worse than the earlier group had done.”

It is hard to imagine much that could be worse than being saddled with a fragment of the weapon for an arm, dealing with the pain and torment of everything that entails, plus the searing of flesh that the Tesseract fragment in its core would cause. But he had heard what was said to the Asset in those other timelines. It is hard to imagine it, painful, but he can imagine it, based on those words and insults. 

“And when Jigsaw got free, right about the time the Chitauri arrived, he turned around and started killing everyone who’d hurt him that he could get his hands on. Then we tracked him down and he came to live here with us.”

Clint Barton looks at Jigsaw. “Anything you want to add?”

Jigsaw thinks and then sets his fork down. “Jigsaw killed many hundreds of HYDRA evildoers and protected many innocents from harm. Jigsaw would do it all again, too. Jigsaw is proud of killing those targets slowly and thoroughly.”

Clint Barton makes a face about it, but all he says is, “Did you get all that, Thor?”

Thor nods. “Truly, you are a mighty warrior for justice, friend Jigsaw. I would know more of your exploits, the details of your battles, the glories and victories you achieved, the devastating losses you suffered. We could trade stories of our battles and our scars.”

“Aw, no, don’t encourage him,” Clint Barton whines. “We’re trying to convince him that he shouldn’t be killing every enemy he comes across.”

“So that surviving enemies can be questioned?”

“That and… other reasons. Lots of other reasons that we can get into later. Good reasons. Anyway, when we brought him here, we knew about his past as Bucky and the Winter Soldier, and we suspected a lot about his time as the Asset. But he hated the very idea of Bucky, so we told the public he was an unknown who wanted to be called Jigsaw.”

Clint Barton spreads his hands, palms up in supplication. “It seemed like the best thing to do at the time, to keep the public from trying to make him be Bucky again.”

Thor nods. “We can never go back to our past selves. We must always press on toward our future selves while living our present lives.”

“…Yeah. If you want to get all motivational poster catchphrase about it.”

“So what is the problem? This all seems very straightforward to me. Awful, that these things have happened, but presented as you have done it, I see nothing unreasonable.”

Kate Bishop sighs. “Yeah, well, with so many people gathered in from the storm, Jigsaw got recognized by a little kid who’s a Bucky enthusiast and now everyone wants to pester Jigsaw with questions and demand autographs from him. That’s the problem we’re having. Too many people assuming they’re welcome to crowd in with their obnoxious selves.”

“We’re also having, sort of behind the scenes, the problem of how to explain all of that history without opening Jigsaw’s life for juicy gossip magazines to rifle through and make snide remarks about.”

“Carlton Badger?” Kate Bishop asks. 

“Carlton Badger.”

“Ugh. My roommate reads that crap all the time.”

“Thankfully, there hasn’t been an article about the Jigsaw-Bucky connection yet,” Clint Barton says. “But it’s only a matter of time.”

Chapter Text

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 3:30 p.m.—

This is going well. 

And he isn’t even lying to himself about that.

Once Thor put his hammer out in the hallway, Jigsaw had seemed to thaw a bit more—and probably Thor’s praise for his murder sprees at lunch had had something to do with that, too—and now Jigsaw is sitting on the floor with Thor, kittens climbing all over them, while he shows Thor his most treasured scrapbooks.

Clint knows that most of those scrapbooks are a combination of himself and Lucky, with Alpine showing up in later editions, and he tries not to be embarrassed about that. The pictures Jigsaw chose are all good ones, after all. Clint is even nicely dressed in most of them, which he suspects is something Jigsaw managed to arrange each time.

Jigsaw is still the undisputed laundry champion in their suite of rooms because Clint would never bother to challenge his reign and because if Clint ever did try to do the laundry himself, he’d manage to shrink all their clothes, or turn everything pink, or both. So Jigsaw collects their laundry every few days, puts it in the washing machine with detergent that smells like nothing, puts most of it in the dryer, hangs or flattens a few things, and then folds or hangs and puts away all the dried clothes.

Clint has two responsibilities that he treats as must-do items on the list of things to do in a day. 

He has to wear the clothes that are freshly clean and arranged at the front of his closet and not the clothes further in the closet or in a rare mostly-clean pile. And he has to put his worn clothes in the hamper, even if they still have another wear in them. Not near the hamper, or Jigsaw will make a comment about his aim slipping or him losing his touch. And not anywhere else in the suite or Jigsaw will point at the offending article of clothing and stare at him until he picks it up and puts it in the hamper.

Clint would complain about these rules if anyone else imposed them, he’s sure. He knows he bitched about Bobbie’s laundry policies and turned it into a constant low simmering argument, even passive-aggressively putting things in the wrong basket. Bobbie had had a thing about lights and darks, and whites and reds, and cold and warm, and wanted everything to go in the right spot according to the tag. 

Like Clint is going to learn the mystical language of laundry recommendations on the tags of his clothes, or read the tag every time he tosses a shirt aside so that he tosses it in the right place. Different kinds of triangle and circle and square shapes with dots and lines and hands and things in them. Might as well learn to be a wizard with all those symbols.

Jigsaw isn’t picky about that. Or if he is, he sorts things out of the bigger batch as he’s doing the laundry instead of having different loads based on laundry symbols.

But Jigsaw’s definitely picky about what he ends up wearing on a given day. It’s generally snug shirts and jeans that are just shy of too tight to move around in, or if it’s a day where he knows Clint will go to the gym, it’s yoga pants and a sleeveless t-shirt from a collection of them that Clint didn’t know he had. Jigsaw really likes his arms and shoulders, after all, a thing that Clint finds pleasing but isn’t sure what to do about other than wear the clothes Jigsaw basically picks out for him.

And that means that he always looks good for whatever he’s doing. Even when he feels like crap. And somehow, looking good usually improves his mood somewhat. It’s mystifying. 

But the scrapbook they’re flipping through now is a new one, one that seems to be focused on Clint in the gym. He’s wearing one of his mysteriously appearing sleeveless t-shirts and some of Jigsaw’s yoga pants, and he’s lifting weights. It appears to be one of his arm days, with a bit of leg day thrown in. He’s not really strict about what he works out and when. Just whatever feels like it needs a workout. 

“I would visit this training chamber,” Thor says as Jigsaw turns a page to one with a picture of Clint squatting with a barbell over his shoulders. “It is an interesting concept, to train without sparring partners.”

Jigsaw gives him a thumbs up and taps his wrist and points ahead of himself—meaning that they’ll go later, literally in Jigsaw’s signing “yes time forward”—and points to Clint’s back in the picture on the page. He gives the picture a thumbs up and signs that Clint has a nice back.

Sitting in the chair across from him, Kate snickers. Apparently, Jigsaw’s appreciation for his back is obvious enough from the gestures and expression that she doesn’t need the ASL to figure out what he’s saying. 

Clint sighs and turns his attention back to the TV. He’s probably missed three whole plot twists in Hospital of Passion by now. That’s what he gets for looking away from the screen with its captions. He will end up rewatching the episode, for sure.

And perhaps because he’s already made up his mind to rewatch it, his mind wanders back to the scrapbook Jigsaw is paging through. Some of those photos he remembers Jigsaw taking while he should have been spotting him. Others it looks almost like JARVIS took for him, based on the angle. Or maybe Jigsaw had been in the rafters. With him, it can be hard to tell where he is if he’s not right there where Clint can see him. 

The next scrapbook is all archery-based, and features Kate as well as Clint. Some of it is from the range, but most is from the gym. Thor makes appreciative noises as Jigsaw points out the highlights.

“I can see the improvements, too,” Thor says in response to something Jigsaw signed. Thor looks up at Kate. “Truly, you are an attentive pupil. Any master would be happy to have you as an apprentice.”

Clint gives her a grin and winks. “I know I’m happy. Who knows? Someday there might be two Hawkeyes.”

“Really?” she asks, eyes wide. “You think I’m going to be that good?”

“I mean, you’re applying yourself. And you’re really good already. Now we’re just polishing some things up and getting you ready for some trick shots.”

Now she’s blushing and Clint feels vindicated—so much for her snickering over Jigsaw’s appreciation of his back. How’s it feel to be praised in front of others, huh?

Clint has to admit that on some level, it feels good, though. 

“You mention tricks,” Thor says, looking over at Clint. “Is this related to ‘trick-or-treat’ or is it something else?”

“Trick-or-treating is where kids dress up in costumes and go around to people’s houses asking for candy,” Kate says. “They ring the bell and say ‘trick or treat,’ and you tell them how cute they are and how scary or pretty their costumes are, and you chuck some candy in their bucket and close the door until the next group of kids comes by. It’s fun.”

“Why do they say that? I do not see any trick happening, only a treat being given in this scenario.”

“Back in the day, we used to throw eggs at houses where they’d hand out toothbrushes or boxes of raisins or other crappy non-candy treats,” Clint says. He shrugs. “I say ‘we,’ but I never went trick-or-treating. Parents too busy, no sense doing it in the circus, too old for it, all that.”

“No way!” Kate says. “You have to go trick-or-treating. There’s the little Halloween neighborhood we built. We can do a round asking for candy and then we can sit and hand it out for a while. I sorted the costumes. There’s some stuff you could use. It’s not all kid-sized.”

Clint shifts uncomfortably. He’d feel like an absolute idiot doing that. “Nah,” he says. “I’m good. But if we can hand out candy, that’d be fun.”

“Then next year. We’ll all go together, and we’ll do a themed costume set. Maybe Star Wars. You can be Luke and I’ll be Leia. Jigsaw can be Han Solo because he definitely shoots first, and we’ll dress Lucky up as a Wookiee.”

Clint sighs. “If Jigsaw is into the idea next year, sure. I’ll dress up as Luke Skywalker. But the real spirit of Halloween is grabbing up all the leftover chocolates at every grocery store you can hit right after Halloween, when there’s still good stuff, but it’s all cheap.”

Thor and Jigsaw look at each other, both of them with a confused kind of blank expression. 

Jigsaw signs “OK” and then makes Kate’s name sign, indicates talking, and then uses his question sign. 

“I, too, was mightily confused. Is this Star Wars a traditional Midgardian tale, perhaps?”

Clint puts a finger to his lips and gives Kate a pointed look. She shuts her mouth. 

“It is, but I’m not going to spoil anything about it for either of you. We’ll have to watch it some time so you can see it for yourself.”

“So is the spirit of Halloween to costume oneself as a character from a traditional tale, or the purchase of cheap treats?”

Kate and Clint look at each other.

“It can be both,” Clint says. 

“And we are not doing either thing in celebration of the holiday this year?”

“Um, we had a party. And Jigsaw carved pumpkins.”

Kate stares. “You had a party? What was it like? Just shop talk, or did you play party games, or what?”

Jigsaw pulls over his tablet, closes the scrapbook, and swaps the one out for the other. 

“Oh, picture time,” Kate says with glee. “I want to see what everyone dressed up as.”

Clint shakes his head. “Wasn’t a costume party.”

“All Halloween parties are costume parties.”

He sighs. Katie-Kate would have dressed up for the party, right along with Stark. It figures, she’s so invested in designing her own tac gear. Why wouldn’t she want to put together a costume?

“Excuse my interruption,” JARVIS says, “but would you like for the tablet’s display to show on the television, Jigsaw?”

Jigsaw hesitates, looks at the screen, and points to Clint. He asks his question sign.

“Um, yeah, sure, if you want. I’m honestly not watching it closely enough to know what’s going on.”

Jigsaw nods, and the TV flickers from Hospital of Passion to a picture of the haunted gingerbread village. It looks better than Clint remembers it looking, all of the houses arranged as though on both sides of a street with the towering gingerbread skyscraper at one end of the street and Clint’s dilapidated slumlord mansion at the other end. 

Jigsaw swipes to the next photos in the album, and they take a moment to appreciate several different angles of Steve’s very traditional gingerbread house with its Halloween colors and the faintest hint of cobwebs in the eaves from the cotton candy. 

“I bet that’s Cap’s or Pepper’s,” Kate says. “It’s neat, professional-looking, lots of attention to detail and skillfully applied icing, but it’s basic. Doesn’t take a lot of risks, but gets the job done. I’d lean toward Pepper, but the picket fence screams 40’s to me.”

Clint nods. “You’d be right. That’s Steve’s house.”

“You made these confectionery constructions?” Thor asks. 

“With our very own hands,” Clint says. “They’re gingerbread houses, but haunted because of Halloween. So they have spooky colors and cobwebs and things. Ghosts and stuff.”

“How delightful! A house made from cookies and sugar.”

The next is Natasha’s Red Room house, with a special view of the sprinkle tapestries she made on the interior walls. “Can you wipe out that much red? Your ledger is dripping” is piped in Cyrillic around the edges of her house, a kind of haunting that doesn’t involve a specific ghost so much as it evokes the entirety of her past haunting her. 

“Um, lots of red, so I’d say the Falcon, maybe, but I thought there was a birdhouse in the street view, so…” Kate trails off. 

“This will be Natasha Romanoff’s, will it not?” Thor suggests. “The language is different but that phrase, it is what Loki said to her, on the helicarrier.”

“Got it in one, Thor.” Clint groans when his own creation is next. “Welcome to the shabbiest, grubbiest, most run-down trap of a housing development you’ve ever seen. Watch your step, the whole thing’s unstable.”

Kate laughs. “It’s not that bad, if that’s what you were going for.”

Clint doesn’t know what he was going for. Something with four sides and a roof, mostly. He’s lucky the thing stood upright long enough to be moved into position and photographed. It was a near thing, too, trying to support a flat roof without any slant to it. He’d needed to add some interior walls just to keep everything upright.

They run through all the houses, with guesses being made on each of them, and mostly correct guesses, too. If Kate is off-base, Thor can usually pick the correct Avenger, and vice versa. 

“Where’s Jigsaw’s house?” Kate asks when they’re on the last one, Banner’s jungle-inspired hut. Then the next photo clears it up for her. “Oh, I see—he piped on panels but didn’t turn them into a house. Did he run out of time?”

Jigsaw signs that he wanted to draw the party itself. 

Kate looks over at Clint with a question in her eyes.

“He says he wanted to draw the party. He wasn’t trying to make a house or anything.”

“Oh. Well, I really like the—wow!” 

Jigsaw has swiped past his own work and is now showcasing the best of the sugar cookies he and Steve decorated. They’re as psychedelic as some of the earlier ones, but these ones use the swirls of colors more artistically. And there’s Jigsaw’s bird on a branch made with sprinkles. And Steve’s grinning pumpkin, also made with sprinkles. There are several close-ups.

“And who created these things of such intricate detail and vibrant color?” Thor asks. 

“Mostly Jigsaw and Steve. Pepper did a few of them, I think.” Clint shrugs. “We’ve got lots of cookies left over if you want to help us eat some.”

“I’ll help eat cookies,” Kate says. “I never say no to a cookie.”

She gets up and heads to the kitchen. “Where should I look?”

“Should be—”

“Never mind. I found them.”

Kate brings back the tub and takes a trio of cookies for herself before setting the tub on the coffee table so everyone can reach if they want a cookie. Jigsaw passes the tub over to Clint and then holds it out to Thor to take a cookie before he takes one for himself. 

“Delicious,” Thor says firmly, as though declaring it to be true before a doubtful audience. He examines his cookie with its missing bite. “And quite lovely.”

Jigsaw taps and swipes to a different album and shows the set of photos where he and Yasmin are carving out pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns. He explains that this is also tradition, that it’s possible to then set the seeds very slightly on fire and eat them.

“This would explain the grinning pumpkin on that one cookie,” Thor murmurs. “This is a tradition that your team has celebrated, then, the carving of winter gourds into lanterns. Where you did not celebrate the trick-or-treat ceremony or the collection of low-priced candies.”

Jigsaw nods, and then goes back to the picture of Yasmin with her jack-o-lantern. He makes her name sign and begins a flurry of jumbled signs that Clint can’t see entirely clearly but catches the gist of simply from knowing what Jigsaw is likely trying to communicate: This is Yasmin, and she is an “expert,” and she is helping me, and a variety of other things, no doubt.

But the signs go on longer than that, and Clint isn’t sure what else is being said. Something about the pumpkin carving process? Something about what kind of expert she is? Something else entirely?

“You have the aid of a healer of the mind, then?” Thor sounds almost flustered, and a little like something has now clicked for him that was a mystery before learning about Yasmin. “Healing of the mind is the pinnacle of the healing arts, and one so successful is rare, indeed. I would be honored to meet her.”

Clint frowns. What does Thor mean by “one so successful?” How would he know how successful Yasmin has been? Clint doesn’t doubt her success, or anything. He’s seen it firsthand, after all. If he were ever going to trust a therapist, it would be her. But Thor has no way of knowing just how messed up everything was in Jigsaw’s head when he first arrived. 

Just how little trust he had, how much fear he had over every little thing. How closed off he was.

Maybe in those other timelines he got an impression of how messed up the other Winter Soldiers had been. Maybe that’s what he’s referring to. Clint wants to know, badly, but he’s not about to bring it up in front of Katie-Kate. She may be a friend of Jigsaw’s at this point, and she may be something like a junior Avenger in some ways, but she doesn’t get access to Jigsaw’s mental health history. 

Time to generalize it, so no one fixates on the “one so successful” comment.

“Yeah,” Clint says. “He’s got a therapist-therapist, a food-therapist and a language-therapist. Steve’s got a regular therapist, too. It’s therapy land here in the Tower. Pepper’s got one, Wilson’s got one—he’s the one who hired all these therapists for Jigs and Steve, him and Banner. They picked out the really good ones.”

Thor definitely seems awed by this abundance of therapists. 

“I wanted to take on a healer of the mind—a therapist—for my brother’s benefit, after the events in New Mexico, but he was lost to us.” Thor frowns and shakes his head. “It gladdens my heart to know that my friends have the aid of such healers. Healing the mind is a most noble calling, and highly honored on Asgard.”

Jigsaw smiles and signs that he likes Yasmin, Caroline and Zoe very much and that he has learned so much from them. Then he brings up the food boards to show them all of the foods he has been able to eat since coming to the Tower, starting—of course—with the vegetables.

Clint sighs. 

About halfway through his exploration of the fruits board, Kate shifts in her chair to get another cookie. “Hey, you know, there are lots of pumpkins down in the cardboard Halloween neighborhood. I bet they wouldn’t miss four of them.”

Clint looks from the fruits to her. “You want to steal pumpkins from the kids?”

“No,” she insists. “The kids aren’t going to be carving them or taking them home or anything. They’re just decorations, and there’s loads of them. I want to steal pumpkins from the Halloween neighborhood, bring them up here, and we can each carve one.”

Something tells Clint that Pepper knows the location of each and every pumpkin down there, might even have the damn things micro-chipped. But would she mind if they pumpkin-napped a few? Just three, maybe, because he doesn’t want to be elbow deep in pumpkin guts, thanks. 

“I have never carved a face into a vegetable,” Thor offers, “but I am willing and interested in the endeavor. The process looks to be enjoyable.”

“There, see? And Jigsaw probably wants to make another one. I’ll take a cart down, load up four appealing pumpkins, and be back before you know it.”

Clint sighs. How did he become the most responsible person in a room? 

Chapter Text

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 4:00 p.m.—

Kate feels almost like a burglar going into the storage closet next to where Jigsaw and apparently Captain America have their therapy sessions. She definitely feels like she doesn’t belong in this room, swiping a cart, carving supplies, and a bunch of butcher paper to work on so the floor doesn’t get pumpkin juice all over it.

But JARVIS had said it was okay, that nothing sensitive ever gets stored in here, that the carving tools and all the rest of it would be needed either before or after she nicked the pumpkins. 

And it’s for Jigsaw, after all. That must surely make it okay to borrow this stuff and then bring it back afterward. It isn’t like there’ll be a session while they’re carving pumpkins and these specific supplies will be needed and found to be missing. 

She still slinks into the room rather than walking in. It’s really quiet, and the fact that the light switch by the door only turns on a pair of floor lamps instead of a bright overhead light makes it feel almost intimate, like she’s about to have a therapy session, herself. 

She walks over and takes the emptier of the two carts, puts the things on the cart in neat piles to the side, and then looks where JARVIS had said the carving tools are. The cabinet is unlocked, which is good, and she finds the tools she needs in a pair of rolled up leather straps tied around the middle with more leather. She hopes two sets will be enough for four people. She’ll be fine using a kitchen knife for hers, anyway, unless they want to all four get fancy with it.

Jigsaw’s witch pumpkin had been a fancy one, for sure. She doubts she has it in her to make one like that. Art wasn’t her strongest subject in university the one semester she’d taken it. She’d done passably well, but only just, and her grade point average had taken a hit that semester. 

Give her trigonometry over sketching a still life any day of the week.

But carving pumpkins doesn’t have to be artistic or skillful. It can just be creative, and there’s no grade involved except whether you have fun or not. 

She thinks they’ll have fun. But they can only do that after she swipes the squash.

So, butcher paper, over in the corner, three rolls of it. Must have gotten a bulk discount, or else they go through a lot of it. She takes a roll and adds it to the cart. Better take a few sharpies, too, if they’re going to draw patterns on the pumpkins to carve out.

And then it’s down in the service elevator to the Halloween neighborhood. No one’s in there when she arrives with the cart, but the candy levels in the bowls are a bit lower than they’d been when she and Jigsaw had been filling them up. Must have had some kids come through at some point. Well, no one will miss a mini-sucker. 

Kate pops the sucker in her mouth and the wrapper in her pocket, and then inspects the decorations. She’s looking for a big cluster that can lose a pumpkin and still look alright, or for lone pumpkins no one would miss… Carvable shapes, standing upright, preferably no obvious field scars…

The door opens when she has three pumpkins selected and is looking for a fourth that meets her requirements, and Pepper is there with a clipboard. Great. Caught red-handed.

“Oh, Kate. I hadn’t expected anyone to be here.”

Pepper looks at the cart with the butcher paper and the pumpkins, and then at Kate. “JARVIS says that Thor is with Clint and Jigsaw. I worried when I didn’t see him in the cafeteria.” She smiles. “I take it you four will be carving jack-o-lanterns this afternoon?”

Kate grins guiltily. “Sorry for stealing pumpkins. I can put them back if you want.”

“No, no. I’m still working to source a suitable room for Jigsaw’s kittens, where there is enough space, but not too much, where parents and guardians can observe without becoming pests, and where the general populace doesn’t line up to take pictures and video through the windows.”

Pepper looks a bit frustrated, and Kate can understand. 

“If anything, I’d appreciate it if you helped distract him until I can arrange for him to come help again.” Pepper gives her a wry smile. “Though you can tell Clint to run his own errands in the future instead of sending you on a pumpkin hunt.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about just sitting around with Jigsaw and Thor, waiting for Clint to come back. Jigsaw seems a little leery of Thor, and they’d both be signing, so… It’s better if Clint is up there with them.”

“Hm.” Pepper frowns. “I wonder why Jigsaw of all people would be worried about Thor. From what Tony’s told me, the man’s a golden retriever when it comes to attempting to make friends.”

Kate shrugs. “Something about Thor maybe zapping him. I don’t know. Clint sorted it out mostly.”

She spies an ideal pumpkin from a cluster of three and moves to put it onto the cart. The two that remain don’t look too bad together. It’ll be okay. Pepper basically gave her a mandate to bring four pumpkins upstairs, after all. 

“Well, have fun, and remember to take plenty of pictures. The ones Jigsaw uploaded of his earlier jack-o-lanterns were wonderful, though I could only use the ones without his or Yasmin’s face. Maybe now, though…”

Pepper trails off, tapping the end of a pen against her lower lip in thought. 

“We’ll try to carve stuff that’s Avengers-appropriate,” Kate says with a grin. “Good luck down here!”

“Oh, yes. Thank you, Kate.”

Kate slips past her and heads back to the service elevator with her cart and her hand-selected treasures. This is going to be so fun.

“Hey, great news!” Kate says as she wheels the cart with the pumpkins into Hawkeye and Jigsaw’s living room. “I ran into Pepper, and she’s totally okay with us taking these pumpkins.”

“Oh, great,” Hawkeye says. “I worried when you took so long. Thought you’d gotten caught and put on door duty or something.”

Kate shakes her head. “Nope. I was just making sure we got good pumpkins to work with.”

They set up at the table for the first step, putting butcher paper in the middle of the table and digging out all the guts to put on it. At Jigsaw’s insistence, they’ll put the guts into the fridge and pick through them for seeds later to wash, salt and roast. He says he remembers how, and that the Falcon showed him.

If it were up to her, and she wanted pumpkin seeds, she’d do like any reasonable person would and buy a package from the store, no muss, no fuss. But he wins out on that part of things. She won’t argue if he wants to get his hands all slimy in the pumpkin guts again after cleaning them off.

Then it’s off to the living room to spread out more butcher paper in two layers, just in case, and see what there is to work with in the leather tool rolls. Jigsaw gets one to himself, of course, because he knows what he’s doing and is already searching his pumpkin for the best side to carve up. 

Kate looks up some jack-o-lantern ideas on her phone and shows them to Thor so he has some idea of what he’s doing that’s in between the basic Yasmin pumpkin and Jigsaw’s freakishly elaborate one with the witch. 

“A-ha!” Thor shouts after scrolling carefully for a while. “I will make a cat, in honor of the kittens.”

After a moment, Jigsaw melts from frozen statue back to graceful, liquid ooze, resuming his search for the perfect carving face for whatever it is he’s decided to create, and Thor apologizes a bit sheepishly for his outburst. He pets Liho, to help her settle back onto his shoulder where she was before, not quite tangled in his blond hair.

Kate opts to make something similar to the goofier faces she saw on her phone before handing it to Thor. First, round eyes. That will take some work with a paring knife, but shouldn’t require any of the specialized tools. Then, carve out the gaps between some goofy teeth. Make them square, not sharp. Yeah. Her pumpkin is going to be so damn cute.

Hawkeye, she notices after getting the first eye of her pumpkin right, is not carving his pumpkin at all. He’s just frowning at it and petting Alpine on his knee. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Can’t think of a face to carve?”

“No, I just— I’ll probably cut a finger open making a jack-o-lantern out of one of these. And it’s not like the resulting design would be worth the trouble to go get stitches from a medic downstairs.”

“But it’s already hollowed out. It has to be carved now or it’s just wasted.”

“Jigsaw can carve it. Or whichever of you two gets done first can carve a second one while Jigsaw finishes his first.” Hawkeye shrugs. “Trust me, I’m shit at arts and crafts. I’m going to be finding pumpkin guts in my hair for the rest of the week, and it’s a small miracle I only scraped my knuckles raw getting them out of this thing in the first place.”

He thumps the outside of the pumpkin fondly. “Can’t wait to see what one of you three turns this into. And hey, now I can watch what you guys are doing.”

“I am carving a cat,” Thor says confidently. “Perhaps even Liho, since she honors my shoulder with her presence.”

He holds up Kate’s phone and shows them all the image he found of a pumpkin that does look like a stylized cat’s face was carved into it, complete with lines denoting the ears at the top and some whiskers cut out to the sides. The spaces to the sides of the slit pupils look like they’re going to be hard to carve out without taking the pupil with them.

Kate doesn’t envy him his pumpkin design. 

“I’m making generic goofy smile number 4,823,” Kate says. “Results to be shown later. How about you, Jigsaw?”

He makes what she recognizes by now as the name signs for Lucky and the two kittens, and puts them in a row—Alpine, Lucky, Liho—and surrounds them with an air circle and some other thing she doesn’t know. 

“Oh, that’ll look neat, Jigs.” Hawkeye smiles. “He’s going to do Lucky sitting in front of a full moon with Alpine and Liho to either side of him.”

Another artistic pumpkin design, then. And this one straight out of his mind and not based on something he’s never heard of before like the witch on a broomstick. Kate decides that when she finishes carving first, because she will definitely finish first based on the other two designs, she won’t carve Hawkeye’s pumpkin for him. 

Not that it wouldn’t be fun to pick another face and try for a scary or a spooky pumpkin. But she kind of wants to know what the other two would come up with after warming up with this first pumpkin. Thor might come up with his own design, or he may consult her phone for another example to follow. But Jigsaw… It’s a complete mystery what he’d choose.

Just like it’s still a mystery to her why Jigsaw would think that Thor would zap him with lightning. But that’s not her place to ask about. She got mad at all those people downstairs for crowding around Jigsaw and asking personal questions, and she’s not about to do it, herself. Jigsaw deserves his privacy.

Maybe she shouldn’t have told Pepper about it.

Oh, that’s right. Pepper wanted pictures. She’d forgotten. 

“You should take pictures of us for Pepper,” Kate says, nudging Hawkeye’s phone with an elbow not covered in pumpkin juice. “She wanted some. With our faces for us to look at because we’re awesome and having fun, but also some that are just, like, the pumpkins and our hands. You know, for the website.”

“Right. For the website.” Hawkeye doesn’t sound very happy about it. But he does pick up his phone and take some pictures of each of them, zooming in to get the little black catloaf on Thor’s shoulder. “Hey Jigs, look over here and smile.”

Jigsaw turns his pumpkin around and smiles for the phone camera, clearly pleased with his progress. 

Kate blinks. It’s like he hasn’t done anything at all except cut a very thin meandering line around the middle of his pumpkin, and she can’t be sure what the line is going to end up being from the other side of the coffee table. But if he looks happy, that’s what matters. Carving pumpkins is about having fun with friends.

“Augh, I lost a pupil,” Thor moans, holding up a small piece of pumpkin. “Perhaps there is glue that will bond it back on?”

“Just use a toothpick,” Hawkeye says. “Drawer to the left of the sink, in the little blue box. Shake it until one comes out.”

Thor stands, careful of the kitten perched under his hair, and retrieves the entire box of toothpicks. “I may need another,” he says with a smile. “The cat has two eyes.”

Jigsaw leans over toward him and runs the tip of his scalpel-looking tool along the surface of Thor’s pumpkin too lightly to score the skin, and then leans back and smiles encouragingly. 

“So I am to cut the detailed portions out prior to the larger portions,” Thor says, nodding. “Yes. Yes, that could work. Many thanks, Jigsaw.”

When she’s finished with hers, Kate poses for a picture with it and then sets it on the coffee table so it can have its solo portrait taken. She understands why Pepper wanted to use more anonymous photos on the website before; Jigsaw would have been outed as Bucky right away if his face was on the internet for everyone to see clearly, and it would be weird to have all of their faces in various pictures except for his. 

But now that the cat is out of the bag, surely they can show faces on the website, and pictures with actual people in them instead of just a hand here or there would be more… eh, she doesn’t know. Humanizing, maybe. But Pepper knows what she’s doing. Kate sure wouldn’t.

Photos taken, though, Kate tries to lure one of the kittens over to play with her. Alpine takes the bait—Kate’s waggled fingers—and Kate pulls her hand back just in time to avoid getting scratched when the kitten pounces. 

“Vet says you aren’t supposed to do that,” Hawkeye says absently. “Encourages them to see fingers and toes as toys to pounce on and bite, and it’s only cute when they’re little.”

“Sorry.” 

Kate reaches under the chair behind her for a wand toy. There’s bound to be one there, whether it’s a teaser on a stick or a fishing type toy with string involved. There are cat toys all over the place, but the wand toys in particular end up dragged under the furniture by Alpine to be feasted on in relative privacy.

There’s one. She pulls it out and takes a look at what she’s found. It’s like a conductor’s baton with a little wiggly puffball at the tip of it, and the whole thing is neon orange. She waggles it about for Alpine and then tries to get it back from the ferocious response.

By comparison, Liho is content to chill out under the curtain of Thor’s hair while he carves. Talk about a tale of two kittens.

In another few minutes, Jigsaw carefully sets a massive C-shape of pumpkin aside, pokes at his pumpkin several times, and then turns it around to face them with a smile. 

Kate gapes at him. The thing really does look like exactly what Hawkeye said he was aiming to make. That line in the middle of the pumpkin must have been the detailed part, the actual outline of the silhouettes, and now what’s left when the moon around them was cut out is the three animals in profile, with some trees to the sides setting them in the park.

How the hell did he do that?

