– Jason –

Something was wrong between Barnes and Jackson. I could feel the tension between them as soon as they shook each other's hands. I didn't know what had caused the uncomfortable energy, but I fully intended to find out. I wasn't that eager, though, so I decided to at least attempt to sleep. Sleep was atypical for me. It wouldn't go well.

I laid down in bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of staying awake another night, but there I was, eyes jacked open as if I had just gulped an entire gallon of espresso without thinking twice. I had become like this on my account, and I didn't care at all. I embraced it; I ingrained it into the image of who I was.

But that didn't stop the flood of memories of who I used to be.

The images of that happy boy, the happy boy that was content with himself and everything around him.

The boy that wasn't a monster.

The boy that hadn't killed people for money.

At night, I longed to be that boy again. The sparkle in his eyes had subsided to dark, calculating storminess. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. Later, it would become apparent that I had reached what I had dubbed "The Point of No Return".

The point where I realized that this was how I would be until the day I died.

I would always remain cold, careless, and uncompassionate. No matter how much I wanted to change, it was cemented into my mind that I never could.

I eventually drifted off to sleep, dreaming of the boy I could never go back to. I dreamt of his friends, his family, his experiences.

And then the scene shifted.

I was on a roof, sitting in the rain. I tried to move, to get out of the downpour, but I couldn't.

And then I noticed something abnormal about the rain.

It was a blood rain.

I couldn't move, couldn't do anything about it or change it. It wasn't something that I had control over. I sat there, letting myself become soaked in the rain. In the small sliver of my conscious mind, I interpreted it as a kind of metaphor for something I had done, something I would have to answer for.

I jolted awake, breathing heavily and tossing the sheets off of myself. I stood from the bed and strode to the window of my room. I looked out and almost smashed the window; the sunrise was blood red, the rain continuing to pour.

Maybe it wasn't a metaphor; maybe it was just the weather.

I wasn't even fooling myself.

It was a metaphor for what I'd done since I'd become a monster.

I dressed in my suit for the day and left my room, albeit it was only about five in the morning. My day had to start early because of my complete inability to let go. I had projected longing for the past as a weakness to all of the men in the building, so it would be hypocritical to express my feelings to anyone else.

I stood at the window, the rain only a light mist now. I felt like there was a knife impaled in my throat, hindering my breathing so much that I felt like I was drowning. I planted my hands on the window sill to try to regain my composure.

That moment marked a turning point in my career. That was the moment that everything I had done caught up to my mind, truly revealing the ugliness to my mind. I couldn't stand to look at it any longer, acknowledge it.

I continued to do what I had done for years. That moment fueled me to go after the bad things, all the things I knew I shouldn't be doing, even harder. The feeling seemed like pure adrenaline, a driving force that pumped through my veins and fueled my desire to do more, do worse.

I stormed up the stairs, too amped up to take the painstakingly slow elevator. My mind raced as I flung Percy's office doors open and found him sitting at his desk.

"What do you want from me?" he asked, his tone sharp.

"I don't want anything from you, except to know what your problem with Barnes is."

He visually reacted to the question, nearly flinching at my mention of the name.

"There is no problem."

"Your eyes say otherwise."

He averted his eyes from mine, and I immediately knew that he had something to hide. I didn't allow things to be kept from me that I wanted to know. He would answer my question, one way or another.

"As soon as you shook his hand, that room was hostile. Anyone in there could tell."

He stayed silent, avoiding my eyes as his gaze darted all around the room. I was becoming increasingly frustrated that he wasn't giving me the answers I wanted, and it wasn't going to be long before I let him know.

"We'll be fine. Professionally."

The answer was vague, but I was satisfied. The only aspect of their relationship that I cared about was the professional aspect. Whether or not they could work together and get along without making problems with each other or even other people, I still wasn't sure. I would just have to wait and find out.

Barnes came in later that day, in a suit and tie sharper than mine. I'd have to work to maintain my appearance around him because he knew how the business used to be and he would compare.

I showed him to his office, upstairs next to Jackson's, and his jaw ticked when I showed him that his office shared a wall with Jackson's.

"You two have an energy that I can't figure out. Who wronged whom?"

He sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets, averting his gaze just as Percy did every time.

But Barnes was different.

He wasn't evasive; he seemed to be thinking about the best words to use to get his point across. He thought and thought some more. Then, finally, he stared down at his shoes and brought his eyes to meet mine.

"It depends on whom you ask."

I smiled because even though I was a ruthless mob boss I enjoyed men with proper grammar. I may have been a psychopath, but I wasn't a Neanderthal.

"Cryptic, grammatically correct answer. I like that," I replied, and he just gave me a sarcastic glance. He just studied me carefully and then grinned, the grin slightly unnerving me.

