Chapter 2: Chief of Sufferers
"Hey Bruce." He froze halfway through putting his notebook in his backpack since the bell had just rung to signal the end of the class period. Classmates rarely addressed him directly like this, but Bruce didn't mind because he had little clue how to react when they did. Steeling himself, he turned to face the direction of the voice and saw Betty Ross standing in front of him with her textbook clutched to her chest.
Only then did he realize he should probably respond beyond staring to indicate he'd heard her, so he stuttered out, "Yes?"
"So, my study group's been working together to prepare for the midterm, but admittedly we're all kind of lost," she explained sheepishly, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You always seem to know exactly what's going on in class, so we were wondering if you could join us and help us figure out how to do everything we just learned, since it's going to be on the test."
Bruce stood there like a deer in headlights, synapses firing at a hundred miles an hour but generating no productive thoughts. Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron. Carbon. The periodic table elements drifted through his head reflexively, one of his grounding mechanisms for panic attacks. What could he say? If he said no, they'd all think he was a rude smartass who thought he was above taking time to help out his peers. But if he said yes, he would doom himself to further interaction with Betty and a bunch of other kids in his class, and there was no telling how deep a hole Bruce could dig if he introduced himself to a situation like that.
Betty looked at him expectantly, her expression starting to shift from neutral to concerned the longer he remained silent. Bruce forced himself to take a deep breath and opted to dodge answering the question. He readjusted his glasses on his face and instead asked a question of his own: "Why me?"
She blushed and tucked that same errant strand of hair back behind her ear. "Because you're easily the smartest kid in the class." The color in her cheeks darkened even more, and Bruce felt his own face fill with a similar embarrassed heat.
"Um…thank you." Bruce internally cursed himself for saying something so awkward. While her statement may have been true, that absolutely did not translate into an ability to teach other people. Hopefully, she would determine that from his complete inability to even hold this conversation and retract the offer. That would at least be better than Bruce having to reject it himself.
"Please, will you help? Midterms are totally stressing me out, and having an extra brain in the study group—especially one like yours—might help."
This was flattery. Bruce recognized it despite never having heard it directed at him before. It filled him with a combination of nerves and—was that a hint of pride? They wanted his help so badly they were willing to extort it out of him via a pretty girl. Either that or this was an elaborate setup to prank him or something. Having never received much of either kind of attention from his peers, Bruce could not figure out which one this was. And if there was one thing that magnified his anxiety, it was not being able to figure something out.
"I don't think I'd be much use," he admitted, finally spitting out something instead of gaping at her like she'd just asked him to run away to India with her.
"I disagree," she said sweetly. Now she twirled that loose strand of hair about her finger instead of trying to push it away.
"Then you don't know me." Bruce flushed an even deeper shade of pink and kept his eyes fixed on the floor off to Betty's left.
"You're right, I don't. But I'd like to." She tried to meet his eye, but underestimated just how determined he was not to reciprocate. He feared he would completely lose control of himself if he looked and saw just how harshly she must be judging him right now. What kind of seventeen-year-old boy couldn't even hold a conversation with a girl his age? Certainly not the kind Betty would want helping her and her friends study for their chemistry midterm. "What do you say?" she asked.
He sensed she might actually give up if he continued to resist answering the question. Would that be preferable to giving an answer he might regret? Probably not. "I—I can't," he stammered. Before she could interrogate him as to why, he fled without looking back, regret and shame filling him with every step. Dad's voice shouted in the back of his mind, telling him how pathetic he was for failing to hold a simple conversation. A toddler could have done better. The worst part: he was right.
For the first time since Dad left, the thought of giving up crossed Bruce's mind.
When he got home, he disappeared into his room and idly flipped through his worn copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, hoping to stumble upon a passage that might assuage some of the self-loathing and hopelessness pulsing inside of him like pus in an infected wound. Lying on his back with the book above his head, Bruce's sleeves slid up his arms just far enough for him to see the scars. He hadn't worn short sleeves since he got them, because the idea of someone seeing them and asking him about them scared him more than their existence in the first place. They existed because Bruce reached a nadir of misery and saw no way out, but he still existed because there was a way out, and he'd taken it. Was it really possible that he'd somehow looped back to that place from which he'd barely escaped?
It didn't make any sense. Dad was gone, so Bruce suffered no physical and emotional pain from which he wanted to get away. He was on medication which was designed specifically to keep these feelings at bay, and he was succeeding in his quest to maintain his grades during the hardest academic year of high school. There was no logical reason to give up now, yet he still thought about it.
Who would he hurt if he did it? His classmates wouldn't mind if their staunchest competition for class rank vanished. Bruce didn't exactly have any friends that would miss him. The only person he could think of was Mom, but even she might benefit from his permanent absence. No more refilling medications, no more coming home to find him in the throes of a panic attack because he'd emailed a teacher with a question about something inconsequential and realized too late there was a glaring typo in it, and no more worrying about how he'd ever find a place in a world so dependent on interpersonal communication.