“Truly you are an artist,” Thor says. “I admire your carving greatly.”

Hawkeye grins and gives him a thumbs up, and then takes the requisite photos with and without Jigsaw in the picture. 

Jigsaw moves to place Hawkeye’s forlorn pumpkin in front of Thor, but Thor insists that Jigsaw be the one to carve it, which prompts Jigsaw to study the pumpkin very closely. Then he studies Hawkeye very closely. 

He’s not going to do a portrait, is he? Not that Kate would put it past him. Jigsaw is downright besotted with Hawkeye, which she has to admit is a good look on a boyfriend and fully reciprocated in this case. It would be just like him to want to commit Hawkeye’s face to pumpkin format for all to see.

Hawkeye seems to have guessed portrait, too, because he suddenly gets extra fidgety. He’d probably be horrible to try painting or sketching in an art class. Just a terrible model unable to sit still or hold a pose. 

But Jigsaw seems to be satisfied with what he sees, and gets to work on the carving. 

“So what are we doing next?” Kate asks. “Cleaning off slimy pumpkin seeds? Getting dinner early? Pepper would let us know if the crowd control situation was resolved, so we can’t do that yet.”

“Eh, I don’t know. We could watch something. Cake Off should have a new episode out.”

Kate blinks. Cake Off? That doesn’t sound like something Hawkeye would be very interested in, so maybe it’s Jigsaw’s favorite show. She likes it alright, though, so it should be fun to watch. Probably more fun than watching Hospital of Passion with the volume at zero and the captions on. She doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in that, other than it’s a hospital soap opera—telenovela, Hawkeye calls it—and it’s got a lot of passionate doctor characters sleeping with their patients and with each other.

“What is that?” Thor asks.

“It’s a baking competition,” Hawkeye says, “where the contestants make cakes look like other things by carving them and decorating them. A cake will look exactly like a sewing machine or a plate of tacos or something. It’s pretty neat.”

Huh. Maybe Hawkeye does like Cake Off.

Chapter Text

Natasha

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 8:00 p.m.—

The dining room next to the kitchen smells slightly smoky when Natasha makes her way down there after her long hot bath and well-deserved nap. She idly wonders what was burned in the kitchen, but more of her attention is drawn toward the dining table.

On the table, instead of a bunch of trays of food from the cafeteria below, there are four pumpkins, carved into jack-o-lanterns of varying complexity. 

There’s a really cute one that’s just a goofy face with squared off teeth in a wide grin, looking happy and fun. She’s betting that’s either Kate or Thor’s creation. She doesn’t know how skilled Thor is in making things with his hands. He might surprise her. 

Then there’s a kind of sad-looking cat design with a toothpick shoved in both eyes to hold a pair of slit pupils in place. That could be Clint’s, though she imagines if it is his, there was help along the way and considerable peer pressure involved in the design. 

There’s an impressive rendering of Clint’s partly shadowed face, which she assumes is Jigsaw’s work. It’s an excellent likeness, and really artistic. If it wasn’t for the subject matter and the knowledge that Steve had forgone a nap to play nice with people downstairs, she’d attribute this one to him. 

And then the last. Is that Kate’s or Thor’s? Kate seems more likely, as she’s interacted with Lucky and knows what he looks like, but somehow Natasha doesn’t think Kate would take the time to make something this detailed. 

Maybe they didn’t each do a pumpkin. Maybe Clint managed to sit it out. That puts Jigsaw doing two—the last two, Clint’s portrait and the silhouette of his pets in the park. Kate will have done the goofy face. Thor… why would Thor have chosen to carve a cat face? Was it Thor who sat it out and Clint who mangled the cat’s eyes?

But the fact still stands that Clint would have picked a design that required the least possible effort, and that’s not a cat face. That’s triangle eyes and nose, plain gaping mouth with maybe a notched tooth. 

So Thor made the cat pumpkin. 

It looks like they all had fun. It also sort of explains the smell of something having burned in the kitchen. 

She recalls Sam making a tray or two of roasted pumpkin seeds earlier, the day after the Halloween party. They’d been tasty; she’d eaten a few. But while she knows Jigsaw was in the kitchen with Sam the whole time, Natasha does not know how many of the instructions were successfully passed on to him. 

It’s very possible that Clint and the rest tried to recreate the roasted pumpkin seed process and got something wrong. Oven temperature, roasting time, maybe both. 

“Whoa, who tried to burn my kitchen down?” Stark says as he enters the dining room.

Natasha shrugs. “I think it was meant well, at least.”

She heads into the kitchen while he inspects the jack-o-lanterns on the table, and finds a baking sheet of blackened pumpkin seeds in the sink, along with a pair of scorched oven mitts and a kitchen towel with a hole burned into it, all of it soaked through with water splashed all over the counter by the sink. On the kitchen island, there’s a bag of raw pumpkin seeds. 

Natasha imagines the chaos that must have unfolded here. Kate would probably have cleaned up the water on the counter, at least, so either she wasn’t involved or she’d been rushed out of the kitchen by panicked other parties. Clint would not have cleaned a thing, but he’d be far more concerned about Jigsaw than about staying put to let someone else clean up. Thor’s a mystery. But Jigsaw…

Yes, Jigsaw would have panicked at the smoke detector going off and at the flaming tray of pumpkin seeds, would have panicked further when the fire spread to the oven mitts, and would have been helped by Kate or Clint—the kitchen towel says there was more than one person handling the baking sheet—someone tossed it all in the sink, and then someone else turned on the water. 

Kate probably. And she’ll be the one who turned off the oven, too. 

Natasha shakes her head. So much for that activity. 

“Did someone burn dinner?” Bruce asks as he joins her in the kitchen. 

“I think Jigsaw tried to roast pumpkin seeds, and it didn’t go well.”

Natasha hopes he’s sufficiently calmed down by now to actually come eat with the team for dinner. They arranged their jack-o-lanterns so nicely, after all. They deserve to be praised for their efforts. 

Sam and Steve have arrived, she sees as she heads back to the dining room. And they brought a cart with dinner on it, along with Lucky.

“These are really nice,” Steve says appreciatively. “I’ve never really tried carving anything, let alone a vegetable, but this looks like a lot of fun.”

“I’m guessing Jigsaw’s responsible for both the Barton portrait and the burning smell?” Sam asks.

Natasha nods. “Seems like they tried roasting seeds afterward. Kitchen’s a disaster zone. But it’ll keep.”

“Hey J,” Stark asks as Sam and Steve start unloading the cart onto the table around the jack-o-lanterns. “Is Jigglypuff coming to dinner, or is he hiding?”

“Jigsaw is being coaxed into joining you, Sir.” JARVIS pauses. “Whether Agent Barton’s attempts will see success is still uncertain.”

“Well tell them we have lots of food and need help eating it, and that no one’s mad about the kitchen.”

Sam sighs. “I’ll bring Lucky up to them. That’s bound to help. You guys should probably start eating while it’s hot.”

Thor

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 8:15 p.m.—

“I’m telling you, Jigs,” Clint Barton says, “you’re not in trouble. No one’s mad at you. You didn’t do anything wrong, and it’s a simple mistake.”

Thor eyes the door sheepishly, unsure whether it was meant to be closed thoroughly or left ajar. 

It is an easy thing to overhear one side of the conversation, and yet not easy to bear what must be the other, silent side of that conversation. 

He has not known Jigsaw long at all, and yet what he has seen of the man is such that he wishes Jigsaw did not feel such fear. 

If Jigsaw has been in the company of these friends for many months, as the days are arranged on Midgard, then he must surely know that there is no harm meant toward him, and no harm due him. 

Clint Barton had specified that Jigsaw had gone by the name of Bucky and had been assumed dead seventy Midgardian years ago, meaning that Jigsaw had suffered such torments as his enemies would have inflicted on him for all or at least most of that time. That is surely enough time to become accustomed to dire punishments for perceived slights or wrongdoings. 

Even with the care of a healer of the mind for some months, there have now been many minutes, many attempts to convince Jigsaw that all is well with the fire—that nothing important had burned, that no one was hurt, that no one would be hurt. Particularly, that no one was angry about it. 

And while no lie had been spoken, yet the truth has not yet been believed. 

“So, uh.” Kate Bishop looks up from her hands, which have held her attention during the half-heard conversation in the room which is apparently Jigsaw’s. “You and Jane, huh?”

Thor sighs. A relationship he has failed to maintain properly, yet perhaps a better thing to dwell on than on a conversation that might be meant to be private. “Alas, I did not visit her when I had the opportunity, but instead ate shawarma with my friends.”

Always have his friends been of the utmost importance, and his people, and this is not the first relationship to have broken apart on the rocks of his friendships.

“Long distance relationships are hard,” she says. “And Earth to Asgard is a hell of a long distance relationship. Don’t feel too bad—I once dated this guy Luke, and we couldn’t even last a whole summer break apart when he was just as far away as Pennsylvania. That’s not even a whole day’s drive away, and the train goes back and forth plenty.”

Kate Bishop shrugs. “You have to make a lot of effort and call all the time and plan to meet up when you don’t automatically see each other every other day in class.”

“You saw him in your classes?” Thor asks. “Every other day is rather often to spend time with a courtship partner.”

“Yeah, but we had the same class, so we saw each other at least three days a week, and we hung out after class, and met each other for lunch, and went out on the weekends…” Kate Bishop sighs. “But when you have to plan it all yourself and you have all this other stuff going on instead, it turns out they start thinking you’re cheating on them because you forget to call every day and tell them how your summer electives are going.”

“I do not believe Jane thinks I was cheating on her…” Thor says. “Just that I was too busy to spare the time to send a raven every once in a while.”

“A raven?” she asks. “What? Like she expected a bunch of pet birds or something?”

Thor shakes his head. “Not as pets, but as messengers. I have no phone. But I could have sent a raven. Maybe even two. Or three.”

Yes, if he could not visit on his search, he could have sent a raven. At least one to explain himself. Though how often would Jane have expected this? He has so little concept of the significance of time’s passing for the mortals of Midgard. 

“Well, sure, then” Kate Bishop says. “You could have sent her… birds. Like carrier pigeons or something but big and black and ominous.”

There’s a knock at the door, and it opens a crack to show the snout of a small dog—or a large one, Thor corrects, by Midgard’s standards—and a portion of Sam Wilson’s face. After a moment, the door opens the rest of the way, and the dog rushes inside to smell everything from the kittens to Kate Bishop, to Thor himself. 

“Why don’t you two head down to join the others and get started eating?” Sam Wilson says. “Jigsaw will feel better if he’s not keeping you from your dinner.”

The dog—Lucky, yes, Lucky—whines briefly and then goes in search of Clint Barton and Jigsaw, nosing that door open and slipping inside. 

Thor catches a murmur of thanks from Clint Barton that Lucky has arrived, and then he and Kate Bishop are being guided out into the hallway. Thor scoops up Mjolnir as they go, heading toward the elevator. 

“I confess to be glad we are excused from the area,” Thor says softly. “It did not feel right to listen, and yet I could do nothing but listen.”

“Yeah,” Kate Bishop says, “but it would have felt even worse slinking out of the room without letting them know, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“A valid point,” he says. 

“It’s mostly my fault, anyway,” she says. “I shouldn’t have been distracting everyone with arranging jack-o-lanterns on the table just so. If everyone had been in the kitchen instead, we would have known they were burning before they caught fire.”

Thor shakes his head. “No, I smelled them but did not say anything, thinking perhaps they were meant to smell like that. On Asgard, some nuts are burned on the fire so that their shells can be more easily opened. I should have known these were too small for that to be the case.”

They descend together in silence for a moment, and then the elevator opens out onto the kitchen and dining room floor of the Tower.

“Hey,” Steve Rogers says in greeting, looking sad. “How are things going up there?”

“Well, Lucky’s there now, so that’ll help.” Kate Bishop takes a seat. “But man, he’s so upset, and it’s not even his fault they burned.”

Thor considers asking the assembled diners what the cause of this fear is, why Jigsaw would be this upset about a mishap that everyone around him has assured him is of no concern, whether it is truly a holdover from his ill treatment at the hands of HYDRA. But it is possible they do not know, truly, and it is as possible that it is something he is not meant to know, something that is meant for others to be aware of.

Instead, he asks after the meaning of the toothpicks with the festive plastic at the tips in green and red. 

“That’s to say whether something has meat in it or not.” Natasha Romanoff smiles. “Green means it’s okay for Jigsaw to eat. He’s vegetarian. He’ll eat dairy and eggs, but not meat.”

“And even the cheese has to come from happy cows,” Tony Stark says around a bite of something that smells delicious in a cornmeal package. “Grocery budget exploded since he decided to go veggie.”

Thor serves himself from the dish closest to his plate—with a red toothpick, he sees—and finds that it is a layered dish of noodles, cheese, and a red tomato-meat sauce. 

“Does he become ill upon eating flesh?”

“Uh, maybe when you call it ‘flesh,’ yeah,” Kate Bishop mutters. 

“Meat, then.”

“No,” Dr Banner says with a smile. “He’s concerned about the welfare of animals—all animals, including those raised for meat. He was agitated when he learned the source of various meats, and has refused to eat them since.”

Thor hums his acknowledgement rather than speak with a full mouth. There are some, a very few, among his people with similar mentalities. It is surprising to find a warrior sharing the sentiment, though. As surprising as finding the sentiment among those raising the animals.

“And the happiness of the cows?” he asks once he has swallowed.

“All animal products coming into the Tower are now sourced from humane, ethical farms and ranches, as free-range as possible,” Dr Banner says. “This is far more expensive than the alternative, and much less convenient, but it feels like the right answer to Jigsaw’s concerns.”

“And because he knows all the animals involved are as happy as they can be,” Natasha Romanoff adds, “he generally doesn’t do more than frown about other people eating meat.”

“Kinda weird, when you think about all the murdering and chopping people up he did before getting here,” Tony Stark says. “But the guy’s got a soft spot for animals. St Francis of Assisi, really, if he was okay with slaughtering people. And was a cyborg. You know, because of the arm.”

“We know, Tony,” Steve Rogers says. “Let’s just eat.”

Sam

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 8:30 p.m.—

Sam taps his knuckles against the door to Jigsaw’s room, but carefully refrains from entering, or even looking in. 

“It’s Sam,” he says. “Can I come in?”

“He says it’s fine, yeah,” Clint answers. 

Sam had figured that would be the answer. That, or someone shutting the door with him outside of the room. He opens the door the rest of the way and comes inside. 

Jigsaw is a lump in the center of his mattress, which is piled high with blankets and pillows. He’s more than half buried in the same. The very tip of his stuffed shark’s nose is exposed, and his face and one hand, and not much else. Lucky has settled on the mattress as well, half on top of the lump that is Jigsaw, his mouth open and his tongue lolling to one side.

Clint looks up at him from where he’s sitting cross-legged on a corner of the mattress and frowns.

“We didn’t mean to almost set the kitchen on fire.”

Sam grins. “I’m sure you didn’t. I take it you set the oven too high?”

Clint shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. We put it at broil, because that’s kind of like roast, right? And then we started trying to put the pumpkins on the table so that they could be decorations for dinner, and we couldn’t decide what order they went in, and then all hell broke loose.”

Jigsaw lifts up a single finger in agreement. 

“So it was like that, huh?” Sam says, keeping his voice light and nonjudgmental. “Well, for the record, ‘broil’ is the highest temperature available, and it’s way too high for pumpkin seeds. You want 350, max.”

“How hot’s ‘broil?’” Clint asks. 

“Five hundred?” Sam shrugs. “Maybe 550. Depends on the oven. But hey, none of that matters, really. You’ll get JARVIS to help you next time, and it’ll go way better.”

Honestly, he’s not sure how they went so wrong with the temperature under JARVIS’s watchful eyes in the first place, but…

Clint looks decidedly guilty. “JARVIS might have said it was too hot, but I might have left it on broil. I thought it would cook faster.”

“Sounds like it did,” Sam laughs. That explains it. “You guys want to come down to the dining room and have some dinner while it’s still mostly warm?”

“What do you think, Jigs?” Clint asks. “Dinner with the others and then some time with Zoe, and then we head to bed early so you can meet with Yasmin tomorrow morning?”

The blanketed heap hardly moves on the mattress.

“You know,” Sam says. “I once tried to serve my mom breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day when I was a little kid. I knew enough to crack some eggs into a pan and turn the stove on. And I knew to yell ‘fire’ when the smoke detector went off. She ran downstairs and found me stop-drop-and-rolling on the kitchen floor while the eggs burned that pan so bad it was never the same.”

“Aw, I bet you were a cute little kid, Wilson.”

“Damn straight I was. Cutest little kid in the whole neighborhood.” Sam looks pointedly at Jigsaw. “And you know what, Jigsaw? My mom spent the rest of the morning teaching me how to make scrambled eggs in the kitchen I thought I’d nearly burned down. No one was angry then, and no one is angry now.”

Sam gauges the effect of his words and then continues. 

“And you know what? If my mom had been angry at me, it still would have been fine. Sometimes we get angry at each other, and that’s okay. She still loved me, even whenever she did get angry. We’re all friends here, and even if someone were angry at you, which they aren’t, it would be okay. Something to talk with Yasmin about tomorrow, if you don’t already have enough saved up from the last two days.”

Jigsaw signs “true” with a question in his eyes that doesn’t make it all the way to his typical question sign. 

“Of course it’s true,” Sam says. “It’s true that no one is angry, or even upset, about the pumpkin seeds or any of that. And it’s true that it would be fine if they were. What matters is that we all want you to come eat dinner with the team, if you’re comfortable doing that. We want to spend time with you.”

Jigsaw looks hesitant, but ultimately nods and signs OK.

“Great. I’m going to head down and let you two have a few minutes to get ready for dinner. See you soon, okay?”

“Thanks, Wilson. We’ll be down in a few.”

Chapter Text

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—

Pepper sets down her tablet with the latest of the tabloid articles on it and sighs. “The Jigsaw Puzzle: Identity Solved, or Stolen Valor?” reads the headline. The article itself, she doesn’t bother to read; not now, at least.

She had expected to see a dozen articles from Carlton Badger of the Honeybadger’s Den since Jigsaw was recognized, and he hasn’t disappointed. But he’s also not alone. 

There are at least twenty different publications—she won’t give them the dignity of calling them news sources—calling her statement flimsy, full of holes, and various degrees of untrue. 

But she’d said everything there was to say in the statement, and even more had been said the last time Jigsaw was part of the news cycle, with that S.H.I.E.L.D. leak about an unsanctioned attempt to replicate Project Rebirth. That one had painted him as an unwilling test subject, which is just as true as the rest of what’s been officially released, though it casts some confusion on who, exactly, had been doing the experimentation, and when.

Things might be different now if they’d only confirmed Jigsaw’s identity as Bucky Barnes when they’d released the initial press release back in September, but Pepper can see how such a thing would have been avoided by S.H.I.E.L.D., ever insistent on maintaining secrecy and ever averse to the kind of spotlight that particular announcement would bring on them. 

And it’s true that at the time, Jigsaw had rejected every part of Barnes, preferring to maintain a blank spot there rather than fill it in with the truth. The team had argued against shoehorning him into Barnes’s identity, and they’d been right for it. But now… Now that complicates things. 

Now it opens them up to the questions of “Why now?” and “How did Rogers not know?” that they could have avoided altogether. 

Because to answer those questions is to give the public too much access to Jigsaw’s personal life, his struggles with identity, his recovery journey. Could she answer the questions? Could she say that they’d realized early on that this wasn’t the Bucky Barnes anyone could have expected, that he’d had no knowledge or recognition of his former identity, that they’d honored his wishes to be known as Jigsaw, that he’d only recently come to a point of accepting his history as belonging to him?

Yes, of course she could. And someday, she might have to. But right now, they’re looking at a whole horde of reporters of all stripes piling on the questions, many of them starting with those pesky “Why now?” sentiments. 

Pepper had given them enough pieces in her statement to put together a basic timeline of Barnes having been captured in 1945 and held until very recently as a prisoner of war. She’s given them a reminder of his lost memories. These things should remind the public about the experimentation and HYDRA, and the need for deprogramming and rehabilitation.

She can’t think of anything they’ve outright stated that can be refuted indisputably. 

But there are still the calls for more transparency. Calls for interviews with Jigsaw, for a press conference with the entire team where the Avengers can be grilled for answers, for the government to be involved via a special hearing. 

And he is simply not ready for any such thing, and might never be ready. Not only that, but the public isn’t ready for it, either. They may think they want to hear from him directly, or that they want to know exactly what happened during those gaps, how he was involved in the intelligence community while still being a captive… 

But she doesn’t think the press is even ready to watch him walk up to a podium. They are expecting—demanding—someone put together and prepared to defend themselves against an onslaught of questions, and Jigsaw moves like a wild animal full of predatory grace and doesn’t always follow questions to their logical conclusions.

The very best they can offer the public is an interview with an interpreter on hand and the questions already planned in advance. And that isn’t going to satisfy many of these demands for clarity.

Pepper doesn’t think the public even deserves any more clarity than has already been offered. Jigsaw is not a public figure the way a politician might be, and he has a right to his privacy. Especially as he’s been essentially pardoned through S.W.O.R.D. He has as much right to privacy as the rest of the Avengers, and the world isn’t beating down Bruce’s door to demand to know how he can live with himself after all the damage Hulk has caused over the years. 

“Ms Potts?” one of her assistants asks in the doorway. “The Halloween village is ready for the children this afternoon. I restocked each of the candy bowls, the stalls with the gluten-free candy selections are more clearly marked now, and I have the photo booth set up. Alice is ready to take pictures as soon as the lunch shift is over.”

Pepper smiles. This is something she can focus on without being distressed. 

“Thank you, Mark. The next priority is the situation with the charging stations. I’d like to spread things out a bit more so that people have a little breathing room while charging their devices.”

And also so that it’s easier to see that no one leaves anything behind whether that be recording device or a charging cable. It would also be nice to put in a bank of tables along the walls where people can come work remotely while their power is off. One thing the Tower has in spades is clean energy.

“Ms Potts,” comes JARVIS’s soothing tones after a long stretch of schedule wrangling with Charlene, “I regret to inform you that your wind-down time has arrived. I’d advise you to begin wrapping up today’s business so that you can enjoy your evening.”

Pepper looks across the work table at Charlene and sighs, setting the tablet with all the potential dates and venues down. 

“Thank you, JARVIS,” she says. “I’d like to work a little longer. Please remind me in an hour.”

“Certainly, Ma’am.”

“Both Hill and Rambeau can make themselves available on Thursday the 8th,” Charlene says. “That gives us enough press coverage to avoid being accused of trying to bury the story, but it’s close enough to the end of the week that it might get buried anyway, which would help.”

Pepper nods. “I wish Nick would agree to come as well. Or Phil. I don’t want it to look like the women are cleaning up after a mess. We need a mixed team of presenters beyond what we have between agencies.”

Charlene shrugs. “What we have are two Marias and a Pepper. I’m sure Rogers would gladly add to the roster of presenters, if you really…”

“No, no. Steve would be a dynamite stick in a barrel of fish. It would be an utter disaster.”

Charlene laughs. 

“Well, at least that’s a full week out,” Pepper says. “Let’s set it up. We’ll do it in the Tower, in Conference Hall B. That will keep press conference attendees away from anyone still needing the shelter areas.”

That should work. They’ll get the materials ready and sent out by end of day tomorrow, and they’ll have plenty of time tomorrow to nail down the story they intend to tell. Each presenter can have a couple of talking points, and they can hold a practice round if needed over  teleconference, though both Marias are well versed in press conferences and shouldn’t need one. 

“I’ll see to the physical logistics if you’ll handle the story points, Charlene. I hate to wait a whole week when the phones have been ringing around the clock about this, but…”

“I still think this Thursday would work better. Even with the accusations of burying the story.” Charlene taps the calendar spread out between them. “Hill can make it for that, and Rambeau is rearranging her schedule to try. If we schedule it for the 1st, that’ll put some pressure on her to make it happen.”

Pepper sighs. If they work through the night assembling materials and send the invitations out first thing on the 31st, it could work. Flights should be starting up again, so some people should be able to get in for the conference if they want to, though many will be stymied by grounded flights.

“I wish we’d caved and done a full press release instead of our statement,” she mutters. “Or scheduled a press conference right then and there, for that matter. Then we wouldn’t be scrambling for the likes of Carlton Badger.”

“There are legitimate news outlets clamoring for a story as well,” Charlene reminds her. “As hurricane news has died down, this other has become more timely.”

Pepper nods, but she doesn’t have to like it. “Alright. Let’s draft the press release, expand on the statement we sent out earlier, and promise that press conference for this Thursday. It’ll be another long night.”

And it will be. Running a hurricane shelter is more of a task than hosting an auction or a gala. The event is longer, the stakes are higher, the need greater. It’s been a week of long nights making this happen, and early mornings besides. 

And tonight will be more of the same. 

“JARVIS, please have someone send us something to eat in an hour. It’ll be a while before we go to bed.”

“Yes Ma’am. Would you like one of the designers to come down and help with the press conference materials?”

Pepper nods. “Yes, in an hour. With the food—enough for three of us. We should have something to design by then.”

“As you wish.”

It really is nice having JARVIS around.

It’s a quarter after midnight when they have the press release and all the press conference materials ready to be sent out in the morning to a well-chosen handful of reporters, most of whom are local to ensure that they have minimal travel issues impeding their attendance at the conference.

It’s short notice for such a thing, but Pepper has to admit that Charlene’s right. This isn’t breaking news that they can release when they feel prepared. It’s already broken, and this is a conference meant to patch up holes so the bucket holds water again. It won’t hold for another week while the press gets their news stories lined up.

Pepper stands up and stretches, and then thanks Lance from the design team for his work, promising him that he’ll see it reflected in his next payroll deposit at triple his normal rate.

That is how to maintain loyalty among a staff as large and diverse as that of Stark Industries. You ask for above and beyond only occasionally and when necessary, and you pay well for the efforts. You make sure people know they and their work are appreciated. And you give praise where it’s due and often. Generosity goes a long way.

She’s glad Lance was one of the Stark Industries volunteers who’d stayed in the Tower during the hurricane to help out with the relief efforts. He’d done an amazing job, and the press conference materials don’t look at all like last-minute efforts the night before delivery. They look as though there’d been plenty of time to get every detail exactly in the right place.

Pepper gives Charlene a congratulatory wave and promises to meet up in the morning for one more pass through the materials just in case something slipped past them all, and then, instead of getting herself to bed, Pepper sits back down and reads it once more, just to reassure herself that it will work, that this isn’t a disaster, and that they will be properly prepared on Friday with a foundation like this one.

Avengers Initiative Confirms Jigsaw-Barnes Connection

NEW YORK CITY, Nov 1, 2012 — The Avengers Initiative, in conjunction with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) and the Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division (S.W.O.R.D.), is pleased to follow up on Sunday’s special statement with further details regarding the identity of Jigsaw, its eighth official member. 

“I’d know my best friend anywhere,” says super soldier Steve Rogers (Captain America). “I recognized him immediately. And we have the records of his capture and imprisonment as well. But we wanted to respect his memories and his wishes, which at the time didn’t align with his former identity as Bucky.”

Jigsaw continues his deprogramming and rehabilitation with the help of a qualified therapeutic staff and frequent evaluations by S.W.O.R.D. personnel. Says Director Maria Rambeau, “Our assessment is that Jigsaw does not pose a threat to civilians or the general populace. He was used as a sentient weapon by HYDRA and others, and those who used him are the ones responsible for his prior actions. They no longer have control over him.”

Jigsaw works to serve his community in times of distress, just as the others on the Avengers Initiative do within their strengths. Prior to Hurricane Sandy, Jigsaw aided in setting up the Avengers Tower hurricane relief supplies and shelter. During the storm, he and fellow Avenger Clint Barton (Hawkeye) helped the relief efforts further by walking the area with Jigsaw’s pets, dog Lucky and kittens Alpine and Liho, offering emotional support. Lucky also accompanied Sam Wilson (Falcon) on his counseling rounds.

“The guy’s gentle as anything when it’s not a mission, and that’s something you don’t see in a lot of people who’ve been through what he’s been through,” says Wilson. “His kittens are meaner than he is, and they’re kittens.”

For additional information, reach out to Pepper Potts.

Yes. It’ll do. It’ll do nicely. 

She sends it to Maria Hill and Maria Rambeau, sends a copy of the quoted material to Steve and Sam to get their approval and sign-off first thing, and finally, finally lets herself head for bed.

Chapter Text

Clint

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 11:00 p.m.—

“Today wasn’t so bad, was it?” Clint asks after Katie-Kate is off to bed and even Natasha has slipped off to her own room. 

Jigsaw shakes his head and gives Alpine a final swipe with the brush. “Bad no,” he signs. “Also yes.”

“Well, yeah, some of it was bad. The pumpkin seeds were bad, though Wilson said he’d show us all how to do it right with the seeds we have left.” 

And they have three pumpkins’ worth of seeds left, easily. Maybe they’ll make a sweet batch like Wilson hinted they might. No telling what that’d be like. Clint’s never had a sweet pumpkin seed. And while he’s been given pumpkin bread and been promised that it’s sweet, he’s never put anything that sounded as disgusting as pumpkin bread in his mouth. Pumpkin pie, sure. But that’s different. That’s pie, and he’s buried it in so much whipped cream he could hardly taste it, anyway.

Clint yawns. He’s not usually this tired this early at night, but it’s been a really full day. A really full couple of days.

“And we didn’t get to go back down to the second and third floors. That wasn’t great.”

It wasn’t that Pepper had failed to get a small conference room cleared out on a hallway where they could block off access to anyone but the guardians of the kids who were playing with kittens. She managed that. But after the pumpkin seed disaster, Jigsaw had been eager to hide and hard to convince to do anything else until dinner.

“Loud,” Jigsaw signs, and then “pain” with a tug on an ear. 

Clint nods. “Yeah, the smoke detector is pretty loud.”

He watches Jigsaw give Liho a few brushes, though that kitten is sleek enough already that no fur comes away with the brush strokes. 

“You feeling like watching something to calm down from the day?”

Jigsaw sits back on his heels and gives Liho an idle belly rub when she repositions herself to flop down at his side, eager to continue getting his attention.

Clint kind of hopes the answer is no. He doesn’t know how much energy Jigsaw has left today, but Clint is running on empty and he’s going to fall asleep if they settle on the sofa and get comfortable. He won’t even make it halfway through an episode of Cake Off.

After some internal debate, Jigsaw shakes his head and points to Clint’s room. “Sleep,” he signs. “Kisses.”

Clint smiles. Can’t argue with that. 

He checks the water level in the pet fountains, makes sure they’re not going to run dry overnight or anything despite the possibility of the kittens playing in their fountain and getting water everywhere. Looks good. There’s a hair tie in the kitten fountain, which Clint takes out and tucks into a pocket. But otherwise it’s all in order. 

While Jigsaw gives Lucky a thorough brushing with a larger brush—and collects clouds of fur with every stroke—Clint heads for Jigsaw’s bathroom to deposit the soggy hair tie and get Jigsaw’s brush. If everyone is getting brushed down tonight, so is Jigsaw. It’ll help him relax before bed, at the very least. 

A traitorous little piece of his mind dives into the other possibilities that could come from brushing Jigsaw’s hair. He could transition from the brush to his fingers, combing them through Jigsaw’s hair. And from there, he could massage Jigsaw’s shoulder and neck again. That could lead to kisses like it had the last time. Jigsaw already indicated that kisses are in the forecast. 

And from kisses, maybe more time spent exploring Jigsaw’s skin under his shirt. It’s been some time since Clint has seen the specific scars littering that skin, though he can never forget where the horrifying C-BAR scar is across Jigsaw’s lower back, with the seventeen tally marks below it. 

That one and that bastard Rumlow’s name and tallies on his inner thighs. 

But Clint will not get mad about it now. He won’t. Jigsaw is already worried about people being angry at him and Clint doesn’t want to give him any reason to suspect that the anger rightly directed toward the dead men who hurt Jigsaw is directed at Jigsaw himself.