"Grace, now that I'm meeting you face to face after studying you for years, I can only find one mistake that anyone made about you."

His tone was dark, full of knowledge, and a bit ominous. He was painting the picture that he knew something that I didn't; a common tactic, but one that I never fell for. I never judged how much or how little a man knew. After the first time, it came back to burn me, so I never made the same mistake again.

"What's that?" I asked, maintaining my nonjudgmental expression.

"There's a bit of blue in the gray of your eyes."

That was the first time that Barnes had unsettled me. Little did I know, it wouldn't be the last.

He sidestepped me and made his way down the hallway, turning into Jackson's office.

The unsettled feeling that I had for many hours after that shouldn't have overtaken me as easily as it did. I should have been used to being intimidated. I tried to tell myself that he was trying to get in my head because he wanted something from me, but I knew that wasn't true.

He didn't want anything from me, and he wasn't trying to intimidate me. I had become so foreign to being challenged, being watched so carefully by someone that I didn't remember what it felt like.

Later that day, I was sitting in my office with absolutely nothing to do. I had resorted to throwing a ball against the French doors and catching it when it bounced back.

That was the time of day when I normally slept, so when someone barged through my door it startled me. I had thrown the ball at the perfectly worst time and hit Jackson walking through my door. The rubber ball hit him squarely in the chest, bouncing off and rolling into a corner of the office.

"I would ask what you're doing, but there are more pressing matters at hand for the moment."

I began to laugh. It seemed like an insensitive laugh, but I was laughing because I had beamed Jackson with a rubber ball.

"What's the problem?"

Jackson rolls his eyes and folds his arms across his chest.

"What's the flaming basement office about? That's kind of creating a problem."

"No, that fixed yesterday's problem. It's all good. We just burned the entire office… Well, I burned the entire office."

Jackson shrugged and nodded as if this was to somehow be expected of me. Almost as if he assumed that I was okay with wasting all that paper.

"I'm a mob boss, not a tree hugger. Paper can't last forever anyway. That's why Crayola exists. They plant more trees after they make colored pencils."

Jackson just stared at me like the comparison was outlandish or something.

"Okay, well, since you're okay with an entire office burning in the corner of my project space, I'm going to head out and ask Buc- Barnes for those suit blueprints."

The slip.

I noticed the slip. He had almost called him something other than his last name, but it wasn't James. Or Buchanan.

It was a nickname. That made their relationship all the more complicated to me.

I dismissed him with a wave of my hand, going back to throwing the ball. I had thrown it so many times at the same spot that I began to worry about the ball wearing the door finish off. I couldn't have a tarnished office door, so I opted for throwing the ball against the wall.

And then my problems started. My phone rang, which was already a bad sign because it forced me to have a social interaction during what was supposed to be my nap time.

"Lombardi. You have thirty seconds, go."

"Um, there are two important-looking guys at the front door saying that they have a meeting with you in ten minutes."

"Impossible. I never schedule meetings at this time."

"Well, they're telling me that it's urgent."

I rolled my eyes, pinching my brows together.

"Can you get names? I can't think of one person that I need to urgently talk to."

There was a short pause on the other end of the line.

"One says that his name is Thor Odinson and that he's acquaintances with your father. The other says that his name is Stephen Strange and that he's come to bargain."

"Tell them that if either of their names starts with P and ends with oseidon then he should leave."

"I just told you their names."

And then it hit me. I remembered who one was. Even though it was my nap time, he was important enough.

"Send them up."

I hung up the phone and waited, almost starting to throw the ball again as I did so.

Eventually, the doors flung open and the two men strode into my office.

"I've come to bargain," the one on my left informed me, and the one on my right couldn't seem to find a way to position his arms.

"Yeah, yeah, I got that on the phone. Who's whom?"

"I'm doctor Stephen Strange. This is Thor Odinson."

"Okay, for my schedule. Stephen with a 'ph'? I pulled out a pen and looked at the calendar on my desk. I crossed out "nap" and waited for his answer to write their names instead.

"No," he replied.

"A 'v'?"

"It's Stephen with a PhD."

I furrowed my brow and gave him the most confused of confused looks.

"Stephden?"

"It's a degree. PhD."

"What does it stand for? Pathetic hoarded dormitory? Painful head death? Are you a brain surgeon, trained to cause head deaths?"

"No, I used to be a neurosurgeon, but… for the love of Dormammu, can we get past Doctor of Philosophy?"

"But the 'Ph' comes first! It should be called a Philosophy Doctor. And congratulations! So are you like, Socrates, or something?"

"Look, I'm not here to discuss my education. We want Barnes and Jackson back, and we have reinforcements to use if need be."