He didn't do it. Not at that moment. But he did use his 'enviable' brain to consider how he would do it.
Cyanide. In biology class, they once read an article about the Chicago Tylenol Murders, when someone had snuck cyanide into bottles of Tylenol and seven people died. That was the reason all medications came sealed the way they did now. Cyanide rendered the electron transport chain within the mitochondria unable to function, meaning no matter how much oxygen a person inhaled, it couldn't be used to generate ATP, and all cellular processes requiring energy shut down.
Arsenic. It was the go-to in all the old murder mystery novels. Element number thirty three, atomic mass approximately seventy five atomic mass units.
Carbon monoxide. A simple molecule with a carbon atom triple-bonded to an oxygen atom. It would take a while, but he'd heard it was painless.
Every day he told himself it would get better, but of course simply telling himself that did nothing to actually improve the situation. Betty Ross gave him strange, almost pitying looks, whenever she saw him around school. He didn't know what to do. If he told Mom he felt like before, he'd only dredge up memories of Dad and make her worry even more than she did on a daily basis. He knew being a single mother was one of the most difficult positions in the world to hold, and it was his responsibility to shoulder his own burden. But it was so heavy.
There was no inciting incident. No one straw broke the proverbial camel's back. He aced his chemistry and physics midterms, even got a personal congratulations from his teacher when she handed it back to him. He should've been happy. Instead he felt nothing. Hollow. Aimless. Only after that did he recognize that he hadn't experienced anything that could be considered joy in months. Looking back, the past weeks had been filled with nothing more than stark apathy, with anxiety attacks being the only thing to ever dare to break the monotony. Bruce found himself sitting at his desk one day, studying for an upcoming physics test, and was struck with an overwhelming sense of why bother?
Neither cyanide, arsenic, nor carbon monoxide were immediately available, so he resorted to whatever he could find in their medicine cabinet, hoping it would be less messy than last time. He remembered the day Mom came to visit him smelling like ash, and, when Bruce asked, explaining that she'd burned the rug where she found him that day. Maybe she'd burn his body with the same confident purpose.
~0~
But there was no body to burn. Apparently suicide was another thing Bruce failed miserably at even with practice. That was his first coherent thought, and his second coherent thought was about how disturbing the first one was. Then, paradoxically, he found himself laughing. It didn't last long, morphing quickly into stunned, painful silence, but he laughed nonetheless. God, what was wrong with him?
Mom was there. That was the third thing he thought. And then the fourth thing: "I wish she didn't have to see this." He remembered how much she'd fretted the first time, believing it was all her fault for not protecting him from the wrath of her husband. Hopefully, she wouldn't blame herself at all this time. The blame for this rested entirely on Bruce's shoulders, as always. His fifth thought, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quote: "If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also." Many people believed that an attempt on any life, including one's own, constituted a mortal sin. But those who found themselves in a dark enough place to try couldn't care less. The possibility of Hell or oblivion frightened them less than the prospect of continuing another day in the real world.
"Why?" His mother must have noticed that he'd awakened, her whispered utterance piercing the silence of the hospital room. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Bruce didn't know how to answer that question. The truth of the matter was he hadn't told her because he didn't want her to worry about him, but it was far too late for that now. Maybe he'd thought that telling her would make it all the more real, that he'd lose the ability to pretend things would get better on their own. Either way, he'd lost that ability now. In reality, there was no rational explanation for why Bruce hadn't confessed. But then again, as he'd learned the first time around, nothing about this disease was rational.
"I'm sorry," he said instead. Because it was true, he was sorry for all the pain and strife he'd caused her since the day he was born. If it weren't for him, she would've led a much easier life.
"I could've helped you if you only told me it had gotten this bad," she said despondently. Bruce could tell she'd been crying, and that she was about to start again.
"I didn't want to be helped," he admitted, voice hoarse with the realization. "I just wanted it to be over."
"Oh Bruce, I'm so sorry. I should've noticed you were struggling. I feel like I've failed as a mother."
"No," he assured her. "You haven't failed. I just never gave you much opportunity to succeed."
He'd intended that remark to make her feel better, but it only made her start crying for real now. Bruce thought he probably would've cried too if he hadn't been this despairingly empty. What had she ever done to deserve this? An abusive husband and a son who couldn't even keep his own head above water. He wished his brain were wired correctly, if not for himself, then for her.
~0~
While he could never truly fix the inner workings of his brain, the team at this hospital certainly wanted to try to get him as close to functioning as they could. The head psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Wilson, with his kind smile and intent gaze, took on Bruce's case. Where Bruce completely lacked faith that things could improve, Dr. Wilson had it in spades. They adjusted his medication dosage, rendering him nauseous and exhausted, but he knew it was necessary to keep his mind in a good enough place for therapy to work.
