So there he was, somehow living with all these people who knew what he'd tried to do, what he'd attempted.
And maybe the funniest part (because it was either funny or heartbreaking, and he had enough heartbreaking things) was that when the other guy spit the bullet out, it wasn't his first try. He'd tried before, and Before. His attempts Before were generally more successful, since there wasn't an inner protector that would come out when his life was threatened Before, but other people still tended to get in the way.
He still had the scars from the one attempt. (That was the second one, because the first time he threw up the pills before they could work. He learned from that.) No new damage would remain on his body from After, but everything Before remained, the blueprint that he reverted to after every transformation.
He'd tried twice Before, and then twice more before spitting out the bullet, and by then, he'd resigned himself to being alive.
And god, wasn't that hilarious. He spent so much of his time around people who were struggling for the same thing, and here he was, merely resigned to living.
God, it made him hate himself more.
When he stuck the gun in his mouth, he thought that would be the end. He thought it would be over quickly, and didn't take the precautions he should have. He woke up miles from where he'd began, a trail of wreckage behind him. He woke up miles away, naked in a field, staring at the night sky. He woke up, and he laughed. He couldn't even kill himself properly. He failed at everything.
Penance, he whispered to himself, looking up at the brilliant sky, feeling very small. Penance.
He knew he was depressed. He knew it, like he knew physics formulas, and how to calculate moles, and the speed of light.
But... he wasn't sure. Because maybe he had all the symptoms, had had them for years by that point, but what if he was wrong?
Feelings were messy, impossible to quantify and measure, and he lived in constant fear of being wrong, even though it was himself that he was diagnosing, and he knew himself better than anyone.
Knew that he could still be wrong.
And maybe it didn't help, the perfectionism, because he wasn't going to seek out help, because what if he was wrong?
That was near the beginning, Before, when he still had the choice of getting help.
Afterwards, when he was on the run, there was no option of seeing a doctor or a therapist, because of the whole fugitive thing. He probably could have, if he wanted to, if he tried, but honestly it was too much work, and he was exhausted with just remaining alive, with no extra energy to devote to anything else, let alone something he could be wrong about.
He tried once, twice, three times more times before giving up on trying to kill himself. He had to resign himself to being a monster, and he did. (The attempts Before didn't have as nice a reason as those ones did.)
He worked on control, because he would never forgive himself if he hurt or killed someone, and it wasn't like he could do anything about it, since he couldn't die.
He worked on control, and then moved on to helping, because he had caused so much hurt that he could at least try to fix some of it, even if it wasn't his fault.
Then Loki happened, and he was sucked up into the mess that happened to be called the Avengers, out of the relatively safe life he'd made for himself.
Because maybe it wasn't safe, but he wasn't actively trying to die.