No, even as the anger about that rises up at the thought of those scars, those men, the things they did, Clint squashes it down again. Not the time. Not the place. He’s going to focus on the feel of Jigsaw’s ragged skin with the scarred lines across it, but in terms of it being Jigsaw he’s feeling, not fucking “I was here” graffiti tags left by asshole rapists.

Yeah. It’ll be as good as the last time. It’ll be— He’s getting ahead of himself, though. He hasn’t even asked Jigsaw whether he’d like his hair brushed. Step one is important. 

He can’t go being all pushy, skipping ahead to where they left off, asking for more than his partner can give. That’s a mistake he won’t make. 

The very last thing he wants to do is rush Jigsaw into anything, or pressure him for anything. If there were ever a man who deserved to pause along the way and thoroughly enjoy every good thing as he comes to it, Jigsaw is that man. Clint’s not going to be the obnoxious hiker on the trail getting everyone to hurry up or be left behind while some people want to look for birds or smell the flowers. 

Although, he would definitely like to explore the parts of the trail ahead that Jigsaw is far too skittish to be ready for—eventually, they might get there. And he knows there will be parts of the trail that are just plain blocked off, no hiking allowed past this point. That may change over time, but he’s pretty sure they won’t hike up the tallest mountain together. They’ll at least be wandering around in the foothills having a good time, though. 

Does he want to hike up the mountain? Well, yeah, kinda. He’ll probably explode if he doesn’t get up there at some point. But he doesn’t have to bring Jigsaw up there with him if Jigsaw doesn’t feel comfortable up there. He can do that part of the hike alone and come back to rejoin Jigsaw afterward. Yeah. Maybe hide that part of the hike in his bathroom, during a shower, so Jigsaw doesn’t even have to know he hiked at all.

Clint startles when he sees that Jigsaw has joined him in the bathroom, and is studying him as though trying to read his mind from about two feet away. 

“Augh! A-are you done brushing Lucky?” Stupid question, obvious answer. Still, he waits for Jigsaw’s nod before continuing. “I wanted to brush your hair before bed, if you’re okay with that. Try to calm us down a bit, distract us from the day.”

Jigsaw nods again and reaches out for the hairbrush in Clint’s hand before pointing to Clint’s head.

“Oh, you want to brush my hair first?”

Clint doesn’t know that his hair needs much by way of brushing, but he agrees and draws Jigsaw out of the bathroom and into the living room, settling himself on the ground in front of where Jigsaw sits on the sofa. 

And it is nice, he supposes, getting his hair brushed. He usually just works at it with his fingers, more pushing the hair where it needs to go than brushing it. That’s easy enough when he keeps it as short as he does. Every few weeks, he heads down to the barber in the public area of the Tower, gets a trim, mostly because he wants to avoid having to do anything to his hair in the mornings but finger-comb it into place. 

Jigsaw, of course, never gets his cut by the barber downstairs or by anyone else, so his hair just keeps getting longer. 

After a few strokes with the brush, Clint closes his eyes and lets the sensation of the bristles on his scalp relax him. Those bristles feel very nice, and the hand on the side of his neck feels nice, and the prickle against his thigh tells him a kitten is climbing him. Alpine? Liho? Probably Liho. Alpine was up in the cat tree last he saw.

It’s all just very… soothing. Domestic, maybe, too. Something he’s only ever known here in the Tower, surrounded by people he trusts who trust him back. Living so close to Natasha, his closest, dearest friend, instead of merely in the same city. Sitting in front of Jigsaw, a man he would probably marry if he didn’t have the memory of Bobbi and divorce. With pets, too. His friends, his confidante, his lover, his pets by proxy. 

Getting his hair brushed.

It’s all so simple. It all fits together beautifully. There are some hiccups, sure. His partner is afraid of loud noises and jumps to the conclusion that he’s in trouble way too quickly. And eats entirely too many vegetables. And has a tendency to murder his enemies in cold blood.

But the simplicity of this moment, the way— 

Ick. The way Lucky’s tongue swipes across his face. 

Clint laughs and raises his arms to scratch behind the dog’s ears. 

Yes, this is great.

Jigsaw

—New York City | Tuesday 30 October 2012 | 11:30 p.m.—

It snuggles closer to the other asset under the covers strewn across the two assets, pulls a leg up over the other asset’s calves, slings the flesh arm across the other asset’s stomach. The other asset is wearing a sleeveless undershirt and some shorts named after boxes tonight, which is not as form-fitting as the soft and stretchy pants, but does leave the other asset’s legs nicely bare. 

The other asset is a firm, muscular presence to cuddle closer to, with a layer of softness that is so good to hold onto. And the fish-looking soft thing on the other side of the other asset’s nest is where the two little cats have decided to cuddle close for the night. The dog is with them, curled up where this asset’s feet and legs would be if this asset were not practically on top of the other asset instead.

The flesh fingers draw idle stars and swirls across the other asset’s sleeveless shirt over the other asset’s abs. The shirt is not as soft as the other asset’s skin would be, but it will do nicely. It can feel the strength in the other asset’s body through the sleeveless shirt. Can rest the chin against the top of the other asset’s shoulder and press the cheek against the other asset’s skin. It is good.

The other asset is not asleep yet. It can tell because the other asset’s abs are twitching occasionally in response to the drawing fingers. It is not pressing lightly enough to tickle, though. Just hard enough to feel the contours of the other asset, the dip of the other asset’s navel, the—

“Can’t sleep?” the other asset asks softly. 

It does not want to sleep. It wants to feel the scars on the other asset’s torso, wants to trail skin fingers along them, along the paths it memorized back when the other asset would come out with just the towel around the hips, looking for soft things to wear for the day.

But that is too complicated to get across in the dark, and so it taps the other asset’s abs once to indicate that the other asset has guessed correctly. 

“Want to talk about it?” 

It wants to kiss about it. But they have already shared many kisses before coming to the nesting room and settling into the other asset’s nest, and even some kisses afterward as well. It is the time for sleeping and not kissing, and the other asset is very tired. It would not like to keep the other asset awake.

It makes the S-shape with the flesh hand and moves it along the other asset’s chest in the sign for “sorry.”

“Wait, what are you sorry for?” The other asset scoots away from it just long enough to pull the string under the lamp on the side table. “And why are you pouting?”

It signs that it wants to kiss, but that the other asset wants to sleep, and that it is sorry for keeping the other asset from sleeping when the other asset is so tired, especially because the other asset is only so tired in the first place because of all the people trying to ask questions earlier, and the pumpkin seeds burning. 

Or it tries to sign all of that. It is not sure how well it does, since many of the signs escape its grasp and have to get added in later or else be mimed instead of signed, and other signs bring themselves out again to be repeated a few times when it tries to move on. But the other asset is good at understanding it. The other asset should be able to get most of the meaning out of the signs. 

“You want to make out some more?” the other asset asks. “More kissing?” The other asset grins. “There’s no need to be sorry about that. That’s way better than sleeping.”

The other asset turns to face it, both assets facing each other in the nest, soft blankets pushed to their waists so that they can sign in the lamplight. So cozy. 

“And don’t worry about the pumpkin seeds. Nothing important caught fire. No one was hurt. And we still have lots more seeds to roast when Wilson can teach us how. As for all those people asking questions downstairs, they’re just curious. It’ll probably be less of an issue tomorrow.”

So it did manage to get the meaning across. It is glad.

It is also glad when the other asset raises up the hem of the sleeveless sleeping shirt and brings this asset’s hands to press against the skin it had so wanted to draw the shapes on earlier. 

“Is this okay?” the other asset asks, pulling the sleeveless sleeping shirt down over the hands.

It nods happily and pulls the other asset closer to it so that it can kiss the other asset’s soft lips. The metal fingers splay out over the other asset’s abdomen, pressing lightly to feel more details without pushing the other asset away, and the flesh fingers ghost along the other asset’s spine at the small of the other asset’s back. 

The other asset’s skin is so soft, with the occasional faint ridge where the other asset has persevered through injury and come out the stronger for it. So strong, the muscles in the other asset’s back; so strong, the other asset’s abdominal muscles. The other asset is a powerful one, even without enhancements. 

It wonders if the other asset enjoys putting hands under its shirt as much as it is enjoying putting hands under the other asset’s shirt. There are many more contours to this asset’s skin than the other asset’s. More scars on the front and back and sides of this asset’s torso. Lots more to explore, but also more for the other asset to be upset about.

It does remember how the other asset has been angry about some of those scars, maybe all of them. But it just as strongly remembers how that anger had been directed at others and not at it. How it was the quiet anger, the dangerous anger, the anger that spelled out destruction for those who hurt it.

And it has not seen that anger in action, but it knows the results of that anger in action: B-RUM is dead. 

It pushes at the fear response to that name, to that handler, tries to push it away so that it can enjoy the present instead of thinking of the past, like Yasmin has explained that it is okay to do sometimes. It is a little successful, but not entirely successful, and so it focuses on the other asset’s actions instead of B-RUM’s actions. 

If it has to think about B-RUM now, it can think about B-RUM being dead.

The other asset killed B-RUM for it, shot B-RUM with the tiny fangs on sticks and slit B-RUM’s throat wide open so that the blood would drain out. In Siberia, the base where it is always cold. Where the others from the wolf pen had been dead. Where it had been together with them under the handler from before. 

From before the fun, before the pushing into it, when the only scars were from researchers carving into it to obtain the data.

The other asset is not angry at Jigsaw for having the scars, but is angry at the agents, the operatives, who made the scars. Even though it has killed many of the ones who marked the skin with the names and the tallies, the lines, the five and the five and the five and the two. Had killed all but one of them that were alive when it was free to give itself missions. 

And the other asset finished that work, achieved the mission objective, took B-RUM and all of B-RUM’s evil out of the world. 

Let all of B-RUM’s evil drain out. 

It does not want to think about B-RUM. It wants to think about the other asset.

It imagines the other asset’s arms and back, shooting the tiny fangs on sticks, the other asset’s fingers—so capable and gentle and strong—on the bow, on the feathery bits. The other asset’s hand gripping the fang and sawing open B-RUM’s throat, the other asset’s arm, dragging the talon across B-RUM’s neck.

The other asset is strong of will and purpose, is together with it, wants to protect it, and has protected it. And it has will, also, stolen away and kept safe. Has purpose, too. Protects the other asset and so many others. Yes, it will think of that, of these two assets and their joint will and purpose.

It sighs happily into their kisses. The other asset has done the very most for it, has killed for it, and it has not-killed—has spared—for the other asset, leaving the tracksuit men alive when it did not have to and did not want to. Yasmin calls that compromise. These two assets compromise, not so that neither party gets what it wants, but so that both parties can be happy enough with what they get.

They are perfectly matched, the same as, together, always. Two assets, in love.

Chapter Text

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 5:30 a.m.—

The other asset is fast asleep, is breathing so deeply, with soft noises that are not a snore but something close to it. 

It does not want to wake the other asset up, even though it has had terrible sleeping images of B-RUM crawling from the rubble of the Siberia base and coming after it, of B-RUM somehow being almost alive despite dying. Of B-RUM not being able to be killed again because he has already died, and there being nothing that anyone can do to stop him now.

The B-RUM in the night images had been pale, bloodless, with a gaping wound across his throat where the other asset had sliced him open. But even without his blood, B-RUM had been able to push into it, to withstand many many many stabs to the torso, to the face, stabs deep into the dead flesh that brought forth no blood, no evil, but only released more cruelty.

The B-RUM it had dreamed about carved the name and the tallies into the flesh, and pushed into it, and held the white hot brand against the flesh and—

And had pressed thumbs into the back, sometimes as if working out knots in the muscles, and sometimes as if trying to poke a hole in the back for him to push into. 

The dog had woken it up, and it is thankful. The dog is the best dog, it is sure. And it has taken comfort in the dog’s hot tongue and soft fur, in rubbing the dog’s blanket-soft ears and pressing the skin face against the dog’s neck, breathing in the smell of clean dog. 

But it also wants the other asset’s comfort. Wants to tell the other asset that B-RUM could rise up out of the rubble and come for it, still. It is not sure that could actually happen, but if it could, that would be terrible. How would they kill B-RUM if the handler was already dead and could not die again? How would they stop him?

The other asset is asleep, though. Was so tired last night, and did not get as much sleep as possible because it asked for kisses. 

It lets the eyes wander over the other asset’s torso—now without the sleeveless shirt because the other asset had dragged it up over the head and tossed it away last night while they kissed. It trails the eyes along the skin, pausing to take in each of the beautiful marks littering the expanse of the other asset’s chest. 

There, a raised constellation of scars from where the tracksuit men had put out cigars and cigarettes when they held the other asset prisoner. And there, there, there, faint lines where the tracksuit men had drawn blades across the other asset. It really should have killed some of them. If it had been able to determine which of them had hurt the other asset…

That one in the other asset’s side, that one is a bullet scar from a mission. Budapest, the other asset had said, but had not elaborated on. Natasha will tell you if you ask, the other asset had said. It has not asked the ballerina woman about Budapest. If the other asset does not want to talk about it, then it will not talk about it, even with the ballerina woman.

And this one, across the other asset’s bicep, a glancing blow, but one that scarred. Also from a mission, this one in this very city. One where the other asset had worn the Ronin tac gear and had been killing tracksuit men with the ballerina woman. There are more like it on the other asset’s back—the other asset does not watch the back very well in a fight, and this was before the ballerina woman fully trusted the other asset.

Now the ballerina woman trusts the other asset with everything, trusts the other asset to the fullest extent she can trust anyone or anything, trusts the other asset the way she trusts that the sun comes up in the mornings. The other asset trusts the ballerina woman, too, just as much. And it trusts the other asset like the sun. It does not yet trust the ballerina woman to the same extent, but Yasmin says trust takes time.

Yasmin. It is Wednesday now. There will be a morning session with Yasmin! And an afternoon session! Everything will go back to normal now, and there will be no more missed sessions. 

What will it talk about with Yasmin? 

The angry-okay connection, maybe. It still does not quite believe that it is okay for others to be angry at it, that nothing bad will come from that. Angry people lash out, angry people punish, angry people strike it and are cruel to it. It remembers that the other asset’s father would be angry and throw things and hit the other asset when the other asset was just a tiny innocent and could not have done wrong.

Even the other asset had looked surprised when the flying man had said that his mother had not been angry about the burned eggs and had not hurt the flying man because of the burned eggs. 

Maybe assets are just different from people so fundamentally that even as tiny innocents they are still to be treated harshly for infractions and disciplined so that they do not mess up again, even before they become assets officially.

It wonders how the other asset became an asset officially. It knows that it was once the bucky, and that the bucky was a person, but it became an asset when it stopped being the bucky. Did the other asset become an official asset when the purple crescents were added behind the other asset’s ears? When the other asset became unable to hear without them, just like it lost the flesh left arm and needed the metal one?

But if the other asset only became an asset then, then why did the other asset’s father lash out like that? The man must have been evil. Like the man in the motel room the night it killed the man who drove the transport vehicles. That man had become a pile of meat in the motel closet, but the other man who was going to push into the woman, who had already been beating her with the leather belt—unacceptable—had merely been carved with stars.

It wishes that it could carve up the other asset’s father with stars. The other asset’s father was evil, had hurt the other asset, had hurt the other asset’s dog, too. And the other asset’s mother. And a brother, as well. Yes, it would carve so many stars into the other asset’s father if the man was alive.

But that is not something it needs to bother Yasmin with. It cannot do that, cannot slice the evil out of that man, and so there is no point to discussing it. They should discuss other things. 

Things like how is it okay for people to be angry at it. Is it not supposed to do everything it can to make the others in the team that is not a cell happy so that they are not mad at it? How can the goal be to make others feel happy and be pleased with it if it is also okay not to meet the goal and for others to be angry and displeased with it?

Yasmin is waiting for it when it gets to the therapy room, even though it arrives before it is time for their session. The door is ajar, though, and that is the sign that it is welcome to come in. So it slips into the room with a big smile on the face and waves an excited greeting before closing the door.

“I’ve missed our sessions, Jigsaw,” Yasmin says with an answering smile. “And I see you’re just as eager to resume our meetings as I am, getting here twenty minutes early.”

Yasmin says she is eager, but she looks tired. Maybe she should still be sleeping.

But before it can suggest that, she is asking it how it feels this morning, and they are starting their session.

“So the thing you’d like to focus our morning session on is anger, then,” Yasmin says after it explains about the pumpkin seeds and the fire. “Specifically, what happens when people are angry at you?”

It see-saws the hand and tries again. 

“Oh, I see,” she says. “What makes it okay for people to be angry at you? Jigsaw, is someone angry with you?”

Someone should be. It made a fire and wasted food. Waste not, want not. It destroyed two fluffy mittens and a small towel. The flying man should be angry, and maybe also others. 

But it shakes the head. No, no one is angry. But if they were, how would it be okay? That is what it needs to know. 

“Okay, that’s good. I’m glad no one is angry with you.” She smiles. “What do you think should happen when someone is angry? Either at you or just in general. What should that person do?”

It hesitates. There are two very different scenarios there. Angry at it, and angry not at it. It holds up one finger and then makes the Jigsaw name sign, points to it. First scenario, they are angry at it.

It cannot bring the sign for “punishment” to the fingers and hands, so it brings over the pad of paper it brought—not the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages, sadly; that is all full and stashed in a treasure box. It draws chains and a whip and a baton with the white electric fire, and then a figure with a star on the left arm. It adds arrows applying all of the things to the figure. 

That is what should happen in scenario one. It does not like it, but that is why it should try to make sure that it is pleasing. The team that is not a cell does not punish it for messing up, but they also do not get angry at it for messing up. If they did get angry at it, though, surely they would punish. 

The second scenario—it wipes away the remains of the Jigsaw name sign and raises two fingers—is harder to draw. It does not know exactly what people who are angry in general should do. It knows some specifics, though. It draws the other asset at the range, with a target full of tiny fangs on sticks. It draws the clown man with the bag of sand hung up, punching and punching. Oh, and it adds two faces with angry open mouths and lots of exclamation marks coming out. Yelling. People do that when angry.

After it has presented its answer to Yasmin it waits.

“Do you deserve punishment when someone is angry at you, Jigsaw?”

It is about to nod, but it catches itself before it does. Gives itself time to think about the question. It is an asset, so punishment is natural. The experience it is living in the hive building is an exception to the norm, not the way things should be. But it does like this experience. It knows that it does not, did not, and cannot deserve to be pushed into. Yasmin has said that many times and she is an expert. But what about other punishments?

It suspects the right answer is no, but it feels like the right answer is yes. In these situations, it goes back to one of the strategies Yasmin taught it—HYDRA lies. So if things have always been one way because of HYDRA, and that way is cruel or hurts, then that way is probably not the way it should be. If things have always been one way and HYDRA has had nothing to do with them, then it should check more facts.

It has always been punished and pushed into and made to bleed for the anger of its handlers, but HYDRA was in control of that. Without HYDRA, though, maybe all that should happen is yelling. 

It slowly shakes the head, no. It points to the yelling faces and nods. That. It deserves that when someone is angry at it. 

“No, you don’t deserve to be beaten or raped,” she clarifies, “but yes, you deserve for people to shout at you?”

…now that feels like it is the wrong answer, too. Like it is not supposed to deserve even yelling. But then how will people make sure it knows that they are angry at it? Doesn’t it deserve something bad?

It shakes the head again. Then asks why.

“When someone is angry, that’s their emotion to deal with, not yours. It’s their problem, and it’s wrong of them to try to make it someone else’s problem. Yes, even by yelling at someone. And yes, even if that someone is an asset.”

Yasmin smiles at it. “No one deserves to be yelled at like that, or to have someone throw their things around, or to have someone break something of theirs or take it away. And no one ever deserves to be hurt, whether someone is angry at them or not.”

Its disbelieving expression must be very prominent, because Yasmin immediately continues before it can even find the sign for “target.”

“Things are different on a mission, of course. You might have to hurt someone on a mission in order to bring them to justice or keep them from hurting others. But in regular social settings, in family settings, in settings among friends and colleagues… In non-mission settings and non-sparring settings, no one should be getting hurt.”

It signs that assets are different.

“Jigsaw,” Yasmin starts, almost hesitating in the middle of the name, “what is that difference? What is it that makes an asset not a person?”

It blinks. There is just a difference, that is all. An asset is an asset, and a person is a person. How to explain… 

It draws this asset and the other asset in the top corner of a new page in the notebook and then draws various activities that assets do—they lurk on rooftops and kill people, they are sent into dangerous situations that people are too important to go into. They are treated roughly, hurt, if they do not do well. What else to add that applies to both assets? 

“Hm,” Yasmin says as it explains the picture. “And Bucky wasn’t an asset, right? He was a person?”

It nods. The bucky was a person, just like the clown man. The tiny innocent had a book filled with pictures of all the people who were friends with the bucky and worked with the bucky. Howling Commandos. People, all of them.

“I wonder, how did Bucky get turned into an asset?” Yasmin continues when it stares at her. “At what point did Bucky cease to be a person, and why? What was it that made Bucky not a person anymore?”

It… It does not know. It was not there for that. Not really. It does not remember. 

But it was told about it. Yes. 

It draws a train up high on a mountain, and a figure falling off of the train. Then the same figure on the bottom of the page, by a river, without a left arm. It draws lines indicating that the figure bounced down the mountain, hitting many rocks on the way to the river. 

“Does losing an arm make someone less of a person, then?”

It shakes the head. If a person lost an arm, they would be a person with only one arm. A person without whichever arm they lost. 

It draws the figure again, this time with the left arm and the star on it. The bucky was definitely a person at one point, and it was definitely an asset at one point. It just is not sure what that point was. 

“Is that what made Bucky not a person anymore? Getting a prosthetic device?”

…no? It hesitates but ultimately shakes the head again. That cannot be it. Just putting a new arm on would not make a person into an asset. An asset is more than just “not a person.” An asset has skills that assets have, has training and missions and things. 

“So what is it that turned Bucky into an asset and stopped him from being a person?”

It writes TRAINING and MISSION and DANGER on the paper, draws guns and knives, draws a bow and some fangs on sticks in a little shoulder basket. 

“Oh,” Yasmin says with a smile that is gentle and also a little bit mischievous. “I thought Bucky was a highly trained sniper in WWII who was lost on a dangerous mission.”

But… But that is not… It is not… It… 

“Jigsaw, is it possible that Bucky was both a person and an asset?”

It stares at her for a long moment. For too long a moment. But she does not get mad at it or look disappointed in it. She just sits there with a kind expression, letting it think or not think.

Maybe the bucky was turned into an asset while still being called the bucky. Maybe it was when the first researcher made the bucky enhanced. But then that would make the clown man an asset, and the curly haired researcher. They are enhanced, too. Maybe it was when the bucky joined the military. But that would make the military all full of assets, and the flying man would be an asset along with the clown man. 

Maybe the bucky was not an asset until the fall, after all. But not because of the arm. Because when the bucky fell, when the bucky landed, there was no more person left. The person fell out, was knocked out of the bucky. Like a ghost. And the bucky’s body continued on without the person inside, and that is why the first researcher was able to hurt the bucky so bad that even Jigsaw remembers the bone saw in dreams, so many wipes afterward.

Wipes. Those, too. Those would wipe away any of the person clinging to the bucky. Those would chase away the ghosts trying to haunt their old body again, until the ghosts are all gone and there is only the asset, no bucky at all. 

It makes the sign for “ghost,” and then points to the figure by the river. It writes PERSON above the word ASSET by the figure. Then points at the PERSON and makes the “ghost” sign again.

“Bucky died and the body that was left was an asset, while the person part of him became a ghost?” Yasmin looks surprised.

It nods. It feels confident about this answer. 

It flips the page and draws the chair with the white electric fire and the asset inside the chair, and then it writes THE BUCKY and PERSON off to one side, in a circle together. It traces the finger from the circle to the asset in the chair and then mimes the circle and its contents bouncing off. The bucky tried and tried to get back inside of the asset, tried to make the asset a person again and again, and kept failing because of the wipes. Yes.

It is Yasmin’s turn to pause and think. But she only takes a short while, not the long time it took. 

“For a really long time,” she says, slowly, clearly aiming to repeat back what he’s communicated to her, but struggling to get it right, “Bucky tried to reconnect with the asset, to bestow personhood upon the asset, but he couldn’t because of the wipes. And so the asset wasn’t a person. And the asset became you once the wipes were not happening anymore. Became Jigsaw.”

It nods. 

“And you, Jigsaw, have acknowledged a connection to Bucky in your past, something that the wipes were keeping you from realizing. From remembering.”

It nods again. 

“So without the wipes keeping personhood away from you, could it be that you’re becoming a person again, the way Bucky was a person? The way the ghost of Bucky was trying to help you be but couldn’t because they kept wiping you?”

It freezes, staring. 

“Or is it possible that you have always been a person, but did not know it because of the wipes? Could it be possible that the wipes made you forget that you were a person the way you forgot that you were once Bucky?”

She reaches forward over the coffee table to tap the circle with THE BUCKY and PERSON in it with her index finger. 

“Could it be that the ghost of Bucky wasn’t so much trying to get back into the asset as it was trying to remind the asset that it was a person all along?” Yasmin asks. “And now that you can remember, now that you’ve realized this part of your past, could it be time to realize this part of your present?”

It swallows, hard. Stares at the page with the picture it has drawn, even after Yasmin has leaned back in her chair again. 

A person. All along? No. It cannot have been a person all along. If it was a person, how would they have done so many things to it? If it was a person, it would have a voice in the throat; they would not have carved out the voice. If it was a person, it would not remember the bone saw; they would have made it sleep through that. If it was a person… No parties. No fun. No special celebrations. They would not have done those things to a person.

People have value.

It turns the page, finally, stares at the lines that greet it, and writes that. Writes BUT PEOPLE HAVE VALUE on the page. 

“Oh, Jigsaw.” Yasmin sounds sad. Very sad. “You have so much value. You are valuable, and you are valued by all of us here. You are worth good things and worthy of good things.”

She takes a breath but does not stop.

“The people around you care about you, your support team cares about you. We all want only good things for you, because you are special to us. Because that’s what you deserve, whether someone is mad at you or not.”

It is not so sure, but Yasmin is sure, and she is an expert. Maybe…

“You deserve good things and people who care for and about you, Jigsaw. You deserve people who value you as a person and not just because of what you can do for them. Because you are a person, and you have value.”

It does not understand why the eyes are stinging and filling up with unshed tears. Yasmin is mistaken, that is all. It is an asset. An asset. It cannot be a person or they would not have done those things. 

They would not have… They…

It draws a figure pushing into an asset, draws an asset and a bone saw against the upper arm, draws all of the batons with the white electric fire and the chair with the white electric fire, draws the whips and chains, the pool with the asset being held under the water, draws the asset curled up on the floor in the middle of all of it. 

Writes, after wiping the eyes, NOT IF A PERSON at the bottom of the page. Keeps the eyes downcast.

Yasmin leans over to the side until her head is low enough that she can make eye contact with it. “Jigsaw,” she says softly, “HYDRA is evil. What makes you so sure they would have treated a person kindly? Did you ever see them treat a person who wasn’t one of them with kindness? True kindness? Not just to use them or manipulate them?”

It shakes the head. 

“Didn’t they send you to kill all sorts of innocent people over the years? Sometimes brutally?” Yasmin asks, sitting up again and bringing its gaze up along with her. 

“They made you drown people, and you know how much that hurts. They made you trap people inside burning buildings, and you know how much that hurts. They made you bury people alive, and you know what that’s like, too.”

She pauses. Then, gently: “They made sure all of these horrible things were done to people. And all of the horrible things they did to you, they did to a person. To you. You’re that person.”

But… why? 

What did it do wrong to be hurt like that? 

What did it do?

Chapter Text

Jigsaw

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 8:15 a.m.—

A person. 

Yasmin has hinted that she thinks of it as a person before, but she has always allowed it to be an asset. Has always added “or assets” or “and assets” so that it was included when she talked about things that had to do with people. People do not have to earn food, and neither do assets. Both people and assets need to get sleep. People and assets should be comforted after nightmares. No one should be raped, not even assets.

Always adding assets in so that it could be part of the discussion without making it pretend to be a person.

But today, Yasmin has not just hinted that she thinks it is a person. She has suggested that it could be a person, that the bucky never stopped being a person, that the bucky’s body that has survived so much over such a long time, is still inhabited by a person, and not an asset. 

Or maybe by a person and an asset. A person who is an asset who is a person. 

So confusing. 

It wants Yasmin to tell it that she was mistaken, that it is an asset after all. 

It knows how to be an asset.

But as it slowly makes its way back to the rooms for— The rooms for assets, where it and the other asset live, as assets… As it puts one foot in front of the other even though nothing feels solid beneath the feet, it knows that she will not say that to it. She will not take back what she said.

Yasmin says that it is a person. That it has value as a person, that it has been treated horribly by HYDRA, yes, but as a person and not just as an asset. Says that HYDRA did all of those things to a person. That it is that person. 

And she is an expert, but she is wrong! She has to be wrong. It is an asset. Being an asset is all it knows. How can it be the same as the other asset, how can it live with the other asset in the rooms that are for assets, if it is not an asset anymore? 

How can it survive if it is not an asset? If such a fundamental part of it is stripped away from it, then the building will crumble, there will be nothing left. What is it if it is not an asset?

A person? What does that even mean? How could it be a person when it does not know anything about being a person? What does it mean to be a person? What is it like being a person? 

What will it be like being separated from the other asset?

Being alone and not together with the other asset, being not the same as with the other asset?

No. It will not be a person. It does not want to be a person. It wants to be an asset still. Wants to be together and the same as with the other asset. 

It comes to the door of the room for assets before it is ready to be there, but the other asset is inside, it knows, and it needs to reassure itself that the other asset is unchanged by this asset’s having become this horrible person thing. Maybe if it pretends that nothing has changed, then nothing has to change. 

Would that be lying to the other asset? That would not be right. But it does not want to leave the other asset. 

It opens the door and goes to the long table where the tablet is sleeping. 

There are words being spoken to it, the other asset and the auction woman are greeting it, and the dog is pressing its nose against the thigh, hoping for attention that it cannot give yet. It must— It must say the truth, but what is the truth?

It was the bucky. Truth. The bucky was a person. Truth. After that… It starts to fall apart. But the important part is that it… 

Is an asset? (False, says a tiny voice)

Is a person? (False, says a much bigger voice)

Is neither? Both? 

Silence.

“…agitated, why don’t you…”

It does not know what the fingers need to make the tablet say, but it tries. The ideas themselves keep squirming around and the words that follow those ideas are even harder to keep in the mind long enough to find on the boards in the AAC app. 

It does not want to be a person. That is true whether it is a person or not. It does not want to be a person. It would rather continue being an asset. It feels like an asset. Does not like the uncomfortable, unfamiliar person feeling. 

“Jigsaw asset,” it hears the tablet say. “Asset asset asset. Person no. Only asset. Jigsaw want only asset.”

The auction woman closes the door behind herself, leaving the rooms for assets—it belongs here, it does, it does, it belongs!—to go… somewhere else. It does not know where.

The other asset comes over to it instead of waiting on the sofa for it to come with the tablet. The other asset picks up the notebook where it has fallen—been dropped, it would never drop the notebook with the stars on the top of the pages—on the floor.

The other asset brings it into a hug, careful not to crush the tablet between them—between the two assets! it is an asset!—and presses the wet skin face into the fabric at the other asset’s shoulder. 

“It’s going to be okay,” the other asset says. “This thing that’s upsetting you, we’ll make it right. I love you whether you’re an asset or a person.”

It buries the skin face in the other asset’s shirt and sobs. 

“I’m right here, you’re right here,” the other asset says. “We’re the same as and we’re together, no matter what.”

It does not know how many times the other asset repeats this, or how long it sobs for, but they do not end up on the sofa when it is calm enough to explain. They are on the floor by the door, partly under the long table with the leash for the dog and the tablet’s bed for regaining energy from the wall, with the dog lying on the floor beside them.

The other asset combs fingers through its hair, is holding it as though afraid that it will float away if not held. And it sniffles against the wet fabric of the other asset’s shirt and clings as if it also fears floating away, only it more fears being dragged away.

