Chapter 2
The morning after his release, Jack wakes up feeling like his whole body is covered in sand. It’s statistically likely he has been covered head to toe with sand before, but something still makes his skin crawl badly enough that he’s back in the shower for round two of scrubbing himself until his body is red and raw.
Standing in the bathroom with a towel around his waist and steam in the air, it takes Jack several heartbeats to work up the courage to look at himself in the mirror.
Hollow eyes surrounded by dark circles stare back at him out of a thin, scruffy face. A month’s worth of beard covers his cheeks and jaw, scruffy and ungroomed. The last remnants of bruising on his chest and ribs have faded into a barely-visible, mottled tan that’s difficult to see under the white markings covering his entire upper body.
Twisting around to look at his back, Jack swallows thickly when he sees a dizzying array of sigils, runes, and symbols covering the skin there, too. One particularly bold design traces up the length of his spine from his tailbone to the base of his neck, and the other markings are arranged in segments that resemble panels of armor too much for Jack’s liking.
He quickly pulls on a long sleeve shirt and some pants so that he doesn’t have to look at a body that doesn’t feel like his.
There’s a safety razor in the toiletries supplied by the motel, along with a small travel-size can of shaving cream. It takes longer than he wants to admit to shave without cutting himself or looking too closely at his own face, and his hands aren’t as steady as they really should be. When he’s done, he runs a hand over his face, cleans up a few spots, then wads up the towel he put over the sink to minimize the mess.
It’s both an immense relief and eerie beyond words that he still remembers how to do basic things like this, when he can’t remember the name of the high school he went to.
And when he finally drags his eyes back up to the mirror, it’s both surprising and not when he finds a long, jagged scar on his chin and jaw, snaking down from his lip. His fingertips and eyes trace it for a few seconds; the world twists uncertainly around him as muscle memory argues with amnesia. Jack has to put his hands flat on the bathroom counter for a few minutes as he breathes.
By the time another agent in hiking boots, Levis, a button-down shirt and a leather jacket knocks on his door to take him to his new apartment, Jack’s fairly sure he’s doing a better job of not looking homeless.
His head aches from the harsh sunlight by the time he gets to the new apartment complex, and the first thing he does is pull the blinds down and block off most of the natural light. It’s a stroke of luck someone was thoughtful enough to install dimmer switches for the overhead lights, and Jack makes good use of those while he looks around his new home.
It’s a studio apartment, one large room with a half-height wall dividing a sleeping space from a living space. A cheap folding screen with machine-painted Japanese-adjacent artwork rests on top of the wall for some semblance of privacy. The bed tucked into the alcove behind the wall is utilitarian, sturdy, and holds a thin but firm mattress; cotton bedsheets sit in their package on the corner.
The washer and dryer live in a closet off the open kitchen, and he’s not entirely sure why he’s so excited to see an electric kettle on the kitchen counter next to the stove. But as he walks toward it, something stops him dead in his tracks.
He blinks once, twice, then as if moving on automatic, starts methodically searching the entire apartment floor to ceiling for- something. It doesn’t take long, and he finds himself back in the kitchen staring at a small pile of tiny electronics in the palm of his hand.
Microphones. SHIELD bugged his apartment.
Swallowing, Jack looks around as if the kitchen appliances will give him any clues as to what to do with the devices. It’s not entirely surprising, given what he’s read about who he used to be, but… He sighs and shuffles into the bathroom, dumps them all in the toilet, and flushes.
Even if someone comes back to install new ones, at least he’s made his point. He tries not to think too hard about how he knows where to look for bugs.
Another manila envelope is waiting for him on the coffee table in front of the shit-brown couch. Sitting with a quiet groan, Jack scoops it up and tiredly leafs through the pamphlets telling him about VA meetings, job boards, local thrift stores, all the well-intentioned aid for a man starting over.
He puts all of that with the documents labeling him as Sean McKinley and sets it back on the coffee table to deal with later.
There’s enough cash in the wallet they gave him to dispose of a body buy groceries for a few months, provided Jack can get himself some sort of income soon. But with his headaches, his amnesia, the fact that he just fucking looks dangerous, he’s not sure who in their right mind would hire him.
He’s a mess. He’s a mess and he can’t remember the name of his own mother.
All he has are fragments.
The first week on his own sees him relearn how to keep himself socially presentable, at least on the surface. The police are less likely to look at him if he doesn’t look homeless, after all.
