Chapter Text
It was a fucking shitty version of Groundhog Day. As if that movie and any parody version of it weren’t bad enough, but no, the limbo you were stuck in was much worse. Time had stretched into infinity, and where were you? Trapped in your rickety car, driving on an endless, country road.
While you couldn’t remember how you had gotten there, the real shit of the whole thing was that the radio was never playing anything you wanted. You had tried flipping through the channels like people had in the days before Bluetooth, but the radio played the same song on every channel. When the song was over, a new song would take its place, but you seemed to be listening to a playlist that some god had made to spite you.
Whoever was running the radio stations in your hell clearly really liked 2010’s pop music.
You had tried pulling over and getting out. Your feet had hit the solid ground for three minutes before you were back in your car in the space of a blink. You never got cramped or hungry. Every time you took your foot off the gas, the car would still run, but when you tried to crawl into the backseat to catch some sleep, you were in the driver’s seat again.
Hell, you had even tried to crash the damn thing.
No dice.
You sat the seat back and let the car drive itself. The radio was playing some pop song that sounded vaguely familiar but other than that, nothing had changed. If you had to guess, you had been in hell for a week.
With your arm over your face to block out the light that didn’t come from the sun, you waited for the song to end.
The songs were a giveaway. That’s how you kept track of time. Since your… imprisonment? Yeah, sure. Since your imprisonment, the songs had never stopped playing, aside from when you first arrived. When you had first woken in your living nightmare, there hadn’t been any music. You had awoken in the car to the static of dead radio. After, and you couldn’t be entirely sure, but around a day, the radio began to play music. While you hated every second of it, the sounds were a break from the monotony.
While sitting back, you tried to remember what you had done before. You had a life before all this, you knew that. In the moments between songs or when you turned the volume down, you could catch snatches of your life.
Most of the memories weren’t good. They had a lot of blood and death in them, more than any normal person should experience. You had killed people. Occasionally you could see their faces, why were they always more clear than everyone else?
What else was locked away?
Well, you could remember the cold. The bitter howling of wind across the endless white of snow. But that wasn’t all there was when it came to the frigid winters. No, there was something else, just out of reach. If you concentrated hard enough, you could faintly see shadows against the white of snow. Someone stood above you, laughing as you lay on the ground, the wet seeping into your clothes. Not a mean or vindictive laugh; a kind one.
You knew you missed that person and had been for a long time. The ache wasn’t a fresh one, but the longing was still there.
Maybe it was best to forget that one. You could deal with the images of gore on your hands but the ache in your chest was almost too much. From that you could deduce that you were an incredibly well-adjusted person who was not in the least bit sarcastic.
You slid your arm off your face as the song switched. There was a brief pause between the song you had just been listening to and the incoming song, it reminded you of when you would put in a cassette tape and there was a long period of silence before your mixtape came on.
What an odd thing to remember, you thought to yourself. You were very familiar with Bluetooth but also with cassettes, and yet you weren’t too old, at least, you didn’t look old in the rearview mirror. You could also remember record players. Of course, you couldn’t remember if you had a family or something but you could remember cassette tapes and vinyl records. What were you, a fucking hipster?
You waited, praying that something good would come on but then you heard it. Inside the radio were quiet bits of conversation. Nothing that was part of a song- no, regular people talking.
You cranked up the volume as far as it would go.
“She’s not getting better!” One of the voices shouted. It was the voice of a woman. Something about it tickled the back of your mind; you knew that person. Who the hell was it? “You said she would get better, but she hasn’t. I thought the damn Hydra doctors had gotten the serum down to a science. Why would a supersoldier not be able to come back from a damn head injury?”
A man spoke, “They say that her head injury is severe, even for someone like her. Nobody’s seen anything like it. She should have died.”
“But the swelling has gone down, that is what you told me. You said she would be awake soon.”
“I’m not a doctor, Yelena. I barely know what the hell is going on half the time. O.X.E. 's doctors said that her brain bleed is under control. I don’t even think they know why she’s not waking up.”
“So what, we hope she gets better? That’s some bullshit, Barnes, and you know it. Why don’t we get help from that sorcerer guy, huh?” Replied the woman, presumably Yelena.
Barnes replied curtly, “I don’t know where he is. His people should be dealing with half the shit that goes down in New York but…”
“Here we are,” Yelena said, seemingly finishing his thoughts.
You couldn’t help but feel bad for the radio people. Not too badly though, after all, they weren’t the ones trapped in your stupid fucking car. Who the hell were they talking about, was it you? That seemed self-involved.
If you were listening to a radio drama, it was a shitty one. But hey, it was better than the music. You noticed that said music had not come back on. Just as you were about to recline your seat again, static crackled on the radio again. There was a faint whispering.
At first you thought you imagined it until it said something; your name. Not your code name or any of the half a million fake names you had sifted through, but your real name. At the foreign sound of the name, memories flooded back. It was as if a dam had been broken in your mind and while so much was still vacant, you had a name again and because of that, you had a self. If you had a self, maybe the rest would come along with it and you could figure out why you were there and how the hell to get out.
