2014.04.04 - Clowns & Coping Mechanisms

It's been a few days so the fact that after an extensive list of injuries that landed him in the infirmary, Steve is down in the training room looking like nothing ever happened, physically. Contrary to that, however, is the fact that he is down here in the training room 'acting' like nothing ever happened. He has not sought to talk about the events in Gotham, save to find everything under the sun to keep his mind occupied. 
That's his coping mechanism. 
Like right now when he's in sweats and a t-shirt doing pushups and sweating like a man whose been spending his nights in a sauna. "One thousand six. One thousand seven." 
Early to bed and early to rise may not get you any wealthier aboard the Argus, but for the majority of agents it /will/ potentially keep you from being shot or written up for being late to report in the morning. Consequently the training rooms are largely cleared out by this hour. Either that or the sheer vigor which Steve is pursuing his pushups has shamed everyone else into leaving. 
Etta watches him from the doorway, wearing an expression of undisguised worry for a moment as she watches him go at it like a man possessed. Which is, truth be told, exactly what he feels like to her empathic sensibilities.
”You’re going to grind a hole in the floor at this rate. And the minute you do, Director Fury will pop out from behind the stairmaster and begin yelling at... well, probably all of us.” For all the worry that showed in her face a moment ago, she keeps her voice light and airy. She winds her way over to a weight bench near his push up spot, fishing a water out of her bag and offering it up to him in the range of his peripheral vision with a smile that only takes a bit of effort to maintain.
Steve is usually a fairly personable fellow, always wearing a smile when he's not pounding on some nerdowell or another. Always a friendly greeting and never does he seem to be so drawn into whatever he's doing that he cannot, at the very least, greet someone who comes into a room. 
In this instance he seems far to drawn to even look away from the floor, though it's clear he can see Etta in his peripheral holding out the bottle. "One thousand twelve." He says in reply, only faltering in his pushups for half a beat of his powerful arms when the Agent sits down near him. 
Sweat runs down his face and clings to the angled point of his chin. His shirt is saturated and clings to every muscle like a second skin. "One thousand thirteen." 
‘Etta doesn’t seem to take his lack of a greeting personally. She sets the bottle within his reach, loitering there atop the weight bench and watching him push his chemically altered physique as hard as he possibly can, idly wondering if what he’s straining towards is punishment or release. Or if he even knows himself. 
”I’m glad to see you’re up and at ‘em.” She says softly after another twenty or thirty push ups. Her voice is soft and quietly pitched, maybe just a little sad as well, sprinkled liberally with worry. She holds nothing back from him, however one-sided her sharing might turn out to be. “I was worried. Well, truthfully, we were all worried.” A flicker of an ironic smile plays across her mouth for just an instant before dissipating into a little shake of her head. 
”It has to be awful, carrying us all around on your back like you do. All our ideals. I barely saw you as a person when I first met you. I couldn’t see past... the idea of you that I’d held onto all my life. I wish I could say that I regretted it now that I know you as a person, Captain Rogers... but I don’t think that would be the truth. Because you can’t know how much the idea of you helped when I was slogging through the desert or hiding in some ditch for days in the pouring rain.” She sighs softly, looking down at the rise and fall of the top of his head. “But I am sorry we’re such a weight.”
Nothing she's said is new to him. Dozens of people have turned that same speech on him in the midst of decisions that cost people's lives. Soldiers under his command assuring him that his image alone carried them through while the memory of plugging a bullet wound in some young kids chest with his finger dances through his head. 
Steve isn't tired of carrying the weight, he's not upset with anyone for being concerned, and he sure wouldn't let anyone take the weight on themselves, but it doesn't make it lighter to hear how proud of him they are. 
He pushes right through it, never pausing in pumping his body to the very breaking point, until the very last thing that Etta says hits his ears. Then he finally stops in mid pushup. He finishes finally and moves into a sitting position with his feet pulled in tight against his thighs and his arms laying across his knees, "If I told you what bothered me, Ms. Black, you would never forgive me for it." Said as he reaches for the bottle and twists the cap off to drain the entire content in several long gulps. 
“Etta.” She says quietly, not brooking any argument on the point it would seem. Her eyes stay fixed on his glistening face, the graven expression in them slightly at odds with the hint of softness in her mouth. She draws a shallow little breath before rolling her shoulders in the smallest of shrugs. “Try me, Captain Rogers. I might surprise you. And I doubt that the prospect of my not forgiving you for anything is the most frightening specter you’ve faced today.”