Because what if it does not belong here, after all?

After a few more minutes, the other asset’s hand stills, cupping the back of its head. “So just from what you said, I’m guessing Yasmin called you a person and that upset you, huh?”

It nods against the other asset’s shoulder. 

“Can you walk me through it?”

It wants to cling some more, but it nods again and slowly releases its hold on the other asset. It accepts the notebook without the stars and pages through it to find the pictures from today’s morning session, the bucky and the train, the bucky by the river with the words drawn there. The page with the chair with the white electric fire and the asset in it, the circle with THE BUCKY and PERSON inside it.

The other asset nods along as it explains the pictures, as it relates everything that Yasmin had asked it, and the things she said. It needs the tablet for some of those things, to find the words she said, but the other asset is very smart and understands it so well. 

…is the same as…

Is still the same as? It asks that, at the end. That is the important thing. Is it still the same as the other asset? If Yasmin is right and it has to be a person and not an asset, is it still the same as the other asset? Are they still the same as, together? Does the other asset still love it, really?

“Yes,” the other asset says. The other asset’s voice is emphatic, almost harsh. Almost angry sounding, but not angry at it.

“I love you no matter what, and we’re together and the same as no matter what. That won’t change.”

It looks down at the tablet and pulls it onto the lap. It wants to believe that nothing will change things, but it has to know. Has to ask, even if it means change that it will not like. 

“Even this asset now person? No two asset but asset and person?”

The other asset looks at it and puts both hands on the skin face, tipping its chin up and holding it still so that it cannot look down at the floor. 

“If you’re an asset, then I’m an asset. If you’re a person, then I’m a person. I go where you go, Jigsaw.” The other asset looks into the eyes, and the other asset’s eyes are so blue, so full of color, so beautiful. “So are we assets or people? Your call.”

It can… It can try… to be a person. If the other asset tries with it. They can learn how to be people together, these two assets. The ballerina woman can help them. And the clown man, the flying man, the hamburger technician. Maybe even the curly haired researcher, and Hulk. The team that is not a cell will be upset to lose both of its assets at once, but if they are both people, they will not be punished for it. 

Maybe not even yelled at. 

It hesitates, but after a minute of staring into the other asset’s eyes, it lifts up two fingers between them. The second option. 

They will be people.

Clint

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 9:00 a.m.—

Two fingers. 

Jigsaw is holding up two fingers, so the second option. 

Clint remembers what the two options are, but it takes him a moment to recall which one came first and which second. Jigsaw’s eyes are just that distracting with their blue-gray depths like a pair of still pools he could get lost diving in. 

But he had asked—assets or people. That order. And the second one is what Jigsaw chose. 

People. 

Jigsaw is deciding to be a person. 

Of course, he seems to have been under the impression that both is not an option, that a person cannot be an asset, so they’ll eventually have to clarify what “asset” actually means—because the whole team is composed of assets, just not the kind Jigsaw seems to have in mind. 

But that aside, it’s a big deal. Jigsaw has considered himself more a thing than a person since the beginning, possibly since as far back as his initial escape from that vault back in May. Possibly further back, if his present consciousness was around further back. Clint doesn’t know when the last successful wipe was done. All he knows is there will never be another.

“Okay,” Clint says, keeping his smile a little on the small side instead of grinning like a maniac and possibly making too big a deal of it in Jigsaw’s eyes. “We’ll be people. You and me. Two people, the same as, together. Partners.”

Jigsaw’s return smile is hesitant, like he’s trying it on for size before committing to it. But there isn’t any fear in his eyes that Clint can see, neither fear of retribution or punishment for claiming to be a person, nor fear of actually being a person with all the potential unknowns that must entail for him. 

“Can I kiss you?” Clint asks, realizing his hands are still cradling Jigsaw’s face and wanting to do something about that. 

Jigsaw’s smile widens and he nods, letting the tablet slip to the floor beside him as he wraps his arms around Clint’s back, his fingers clinging for a moment before relaxing to rest lightly against his spine.

Clint captures Jigsaw’s lips with his own and proceeds to lose track of time as though time isn’t even a thing that exists, as if there are no such things as seconds or minutes, as though nothing and no one could possibly matter more than the prolonged, timeless instant that is this kiss. 

And it would be perfect, would be everything he wants in life, would last forever, if his damn stomach didn’t rumble.

Jigsaw pulls back from him breathlessly, his chest not heaving exactly but moving in a very distracting way, and reaches between them to rest a palm over Clint’s stomach. He signs that he’s sorry and that they need to eat.

“I’m not sorry,” Clint says, trying to slow his heartbeat down a bit. “And I’d ask to keep kissing you, but I know you’ve gotta be getting hungry, and you’re right about us needing breakfast.”

And probably, breakfast is all cold in the kitchen by now. He doesn’t even know what time it is, now that time has become a thing that exists again. But he’ll eat cold scrambled eggs and whatever else was on the breakfast menu, and he knows Jigsaw will, too. 

And surely Natasha and Katie-Kate went down to breakfast without them instead of waiting around for however long it took to iron out Jigsaw’s post-therapy upset. He’s kind of feeling bad that Kate was even here to see Jigsaw so upset, even if she hadn’t seen it all or heard—hopefully—the main points. 

Clint could kick himself. Sure, he’d thought their first session back would be pretty lighthearted—more catching up with each other than hashing out anything deep or dark. But therapy isn’t exactly predictable, is it? Sometimes it’s pumpkins and scrapbooks, and sometimes it’s the concept of personhood or the discovery that none of that rape and torture had been warranted.

And this wasn’t even the first time Kate had been around just after a therapy session, or the first tip of a meltdown iceberg she’d seen. All in all, Katie-Kate has seen and heard entirely too much of Jigsaw’s various trauma responses while staying with them during the hurricane. 

At least she’s pretty good at keeping secrets—even without an NDA they’d have been in good hands, and they do have an NDA.

Clint reaches for his back pocket to check his phone for the time, and remembers that he’d left it over on the coffee table. 

Well, whatever time it is, they’ll find something to eat downstairs in the kitchen, and probably no audience for it. Or if there is an audience, it’ll be people lingering over coffee and maybe they can take it elsewhere while he and Jigsaw eat. 

It’s been a stressful several days, and it’ll be nice to eat a meal, just the two of them, no need to explain anything or put on cheerful faces when all they are is hungry.

Clint gets to his feet, checking for nearby kittens before making any moves, and then helps Jigsaw to his feet as well. Lucky swishes his tail back and forth and looks up at them with a faint jingle of his collar. Clint thinks it’s pretty likely Lucky wants to go with them wherever they’re headed, and equally likely that it’s a good idea to keep the dog by Jigsaw’s side while he processes personhood.

These past two days with Lucky tagging along with Wilson were fine and all, and the evacuees had definitely been better off for it. But it’s about time Lucky got to spend a solid day by his person’s side.

And his person won’t be heading down to be mobbed on the second or third floor today, hopefully. With the storm passed, hopefully it’s a matter of helping transport people to their homes to assess damage and offering meals and charging stations for various electronics, maybe some daycare services so parents can work on getting lives and livelihoods back in working order. 

Not much Jigsaw and a pair of kittens can do to help, there. 

As the City perks back up and comes back online, more and more buses and taxies and ubers driving around, workplaces turning the lights back on where there’s power available to do that with, Clint’s hoping the Tower and its inhabitants will fade back into the way it was before, when they could mostly come and go without being swarmed even when they left the building and went to the park.

Not that he thinks they should go to the park today. But it would be nice to be able to go to the park. He hasn’t been out there in a while, except for a quick walk with Natasha during one of Jigsaw’s afternoon sessions and that time Monesha came up from D.C. and they’d eaten sandwiches in the park. And that was, what, two weeks ago? A few days shy of two weeks. Hard to imagine.

The leaves had been turning when Monesha came up. Now the leaves are mostly gone, blown off by the hurricane, along with a number of branches and even a few whole trees. 

Just as blown is Jigsaw’s cover, though. Not much chance that people will leave them alone if they were to head out to the park any time soon. Even if they were signing, even if Clint gave them the stink-eye, people would be drawn to the prospect of Bucky Barnes, and no amount of Jigsaw would keep them at bay, despite the fact that nothing actually changed about the situation other than public knowledge.

Well, at least they got that nice trip to the park in before everything got stealth-announced.

Lucky leads the way the to the elevator once Jigsaw is suitably reassured that both kittens are doing just fine in the cat tree’s condo. And thankfully, Natasha and Banner are the only people still in the dining room, sharing a pot of tea and talking about rooting hormone, whatever that is. 

“Where’s Katie-Kate?” Clint asks as he and Jigsaw pull up chairs in front of the consolidated trays of breakfast. “Figured she’d stick with you, ‘Tasha.”

Natasha shakes her head. “She’s getting packed up to head back to her apartment. If they’ve got water and electricity, she’ll stay, otherwise, come back here.”

Clint nods and takes all three of the sausage links, because no one else is going to eat those. “Even if they have water, is it safe to drink it?”

Banner shakes his head. “I doubt it. We’ve been sending people home with a gallon of drinking water apiece and an open invitation to return for more. And the others are out distributing clean water to those who sheltered in place.”

Jigsaw looks up from his mound of floppy cold fried eggs. “Poison?” he signs.

“Not anything intentional or malicious like that, no,” Banner reassures him. “But the water that comes out of the faucet in most places is dirty because of the storm, so it would make people sick if they drank it.”

“Not here,” Natasha says. “The Tower water is all incredibly well filtered and decontaminated. Lucky and the kittens are safe drinking from their fountains.”

Jigsaw relaxes and resumes his work on the fried eggs. 

“So we’re sending Kate with some drinking water, right?” Clint asks as he spreads butter on a few waffles.

“Naturally.”

Honestly, he’s not sure why she even has to leave today. It’d be one thing if transportation was more or less guaranteed, the power was on all over the place, there were lots of restaurants open and delivering food… But none of that is the case, and she’ll be back in a few days for her Sunday lesson even if she does end up staying in her apartment today.

Why not just have someone do her laundry here and head out Sunday afternoon instead of today? If she’s sick of them, she could watch TV in her guest room all day instead of hanging out.

He hopes she’s not packing up and heading out because of earlier this morning. They can work out a schedule where she’s hanging out somewhere else in that window when Jigsaw’s due back from therapy. And Jigsaw’s alright with Thor by now, and they won’t set off the smoke detector again. 

They could watch a movie or something after hitting the gym. They’d have time before lunch, even if they all grabbed showers before the movie.

Or maybe they wouldn’t, really, because they’d need to pause the movie pretty often to explain things. But they could get started on a movie. Or they could watch some Cake Off. 

“Hey, Clint, Jigsaw,” Kate says, poking her head into the dining room. “JARVIS said I could find you here and say goodbye.” 

She has her duffel bag across one shoulder and her archery equipment across the other. Clearly ready to go, then. Probably the water and some non-perishables are waiting for her with the car so she doesn’t have to lug them around. 

“Sure you don’t want to stick around, Katie-Kate?”

“I mean, I left all my coursework in the apartment, so I at least need to grab that. I have a test next week, and a paper due, and we’ll get an extension, but probably not much of one.”

“Why don’t you leave your stuff here, then, and just go grab your school things?”

“Really? I’m not… getting in the way?”

Clint shakes his head and looks at Jigsaw. “Is she getting in the way, Jigsaw?”

Jigsaw shakes his head and signs for her to stay. 

Kate grins. “Okay. Awesome! I’ll just go get my laptop and all my books and things.”

She ducks back out, and the elevator takes her off with a ding.

Clint looks up when he feels eyes on him, and sees Natasha with her eyebrow raised. “What?”

“I hope she enjoys gardening,” Natasha says, “because that’s what I’m going to be doing this afternoon around five. And she’ll be with me.”

Five. When Jigsaw gets out of his afternoon session with Yasmin, she doesn’t have to say. Which will leave Clint alone so there isn’t a repeat of this morning if Jigsaw is still a bit raw from his therapy session when he gets back to their rooms and needs to talk some more or show Clint pictures. 

“Thanks, ‘Tasha.”

“You owe me one. I was going to try propagating one of Pepper’s dragon plants, but I’ll have to find something Kate can help with, instead.”

Chapter Text

Kate

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—

Ugh. 

She can tell from the smell when she opens the door to her apartment that something went off when the power died. She knew she should have done something about the stuff in the fridge. That’s going to be a mess and a half to clean up later. But it’s a problem for later-Kate. 

Right now, all Kate has to worry about is making sure she packs all the research article print-outs and library books she needs for her paper. And yeah, she probably needs to worry a bit about the broken window in her bedroom. That’s a present-Kate issue if only because it means her room looks like— well, like a hurricane swept through it.

There’s glass from the window all over her bed and the floor around the window her bed had been up against. The mildew smell says that enough rainwater got in to ruin the mattress, even if she lets it air out while she stays at the Tower. Some of her textbooks are a bit worse for the wear, and everything she had just out in the room.

But her clothes in the closet are okay, mostly because her desk had gotten blown over to keep the closet door shut, and none of the rainwater had made it that far into the room. 

And her computer is fine, and all her stuff for this paper. Next time someone questions why she sets up in front of the TV in the living room for something like a paper, she’ll point to this and say that it’s a matter of hurricane damage control. Not just that she likes to snack while she works and is kind of a little afraid of cockroaches.

Maybe a lot afraid of cockroaches. 

Certainly afraid enough of them that she does not want even one of the gross things so much as looking in the direction of her bedroom. So no snacking in her room, ever, not even while writing a huge paper or studying for a major exam. She isn’t laying out a welcome mat for them.

Kate takes some photos and then does a walk-through with video, talking about what it is she’s seeing that’s damaged—nearly everything in her room—and about how much it cost her. She’ll need that for the renter’s insurance. And then she pokes her head into her roommate’s room, just to see if there’s something similar going on in there. 

There isn’t. It’s only Kate’s room and Kate’s stuff that got walloped by a hurricane. Figures. Still, she takes a few pictures and sends them on to her roommate with an all-clear message. Then she adds that there’s something funky in the fridge, but that she doesn’t have time to figure that out right now. She sends a few photos from her own room and finishes up with a note that she’s staying with the Avengers until stuff gets repaired.

By the time Kate has packed up her schoolwork in a bit of luggage she had up high in her closet and the book bag with the padded laptop compartment, her roommate has sent back a barrage of texts that amount to “holy shit” and something about Kate living a blessed life, as though having her room trashed by the storm is all that blessed. 

But she is staying with the Avengers, so maybe her life’s a little blessed.

Kate locks up without investigating the fridge or the moldy beast growing within it, and slings her book bag over her shoulder while hauling her luggage down the stairs. The power may be back on but she’s not going to risk the elevator. The last thing she needs is to be on the news as “local girl rescued from elevator by Thor.” If that’s even who they’d send. Jigsaw could probably rip the doors off the elevator and climb up to her, and then give her and all her books a piggyback to the ground floor. 

Jigsaw. 

So the guy doesn’t want to be a person. That’s really rough. Sometimes she doesn’t want to have to deal with whatever crap life is throwing at her, but she would always rather be a person than the alternative. Unless the alternative is a cat. Cats seem to have it pretty nice.

She thinks “asset” is some kind of military lingo for a soldier or spy lingo for an agent, maybe. But only being an asset and not a person doesn’t sound like the way to go. And he had just come back from a therapy session, too. That’s why they were waiting to go down and get breakfast. They were waiting for Jigsaw to come back from therapy. 

Kate doesn’t think it’s going very well if they’re months in and he still doesn’t want to be a person. 

It’s been a while since those articles were circulating about S.H.I.E.L.D. announcing him as the newest Avenger, and the maybe-leak about how Jigsaw needed to be rehabilitated from what he’d been through. Deprogrammed, she remembers. That one mystery S.H.I.E.L.D. source had been talking about Project Rebirth, Captain America, the possibility that Jigsaw wasn’t a volunteer for the serum but had been forced. That all those serial killings, if they were his doing—Kate’s pretty sure they were—were just revenge.

That was just a month and a half ago. Sheesh, time flies. Jigsaw more or less fell off the radar after that flurry of a news cycle, but Kate thinks rehabilitating and deprogrammed are the right words to use for it if he sees a therapist for three hours a day every day and then has a speech therapist he sees in the evenings, and another therapist just for food. Hawkeye said he had all those therapists.

And if he has had those therapists seeing him that frequently and for as long as he’s been in the Tower, and he’s still stuck on whether or not he has to be a person… 

Yeah, that doesn’t seem to be going well at all. Or worse—it’s going well and that’s a sign of how bad off he was at first.

And now he’s going to have to deal with the public trying to beat down the doors to ask him about Bucky and why doesn’t he go by that name anymore, and a bunch of other questions. When it’s pretty clear to her. He hasn’t been Bucky in a hot minute, doesn’t remember being Bucky, and has gotten pretty comfortable with his current name. Done deal.

Maybe he should only go out of the Tower with Hulk by his side. She’s willing to bet if Hulk says “no cameras or Hulk smash,” the reporters will scatter.

Yasmin

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 2:45 p.m.—

Yasmin looks at her phone with a frown and then puts her husband and his current entreaty that she return home for Thanksgiving out of her mind. She needs to prepare for Jigsaw’s appointment, not worry about things that can be dealt with later. 

She’s already extended the Tower’s generous offer to fly him in and host him here or host the two of them elsewhere for a weekend in late November. There’s no sense in debating and a lot of sense in leaving him on read to consider his options, which are to take her up on the Tower’s offer if he wants to see her and spend time with her, or to continue being obstinate if his goal is more to be in control than anything else. She would like to think he will come around and work from New York for a while. But she will not be controlled.

This morning, according to JARVIS, a press release went out to various reporters in the City and surrounding areas—embargoed, of course—ahead of a press conference to happen tomorrow mid-morning. Things are moving on the public relations front, and every movement there is a movement toward a time when Jigsaw will need to be ready to deal with public responses to his presence in the Tower and his very existence. 

It’s not entirely on her shoulders to prepare him for this time, but she does take a portion of that responsibility willingly. He will be confronted with some very rude people at times, and he needs to have a strong sense of self as a person who will not retreat into himself but who knows how to stand as a person. 

While it’s true he has the option of hiding from the world around him, or tucking himself into an asset-shape and taking up no more room than his view of an asset would, she doesn’t want a small life like that for him. She wants him to feel confident to seize life and the experiences that come his way and to make sense of things with advice he seeks out. 

That said, she does feel she overstepped in their last session. This afternoon will be an opportunity to rectify that, to explain how she’d overstepped and to apologize for doing so. She told him at the start of their journey together that she wasn’t here to change him into something he’s not, but to understand him and help him understand himself and others.

Press conference or no, it is up to Jigsaw to understand himself as a person—or not, as he chooses.  

As though summoned, Jigsaw slips into the room precisely on time, accompanied by Lucky, as is usual for their afternoon sessions. She’s glad Sam had been able to spare Lucky for the day. After the morning session’s discussion of personhood and value, there will probably be a need for the dog this afternoon.

That, and everyone should be entitled to taking a break for their mental health and to keep their energy up, even emotional support dogs.

And assets, she reminds herself, if Jigsaw is too reluctant to accept or can’t yet internalize her message.

“Hi, Jigsaw,” she says with a warm smile. “I’m feeling really good right now. Refreshed. How about yourself?”

Jigsaw holds up two fingers, and then signs that he’s confused, putting that sign to his left, and anxious, putting that sign to his right. Pointing to the left, he shows her his tablet, on which he has come prepared with a typed HOW PERSON IS LIKE. Then he points to the right and swipes to a new page, where he has already typed WHAT IF WRONG? PUNISH FOR PERSON WRONG?

“That is a beautiful organization of ideas, Jigsaw, and I really appreciate the homework you did for this session. I asked you to think about it, and you went above and beyond. Thank you.”

Jigsaw smiles, seeming to loosen up under the praise, as if he had been coiled somewhat before, unsure of what to expect. 

“Let’s start with your second idea,” Yasmin says, pointing to where he’s placed it in the air. “Are you asking “What if you’re wrong and I’m not a person after all?” or are you asking “What if I am not able to be a person properly?”

Jigsaw nods. 

“So both, then. First, you are in control here. I pushed too hard this morning, and I apologize for that. I stand by what I said about you having great value intrinsic to your being you, who and as you are. But if you don’t want to accept personhood, you do not have to. I shouldn’t have pushed that onto you.”

He blinks and then signs that he will try, that Clint and he will both try, that they are the same as together.

Not for the first time, Yasmin is grateful that Clint seems to intuitively grasp the right thing to say or do in response to Jigsaw’s insecurities. It sounds like Jigsaw had asked about it and Clint had agreed to be a person alongside Jigsaw, as though he’d not been a person beforehand. Whether or how that might come back to haunt them is something to ponder another time. For now, it helps.

“You’re both going to try out being people?” she asks.

He nods, and his smile is tentative but present.

“Then you’re a person. It isn’t something it’s possible to be wrong about. If you decide you are a person, then you are a person.”

Jigsaw points to the second question on the tablet at present.

“What if you aren’t able to be a person properly, or get things wrong, make mistakes?” she asks. “Are you worried that you’ll be punished for being a person the wrong way?”

Another nod. 

“I have good news and bad news for you, Jigsaw. The good news is there is no punishment in the sense that you’re thinking. No one has the right to hurt you for being different, and you have the right to defend yourself if they try to hurt you.”

This next bit will be difficult, but Yasmin thinks they can manage it by now. And they have all afternoon if need be.

“As for being different—not being the same kind of person as most, making mistakes, that sort of thing, even reverting to thinking of yourself as only an asset sometimes—none of that is going to be punished. The word we’re looking at is that there will be consequences.”

Yasmin pauses, gauging his response. He seems almost academically interested in the difference between punishment and consequences, which is a fair place to start out. She’ll take this on with examples, as if just teaching him about them in general, and they can apply the concept to Jigsaw himself later.

“Every action we make has a consequence,” she says. “If I smile at someone, they will react to me differently than if I scowl at them. Those reactions are the consequences of my smiling or scowling.”

Another example.

“If I were to wear casual clothing, like ripped up jean shorts, and go to a very fancy and formal event, I might not be let in to the event. That’s a consequence of my choosing to wear inappropriate attire.”

She brings up a picture of various women’s formal wear to show him on her phone. 

“If I were to wear a formal ball gown like this to a family picnic, people might look at me and wonder why, or someone might laugh, or someone might think that I thought I was better than them. Those are all examples of consequences of my clothes.”

Now to make it more connected to Jigsaw. 

“Here in the Tower, your friends are used to you, and used to your behaviors and the way you move. But you know that Happy is afraid of you. That is a consequence of your smooth movements and mannerisms. If you didn’t let Sam take Lucky out for his walks and bathroom breaks, Lucky might pee in your rooms, on the carpet. That isn’t punishment, but it’s a consequence of an action. Cause and effect, without any strings or moral values attached.”

Yasmin smiles. “So yes, outside of the Tower, and even with your friends, there will be consequences to your actions and behavior. There already are consequences. As you navigate being a person, you might get something wrong, yes. And while no one will hurt you here, there will be consequences, whether ones that you like or ones that you don’t like.”

Jigsaw nods, not necessarily in agreement but clearly considering the information. Then he swipes to a new screen and draws a closet with neatly organized clothes, and a pile of clothes. He draws a figure with half circles at the ears—Clint, then—dressed in baggy clothes next to the pile, and then a figure of Clint dressed in more form-fitting clothes next to the closet. A happy face goes near the closet grouping, and a frowning face near the pile grouping.

Yasmin blinks. “Clint wearing nice clothes is a consequence of your organizing his closet,” she guesses, “and it’s a consequence that makes you feel happy. When there were piles on the floor, Clint didn’t dress as nicely, and that was a consequence of the piles of clothes and made you feel unhappy.”

When he nods again, she continues. “That’s exactly how it works. Also, to take it further, Clint wearing nice clothes has the consequence of you feeling happy. And his wearing less nice clothes has the consequence of your feeling less happy. Yes. But outside of the Tower, when Clint wears the nice clothes, people will treat him better than when he wears the less nice clothes.”

He frowns and shakes his head. 

“They will, yes. Just like you would be treated differently based on whether you were in tac gear and killing face, which would frighten people, or in your everyday soft clothes, which would not frighten people. Or if your metal arm was showing or was covered up.”

It’s not an exact parallel, but she’s never seen Jigsaw wearing clothes that were ill-fitting, wrinkled or smelly, so she isn’t sure that he would understand if she used that example. And she doesn’t want him to become self-conscious of any part of himself, least of all something like his arm. 

“People you were rescuing from evil were mostly afraid of you—sometimes more afraid of you than of the evil you were slicing up.” Yasmin waits for the acknowledgement in his eyes—they’ve been over this before—and then continues. “That was a consequence of your attire and your actions. If you had been walking down the street in civilian clothes with Lucky by your side, would people be afraid of you?”

He shakes his head. 

“No. They’d even sell you a treat for Lucky to eat, like they did in Las Vegas. And they might pause to pet Lucky. There would be smiles and not screams.”

Jigsaw sighs. 

“You are the same person in both situations, but you’re perceived as a person when you behave like the people around you. And when you behave outside of what they expect, even if that’s just moving differently like Happy is afraid of, other people will take notice and they will act differently toward you.”

Yasmin gives him a sympathetic smile. 

“But here’s more good news,” she says. “You have a lot of time to practice behaving like a person, and since you are a person, it will be easier than you think. Let’s talk about your first concern now, how to be a person.”

Chapter Text

Jigsaw

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—

So much to remember—to get right, even if Yasmin says there is time to learn and that every person is different—so much to remember, and it is very far behind. 

The team that is not a cell… No, that is not right. It is part of the team that is not a cell and has not really been a person before now, and the other asset, too, is only just starting out on the journey. So instead, there are some members of the team that is not a cell that have been people for so long. The flying man, the clown man, the hamburger technician and curly-haired researcher, all of them have been people for so long. 

Yasmin says that there is time to learn, but the two assets are so far behind. 

How will they ever catch up? 

The ballerina woman might know. She was an asset, it thinks. The Red Room. The Red Room made spiders to spin webs and dance through the silk strands until poised perfectly to bite. Black Widow spiders. Assets, not people.

But the ballerina woman is a person now. Has made this transition. Has left the Red Room and joined the team that is not a cell—first had joined STRIKE Delta, it knows. She said so in her question and answer cards so long ago. Had explained that she did not know anything about HYDRA when she was part of STRIKE Delta. That she had been betrayed by S.H.I.E.L.D.

There is still the part of her that is always tied to the Red Room, tied to the Red Room by the blood of her handlers that she spilt in her leavetaking. Just as it is tied to HYDRA by the blood of its handlers, long and glistening trails of it like the tail of one of the comets in the outer space that is all around the planet, streaming out behind for countless miles and shining just as bright. 

It has painted the night skies brilliant crimson with its kills, and that is what is left of its connection to HYDRA. That is the mark that it has left on HYDRA, the same way the ballerina woman has poisoned and ruined lives, torched and destroyed where she was once dragged on her leash. 

Maybe it is something that she can help with, the becoming a person, the learning how to do it, how to be one of them. Her path was different, and the type of asset she was is different from the type of asset it has been, or the other asset. But if there is advice to be given, perhaps she will give it.

What it knows from today’s session with Yasmin is that people and assets both have to follow rules, but that people follow different rules than assets.

People are allowed all of the freedoms that it has here—to eat at will, when it is hungry; to sleep when it is tired and in a nest of its choosing; to have plentiful soft things and treasures and little objects that would have been hard to obtain without stealing from targets in the original hunting grounds. 

As a person, it is normal to have a brush for the hair that is its very own, and a brush for the teeth that is its very own. It is normal to have soap for hair and teeth and clothes and dishes and hands and faces and whatever else. These things had been so difficult to acquire before, on its own, had been treasured and kept hidden lest they be stolen from it the way it had stolen from targets. 

But as a person, it is expected to have these things. And it is… easy… to get them, or to get new things to replace worn or broken things. As easy as going out and getting, when it has mastered the art of personhood. But for now, while it is still learning, as easy as asking and JARVIS will provide.

That is where the soft things that it dries off with came from—from JARVIS. The towels. But the clown man had given it the brushes and the combs, the hair ties it rarely uses and the fish-looking soft thing. And the ballerina woman had given it so many soft things to wear that it does not have to pull from the closets of others on the team that is not a cell. And the other asset had given it the so-fuzzy so-soft socks for the feet. 

But if it needs more of any of these things, JARVIS will take care of the acquisition. The same way a fresh bar of soap appears whenever the current bar of soap gets thin and fragile from being used up. 

This is part of being a person. 

So are the rules. They get all the freedoms that were given to it in the Tower, but in return for all of that and more freedom in addition—freedom to do all kinds of things that it is not ready to do yet—they must, as people, avoid breaking the other rules. The people rules. The things called laws.

And it does not know all of those, so it is not sure how it is going to navigate this person thing. 

How will it avoid breaking the laws it does not know? And what about the laws it does not agree with? Does it have to follow those rules, too? And who gets to make the rules for people to follow? People make the rules that assets have to follow, but is there something else, some third thing, that makes the rules for people to follow?

It will have to think about this, will have to be sure that the trade is a fair one. Will have to check all of the rules, the laws, and be sure that it can follow them. That it wants to follow them. Because there are punishments for breaking some of them that could be very bad. 

It holds in a scoff. 

Very bad. At least as far as people are concerned, the punishments could be very bad. As far as assets are concerned, the punishments are hardly anything to be called a punishment. 

Mostly, it’s being put in a cage for a long time, years. Or if the punishment is so severe, the worst one, being put in a chair and having white electric fire pulsed through the body. Being injected with poisons. Maybe even having a rope tied around the neck and then being dropped through a floor. That last one would at least be new to it, sort of, but even that sounds less bad than being a chandelier of asset. Dangling, but from a rope instead of meat hooks. It has a strong neck. It could not be so bad to become a chandelier of person.

In that regard, being a person is the preferable thing over being an asset. 

People are hardly punished at all.

But secretly, it wonders if it is really a person… physically. Because Yasmin called many of those punishments death penalties and said they were used in the most severe of situations in only some of the places in the world. And it does not think those things would kill it. They would hurt, and they would damage. But not kill. So they could not be death penalties at all, for it. Because maybe it cannot be a person.

What if it has decided to be a person and is actually not able to be a person?

And then there is the matter of killing. That is one of the major laws that people should be bound by. Except in a very narrow set of circumstances, killing is against the law. Murder, too, which makes sense. Murder is wrong. But even killing is against the rules.

Maybe killing is something for assets to do, and is right and good, but murder is something people do, and because of the laws, it is bad. So because there is no rule against killing for assets—assets are supposed to kill, it is what assets do, their primary function—it was free and right to kill and kill and kill before.

But now that it is a person, that is against the rules. 

That is one of the laws that it does not agree with. It does not see why a person who was an asset before should not retain the clearance to kill, especially when there are no remaining assets to do the killing for it. The killing needs to be done, after all. But if only assets and only ever assets are cleared to do this, then the team that is not a cell will be crippled by the inability of any of its members to kill a target.

Exceptions exist for soldiers in war, and there are so many different kinds of “making a person no longer alive” that the laws lay out. Something called manslaughter, which sounds amazing but just means something was carelessly done, and different degrees of various killing “crimes”—which is just a people way of saying “against the rules.”

As an asset, it has never committed a crime. All of its killings were sanctioned, and even if they weren’t, crime is something people do, not assets.

That is the one advantage to being an asset that it is not interested in giving up. There has to be a way for it to kill when it needs to kill, to take out targets and complete the mission to remove the evil of HYDRA from the world, even as a person.

But Yasmin assured it that the courts and juries—things that did not matter to it as an asset but that now need to start mattering—would not excuse it for killing when it means to kill. That killing because it planned to do so would get it punished.

The things it has done before were “overlooked” and “pardoned” because of the agreement with S.W.O.R.D. and the fact that it was an asset. But as a person, it needs to follow person rules. 

It sighs. 

