Sorting Through Trauma
“So how’s Peter holding up? Any news on the boyfriend situation?”
Sage laughed. “I think he’s doing pretty well. They’re going on their first date today, so we’ll see how he’s doing after the fact. Sometimes friend dating can be weird at first.”
“That’s fair. I talked to my dad, by the way. He said it’ll be fine for me to come over, and I can even spend the night! We’ll just take Eddie to the zoo on Saturday.”
“Awesome! You’re in charge of helping me plan things, then. I don’t know what we should watch or what we should do for food. I was thinking maybe Chinese?”
Addy shook her head. “Thai. It’s less common. I feel like we should do a musical night.”
“Ooooh. I like the way you think. Which ones? The Mamma Mias? Some Disney mvoies? Les Mis?”
“Definitely not Les Mis. That movie takes a million years to watch and twenty years off my lifespan.”
“Yeah, that’s fair.”
“Definitely Mamma Mias though. I’m ultra gay for Lily James.”
“Oh, same. Okay, good. Disney?”
“Yeah, maybe. Like, Princess and the Frog and Pocahontas?”
“Yes, perfect. Princess and the Frog is Clint’s favourite.”
“Because of the-”
“Yeah, the firefly guy.” Sage grinned. “He may be a dork and a weirdo, and he may be a man of simple tastes, but at least he’s predictable and funny.”
Addy laughed. ”Sure. Did you do the Spanish?”
“No. I mean, honestly, what’s the point of doing the homework if it isn’t going to be graded?”
“Okay... did you at least do the math homework though?”
Sage shrugged. “Ehhhh. I’ll do it in class.”
Addy rolled her eyes. “Sage, you have to do your homework!”
She waved her off. “I’m dealing with emotional trauma, leave me alone.”
“Okay, while that is valid and probably true? That’s not something your teachers are gonna acccept.” She noticed Sage avoiding eye contact and put a hand on her arm, stopping them both. “Hey. Is there something else going on? What’s wrong?”
Sage shook her head. “I just went to bed late last night. It’s not a big deal. Just tired.”
“Have you been sleeping okay?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, it’s fine. Just not sleeping a lot. It’s fine.”
“So if you aren’t sleeping, and you’re not doing your homewokr, what exactly are you doing during the nights?”
“Sleeping around.” Sage smirked at her.
“That’s not funny, and you know it.” Addy gave her an unimpressed look and bit her lip. “Is this something we need to talk about?”
Sage’s face fell and she sighed, rubbing a hand down her face. “Listen, I love you. I just can’t do this right now. I need to have enough energy to deal with math class. Can we just… have this discussion another time, please?”
Addy gave her a careful once-over. “Okay. You will talk to me about it though, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I will. Just… Not right now.”
“Okay, that’s fine. I love you.”
Sage smiled tiredly. “I love you too.”
---
“You’d best be calling me to tell me that your date went well.”
Peter laughed over the line. “Wow, okay, I love you too.”
“I just want to know if your boyfriend is coming to my patty. I know that you’re coming, so that’s way less important.”
“Wow, I feel so appreciated. Just for that I’m not coming.”
“Yeah, okay.” Sage rolled her eyes.”Now tell me about your date. I need the details.”
“I mean… It was a date. There isn’t much to tell. We’re boyfriends as far as anyone else is concerned, so. That’s pretty neat.”
‘Peter… Don’t make neature walk references. Please, for my sake.”
“Yeah, okay. How are you and Addy doing? It can’t be easy, after everything that happened.”
“I mean… We’re doing. She wants to help me work thorugh my trauma and shit and I want to ignore it, so.”
“Well that’s… healthy.”
Sage rolled her eys at the note of sarcasm in his voice. “I know, I know, I know. It’s just… She doesn’t need that, you know? And I’m not trying to pull that ‘Oh, it’s my shit, I need to deal with it’ or ‘I don’t want to be a burden’ or whatever else. I know that she genuinely wants to help. I’m just saying that I did go through actual legitimate trauma and I don’t want to just dump that on her with no thought given to the repurcussions. I don’t want to give my girlfriend… second-hand PTSD.”
“Trauma by assocation.”
“Oooh. I like yours better. Let’s go with that. And anyway, you want to know a secret?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t… actually remember anything.”
“Really?”
“Dead serious. According to Papa I was knocked out the whole time. I remember getting snatched from the street, I remember waking up blindfolded and then getting knocked out, and I remember waking up just before we were rescued. That’s it. Yeah, still traumatic, but like… I don’t remember the worst of it, so I’m… not fine, but like… okay.”
“Are you having nightmares?”
