Picking up the Pieces

"It's a lot easier to do good work when you have good words to say and work with good people."

-Mark Harmon

Clint Barton, as it turned out, was a fairly easy case. He'd had little but corrupt doctors looking to exploit his minor mania since his ordeal, and all he really needed was someone honest to talk to. Gideon offered little more than a ready ear and the occasional suggestion. Sometimes they even went fishing outside the complex, though that tended to make Coulson nervous. Gideon was not too worried about him—it was evident the soldier had a robust mind, and should be fine given time.

Most interesting was the joint session he had with Barton and the young redheaded woman who showed up—the one who refused to give her name.

"This is a waste of time." The redhead scowled from her chair. "Clint can work his problems out on his own. There's nothing wrong with his head."

Clint raised an eyebrow at her. "Speaking as the owner of the head, I'd have to disagree."

"Speaking as the expert on heads, I don't." Gideon smiled. "As far as heads go, Clint's is in remarkably fine order, and perhaps, given time, he would work through them. But the best way, and the quickest way, for him to work them out, is often just to talk about them."

"Because you're also the expert on being mind-controlled by a god." The redhead crossed her arms.

"No." Gideon shrugged. "That's the point of talking. To try and communicate what it's like. And often, simply the act of talking to someone may make someone realize the solution on their own."

"Then he can talk to me." The redhead kept her arms crossed. "There's no need for interlopers like you."

"Be nice, Nat." Clint gave her an amused look.

"Clint!" She hissed. "No names!"

Gideon could not quite restrain a smile. It was not hard to guess at the relationship between the two, especially given the arrow necklace the redhead was wearing. "Have you, ever?" He asked. "You clearly trust each other a great deal. Have you ever talked about the events of... that day?"

"Don't." The redhead held up a warning finger. "Don't even try. I'm a master interrogator, I know every technique in the book, and this grandfatherly routine you're pulling on me isn't working."

"It's really not a routine." Gideon shrugged. "I'm just old. I'm not sure I could pull off anything else if I tried."

Clint snickered. 'Nat' sent him a glare.

"So you haven't talked about it." Gideon returned to the subject on hand. "Why not?"

There was a little shrug from Clint. "Nat tends to be pretty busy." He offered. "And when she visited, I always wanted to talk about work."

"Why?"

Another shrug. "It seemed easier. Got my mind off of cooling my heels in a psyche ward, helped me stay in touch with the game."

"There wasn't any need to." Nat answered curtly. "There was no point. What's done is done. The less he thought about that day the better."

"Except what's done is never really 'done.'" Gideon shook his head, a wave of melancholia washing over him. "The past always haunts you. You can't just ignore it or pretend it didn't happen."

He noticed that that seemed to strike home to the redhead. She looked away and bit her lip. Clint, too, seemed rather affected by his words. Gideon decided to press the issue. "These things need to be resolved." He continued. "You need to find the proper context in which to view them, and that's not something you can really find on your own, particularly if they're things you keep running over and getting the same results. You need..." He gestured to the redhead, who looked uncomfortable, "...a second opinion. One you can trust in. Most people are surprisingly reluctant to trust their own opinions."

"It just... seemed a bit unnecessary." Clint answered, seemingly defending Nat. "I mean, I was already talking to about five doctors about that... day."

"Did you trust them?" Gideon raised his eyebrows.

A shamefaced grin. "Not really."

Nat let out a sudden snort. "With good reason, as it turned out."

"And you don't trust me," continued Gideon. It wasn't really a question.

This time, Clint hesitated. "I... respect you." He said at length.

"But you don't trust me."

A reluctant shake of the head.

Gideon chuckled. "It's all right. I've rather suspected as much for several weeks now. I understand it's hard for spies to trust anyone, even—especially—each other. That's why I find it so remarkable that the two of you do."

He rose. "Honestly, I feel like I'm rather superfluous to this whole equation. So I'm going to leave and check up on my other patient." He looked from one to the other. "But I want the two of you to promise me that, if I do that, you'll spend the time talking about something that really matters. Trust is rare, and precious." He walked out the door. "There are better things to spend it on than work."

After that day, Barton improved rapidly, and Gideon felt that his recovery was only a matter of days. He suggested to Coulson, though, that when the man was relatively capable, that he be sent back into the world to follow his own path—not inducted into SHIELD. Barton's god experience had left him somewhat dependent, and it was better not to nurture that through giving him orders.

Leo Fitz, on the other hand, was a hopeless case. Gideon suspected that the reason Coulson had been so willing to take a profiler on as a therapist was that he'd known there was little that could be done for the poor boy. He was not quite vegetative—he seemed to respond and recognize visitors, and he occasionally uttered the odd word—but for the most part he just lay in bed. Gideon filled the time by talking to the young man about his own experiences and problems, or, if the boy had visitors, talking to his visitors.