Such a hassle. Such an imposition.

Maybe the ballerina woman has a way around this. She has killed, it is sure, outside of the mission in Siberia, but still when she was already a person. And she does not seem to have been punished for it.

Was it wartime? Is that the exception that allowed her to kill? Or did she just hide it really well instead of advertising her actions for all to see?

Did S.H.I.E.L.D. allow it for operatives? If so, that does not explain Siberia, because the ballerina woman was not working with S.H.I.E.L.D. then. 

And if S.H.I.E.L.D. allows it, then why would S.W.O.R.D. not allow it?

Frustration. It is feeling that prickle of irritation that makes it want to pull at the hair or expend lots of energy in the training room. Why can’t things be clear and simple?

Natasha

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 5:30 p.m.—

Natasha hides her smile at Kate’s sigh and trains her eyes on the African violet she’s been working on. The girl had agreed to garden with her, rather than going elsewhere on her own, but it’s clearly not her favorite task. Maybe next time she’ll choose to work on her paper instead of accompanying Natasha.

And really, it’s a task—a hobby rather than a chore, to Natasha—that Natasha would rather do with Jigsaw than with Kate. But needs must. They have to find ways to make sure Jigsaw has privacy to process his therapy sessions with Clint, but without making Kate feel like she’s an intruder who must be sent and kept away. 

So today it’s gardening, and maybe tomorrow she can help Sam and Steve make cookies or something, though there are still cookies left from the Halloween party to be eaten. She’s sure, somehow, that “too many cookies” isn’t a real problem they can have in the Tower.

Or Natasha can monitor Kate’s progress with parkour, even if she won’t have advice on adding archery to it. That might be more in line with Kate’s vision of spending time around the Tower. 

Well it’s too late for today. And actually, it’s pretty late for a therapy session, too. Those typically end around 5, and Clint was going to let her know when they were ready for company. 

Guess not yet. 

“I think I’m done, now.” Kate brushes a bit of potting soil from her hands and presents her carefully planted row of carrots in their long planter. “How’s it look?”

“Very nice. Which do you want next? Onions or radishes?”

Kate frowns. “Why are we planting vegetables, anyway? And inside, in the winter? I thought vegetables grew in the spring and summer.”

“These are winter vegetables.” Natasha shrugs. “And it’s a hobby,” she says. “Why does anyone have a hobby?”

“I guess.”

Kate looks around at the seed packets, the planters waiting to be filled with soil and seeded, and the row of prettier pots with their succulents that had needed tending.

“Working on those might be more fun.”

Natasha smiles. “We have to leave something for Jigsaw to do other than take photos and rearrange all the pretty pots.”

Of course, Jigsaw would also want to plant onions and radishes. But just as she doesn’t want Kate to feel bad about being present to overhear therapy recaps, she also doesn’t want Kate to feel bad about taking over tasks Jigsaw would find really enjoyable. 

Her phone chimes, and Natasha brushes potting soil from her hands before checking it—it’s Clint, but not the message she expected.

[Still no Jigs. How worried should I be?]

Natasha isn’t sure how to answer that. It’s true enough that it doesn’t take half an hour to get from the therapy room to Clint, but afternoon sessions could run long this close after the skipped sessions and hurricane, and they’re dealing with matters of personhood. That could take longer to discuss.

She’s halfway to having composed a response about not worrying and about asking JARVIS if Jigsaw is on his way or still with Yasmin so that they don’t miss each other in passing if Clint goes to meet him somewhere, when the gardening room door opens to reveal Jigsaw himself, looking a touch contemplative but not upset. 

Natasha welcomes him in and then deletes her message to type in a new one: [Jigsaw just showed up here. You want to come garden with us, or you want me to send Kate to you?]

“I’ve got some succulents for you to repot if you’re interested, Jigsaw,” Natasha says with a gesture to the row of pots. 

[Is he upset?]

Natasha takes in Jigsaw’s nod and the way he smoothly takes a seat across from her with the succulents in front of himself, appearing to her to be interested and even a little eager to take on the job. He doesn’t seem upset.

[No.]

[Okay, send Kate to me, then. Have fun with your dirt.]

“While Jigsaw and I work on these succulents,” Natasha says, “why don’t you go get a workout in with Clint before dinner, Kate?”

“Really?” Kate looks like she’s been given some great reprieve and immediately drops the seed packet she’d been reading. “I don’t have to plant onions or whatever?” she asks sourly. “Not that I would have hated that or anything.”

Natasha gives her a knowing smile, which just flusters Kate into leaving more apologetically than needed.

Jigsaw looks over at the seed packet with unguarded curiosity in his eyes. 

“Would you rather plant onions and radishes than repot the succulents?”

After a moment, he nods and moves over to where Kate had been sitting. 

Natasha gives him time to read the back of the seed packet to pick up the sowing depth and spacing information and pulls the succulents across to her own spot at the table. When he starts preparing the seedbed, she determines that he’s confident in what he’s doing and won’t need her to explain to him. 

“Kate wasn’t as much of a gardening fan as we are,” Natasha says. “She was bored after just doing the carrots.” 

Jigsaw signs that he’s happy there will be carrots, and then points to the long planter Kate had worked on and raises his eyebrows.

“Yep, that’s her handiwork.”

He gives it a thumbs up and then sits back a bit on the stool he’s perched on, looking at her with an expression that hints at more complicated questions floating to the surface. After a moment, the first question comes out.

“Person Natasha expert in person,” he signs, “teach Jigsaw Clint person?”

She blinks. “You want me to teach you… and Clint… how to be a person?”

He nods. “Asset time-before, now-time person. Natasha knows change, asset into person. Will teach?”

So in his eyes, she used to be an asset, probably while she was under Red Room control, and has successfully made the transition into being a person. And seems to think that Clint—the person who taught her most of what she knows about being a person, despite his terrible opinion of himself as a person—has been an asset and not a person at all up to this point. 

On the one hand, it’s an honor to be asked. And she did need to unlearn a lot of things the Red Room had taught her in order to really live her life as a person. 

But she can’t simply say “yes” and proceed to pass on her knowledge. That would be dishonest. Because while she’s made that transition, she’s not the “expert in person,” not really. She doubts she ever will be. Only this past summer did she learn what it felt like to have a family that cared for her enough to send flowers and cards after a surgery. She suspects there are plenty of other things she currently has no experience with, too. 

And even if she were an expert, she can’t pretend to teach Clint how to be a person when he’s the one who taught her in the first place. She suspects Clint would gladly allow her to “teach” him along with Jigsaw if that made it easier for Jigsaw to feel “the same as” him, but it’s a subterfuge she wants no part in. She’ll actually teach Clint what is needed, but that’s mostly about self-esteem.

“Well, I can share some tips with you from areas I might be more familiar with than Clint, having made the journey myself, yes. But I don’t have much to teach Clint. He’s the one who taught me.”

Jigsaw cocks his head to one side, eyeing her quizzically. 

“After I left the Red Room, I was targeted by S.H.I.E.L.D. as an enemy agent—an asset—to be taken off the field. I was Clint’s target, and his mission was to kill me. But he made a different call, and brought me in to join S.H.I.E.L.D. instead. As a person.”

“Taught?” Jigsaw asks, looking around as if searching for someone. 

“Clint’s the one who taught me,” she answers, thinking she has the question right. “In S.H.I.E.L.D., we were both assets, but we were also people. That’s where the biggest challenge is going to be for you. The jump from just an asset to being an asset and a person.”

“Can both?” he signs, looking like he’s not sure he believes her about that being an option. “Asset mission kill targets, person no never kill law jury punishment. Both?”

Natasha hesitates, not sure what Yasmin has said about personhood and not wanting to contradict his therapist. “Let me explain how it’s been in the past for Clint and me, and for you.”

Jigsaw nods.

“The main difference I see between the three of us is the degree to which we were treated as human beings. In the Red Room, I was an asset, but I was considered a human asset.” She pauses to let that sink in. “And in S.H.I.E.L.D., Clint was an asset, but a human asset. We were treated like human beings. Not animals, not purely tools or weapons.”

Natasha frowns. “HYDRA treated you like an asset, but not a human one. You were considered to be an inhuman tool or item, maybe half a step up from an inanimate object, but only because you could move on your own.”

Jigsaw appears to give this some thought, so she pauses her explanation for a moment to allow him time to ponder.

“If we put it on a spectrum, Clint was considered human and a person while being an asset. I was considered human but not really a person while being an asset. And you were considered to be nothing more than an object to be used while being an asset.”

Jigsaw’s nod is a slow, considering one, his eyes unfocused as he processes.

She waits a while before continuing. 

“Clint, a human person and asset, taught me, a human asset, how to live as a person as well. And I am now a human person and asset, just like Clint. And we can teach you how to live as a human person and asset, too.”

After a moment, he nods again. “So can kill targets,” he signs. “And person.”

Natasha hopes he’s getting more out of this than that, but she can see how he might focus on the part that has the biggest impact on his life to date. If he thinks that people aren’t allowed to kill other people, it might be a comfort to him to hold onto his asset-only status. She wishes she knew what Yasmin had said in today’s session.

“On a mission,” Natasha emphasizes, “as assets who are part of this team of Avengers, if we accidentally apply enough force to kill someone, it’s excusable. But we don’t have clearance to slaughter willfully and we definitely aren’t allowed to torture or maul people.”

This gets narrowed eyes, but in consideration rather than disapproval, she thinks. 

“Siberia?” he asks.

Well, he’s got her there. During that mission, they’d definitely applied enough force to kill everyone in that base, and it was decidedly not by accident. Tony had repulsor-beamed people in the face, Hulk had smeared people onto the walls, Natasha had shot to kill, and Rogers… She’d never seen rage like that on his face before, and never wants to see it again, as he’d pummeled and sliced with that shield of his.

“There were extenuating circumstances,” she says, and then stops, her shoulders settling back into a less defensive pose. 

“No,” she says. “That’s a lie. We used excessive force and brutality because we were angry at what Rumlow was saying that we could hear through your comms. And we should not have. Ideally, we should have aimed to disarm and incapacitate.”

And that’s true. Ideally, they’d have been able to do that. But the mission hadn’t been ideal in any way. 

“But while the brutality wasn’t quite called for, at the same time, they were definitely aiming to kill us, so we didn’t have a lot of choices in how we aimed our shots. If we’d gone easier on them, someone on our team would have gotten seriously hurt or killed. Beyond what happened to you.”

“Punish Siberia mission?” he asks. “Intention kill not accident? Jury and cage-prison and punishment?”

She blinks. “No. For one thing, no one knows about it. The base was thoroughly destroyed by Tony’s extra robots within hours of us arriving back here. No footage could possibly leak and we killed nearly everyone there—everyone who showed a face, anyway—and no survivors have made trouble for us. But even if footage did get out somehow…”

Natasha thinks about it. What would happen? If there were audio on the footage, their actions would be understandable. Without it, it will just look like they went in and slaughtered the people who ambushed them. It would be obvious that both sides were aiming to kill. She’s pretty sure their excessive use of force would be swept under the rug of “necessity in dire circumstances.”

“I don’t think there would be punishment beyond a slap on the wrist and injunction to be less brutal in the future.”

Jigsaw slaps his wrist and asks his question sign.

“Figure of speech,” she says. “Meaning a minor or ineffectual punishment like a slap on the wrist, which wouldn’t have any impact on most people.”

“Rule broken no punishment law,” he signs, looking thoughtful again. “Some law obey and some law no obey.” He puts the laws to be obeyed in one pile and the laws to be disobeyed in another. Then points between them and asks his question sign again.

“I’m afraid for most people, it’s common sense which laws should be obeyed and which not. But we’ll work on it until you can tell the difference. And while you learn the differences, I’m sure there can be some leniency.”

Natasha smiles at him. “Just don’t go torturing anyone on the streets, for now. That’s a law that should definitely be obeyed all the time, even on a mission when acting as an asset.”

“Asset and person,” he signs wonderingly, as if considering the combination and finding it just a touch bewildering. “Asset and person.”

She smiles again. “Yep.”

A new thought occurs to him and he goes down the list of Avengers, making their name signs and placing them all in a row. Then he makes Clint’s name sign and signs “both.” Natasha’s name sign gets “both” as well. Then he points to Tony’s name sign and signs “technician and asset,” and Rogers’s name sign with a pause and then his question sign.

“You want to know which members of the team are assets and also people?” she asks.

He nods. 

“All of us. We’re assets as Avengers, and we’re also people. And yes, I suppose Tony’s also a technician and Bruce is also a researcher,” she adds. “People can be all kinds of things at the same time.”

Jigsaw mimes his head exploding, and she grins. 

“Yeah, it’s a lot to take in.”

“Jigsaw need think hard think. Homework Yasmin, think hard.”

“Well, how better to think than by doing something with your hands?” she asks. “Want to plant some onions?”

He nods, and they get to work.

Chapter Text

—New York City | Wednesday 31 October 2012 | 10:15 p.m.—

Jigsaw is tense when he gets back from his evening session with Zoe, and Clint isn’t sure what they discussed that would ramp up his tension this much. It couldn’t be the Halloween thing, because they’d hardly been involved with the Tower’s trick-or-treat zone beyond setting up the cardboard village. That was how Kate had spent the afternoon and evening, but not them.

Still, while Jigsaw sits in front of him with his tablet in his lap, Clint’s hands on his back are accomplishing nearly nothing toward relaxing him for bed.

Clint has been reading massage books, or at least reading the diagrams and useful bits—he doesn’t need all the theory crap; he only needs the practical stuff—in a bid to give more effective massages and help alleviate some of Jigsaw’s pain. He’s gotten pretty good, if Natasha’s assessment is worth anything, and he’s sure it is.

At the very least, he’s gotten to the point of not being as afraid that he’ll damage something in Jigsaw’s back by applying too much or the wrong kind of pressure. He still stays primarily to the right side, where that horrible body map of Stark and Banner’s indicated most of the muscles are legitimately Jigsaw’s muscles and not synthetic muscles crafted by HYDRA. 

Clint doesn’t hold it against those HYDRA-made muscles or anything. They can’t help that they were handmade by evil mad scientists. But he’s not sure how they work, exactly, or if they lay differently than natural muscles, or if there’s something nasty embedded deep inside that would be painful for him to press on.

So Jigsaw should be melting gradually until he’s all the way ready to let Clint help him up and they can crawl into bed for the night. But he remains as tense as before Clint started, and that’s unusual. 

Maybe he should have brushed Jigsaw’s hair instead of this back rub. 

“Everything okay?” Clint asks, resting his flat hands over Jigsaw’s shoulder blades. “You’re tenser than usual tonight.”

Jigsaw shrugs, not enough to dislodge Clint’s hands, and holds up his tablet for Clint to see.

There’s one of those overlapping circles charts, Venn somethings, on the screen, and Jigsaw is apparently putting things into categories on his tablet. Not the usual basket sorting, but something that emphasizes the overlapping nature of the two main categories and the presence of the resulting third category. 

On one side, the circle is yellow and the words above it are “OK to kill,” and on the other side is a blue circle with “Not OK to kill,” with a green overlap.

HYDRA is in the yellow, and EVIL. Also WAR and MURDER. The blue has INNOCENTS and CIVILIANS in it, along with ANIMALS.

In the middle… The middle has some interesting entries. MISSION and TARGET Clint expects to see there. ACCIDENT is there, as well, though, which is a bit of a surprise. This is the first time Clint’s seen that Jigsaw has acknowledged that sometimes death is a result of an accident and not something intentionally caused. MANSLAUGHTER is in the middle, too. Also FOOD. 

There is plenty of room for more in all parts of the chart.

“Homework from Zoe?” Clint asks.

Jigsaw nods. 

“It’s okay to kill because you’re hungry?”

Jigsaw shakes his head and points to ANIMALS in the no-kill circle.

“Oh. So it’s okay to kill an animal if you need to eat that animal, but otherwise it wouldn’t be okay to kill that animal.” Clint waits for the nod. “What about a really tenacious attack dog? The kind that will rip your throat out at a single whistle and the target is whistling for all he’s worth?”

Jigsaw pauses and then taps in the middle of the circles to add ATTACK DOG to the list. 

He sets the tablet in his lap again and leans back into Clint’s chest. He signs that it’s complicated and that he doesn’t like it. That it should be simple. Kill HYDRA, do not kill innocents. Done. That people have it really hard needing to make all these decisions all the time.

Clint wraps his arms around Jigsaw to hug him for a moment before releasing him and resting his hands on Jigsaw’s thighs. 

“Being a person is hard, yeah.”

Natasha has told him all about their earlier conversation, about how she needed to out him as being a person already and about how Jigsaw hadn’t seemed overly surprised or hurt by the revelation. Apparently, Jigsaw had kind of suspected Clint had been treated as a person long enough to have adopted many person traits on top of his asset traits. 

And Jigsaw had been surprised to find that she insisted it was very possible to be both an asset and a person. That it wasn’t immediately accepted, but that he had considered it from a variety of angles and then continued planting onions. 

Jigsaw tips his head back onto Clint’s collarbone and sighs. He repeats that it’s complicated and then wraps Clint’s arms over his stomach. And just when Clint is sure Jigsaw’s settled in for a silent cuddle session, he adds that it’s not fair.

“What’s not fair about it?”

Jigsaw signs that being an asset is easy, being a person is hard, and being both is harder still. It should be that being a person alone would be hardest, he insists, not being both a person and an asset. It should be asset is easy, person is hard, and both is somewhere in between. Medium.

Clint can’t see Jigsaw’s lips from this angle, but he’s sure there’s a pout on those lips. 

He’s equally sure the pout is adorable and that he’s missing out because he can’t see it. He doesn’t necessarily like it when there’s something for Jigsaw to pout about, but he does like the look of Jigsaw’s lips when the man’s feeling pouty. There’s just something extra kissable about the downward turn of his lips. 

Clint settles for the warmth and solidity of Jigsaw’s back against his chest, the rise and fall of his chest and stomach under Clint’s hands, the hint—and only a hint, even after so long eating proper meals—of softness along Jigsaw’s midriff. Apparently, even a super soldier who hasn’t been training as hard as usual and who is well past lean times just doesn’t get more than the thinnest layer of padding, no matter what.

Lucky snorts in his sleep beside them on the floor, paws twitching as he dreams about chasing rabbits or catching a ball, whatever it is that dogs dream about, and Jigsaw reaches over to rest a metal hand lightly along the dog’s neck, stroking Lucky’s fur softly. 

“I’m sorry it’s not fairer,” Clint says, “about the personhood thing. And I’m sorry for suggesting that I wasn’t a person earlier. I only meant that I would follow your lead, not to mislead you.”

Jigsaw signs that it’s okay, and that Clint shouldn’t be sorry. 

“You know, it might be easier to be just an asset or just a person, but it’s really rewarding to be both. You can have the best of both worlds. You don’t need to combine the worst of them.”

Clint waits for a response, but all he gets after a moment is Jigsaw raising his right hand up over his head to stroke Clint’s hair and the side of his neck. 

“And while I know how much the entire killing area matters to you, that’s only a very small part of things. A tiny little piece of the puzzle, not even an edge or a corner.” Clint tips his head toward Jigsaw’s palm, nuzzling a little into his partner’s hand. 

“HYDRA didn’t even treat you like a real asset to be cared for and protected and prepared for the field with everything you needed for success. They treated you like a broken weapon they could squeeze a little more use out of before it was time to toss you aside.”

Clint will not allow himself to become angry about that, not right now. He’s trying to make it clear that there is a wide gulf, a gaping chasm between how HYDRA treated Jigsaw and how most assets are treated. His anger doesn’t have a role to play here. He can swallow it down. He can. It just tastes horrible—bitter and ugly on his tongue.

“Natasha wasn’t treated like that. She was valued, highly prized, almost pampered by comparison to her less skilled sisters in the Red Room. Just not a person, really. And that wasn’t right. Because all humans are people, even if we don’t like them, or if we hate them, or if we think they’re monsters.”

By extension, of course, that means the likes of Rumlow and that lot were people, back before they were corpses. But Clint’s gotta be honest about the distinctions, and that’s a slippery slope, denying that humans you hate aren’t people. No one said all people had to be good people. Rotten ones exist.

Jigsaw’s left hand leaves Lucky’s fur and signs HYDRA, and then he shakes his head. 

“No, sorry, Jigs.” Clint hates to say it, but… “Even HYDRA is made up of a lot of people. They’re just people who suck. Terrible monster people. But they’re still people.”

That gives Jigsaw something to think over for nearly a minute, and then he makes Loki’s name sign, the L curling up from his temple to mimic the godling’s horned helmet. He asks his question sign. 

Clint sighs. “Yeah, him, too, I guess.”

Jigsaw makes the name sign again, and then “alien” and “army,” “war” and “city.”

“Chitauri?” Clint guesses.

Jigsaw nods against his collarbone and taps one finger against Clint’s cheek to confirm his response.

“Well, they might be more like bugs than people, just based on how they looked, and they sure weren’t human. Just humanoid. But that’s probably unfair. Thor’s an alien, after all, and he’s a person. So sure, the Chitauri were people, too. Just people we had to defeat to save the world.”

“Lucky?” Jigsaw signs.

…What? He’s not sure where that is coming from. Jigsaw knows Lucky isn’t a person, and he’s definitely a dog, an animal, not a humanoid or a human. 

“No,” Clint says. “Why do you think he could be a person?”

“Dolphin-fish?”

Clint blinks. He sure wishes he knew what Jigsaw was getting at. 

“Nope.”

Jigsaw signs that they are smart, the “dolphin-fish,” and that they make talk bubbles and click noises. That they have families and friends.

Clint is feeling decidedly out of his depth on this one. 

“Uh,” he says, very intelligently. “I guess this is something Stark showed you in the lab?”

Jigsaw nods and sighs. “Dolphin-fish people?”

“I don’t think so, no. I think they’re really smart animals, and not people. I mean, they’re in zoos and, like, Seaworld and stuff, doing tricks and things.” The ground he’s basing this premise on feels really shaky. Because aren’t there circuses with people doing “tricks and things” and activists and stuff that are against Seaworld, specifically? “Seaworld is like a zoo for animals that live in the water.”

“Jigsaw HYDRA captive tricks. Is person.”

Yeah. Clint knows there’s a difference, he just can’t be sure exactly what the dividing line is between person and not person when it comes to smarts. Parrots are smart, and ravens and crows and monkeys and things, but they aren’t people. And HYDRA treating Jigsaw like less of a person than he is doesn’t mean that zoos are keeping people captive in the animal enclosures just because those animals are smart animals.

“I guess it’s a gray area,” Clint says at last. “I don’t think dolphins are counted as people, but I can see why it might seem like an arbitrary decision to make.”

Jigsaw signs that it’s complicated again, and sighs. 

“If you drew a line from ‘all the way a person’ to ‘all the way not a person,’” Clint says, “we’re all the way on the person side, and so is Thor, Loki, Chitauri, HYDRA, and all of that. And Lucky and the kittens are all the way on the not a person side. They’re just plain not people, even though we love them a lot. And dolphins are kind of somewhere in the middle, I guess.”

“Zola?” Jigsaw asks. “JARVIS?”

Oh, god, now there’s robots in the mix. 

“I…” Clint sighs. “I don’t know. Zola was a person when he was alive, but he’s kind of turned into a robot now, and I don’t know if he still counts. JARVIS was never alive, at least the version that lives in the ceiling, but he’s kind of a person in my eyes. If he wants to be.”

“JARVIS?” Jigsaw asks again. “Person?”

Clint opens his mouth to answer, but JARVIS beats him to it.

“I have given it much thought while observing your own journey toward the acceptance of your personhood, Jigsaw,” JARVIS’s voice says softly. “I believe that I do have a developed personality beyond that with which my creator imbued me. I would consider myself conscious and self-aware. I certainly have the use of language, and I am in possession of what many would consider a moral compass.”

“Person,” Jigsaw signs with a nod. “Jigsaw thought person.”

“I gladly consider myself to be a person alongside you, Jigsaw.”

Well, at least that’s cleared up. 

“Thanks for chiming in, JARVIS,” Clint says. “It’s good to have you around.”

“It is good to be around, Agent Barton.”

They sit like that, Clint leaning back against the sofa with Jigsaw leaning back against him, Clint’s arms around Jigsaw’s midriff and Jigsaw’s right hand cupping Clint’s cheek, until Clint feels his butt start to freeze into the flattened pose against the carpet. At this rate, his legs will fall asleep before he does, and he’ll be a jelly monster from the butt down when he tries to stand. 

But Jigsaw is comfortable, presumably, and doesn’t seem to be falling asleep while Clint traces his fingers lightly across Jigsaw’s abs. 

Clint would have to starve himself for days and probably ration his water, too, to get abs like this. At least over Jigsaw’s thick shirt it’s harder to feel the scarring that Clint knows covers those muscles. Not that it would make him mad at this point if he felt those scars more directly. He thinks.

It’s always a bit hard to know for sure what will anger him, but the day’s been a long one, and they’re winding down. He feels like his anger wouldn’t come bubbling up out of the middle of a wind down. 

“You thinking about heading to bed any time soon, Jigs?” Clint asks. 

Jigsaw shrugs. “Dolphin-fish close person,” he signs. 

Clint eyes the ceiling. “So that’s a no. Is your mind racing about personhood still, or is it something else? Because my butt is getting sleepy. I might need to shift our position soon.”

Jigsaw sits up, twisting around smoothly as though he hadn’t been every bit as still as Clint for every bit as long. Not for the first time, Clint finds himself envious of Jigsaw’s seemingly never-ending stores of flexibility. It’s like the man’s made of ball bearings the way he is always primed to change his position. Forget personhood being hard. That is what isn’t fair. The ball-bearings in Jigsaw’s joints.

Of course… that makes Clint consider the actual ball bearings and metal bits and similar that are definitely buried somewhere in Jigsaw’s torso and the nature of his prosthetic arm and its “anchor points” as Stark and Banner call them. And Clint immediately feels like shit being envious of something that probably costs Jigsaw a lot in pain, for all he doesn’t show it on his face.

“Okay?” Jigsaw signs, looking concerned for Clint’s butt’s wakefulness. Jigsaw shifts to his knees like he’s been limbering up for the last half hour instead of sitting there on the ground for twice that long, and then offers Clint a hand up. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, taking hold of Jigsaw’s hand. “Yeah, I’m okay. My butt’s just half-asleep is all. How are your shoulders feeling? Did that massage earlier do any good?”

Jigsaw has him up on his feet in one smooth motion, and Clint pretends his own knees didn’t crack as he stood up, himself. 

Jigsaw watches him as though confirming that he’s okay to stand on his own and then gives his right shoulder a roll and does a recalibration loop on his left arm, the plates all shifting up and then back down into place.

Clint remembers the first time he encountered that recalibration loop, how horrified he’d been that he had somehow caused damage to that metal arm, and his chagrin at learning that it was just something the arm could do, no big deal. The very first time they’d held hands, afterward. 

Clint reaches for Jigsaw’s left hand, holds it in both of his own. “Your back?” he asks. 

Jigsaw signs that it feels the same as usual, which Clint is not feeling particularly satisfied with, given that he’s been able to make Jigsaw feel better than usual many other nights since he started with the back rubs. 

“Can we try something to make your back feel better?” he asks. “And your shoulders?”

Jigsaw taps Clint’s wrist twice but nods. 

So he’s aware of the time and wants to make sure Clint gets good sleep, but he’s also wanting to please Clint by agreeing to humor him. Clint supposes he’ll take it.

“I’ve got a heating pad you can lie back on, and that might help. I know you already run hot, but maybe a little more heat will help loosen things up. Nothing that would burn you, I promise.”

Jigsaw lets Clint draw him along to the bedroom, with Lucky following—Alpine and Liho don’t rouse from their perch on the living room cat tree, though Clint knows they’ll end up snuggling into the pile with the rest of them at some point during the night.

Clint gets the heating pad set up and tucks it and Jigsaw into the bed for the night, promising to be right back after he changes for bed, and to join him. But he doesn’t get far beyond helping Lucky into the bed before Jigsaw waves to catch his attention and signs that he wants to look at him.

Clint blinks, points to himself, and blinks again. “I’m right here. What’s there to look at?”

Jigsaw shifts to his side—Clint is going to have to remind him that his back needs to be in contact with the heating pad for there to be any point at all to using the thing—and repeats himself. 

“At me?” Clint feels himself heating up, and he’s not even touching the damn heating pad. 

Jigsaw nods, his eyes giving nothing away but the smile on his lips inviting him to keep asking for clarification if he’d like.

Clint shrugs. “Alright. I’m just going to take my jeans off, it’s not like you haven’t seen everything before. And lie back down. That doesn’t do any good if you’re not lying back on it.”

Clint tugs his jeans off, somehow more aware of Jigsaw’s eyes than usual, and commands his face not to be flushing bright red at the thought—the feel—of Jigsaw’s eyes on him as his partner stretches out, waiting for him all propped up on an elbow. 

“Is it okay if I go put these in the laundry hamper in the bathroom, or do you want me to stay where you can see me?” Clint asks, knowing full well that he’s losing the battle of the blush.

“Leave pants stay” is what Jigsaw signs back at him, and Clint nods.

“I’ll leave them by the bathroom door. Don’t complain about it in the morning, though. You told me to leave them there.”

Jigsaw smiles and settles back onto the heating pad, patting the bed beside himself and Lucky, and Clint joins them, giving Jigsaw a kiss as he does so.

“Did you get a good show?” Clint asks as he crawls under the covers and snugs himself up against Jigsaw’s side. He gets to be the one on his side this time, which is nice. He gives Jigsaw another kiss and then rests his head on Jigsaw’s right bicep and snakes a hand around Jigsaw’s middle.

Jigsaw nods, and signs his thanks. 

“M-hm.” Clint considers teasing him, saying something like how it was Clint’s turn to watch next time, but on the off-chance that such a thing might be triggering, he keeps his mouth shut for once. 

Good job, Clint, he tells himself. Keep your feet out of your mouth.

“JARVIS has that thing on a timer and temperature control, so you shouldn’t burn or get too warm with it, even if you fall asleep with it on. It’ll turn off well before there’s any kind of danger, but if it gets uncomfortable, just poke me, okay?”

Jigsaw nods again, and turns his head to kiss Clint’s hair.

“JARVIS, lights, please?”

The lamp on the nightstand clicks off, and Clint settles in for the night.

Chapter Text

Charlene

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 10:45 a.m.—

The press is keeping it to a low rumble in Conference Hall B, and she knows the mics all work as planned because she tested them herself with the IT staffer before the press was let into the conference room. There have been no mishaps with the invitations that she’s been made aware of, no leaks that her team has uncovered. Everything should be in order. 

Charlene looks between the two Marias, Rambeau and Hill, both dressed in no-nonsense black suits with the lapel pins of their respective organizations in place. Pepper stands between them, her own outfit not a plain suit but something a bit more feminine, in a navy and cream with red accents. 

Together, the three of them present the strict bridge between military and government and the more personable Avengers side of things. 

Really, the Avengers Initiative needs its own press secretary. Charlene is happy to continue devoting her own expertise to the cause, but Pepper is going to be worn thin if she must continue to head up Stark Industries and also see to the Avengers’ public relations. 

There should also be at least two interpreters on staff for the Avengers, from what she’s seen. Jigsaw might not be giving interviews or answering questions at this point, but someday he will be, and they can’t count on biased interpretation as from his fellow teammates, whom the public could suspect of covering for a dodgy answer. They’ll need to present at least somewhat a third-party face. 

That third party should be fluent in what Charlene understands to be a nonstandard form of ASL, as signed by Jigsaw. The sooner they get started with that, the better. They’ve got an interpreter here today, just to set the standard for the future, and because accessibility is Pepper’s latest big thing after clean energy in how she wants to position Stark Industries. 

Chris is waiting in the conference room, sitting to the side and reviewing the materials Charlene had given them. They’ve been with Stark Industries for a few months now, and Charlene will be sad to see them get transferred out to the Avengers Initiative if that’s the way things turn out after this conference. 

