Work Text:
Those eight seconds happened. You know that for a fact. You’ve read the medical records and you’ve talked to Dr Streiten. Everything that happened during those eight seconds and afterwards is painstakingly accounted for, per SHIELD regulations. You have undeniable proof that you were dead for eight seconds, no more, no less.
It still feels like longer.
Tahiti happened. You know that for a fact. You can remember the sun and the sea and the pain, remember brown hands supporting your first unsteady attempts at walking, remember communicating in a garbled mix of English and French and the few reo tahiti phrases you managed to pick up. You remember the books you read, the hours you spent on the paradise-perfect beach. You remember everything that happened, everything you did, what everything looked like and sounded like.
It’s almost like you remember it too well.
Those eight seconds happened and Tahiti happened. It’s just the tiny details that don’t make sense. How your scars don’t quite correspond to the extensive damage done to your chest cavity. How your recovery has been too quick, too neat. (You pride yourself on your efficiency, but people don’t bounce back from injuries like that, they just don’t.)
You wish that there was someone you could talk to about these things, but the only two people in the world you could possibly trust with your current sense of unease are not even cleared to know that you’re alive. It’s not up to you to question SHIELD regulations, and you’re usually the first to uphold them, but it’s one more thing that just feels plain wrong.
It’s a miracle in itself that you’re even alive. You know that you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but you have a curious feeling that if you were to pry open the jaws of this particular circus pony, you won’t find bad teeth, but something else entirely. Sooner or later, whatever happened during those eight-seconds-that-felt-a-lot-longer will come back and haunt you.
In the end you come to the conclusion that if you keep thinking too much about it you’ll drive yourself crazy. The best thing to do to keep your mind off of everything that doesn’t seem quite right is go back to work.
So that’s what you do.