A Psychiatric Institute? Steve would have blurted out something along the lines of 'why? There's nothing wrong with me!' if he didn't have horrific nightmares that often ended with property damage and bloody knuckles (at least). But how had he ended up here? He remembered the feeling of his fists connecting with flesh at bone-jarring speed, remembered the binding of restraints around his straining arms and a sharp pinch in the side of his neck, and then...blackness. It was all so overwhelming for the good Captain; he slumped back against the bed with an exhausted, disbelieving sigh. It hurt to be thought of as crazy. He'd been the underdog enough times in his past to know the shame of it, the feeling of people standing over him and laughing, jeering, talking down to him.

Fortunately, his lovely companion was doing no such thing; she had drawn a chair up beside him, cleverly just outside the range of his swing should he break free. Her gaze was intent but patient as she looked at him, and he looked back, mouth slightly agape as he continued working for breath. However he got here, he was lucky to have such a calm companion in with him, a companion that looked remarkably like a shade from his past. Steve vaguely remembered her offering him a drink, and nodded fervently in response; how long had it been since he'd had a drink, or any food? His body felt sore and out-of-use, weak and straining even for breath. A bit of panic flashed through him; he looked down at himself just to make sure he hadn't become the scrawny nobody he used to be, and a broad chest of tense muscle and arms like tree trunks met his gaze -- reassuring, despite the fact that those muscles hadn't been fed in several days, according to how they felt.

What had she said her name was? Katy? He would have to make sure once he was calm enough to articulate his thoughts. "Y-yes, please, ma'am," he stammered, still making a bid to calm his racing heartbeat.

She knew that look; the strange amalgamation of incredulity and gnawing self-doubt that graced the faces of the more mentally grounded of the patients admitted here. It broke her heart every single time she saw it, because there seemed to be nothing more terrifying than losing the one stalwart presence in your life: your mind. In repose, his face was undoubtedly even more attractive, but it was not the near-perfect symmetry of his features that kept her dark eyes deadlocked on him for longer than necessary. It was a strange familiarity, a twinge in the back of her mind that kept fighting to connect with its answer. She felt as if she should know who he was, but her mind kept coming up blank. Katy did not read newspapers or magazines, not really. She did twelve-hour shifts, slept for four hours, and spent the next eight working on her thesis. If the other nurses left a copy of the New York Times at the desk during her break, she might glance at the headlines casually. It was, however, a rare day indeed, if she was not skipping her lunch to calm down someone having a psychotic break or convince another patient to put down the glass vase she had pinched from the nurses’ desk before she hurt herself. Katy took a tentative few steps forward, moving slowly enough that she hoped would not inspire another episode.

“I’ll go fetch that for you then, Mr. Rogers. Be back in a minute.” She said, and before she could stop herself, she patted his hand softly in an involuntary gesture of reassurance. Her face flushing slightly, she walked briskly to the door but stopped for a second or two before turning the knob. “You can call me Katy if you like. Ma’am makes me feel rather old to be honest.” The door now open, she slipped into the hall to have a rendezvous with the vending machine five hundred feet down the hallway and the supply closet with the jumbo pack of bendy straws nestled next to the pile of fresh sheets. Once she had gathered her supplies, she headed back to the room, only to be stopped by the guards yet again. It was not, however, about her ID. Apparently, her patient had a visitor en-route. Katy was less than pleased with this development, and she argued with the guards for several minutes before forcing them to agree to text her when said interloper did arrive. She was not going to put up with social bullshit if it was detrimental to the already complicated psychological prognosis she had to handle within the confines of the room.

Her slight smile had returned by the time she was on the other side of the door, and she kept it in place when she plunked the bottle of water and the red and blue striped straw onto her chair. What she was wanted to do was (a) dangerous; (b) exactly what Dr. Sullivan had warned her against, and (c) rather reckless at best. The fact of the matter is that she really did not give a shit about regulation, and she had enough faith in her own abilities to trust her intuition for at least a long enough time for Steve Rogers to get a drink out of the damned water bottle. “Here’s the deal, I want to loosen the restraints on your arms before your tongue turns into leather. Not permanently. Just for a minute or two. What you are not allowed to do is worry yourself into a tizzy over it, because I believe that you are quite capable of handling that. And don’t worry about hurting me either; I’m faster on my feet than I look. Deal?”

ooc; i suck at writing intros... and i had a hard time with this one, but it'll improve as we get more into the rp, i swear. ;; bic;

Loki was plotting.

Not the regular sort of devious plotting that normally plagued his mind and kept him awake at night.

No, this was something bigger.

He had been free for quite some time. Free from his favored brother, free from his lying father. Free from life in Asgard.

However, the God of mischief was an enemy of Earth, and Earth's 'mightiest heroes'; the Avengers. Mightiest heroes his ass. Loki was sure that if he was at full power, he could easily take down his brother and those pathetic creatures he called his friends. The very idea brought a smirk to Loki's face.

