A/N: LOL UM HI.

It's been, what, 5 months? I hope you all were able to tolerate this unannounced hiatus as I was blindsided by my first year of * le college *. In all honesty, I wouldn't have continued writing this if it hadn't been for your adorable reviews. Seriously, never underestimate how much your words motivate me. Love you guys to death. If you enjoy this latest installment, let me know! xox

[still crying over the civil war trailer tbh]

"If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

~Mark 3:25

The Soldier's eyes were rolled so far back into his skull, the irises were totally invisible. Snipped groans of agony ripped from his throat as he convulsed, his teeth clenched to breaking.

The moment the words left Tony's mouth, Avery's blood congealed. There was no doubt in her mind that what the billionaire said could be true. She went still, cradling the fallen Soldier's head as he jerked fitfully.

Everyone's eyes darted from Tony to the Soldier—everyone, except for Steve, who was rooted to his spot in the center of the action. His broad form shielded Avery and his fallen friend. He hadn't dropped the tray that deflected the arc blast, but held it at the ready.

"It was a long flight back," Tony said, "I had plenty of time to read up on HYDRA's files. Did a little bit of research on your friend here," he spit venomously, giving a backhanded gesture in Avery's direction. She winced, and so did Pepper. The vitriol in his tone sounded wrong coming from the comedian of the group.

"Turns out it wasn't a car accident that did them in, after all."

A beat passed. From her point on the floor, Avery saw Steve's jaw work. Pepper had stopped between Bruce and Tony, looking forlorn and unsure.

Steve tossed the tray aside, the thing making a sharply metallic noise in the strained air. Raising his hands in a placating gesture and stepping forward, he began, "Look, Tony—"

He didn't get to finish. The moment he spoke, a hurricane of emotions flickered across Tony's face. As he scrutinized Steve's entire demeanor, his eyes narrowed, then bulged.

"Wait," Tony hissed. "You knew?"

Sound was sucked from the room. All eyes fell on the Captain.

Steve's mouth formed a firm line, brow heavy. He said nothing.

Tony's face twisted, a picture of rage and betrayal. "You knew, and you still came running to me for help? To rescue the guy that killed my parents?"

Unmoved, Steve replied firmly, "It wasn't him, Tony. He didn't know what he was doing."

Tony's mouth hung open as he grasped for words. He twitched, then said, "Oh, yeah, well that just makes it entirely okay. The man who pulled the trigger of the gun that shot my father, fatally crashing the car with my mother in it, is now chilling on my living room floor. I am a hundred percent fucking okay with that, Steve."

No one seemed to be able to speak. Avery felt sick. By chance, she made eye contact with Sam, whose dark expression looked considerably less surprised than the others'.

He had known, too.

"You wouldn't have helped," Steve said. He was trying to hide it, but Avery heard the traces of guilt in his voice.

"You're goddamn right I wouldn't have helped!" Tony yelled. "Were you ever going to tell us? Or were you just going to sweep it under the rug—you know, ignore the fact that we all just risked our lives for a murderer? I almost died on this mission, Steve!"

Pepper neared her fiancé tentatively, putting a hand on his arm. Tony didn't seem to notice her. After a moment, she looked at Steve, too—but she didn't look betrayed, only sad.

Avery's glance darted downward again. To her alarm, the Soldier's lips had turned blue. His fists were balled impossibly tight.

"Steve—" her strangled voice punctured the conversation. Steve turned, his eyes falling on his seizing friend, his nostrils flaring. Avery brushed a trembling palm over his forehead.

"The EMT squadron has arrived, Sir," JARVIS's voice interrupted. "They're in the lobby."

Tony and Steve's eyes met again. Infinitesimally, Tony shook his head back and forth, the picture of nauseated disbelief. Like someone cut a wire, his shoulders sagged, and the anger sapped out of him.

He turned on his heel, moving quickly from the room.

"Send them up," he directed JARVIS, voice cracking.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Despite the lack of windows in the room, Avery intuitively knew that it was late. Very late.

For some time, her only companion had been the low, methodical beeping of the heart monitor at her side, giving some sense of time as she kept watch over the unconscious Soldier. If she was honest with herself, its mechanical chime was more than welcome; it served as a distraction from the diagnosis delivered to her and the Avengers a few days prior.

Immediately after the paramedics had stabilized and sedated the Soldier, Bruce contacted a doctor whom he had worked with at some point in his turbulent past. Upon arrival, the doctor immediately ordered a CT scan of the incapacitated patient, the remaining paramedics helping to transfer him to the scanner.

Steve, Bruce, and Sam, and Avery waited in a separate wing of the medical facility as the giant machine whirred and swiveled around the Soldier's limp body. The anxiety of everyone in the room, though varying in degree, was palpable. The sharp stench of Lysol stung Avery's nostrils, and the brightness of the white room made her want to lie down and never get up again.

Neither Pepper nor Tony had made an appearance for a good three hours.

When the doctor had finally entered the room, everyone straightened. His grave face made Avery pray that she wouldn't be sick all over the shining white floor.