In addition, per the advice of his doctors and therapists, he started keeping a routine. Bruce always functioned better with routine. Some of his worst anxiety attacks had been triggered by sudden changes in routine such as pop quizzes or last-minute dinner invitations from his dad's work buddies. He took his meds at the same time every day down to the minute and took a walk every morning along the same route throughout the hospital. At first, a nurse had to accompany him because he was still a suicide risk, but eventually they lifted that restriction and he wandered the hospital on his own. Stopping by the NICU was his favorite part of the journey. They had a window for new parents to look at their babies, and Bruce used it too, watching their little chests rise and fall and wishing he had as little on his mind as a newborn. Focusing on that wish helped him with meditation, a skill he was working on with another therapist here, and he tried to quiet his mind and narrow his thought process to just breathing instead of the thousand things he constantly worried about.
School helped with routine too. Their teacher the Ancient One was just the sort of scary competent that Bruce expected from a college professor, but he loved learning from her. There were other kids in his class: Carol, Quill, Thor, and sometimes Bucky. On his first day of class, they said hi to him and he managed to say hello back, but he made it rather obvious that he was painfully shy. They didn't force him to chat with them, which Bruce appreciated. He set a goal for himself of spending more time with them as soon as he felt comfortable. Before bed every night, he read one of the many books his mom had brought him. Reading, fiction and non-fiction alike, also provided an escape from the stress of everyday life.
In their sessions, Dr. Wilson started, as most people in his field had been trained to do, by building rapport. He asked Bruce about things like hobbies and favorite school subjects, expertly interweaving inquiries about his family life and social network—not that there was much to talk about when it came to that second one. Bruce knew Dr. Wilson must have access to his records from back in Ohio, so he didn't need Bruce to recount his life with his father for informative purposes. It was for Bruce to confront that era of his life and force those memories to relinquish control over his current mindset.
"He used to beat me when I was too anxious to do something he wanted me to do," Bruce sighed, remembering the terror that would overcome him when he knew his spiraling had pushed Dad over the edge. "And a part of me still feels like I deserved it."
"Why do you think that is?"
He shrugged. "They were silly things like making a phone call or going to one of his friends' houses for dinner. I made his life a lot more difficult by being unable to just go along with those things. My mom's too. She's been through so much because of me."
"Because of something that happens to you," Dr. Wilson corrected. He made it clear that Bruce and his anxiety and depression were not one complete, singular entity. Bruce tried to believe that, but it was hard to erase years of conditioning.
"I just want to be able to have a conversation with someone without feeling like I'm driving a car at eighty miles an hour with no brakes," he stated. "The only person I can talk to without completely overthinking it is my mom. And you I guess."
"What kinds of thoughts prevent you from having easy conversation with less familiar people?"
"I'm just constantly worried that I'll say something completely stupid, or offend someone, or start talking and be unable to stop until they look at me like I'm insane."
"Can you think of anything you might be able to think about instead?" he suggested. "What if, instead of thinking about how a conversation can go wrong, you actively try to consider how it can go right?"
"Sounds hard," Bruce said with a huff.
"I know. These things are difficult, especially at first. Like any skill, it takes practice."
"Okay."
He asked Bruce which sorts of conversations he found the most difficult, and for the next several sessions they started with a practice conversation during which Dr. Wilson pretended to be someone else and Bruce focused on positive outcomes. Sometimes he even said them out loud to reinforce the idea. Whether this would carry over into actual conversation with peers or other strangers, Bruce didn't know. He did, however, find out.
Bruce set out on his daily walk one morning in mid-March, expecting today to be just like any other day here. Occasionally, he'd run into another one of the kids on the ward and maybe they'd say a polite hello, but they never paid him much attention. When he encountered the young stranger in the hallway, he expected the same almost-dismissal from him. Afraid of coming across as sullen and rude, Bruce blurted out an awkward greeting to the unfamiliar face, and he responded kindly. Somehow, it morphed into an entire conversation, one which Bruce stumbled his way through with more grace than he ever thought possible. He was skeptical of Dr. Wilson's advice and practice helping at all, yet here he was talking to a kid his age like it was no big deal. Bruce could have squealed with joy.
Much to Bruce's surprise, the kid, Tony, asked if he could tag along. Nobody had ever offered to join Bruce on his daily walk before, and he found the idea that someone was not only willing but asking to spend more time in his presence rather heartwarming. Inexplicably, Bruce found talking to Tony just a bit easier than talking to anyone else except Dr. Wilson or his own mother. He was the first person here who treated Bruce like a potential friend, and for the first time in far too long, a flickering warmth erupted in his chest. Hope.
I hope this ending at least somewhat makes up for the first part of this prequel. I didn't realize until I started writing it just how heavy this story would be. Our next leg of this backstory journey will take us to Bucky. I actually wrote his right after Natasha's, but I wanted to save it for later because it's one of my favorites. His and Steve's are such a unit that I have to post them back-to-back. Hope to see you there!