Word had traveled from Earth. It appeared that one of the Avengers was having a hard time; something about vivid night terrors. Loki figured that if there was ever an opportunity to strike that team of sickening mortals, it would be then.

Loki gripped tightly onto his scepter. He was certainly going to have his fun.

She left, and for a moment, he panicked. Not enough to set him off again, no -- just enough to get his heart rate up and his breathing a bit quicker, muscles like coiled springs beneath the trembling restraints. The room was eerily quiet without anyone in it; his breathing sounded like the roar of a freight train in the horrible silence. His super soldier senses kicked in, and that horrendous sterile smell sharpened and stabbed into his brain like a scalpel, primed to cut out the seed that tortured him so. He heard shouts and raving screams from several rooms down the hall, and the soft click of her heels on the linoleum, as well as the guards shifting their gear just outside his door...SHIELD Agents, no doubt, trying their best to keep the good Captain's condition and his identity under wraps. He wondered how much his lovely Peggy-esque nurse knew about him, if she knew that he wore a star on his chest and carried the weight of America at war nearly seventy years ago, for all his twenty-six year old face showed.

He thought to ask her, but when she came back into the room, all lovely auburn curls and dark eyes and sassy attitude, the words expanded in his throat until he could barely breathe around them. It had been so lovely when she patted his hand; it felt trusting and reassuring and hopeful, even in this horrible place. How could he ruin their first impressions by blurting out that he was some kind of veritable superhero?

A pang of guilt and sorrow hit him in the chest as she offered to remove his restraints; that she even had to worry that Captain America would make a grab for her during some insane outburst made him feel shameful and disgusted by more than a few degrees. But, of course, he reminded himself, she didn't know he was Captain America -- all he could do was nod and swallow, trying his best to not look as hangdog as he felt. His tongue felt like it hadn't been used in months, and his throat was drier than Director Fury's sense of humor -- it would be lovely to get his hands on something to drink.

There was still a spark of panic in his eyes when he nodded, but she could feel it subside bit by bit as the seconds ticked away. Good. She had taken a moment, standing in the linen closet with only the straws and the laundry for company, where she had reconsidered her idea. It was the sort of thing that could get her fired and/or killed if it backfired; and yet there was an unidentified aura of trustworthiness about her patient that seemed to override any misgivings she may have had. The only member of her family that she still spoke to, her youngest brother, was a sleepwalker who suffered from occasional bouts of night terrors. She had quite lost count of the times that Rhys had bitten, punched, and screamed at her when she would find him hanging on the rail of the balcony or barefoot in the garden shed. After shaking him awake, he would look at her blankly until the veil of sleep faded from his mind, and then he would start flinging apologies left and right as if he had done these things on purpose. The one time that he hurt her enough to leave an easily visible mark, a black eye that she had blamed on her own clumsiness, he was devastated and kept leaving flowers he had stolen out of the neighbors’ yards in front of her bedroom door. It was the intent, not the actual punch, that mattered to Katy Fletcher.

She was endeavoring, as she unhooked the restraints on his wrists, to ignore the general body tone of Steve Rogers. Her face may have shown a placid, pleasant concentration, but a bead of sweat was rolling down the length of her spine as she worked. It was the coffee, she told herself. Six cups of coffee was excessive, even for her. That was why her face was slightly flushed and her mind prone to wandering this morning. When it occurred to her that she would need to loosen the restraint across his chest, she nearly died. She didn’t have attractive, polite patients, not really. It was always the difficult dementia patients and the anomalies like the pyromaniac who nearly singed her eyebrows off with a lighter he had stolen from an orderly that found their way into her rotation. The moment that she could spend with her face turned towards the chair was a breath of relief that she sorely needed. He couldn’t shift all that much, but she curled his hands around the water bottle securely before she carefully took a few steps back and sat gingerly in the folding chair. “Better?” She asked, holding her breath. Maybe this would work, maybe it would end up with her missing a few key bones, but at least she’d given him the benefit of the doubt. "I'm here 24/7, so if you need anything, don't hesitate to ask. I'd rather you not have to suffer in silence, at the end of the day. Not if there's an alternative."

Iron Man landed as lightly as he could on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, a McDonald's bag in his hand. A few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents greeted him at the door, looks of relief on their faces. They hurriedly escorted him inside; he didn't bother to remove his helmet or anything like that. Details like that weren't necessary at this point. They knew who he was, who he wasn't, and who he was here to see.

A few nurses peered curiously out of the doors on either side of the overly-long hallway; must've been the clanking of his metal boots on the polished linoleum. He hated the falseness of these places, so drab and lifeless. The people who worked here were just as empty as the people who were entombed here, as far as Tony was concerned. Poor, miserable fucks.

He sauntered into Rogers' room, cooler than the ice cubes in his favorite drink. "Hey, Capcakes," he said, the grin on his face only showing in the tone of his voice. "Happy to see me? I brought lunch, so you'd better be."