'It was a wonder that Steve Rogers hadn't fallen off the deep end before this. It was well-known that Captain America had a serious case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the nihilism created by waking up in another world certainly didn't help with that. For the Avengers, it was really a matter of time before their fearless leader hit rock bottom, and all, with the exception of one Mister Tony Stark, appeared braced for the day it would. Director Fury speculated that, for Mr. Stark, Freedom In Tights was just another relic of his father's time, another very expensive and important national symbol of a relic that had consumed his father, body and soul. So when Stark crawled into a bottle of whiskey that fateful night, the rest of the team thought it was just another night of Iron Man's raging alcoholism. It was only when they found Rogers staring down the barrel of a pistol that they knew otherwise.'

'Sending Rogers to New York State Psychiatric Institute was SHIELD's only option. They had tried securing him on-base, and that had ended unfortunately for several junior agents and almost as unfortunately for himself. Apparently, being around black suits and high-tech equipment in the basement he had woken up in after his seventy-year sleep only served to incense him. But among the familiar mannerisms and accents of his hometown, he seemed less volatile, and so SHIELD got their hooks into the NYSPI and secured the good Captain a room and nurses who wouldn't blab. Still, Cap had not gone willingly -- more junior agents wound up in the medical bay by the time they had him sedated and shipped off. The Avengers watched as they hauled him away, sympathetic and unsettled and feeling horribly misguided without their beacon of patriotism. But one Avenger was on the ground, shouting hoarsely at agents who refused to listen to him and waving a fistful of hundred-dollar bills in attempts to bribe them, to keep their blonde-haired compatriot with them.'

BASICALLY, if you don't like reading long paragraphs, here's the abridged version: Cap has been admitted to a mental institution to level out. He has night terrors, flashbacks, and real trouble connecting with people -- this frustrates and frightens him into a state that can only be described as frenzy, making him a hazard to himself and everything within arms' reach. There's the potential for romance here, between Tony and Cap or Cap and an OC patient or nurse or ANYTHING, really. And there's lots of potential for violence and grotesqueness and swearing, of a PG-13 nature of course. And lots of potential for GPOY on my part, which I apologize in advance for. Let me preface this with this: I'm not sure how many characters this will need, but it's definitely not something large. I will be Cap. (I'm working on his character, so bear with me if it's not the best, but I'm trying.) Obviously, I need a Tony/Iron Man. Any and all OCs that are literate will be accepted. Any other Avengers/SHIELD members are welcome, including Coulson. Also, I'll take any other form of Marvel hero, just for giggles. Work them into the story and YOU WILL BE REWARDED.

Note: This is based heavily on the Avengers 2012 film and Captain America: The First Avenger. So, post away! My only request is for literacy (semi-lit/Lit), and that if you intend to use an OC, you ask for a bio skeleton, as you will need to provide one before I add you to the roster. c:

[[ Mmn...who to take...

I can't take Stark. Nope. Since you and I are related, I don't want to get creepy.

Maybe Banner. Or Barton. I don't know. >> Help me, Steve. Who do you need more? ]]

(I have my OC formulated like we discussed, what form do you want me to use, darlink?)

: Hah, the usual will do! [Picture/Link if applicable] NAME: SHIELD/HERO NAME: (if applicable) AGE: GENDER: ABILITY/POWER: (if applicable) PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: (If you cannot find a picture, or if you'd just like to) PERSONALITY: PAST: (briefly) OTHER:

http://i689.photobucket.com/albums/vv260/RhapsodicContinuum/tumblr_m3ib2aG6Ov1qd0tpoo1_500.jpg"> NAME: Katherine Mared Fletcher SHIELD/HERO NAME: (if applicable) N/A AGE: 26 GENDER: Female ABILITY/POWER: Latent low-level telepathy

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Katy is stronger than she looks, she was a gymnast in high school and runs diligently for an hour every morning. Her hair is kept in a somewhat severe chignon, she learned about the dangers of ponytails in a psychiatric hospital the hard way on the first week she worked there. Her makeup is discreet but carefully structured to draw the eye; or so the magazines she skims at the hair salon tell her. Her clothing at work is modest and professional, but not drab in color or cut. Everything she wears or does to her appearance is part of a routine she’s performed every day since she was fifteen in an attempt to look (and feel) less working class than she is.