But Stark Industries can find new interpreters with ease compared to how tricky it would be to find even one interpreter who can work with Jigsaw. The higher security clearance needs, the nonstandard use of the language, the hazards of the job… all of that will make it better if Chris agrees to offer their services to the Avengers Initiative.

“Anything else you can think of that might warrant addition in the presentation?” Charlene asks the three presenters. “Any objections to what we’ve agreed upon?”

Rambeau shakes her head, speaking softly, “I’ve reviewed Arsenio’s reports from Rogers, and all looks to be in order.” She nods toward Hill and then Pepper. “I have no doubt there are things that haven’t made it into the reports, but I trust Rogers’s discretion on such matters.”

“The prevailing opinion at what’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D. is to relay as little information as possible,” Hill says, just as softly. “I’d be happiest if we weren’t even here today.”

“Well there’s a need for it,” Pepper says with a touch of harshness. “We can’t ignore the phones as readily as S.H.I.E.L.D. or S.W.O.R.D. can. We have a company to run on top of unofficially managing the Avengers Initiative. It will help if the ‘no comment’ responses come from official sources, at least, and not me.”

Hill folds her arms. “If they’d let S.H.I.E.L.D. take it back over, we would. Rogers and Stark in particular don’t cooperate with Nick and myself.” She smiles. “Though Jigsaw still faithfully sends back his folder of names and faces every time I send one to him.”

Hm. Charlene could have sworn Pepper said the exchange of personnel files had stopped some time ago. Well, it won’t come up in the press conference, in any case. That’s what matters now. The possibility that Jigsaw is unofficially vetting S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel could probably remain between Jigsaw and Hill. 

Still, she’ll stick a pin in it to come back to and draft up some explanations that might be useful if the public does find out and object for some reason. It never hurts to be prepared.

Charlene consults her watch. It’s nearly time. 

“Alright, let’s file in and get this circus on the road.”

Pepper

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 11:15 a.m.—

Pepper knows not to let herself relax until the last questions have been fired off, but she also can’t help but feel that Charlene’s introduction of the three of them and presentation of the facts of the press release went exactly according to plan, and that this is an excellent start to what could prove to be an otherwise challenging press conference. At least the first part has gone well.

At Charlene’s gesture, the first reporter stands up and announces herself. 

“Margaret Summers from The Tribune. You say the reason for keeping Barnes’s identity hidden was to cater to the ‘memories and wishes’ of Cap’s ‘friend.’ Do you feel those memories and wishes outweigh the right of the public to know the details of a matter of such national importance?”

Pepper waits for Maria Hill to take the question, as they’d planned to divvy things up by subject. If Hill doesn’t step forward, though—

To her relief, Hill does step forward. 

“We do not believe that Jigsaw’s identity or personal life is a matter of national importance. Nor is the identity or personal life of Sergeant Barnes.” Hill manages to mix sternness with exasperation while keeping a surface layer of professionalism as she continues. “This press conference was called in response to media interest, not a national crisis.”

Charlene points to another reporter with his hand raised, and Summers sits down with a frown, clearly dissatisfied with the answer she received.

“Dirk Varda from The Daily Chronicle,” he says. “What’s changed between now and when he was first retrieved? Or for that matter, between now and your special statement on Sunday? Did he get his memories back?”

Pepper steps forward. “That I am aware of, he has not regained any memories of his life as Bucky Barnes, no.”

“Then why call a press conference to rehash the details of a situation that hasn’t changed?” he follows up.

Pepper smiles at him. “Simply put, to answer the burning questions of publications like your own Daily Chronicle, which has left several messages asking for further detail.”

Charlene gestures. 

“Cora McLean, Daily Gazette. You say you have records of Barnes’s capture and imprisonment. What do those records say, exactly? What was Barnes doing in the intelligence community while supposedly a HYDRA captive?”

“I’d like to remind the press that he goes by Jigsaw, thank you,” Charlene interjects before allowing Maria Hill to step up to the mic.

Hill looks back at Charlene with a smile. “Thank you, Ms McKenzie.” She turns to face front once more. “That is sealed information, and beyond the scope of this conference.”

“Was he a Soviet operative?” calls out one of the voices in the crowd, unidentified. 

“Details of Jigsaw’s past are sealed and beyond the scope of this conference,” Hill repeats. “We are here to address matters of the present, and I thank you all to keep your questions relevant.”

At Charlene’s pointing finger, a reporter Pepper very much wishes she didn’t recognize stands. 

“Christine Everhart, WHiH World News. If Jigsaw was used as a ‘sentient weapon’ by HYDRA and others, and those crimes aren’t his responsibility, then what about those actions Jigsaw took against his HYDRA masters? The Red Star killings, the D.C. Slasher attacks before them? Are you saying those get swept under the rug as well?”

Maria Rambeau shakes her head as she takes a step toward the mic. “The one in control of a weapon is still responsible for that weapon, even during a misfire. Those parties no longer have access to or control over Jigsaw.”

“How can you guarantee that this remains the case?” Everhart follows up. “Is he not at risk of conveniently falling into their hands again? Just how many times can a serial killer be pardoned?”

“The risk you cite is minimal, Ms Everhart,” Rambeau says, “and decreases over time as his deprogramming and rehabilitation continue.”

“Isn’t a minimal risk still a risk? How can you guarantee that rehab has worked?”

Rambeau doesn’t look perturbed, though Pepper can tell Charlene is regretting calling on this reporter. “Your question betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of rehabilitation and recovery. Jigsaw’s rehabilitation and deprogramming is ongoing and we are monitoring it and him closely. He has shown no signs of regression. His therapy team is satisfied with his rate of progress.”

“Shouldn’t he be locked up to prevent him from falling into HYDRA hands again?” Everhart asks.

“Another question, please,” Charlene says, pointing to a different part of the room.

“Joey Sanders, The Globe. Same question. Shouldn’t Jigsaw be locked up to keep him and the American people safe?”

Rambeau gestures for Charlene to allow the question and steps forward again. “Jigsaw is a human being before he is a sentient weapon. He is not responsible for the actions taken by HYDRA or others, and it would be inhumane to lock him up for the crimes others have committed against him and/or using his body.”

Charlene calls on another reporter.

“Vincent Burke with Daily Townsman. Who are these ‘qualified staff’ on Jigsaw’s therapy team, and what makes them qualified to deal with this situation? No one’s ever handled an enhanced POW of sixty years.”

Pepper steps forward. “For the safety of those staff members, we are not disclosing their identities at this time. Needless to say, they have been selected from among a specialized pool of trauma-informed behavioral therapists and others. Some of them reside in Avengers Tower, some commute in, and others are entirely remote, but the team is comprehensive.”

It’s not a complete lie, though the remote personnel she’s thinking of are Tony’s medical advisors who have been helping him and Bruce with their theories on Jigsaw’s prosthetic and not a mental health professional. Dr Cho wouldn’t mind being classed as part of the qualified staff on the team, though.

And it should help keep Caroline and Linda out of sight amidst the hundreds of others who commute in to Stark Industries every day, and might even keep Zoe and Yasmin out of the spotlight for a while longer.

“Yes, in front,” Charlene says as Pepper steps back. 

“Bryan Hall from Metro 1. Who is the young woman, Monesha Fowler, who has been seen in company with Clint Barton and Jigsaw? My colleagues in D.C. were actually warned away from her.”

Pepper holds in a sigh and doesn’t snap out her answer, instead maintaining a professional—if clipped—tone. “She is a private citizen, and that’s her private life. There’s no need to discuss that. Next question.”

Charlene speaks into the mic. “We have time for one more question.”

There’s a clamoring of called out questions, then, and Pepper doesn’t catch many of them in the din. 

“—responsibility to—”

“—really just co-opting the valor of a beloved war hero to make people comfortable with a known killer?”

“—Siberia—”

“Why warn the press to stay away from—”

“—freedom of the—”

One particularly loud voice comes not from a reporter, but from a young man with a camera. She can’t make out the publication name on his press lanyard and he seems young enough to be an intern at best—but the question is one she’ll gladly use to wrap up the conference. 

“Is Jigsaw deaf?”

Pepper taps the mic and the noise dies down. “Jigsaw is not deaf, no. He hears exceptionally well, but has no voice. Jigsaw communicates using sign language, by writing, and through an augmented and alternative communication app on his tablet.”

“Thank you,” Charlene says as the noise ratchets back up, reporters hoping to make their questions heard or turning to make voice memos to themselves. “This conference is at an end.”

Vultures, Pepper thinks as she steps out of the conference room and into the sound-proofed green room behind it.

“That went about as well as I expected it to,” Hill says once the door is closed between them and the press. “I wish you hadn’t answered that last question, though. Any weakness the public knows about is a weakness that could be used against him.”

Pepper shrugs. She’d had a momentary lapse of judgment there, yes, but it’s not the end of the world. “His enemies already knew. They’re the ones who did that to him.”

“And his newer enemies?” Hill asks. “They’re out there. Some of these reporters are going home to feed rumors and fan flames. And the part of the public who’d gladly see Jigsaw hang will eat it up.”

Pepper doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do about that other than not tell anyone anything and let the story the general public comes up with be as bad as possible. Better they offer up a story they can work with than be stuck with whatever rumors grow out of their silence.

“Done is done,” Charlene says. “They can come up with more questions and ask for interviews all they want, but the security team will see them out and they’ll no doubt have a race to see who can present their breaking news first. That alone buys us some time.”

Peter

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 11:45 a.m.—

It’s official—he’s cut out to be in the reporting business if he wants to be. His was the question Pepper Potts answered at the end, despite lots of other questions being more on topic. Maybe because of the others being more on topic. Pepper hadn’t really liked the direction those other questions were trying to lead things.

He’d only really asked his question at all because there was that ASL interpreter up there signing and it had reminded him of the tweet he read about Jigsaw signing about kittens with that one counselor.

But that’s definitely an angle he could write about in a blog, and he has all the photos he could ever need for it on top of what’s already out there on the internet. A blog entry might be interesting. He’ll need to do some more research before he could do the topic justice. He’d need to learn more about this “augmented and alternative communication” app, or what augmented and alternative communication even was. 

Probably something to do with sign language, if he’s guessing right, but he might not be. Definitely a kind of communication, though. And a bit of internet sleuthing should tell him something of an answer.

He’ll need it.

Because it might be official that his question could get answered, but he’s no reporter all the same. He’s just the photographer, and even then, he came without exactly being invited. Sure, his boss was invited and couldn’t make it. And sure, his boss had waved aside his request to go in his stead with “sure, kid, go wild,” which isn’t exactly sending him out to cover anything important.

But it’s still something, and if the news cycle is dead later this week, maybe one of the columns will need a story to fill it. He’s got the photo for it—he caught the interpreter and all four of the women presenting in one shot and no one had their eyes closed or a scrunched up face, and it’d do well, he’s sure. 

He may not know news yet at this point in his internship, but he knows how to take a great photo.

Chapter Text

Clint

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 4:30 p.m.—

“So, what do you make of it?” Clint asks, having laid out the whole evening before Natasha during this brief window they have while Jigsaw’s in therapy and Kate’s working on her homework, Thor’s entertained by Steve and Wilson, and it’s finally just the two of them. 

“It was weird, wasn’t it?” he asks when she just looks at him. “What was it all about?”

Natasha keeps looking at him for a long, drawn-out minute, her expression waiting for him to answer his own question. 

But the reason he asked is that he wants her opinion on it, wants to know if it was weird, what it was all about. And he can’t ask Jigsaw what was meant by it or he runs the risk of Jigsaw thinking it was weird when it wasn’t, and that would make it weird when it might not have to be weird. 

Assuming, maybe generously, that it wasn’t weird in the first place.

But finally, Natasha either takes pity on his cluelessness or else gets impatient with him.

“Clint, we’ve already been over this ground, remember?”

Clint blinks. “No? No, I don’t. What ground?”

She sighs. 

“Jigsaw thinks you’re hot,” she says with considerable exasperation. “That you are supremely attractive. That you are some kind of archer god with Adonis-like features. It’s definitely your back muscles and not your common sense,” she mutters. 

“So if he says he wants to watch you get ready for bed, he means exactly what he says. He wants to watch you undress.”

“Because I’m hot.”

“Because he thinks so, anyway.”

Clint watches her irritably wave at her sofa and obligingly takes a seat instead of continuing to pace her living room. 

“Do you think…” Clint sees her quirked eyebrow and keeps talking. She’s in a mood today for some reason. Better not to rile her up by hesitating too long. “I was about to say that next time it would be my turn, last night. To tell Jigsaw that I wanted to watch him undress if he was going to watch me.”

“Probably better you didn’t.” She looks over at him sharply. “You didn’t, right? He seemed fine at breakfast so you couldn’t have.”

“Yeah, I kept my mouth shut.” 

She nods. 

Clint pulls her foot into his lap and starts kneading at her arch, firmly running his thumb along the bottom of her foot so as not to tickle. She’d had a headache at breakfast. Maybe that hasn’t gone away. Or maybe she’s just still sore from being “on” for so long during the hurricane after so long necessarily sticking to knee exercises and a bit of dancing. 

Either way, a foot rub isn’t something she’ll turn down.

“I didn’t want to risk upsetting him,” Clint says, “but I do kind of want to see— More of him, if you know what I mean, on a regular basis. I just know better than to ask. And if I know better than to do a thing, you know that thing is a bad idea.” 

She huffs out a soft laugh. “That feels good.” Natasha points her toes and then relaxes her foot again, leaving it in his hands. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, any time.”

After a few minutes of Clint kneading at her foot, she says, “You could ask to see more of him, you know.”

“How, though?” Clint shakes his head. “He interprets any sort of undressing as something to be afraid of. Even around me, he tenses up. And it makes sense, given what he’s been through. I don’t want to push, especially not for something that makes him uncomfortable.”

“Just say what you said to me. That you’d like to see more of him than he shows you. Just don’t phrase it like it’s an obligation or like he owes you some skin or something because you took your jeans off for him.”

She puts her other foot in his lap and he starts on that one. “You just took them off, right? It isn’t like you did a sexy dance while stripping for him.”

“Right.” Clint suspects he’d keel over from embarrassment if he tried to do a strip tease for Jigsaw. And he’s not sure Jigsaw would “get” it, or appreciate it if he did.

“He still sleeps fully clothed, right?” she asks.

“Mhm. Everything but shoes. If he’s wearing socks, they come to bed. If he’s already barefoot, though, that’s fine.”

“Maybe get him some snug shorts to wear to bed. Knee length, not boxer briefs. Just compression shorts so he still feels like he’s wearing proper asset gear. Yes, I have his size,” she says before he asks. “And yes, I’ll order some for you. And maybe a few sleeveless sleep shirts.”

Natasha makes a noise in her throat, like she’s discovering something.

“What?”

“Actually,” she says, “I’ll order some for both of you.”

“I already have pajamas I don’t wear. I don’t need more.”

She shakes her head. “You could couch it as matching. You know he’d be enticed by the prospect of being ‘the same as’ all night long.”

Clint can see several incredibly sweaty nights wearing long, snug shorts instead of easy breezy boxers, but it would definitely be worth it to feel Jigsaw’s calves and arms against his own, instead of feeling fabric there. Jigsaw wears soft fabrics to bed even if he’s worn jeans during the day, but the feel of his skin would be electric. The good kind.

Ugh. He’ll especially be a sweaty mess if the heating pad makes a return appearance. Heating pad, super-soldier hot-water bottle, blankets on top, and a dog and two kittens, a stuffed shark tucked in somewhere… He’ll definitely need morning showers just to sluice off the sweat. But…

“Think that would work?” he asks.

“I think it’s worth a try. And if you eventually switch back to wearing your boxers, you can explain that the other was too warm for you, but that you like the way he looks in the shorts and sleeveless tops.”

Clint nods. “He’d like that, then. Me telling him that I like the look of him.”

She gives him a look that could be the very definition of long-suffering. “You liked hearing me tell you that he thinks you’re hot. Why wouldn’t he like you liking the way he looks?”

“I guess I don’t want to make him feel like I’m staring at him. Objectifying him.” That’s the word for it. He’s proud that he knows that much. 

“Why is it two steps forward and one step back for you?” Natasha presses her thumb into her temple with a frown. “You’re allowed to look at your boyfriend and like what you see. Just don’t make him feel like a piece of meat, or like he owes you anything.”

Clint supposes. He starts working on her toes. “I do like it when he looks at me. Maybe that’s mutual.”

“Of course it’s mutual.” Natasha gives him a tired smile. “In anyone but Jigsaw, the level of eye-flirting and peacocking in those yoga pants would be obvious to anyone within a hundred foot radius of you two.”

“But he’s not ‘anyone but Jigsaw.’ He’s Jigsaw.”

“Yes. For Jigsaw, I think the yoga pants aren’t for you. They’re for his comfort—he likes tighter clothes, compression pants, things that make him feel snug and secure.” Her smile turns into a thoughtful frown. “Probably more like ‘what assets should wear.’”

Clint isn’t so sure that part of being an asset will go away, but he’s also not so sure he wants it to. Jigsaw does look appealing in his yoga pants.

“So maybe peacocking is off the list,” Natasha says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “But the eye-flirting? Clint. The man looks up at you through eye lashes a camel would envy and he’s doing it constantly. That is a green light for looking back appreciatively.”

Clint swallows. “And it doesn’t make me a monster for objectifying someone who’s been through hell and treated like an object. Especially in the, uh, specific ways he’s been treated like an object.”

Natasha would probably pat his cheek if she were close enough to do so, just based on the fondness in her expression. “It’s really sweet that you’re being so careful. But you can make a move on a person without objectifying them. Give Jigsaw another facet of personhood to enjoy.”

“Agent Romanoff,” comes JARVIS’s voice, “Agent Barton, Jigsaw is on his way back from therapy. Shall I tell him to meet you here?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Natasha says. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

Clint sits there for a half second before resuming his foot rub. “It’s great that JARVIS is getting along so well with Jigsaw these days. It was sure inconvenient when he wouldn’t even listen to JARVIS.”

Natasha nods. “I think JARVIS has a light trick to guide Jigsaw through the halls when needed. Like a cat with a laser pointer, only much less frantic.”

“…Is it really okay that we’re going to be in your space? You’re obviously not feeling great. If you’d rather rest, just let me know.”

“Really, you’re sweet. I don’t know why you keep insisting you’re terrible.” Natasha winks at him. “You’re only terrible sometimes, at some things.”

Well that’s not a “go away so I can rest,” so presumably she’s up to whatever personhood trauma Jigsaw will be coming back with from today’s therapy session. He’ll take her word for it, trust her to know her limits.

Jigsaw

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 5:00 p.m.—

JARVIS says that the ballerina woman and the other asset—it will have to consider whether that is still applicable, but that is a task for later—are in the ballerina woman’s rooms, so that is where it stops in the hallway, instead of walking into the rooms for assets. For asset-people.

That will also take consideration. Especially because it turns out that the entire team that is not a cell is made up of people-assets. People first, and assets later. Unlike this asset and the other asset, which are assets first, and people later. Yes.

It taps the soft stuffed spider hanging from the handle to the ballerina woman’s door. So soft. It likes the feel of the soft stuffed spider. It is glad she decided to keep it even after its eyesight healed fully.

“Come on in, Jigsaw,” comes the ballerina woman’s voice from inside, and it enters the rooms as directed, glad that it did not need to knock or to wait for the dog to paw at the door for it. It hates making noises like that. Announcing itself. Such an odd feeling, still.

Inside, the ballerina woman is sitting long-wise on the sofa, her feet in the other asset’s lap and the other asset’s hands—such strong and skillful hands—massaging the ballerina woman’s feet. The ballerina woman looks… off. Like she is enjoying the attention the other asset is giving to her feet, but like there is something else that is bothering her too much to fully enjoy the foot rub.

It asks if she is in pain. At the breakfast meal, she had an ache in her head. It made her less friendly than she usually is.

“Actually, yes,” she says. “Could you go into the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and get me two of the ibuprofen tablets and a glass of water?”

It can do that, yes. Ibuprofen. Tablets. Two of them. They will be behind the little mirror door in the bathroom.

It nods, sets the tablet down on the low table in front of the sofa, and goes where directed. There is a bottle in there that it thinks says ibuprofen, but there are also other bottles, and it tries to read those labels as well to be sure it has the right bottle. It knows from poisoning targets that the wrong medicine can be a poison. So can too much medicine. Or in some cases, not enough medicine. 

People need medicine. And some assets. This asset never needs medicine. It heals all on its own, the body fixing whatever problems come up without need for external intervention. Except for the metal arm. It sometimes needs intervention. But not for a long time now. It is careful with the metal arm so that it does not start to need intervention.

When it is satisfied that it has the correct bottle, it tips two of the little pills inside of it into the palm, thinks for a moment, picks up the ballerina woman’s brush, tucks that into a pocket—only the handle part fits, but that is okay—and then goes to the kitchen to get the second part of her request.

It hands the pills to her carefully—a dropped pill could be of interest to the dog, and that would be a bad thing, it is sure—and then the water, and when she has downed half of the glass of water, it accepts the water from her and puts it on the low table, out of the way.

It pulls the brush out of the pocket that only the handle fits inside of and makes the question sign, then points at her head.

The ballerina woman blinks up at it, but it knows that it was clear. There is only one interpretation that makes any sense. It is obviously not asking if she wants it to beat her over the head with the brush.

After a moment, she nods. “Okay. Thank you.”

She still sounds confused, but it attributes that to the ache in her head and begins brushing the ballerina woman’s hair the way the other asset brushes its hair. Section by section, gently, gently, from the very bottom and then from a little higher up, and then from a little higher up, until it is brushing the first section from the root part to the tip part of the hair. 

“Mm.”

It pauses to see if she has more to add, or if she maybe wants it to stop. When there’s nothing more, it moves on to the next section of hair. 

The color is so pretty against the shine of the metal hand, and so silky soft on the skin of the flesh hand. The ballerina woman has thick hair, too. And not very tangled at all. It is brushing all over her head very soon, and then there is nothing to do but to keep brushing for a while, to make the ballerina woman’s hair as smooth and shiny as it can be, to make sure there are no tangles anywhere.

It will do a good job. 

And it is doing a good job. The ballerina woman’s breathing has deepened, and she is relaxing more and more as it brushes.

The other asset, at the other side of the sofa, just smiles at it and keeps rubbing thumbs in small circles along the ballerina woman’s feet, rolling the ballerina woman’s feet at the ankles to stretch out muscles and tendons. The other asset is very good at doing that. The other asset has relaxed this asset’s feet before, and it was very nice.

Eventually, it puts the brush on the low table with the water, and then starts to do what usually happens next when the other asset brushes the hair. It lets the hair trickle through the fingers like a waterfall of red, but somehow red like a sunset, not like blood. It is a pretty red, even if it is not like blood.

It runs fingers through the hair, and then realizes that it has forgotten to bring an elastic loop—a hair tie—to put the ballerina woman’s hair up so that it can rub her neck and shoulders without hair in the way. 

Maybe it will not do so good a job after all. 

But it cannot just leave her like this with the hair brushing incomplete while it heads to her bathroom to look for the necessary hair tie. It ponders for a moment, keeping the hair in motion so that she will not feel like the hair brushing is coming to an end. It will just have to push the ballerina woman’s hair out of the way a bit. Push it all over her right shoulder so it can work on her left shoulder, and then switch sides. 

Or maybe it can rub her shoulders and neck without pulling her hair. Pulling her hair, or getting it pinched between plates of the metal hand, would negate the hair brushing by introducing pain.

Order comes— No. No, everyone here insists that order does not come from pain. And even if it does come from pain, hair brushing is no place for that sort of order. This is the place for painless order. 

So it will just not pinch or pull at her hair. That is all.

It parts the ballerina woman’s hair in the middle, half to the right side and half to the left, and begins gently running the thumbs along the side of her neck. Up to where her hair begins, and then a little way further to massage her scalp, then dragging down along the sides of her spine, and sweeping out to her shoulders. Back up, then back down. A few times. Maybe then it is time to make the tiny circles with the thumbs. 

The ballerina woman is breathing very deeply now. She is still upright, though, so it knows that she is not sleeping. It also knows that its own breathing deepens when the other asset does this for it, when the other asset brushes the hair and massages the scalp and the right shoulder. The left shoulder is metal, so it does not get much of a massage—what would even be massaged?—but the neck gets rubbed, and that is very nice.

Muscles put into order with no pain. 

Because it is not HYDRA, and this is not HYDRA, and HYDRA has no place here.

“I think you’re about ready to pass out, ‘Tasha,” the other asset says in a low murmur. “How about we scram so you can take a nap before dinner?”

“Mm’kay,” she says, her voice drowsy just like the other asset said. “Thanks, guys. I feel so much better.”

It smiles and stands back as the other asset helps her lie down on the sofa fully and drapes the soft blanket over her. It knows that it is not allowed in her personal bubble of space unless it asks first, like with the hair brushing. The other asset does not need to ask, because they are… It is not sure what they are, other than really close and very the same as.

It will someday be like that with the ballerina woman, it hopes. Until then, it will keep asking first.

Chapter Text

—New York City | Thursday 01 November 2012 | 6:00 p.m.—

“What do you say we catch a nap of our own?” the other asset says as they arrive at the door to the rooms for assets.

It is not tired, though. It wants… to dance. Or if the other asset is tired, then it wants the other asset to watch it on the wall studded with molded fake rocks, or to watch it spinning and twirling on the gymnastics equipment, the bars of all sorts, the rings. Or maybe to watch it zip through the parkour section of the training room, leaping off walls and tumbling just so.

It wants to move with the other asset or to show off for the other asset. 

“You’re not coming in, so no nap, I take it?” the other asset has the door open, and is holding it open. 

The dog is circling, and the little cats are curiously creeping toward the door, their earlier excitement to escape the rooms for assets diminished by their sleepiness.

It signs dance and then watch, the two things it would like to have happen before the dinner meal. 

The other asset nods and closes the animals inside of the rooms for assets—they will come back soon. It is not too long for them to be alone.

“So, were you thinking waltzing some more, something slower, or maybe something a bit more upbeat? You should be pretty clear on the foxtrot variations Natasha taught you, right?”

Yes! That is what they will do. They will foxtrot. A fox is a small red cat-dog with a fluffy tail like a squirrel that is very playful and sometimes eats trash. It knows all about eating trash. That is mostly what it ate for a very long time in the freedom days, at the beginning. And it was very playful, handing out the bad kind of fun to all those who had had the fun with it before.

It likes foxes. And this is a dance called after them. The ballerina woman says it should be smooth but also have a playfulness like a fox.

It is feeling smooth and playful. It had a very good sleeping time the night before, with the heating pad under the back and the other asset snuggled up against the side, with the dog and eventually both little cats tucked in around the assets.

The asset-people, it reminds itself.

That will be hard to think for a while. It is so used to thinking of them as assets, this asset and the other asset, and to think of them as people as well, as asset-people, will be a challenge. But thinking about the experts by their names like they asked was also a challenge, and it succeeded. 

It can succeed here too. It is feeling positive.

It nods and makes the sign for fox. 

“Foxtrot it is, then.”

The elevator takes them down, down, down, all the way to the training room where they will have the space needed to foxtrot around without needing to rein in their steps.

But they are not the only ones who have thought about the training room. There are sounds of fighting when the elevator doors open. Slaps and thunks of fists thudding into torsos or being blocked, skids of feet on mats, grunts and huffed out breaths, and then a “good blow!” called out in a joyful tone by the man with the red cape.

It creeps forward until it can see the fighters. The last time the assets came to the training room and there was a fight, it was the hamburger technician inside the robot and the clown man with the star-shield, and the assets had needed to leave. 

Is this like that? Is there a need to leave?

It is the clown man fighting with the man with the red cape, grappling now, both down on the mat and each trying to get the upper hand, grimacing with their efforts and with their muscles straining. They are… actually fighting? Or is this that silly pretend fighting that serves no purpose?

The flying man is sitting on a stack of mats off to one side, watching over a cooler of chilled but not icy bottles of water.

It is a “sparring” match, then. Otherwise, the flying man would be trying to separate them and calm everyone down. The flying man likes for people around him to be calm and not fight each other. 

“Sam!” the clown man yells. “Judgment call: hair pulling?”

The flying man considers, then calls back: “I’ll allow it.”

The man with the red cape yelps as the clown man grabs a fistful of hair and yanks viciously to the side. 

There are no weapons in this fight, just hands and feet and heads, and not even shoes, though the wrists of both fighters are wrapped snugly. They are following rules it does not know, then. This is not a real fight at all, where anything is acceptable if it results in a win and the death of the opponent. This would not even result in the defeat of an opponent, not a true defeat where the opponent is incapacitated and cannot rise again to challenge.

The other asset avoids having the clown man thrown bodily where the other asset was standing, but only by a quick step. The other asset sidles the rest of the way over to the flying man and gestures for it to join them.

It will do that. Yes. When the other two are rejoined in this imitation battle. 

The clown man rights himself with ease and launches himself at the man with the red cape with a fierce roar, and the flurry of punches and kicks and blocks and evasions begins anew.

The clown man is enjoying himself, and so is the man with the red cape. Also, the flying man seems to be enjoying the observation. That, it understands. The flying man feels toward the clown man something like what it feels toward the other asset. Of course he would want to watch the clown man in this exertion.

The clown man is fast and strong, and is enhanced. A super soldier. It has tussled with the clown man before, though only briefly and in an attempt to flee the area and B-RUM rather than with any intent to harm. The clown man jumped off of the building after it. Climbed the side of the building after it before the jump. 

The clown man is being outclassed by the man with the red cape. The man with the red cape is not as fast, but is stronger, and can withstand greater degrees of damage without backing down. The clown man is not doing his very best, it suspects, is holding something back, is aiming blows for center mass and not the head. But the man with the red cape is doing the same thing.

Without seeing them actually try to kill each other, it will never know which one of them could kill the other. How much is one holding back versus how much is the other holding back? No way to tell. And with boots and weapons… 

Weapons like the man with the red cape’s white electric fire. From the big hammer or from the man himself, it makes no difference. That sort of weapon would end a fight very quickly.

After another bout of fists and feet devolves into grappling once more, the flying man calls for them to take a break, and the clown man reaches down to help the man with the red cape up off the mat. They are each handed a small towel and a bottle of water with the faint misty look of cold water on a hot day, and they each wipe their faces down before drinking thirstily.

It should drink water, too. It needs to stay hydrated and it last drank water before the therapy session with Yasmin. It is time for water. But it has not earned— It does not need to earn water; it knows that. But this is special water in a cooler for people-assets that are play-fighting. There is a metal box on the wall with a button that causes water to spring out of a hole, and that water is good enough for an asset, even an asset-person, that has not exerted itself.

“Jigs, where are you going?” the other asset asks as it turns to get some water from the wall near the elevator.

“Water,” it signs, and then points.

The flying man holds a bottle out to it. “Here, man. There’s plenty to go around.”

It thanks the flying man and accepts the water, opening the bottle and taking a drink. It is cool, but not cold enough to be uncomfortable on the dry throat.

“Yeah.” The flying man nods toward the mat the clown man and the man with the red cape had been play fighting on. “You feel like taking a turn? I’m sure either of these two would love to spar with you.”

It shakes the head. No. It signs that it does not want to kill either the clown man or the man with the red cape, that they are friends, and that friends are in the “do not kill” side of the circles chart Zoe has it working on. Not even in the green part where the circles cross over each other.

“It’s sparring, though,” the clown man says. “No one’s trying to kill anyone, we’re just practicing our fighting skills and getting a good workout in.”

The flying man nods. “You could practice being non-lethal. These two can take the hits if you misjudge the strength of your blows. Just try not to smash anyone’s head in with your metal fist.”

“I would very much like to see what the weapon is capable of,” says the man with the red cape.

The clown man frowns. “The weapon? You don’t mean Jigsaw, do you? All that ‘sentient weapon’ nonsense is just for the press.”

The man with the red cape holds up a hand defensively. Then he begins to sign while speaking, like he did sometimes before.

“Friend Jigsaw is a mighty warrior and defender of the innocent, but he is not a weapon. Have no fears that I would class him as such.” The man with the red cape takes another drink of water, and looks uneasy, but continues. 

