Echoes
Author's Note: Major trigger warning for sexual assault. (Not actual but … the language used to describe the violation of the mind control in Avengers was very similar and this continues to draw on the parallels, further explanation to follow in author's note at the end. This includes fairly explicit references to physiological responses and more general references to sexual memory – you have been warned.)
People have no idea.
What it's like to have someone find every memory, corrupt the fond ones, and dredge up the painful, the embarrassing, the crushing to examine and dissect at his leisure … to have someone picking over your first, fumbling, clueless sexual experience, the day you lost your mother to cancer, the time when you were thirteen and thought you were being edgy by tormenting your Catholic parents by worshiping him which he lords over you, the moment you realized that no matter how hard you worked together, your marriage wasn't going to work out, the car wreck you barely survived …
To take you out of your own mind and put himself in. To fill you with his hatred, his madness.
I've thought about calling Barton … I've thought about that a lot. But I know how mortifying it is when someone brings it up to me, and I don't know if it would be any better if it was someone else who lived through it. At least he didn't do to me what he did to him – make him live though what it would be like to torture and murder his best friend …
I wonder if there was any part of it he liked … my stomach turns sour with shame every time I realize I did. I liked seeing all the things he showed me … the universe teeming with strange new life and more unusual astrological phenomena than any human should hope to ever witness …
Did he show Barton the same thing? It makes me feel very odd to think that he did. Did it mean the same thing to him, if he saw what I saw? Even with all my background in science, it was so far beyond anything I could comprehend …
Sometimes I feel so small and constricted in my human body, after all that I saw, and I end up taking off my clothes without thinking about it, even in public. It's not being naked in public that bothers me – in Sweden, my family thought nothing of visiting a clothing optional beach in summer. It's the way people react – like my naked body is the worst thing to ever happen to them. I've never wanted to be home more – surrounded by familiar things and people who would, at worst, have a good laugh at me and a policeman might tell me, gently, to find my pants or go home. If it got really out of hand … if I was lost or it was dangerously cold to be wandering about naked, they could call my son or my sister to come and get me. Baby Anna would probably love to see her granddad – and nothing would make me happier than to play with her and spoil her some more.
But I have to stay here – I'm needed here. I think.
It's so hard sometimes. Jane is so beautiful, she could have any man she wants, and so brilliant. Sometimes I just want to shake her, to try to yell some sense into her. She knew Thor for two days … two bloody days and she's going around in a funk like her world has ended. I never do – I just offer what comfort I can, drink my coffee, and go back to work.
I go back to work to try to elucidate some of the things he showed me, to put it into scientific words and research papers. To try to take some of that huge mass of squiggly, unquantifiable knowledge and label it and measure it out. But even as I do, the sick feeling comes back. Is this new knowledge tainted by what he did? What I did?
I wake up feeling hot all over sometimes, sweating even though it's winter in London, thinking about the people who died in New York when the Chitauri invaded. Five months ago, the anniversary of the attacks was all that was on television. They focused mostly on the facts of what happened and the Avengers heroically shutting it down, but they had pictures of the victims … oh God, those pictures … they might as well have died at my hands. I built the thing that brought the monsters here.
Maybe I need to just go home for a while – see Anna and her daddy again, be with my own people for a while …
But the truth of it is, I don't think I'm worthy of them. I cringe at the thought of the hands with so much blood on them holding pure, sweet, Anna. I don't deserve to feel at home – I deserve to be miserable.
Yet despite my self-loathing, I hate how I'm referred to in the media – they refer to my "involvement" which makes it sound like I collaborated. Like I didn't have some god come to Earth and stab me while I was frozen in terror and pour himself inside me …
I can't think about it too much, or I have a panic attack. The first time, I thought I was having a heart attack … yes I was that stereotypical anxiety patient, mistaking a panic attack for a heart attack. With my luck, I'll have an actual heart attack and mistake it for a panic attack and meet my death that way.
The pills don't help. I wish I could forget … yet I wish I could remember. It's like one of those dreams you can only half-remember when you wake up. I remember just enough to relive in my nightmares … and I don't remember just enough to keep me up at night.
I envy Coulson – he got off a good shot at the man who ended his life. And he's dead – if my parents are right he's in Heaven, in joy and peace, without any pain. Even if there's nothing after death, the "without pain" portion still applies.
I understand now … why they say to pity the living, not the dead.
I only wish I could remember … if he told me to put the back door in or if I did that of my own free will, and if I did if it was because I resisted him or just because I knew it was a good idea. I don't know why, but I feel that if I could remember that … it would help me get to sleep.
