A/N: Just an appetiser for the whole chapter, which'll hopefully be finished sometime this century.
February 5, 1990
He had killed his best friend! And it was his fault!
Katz stared at his mangled best friend through distressed tears, loaded with remorse and anguish. "B― He – I – Bu―" he hiccupped in between shallow breaths. His gaze was fixated on the tufts of white stuffing that accusingly poked out from underneath the ripped brown fur.
"It's OK, Katz," his father tried to soothe him. Edwin's calm, level voice usually did the trick in a jiffy, but not this day, not this moment.
"No, it's not!" he cried. Katz Jarvis was a baddie. A villain! A monster! He didn't mean to, but he'd hurt the first friend he ever had.
Although his blue gaze was fixed on his best friend's torn shoulder, his watering, overlarge eyes were compelled to slide down towards the severed furry limb on the cold concrete floor. He was bad. He was evil. He was going to jail for this. He should be going to jail for this. Bucky was dying because he was too strong and too weak. His best friend was dying because he couldn't handle a little pain.
"It'll be OK, Katz."
Katz didn't dare move as his mother wrapped an oh-so-squishy, oh-so-breakable arm around his small shoulders. Ana laid an affectionate kiss he didn't deserve on the top of his head as he heard a stranger speak from the entrance of the medical laboratory. "Oh dear." The stranger's voice belonged to a lady, and it held a similar cadence to his father's. English, as he'd initially understood it. "English-English," as Tony had told him.
The lady strode through the room, her dark high-heeled shoes clacking, the clacks loudly echoing in her wake. She had a serious but kind face, lined like his parents' faces, like Mr Stark's, who'd followed her into the med bay. Katz liked Mr Stark, but he wasn't sure Mr Stark would like him after he discovered what had happened to Bucky.