PERSONALITY: She is very disciplined, especially in the context of her work and education, but has a tendency to go the extra mile when it is patently unnecessary on the off chance that it pans out in her favor. She is a habitual insomniac and runs on no more than four hours of sleep per day, often less than that. Katy is a calculating, intelligent risk-taker who often takes on projects that are much more that she really should be handling so she can impress her superiors and gain their respect. All of these can be traced to her wish to distance herself as far from her past as is physically possible, and her burning desire to get as far up the social ladder as she can safely go. She is an efficient nurse, but she is emotionally distant with her coworkers. Her skills lie in her empathy and her willingness to take on almost any case, and she has developed several friendships within her sphere of patients. Her cheerful, kind façade masks a deep-seated loneliness and sense of abandonment stemming from her childhood. Her telepathy is not obvious to her, it is more of a strong intuition about the motives and thoughts of the patients, with occasional flickers of memories that are important to them.

PAST: Born into an itinerant Welsh mining family, Katy is the oldest of six children. Her five younger siblings are all boys, and all of them are either in jail or on the dole. She is the only person in her family to graduate from secondary school, and when she was eighteen she left Wales for Columbia University in New York on a student visa. No one else in her family understood or even approved of her intellectual ambitions; but she was fed up with the constant physical and emotional abuse from both parents and being blamed for not controlling the actions of her delinquent brothers. The Psychology instructor in her secondary school, of whom she was very fond, encouraged her to apply to Columbia University to study psychology, and with some help from the teacher's uncle, she won a full scholarship. Her future plans, once she finishes her doctorate, include becoming the head psychologist at NYSPI within ten years.

OTHER: Her supervisor has recently revised her work schedule and assigned her to work with only one specific patient suffering from night terrors, in lieu of her prior duties.

I really wish I could help you out with a Tony Stark, but I really don't have the time! Dx This sucks; this is an amazing idea. I wish you the best of luck trying to find a Mr. Stark!

oh man this is so tempting. i would love to join as loki, but i don't really see how he would play into this story. D: if you want him though, and you have an idea for him to fit in with your story, ping me! this sounds like a really cool rp. (plus i'm a huge steve/tony shipper, haha.) good luck. :3

[[ - Oh, fuck it. I'll take Stark. >> ]]

((: CONVENIENT INSERTION OF PEGGY LOOKALIKE. 8D Brilliant, as usual, love.

: Aww. :c I might ping you in a week or so if we still don't have a Tony? Kk, got one. c: Feel free to lurk if you want.

: We can always use a baddie. >D Perhaps Loki comes back and finds out about Steve's condition and goes to mock him/break him/do assorted mean things to him, or the Avengers have to assemble to take care of him and Steve is tortured by going and helping and risking his friends' lives or staying and risking everyone else's lives.

: AWESOME. Does my intro sound good enough for you to work yourself in?))

Absolutely! I can be your back-up Tony if needed! xD

love it, love it, love it! can't wait to start. c: i know someone who is a really good thor... would you be interested in having them included?

((: Yes please. :D Could always use a good Thor.))

[[ - Yeah, yeah. I can do it in all my spare time. >> subscribes ]]

pinging you should join as thor. C:

Katy Fletcher, after gulping down her sixth cup of coffee in the past twenty-four hours, had felt rather pleased with herself in spite of the building headache in her temples and the circumstances that had led to her ‘promotion’ of sorts. When she had answered the phone that morning, reaching blearily over to the overburdened nightstand and knocking over several thick books in the process, her supervisor’s voice gave no indication as to what exactly had happened to merit dragging her out of bed a mere three hours after she had finished her shift. “I have noticed,” he had said, “that you never seem to sleep anyway, Katherine. My office, 9:15, and I would suggest dressing as if you were attending your dissertation defense, without those ghastly red heels of yours.” There had been a click, and the line dissolved into dial tones. With a growing sense of intellectual doom, she had dressed, refilled her cornucopia-like travel mug with espresso, and sat stoically in the subway beside a rather obnoxious shop girl with a bad spray tan.

Dr. Sullivan was passive aggressively sorting paperwork in his office; he nodded vaguely at her to enter the room and told her to sit down in a harassed tone of voice that suggested a frustrating morning thus far. In his customary curt style, he explained that she had been reassigned to one particularly important patient with a severe case of PTSD. He managed to tell her absolutely nothing else about the patient’s history while combining what she should not do and what this sort of thing could do for her resume into a ten-minute speech. Lawrence Sullivan made it sound like some modern form of an ordeal by fire; he spoke of it as darkly as he did her doctoral qualifying exam and the Holocaust. After being shuffled out the door and into the hallway, she walked briskly towards the distant room number he had given her with a thin manila folder clasped in her left hand. The ward on the top floor had been emptied, and all of the patients shuffled into open rooms below. There were two men dressed in full body armor standing outside of room 875, shouldering their rifles and eying her warily even after she dug her ID card out of the pocket of her lab coat and let them examine it. The one of the right hand side of the door looked her up and down with an expression of doubt, then handed back the card and let her into the room with a rather sarcastic sounding ‘Good luck’.