The second week sees him keeping a chair warm in the back of a group session at the VA. The man running the meeting stares at Jack wide-eyed for several seconds before swallowing and turning to talk to someone else, and he doesn’t give Jack much more than the occasional cursory glance once the meeting’s under way.
Jack disappears before the group leader can approach him after the meeting. He doesn’t have any answers for the questions he knows he’ll be asked.
Week five sees him finally work up the nerve to introduce himself at one of the VA group sessions.
His cover name, Sean, is easier to say even if it still feels wrong. He's been taking odd jobs here and there, mostly helping people move from house to house. Craigslist is an invaluable resource, and it gets him out of the house and interacting with people. The other vets nod approvingly. But when he quietly tells the veterans that he doesn't remember who he is, his voice cracks and his eyes prickle.
He spends the rest of the meeting silent, arms wrapped around his stomach, staring at the scuffed linoleum. Sam- the leader's name is Sam, apparently- pulls him aside afterwards and hands him a business card.
"I don't wanna freak you out, but... you an' me, we got some history," Sam says, very quietly. "I wanna help you, though. You need anyone to talk to, you call this number, okay?"
There's a cell number - Harlem area code - handwritten on the business card in blocky shapes. Jack nods and thanks him, then just... leaves.
He doesn't come back for a few weeks.
When he does, though, he tries to give Sam a smile. It seems to work.
After that meeting, Sam just hands him a flyer for a job nearby and smiles at him, then walks away. He seems to have picked up that Jack doesn't like talking much.
Jack digs through the clothes he was given until he comes up with an outfit that looks at least somewhat civilian-professional, then takes a picture of himself in his bathroom mirror and sends it to Sam for a sanity check.
Lookin sharp man comes back minutes later, and Jack breathes a sigh of relief.
The bus ride is thankfully uneventful, and the job flyer even includes a helpful map. He takes a moment to breathe before he walks in, looking up at the huge university library with no small amount of anxiety.
Just inside the doors and off to the left is a little cafe with a short line of harried college students. One of the smoothie machines whirs to live and Jack reflexively winces, tilting his head away from the noise. Thankfully, the info desk is immediately in front of him; he walks up, smiles at the boy sitting at it, and holds out the flyer.
“One of the guys from the VA told me you’re hiring,” Jack says, and thanks whatever god is willing to look out for him that his voice comes out strong.
Turns out, his interview is more of a hands-on sort of experience. It’s less than ten minutes in, and Jack finds himself standing at the base of what looks like a filing cabinet and a Transformer bumped uglies a few times. He looks back down at the bright yellow robotic… thing that’s sitting despondently at the bottom of its vertical track, one of its arms more extended than the other, a hydraulic piston clearly bent. One of the servomotors quietly twitches away, and the little buzzes sound almost mournful in the cool, controlled quietness of the storage bay.
“Well,” the library’s executive director says, a little too cheerfully, and smiles up at Jack. “Think you can fix it?”
He swallows, gives the robot a dubious look, then shrugs. “I can try.”
“Great! You’re hired.”
Jack blinks at her a few times, but she’s already leafing through a folder and pulling out sheets of paper for him to sign. He takes the pen and clipboard from her, nods when she says to bring the paperwork upstairs to her when he’s done looking around, and sits down next to the robot to figure out what he’s just got himself into.
No one at the library or the university it’s attached to cares that he’s quiet. No one cares that he can’t remember anything concrete earlier than late January. No one cares that he’s got a massive scar on his face and is jumpier than some of the standard-issue vets he keeps company twice a week. As long as the automated book retrieval system keeps working, his boss is happy and he gets his paychecks.
Since Jack's taken to running to keep himself fit, he's lost some of the whipcord tone in his muscles from when he was first captured. Or rescued. He's really not sure which, at this point. He has more nightmares about what he knows now is his former team than he does about the people who rehabilitated him.
He's also admitted defeat and started wearing glasses, which helps with several things including his headaches; there's no fucking way anyone in their right mind would have let such a nearsighted person be a sniper. Or a soldier of any variety. Maybe he wore contacts before? He can't even bring himself to think about it now. Just the mention of anything touching his eyes and he's running for the bathroom with a hand over his mouth.