"You know what." Steve holds the bottle out and points at her from around its midst, "You'd be surprised exactly how wrong that is. And I don't mean you specifically... I mean you're a swell lady and all, but what I'm saying is: People will lose faith." His brow curls inward, "Which doesn't matter to me personally, I'll still wake up tomorrow, it matters because of the image. Inspiration is a powerful thing and we need that... I need that." 
The cap is twisted back on the bottle and laid down on the mat beside him. "So yes, you not forgiving me would be worse than anything I'm facing." He lifts himself up off the ground by straightening his legs out of their fold and heads over to a weight bench next to the one where she sits. The adding of weight is really a systematic thing, until there's about two fifty on each side. 
“Try me anyway.” Etta says again, placid but insistent as she watches him load weight after weight onto the equipment, ready after that tiny break to continue his quest to bludgeon a breath of nothingness into his consciousness through exhaustion. “Because, really, what choice do you have? You say it wouldn’t be personal, that you’d be fine... but at the same time you’re aware of what I was talking about. About how you, unlike all the other heroes in our arsenal, matter as much for what you stand for as for what you do out in the field.” 
She looks away for a moment, down at her toes as she says, “I wept when Tony Stark died. Like a little girl, for all that our acquaintance was a matter of weeks. He’s gifted like that... made of charm, despite all his flaws. Maybe because of all his flaws.” She frowns to herself, turning it over in her mind. “Terribly unfair, isn’t it? That double standard. We want you to be the most human of all of us, we want to believe that all the things that we demand of you are actually /easy/ to live up to, because they’re in all of us. And in holding you up, we demand that you’re the least human instead.” 
She lifts her head, looking him over carefully as she says as gently as possible, “But you might as well get it over with instead of fretting over it. And either my heart will break and it will be as bad as you think, or it won’t. But either way, it will be over. And you’ll know.”
Steve settles down beneath the weights and pushes the five hundred pounds easily up off the brackets. Which seems to be his answer as he quietly goes into a steady lifting routine without so much as a word spoken for almost a twenty count. The sweat continues to bubble off his brow and his face huffs with each lift, until he gets to thirty five when he drops it back into the housing and sits up. 
"I had him." He says quietly. His legs fall down to either side of the bench and his arms settle down between them. "He was laying there in front of me and I could have pulled the trigger. Everyone he's ever killed would have been avenged, every crime he'll commit afterwards would have been stopped dead in its tracks." 
"And I'm not upset because he survived. Heck, everyone would have clapped me on the back and... No, I'm not angry because I showed restraint." He doesn't look her way, but then he seems to be looking at something far away and not even in the room with them. "What bothers me most is I 'wanted' to kill him. Which isn't the same as killing, so I'll call it like it is... I wanted to murder him. Because it would have been easier." 
She’s quiet for a moment even after he’s finished speaking, letting the words settle in her head as she watches him from her perch a few feet away. “It took me a bit longer than a week to figure out that you were human after all. And that’s all you’ve just told me. You’re human. That’s all it means, and nothing more. Especially since you didn’t give him what he wanted... your soul, and by proxy, the souls of everyone who carries you about in their hearts like a sainted idol instead of a human man.”
A humorless, slightly bitter smile forces its way across her lips before she presses on, her softly lilting voice grown taut, edged with something sharp. “My contact, the one I mentioned before? I knew he’d been involved in that bar fire with your clown because, when I went to see him...” She gives a little shake of her head. “He’s not well. Not even before, but... he’ll be scarred for the rest of his days from the burns, even if the inevitable infection doesn’t do worse still.” Her eyes narrow as she pauses again, clenching her jaw tight for a moment. “I told him: All clowns, in their heart of hearts, fancy themselves philosophers. They’re all Pagliacci or think they are. And this one, though evil, is no different in that respect. He was able to set you a moral and philosophical puzzle that you couldn’t hope to escape unscathed from because he doesn’t care about anyone, ultimately, himself included. I expect he’d have been delighted to have you shoot him dead on the spot, because he’d have known what would come of it.” 
Another little shake of her head brushes her hair across her shoulders. “You did just about as well as you could. You’re still you. You’re still blessed and cursed with the burden of all our faith. And... Steve...” she says, hesitantly, gently using his Christian name with a more genuine if slightly anguished looking smile. “There’s nothing there to forgive. Truly. You’re a man. But what matters is... you’re a /good/ man.”