Wordlessly, the man made a beeline for a whiteboard on the opposite wall, clipped a cranial X-ray to it, and flipped on the backlight.

"The head trauma…is extensive," the doctor huffed, his eyes glued on the image. He made a hurricane of gestures, rattling off a never-ending list of problems pictured therein. Though Bruce seemed to keep up, the others were less fluent in medical terminology. The doctor took in their faces, noted this, and began again, speaking in a more measured tone.

"Perhaps I can explain it this way," he said, holding out his empty palms. "In these situations—the kind dealing with memory erasure, that is—the brain acts like a rubber band. You pull and pull, and it keeps springing back into shape. The memories return, one way or another. If you pull it often enough, and hard enough, however…the band loses its strength. One day, you pull it too far, and it snaps."

The man's voice, the blinding room, the others in it—they all seemed to drift further and further away as Avery listened, the doctor's final pronunciation yanking her back down to earth and slapping her sharply across the face.

"Routine use of the memory apparatus on a subject confronted with repeated triggers has caused massive hemorrhaging. I am not familiar with circumstances quite like these, but the brain damage may be permanent. I'm afraid it's too soon to tell."

Beside her, Steve kneaded his forehead. Sam sat very still. Bruce, brow furrowed in deep, deep thought, pinched the bridge of his nose.

Avery felt like the floor had caved in beneath her feet. They had been too late after all.

She was barely present as Bruce asked a few somber questions. The doctor assured him that the only thing to be done was to wait.

So wait, they did.

No words had been needed between Avery and Steve after that. Over the next few days, they fell into a silent cycle of keeping watch over the Soldier, trading places at his bedside when the oppressive atmosphere of the medical wing became too much for one of them. An unspoken bond was fortified between the two—perhaps the only ones who knew just how much of a victim the Soldier had been in all of this.

Every now and then, the Soldier's eyes would move rapidly beneath his lids, providing just enough of a spark to keep the hope burning in Avery's heart, but never enough to give her cause for joy.

Now, as she watched him, memorized the curve of his jaw, studied the rich shade of his hair, she wondered what he would have been like in another life. One where the traces of kindness in his crystal eyes weren't obscured by walls of suffering, and one where he hadn't been consigned to a life as a perfect assassin, deprived of even his autonomy.

Bruce and Sam kept themselves occupied with heroic jobs around the city. From what she'd gathered, Tony was refusing to speak to anyone else in the building. The only sign that he was even still there was the sheer number of empty bottles and decanters piling up dangerously high outside his room. During that period, she'd seen Pepper only a handful of times. Between trying to steady her fiancé, keeping the company running, and trying to fix JARVIS's virus—which, at this point, was causing him to fritz every time he tried to speak or open a door—it was no wonder that Pepper's appearances were rare.

Everyone knew that the Soldier's arrival had shaken the group to its very core.

Avery swallowed, reaching to hold one of the Soldier's hands in hers. It was ice cold, even for him. Absentmindedly, she drew small circles on the back of his hand with her thumb. She knew it was foolish, but if there was any chance he was aware of his surroundings, she wanted him to know that she hadn't abandoned him.

She willed him to pick up everything she felt through the contact.

Observing no change in his dormant expression, she looked at the floor, taking one slow breath.

Footsteps.

She quickly detached herself from him, eyes finding Steve as she turned swiftly toward the door. He had come to relieve her. As she stole a glance at him, something about his body language declared he had caught the interaction. He didn't meet her eyes, looking pensively at the ground.

Without a word, she stood, passing him as she made her way to the elevator.

"You know," he shattered the unspoken vow of silence, even his gentle voice sounding like a gunshot in the deathly stillness, "I knew him all my life, and it took him almost beating me to death for him to even remotely recognize me."

Avery stopped, her back still to him, listening.

"All he had to do was look at you."

She turned partially back to him. He was watching her, gauging her reaction.

"Steve," she said wearily, "Bruce already explained this. They had seventy years to get rid of his memories of you. They had one, maybe two days to get rid of the ones of me. It was just a matter of timing."

"I don't buy it," he said cryptically. She looked at him sharply, trying to detect any sort of disapproval. In its place, she saw only earnestness.

She turned her head away, searching for something to say, or maybe waiting for him to elaborate.

They didn't speak for a long time.

"What are we going to do?" she questioned at last, unwilling to dwell on his words and their full implication. "I feel like he slips further away every day we wait. I can't stand this any more."

A beat. He sucked in a breath and blew it out with noticeable force.

"I've tried thinking of any other alternative, but it looks like it's gotta be this way," he said. He fixed her with a stare, the bright lights above them highlighting the grim shadows of his features. "There's only one thing I know of that's powerful enough to heal him."

Her pulse sped up. "Heal him?! You mean—"

He nodded. "Get his memories back. Mend the brain damage. Everything."

"Wh—"

"The Tesseract," he said with finality, determination in is blazing eyes. "The Tesseract can do it."