A bitter, unseasonably cold late April wind blew through New York, kicking up flower petals and discarded plastic bags and causing a young woman to pull her coat tighter around herself while her hair whipped around her face. She paused on the sidewalk to glance behind her at a group of four men. All four were wearing coats, one had a hood pulled forward, two had on sunglasses, two—including one of the ones with sunglasses—were wearing hats, and one had on gloves. All in all, they looked no different from any other clump of pedestrians. The man with the hood had a hand on the man with gloves' elbow. The man with sunglasses and a hat nodded subtly to the woman, who nodded back and pulled open the door to a staircase tucked between two shopfronts, and the five of them filed up the stairs to the concierge medical practice on the second floor. At the top of the stairs, Coulson pulled off his hat and sunglasses and pressed the buzzer on the back door. A moment passed, then the intercom chirped and a receptionist's voice came through. "How may I help you?"
Jemma pushed her hair back. "This is Jemma Simmons with patient, here to see Dr. Kelly."
There was a pause from the other end, probably while the receptionist went through an appointment list. "Yes, Mr. Stark called to let us know you're coming. Please come in."
Once inside, the group was led by a bottle-blond nurse to a large, cushy exam room where they collectively shed their coats and elected not to sit down. Barnes tapped his fingers on the back of the nearest chair, filling the room with a rhythmic metallic clinking. Steve put a hand on his wrist. "It's okay, Buck."
"You say that..." Barnes muttered back.
"We're just here to get a couple scans." Jemma smiled reassuringly. "Some pictures and we're done."
He looked at her, then shrugged. Just then there was a knock and the door opened, admitting an older man in a very well tailored lab coat. "Hello, hello. I'm Dr. Kelly. One of you must be, I assume you are Jemma Simmons—" he gestured at Jemma and she nodded "—and one of you fellows is the patient."
Barnes lowered his head, hiding behind the fringe of his hair.
"This is my patient." Jemma indicated Barnes. "The other three are insurance."
"So, you're the attending physician?" Dr. Kelly tapped a stylus against the edge of the tablet he was carrying. "Mr. Stark's message was rather lacking detail so I'm afraid I don't know what's going on. Though I do notice that your 'insurance' includes Captain America. That, or hired muscle in this city is getting a lot prettier."
"I work with Stark." Steve crossed his arms. "He set up this appointment as a favor."
"James here is being treated for various neurological and psychological conditions," Jemma said. "We need scans to establish a baseline so we can monitor his progress throughout treatment. As you can see, he has a prosthetic, it doesn't come off so no MRI." She glanced at her patient. "He's also claustrophobic and both I and his attending psychologist agree that sedating him should be avoided."
Dr. Kelly frowned and nodded. "Metal and claustrophobia certainly do rule out MRI. Were you thinking PET scan, then?"
Jemma shook her head. "I doubt he's sit still for the hour or so those take, especially not in the dark after having been stuck with needles to inject irradiated sugar. Our best option is going to be a CT scan without intravenous contrast."
The older doctor hummed and tapped a couple things onto his tablet. "Alright then. I'll go have someone get that ready."
As the door swung closed behind the exiting Dr. Kelly, Clint stuck his hands in his pockets. "I did not follow all of that, but it seemed too easy."
Coulson shrugged, and signed as he spoke. "This place handles the likes of Stark, I'd bet they're used to not getting details."
"We'd have lied anyway." Jemma turned to her patient. "To get the scans we need, you're going to have to lay still on a table. The table moves slowly through a big ring that makes a lot of buzzing and clicking noises. It won't hurt though."
"I'll be fine." Barnes traced a fingernail between two plates of his left hand.
Jemma flicked her eyes toward Steve. "Of course you will."
A few minutes later, Dr. Kelly returned to fetch Barnes, Jemma, and Steve, leaving Clint and Coulson in the exam room with the discarded coats. For a long minute, neither man said anything, Clint staring intently at a framed anatomical diagram on the wall. Coulson waited patiently for the archer to look at him before asking, "Are we speaking again?"
"Nope."
"We're sharing a bed."
"I missed you. I'm also still mad at you." Clint pulled himself up to sit on the edge of the counter, fished his phone out of his pocket, and started playing some little match-three game. Coulson sighed, leaning against the wall.
It was dim in the room with the CT machine, lit vaguely blue.
"Just lay still." Jemma firmly pressed Barnes's hand to the table; he kept fiddling with the hem of his shirt and muttering anxiously in German. "This won't take long."
He turned his head to look around Jemma at Steve. "Kannst du bleiben?"
Jemma caught the Captain's eye and shook her head infinitesimally. Steve took a breath and reached out to put a hand on the sergeant's shoulder. "No, Buck, I can't stay. I'm sorry."
"We'll be in the next room." Jemma gently ushered Steve out of the room. She nodded to the radiology tech and leaned up to Steve. "Since it seems to be the question of the week, are you okay?"
Steve let out a huff of breath. "I'm exhausted. He keeps swinging between angry, ambivalent, and completely lost. All three are hard to be around."
"We're all doing everything we can to help him get better."
"I know. But he's not better yet."
She patted his arm. "He will be. I promise."
"People said the same thing about my mother before she died."
"Oh, Steve." Jemma put a hand over her eyes. "I'm sorry. Medicine has improved greatly even just in the past couple of decades, though." She looked up at him. "He is going to get better."
Steve nodded. The tech mashed a key and gestured that they go back in to Barnes.