“...Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“Are you kidding. I was… kind of directly related to the reason my Uncle Ben died. I literally watched him get shot and held him in as he bled out. I had nightmares for months.”
“Holy shit.”
“But I went to therapy, and now I… I’ve moved on. No more nightmares. Well. Way less frequent nightmares.”
“So what you’re telling me is that I should go to therapy.”
“Sage, I think every single person who has ever lived in New York City should go to therapy. It’s a traumatic place to live.”
She laughed.
“I’m not saying ‘no you have to go right now immediately or else.’ I’m saying I think it would be helpful and I know for a fact that there is an entire floor in the tower full of therapists that I’m pretty sure everyone on the team utilizes.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I can take you and we can go visit together sometime if you want.”
“I might have to take you up on that, Parker.”
“I hope you do, Ahlers. Hey, also? Maybe you should actually talk to your girlfriend.”
“Rude. I talk to her.”
“Yeah, sure. Takk to her about this, though.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I hear ya.”
---
“So.”
Sage looked up from her book and arched an eyebrow at Tony. “So?”
“What’s up with movie night?”
“What do you mean ’what’s up with movie night?’ We do movie nights all the time.”
“What’s the plan? What’s the reason behind it? What’s shakin’?”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “It’s really not a huge deal. I just… we haven’t really done much as a team recently. I wanted to… do something. I wanted us to all spend time together again.”
His face softened. “Sage… It’s only been a week since you got back. Less than a week, actually. We just… all need some time. The effects of trauma don’t just disappear overnight.”
She scowled. “I know. I know. I just… i wanna fix things as much as possible. It almost feel slike things are broken now, and it’s my fault. And I know it’s not my fault. I get that. It’s just… hard right now.”
Tony sighed. “C’mere.” He held out his arms and grabbed her in a tight hug when she rushed over. “How can I help?”
Sage leaned her head against his shoulder and let her eyes fall shut. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I just wanna help, and I wanna stop having nightmares about getting kidnapped, and I wanna be able to talk to Addy about this without being afraid that I’m gonna scar her for life, and-”
“Shhh, sweetheart. Shhh.”
Sage took a deep, shaky breath, suddenly realising she was crying. “God. Sorry.”
“No. Nonono, it’s okay. I- you may not have been processing this quite… as well as you could have been. Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”
She sniffled and looked up at him, swiping at her eyes. “What?”
“The stuff the team does, we all come with… baggage, and some of the stuff we see or encounter in the field… a lot of it isn’t great, you know? Some of us have healthier coping mechanisms than others, but no matter what there’s always an entire floor of trained counselors and therapists on standby for anything. If… if that’s something you’d be open to, something you’d want to take advantage of, you can ask anyone and we’d definitely be willing to go with you for the first few times if you wanted, or to just walk down with you or whatever you needed.”
Sage started nodding slowly. ‘Y-yeah, Peter metioned something about that. I- um. It… I think it would be… a good idea. I just… I’m terrified of doing it by myself.”
“I get that. And that’s okay. I promise just about everyone would be willing to take you and even just wait outside if it would make you feel better.. It’s up to you. I won’t pressure you into anything, but I’m glad you’re considering it.”
Sage pulled him into another tight hug. “Thank you,” she mumbled into his shirt. “I feel like this whole thing affected everyone else more than it affected me. Especially you.”
“Maybe. But what you’re going through is still important. Even if it was worse for other people, it cerainly wasn’t a walk inthe park for you. I mean I definitely would have been traumatized by what you went through.”
She pulled away slightly and laughed wetly, sniffling. “Yeah, that’s fair. I… Thank you for this.”
He smiled. “Anytime.”
---
As they climbed into bed that night, Loki noticed that Tony had a pensive look on his face. “Something the matter, my love?”
“Hmm?” Tony shook out of it and made eye contact with Loki, realising he’d been lost in thought. “Sorry, what?”
“It seems as though there is something on your mind. Something you’d like to… share with the class?”
The corner of Tony’s mouth quirked up at the phrase that usually came from him. “It’s nothing. Just… I was talking to Sage today, and I think she’s been having a harder time than she’s letting on. She mentioned something about having nightmares and how she feels partly to blame because we haven’t been spending a whole lot of time together as a team lately. Which, part of that is because we’ve all simply been… busy, but she’s got a point. I didn’t really notice until now that we all retreat after particularly hard missions or whatever. We draw into ourselves, we cling to our significant others, we mend ourselves inside our little bubbles, and we don’t venture out until then. This has been the worst thing to happen for a while, and we were unprepared for it. Everyone’s still healing, but we’re not healing together. We all fix things separately and then come together and complete the circuit. It’s what we’ve done since the beginning and we’re all used to it, but Sage isn’t. She hasn’t dealt with something this huge with the team before, and so from her point of view we’re all hurting apart from one another, and she’s to blame.”