He had three main visitors—Coulson, a young girl named Skye, and most often, the brunette doctor Simmons. Gideon gathered that the two had had a relationship of sorts before Fitz's accident. Now, Simmons was Fitz's primary caregiver—apart from the irascible Dr. House, whom Gideon gathered was a new recruit like him. Every so often the mysterious May would drop in, take a look, and shake her head, and occasionally a black man, Tripp, would come in with Simmons, but most of the other agents seemed to leave him alone.

Gideon's talks with the agents were fairly insightful. Coulson was fatherly, protective, optimistic, and a little overwhelmed with the task ahead of him. He was also a man of faith. Gideon gathered that he'd had a traumatic life experience fairly recently, that had defined a great deal of his current character. Skye was fun-loving, even more optimistic, and emotionally needy—as she came by more and more, Gideon started to suspect that she was seeing him as the father (or grandfather) that she'd never had. Simmons was interesting; the accident, whatever it was, with Fitz had clearly left her feeling guilty, and there was also an air of profound disillusionment with her that spoke of a previous optimism that had died violently. Even House was interesting in his own way—the man clearly was excessively morbid, and used his prickly personality to keep people at a distance. Gideon suspected he might have recently lost a friend.

But Leo Fitz was his charge, and he could gain little knowledge about Leo Fitz, until one day, when he uttered one of his rare words: "No, Ward, don't..."

"Ward" sounded like a name, rather than a verb or noun. Gideon went to ask Coulson if Fitz had known anyone named Ward.

Coulson's face tightened, and gave him a file on the man named Grant Ward. He also spoke, long and passionately, about Grant Ward, and more particularly his relation to Fitz's 'accident' and how he related to Fitz's current condition. He even showed Gideon a live feed of the real Grant Ward, locked away in a high security government facility.

Gideon asked each of the visitors about Ward. Simmons hated his guts, and held him largely responsible for the whole thing. Skye spoke about the man with a mixture of regret and disgust—Gideon gathered she'd been rather attached to him at one point. May dropped in completely unannounced, simply because she'd heard he was asking, specifically to give her complete, uncensored opinion on her former partner.

House had never known the man, but had several ribald suggestions as to why everyone felt so strongly about him.

None of this, however, changed the fact that Ward had clearly meant a great deal to Fitz. And none of it diminished Gideon's growing interest in the man.

Finally, he went one day to Coulson's office. "I'd like to speak to Grant Ward."

Coulson looked at him like he'd gone crazy. "Out of the question." He shook his head. "That psycho's a one-man killing machine who ruined my team, and killed more fellow soldiers than I care to think about."

"He's a boy." Gideon gave a soft smile. "One who never really had a chance before you took him in. And he blew it, but I think there's still one more chance yet. Let me talk to him. I know a few things about psycho killers."

Again Coulson shook his head. "He can't even talk." He said. "May paralyzed his vocal cords. The most likely result is that he'll kill you with his own fingernails."

Gideon shrugged. "Than you'll have lost a profiler who's nearly outlived his usefulness anyway." He answered. "Barton is as good as healed, and I'm not making much headway with Fitz. Let me give this a try." He could see Coulson was still reluctant, so he added: "Let me do this, and I'll help you with profiling those super-villains you're after."

Coulson's face changed. "Super-criminals." He reminded him. "And as I said, most of them aren't that hard to find." For a long moment he seemed to consider the suggestion. "Fine." He said at last, picking up the phone. "I have a friend at that facility who owes me a favor—he can let you in unnoticed. But May goes with you, and if you ever make a suggestion about releasing him, I'll cut your visits entirely. Understood?"

Gideon nodded. "Very well." And finally, he felt like he was doing real work again.

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. "
― William James

A/N: Actually, I rather doubt Ward will be redeemed-certainly not in the next season. But he might very possibly start on the road to recovery, and Gideon is just the person to give him the nudge in the right direction. However, I have no intention of writing any of Gideon's interviews with him, for the simple reason that I don't really understand psychology, as my presentation of the Gideon's session with BW and Hawkeye doubtless shows. Thanks to Sage of Wind Dragons for suggesting that it would be fun to have the two of them up in front of a profiler, but it turned out to be surprisingly puzzling to write. So I'm calling it good on this story for now.

However. Another story that I'm very excited about is Bissek's new story, "Brighter Futures," a crossover with the Dresden universe. I had always planned to incorporate Dresden into the Recruitment Drive series, but the version he sent me was much more detailed than anything I could come up with, and with a much more interesting structure than I had planned. So even though I did do some editing and dialogue to spice up the story, he's the real writer of that particular crossover, and you all should totally go over to his profile to check it out, particularly if you're Dresden fans.