So, his face is softer and less angular than the mug shot haunting him from the file in the safe in his closet, the glasses bring out the green in his eyes, and he's leaving his hair curly and loose rather than scrape it back with gel like he apparently used to. A sweatshirt emblazoned with the university's letters and jeans go a long way to mask what's left of his soldier's body; rather than a hulking wall of muscle, now he's just a tall guy.
It catches him by surprise the first time one of the students flirts with him while he’s filling in at the reference desk during lunch, less than a week after he’s started his new job.
He’s squinting in confusion at the ten numbers written on the slip of paper the girl left behind, trying to parse them into one of the catalog systems the library uses, when Ashely returns from her lunch break.
“Oh, someone gave you digits?”
Jack makes a confused noise.
“That’s a phone number, honey.” Ashley’s smile is both fond and amused. “You don’t have to text them, though. Not if you don’t want to.”
Laughing awkwardly, Jack leaves the phone number behind as he makes his way back to his little office next to the ARS access door. He’s turning the knob on the door when-
-leaning in the doorway, the corner of his mouth pulled up in a smile as he looks at the wiry man sprawled out facedown across the bed, fast asleep without a scrap of clothing on him, plain gold ring on his left hand glinting in the morning sunlight. A messy mop of black hair threatens to get stuck in cowlicks if he doesn’t wake up soon-
-his hand slips off the knob and he whacks his knuckles hard on the steel door frame. Swearing under his breath, Jack shakes out his smarting hand and opens the door with his other. He gets inside his office, closes the door, then puts his back against and slides down to sit on the cold concrete.
Pushing his glasses up, Jack rubs at his eyes, then looks at his own left hand. The skin is smooth, unmarked; there’s no indication he ever used to wear anything there. He rubs the fingers of his right hand over where a wedding ring might sit, suddenly feeling very conflicted. His SHIELD file hadn’t said anything about a spouse, of any gender.
What else has he lost?
He spends a few minutes with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the door, just breathing the way the prison psychologist taught him how. It takes him a few more minutes of that as he realizes that it’s entirely possible he was someone’s husband’s plaything.
He’s not sure which would be worse: forgetting his own husband, or forgetting that he was a homewrecker.
Hands shaking slightly, Jack pulls out his phone and taps out a message to Sam.
Can you ask Rogers if he remembers me ever wearing a wedding ring?
The typing dots appear and disappear several times below his message, until, finally: Shit, man.
Jack swallows and replies, I know.
He stares up at the ceiling while he waits, and looks back down at his phone when it buzzes in his hand.
He says yes. One of those silicone ones, black with a blue line on it. And then he gets a picture of a quick sketch, courtesy of Captain Rogers and an unfortunate cafe napkin of Jack From Before sighting with a rifle, his finger on the trigger, and a ring on his hand.
Apparently he shot lefty.
Relief floods through Jack so quickly that it leaves him dizzy, and then his lungs catch on his next breath. Sam seems to know what’s happening, because his phone rings a moment later.
“You okay, man?” Sam asks him, and Jack chokes out something that’s trying to be a laugh.
“No.” He swallows and drags his glasses off, then wipes his face with his free hand. “But at least I know I wasn’t someone’s side bitch now.”
“That’s… somethin’, yeah.”
Jack sniffs wetly and takes a slow, deep breath.
“You gonna be okay to finish out your work day?”
“I literally lurk in the concrete basement,” Jack says, and this time he actually manages to laugh even though his nose is getting stuffed up already. “One of the kids upstairs is running book pickup today. I’ll be fine.”
Once he’s off the phone, he just sits there for a few minutes until he’s breathing normally again. His knuckles are still aching a bit from where he accidentally punched the door, so Jack lurches up off the floor and grabs the bottle of Advil.
A cup of tea does a lot to steady his nerves after that, and Jack spends most of the afternoon completing the latest online training for the ARS from the manufacturer.
He doesn’t notice he’s been doodling idly in his notebook until after he’s passed the online test and made sure the certification shows up on his user profile. Objectively speaking, Jack knows he can draw. Every other page in all of his notebooks have a half-finished sketch of whatever caught his interest at the time. This is the first time he’s drawn something from memory, though.
He rubs a hand over the back of his neck as he looks at the four small portraits in the corner of the page. They’re all of the same angular face, lean and without any extra padding, a lopsided smile on one of them. Another sketch has the man wearing some sort of Bluetooth earpiece. He didn’t shade in the man’s hair, but… Jack’s pretty sure it’s supposed to be black.