In her twenty-six years, she had seen many, many disconcerting sights, but none had struck her as much as the one that assaulted her eyes upon entering that room. There was a powerfully muscled man with thick blond hair strapped to one of the reinforced beds reserved for particularly difficult patients; his breath ran ragged and his hands were twitching slightly in the throes of what looked like a rather awful dream. Within thirty seconds of her arrival, he started to scream. She was no stranger to screaming. The scream of her mother when her father came home from a night at the pub, the screams of the paranoid schizophrenic woman she had worked with three years past when she thought she saw the aliens coming to collect her in the hallway; it was a familiar sound to her ears. This scream, however, was quite different. It was not the rush of the armored men into the room that made it peculiar, it was the potent mixture of anguish and long-hidden fear that distinguished his caterwauling in her mind. Before she could stop them, they were holding her new patient down in a sort of painful full-body lock while he thrashed wildly. Clearly, at least to her, they were simply making it worse. Diving at him like a pack of wolves was the last thing they should have been doing, and it would not do if they were going to do that every damned time he screamed. Carefully avoiding the patient’s swiftly kicking foot, she collared the closest guard and dragged him to the other end of the room. She was rather short with him, and explained that he and his colleague were not allowed to do her job for her, that she could handle herself, and if they tried that again she would have their balls framed and hung on the wall of her office for their efforts. His spluttering objections were met with a steely glare and a smart thwack upside the head with her folder. It took her several minutes more, but she managed to get them out of the room and back to their posts. Standing in front of the door, she gave her charge a slightly flustered smile and pushed a strand of hair that had come free back into a bobby pin. “I’m sorry about that.” She said, carefully managing her best BBC accent and news anchor’s tone. “Won’t happen again on my watch, I hope. My name is Katy Fletcher, and that was a terrible first impression for a nurse to make.”

It was Bucky again. Why was it always Bucky? Steve didn't know, but he could feel the cold steel beneath his fingertips, hear the mountain wind howling like his beloved Commandos, smell the bitter winter air and the sharp breath of gunpowder inside the train. Bucky was wailing as he clung to the steadily-bending railing, feet dangling out behind him like the feet of a ragdoll, fingers peeling as they made a desperate bid to cling to the freezing metal. He heard his own voice plead, "Bucky! Bucky, take my hand! Reach for it, Bucky!" And Bucky wailed, and the wind howled, and the train surged on. He heard the metal groan beneath his weight as he stepped further onto the blown-out steel, heard it scream as the bar ripped from its side -- or was that Bucky screaming as he plunged down, down away from the speeding train into the yawning chasm a thousand feet or more down the mountainside? And then, suddenly, the chasm actually yawned, and it roared as it swallowed Bucky up, tongues of fire curling around his form and twisting more screams from him. And Colonel Phillips was there, in the flames, telling him how pathetic he was and how he was nothing more than a damn fuck-up for costing him one of his best men -- real men, real soldiers, not chorus girls with toy shields and spangly uniforms. And Steve believed him, knew that he was worth less than the ground Bucky had walked on.

And now, the train was falling, falling into that horrible, fiery maw, and bullets came shrieking up from the flames along with battle cries and the screams of wounded men. And the wind howled, and the snowflakes were cold on his eyelids as he closed his eyes, and Bucky's tortured screams buffeted his ears like a gale would a sailboat. Colonel Phillips was ordering a gun into his hand, roaring at him to put it in his mouth, to pull the trigger -- and then Peggy told him to, and before he knew it, bloodcurdling screams were wrenching themselves from his lungs on repeat. Like a caged bird singing for its freedom, he screamed for his life. Something pushed down on him, compressing his organs into a painful chum and forcing the air from his lungs, but still he screamed, if only to drown out the horrible sound of her ordering him to kill himself.

And a voice, familiar then and now, ordered him to wake the fuck up. And so, he did.