“There is a weapon, though, known in Asgard as Destroyer, and a variation on that weapon’s building instructions were left here on Midgard thousands of years gone.” The man with the red cape turns to face it. “What I have seen in my search of the timelines is that a part of that weapon has been created here and stitched into your very flesh, Jigsaw.”

“It’s Asgardian?” the clown man asks.

The man with the red cape see-saws a hand. “By design, yes. By make, it appears to be of Midgard. No Asgardian would do such a thing.”

It hears a grinding noise from the clown man, and sees that his jaw is clenched. But his hand is gentle around the water bottle. Waste not, want not. 

The other asset slips an arm around its waist, pulls it close for a moment in a sideways hug. It is not sure why the other asset does this, but it enjoys the reassurance of the other asset’s sideways hug and so doesn’t question it.

“The sadism that would be required to go through with attaching any part of the weapon to a living person is beyond any I have encountered,” the man with the red cape says. “Several have theorized how it might be accomplished, but it would be an exilable offense to act on these thoughts.”

The man with the red cape shakes his head, looking grave. “It should never have been done.”

Will… will they try to undo what has been done? Will they start thinking that it should not have the metal arm, that it is wrong for it to have the metal arm? Will they want to take the metal arm away?

“You’re tensing up, Jigs,” the other asset says softly. “What’s going on for you?”

It takes a step away from the man with the red cape and the other asset comes with it, still holding it around the waist.

It signs no, signs does not want, signs that the metal arm belongs to it, is Jigsaw’s arm, is part of it, part of the body, and that it does not agree that they can take it away from it. Yasmin said so. Said it has— has autonomy, it does not know the sign for that word now, but it can say no, it can say do not work on the metal arm and then the hamburger technician and everyone else has to stay away from the metal arm, and it does not consent, does not want to lose the metal arm.

All of its signs come out in a wild jumble, and it can tell that it is repeating things, sometimes signing the same thing many times in a row before it can move on, but it cannot stop the hands from making the signs, cannot stop the head from shaking—no, no!—cannot help but shrink into the other asset’s side as it signs, though the man with the red cape and the clown man are stronger than the other asset, and the other asset would not be able to protect it if they thought it was best to take the metal arm away.

The man with the red cape takes a large step back from it, and has both hands raised, the water bottle gone now, set down while it was signing and while the world around it narrowed into a pinprick straight ahead of it.

The man’s hands move through the signs, swift and smooth, and his voice is soothing and insistent, somehow cutting through the scrambled reassurances of the other three in the training room. 

“There has been a misunderstanding, friend. No one will remove your prosthesis unless you ask them to. On my honor, I, Thor, son of Odin, wielder of Mjolnir and god of thunder, who calls upon the very lightning to do my bidding, will fight to my last breath to ensure it is so.”

There is silence instead of the earlier buzzing in the ears as the world closed in, and the world expands back out to include more than just what is in front of it and who is holding it. The clown man and the flying man are looking at the man with the red cape, but are no longer talking.

“Yeah,” says the other asset at its side finally. “What he said. Only nowhere near as grand and powerful. And with only one title apiece.”

The metal arm is bad, should not have been put onto it, but they will let it keep the metal arm even so. Because it has not given consent for anyone to take the metal arm away from it. Yasmin had said so about the scanning in the hamburger technician’s other lab area, and that protection extends even here.

It is so relieved that the legs feel like it could not foxtrot at all, but would wobble around if it tried. The stomach is still tensed up, and the jaw will not unclench, and it can feel that the eyes are wide in the skin face. But it manages to sign the O and the K and then the “thank you.”

The man with the red cape bows his head, and it feels a sensation like its thanks is being accepted even though the man with the red cape has not said anything. 

Then he turns to hold out a hand toward the clown man. “Are you rested for another round, my friend?”

The clown man says under his breath that he needs another round just to blow off steam, and it is not sure any of the others will have heard that, but the clown man might not want anyone to have heard it. It decides to pretend that it has not heard, in case the clown man meant to say it only to himself. 

For the first part of the play fight, the assets stand by the mat and drink water from the bottle the flying man had handed it, which the other asset picked up off the floor where it must have dropped the bottle when the world shrank. But after a while, it feels like the legs will truly support it again, and the water bottle is empty.

It points to the rafters and then slips out of the other asset’s side hug to walk toward the wall with the molded rocks stuck to it. It is a spider, nimble and swift, scurrying up and over the top, and then leaping up to the bars that anchor the lights for the training room. It stays there while the other asset makes a slower ascent, and then hooks the knees over a bar to reach down and offer the hands for the other asset to leap up and clasp by the wrists. 

The other asset scrambles up to the bars with its help and then the assets go to find a wider bit of rafter framework to perch on and watch from what might be a safer distance.

Except there is no danger. It knows that. The man with the red cape said a lot of things but the honor part was important. On my honor, he had said, and that means more than a promise. And he will defend to the death Jigsaw’s right to keep the metal arm. The consent, or the lack of its consent, is being respected.

“You feeling a little better now?” the other asset asks. 

It nods. It tries to remember what the man with the red cape’s hands and face had been doing that mean honor and fails. But that is okay. It signs that it feels safe again, and thanks the other asset before lightly bumping shoulders with the other asset and flashing the special sign that means I love you for the other asset to see.

“Same to you, Jigs.” The other asset repeats the sign, and then smiles. “Looks like we’re not foxtrotting before dinner.”

That is okay. It has learned something about the metal arm, and it would not have learned if there had not been people play-fighting in the training room when the assets arrived.

It can hear, though faintly, the words of the man with the red cape and the clown man as they trade blows and take hits to their torsos and kicks to their shoulders.

“It is clear that you love Jigsaw as part of your own self, Steve Rogers. Your rage at his ill treatment is a testament to your care for him.”

“He’s my friend,” the clown man growls. “And he always will be.”

“I would speak to you of Lady Sif and the Warriors Three, my friends on Asgard, who are together with me bonded in friendship by the blood and sweat of battle.” The man with the red cape slips free of the clown man’s grip. “It is a bond far closer and far deeper than any other I’ve known. Of course he is your friend.”

“Yeah,” the clown man says with a grunt as air is kicked from his lungs. “Maybe after dinner.”

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” the other asset asks, and it turns its attention to the side with a nod. “It’s rude to eavesdrop, in that case.”

It shrugs, but then resolves to let the other two have their conversation without paying attention to it. Of course they want to talk while they perform their play-fighting. From the very beginning, from the second moment it knew they were chasing it, back in the original hunting grounds, it has known that the team that is not a cell likes to talk.

It smiles.

Chapter Text

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 6:45 a.m.—

The Tower’s function as a hurricane shelter is coming to a close today, for many. 

As far as she knows, the charging and fresh water stations will remain available until into next week, simply because the City’s water is still suspect at best and power is out in so many places. But the cots and similar are in the process of being hauled back to wherever they came from, as well as any unused supplies, as a more long-term shelter is set up around the block for those whose homes have been too badly damaged to occupy.

She might offer her counseling services at the long-term shelter here and there, if time and security permit.

This is the first hurricane she’s weathered, and it was certainly an experience. 

Of course, one of the most stressful things about the hurricane had not been the hurricane itself or the crisis those within the shelter were experiencing that she had her hands full with during the days and into the nights. The biggest, most stressful element of this past week and a half has been the husband who should be supporting her.

The constant pressure to evacuate the area before the storm hit, the frequent check-ins to be sure the Tower hadn’t been “compromised,” the unfortunate but inevitable confirmation that Jigsaw is her client here in New York, courtesy of speculation and the process of elimination based on tweets… And now the insistence that it had been foolish to stay in the path of danger.

It’s been such a drain having to reply at intervals to reassure him, particularly because during many of those check-ins, he’d been insisting that winter weather in the northeast was terrible, that the weather at home was better, safer, more predictable. That her clients back home were also better, safer, and more predictable. And that at the very least, she could fly back to Los Angeles for the holidays to get a chance to thaw out in the warm weather before having to “trudge” back to her “insane, dangerous” client.

And worse, she can’t refute anything he says or she’ll be confirming something that he isn’t saying: that things are going well, that Jigsaw is actually one of the more receptive clients she’s had over the years, that she is enjoying herself as much as possible considering the subject matter that often comes up in their sessions, that she feels supported by the others in his care team.

Any confirmation or denial of anything could turn into a leak, and she won’t have that. 

So far, he has not leaked any of her information, possibly because he’s aware that her safety could be at risk if she’s known—or that his could be, even, knowing HYDRA. But there is always the chance a neighbor or colleague could put disconnected facts together to arrive at the truth of her sabbatical. 

She’s cautioned him, of course, and they had discussed these things early on, when deciding that yes, this was an opportunity not to be passed up. But so much of what they had discussed early on has been thrown out the window as her stay here has continued past what Frankie had anticipated. His patience, for one thing, and his willingness to accept that it’s time for her to travel for her career after so long with him traveling for his career.

“But we’ve always been together for Thanksgiving,” he’ll insist one night, but they haven’t spent every Thanksgiving even in the same state. It’s not one of the holidays they place a great deal of importance on. Or “I wanted to have your parents over for Christmas this year, but you won’t be here,” when it’s common knowledge that he hates her mother and her father hates him. He’d never want her parents at Christmas dinner.

The only holiday she can honestly say that she’ll regret missing is New Year’s Eve, and that is primarily because it’s a time to gather with her friends and reminisce. They will have to do that over video conference this year, and it will not be the same at all, being the one person on a screen when the rest of her friends are in person.

But unless she misses her mark, this first round of holidays will be jarring for Jigsaw, and she would rather avoid holiday travel traffic in either case. She can miss a New Year’s Eve with her friends and it will not be the end of her world. And it will not be the end of her husband’s world if he has to travel to her for the holidays. She’s traveled to him in the past, when work kept him away but she wanted to spend time with him during a holiday season.

Her phone vibrates on the arm of the chair and she takes a breath and pushes Frankie and his stubbornness out of her mind. Jigsaw is due to arrive any minute now, and he deserves her focus for the next hour. 

Not only deserves, but requires. He might be one of the more receptive clients she’s had, but his traumas run far deeper than most if for no other reason than the sheer length of time he’s carried them. And she will not fail him by being distracted during their session.

Especially not this session, as she’s been tasked with broaching the subject of the annual flu vaccination with Jigsaw, something she understands has been brought up in theory while discussing Alpine’s first set of vaccinations, but is now coming to a head in reality, as flu season approaches. Hopefully she can get that discussion handled in this morning session. 

Jigsaw arrives not a full minute after her alarm goes off, gliding in as usual and punctual to a fault, she’d say, if she thought he was obsessing over being timely. It’s more likely that he has timed his journey and leaves at the same time every morning and afternoon to reach their sessions on time. She’d be surprised if he were to wait by the door for the precise moment it was right to enter.

“Good morning, Jigsaw,” she says with a smile. “I’m feeling energized for a new day. And how are you feeling this morning?”

He hesitates, and then signs that he is feeling proud—he thinks—and frustrated with himself.

“I see,” she says. “Would you like to share what you’re proud of first, or what is frustrating you first?”

Jigsaw frowns as he has a seat, and then holds up two fingers. He signs that it will make more sense that way.

Yasmin nods. “Alright. So what is that is frustrating you?”

“Fear thinking,” he signs. “Know safe, know, know, know. Fact checking. Jigsaw knows is safe.” He sighs and then shakes his head. “Fear thinking still why?”

“It can be really hard to tell the inside parts of our brains that we’re safe and have them believe us. According to some, the human brain is made of three evolutionary layers, Jigsaw. We have what’s called a reptilian brain in the middle. It’s what we had first, and it handles things like life and death dangers, and fears about physical safety. It thinks very quickly and it’s what gives us our instinctive responses to things like pain or a predator chasing us.”

Yasmin stands and uncaps the marker on the dry erase board so she can draw the layers for him. This might not be the most current theory on the matter, and the layers might interconnect far more than this simple explanation, but all he needs is a rundown of the basics. 

“Then we have the next layer, called a mammalian brain, that grew around the first layer. This part enables us to feel emotions and form memories. If something makes us angry or frustrates us, or makes us happy or sad, we’re getting that from this middle layer of our brain.”

Jigsaw seems to be following her, though she’s not sure if there’s acceptance in his eyes or if he’s still waiting her out before he makes his mind up. When it comes to anatomy, he might trust his firsthand experience more than any expertise she might possess.

“At the outside, we have the human brain, which is where we work with planning, problem solving, and language, among other things. We developed this part last, and it’s where we do most of our thinking.”

“Three brains,” he signs, “same as cake or same as onion?”

Yasmin smiles. “More like an onion, but not exactly like it.” She draws a more accurate image of a brain and labels the brain stem, cerebellum and cerebrum. “You might be more familiar with how the parts of the brain look in real life compared to how they look in my drawing. And my point is not so much the physical parts of the brain but to discuss how we process the things that happen to and around us.”

Now he’s nodding. She knew he was well aware of the way a brain looks outside of a skull. Now she’s reassured him that she’s talking about bits of the brain that he recognizes, and they can move on.

“So when something happens to us, our brain needs to process it. These three parts of our brain do that at different levels. Something dangerous can make us fight or run away or freeze because our reptilian brain acts on it first. But sometimes, we know that something is actually safe, and our reptilian brain still reacts with fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses.”

Yasmin caps the marker and sits down. 

“Sometimes even if the outer parts of our brains know that something is safe, the inner parts are feeling upset emotions or are trying to keep us safe from danger. That’s all a long way of saying that it’s perfectly normal for you to have fear thoughts and worry thoughts about things, or even people, that you know won’t hurt you.”

Jigsaw nods, frowning at her rough diagram.

“It’s also perfectly normal for this to be frustrating to you,” she adds gently, “as your mammalian brain processes the fear thoughts and worry thoughts and has an emotional response to them.”

He sighs. “Tired afraid.”

“Jigsaw, what made you afraid yesterday? Or this morning?”

He holds up a finger, indicating that the fear was yesterday and not this morning. Then he signs Thor’s name and stops with a frown into the middle distance.

She wonders if it’s still the lightning-strike feeling that is causing this fear for him, like he’d explained to her earlier, or if there’s something newer. 

Jigsaw sighs and pulls his tablet over to draw on with the stylus. He draws the familiar figure with the star on its left arm, and a new figure—with a cape and holding a hammer: Thor. Then he types out the words EVIL, SADISTIC, WRONG, and SHOULD NOT DO. He draws a speech bubble around them and connects that bubble to Thor’s mouth. Then he points to the first figure’s left arm.

Then he mimes taking off his left arm and throwing it away and signs “fear” three times in rapid succession.

“Thor said those things about your prosthetic arm,” Yasmin clarifies, “and you were afraid that he would take it away from you?”

He nods. Then signs that he knows better, that Thor won’t hurt him, but that he was still afraid.

“I wonder why Thor said those things,” Yasmin says. “Do you have any ideas about that, Jigsaw?”

She’s not the sort to bet on things, but if she were, she would lay good money down that Thor is somehow aware of how much pain that arm must cause Jigsaw with its weight dragging down his whole left side. It might be something Thor had specifically asked the team about to learn more. 

Yasmin doesn’t know how common prosthetic devices are on Asgard, or what materials they’re made from there. It could be the first metal arm Thor has seen, or it could be that he has remarked on Earth having similar mobility and accessibility aids as Asgard. Regardless, if he has asked, anyone on the team could have told him about the drawbacks Jigsaw lives with.

Especially if “sadistic” and “evil” were part of what Thor had said and not simple summations of a much longer statement.

Jigsaw signs “pain” and then names the figure’s starred arm “weapon” and “destroy.”

“Thor said your arm was a weapon that should be destroyed?” Yasmin blinks. That doesn’t sound right at all. Thor’s biggest claim to fame is a massive weapon of his own, and she can’t imagine him insisting on destroying someone’s prosthesis.

Jigsaw types out DESTROYER and signs “name” and “weapon,” followed by indicating that his arm and this “destroyer” are the same as.

Yasmin blinks again. Something is not clicking for her and she can sense it just outside of her reach. 

Jigsaw mimes recognizing something and points to the Thor figure and then to his arm and the word “destroyer” on the page.

Click. There it is.

“There’s a weapon,” Yasmin says, “an Asgardian weapon called a destroyer, and Thor recognized your left arm as being one of these weapons?”

Jigsaw draws a new figure and then circles just the figure’s left arm, and draws an arrow from the circled arm to the Jigsaw figure’s left arm.

“Oh. So a destroyer is a whole figure and somehow the arm of one of these destroyers ended up here and was put on your shoulder.”

He nods. 

“How does that make you feel, Jigsaw? About your arm?”

“Not good. Bad. Afraid like is danger. But is Jigsaw arm. Part of Jigsaw. Keep it.”

“Those are some heavy emotions to carry, and so close to yourself. Do you feel like it reflects on you, at all? Like you are bad or dangerous to the people around you because of your arm?”

He shakes his head. “Jigsaw same as Jigsaw. Just is.”

Yasmin smiles at him. “I’m proud of you for that, Jigsaw. I remember how you were afraid that your arm could hurt Clint because of the little piece of the Tesseract that powers it, or like he would be afraid of you because of that. You’ve come a long way.”

Jigsaw smiles back at her. 

“We still have several minutes in our morning session,” she says. “Do you want to tell me what you only think you’re proud of yourself for? I’d love to know.”

Jigsaw points to the tablet with its current screen of drawings and indicates that all of that is a backdrop for what he’s about to convey to her. Then he signs that he did not consent to his arm being taken away, and that they had to let him keep it because of that. He mimes the scanner that had been such a horrible experience for him, and links the ideas together with the word trust.

“You trusted that by withholding your consent for anyone to mess with your arm, you were safe from Thor or anyone else trying to take it away?”

He nods and see-saws his hand, so she’s close to his meaning. Close enough that he’s satisfied, anyway.

“I’m proud of you for remembering that you could consent to things you wanted and not consent to things you don’t want. Especially when you were afraid.” Yasmin smiles. “It can be hard to remember things like our right to consent or withhold consent when we’re in a frightening moment. Sometimes, in moments like those, we can forget and freeze up, and it’s okay if that happens. But I’m glad it didn’t happen that way for you yesterday.”

In fact, this is as good an opener as any she’ll get in the near future, and she’s been meaning to ask him how his relationship with Clint is progressing. They do have a few minutes. Not enough to fully unpack anything, but… If she can just get Clint in this room for a bit, she could ask them together, and they’d have time to unpack whatever answers they have or issues they’re running into.

“Jigsaw, for your homework this afternoon, I’d like for you to ask Clint to come to one of our afternoon sessions. I’d like to discuss your relationship with both of you, together, and to see how you’re feeling about being people together. Especially when it comes to intimacy and consent.”

Jigsaw signs OK at her and smiles. 

Excellent. Subject broached. Now it’s up to Clint to decide that his partner’s well-being is worth the discomfort of sitting on a therapist’s sofa himself.

With any luck, he won’t spook or start thinking that he’s in any sort of trouble. 

Now, with the last handful of minutes left to her, Yasmin will bring up the flu vaccination. 

Jigsaw has already been through the deliberations for Alpine’s vaccines, has already faced the dilemma of his beloved pet being injected with, well, with anything, really. Jigsaw has such awful memories of being injected with various poisons and punishments and a whole host of drugs designed to keep him under control. 

It’s only natural he has some reservations about the entire idea of shots, however helpful they may be.

But he has done the work for Alpine’s vaccines. And that whole process went very well. So this might be accepted without a qualm, or it might be balked at every bit of the way until it’s done. There’s not sure way to tell other than to mention it.

“Jigsaw, before you go eat breakfast, there’s one more thing to note. This upcoming Tuesday, the team is getting their flu shots. That is a kind of vaccine that is for people, and that helps them avoid getting sick during a part of the year where getting sick is pretty common.”

Jigsaw looks… serious. Not anxious, but that might be because he’s still processing. But at least he’s not immediately fearful.

“You do not have to get a flu vaccine,” Yasmin says. “But the rest of the team is getting one, and it seemed you should know about it ahead of time so you can have some time to decide whether you want to get one as well.”

He nods, looking into the middle distance. Then he focuses on her again and makes Clint’s name sign and his question sign.

“I think so, yes. Last I heard, everyone was getting one. Even Steve, who can’t easily get sick, and might not be able to get sick at all now, because he’s enhanced.” Yasmin smiles. “I’ve already gotten mine, and so has Zoe.”

She tells him about the mobile flu clinic that visited the Tower back in September, and again in October, and that will be here again on Tuesday. She explains the process, the reason Stark Industries provides this for Tower workers, the benefits of having all of the staff and other Tower occupants vaccinated, and the way a flu shot feels.

And maybe it’s her voice remaining calm and informative, unworried, or maybe it’s that Alpine got vaccines and was fine, but Jigsaw seems not to be anxious about any of this. He asks about the doctors, asks about vetting processes, asks about how to make sure it’s a vaccine and not a poison slipped into the system. But while his questions are the sort of vaguely paranoid ones she expects from someone with his degree of trauma around medical abuse and traps, he doesn’t seem upset while asking. 

As they are running out of time, Jigsaw verifies that he can get a shot or not get a shot, and it is up to him to consent to it or not, either way he feels like. When she nods, he makes sure he can be there to watch over the others even if he doesn’t get a shot himself. 

Yasmin nods.

“There might be a photo shoot afterward, knowing Pepper. It would be pictures of the team with their band-aids on, probably. Not of them actually getting their shots, I would think.”

If anything, he brightens at the thought of photographs. She smiles. “You could make a scrapbook page for the event.”

Chapter Text

Clint

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 8:15 a.m.—

Breakfast is omelets, Clint’s happy to see. And someone has made him an omelet filled with ham, bacon, sausage, and cheese, without a vegetable in sight. There are also biscuits, but those can wait. First he needs to get this omelet in his stomach. For some reason, he’s feeling famished this morning. 

He might even get one of the smaller single-egg, plain cheese omelets after this big meaty one is all gone.

Natasha slides an omelet that’s the complete opposite of his onto Jigsaw’s plate—all of the veggies, none of the meat, and half an avocado sliced on top. Her own omelet, from what Clint can tell sitting across from her, is a custom job with a few vegetables, ham, and cheese. She gets the second half of the avocado, too. 

Mm. 

“Haven’t had omelets in a while,” Clint says, spooning some salsa on top of his omelet. Salsa is the only form vegetables should take in the mornings. He’s okay with salsa. 

Jigsaw makes Kate’s name sign and then his question.

“Sleeping in, according to JARVIS,” Natasha says. 

“Who made the omelets?” Clint asks.

“Bruce, I think. Sam and Steve are already out distributing supplies again, with Thor. Not that I’d trust Thor in the kitchen.”

Jigsaw looks down, possibly remembering that fiasco with the pumpkin seeds a few days ago. Maybe he thinks he’s also not to be trusted in the kitchen. 

“Hey, you made great banana bread, Jigs,” Clint says. “Thor wouldn’t even know how to open a banana.”

“But he does know ASL,” Natasha muses. “And while he’s maybe a little old school and formal about it, it’s still a wonder he knows it at all. I wonder why that is.”

Clint shrugs. “It’s convenient, however he knows it.”

“It is that.” Natasha passes around the various options for biscuit toppings—butter, three different jellies, honey. “It must be an Asgardian thing. Like a babelfish.”

Jigsaw asks what that is, and Clint’s glad he does, because Clint wants to know, too, but has his mouth full of omelet.

“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” she says. “It’s a translation device from the series.”

Jigsaw nods and starts eating. 

Natasha smiles and does the same.

After a few minutes—and more than half of his omelet—Clint finally slows down. He’s not full or even approaching full, but he’s at least taken the edge off his hunger. He can eat like a person and actually chew his food.

“So how’d therapy go this morning?” Clint asks. “Anything interesting lined up for your homework today? Getting pictures of things, making a collage, that kind of thing?”

Jigsaw sits up straighter and beams at him.

He signs that he might make a flu shot scrapbook and take pictures of the team. He adds that he is not sure he will get a vaccine himself, but that he has time to think about it. He signs that he’s glad Clint is getting one so that he will not get sick, and Natasha as well. He seems… actually excited about the whole thing. 

Clint wonders how Yasmin did that. She must have really sold the whole thing well for Jigsaw to be excited about shots. Clint’s not excited. He hates getting shots, himself. But he hates getting the flu more, and anyway, it’s one of the things Steve is really focused on after the hurricane for some reason.

Maybe he only found out about them recently or something. 

And then Clint’s stomach drops as Jigsaw signs that Yasmin has invited Clint to come to their afternoon session. 

Is he in trouble? Did he do something wrong? Did something Jigsaw conveyed to her make her think Jigsaw wasn’t safe with him? Or that Clint wasn’t being respectful? Sure, he’d talked to Natasha about looking and stuff, and Natasha had said it was okay. Even encouraged. That Jigsaw would like it. And Clint had looked. And maybe it made Jigsaw uncomfortable and he’d told Yasmin about his discomfort, and—

Jigsaw adds that they are going to talk about consent and being the same as. 

“I… Um. T-today? This afternoon? This session coming up?” Clint rifles through his brain looking for reasons he can’t make it and comes up short. 

Jigsaw nods.

“Does she think…” Clint licks his lips. “I didn’t do anything wrong, did I? I’m probably in trouble for something, and I’m sorry for whatever it was, but I don’t think two hours of, uh, of talking about it is the solution. What did I do? I can fix it on my own, I swear.”

Natasha lightly kicks his shin under the table. “Stop panicking. She just wants to check in with you, together. It’ll be a good thing. The time will fly by.”

Jigsaw pats his arm and then signs that Yasmin is a good expert, and not a bad one. That she won’t hurt him at all. That talking with her is nice.

“I’m not afraid of her,” Clint says, and it’s not a lie. He’s not. He just doesn’t want to sit on a sofa and talk to her for two hours. “I know she won’t hurt me. It’s just that I don’t need therapy. That’s all.”

She’ll see something wrong with him if he sits in a room with her for two hours. She’ll see right through him. And while she’s good for Jigsaw, while her brand of therapy is good for Jigsaw, that doesn’t mean that Clint is going to get anything out of it except a label of “difficult” just like the S.H.I.E.L.D. therapists always gave him. 

Difficult, and only borderline field-ready. He’s way more than borderline field-ready. He’s entirely field-ready. He does his best work out in the field. He’s competent and not a bumbling mess of neuroses and idiocy in the field. 

Sure, he still makes mistakes while on missions, but everyone does. No plan ever goes like it’s expected to, and problems come up that need creative solutions. He’s good at that. In the field. 

Maybe he just needs to think of this as a mission. Mission objective: avoid therapy. Yes. So the problem that has come up is that he’s been “invited” to what is the equivalent of a psych eval, only instead of field-ready, he has to prove he’s relationship-ready. 

Well, that’s the first snag, isn’t it? He’s not relationship-ready. He’s confused and going to Natasha about every little thing. So what if he goes to this session with Jigsaw and is pronounced not only “difficult” but also “bad boyfriend material?” He already knows he is, but having it made official would kind of suck. And she might insist that they break up until they’re both ready for a relationship. 

He’s not sure he could handle that. He’s not sure he’ll ever be more relationship-ready than he is right now.

Jigsaw waves to get his attention and Clint watches as he signs that the session is for them, not for Clint alone. That it will be okay. That he’s looking forward to it, even. It’s his homework, too.

“Your homework is to drag me to your afternoon session?”

Jigsaw nods, but he signs “invite” like there’s a difference. 

And maybe he thinks there is a difference. But Clint knows that when a therapist invites you to come see them, it’s not really just an invitation. It’s like a demand to attend the session they’ve already planned for you.

“I think you should go,” Natasha says. “It might even be educational.”

“I’ll… Can I think about it?” Clint asks. 

Jigsaw tilts his head with a curious frown, but signs OK and resumes eating. 

Well, shit. Clint takes a bite of his omelet, but it doesn’t taste as good as it did before, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to finish it, let alone help Jigsaw with the smaller ones afterward. There might be leftovers today.

Could Yasmin somehow know that Clint jerks it in the shower to thoughts of Jigsaw joining him in there? Is she upset at him for thinking of Jigsaw like that? Does she worry that he’ll… what, try to convince Jigsaw to go further than he wants to go? Try to talk him into doing things he’s not comfortable doing? 

There’s got to be something he can be dragged away to do this afternoon. Something that will get him out of this. Some urgent, pressing matter. 

What about just refusing to go? Is that an option? 

Refusing to go may or may not be an option. And Clint might be worried as hell about it all morning, like a background hum of doom while he works with Katie-Kate on her archery and various quick-draw techniques to combine with her parkour. But when Kate has to resume working on her paper and it’s just Clint and Jigsaw dancing in the gym, there’s no room for worry.

There’s no room for much of anything beyond the next steps of the dance, the music, the beat, the feel of Jigsaw in his arms—alive, almost electric—his body pressed against Clint’s far more closely than the dancing calls for. Almost too close, almost close enough to interfere with their steps. 

Clint remembers the last time they danced like this, the last time they’d had no audience and had let one thing lead to another until they weren’t dancing at all, but merely making out, right there in the gym, with their hands up one another’s shirts like a pair of giddy teenagers exploring each other while the chaperone is looking away.

Will this become like that? They’re close enough he could kiss Jigsaw, but Clint leaves the first move to him, and Jigsaw’s interest at the moment is the dance. So there are twirls and flourishes added in, with Clint getting spun around, and Jigsaw spinning around in his turns, and Clint is getting sweaty and breathing hard for a reason other than the thoughts of making out with the man in his arms. 

And when Clint is panting and danced-out, they go back upstairs to their room, where they have a brief argument about whose shoulders should be rubbed, which Clint barely wins, and only because he can claim he needs to practice a new massage technique from his books. 

It’s true enough there’s a new pattern for him to practice, one that should include more of Jigsaw’s left side, even the parts that are definitely metal. Jigsaw enjoys it when Clint messes around with his metal arm, so why wouldn’t he enjoy it if Clint included the metal shoulder? Maybe all he’d feel would be pressure, but that’s okay. 

Clint debates getting in a shower beforehand, maybe to help discharge some of the arousal he built up while they danced, but Jigsaw does like the way he smells after exerting himself, and he’s not that sweaty, anyway. 

So Clint settles them on the sofa, Jigsaw perched in front of him, and begins his massage. It’s meant to be a relaxing, soothing thing, the massage. Not invigorating. And it’s definitely not meant to arouse. Sure, some massage is meant to arouse. But his massage books aren’t those kinds of books.

But having Jigsaw breathing deeply in front of him, rubbing his hands all over Jigsaw’s shoulders and neck, hearing the plates of Jigsaw’s arm do mini recalibration loops… Clint is feeling almost like they were still dancing. His own heartbeat won’t slow down, though he manages to control his breathing. 

A recalibration loop. A thing of necessity sometimes, but in times like this, a sign of contentment and enjoyment. Clint is successfully helping Jigsaw with his massage. 

There are areas further down Jigsaw’s back that need to be included in the massage, but Clint worries if he kneads too hard, Jigsaw will just lean forward with the pressure, being—hopefully—floppy from all the relaxing. Clint always gets floppy when Jigsaw massages him, after all. Like his muscles are made of jelly.

Clint moves one arm forward around Jigsaw to brace his torso with a palm on his sternum and kneads down along Jigsaw’s spine with the other. This earns him a sigh, and Clint grins while working his way back up. This would be much easier with Jigsaw lying down on his stomach, but Clint is well aware that that position occasionally makes Jigsaw tense up. That would defeat the purpose.

That purpose, trying to get tense muscles loosened and bring more blood flow to the area so that there’s less pain overall, seems to be going very well. And Clint suspects it would have continued to go very well if his stupid half didn’t have any input. 

But alas, Clint is too much of a disaster for that. And it’s probably closer to his stupid three-fourths, anyway.

He hardly realizes what he’s doing until his lips are already pressed against the back of Jigsaw’s neck, and by then it’s too late. Jigsaw leans back against him, putting a hand over Clint’s on his sternum, and Clint brushes aside Jigsaw’s hair to kiss and nibble along the side of Jigsaw’s neck, and the whole idea of a massage goes out the window.