Steve doesn't look relieved by having voiced his inner demon. He looks drain and tired. After a second he slides beneath the bar and returns to pressing the weights with a huff between each lift. "I don't deny anything you've said, Ms. Black and I'll be fine after a few days. But right now I really need to work through this." Nodding to the bar when it lowers down to his chest. 
"I've made it my mission throughout my life to stand in the way of people who intentionally go out to terrify others. I thought that's what I was doing in Gotham, but what I found there was worse than that." his voice is quiet, but no less strong for it. His demons have done nothing to demoralize 'who he is'. "I lost people because of my decisions. Good Agents and civilians who trusted me to do something about him... and I wanted to. God knows I wanted to. I just couldn't do it. I knew exactly what it would mean to pull that trigger and as bad as I desired to end his miserable life... I couldn't." 
"So I have to go tell those agents families that they died and he still got away in the end. That every one of those people's lives was in pursuit of.. what? What exactly did I accomplish? My being there, it was like I'd poked the bees nest and nothing I could have done would have changed that. So yeah, I'm human. I wanted to kill him for it." 
It’s taxing, to sit and bear witness to what he’s going through and fail so thoroughly at trying to blunt its sting. It steals the color from her cheeks and a bit of the light from her eyes, but if anything it deepens her resolve. “He offered you the chance to win the battle and lose the war. Do you think that any of the agents who you lost would have thanked you for taking him up on it?”
She shakes her head yet again, answering the question for him before he can. “There /was/ no way for you to have /won/. That was the one thing he made sure of before he ever left that poor man on our doorstep. And he chose you /because/ you are the symbol you are. You. Not Tony, not Bruce, not Agent Barton... none of them would have done for what he wanted. They’re men. You’re justice, and bravery, and goodness. And the only choice he gave you was to either bleed and watch as those around you suffered, or let him kill what you stand for through your killing him.” 
But that won’t help either. She knows it before she’s finished speaking, and ends up looking down at her feet again. “You know all of this though. I know you do. What you mean, what he wanted, that there was no ‘right’ choice here, which is why he made you choose.” A pause of a beat and she says in a murmur, “I’m terribly sorry I suppose. None of the answers seem to help, do they? And I do wish you’d stop calling me Miss Black. At the very least I’m owed Agent, even if I haven’t managed to do enough to earn your calling me ‘Etta.”
Steve drops the weights down into the brackets and sits back up. Quiet for all the staring across the room, focused on nothing as he looks so intently at something that isn't even there. Not right in front of them, but something internal that's hiding. Acceptance? It's hard to lose men. It's hard to lose them and have nothing to show for it except 'you stand for something Steve'. 
He closes his eyes and nods, then slides his fingers back into his hair until it's slicked back out of his wet face, "You don't have to be sorry. You're trying. I'm not having a breakdown, I'm just facing it the only way I know how. You said it yourself..." Motioning towards her with his eyes opening to turn in her direction, "Everyone expects me to shoulder this without flinching, but I'm not built like that. I'm tough, I am.. and I will get through this because I always have, but I cannot just let it go because I made the right decision in the face of two bad decisions." 
A smile ghosts across his face and disappears like a phantom. "You have helped. Talking about it 'helps', but..." He shrugs and chuckles quietly, "It always stays up here." Tapping at his temple, "To remind me, so that next time I have to make a difficult decision I know why it had to be made. And even knowing why it had to be made, that it's going to hurt all the same. So.. now that I've completely ruined the image they wrote about me in those story books..." He grabs a towel that was draped across the back of another bench and wipes at his face, "Thank you, Etta." 
“No.” 
Just no, at first, but voiced definitively. Her brows lift as she watches him towel the sweat from his face. “If anything, you’ve only changed them. The fact that you’re a real man, the fact that this is difficult and not like water off a duck’s back to you... that doesn’t make you /less/ in my estimation. Quite the opposite.” Another smile that doesn’t touch her eyes and she adds, “But I don’t think I’ve helped. Not really. Though, selfishly, I wish I could believe that I had because... well, this is all so bizarrely lopsided, isn’t it? You mean a great deal to me and I’m little better than a stranger to you. One of a hundred or more of the adoring faces that you pass in the hall every day. I expect we all blur together and that none of us seem... quite real anymore.” 
