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—Alexander Pierce’s living room, Washington, D.C., some point in 2002—
The tiny disc robot is the stupidest thing he has seen since they wiped him last. It bonks into walls with wild abandon, spins around partway, and heads off toward another wall, only to bonk into it. Or a table leg. Or an asset leg.
Bonk bonk bonk goes the tiny disc robot. Spin spin spin.
If he knew for sure what its purpose was, what it was trying accomplish with its headless, heedless wandering, he might feel—might dare to feel—sympathy for it.
Because it is clearly not achieving that goal. All it is doing is bonking into things, spinning, finding more things, bonking into them, spinning...
The tiny disk robot scoots over a bit of paper, one of the tiny curls left over when the Captain tears a sheet out of a spiral-bound notebook.
There is a new sound from the tiny disc robot, a satisfied little whir that the Arm responds to with an answering click. And when the tiny disc robot moves on, it takes the paper curl with it.
Oh.
The tiny disc robot’s mission is to collect these things, any little bits it finds, and to store them up inside. Leave no mess behind. It’s a noble mission.
Far nobler than any of his own. At least… it seems that way, sometimes.
The Captain is always very clear about the purpose behind his missions, the reason his mission objectives need to die, the many ways the world is being improved one corpse at a time.
He is shaping the world at the Captain’s direction, picking out the disordered bits so the rest of the world can continue its march toward order.
He makes messes where the tiny disc robot cleans them, but the underlying purpose is the same: remove the unsightly garbage to leave the world a cleaner place.
There is never an end to the missions he is tasked with. It’s… good to be useful, he supposes. Nice to be needed. And if he has a mission, then there is no march back to the vault, no trip down the hall, no struggle with the team there, no being forced inside the tube and shot through with ice and pain.
He… he hates his missions. But they are better than the alternative. And he has three more this week. He is safe from the cold and safe from the stun batons and maybe even safe from licking shoes until there are no missions left.
The tiny disc robot has eaten its mission objective, and is bonking ferociously into a coffee table he has never seen anyone put coffee on, though that doesn’t say much. He is only ever here for a short while. There are lots of chances for coffee to be put on the table when he is not there to observe.
Otherwise, it’s a garbage name for a table.
He looks around the room for the tiny disc robot’s next objective and can’t see anything at all for it to eat.
What happens to the tiny disc robot if it runs out of missions? Does it get stepped on, or kicked? Does it get swept into a box to wait out its uselessness in shame and misery?
What happens if it doesn’t achieve enough objectives? Are there beatings? Shocks? Just screaming and threats?
The tiny disc robot scoots under a chair, bonks into a leg, spins, bonks into another leg, spins, bonks back into the first leg, spins, bonks, spins, bonks, spins and spins and raises a plaintive beep.
He gets to his feet and picks the tiny disc robot up, pulling it out from under the chair despite its whirring wiggling distress and shifting underbelly.
It’s lost and hungry, and it could be punished severely if it doesn’t see enough success. He won’t let that happen.
The notebook is still on the table. It still has 74 pages of the original 80 proclaimed on the cover. The Captain might not miss a couple of pages, and if he does, he’ll punish the asset for it instead of the tiny disc robot.
And that’s acceptable.
He softly shushes the agitated little comrade tucked under the Arm and silently tears a sheet out of the notebook, ripping it up further into little bites he knows the tiny disc robot won’t choke on.
There.
Now he can set the tiny disc robot down to carry out its mission, and can provide objectives for it at every spin.
They will open the tiny disc robot up later and be so pleased at all it has accomplished.
The Arm ripples its satisfaction at a job well done.
—Avengers Compound, Upstate New York, November 2014—
-click-
-click-
Sam brushes a hand across his tablet to turn the page on the recipe e-book he’s literally thumbing through.
-click-
He keeps his head down as he skips to the end of the section — mashed potatoes of any kind are out, some kind of texture problem, so he’s moving on to soup — but lifts his gaze just over the top of his tablet.
-click-
Barnes is still sitting there with the construction paper and the hole punch, methodically punching holes in red, then black, then red, then black. Hasn’t touched the white or the blue, and Sam’s not going to think about that too hard. He’s just going to focus on the win — Barnes is sitting at a table. In a chair. Like he was asked to do. Success.
-click-
-click-
It’s not about destruction. He’s not punching holes in things to ruin them, and there’s as little anger in his demeanor as there ever is. If anything, it’s an effort to create a pattern, to cut things out in an order that will be pleasing. At least thats Sam’s current guess.
