Title: Don't Piss of the Personal Assistant
Fandom: Avengers/Bleach
Characters: Steve, therapist
Chapter: 39
Word count: 1381
Warnings: nothing much
AN: So a few things happened on Monday. Most notably was that my girlfriends BRAND NEW PHONE found the ONE rock on the sidewalk. 1. Rock. 1. That's it. The only rock and it takes out the phone which we hadn't been able to get protection services on yet (money is a thing after all). So…new phone will be here on the 4th and we're selling the other one so that's fun.
But I did get a brand new bed (love it, it's a full and so big damn it). Breath of the Wild has been bought (I own Age of Calamity to so yay!) and so has Luigi's Mansion 3. I will murder whoever thought up some of these ghosts.
Fucking specific attack moments. Mrgh.
Anyways, enjoy this chapter.
I will also be posting a series of stories that I have restarted to share with you how my stories tend to look in the background. Is it so that I can also finish off a few other mini's? Yes. But also because I have these files doing nothing and people seem interested.
Steve shifted as he smiled slightly at the therapist that had been chosen for him by the Accords council after he finished his more intense therapy with Xavier. She asked to be called Arin and looked a lot like the spritely little secretary that Ichigo had taken under his wing just before things had gone to hell. He still couldn't get up the courage to ask if they were related, didn't think that it mattered much in the long run.
"Hey there, Doctor," Steve said, getting a slight smile from her.
"Hello, Steven. How are you doing today?" Arin asked as she put the microphone onto the table. Their very first session had been all about boundaries and how she ran her sessions, including recording them onto a specially encrypted computer that was just for recordings.
Steve rubbed at his head with a slow release of his breath. "Conflicted," he finally admitted. "I keep getting e-mails that somehow slip through the filters that all of our computers have."
"What kind of e-mails?" she asked, making a note to talk to Tony about the filters and maybe tightening them up for a time.
Steve reached down and dug out a bunch of papers that he had printed out from his e-mails. "Things saying that I was right in taking down IronMan, that he was a traitor...things about how he was a wuss and anti-American for closing his weaponry factories." He handed them over and let her read over them, Arin frowning slightly.
"I see," she mused, looking up. "You mind if I keep these?" she asked, Steve waving a hand in permission. "What makes you feel conflicted?"
Steve shifted. "I'm still dealing with the misinformation that I believed for so long about Tony and seeing that I was right in the way I acted towards him feeds into that part of me. I'm working on...as you called it 'killing it with truth and common sense' but still."
"It's feeding into the part of you that feels that you are still the scrawny sick man that you were for so long," Arin said, Steve grimacing at that.
"Yeah." Steve rested his elbows on his knees and played with his tracking bracelet. As part of his current parole, he had to deal with being watched by the Accords council via the bracelet, but he wasn't the only one. Bucky, Sam, and Clint all had their own, even though Clint had been under Wanda's influence. "I know what I did was wrong. More so than before. I saw some of the videos that Peggy recorded of her life, and talking about the years that she lived, and they're helping to show me I was wrong in so many ways."
"It's good that they're helping you," Arin said, smiling at him. "What are you thinking of doing about this inner conflict?" she asked.
Steve rubbed at his chin, making a mental note to get some razors to be sent to the compound again. "I think I'll send a request to Tony about tightening my filters and maybe see if one of the AI's will be willing to scan them before sending them through. I know that Jo and Friday work at the compound, the institute and the tower now," he said. "Maybe they'll be willing to keep an eye on my e-mails until I'm on a better mental standing." He shrugged. "If they can't, or just don't have the time, I'll create a short list of e-mail addresses that will be allowed into my inbox and see if Sam will help me set that up. We're doing better now days, so it would be a good time to fix what I broke."
"Very good ideas," Arin said, smiling at him as she looked at the laptop, pleased that it was still recording properly under Yuzu's watchful code. "How are your relationships with your other teammates?" she asked.
Steve smiled slightly. "Sam has stopped giving me disappointed looks. I think that you were right about me writing him a letter about everything and being up front with what my mental state was at the time. And what I was told before everything went down. Just laying it bare in that first letter that I wrote for him made me really think about myself. And then rewriting it so that it read coherently showed me that I was...in a bad place. And that I really should have been punished even when I was sick. Having consequences in my life would have carried over to now and made me think about what I was doing. Having them now is really forcing me to adjust my thinking."
Arin smiled even wider. "That's good. I'm sure that your communications through the letters are helping this process," she said, Steve smiling slightly.
"Yeah. It is. We work well when it's time to get down to it, but right now we both agree that it's best if we communicate through only letters. Since we need to stop and reread our responses, if we write something in anger, we can remove it after rewriting it," Steve said, leaning back. He picked up his water bottle and drained half of it, sighing. "I think we're going to try a lunch soon. See how that goes."
"Will someone else be there?" Arin asked.
"Yep," Steve said. "Natasha agreed to be the neutral party. She said that she'll be like Switzerland in this case, so it'll be good since she can force both of us to walk away if something goes wrong."
"I hope that it won't go wrong," Arin said. Steve smiled and nodded.
"Same here. Me and Clint have started to trade e-mails. He's back and forth between the compound, the Institute and the New York Headquarters of the sorcerers lately. Working on his own mental issues and that sort of thing," Steve admitted. "I apologized, and I mean a real apology, for dragging him into something that he shouldn't have been a part of."
"And what was his response?" Arin asked.
"That I was an idiot and need to get checked out by the Sorcerers. I did as he advised and found that the serum helped to block out most of her influence, at least things that were a part of who I was at the core," Steve said, resting his chin into his hand as he sighed. "I also found out that she did manipulate me. Just enough to make my biased opinions on everything around us right now worse. It was a bit more subtle than what she did to others and just worked off what I had in my head, bouncing off of the subtle manipulation that I had been put through with Hyrda acting as SHIELD. Doctor Strange told me that I would need to focus on those issues on my own, but the pathways are closed. Like Clint's. And…I am."
"I'm glad that you came to that conclusion," Arin said, picking up her cup of tea. "You know that I don't tell you what I think you need to fix, but instead I lead you to discovering the truth on your own. It makes it so that the lesson is well learned and ingrained."
Steve smiled slightly and rubbed at his head. "I know that I probably have other issues, but I've signed up for a long-distance video course outside of the classes that I'm attending to keep my Captaincy. Mostly history of the Americas, but next semester I'm doing a world history class. I'm also doing some research into drugs and how the illegal trade works," he admitted. "It's helping expand my worldview."
Arin smiled. "Wonderful. Tell me about them," she said, checking the time. "We have another twenty minutes and I'm curious as to the views you're building and how your opinion is changing on things. Are you going to try to attend the pride parades and celebrations next month?" she asked, crossing her legs.
She was pleased. Her next report to the Accords council was going to be much more than a 'verge of a breakthrough' report that her last four had been. Especially when Steve started talking about his research into gender, sexuality, and all the nuanced parts of it that he was just discovering.