She rises too, though her shoulders are a little more stooped than when she sat down, her steps a bit less buoyant, like she were weighed down a bit by failure and the proximity to his struggles. “But if I can’t help, you can. You needn’t grapple with this all alone. And I don’t think... I don’t think I would know who your friends are if you asked me. But you should figure it out, Captain Rogers. I don’t think this will get any easier for you so long as you’re doing your very best impression of an island.”
Steve Rogers is a lot different from Captain America. Steve Rogers is still just a little guy from Brooklyn who wouldn't back down from a fight while Captain America is the idol to an entire country, possible the entire world. The two men have to find some middle ground between idol and reality. In his mind, he'll always be that little guy, that's never going to change. It is his defining characteristic, but he knows exactly the importance of Captain America. 
Like everyone else, Steve Rogers is inspired by Captain America. When he walks through the hall ways and people salute him that have never said two words to him, he feels that inspiration. When some young boy runs up on the street to get his autograph in a Captain America t-shirt, he is motivated. 
That too will never change. It's another of his defining characteristics. He appreciates what he stands for as much as he appreciates his own ideals. It's for that reason that he'll always be at the front, no matter what the cost and it's the exact reason why he'll never give up no matter what the threat. 
"Just because I haven't shed my concerns after a single conversation is no reason to say you haven't helped." He says this quietly, rubbing the towel back across his hair. "I've spent my entire adult life using action to compensate for dealing with those actions. I did it because people needed me to and they still need me to. So every once in a while, I disappear and go try and find Steve. Spend a few weeks hitch hiking or working on a construction crew.. it probably seems trivial, but that's where I rejuvenate. That's when I let it all off my shoulders... until then." He motions to the weight bench. 
"I have to keep riding it on my shoulders. Otherwise, the idol falls a little. So if I sneak up here to do a few thousand pushups to find some temporary relief from painful decisions I've had to make that ended up costing lives.. to me? That's a small price to pay for what I mean to everyone." 
"But you came and let me talk about it.. and more than that, you kept me company when I needed it. So, no.. you have certainly helped. Just maybe not in the way you thought you would." 
And that helps. Maybe only a little, but some. There’s the barest upturn at the corners of her soft mouth as she looks at him, her expression gently composed if still a little melancholy. “Thank you.” She says quietly, though she adds in the same breath, “... but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t /want/ to leave you at content and peace, however unreasonable that desire might be. “ 
Instead of leaving, she takes a step towards him, looking up earnestly into his face as she says, “But you have to at least try and work towards letting Steve live here too, at least sometimes. He can’t live in the dark all but a week or two a year. He deserves a life too. You deserve a life.” She manages a bit more of a smile by way of punctuation and says, “Come play cards one night with Bruce and I. I’ll make us some passable pasta something on the Bunsen burners and you’ll have a beer and we’ll play poker. And maybe one night you and Bruce and Tony will actually leave the Argus and go... play pool, or do something. Like lads. Just lads, not saviors of the human race. End the night at a grubby curry place, talking about how difficult we women are. “ She lifts her brows and says, “In my professional opinion, that’s the best thing for you right now. That and learning to call me ‘Etta.”
"I'll work on it." Steve says of calling her Etta with the first lengthy smile crossing one corner of his mouth as he does so. The invitation is given a genuine nod, "I'd like that. I haven't played cards since..." Thinking back, eye brows raised, "huh.. Belgium. Couple of guys from the one oh seventh. I let them win, of course." Those boys needed it. 
"Next time you're having pasta and I won't be interrupting, let me know. It would be good to catch up with Bruce anyways. Seems like it's been forever." That being said, he glances up at the clock hanging on the wall and shakes his head, "I should try and get some rack time. I don't need much sleep, but I do need some." 
And his smile, in turn, deepens her own and restores a little of the light to her expression. “Goodnight Captain Rogers. And I’ll check with Bruce to make sure he doesn’t have anything pressing to irradiate but one night early next week. I know he’d love it too.”
"Good then." Steve says with a nod and a grin, "Let me know what he says." The towel is left to drape around his neck, both hands wrapped around either tail as he turns on his heels and starts towards the exit of the training area. "Good night, Agent Black." 
She smiles and nods her goodbye, though can’t entirely bite back a hint of a sigh. At least she’s been promoted to Agent, which is something. “Sweet dreams, Captain Rogers.” She murmurs at his departing back, possibly too softly to be heard.
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