It was like an electric jolt had run through him; he bolted upright, or he would have if there weren't restraints binding his straining forearms to the bed beneath him. His chest was heaving like all the air in the world wouldn't help him catch his breath, and the walls were ringing with what was left of his fit, and despair and embarrassment settled into his stomach. Had he been screaming like that out loud? Jesus, what would Tony think--

Wait. He looked around at the nearly-empty room, all white and smelling of bleach and ammonia and hospital. The Avengers were nowhere nearby to hear his fit, but where was he? Immediately, he focused on the only other person in the room, and swallowed the urge to pinch himself. Was he dreaming again? The nurse had long auburn hair and striking eyes, the spitting image of Peggy. He was almost at a loss for words as he looked at her, but the need for answers won out and he opened his mouth, throat aching from his screams as he hoarsely asked, "W-where am I?"

The fact that he had stopped screaming was at the very least, a small improvement in his condition. Her eardrums were ringing slightly with the decibel level change within the confines of the room. She made a mental note to keep those idiot guards outside of the room at all times, no matter how many times he lost control from that point on. Despite the aching in her head from the echoing of his screeching in the back of her mind, Katy Fletcher felt no animosity towards the man that the folder in her hand had told her was Steven Rogers. She pitied him; the bewildered look on his face and the wave of soul-shattering desolation pouring over her as she took several steps towards the bed justified and strengthened that snap judgment for her. It was quite apparent to her now why none of the other nurses would have taken this case; and why they wouldn’t have been suited to it anyway. Whether or not she should take Dr. Sullivan’s reassignment as a compliment or a last hazing of the rookie was up for debate. “At the moment you are in New York State Psychiatric Institute.” She said matter of factly in the calmest tone she could muster.”Mr. Rogers, would you like a drink? I’m sure that your throat must be rather sore.” His voice sounded like he had been eating sandpaper, and he was obviously in enough pain already. The room was lacking every other accoutrement that the others had, except for an austere metal chair in the far corner. So much for mundane distraction as a calming technique, she thought with mental sigh. Standing over him was probably a bad idea as well, it was overbearing and hadn't served her well in the handful of other PTSD cases she'd encountered. Katy commandeered the corner chair and placed it just out of her rough estimation of the range of his arms should he break his restraints. “I can probably manage that at least, for the moment."

[[ Here comes my shitty intro. bad Poker face ]]

For Tony Stark, poster-child and landlord of the Avengers, morning meant two things: coffee and stimulation. After a languid start, complete with the desired four cups of that battery acid that he so loved, he meandered to his lab, yawning and scratching at his scalp. Time to take care of his other morning duty, he guessed. He was late, admittedly, but can't a guy catch a break every now and again? He's a hero now, and not just any hero: an Avenger. But he was also Tony Stark, and so lateness should have been waived wherever he went. Busy man, after all.

As he suited up, his mind drifted. Life as a 'hero' was stupid, he reasoned. Too much responsibility for someone who spent the majority of his life fucking around. And now he had been voted in charge of yet another task that the Avengers needed of him. What the hell.

Repulsors online. Systems checked. Diagnostics running. Iron Man Mark 7 powering up.

...ah, the sky. Finally, the only place that he could truly call 'his own'. The suit took him high into the blue, high enough that he could have sworn his fingertips were scraping the cloud-patterned tiles of heaven. He banked slightly, rolling onto his back and savoring the crystalline, pure space above him. A few clouds passed his line of vision. A bird or two squawked from below, the sound clear against the backdrop of bustle from the morning commute. Aside from his winged fellow sky-travelers, he was alone. He made a delighted, albeit slightly sleepy, sound in the back of his throat, lips curling up in a smirk. Not even Thor could tangle with him up here: this was Iron Man's playground. No one could bother him...well, almost no one.

"Sir, you should stop playing around for now. You must pay Mister Rogers the expected visit; I am certain that the staff are wondering where you have been," Jarvis' chiding voice crackled in his ears.

"Yes, Mom," he replied with a roll of his eyes. "...get me directions to that prison cell where they've got Cap. Take the highway, would ya? Chop, chop!"

"Yes, sir."

Iron Man arced left, then rocketed down in a straight shot toward the grid of streets below. Pulling back so that he was about ten stories above the ground, he navigated the network of streets with ease, passing grid-locked traffic and several bikers. A pedestrian waved at him, smiling; she obviously appreciated what the Avengers were doing for this place. He would have been tickled pink if he gave more of a shit.

This daily commute kept people aware of the Avenger's presence here. Maybe that was to further Fury's message to evildoers from this world and the next. Tony didn't give a fuck. All that he wanted was to go back to playing around among the clouds and his own thoughts, gears always turning. Alone time was Tony time.

ooc; i'll jump in soon... waiting for the right moment. ;D

((Sweet. I'm glad you found a Tony. I'll probably lurk around just for the hell of it! I like to read! xD))