Loki was silent for a moment as he processed what Tony had said. “Does she know that she isn’t? That this all was in no way her fault?”
“Oh, yeah. But I think she’s hurting and she’s trying her best to fix things without telling people what she’s doing or what’s going on with her. I mentioned therapy today, and it seemed like something she was really considering. She said that she wanted to talk about everything with Adeline without accidentally causing the poor girl more damage than she already went through. She’s doing her best to be so strong, babe. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”
“The movie night will be a start. Perhaps we call a team meeting and try to explain the pattern to the others, discover their views on the matter. We should certainly have a discussion with Sage. She needs to know that this is simply how we’ve dealt with things in the past, and that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to fix things, but we do need to encourage her to properly confront what happened and to process it accordingly.”
Tony hummed and cuddled closer to the god. “Speaking of processing things, how have you been doing?”
Loki shrugged and wrapped an arm around the smaller man’s shoulders. “I am… Alright. I’ve been meditating more often. I paid Jeanette a visit the other day.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mmm. She sends her regards.”
“Did she dye her hair again?”
“Indeed. It’s a navy colour this time, and I must say, I approve.”
“Ooh, sounds cool. I’ll have to go see her.”
“Sage hasn’t spent an afternoon with me since we’ve returned.”
Tony bit his lip. “Yeah. She’s been in the lab every day. I didn’t want to mention it. I don’t think she’s avoiding you on purpose, I think she’s just trying to give you space. She said something today about how she feels like she was the person least affected by the whole thing… I almost wonder if she’s been trying to give you space because she thinks you were the one who got most fucked up.”
Loki scoffed. “That’s preposterous.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Is it? Really? Lokes, you were bleeding in my bathtub. I watched you scrub your skin until it would have gone if you were human. I think it’s safe to say that you weren’t exactly fine after that.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Perhaps not. But she shouldn’t be afraid to come see me. She is my daughter. The sight of her will not… send me into an episode. She has as much right to be affected by what happened as I.”
“She doesn’t feel like she does, though.” Tony laid a gentle hand on Loki’s chest. “She’s been having nightmares about getting kidnapped, but something tells me her most vivid memory of the whole thing is you two getting rescued. You were a mess. Hell, I was a mess too, but she knows what happened, Lokes. Even if she won’t let on that she does. She knows what happened while she was unconscious, even if she doesn’t know the specifics. If anything, I think she’s scared that you blame her too.”
Anger creased Loki’s face and his voice raised as he said, “I would never-”
“I know. I know, I know, I know. Shhh.” Tony swung a leg over Loki’s lap, pulling the god’s face into his hands and resting their foreheads together. He sighed. “I know, babe. And so does she, I promise. But, she’s just- Loki. She’s only fifteen. She’s a scared little kid who got kidnapped and who knows that her father was tortured because of her. She looks up to you so much. I think she’s terrified.” He stroked his thumbs gently over Loki’s cheekbones and felt the god’s hands come up to clutch at his hips.
He took a few deep, steadying breaths, willing himself to calm the fury coursing through his veins. He wasn’t angry at Sage. He was just engraged at the idea that anyone would think that he could ever blame his daughter for such a thing. It was a ludicrous idea. Ridiculous. And it made him feel as though perhaps he was more like Odin than he thought. “I... I need to talk to her.” He squeezed his hands over Tony’s hipbones and looked into the other’s deep brown eyes. “Anthony, I-”
“I know.” Tony carded one hand carefully through Loki’s hair. “I know. But not tonight, okay? Tomorrow. After she comes home from school. Before the movie night. But don’t… Just be gentle with her. She’s going through things too.”
“Of course. Of course, I wouldn’t-”
“Shhh. I know.” He kissed him gently and lingered there for a moment, both of them simply allowing themselves to exist. To hear each other’s breath and to feel the soft beats of their hearts, and to remind each other that they were there. They were safe. Nothing could hurt them here. “We need to get to bed. It’s a big day tomorrow.”
Loki chuckled softly and looked up, making eye contact again. “I suppose we do.”
“I love you.” Tony’s hand came to rest on Loki’s collar bone, thumbing along it absentmindedly. “I love you more than anything I could create.”
“More than I have the words to describe.”
“More than there are stars in the sky.”
“More than anything.”
“Anything.” Tony looked into those poison green eyes for a moment more before sliding off his lap, curling into the other’s side. “Goodnight, Wesley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
Loki laughed softly, wrapping himself around the smaller man. “I think you should make a wonderful Buttercup.”
“... Shut up.”