The one I assumed to be Thor had stood with his hands folded in front of him the entire time, not saying a word.

"Odinson. That's your name, right? Can I borrow that pen? Mine's out of ink."

He brought his pen above his waist to toss it to me, and it made an odd sound. It shouldn't have made a noise just from moving, but I ignored it.

I tried to catch it, but my hand ended up pinned to the table and unable to move.

"What is this? What's in this, and how in the world does it weigh so much?!"

He smiled, and then slammed his hands onto the desk.

"Listen, Midgardian, you will surrender the men to us or we'll make you pay the price."

I smiled, looking down at my fingers that were beginning to turn blue from the lack of blood flow.

"Listen, that would be great, but can you take your stupid pen back? It's up to them if they want to come back since they came willingly."

They had what I interpreted as a silent conference with each other, saying nothing but seemingly speaking with their eyes.

Which was slightly weird.

"Where are they?"

"The basement," I replied.

"The words of a kidnapper," Thor retorted, glaring at me as he picked up the pen. As he walked out, the pen turned into a hammer. Even worse, he left the doors wide open. One of my biggest pet peeves.

And that was only the beginning of that day's problems.

Half an hour later, Barnes, Jackson, Stephden, and Thor stormed back into my office and stood before my desk.

"Hi."

Stephden glared at me questioningly.

"They've told me that once you're a part of whatever operation this is, there's no getting out. But Jackson doesn't want out. Why?"

I was nervous because I had no idea who these people were or what they could do.

So I did the only logical thing to do.

I pushed the button under my desk that activated what I had dubbed the "Grace Clause", which opened the trapdoor under my chair and sent me down a chute out to the back door. I ended up on the blacktop, on my back, feeling as if every bone in my body was broken.

A man ran over to stand over me, staring at me.

"This is the guy he warned me about? They have got to do better," he muttered, and I stood to face him.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that you look like an idiot."

And then I realized that he was Captain America.

This consequently led me to a conclusion: I was screwed.

"But you're supposed to be all righteous and preachy. You just called me an idiot."

He shook his head, taking in our surroundings.

"No, I didn't. I said that you looked like an idiot."

He touched his earpiece, presumably listening to someone talking on the other end.

"Come on, guys! You had one job, and that was to prevent the entire place from getting leveled!"

The top floor somehow imploded on itself, collapsing and threatening to take the rest of the building with it.

"What in the world did they do up there?"

I knew exactly what had happened. As soon as I pushed the trapdoor button, an alarm sounded throughout the entire building and everyone was summoned to my office. Theoretically, the threat would be there since I had felt a need to escape the office.

He shrugged, looking up and surveying the damage just as I was. There were at least two people that I could see flying around above the building, shooting lights around and swooping down towards what was left of the building. Upon closer inspection, I decided that one of them was some guy that looked like a bird and the other was Tony Stark.

"Wouldn't it be awesome to be killed by Tony Stark? A good way to go," I commented, and Captain America looked at me like I had proposed something ridiculous.

"If you get killed by Tony Stark then that means that you're on the wrong side of a problem. The wrong side is the side that's not good to be on, in case you needed that clarification."

I think he was calling me stupid again, but I could be wrong.

My men were on the roof, more and more of them coming up to seemingly no end.

They were also dropping faster than they could increase in number. Between the flying people and the people fighting them on the roof, I was losing the battle.

And I wasn't even doing anything but staying sprawled on the pavement and shielding my eyes from the sun as I watched.

"Stark, can you give me a ride up there? I have Lombardi or Grace or whoever he is, and I think he's watched long enough."

"I have not! I'm plenty comfortable here on the ground," I replied, but he just dragged his hand across his throat and I got the message to shut up.

One of the flying people came down and grabbed Captain America by two straps on his back, and then Captain America grabbed me by my shirt collar. Before I knew it, we were in the air.

He dropped me on the roof, or what used to be the top floor. I was left to fend for myself, but I could do so quite well.

I just wasn't in the mood to summon lightning against enemies.

The building began to collapse further; it was nearly a pile of rubble.

After watching everyone else fight for a while, there was hardly anyone else for them to fight. They all simultaneously turned to me, but Jackson just shook his head and sat down on a piece of concrete. He was refusing to fight, which pushed my level of confusion about him to the brink of insanity.

"Stephden? You're with these guys?"

"Would you stop calling me that? My name is Stephen, but I have a degree that's called a PhD. Now. Give us back our Barnes."

I held my hands up in surrender, motioning for them to take Barnes back. He walked toward Captain America, standing beside him and glaring at me with the rest of them.

"Jackson? You know these people?"

He stayed silent for a moment, avoiding my eyes as he typically did. He looked over to Barnes, staring him in the eyes for a moment before speaking.

"I used to."