Sighing, he taps his fingers under the sketches and chews his lip. Chances are, whoever this was, there’s a reason he hasn’t reached out or come looking for Jack.
Jack swallows thickly and turns to the next page in his notebook. He hopes the poor guy isn’t having too much trouble moving on.
Doctor Carrick hands Jack a cup of hot water and a small basket of sealed tea bags. “How’s the job going?”
“Great, actually,” he answers as he pulls out a bag, rips it open, and drops the paper sachet into his mug. “There’s a learning curve, but I don’t seem to be having any trouble remembering which sections of the library are for what.”
Nodding, Carrick sits down with his own cup of tea. “And how’s the head? I imagine the stable schedule is helping.”
“It is, yeah.”
“Making any friends?”
Jack nods and smirks slightly. “The robots are quite companionable. Oh, and the people are nice, too.”
Carrick chuckles and shakes his head. “And how’s the memory? Anything coming back yet?”
Smile fading, Jack looks down at his tea as it steeps and takes a breath. “No,” he lies. “Nightmares, sometimes. Dreams. But I don’t remember them when I wake up.”
The winter term ends a week or so after that, giving the ARS some much-needed downtime for Jack to go through all the book carts and file down the rough edges. He doesn’t want another one of the kids slicing their hand open on a burr or sharp corner. Thankfully, the library director hadn’t protested at all when Jack handed her a reimbursement request for a more comprehensive first aid kit after that.
Judging from the reactions of the other library employees, though, his idea of ‘comprehensive first aid kit’ is a little skewed. Maybe he should get in touch with the student EMS team on campus and schedule some sort of first aid workshop. The kids probably won’t need to know how a decompression needle works, but… better to know how and never need it, right?
As the weather warms up, Jack settles into a comfortable routine. It’s relaxing to work on the robots, and he can keep the lights adjusted to a level that doesn’t make his eyes ache. The reference librarian does tease him occasionally, calling him Hades just to see him smirk and roll his eyes.
His coworkers find it hilarious when he names the three different robots in the ARS Spot, Fido, and Barker. It gets even funnier when Barker starts actually barking whenever its guide belt gets loose. The ARS is informally renamed Cerberus, and someone even tapes up a sign on the door leading to Jack’s little domain that says THE RIVER STYX on it.
Since he’s not paying rent on his SHIELD-sponsored apartment, he orders himself some nicer work boots and better tools online. The faded calluses on his hands shift from firearms and knives to wrenches and screwdrivers.
After the fourth time his eyes glaze over as one of the ARS manufacturer’s technicians remote-sessions into Jack’s computer to debug a glitch, Jack enrolls in an introductory programming class on campus during the upcoming summer term. If nothing else, he at least wants to understand what he’s looking at.
The first day of class, he’s a little nervous; while he has his boss’s blessing to be here, he still feels out of place. He’s pretty sure the only person older than him in the classroom is the professor, and even that’s not by much. The fact that he’s literally twice the age of his classmates is made all the more apparent when he’s the only one that sits down with a notebook rather than a tablet or laptop.
He tries taking notes on his laptop the second day, but he spends the rest of the day with a splitting headache. The notebook comes back with him to the third session.
“Huh,” the girl to his left says at the end of class when they’re packing up their things. “I didn’t know people still wrote in cursive. Why not just type it?”
Jack huffs a laugh and smiles slightly. “Screens give me migraines more often than they don’t.”
Her face flits through a complicated mixture of embarrassment, sympathy, and curiosity. She blinks at him a few times, then shifts her purse around so she can stick her hand out. “I’m Cassie. Wanna be study buddies?”
“Sean,” Jack says as he shakes her hand. “And sure, thanks. I think I could probably use the help.”
Jack manages to pass the class with an A-. Sam brings donuts to Group that week in celebration.
The start of the new school year brings Cassie’s boyfriend Kevin and his roommate Ryan back to campus for their sophomore year.
Kevin eyes up Jack for a few seconds, and Jack doesn’t have to have a memory to know what that look means.
“Relax, bud,” he says, when Cassie gets up to get their lunch orders. “I’m twice your age and not even remotely interested in women.”
It takes Kevin a few more seconds to parse that, then he’s laughing. “Okay, I’m man enough to admit when I misread something. My bad.”
Ryan glances up from his calculus homework long enough to look between them, confused, then just shakes his head and goes back to studying.
By the end of the second week of the term, Jack’s officially been adopted by the trio of dorky misfits.