Jigsaw

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 11:00 a.m.—

The other asset’s hand on the chest, the other asset’s lips on the neck, the other asset’s fingers brushing the hair aside… this back and shoulder rub has turned into something wonderful. It leans back, hoping to bring the other asset into more complete contact with it, and then comes up with a better idea.

It wants the other asset’s lips on its own lips, not just on the neck. It eels around on the sofa, twisting to face the other asset, this asset on its knees and the other asset sitting, and captures the other asset’s lips with a sigh. 

The other asset makes a pleased throat noise, kisses it soundly, many many many times, kisses that turn into more kisses, that steal away breath and leave both assets gasping between kisses, in those brief moments when their lips part from each other. The other asset’s pulse under the hand it lays gently against the other asset’s neck is wild, racing. The other asset’s chest presses against it with every indrawn breath, and the other asset’s throat swallows under the flesh fingers.

It holds the other asset’s life in the flesh hand, and it cradles the other asset’s head in the metal hand, while the other asset’s hands… travel. There is a hand at the hem of its shirt, fingers trailing where the fabric is bunched from its turning around, seeking skin. There is a hand pressing fingers into the muscles along the spine, trying to continue the massage, maybe, or maybe just seeking out ways to caress it. 

It wants… It wants the fingers at the hem of its shirt to dive under the fabric, to lift up the fabric, to pull the shirt up and even— Even— To pull the shirt off of this asset entirely. The other asset would be able to feel all of the skin that way, not just sample a little skin along its waist.

But the other asset will not do that without asking, and it is kissing the other asset in such a frenzy that there is no way the other asset could ask. If only the other asset could read what is in this asset’s mind. Maybe, if it…

It does not want to release the other asset’s neck—gently putting a hand, either hand, on the other asset’s neck is something the other asset likes very much—so it moves the metal hand down to the hem of its own shirt. It pulls the fabric upward, enough that the other asset’s hands can reach under the shirt, can access this asset’s skin with all the scars that say, it has survived and, it has persevered, and, it is stronger than what has been done to it.

The other asset wastes no time. The hint has been given, and that is a kind of consent, maybe. It will have to ask Yasmin to be sure. The other asset’s hands caress the skin, fingers trailing along scars, grazing over the ridges lightly and then pressing harder, almost clutching at it, clutching it toward the other asset, and it is crushed in a hug against the other asset’s chest, the other asset’s hands and even arms wrapping around it, holding it tightly, like the other asset needs it to be closer still.

It cannot get closer, it thinks, unless the other asset’s shirt is also pulled out of the way, but this is already amazing enough, the feel of the other asset’s callouses moving over its skin, the other asset’s fingers, palms, pressed against the back, not just the small of the back, but up higher, where no one has touched it since the horrible wound cleaning in the quinjet after the first mission it went on with the team that is not a cell. 

Where no one touched it, ever, before that except to shove it where they wanted it to go, or to press it down so that the skin face was on the ground while they pushed into it. 

This touch is so different from all of those other touches. This touch is welcome; it wants this touch, craves it, wants even more of it, cannot get enough of it. 

It is not sure if the other asset pulls it downward as the other asset leans back onto the sofa, or if it pushes at the other asset, pushes the other asset back onto the sofa. But they are tipping over, the other asset with back against the cushions, and this asset on top, pressed so close, hugged closer still by the other asset’s grip on it. 

The other asset moans into their kisses. It is a soft moan, a moan that does not indicate pain. The other asset sometimes moans like that when they kiss. It is a good moan, the other asset has assured it. The first time the other asset had truly moaned like that, it had been startled and had wondered if the other asset was hurting.

Now it knows. 

The other asset is not hurting—the other asset is enjoying.

It smiles against the other asset’s lips and dismisses the thought floating across the mind that it could have moaned back, if it had the required parts inside the throat. It has to settle for sighing happily, for nibbling at the other asset’s lower lip—another thing the other asset really likes—for slightly increasing the pressure of the flesh hand at the other asset’s neck. 

It has been strangled before, many times. It does not understand why the other asset enjoys it when there is pressure at the other asset’s neck, pressure around it, not pressure from massage. But the other asset does like it. Does like the pale shadow of strangulation. Does like the possibility that something could become strangulation if it chose that path. 

They both know that it never would, though. 

There is the familiar stiffness between the other asset’s legs, the malfunction that the other asset has assured it that no one will ever punish the other asset for. And if they are to be people as well as assets, asset-people, perhaps it is not a malfunction that the other asset gets hard sometimes when the assets are kissing so wildly. 

It does not mind the hardness. Just as they both know that it would never strangle the other asset, they also both know that the other asset would never push into this asset. Never. The assets do not harm each other. The assets love each other. Are the same as, together, forever. 

It grins at the thought—the same as, together, forever—and redoubles its kisses, chasing the other asset’s lips with its own and swallowing down the other asset’s delicious throat sounds, the sounds that the other asset makes only for it, and only during the very best of their kissing.

The other asset squirms, then, and there is a throat sound that is different from the rest, is urgent but dismayed. 

It pulls back onto the knees and looks down at the other asset with concern. What is wrong? It makes the question sign and is going to ask if the other asset is hurt—maybe it weighs too much or the metal arm pinched the other asset—but the other asset is speaking too fast, rapid-fire words that it hardly understands for the speed and the mumbling.

“Have to— Gotta— Just—” The other asset backs away from it and shifts to stand up as soon as there is clearance to do so. “Be back in a bit, sorry, I just— I gotta— There’s—”

And the other asset is dashing to the bathroom of all places, nearly slamming the door in haste.

The other asset needs relief, then. It has been with the other asset most of the day so far, and the other asset has had very little to drink. But it has been denied the option of relief when it needed that relief badly, and it has failed to wait until a handler said it could relieve itself and been punished for it. 

They are people now, so there would be no punishment, but the other asset must prefer not to make a mess if that can be avoided. In this, at least, the other asset is not messy.

It settles on the sofa to wait, and it is waiting for several minutes, putting the mind on other things, observing and focusing on the things around the living room, on the kittens in their snug box on the carpet tree for cats, on the artwork the woman with the long red hair chose for the room, on the dog bed, on the—

The other asset is taking a long time, and making no sounds at all, and that is worrisome. Is the other asset alright? Did it do something to upset the other asset, and that is why the other asset needed to leave so suddenly? Is the other asset going to wait in the bathroom until it needs to leave for its session with Caroline so that there is no need to talk about what it did that was so upsetting?

There is muttering in the bathroom. It could understand some of the muttering if it listened closely, but that is a rule no one has spoken aloud that it has still managed to learn: behind closed doors is meant to be private. It is not polite to “eavesdrop” by listening to what it can hear behind those closed doors. Especially when the door is closing off a bathroom or a bedroom.

It is good at not listening to things it can hear. 

It does not know what it did wrong, but it tries to think of what it could be that chased the other asset off. Maybe the hand on the other asset’s neck was too tight? Maybe the weight of it on the other asset was too heavy? Maybe the metal arm pinched the other asset somehow? 

But all of those things have happened before—it cannot lie down on top of the other asset on the floor, it knows, because there is not enough padding for the other asset; they can only do that on the sofa or in a nest. And it has put more pressure on the other asset’s neck in the past and it has not been a problem, though that does not mean it will never be a problem. Consent can be taken back, Yasmin says, and consent once does not mean consent always. And it knows the metal arm did not pinch the other asset.

The other asset is muttering louder now. Things like “stupid” and “dipshit” and “get a hold of yourself.” 

It wonders if the other asset is okay in there. There is the tablet. It could ask with the tablet or it could tear out a piece of paper and slide it under the door. It could knock, too. Or… JARVIS can see everywhere. 

It makes JARVIS’s name sign and points to the closed bathroom door. It signs OK and asks the question sign. 

The response is not as loud as normal, is soft and quiet and pitched so that most would not be able to hear it at all. But it is still sure, certain-sounding, like an expert.

“Agent Barton is experiencing mental distress, but would not welcome an inquiry or interruption from anyone. He would rather work out the source of his distress on his own. I believe if you were to attempt communication at the moment, he would be embarrassed by the intrusion.”

It frowns. If the other asset is in distress of any kind, then it wants to destroy the source of the distress so that there is no more distress. But it still does not know what has caused the distress… unless it is what caused the distress. 

“I hasten to add, Jigsaw,” JARVIS continues smoothly, “that nothing you have done is wrong or inappropriate. Agent Barton is not upset with you in the slightest. This particular foible is a regrettable part of being a person.”

It does not know that word. Foible. It asks the question sign and the sign for “word,” hoping that JARVIS will know which word it does not understand.

“Foible in this situation is akin—or alike—to a quirk, a hang-up, a minor defect or flaw that does not detract from the quality of the whole. A minor shortcoming.” JARVIS pauses. “Another example of Agent Barton’s foibles is his dislike for vegetables.”

Oh. That sort of thing. That is a very small thing. The other asset seems to be experiencing something much worse, but maybe that is just how it appears, and not how it is. Yasmin has told it all about things that look like one thing but are actually another. It is part of understanding others and itself that it learns to accept that things are not always what they seem to be.

It frowns toward the bathroom door. It cannot help? It signs that. It wants to help, but if JARVIS says that it cannot…

“Eventually,” JARVIS says, “you will be of great help. But in this moment, I would advise you to write out a note and leave it on the coffee table for him. You do not want to be late for your session with Ms Smith. Caroline, that is.”

It ponders that. What note to leave?

Chapter Text

Clint

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—

Clint scrubs his face with a cold washcloth, frustrated with himself beyond words. He’s missed his opportunity to go out there and apologize to Jigsaw, to explain himself maybe—though that would be embarrassing and possibly lead to really uncomfortable conversations—and reassure his partner that nothing is wrong except Clint himself. 

By now, Jigsaw will be out of the living room and off discussing tofu or the benefits of chickpeas or something with his food lady. And possibly will be feeling like he did something wrong. Because Clint is a loser who can’t keep it in his pants. 

Except he did keep it in his pants, so more like a loser who can’t keep it in his head. Who lets it get to the point of being right there on the edge, in his pants. 

He’s got it under control now—thanks, baseball, for being boring—but it took way too long and way too many attempts at boring thoughts to chase away the feelings of Jigsaw’s fingers against his throat, Jigsaw’s lips on his, Jigsaw’s weight pressing down on him, the feeling of all those ridges and shapes on Jigsaw’s otherwise smooth skin. So much of his skin. And Jigsaw willingly, even eagerly, pulling his own shirt up to expose that skin. 

The trust, the desire, mingled together into a heady mixture that had sent Clint to paths of thought best left untraveled when Jigsaw is present. If he’d gone off, if he’d tripped over the edge into orgasm with Jigsaw right there, if he’d rutted up against his partner even once… 

The very last thing he wants is to hurt Jigsaw, or to break that trust or chase off that desire. The mere thought of upsetting his partner in that way is repulsive to him. 

Clint looks down at his crotch. Fuck. Clint is repulsive to himself. After everything his partner has been through, every torment and rape, how could Clint come even a little close to such a thing? He’s gotten hard before—of course he has; Jigsaw is an Adonis in the flesh, with beautiful eyes and lashes, lips Clint can’t get enough of, strength and power in every smooth movement… 

So yeah. He’s gotten hard. It’s difficult not to when a creature as perfect as Jigsaw is in his arms. But never like this. He’s always been afraid Jigsaw would spook, like that time Jigsaw really took notice and panicked on Clint’s behalf because he thought someone would punish Clint for his hard-on because assets didn’t get those. But Clint never thought he’d be the one to spook.

Clint shakes his head. And had he ever spooked. Scrambling back and off the sofa like that, like it was Jigsaw’s fault, like he had to get away from Jigsaw when all he really needed was to race off to take care of himself and his stupid dick.

His stupid, stubborn dick. 

Clint had been half afraid he’d come in his pants before he got to the bathroom, the sensation had come on so suddenly, or that he’d miss the opportunity to come into a tissue or something and would get the bathroom floor all messy.

But once he had the leeway to come at will and get it over with so he could wash away any evidence and go back out to his partner, his dick had just plain not cooperated. Any racy thoughts were tinged with so much guilt and self-recrimination that he got nowhere, and when he tried heading the opposite direction, his dick wouldn’t soften. 

Even baseball nearly failed him, and he’d nearly needed to move on to golf—the last, most potent option when trying to chase away a hard-on. 

The problem was that baseball had those tight pants and his partner had snuck into his baseball thoughts and nearly prevented the cure from taking effect.

And now, because his dick dithered about trying to decide which way to solve the problem, Clint had taken long enough in the bathroom that Jigsaw is gone. 

Worse, Natasha will be eating lunch with the others and he’s not bringing this up at the table with the rest of the team. Then Jigsaw will be back and he can’t very well just greet his partner with a discussion of unruly boners and things. And then a session with Yasmin that he’s been “invited” to join. Two hours of interrogation about his intentions toward her client. Or something like that.

Clint braces both hands on the edge of the bathroom counter and groans, his head hanging low. Two hours of therapy. S.H.I.E.L.D. psych evals only lasted half an hour, maybe ran a few minutes over if they weren’t buying his answers. 

He’s had one session, right after the Budapest debrief, that lasted nearly an hour. But never anything approaching two hours. Two hour sessions seemed excessive when it was Jigsaw being subjected to them. Now that it’s Clint who’s probably getting dragged to one, “excessive” seems a bit understated.

His stomach rumbles, and Clint sighs. He needs to eat something, and he needs to brace himself for this afternoon. He doesn’t even know when his decision to deflect and avoid this therapy session had turned into grudging acceptance of the session, but if Jigsaw “reminds” him about the “invitation,” he knows he’ll go. 

Saying “no” to Jigsaw is somehow very difficult to do. It probably has something to do with how little Jigsaw asks for.

Clint stands up straight and checks himself over in the mirror before leaving the bathroom. He’ll eat snacks from the kitchenette instead of getting actual food from the kitchen. He doesn’t want to talk about why he’s late to lunch, and there’ll be questions asked about that if he goes now. They’ll be well-meant but he still doesn’t want to answer them. He’d probably blush and they’d turn the questions into teasing, and he just… He can’t deal with that right now.

Anyway, lunch can be three protein bars and a cheese stick. Maybe a spoonful of peanut bu—

There’s a note on the coffee table beside the video game controller. Clint walks around the sofa to pick it up and read the shaky all-caps of his partner’s handwriting.

ASSET-PEOPLE THE SAME AS

TOGETHER FOREVER

JIGSAW LOVES CLINT

He drops into a seat on the sofa hard enough that the wood of the frame creaks. Clint has known that Jigsaw loves him—they’ve exchanged their love for each other in both of these formats before, Jigsaw’s “the same as, together” and also the “I love you” that Clint is more familiar with. But for some reason, “asset-people” really gets him in the heart, and “Jigsaw loves Clint” gets him even harder, deeper, like a blade of love slipped between his ribs.

Somehow, Jigsaw is not upset with Clint and hasn’t been upset by Clint. He’s on as even a keel as anyone could be after a make-out session like the one they’d shared, the one Clint had cut short without explanation. 

Yeah, Jigsaw’s doing great. Clint’s the one who’s all messed up.

Jigsaw

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 12:15 p.m.—

“I’m glad to hear you made it through the hurricane without too much trouble, Jigsaw.”

Caroline made it through, too, and it signs that it is happy about that, even though it wishes she had sheltered in the hive building so that they could have had their sessions like usual. It does not add that part, though. It only signs the happy part.

“Thank you. Now, today’s lunch is something you might enjoy, and that you might not,” Caroline warns it before pulling a paper bag out of her cooler. 

The smell of… something meaty enters the room. It frowns. 

“This is what is called ‘Wonder Meat,’ formed into a burger. It’s not made from meat at all. No animal products are in this. But it looks and smells and tastes very like beef, in this case. There is also ‘Wonder’ chicken, which also contains no animal parts at all.”

Caroline sets the bag in front of it and pulls a second and third bag from the cooler. The second bag goes in front of her—her own meal—and the third in between them. 

“The fries are just french fries like usual, and I brought plenty of dipping sauces for you to experiment with. There’s also pasta salad, for afterward. That way, even if you don’t like the Wonder burger, there will still be some things you do like in today’s session.”

It reaches into the bag in front of it and withdraws what looks like a cheeseburger once it is fully unwrapped. There is lettuce on it, and pickles, onions, tomatoes, drippy gravies, cheese—all things to be expected and things that it will enjoy. But there is also the… the meat disc. The “Wonder Meat.” There in front of it, and smelling kind of like—very like—beef. 

Like little cows with their horns and spots and long legs and boxy butts. Poor little grass puppies, ground up into hamburgers and sliced into steaks.

It does not want to eat grass puppies. But this is not really beef. She said so and Caroline does not lie to it. But why not just have a garden burger with beans and mushrooms and all sorts of tasty vegetables making up the disc at the heart of the stack of burger. Those taste excellent, and smell good, too. And they aren’t anything at all like beef.

Why does it have to be like beef? It does not want to eat beef, does not miss eating beef since it found out what that was. It does not need a replacement for beef.

“This is made from soy, primarily, which is the same thing that makes up a lot of tofu.” Caroline unwraps her own not-quite cheeseburger and puts some of the fried potato sticks on the paper beside the not-beef burger.

It points to the “Wonder” cheeseburger in front of it and asks why.

She smiles. “Because variety is important, and because the novelty of it might prove enjoyable. This is a way to have a taste of something from before you decided to adopt a vegetarian diet, but while adhering to your moral values. I want you to explore the tastes and textures and smells of your meal. We’ll discuss how you feel about the Wonder burger as well, especially if anything gives you pause.”

It nods. It can do that. Mindful eating is something it has mastered, after all. It can be very mindful about this meal. It picks up the hamburger and takes a deep breath, breathing in the smell of grilled beef, and tries not to think about the grass puppies. No animal parts, Caroline had said. No grass puppies got hurt for this meal. 

It sets the burger back down and signs that it smells like a hamburger, mostly. There is a faint otherness to the smell, something that is not beef, something that is… almost sour. Almost… It is not a rotten smell like in the metal boxes outside the food stores where food that is too old to sell goes. But there is some smell inside of the Wonder meat that is also in the pouches of food that the little cats eat.

“Well?” Caroline asks with a smile. “What are your thoughts on the smells and appearance?”

It signs that it does not like the smell, that the smell is sideways from beef, that it is sour, that it is like cat food.

“Sideways from beef?” she asks. “Can you explain that a bit?”

It signs that it is like beef, but if beef is over there, this smells next to beef. To the side. Like beef, but not beef. 

“I see.” Caroline nods to herself. “It seems like the sour scent you’re picking up is an unpleasant one. Is that right?”

It nods. 

“Is that the only reason you’re reluctant to eat the Wonder burger, or is there something else as well going on for you?”

It looks at the burger. Then at her. “The same as innocent meat” it signs. It signs that the grass puppies should not be ground up, even though it knows that this burger does not contain any grass puppy. 

“You do not have to eat it, Jigsaw,” she reminds it. “You are always in control of what you choose to eat or not eat, and I am not going to be upset or disappointed, so long as you consider your choices before making them.”

It lets out a breath it did not realize it was holding. It wraps up the Wonder burger and puts it back inside of the paper bag. 

“Would you like the pasta salad instead?” Caroline asks. She reaches into the cooler before it has even finished nodding, anticipating its nod. “Here you go. This is all for you, Jigsaw. I will be full with just this burger and some fries.”

It happily digs into the pasta salad—shell shapes, and three different kinds of bean, and some sharp feta cheese, and two kinds of olive, and some cucumber and tomato, and a tangy sauce with herbs. So delicious. Between bites, it signs about the smells and tastes of each of the parts of the salad, and how they go well together, and about how the salad behaves as a whole, the mixture of the component pieces. 

And there are the fried potato sticks as well. Very nice and still a little crunchy. It tries all of the colorful gravies for dipping the potato sticks into and describes them to Caroline before deciding that it likes the fried potato sticks on their own better than with the gravies. 

When Caroline is all but a few bites from finishing her burger, she pauses in her explanation of “food substitutes”—what can be used to replace things that cannot be found or that cannot be eaten for various reasons, and why people turn to substitutes instead of just not eating the things—to smile at it. 

“Thank you for trusting me today, Jigsaw. I really appreciate that you were honest with me and that you didn’t think there would be a punishment for choosing not to eat the burger. I respect you and your choices.”

It smiles back at her. Such a good feeder.

It accepts her offer of the terrible-smelling Wonder burger to take with it, because maybe the other asset will enjoy it, or maybe one of the others on the team that is not a cell. Caroline seemed to enjoy her own burger, after all. Maybe it is something that only someone enhanced can smell. Or maybe it is about the grass puppies, after all, the mind interpreting the smell as a bad one because it did not want to eat grass puppies.

When their session is over, it brings the burger with it to the dining room, where the others will be finishing up their own meal. 

The other asset is not there—odd—but the others are.

“Wonder meat?” the flying man asks. “I’ve heard about that. It seemed interesting but not interesting enough to go get some.”

The clown man accepts the wrapped up burger curiously. “Made entirely out of plants, you say? It smells…” The clown man pauses. “Well, mostly like beef.” He looks around the table. “Anyone want to split this with me?”

They all decide to eat some of the Wonder burger, cutting it into wedges and passing bits of it around the table. The ballerina woman says that the other asset would never want to eat it upon learning that it was made of plants, so there is no sense in saving a wedge for the other asset. It considers objecting to that, but she has a point. If the other asset were told it was a plant burger, even if the other asset smelled meat, there would be a rejection of the burger wedge. 

And it will not feed anything to the other asset without first telling the other asset what it is.

There are exclamations all around the table about the taste and texture of the Wonder meat, with many of the team that is not a cell enjoying their wedge, and the clown man looking thoughtful rather than like he enjoyed it. 

“I’ll still take my burgers made out of actual mooing cows,” the hamburger technician says, “but that’s not terrible. In a pinch, it’ll do.”

The ballerina woman nods. “If no one told him what it was, Clint would like it. But he’d definitely prefer real meat to plant meat.”

The auction woman laughs.

The man with the red cape appears to be considering whether he enjoys his wedge of the burger, and finally settles for calling it “interesting” and leaving it at that. 

It agrees. There is something interesting about the Wonder meat. Not necessarily good, and it will not eat Wonder meat any more than it will eat actual meat. But it thinks if people who like to eat grass puppies could learn to like eating fake pretend grass puppies, there might be fewer actual grass puppies chopped up. That would be good.

“We’re not switching out our supply of beef for this, are we?” the hamburger technician asks, glancing its way and ultimately looking at the curly haired researcher. “It’s still okay to eat real beef, right? Right?”

“It would be unwise to switch over to this throughout the Tower without careful consideration,” the curly haired researcher says. “It’s not just a matter of cost, after all, but also nutritional impacts and opinion polls from workers and Tower inhabitants. It could be included as an option alongside beef, though.” 

“Oh, good.”

“So if you brought us this burger, Jigsaw, did you get enough to eat at lunch?” The clown man gestures toward the remnants of the meal they had been eating—something like mixed vegetables and chicken that is white in a creamy gravy, with biscuits on top of it. “If you don’t mind picking around the chicken, anyway.”

It decides that it is not hungry. There was a lot of the pasta salad. And there were the potato sticks, also.

What it does want, instead of more food, is to know why the other asset is not here. Is the other asset still in the bathroom, wrestling with foy… foy… what was the word for it… Foy something? With distress that is a little thing that does not matter so much. Yes. Is the other asset still wrestling with that?

It hopes not. That is a long time to be stuck on something. Maybe it is time for it to go help now, where before was not the time to go help.

Natasha

—New York City | Friday 02 November 2012 | 1:30 p.m.—

She suspects that Clint’s reason for not coming to lunch was that he was sulking about Jigsaw’s request that he come with him to the afternoon session with Yasmin today, or else that he was panicking about that request and the resulting joint session with her.

It’s something she would have talked with him about if Thor hadn’t asked for a tour of the gardening room after they’d finished their breakfast. But there’ll be an opportunity to discuss it now, once Kate has scampered off to work on her seminar paper and the rest of them have scattered to wherever they plan to spend the afternoons. She thinks Thor is tagging along with Tony and Bruce today, and Steve and Sam are probably enjoying a bit of time alone together. 

So it will just be her and Jigsaw chatting with Clint about Yasmin and her afternoon session, trying to convince him that it’s a good idea. At the very least, they need to get him out of his head, because he’s been stewing on the issue for hours if he didn’t come to lunch, and that means he’s probably thinking the worst possible scenario is unfolding before him.

“I’m not entirely certain why Clint didn’t come to lunch,” Natasha says in response to Jigsaw’s question in the elevator. “How was he when you left to go see Caroline?”

Jigsaw sighs, and then signs that Clint had been odd. He explains that they had been massaging, and that had become “so many kisses,” which had included Clint touching under Jigsaw’s shirt. Jigsaw flushes happily at those signs, without a shred of embarrassment at having shared that information or at blushing so fiercely. 

Natasha smiles. She loves this for him. To be so unaware of embarrassment or shame. To be discovering these sensations and emotions here with Clint for the first time, and in a safe and responsible environment, whatever Clint thinks about himself. Joyful. Jigsaw is downright joyful in his enthusiasm, not shy in the slightest. Not many can muster that lack of self-consciousness, the uninhibited thrill of discovery.

Then Jigsaw frowns, and signs that Clint left suddenly, that he had darted to the bathroom in the hallway and not come out or made any noises for a while, and then that he’d muttered things that were mean to himself. Things like “stupid” and “dip” and “shit”—which she suspects was one word. He tells her that he loves Clint and left him a note saying so, but he doesn’t know if Clint got the note yet.

In fact, Jigsaw apparently worries that Clint is still closed away in that bathroom. 

“I’m sure he’s not in the bathroom still,” she signs to him as the elevator opens onto their floor. No sense in alerting Clint to their conversation by speaking aloud. “Clint is fine,” she continues. “Just being silly about something. It’s a hangup of his that he’ll get over eventually.”

“JARVIS said,” Jigsaw signs. “Hanging up. Small flaw, not big, not problem.”

“Well, there you go,” she signs. “If JARVIS says so, you know it’s not an issue to be worried about.”

“Still worry,” Jigsaw responds, looking vaguely petulant.

“Why don’t you bring it up while you’re with Yasmin, and see if you two can iron it out in a group setting?”

Natasha does feel a touch bad tossing Clint to the wolves like that, but there’s no telling how long it would take Clint to get around to discussing it with Jigsaw otherwise, and if it goes undiscussed, it will have negative consequences. Either Clint hiding out in the bathroom whenever things get hot and heavy will become a pattern that hurts and confuses Jigsaw, or Clint will purposely deescalate any future make-out sessions to avoid getting too excited, which will also hurt and confuse Jigsaw.

No, if Clint managed to discuss morning wood with Jigsaw—and that had been horrific, in his recounting to her, full of a very protectively upset Jigsaw insisting that assets don’t get hard and explaining all sorts of genital torture that made it so—he can discuss this as well.

And if it weren’t for Yasmin inviting Clint to join a session, Natasha might have stepped in and forced the issue out into the open to be discussed, herself. Just to spare Jigsaw the hurt and confusion. But if Yasmin does want to discuss their relationship, as Jigsaw had said, then it’s not really Natasha’s place to step in and guide that sort of discussion. 

According to Jigsaw, Yasmin wants to talk about consent and being the same as one another, and that’s not exactly tied to what happened earlier this morning between Clint and Jigsaw, but it’s not not tied to it, either. 

If Clint is still trying to take Jigsaw’s eager enthusiasm for innocence that must be protected, or whatever his hangup really is about under the surface, then they do need to discuss consent. And openness. As in, Clint needs to explain what happened and why he acted like he did, and then—once Jigsaw has all the information he needs—they can make plans for the future.

When they get to the rooms Clint and Jigsaw share, Clint is not still in the bathroom, thankfully. He’s losing his latest game of Here Fishy, Fishy, even though he’s standing on the shore and there’s not a boat to add to what can go wrong in the game. 

“Aw, come on,” he mutters as the door closes behind her. “I had that one.”

The bloop bloop of the fish laughter is quieter than usual. He has the volume down, possibly to better hear Jigsaw coming in—like he’d ever manage to hear Jigsaw. Clint is oddly hopeful about that potentiality. 

“Hey Jigs, ‘Tasha,” Clint says. “How’d lunch go?”

Jigsaw explains about the Wonder Meat, that he didn’t eat it because it smelled bad and he thought too much about the cows—grass puppies, in his words—but that there’d been a pasta salad and fries that were tasty. 

“It tasted just fine,” Natasha adds. “We all split the burger after lunch. You’d have liked it if it wasn’t made out of soy and vegetables and things.”

“Why ruin beef by taking the beef out of it?” Clint gripes. “That’s an abomination. That’s a lie. It’s wrong, is what it is. Burgers made of veggies that actually pretend to be beef. What’s wrong with those garden burgers that don’t pretend to be anything but what they are?”

Jigsaw nods firmly. He points at Clint and signs that he’s right.

Natasha laughs. “Well, at least you have Jigsaw on your side, Clint. The rest of us liked it alright.”

They watch him lose three more rounds of his fishing game, Jigsaw sitting on one side of him and Natasha on the other, before Natasha takes a turn and reels in a decent-sized walleye in about five minutes, using the same settings Clint had for rod, line, and lure. 

Clint just shakes his head. “I swear, this game is rigged.”

“I think it’s just you, Clint.” Natasha casts again and waits for a bite. “If Jigsaw didn’t worry about hurting digital fish, he’d manage to catch fish with the best of us. But you? You’re cursed.”

Natasha flicks the controller up and snags something, and then begins the task of reeling in whatever it is.

“Speaking of cursed,” she says with a laugh as her fish struggles, “how excited are you for this afternoon?”

Jigsaw beams at Clint, clearly not understanding the word “cursed” or else focusing on the excited part instead.

Clint sighs. “Yeah, I was thinking, maybe this week is too early. Too soon. Maybe after I have a weekend to prepare, we can go together Monday.”

Jigsaw asks what he has to prepare for.

“I— I don’t know,” Clint says. “Just preparing myself, I guess. It’s been a really long time since I last had a psych eval. It’s tricky business, passing those.”

“It’s not a psych eval, Clint,” Natasha says, letting the line out a bit before reeling in some more, to tire out her fish and get less of a fight when she brings it in close. “Yasmin just wants to chat with you.”

“That’s what they always say,” Clint says darkly. “They just want to talk. Ha. Therapists never just want to talk. They always want to talk about things you don’t want to talk about. Upsetting things. And then when you get upset about it, they mark you down. Like they’re not the ones who upset you by bringing it up.”

Jigsaw signs that there isn’t anything upsetting about them, that they are the same as, together, and that is not upsetting. And that consent is good, not upsetting. He adds that it will be okay and that Yasmin is nice. A good expert.

Natasha gives Clint a knowing smile. She knows what things he finds upsetting about their relationship—the things about himself that he fears will upset Jigsaw, rather. And by his tightening lips, she knows that he knows she knows, and that he doesn’t want Jigsaw to even know about those things. That he fears Yasmin will expose him somehow as a bad boyfriend and a rotten partner for Jigsaw.

Of course, she also knows that Clint is an excellent partner for Jigsaw. Maybe not any of his previous lovers, sure, but Jigsaw is nothing like any of those previous lovers, and has a completely different set of needs to be met, and a different set of expectations, too.

“You should go, Clint. If you go to the session today and whenever you’re asked, then I’ll chat with you afterward. But if you don’t go, I won’t give you any more advice.”

“Blackmail!” 

She laughs. 

“The dirtiest of blackmail, yes.” She presses pause on the game just a few moves from successfully reeling in her bass. “To make it up to you, here. You finish catching this one and you’ll have caught a fish, finally.”

Clint narrows his eyes at her, looks at the controller she’s offering him, and then stares at the screen for a while. “…Deal.”

Within two button presses, the line snaps and the bass gets away.

Clint sighs. “…Son of a fish.”