pennysheets | Rescue from Bakerstreet

He looks away again. And answers the second statement rather than the first. (He's got no right to be hurt. Steve can do what he wants. Sam's the better candidate, and he didn't want it, anyway.) What he says out loud is, "Tell that to pretty much everybody. You know they're making my pardon contingent on going to therapy? With this... nasty woman who wants me to make amends?" He's had two sessions so far. He hated both of them so much.

Also, though he doesn't know this, having a pardon rather than exoneration implies guilt to anyone who hears about it. Not that he doesn't live with guilt every day, anyway.

"That sounds like manipulation, not therapy," she says, tone gone sharp with indignation.

The entire thing smells a bit like a con to her, dangling freedom while keeping him on a leash, keeping the wounds of his past raw to undermine him - a super soldier in reserve, to replace the one they'd lost.

"You don't have anything to make amends for."

It's not something he really expected to hear, right now. It's not something anybody but Steve and a couple Wakandans ever had said. But Layla herself always seemed to be on his side. Even when her husband was involved, sometimes.

So he keeps back the weary feeling of tears in his eyes and gives her a little smile, slightly pained though it is. "Nice to hear somebody thinks so. Can I keep you for a while? Keep me from going nuts? Or is your man waiting around the corner for you?"

She shakes her head slightly. "Solo trip this time. Marc knows where I am, but he's off on some business. Won't even miss me for at least a week, so I'm yours while you need me."

She pauses a moment, then adds, "If this all gets to be too much, I still have sources for solid documents, and a couple safehouses in places without an extradition treaty with the US."

He swallows hard at that one. For a moment, it seems like the solution to everything: the government, the therapist, Steve, Sam, his shitty apartment, maybe even his nightmares. Somewhere new. A new name, a new life.

This is what Steve wanted, though. Home. Getting better. Hell, maybe Steve wanted him to pick up the fight again, be Sam's back-up.

The thought makes him feel vaguely ill. He turns away, conflicted, to start the press now that it's steeped. "I'll think about it. That's... a big step. You might be my favorite person, right now, for even offering, though."

"There's no rush," she says quietly. "I'm not trying to bully you into anything."

There's been quite enough of that already, she thinks, studying the set of his shoulders as he busies himself with the coffee.

"The offer's there if you ever need it."

He breathes through the conflict, intentionally sets it aside. He's good at that. He can think about what he wants to do. She's not going anyway. (Probably. Oh god, she had better not die on him, he really would have no one left.)

"Thank you," he says, putting that worry aside, too. That husband of hers is about as protective as he is, and Layla can look after herself, too. He shakes his head a little. "For that. For this. Jesus, I shoulda looked for you."

"You had other things on your mind," she says. "Besides, it doesn't hurt for me to be the one to come looking for you for a change."

It doesn't hurt, she thinks, for him to have that little bit of proof that he's wanted, still a valued part of her life. She would have welcomed him, if he'd tracked her down first, but that's not quite the same thing.

No, it really doesn't hurt. This is the most loved he's felt since that first exhausted night after the fight. He has no idea what to do with the feeling.

Rather than try, he just gets down mugs for them both, releasing the press to pour.

"So what all did we miss? I've been trying to catch up, but most of the news is about what's happening now, now what happened before the Avengers did their thing."

"The world went a bit mad for a while," Layla says. It's probably the understatement of the year. It's still the easiest way to sum up the upheaval that followed in the wake of the event, the way the world broke under the weight of so many dead.

"Not just grief - mass emergencies, power grid and telecomm failures, economic collapse. When the dust settled, a lot of places...contracted. Not all the way, there are still small towns, farming communities, all that, but the cities - you can probably see the echoes of it, if you wander around Manhattan, but there are parts of pretty much every urban area where everyone who could just...relocated. It was meant to be temporary, until the infrastructure could be stabilized with half the population, but you know how those 'temporary' measures go."

"They're probably still there right now, aren't they," he guesses, offering her one of the mugs. Dark blue, no design, plain and utilitarian, like most everything in this apartment. "And now that everybody's back and there's gonna be a rush to get everybody housed, I bet nobody's gonna be getting out of 'em any time soon."

Especially not the poor people. Or the people with traits that are less desirable by the people in power. He'd been owned by a Nazi organization for decades; he knows how deep that goes.

She takes the offered mug, and lifts it in a tiny salute, opting to give the coffee a minute or so to cool before she takes a sip rather than run the risk of scalding her tongue.

"They are," she agrees. "I haven't really had a chance to get the temperature here, but things are already turning ugly in Britain. And in half of Europe, from what I've heard for my contacts."

And he hasn't even looked. The guilt hits him again, the disgust that he's just... holed up in here feeling sorry for himself. But what exactly can he even do? He's a former terrorist on a short leash.

But he can agree, offering her a mug and looking hang-dog, "Knowing America, it's gonna be bad here, too. Might be Sam's gonna need that shield sooner than later. At least to make a speech or two behind, even if he can't bash heads with it to fix inequality."

"Too bad," she says, a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "Smacking people over the head until they stop being assholes would probably be cathartic."

"If hitting people made them stop being assholes, I'd have had a lot more luck in my little revenge tour, when we met," he says dryly, and settles back against the counter with his own mug, contemplating just how much to doctor it. "You want sugar or milk with that?"

Layla ducks her head slightly at that. "Probably," she says. And because it's James, because she knows that the violence he was forced into is still a raw wound, she doesn't follow up with a comment that dead is technically no longer an asshole.

She curls both hands around the mug of coffee. "Black's fine." Which is a departure from how she'd taken her coffee the last time they saw one another, but that was several years, dozens of jetlagged trips, and hundreds of late nights ago.

Hey, he stopped killing people... eventually... probably for the best to let it lie, though, since he is a lot touchier about it these days than he used to be. "That's new. Worried about falling asleep on me?" he asks, mostly a tease, but he goes to get milk for his.

"Your time zone is ridiculous," she informs him gravely. "And I might've picked up a couple of bad habits since the last time we got together. At least this one isn't antisocial."

"You? Bad habits? I don't believe it. You're perfect and everyone should be just like you." He's clearly joking, but it does make him smile a little better than his last couple. "C'mon, let's sit. I can turn off the news, maybe you can tell me how you and your guy did through the blip."

She'll take it. At the moment, even a slight sign that he's edging back onto slightly firmer ground is a win.

"I still can't believe that's what they're going with," she says, shaking her head in mock dismay. "But yeah, I'll give you all the good gossip."

Rescue from Bakerstreet - Layla and James

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