-click-
So far he’s got a grid that’s so uniform and even it might as well have been punched in by machine — another thing Sam’s not going to dwell on. Sam’s pretty sure you could use it like a ruler to measure something, the spacing is so exact. Despite being eyeballed.
-click-
Yeah, the only question Sam’s pondering when it comes to this particular activity — okay, the only questions, plural — are why is this the way he’s chosen to spend the past half hour, what is it about the hole punch he finds soothing, and maybe how can they replicate that calmness in a way that’s a little more engaged?
-click-
-click-
So, soup.
At first, Sam had thought maybe a borsht. Something with beets and cabbage and maybe some pickles. Whatever Russian soup is like. Because if they have to work back from the unstoppable terror that fought them on the helicarriers and that bridge, to the unstoppable terror that shot Natasha despite practically raising her, to the unstoppable terror that the KGB built, all to get to the unfortunately very stoppable Barnes who fell off that train, then maybe a little home cooking would help.
-click-
Goddamnit.
Sam is going to go crazy and throw this tablet at the wall if the hole punching doesn’t stop. And he’s a very patient guy, a very understanding guy, a guy who knows his way around trauma and trauma responses and who might be so far out of his depth that he’s not in the same galaxy as that depth, but who isn’t going to throw a tantrum about what turns out to be worse than incessant pen-clicking during an exam.
He’s saved from the clicking by the low hum of Stark’s VERUMBA — Very Efficient Room Uncluttering Machine, But Awesome — which is basically just a souped-up roomba with the quietest motor Sam’s ever heard on one of those. It’s also legitimately efficient, though it does still get stuck from time to time, and occasionally bumps into things despite its state-of-the-art sensors.
Barnes is off the chair in a flash, hole punch in one hand and nearly shredded webwork of construction paper in the other.
And just as Sam is about to try his hand at calming him down and reassuring him that it’s just a futuristic vacuum cleaner, there’s no need to be alarmed, Barnes crouches down in its path and sprinkles a few little confetti dots of construction paper on the polished floor, like feeding a tank of fish, just a few flakes at a time.
VERUMBA makes a beeline for the paper dots, because part of its efficient programming is longer-range sensors and an inclination to assume that a mess in one place means a need to focus more attention on that place in search of adjacent messes.
Sam hardly notices that he’s lowered his tablet to watch Barnes actually feeding the roomba like an old man sitting on a park bench with a bag of bread crumbs, only he’s an ancient, defrosted man slav-squatting on the smooth concrete floor of this compound with a palm of construction paper dots.
When VERUMBA has made off with the entire collection of paper dots, it circles Barnes instead of heading off on its original path. Like it knows that Barnes has more messes for it if it just gives him a moment to prepare them. It’s like a yappy little chihuahua dancing for a treat while Barnes delicately picks off bits of the construction paper webwork, little nibs of paper like the ones that litter a whole area when you try to rip out old pages of a notebook.
Clicking the hole punch was the Winter Soldier equivalent of chopping vegetables into matchsticks for a party platter.
What the actual —
How did that become a thing? Why? Where would something like that have even come from?
…And why does VERUMBA seem to know to expect this from him?
Sam hurriedly raises the tablet again when Barnes brushes his fingertips together and then spreads his hands open —an apparently universal signal for ‘ all gone, see? no more’ — so the man doesn’t notice he’s been staring.
Except, oh, who is he kidding? Barnes knew the whole time, he’s sure. But Barnes at least doesn’t seem to care — ever — that he’s being observed. Seems to expect it more than anything else.
Barnes just pats the top of VERUMBA’s outer shell a few times, so gently the metal of his hand barely clicks against the roomba’s metal top.
And the vacuum seems to know that this is the end of what is clearly a ritual, because it makes another circle around Barnes’s feet and then trundles off to parts unknown with its insides full of HYDRA-themed confetti.
Sam makes a mental note to consult JARVIS, the keeper of all strange factoids concerning Barnes’s often inexplicable and occasionally whimsical activities.
It’s possible the AI will know exactly what just happened because Barnes apparently confides all manner of things to JARVIS so late at night that it’s early in the morning. Of course, it’s just as possible that the AI’s response will be that he “really could not say, sir,” because things that are confided are by their very nature confidential.
In the meantime… maybe chicken noodle? Maybe start off with just broth and some mushy carrots? Maybe little pasta stars. Barnes likes things that are tiny and cute. Star-shaped pasta is tiny and cute. Maybe there’s a can of cheap Campbell’s in the pantry somewhere.
Sam’s going to win lunch, one of these days.