The voice continued on. It was much louder than the others had been and echoed through the car. God, the voice was so familiar, you knew them, you missed them, but their face and name swam just out of reach. “Things are kinda going to hell without you. We’re- uh- well, falling apart. I think we all really miss you. I-” the voice trailed off for a minute and was accompanied by a quiet, stifled sob. “Shit, sorry. I really miss you, so… if you could just give us a sign or something. Maybe that’s stupid. You’re not dead or anything but, if you’re listening, could you just come back to us? We need you.”
You could hear the sound of shuffling and the shrill screech of a chair moving across hard flooring. There was the faint sound of steps as the man began to walk away.
“Bye,” the man muttered before the music turned back on. It was a song you actually liked but something about it felt wrong, it felt like something had changed.
“How?” you said aloud. When you got no reply, you began to scream. “Tell me how and I’ll do it! Please, get me out of here! Can you hear me? Hello?”
Your breaths began to come in heavy gasps. Oh, fuck, were you dying? No, stupid panic attack, you’d be lying if you said it had been a long time since you had one. You tried to breathe but the pressure on your chest was too great.
Your eyes swam as you collapsed back into your seat.
“Don’t leave me here,” you croaked, your voice harsh and raw from screaming. “Please, don’t leave me here alone.”
For the first time since you woke in the damn car, you got one thing you wanted, your eyes closed, and you sank into unconsciousness. Maybe this time, you wouldn’t wake up.
You gasped back to the waking world, or well, it wasn’t actually the waking world. You were still in your dumb self-driving cars on the same road. It would almost be funny if you weren’t filled with a violent rage. For the first time in a long while, there was absolutely no music. Instead, the radio let out a rhythmic beep every once in a while.
After about ten seconds of the beeping, you knew it would piss you off much faster than bad music.
You slammed on the brakes. You needed some air, even though you logically knew that it was all bullshit and the version of you that stood in the road was not breathing air. You knew that somewhere, your body was unconscious in a hospital or something. But you were in some stupid Sherlock Holmesian Mind Palace but instead of a palace you got a stupid fucking road.
You slammed your fist into the side of the car, leaving a far bigger dent that you had expected. Hadn’t those people- Yelena and Barnes- said that you were a super soldier or something? If they were talking about you, assumably they were because you just smacked a crater in the door. Smiling, you punched the car again. It rocked with each swing.
Should you technically be hurting some sort of mental manifestation that you had made? No, probably not. A psychologist would probably say that the car was some sort of manifestation of a repressed part of yourself. The part of you that wanted to be loved, driving towards an unattainable goal of fulfillment. You hit the car again.
If a psychologist asked, you would say that you were merely trying to get out of your empty dreamscape and exploring many options.
Just when you were beginning to enjoy yourself, you blinked and arrived back inside the car. Shaking right your hand out, you placed your left on the wheel, “Fun while it lasted.”
Wrenching the wheel, you turned into the forest that lined the road and floored the gas. You hit a tree at ten miles an hour and then were back on the road.
“Bitch,” you mumbled before throwing the car into reverse and flooring it yet again. You blinked and looked down at the gear shift only to see that you were in drive again. You cut the wheel hard and drove in the other direction. The road looked the exact same as it had the thousand other times you had tried these tricks.
With your left hand, you reached to the side of your seat and pulled the lever. The seat reclined and the car kept driving. You threw your arm over your eyes and tried to stifle the sob rising in your throat.
“Have I tried jumping out while it’s still moving? Seems like a pretty solid option,” you said aloud. It was a pathetic attempt at a joke, one you couldn’t even bring yourself to laugh at. You knew that joking about suicide was terribly morbid and never helped when you were on the verge of a breakdown, but… what else was there to do? If you couldn’t die, at least you could joke about it.
“That’s a pretty bad way to go. I fell off my bike as a kid and it was not fun,” a voice said.
You sat up in a flash, your eyes snapping open. Had someone on the radio finally heard you? Were you finally waking up? You looked wildly around until your eyes landed on the passenger’s seat.
Someone else was in the car with you. You had hoped that it would happen for a long time, but you had expected the grim reaper or maybe the devil. Not a familiar, mostly mild-mannered man who sat in the seat right next to you. Oh, god, how had you forgotten him? As you stared at him, it all came flooding back in an instant; your life, the past year, The New Avengers (formerly Thunderbolts).
You slammed on the brakes, as you did, he threw out his hands to stop himself from being splattered on the dashboard, although he didn’t actually need to worry about that. Once the car was fully stopped, you stared at him for a moment. He was wearing the hospital gown that he had been wearing when you’d met him. Why the hell would he be wearing that? It had been over a year, what the hell was going on? “Bob?”
He shyly lifted his hand and waved, “Hey.”