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fudgebuggyy · 3 months ago

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H E L L I C O N I A S P R I N G

Pairing: Thunderbolts!Bob x Thunderbolts!Yelena

Tags: Post-Canon, Thunderbolts Team Members Live in the Watchtower, Mutual Pining, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort

Warnings: Thunderbolts SPOILERS contained!, Implied/Referenced Past Drug Addiction

Word count: 3.186k

Chapters: 1/4

Next Chapter

Summary: Three months have passed since the Void descended upon New York, and Yelena is getting used to the life her sister led--dealing with PR agents and working in a team she's only recently learned to tolerate.

And then there's the Bob thing. And the Bob thing is super fucking complicated.

✢ Chapter 1 ✢

Robert Reynolds wasn’t Sentry.

Robert Reynolds wasn’t the Void.

Three months after New York had been swallowed by a nightmarish blanket of psychological agony, Robert Reynolds was, once again, just Bob. And Just Bob liked boring French New Wave movies and Depeche Mode and pictures of baby Highland cows. He had a scar on his left knee from where he blew it out as a teenager, drunk on a bike in the suburbs. How about you? How many bones have you broken? (Possibly every single one and possibly twice, Yelena had told him; an answer that always seemed to thrill him in some freakish way, that boyish giddiness that overcame grown men showing off their scars).

Bob hated when people chewed with their mouths open. He was a surprisingly good cook and a surprisingly good singer (the latter she had only found out after catching him sneaking a smoke on the Watchtower’s helipad, quietly singing Al Green). He liked stacking french fries inside his burgers in neat rows like a Jenga Tower. He’d been a Buddhist for three years. He made a mean Lasagna alla Bolognese. He liked Jane Kenyon, Allen Ginsberg—from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine. He played the guitar (kind of). He knew how to jumpstart a car (pretty well, actually). He liked chess.

He had a tiny sun tattooed in the dip below his right ankle, a corny memento he'd gotten in Thailand, in a place that doubled as a shoe repair shop, by a half-blind woman who didn’t seem to mind that some white boy was tripping his balls on shrooms he’d stolen from loaded tourists at the Full Moon Party, their tote bags left unattended on a lounger.

Bob had spent most of his life high, bridging the sober gaps with odd jobs and side hustles and jail. He’d stolen from everyone who’d cared about him enough to let him into their lives. Even from his mother: monogrammed silver cufflinks that had belonged to his grandfather, a decorated war vet who'd had a habit of blaming all his problems on immigrants and women.

Yelena collected Bob’s little revelations inside herself. She’d pluck them from him like a magpie lining her nest. Where'd you go to school? Tell me again about those limestone cathedrals on Railay Beach, the rainforest in Taman Negara. What was your brother's name? Did you really run track? You must've been very slow.

For someone who claimed to be “average white trash”, Robert Reynolds had lived a strangely extraordinary life. Civilian, yes. But extraordinary.

Lately Yelena had been catching herself watching him more than usual—Bob, in his hoodies and scuffed sneakers, tousled hair and boyish slouch, the secret packet of American Spirits peeking out of his back pocket—standing there being all strange and extraordinary. He was always around, puttering in the background like a housecat and only emerging fully to greet the team whenever they piled in from the helipad, busied by another one of their stupid arguments only made more stupid by the fact that they all lived in the same building now. She didn't remember when she'd started looking forward to it, to him. His small smile whenever he caught her looking.

Hesitant, bashful.

Bob had the kind of face you could excavate things from, his thoughts so thick they were tangible. Yelena imagined sometimes, plucking the viscous globs of shame from it whenever he assumed he’d said something wrong; the sadness when he thought no one could see; the unmistakable mounds of happiness that bunched around his cheeks, blooming splotchy-red and delightful, crinkled at his eyes, whenever she made him laugh.

She liked making him laugh. That throaty lilting hiccup. He had a kind laugh. He had a kind face. Yelena didn’t remember the last time she’d met someone genuinely kind, someone who liked boring French New Wave movies and Depeche Mode and pictures of baby Highland cows.

Someone who could slam her into the ceiling with a swoop of his hand, and then tear the Winter Soldier’s vibranium arm right out of its socket.

Robert Reynolds wasn’t Sentry, he wasn’t the Void—but he had been. He would be again.

It was a thought that hummed inside of her like the whistle before a bomb hit.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

They stuck him in a cell for a month.

A safety precaution, Valentina had called it, ensuring Bob didn’t…change again. And he didn’t at first: no floating, no super-strength, no telekinesis or freaky eyes. For a month, they watched and they waited, while they underwent the grueling process of heroification. It turned out Valentina had a knack for cleaning up. She was the magician; they were the feral rabbits in her very skinny, very expensive silk top hat.

Life was a barrage of press conferences and image consultations and government endorsements and merchandising and PR agents pondering on what uniform trousers gave Yelena the most “appropriate” amount of ass. Everything was to be practical but presentable, assertive but inoffensive.

Walker knew the drill, Bucky tolerated it, Alexei flourished under the attention like he was running for prime minister of a very tiny Eastern European country, mustache and bravado and all. Yelena was glad to have Ava around, who’d spent a large chunk of her life in a box and who’d called Valentina’s PR agents incompetent parasitic dildos after they asked if she wanted a uniform with cleavage when they shot for their Wheaties commercial.

By the time Bob was trusted enough to wander around the Watchtower freely—having regained barely enough telekinesis to lift a fork—each sleeve of the team’s new uniforms donned a red A. (And their asses were all deemed appropriate.)

To call themselves a team still felt like a gross exaggeration. Their togetherness was built on shaky forbearance and the mutual agreement to neither murder each other in their sleep, nor the conveniently placed news anchors stationed at street corners during assignments in the city.

Because there was another rule to add to the plethora of rules that secured their existence as the New Avengers: fight like heroes.

And fighting like a hero meant fighting clean, and if you didn’t fight clean enough, someone would be sent to clean up after you. No more sloppily tossed nail bombs, no more torture, no more nailing bad guys to the wall by their junk (much to Yelena’s dismay). Murder was a big no-no. Death was to be doled out only when explicitly necessary, and there were only so many excuses Yelena could come up with during debrief to try and explain away her mounting tower of corpses, according to Valentina, who loved hyperbole as much as she loved making Yelena's life a living nightmare now that annoyance was the only way she could make the team pay for the cataclysmic inconvenience they've caused her since not dying in a desert warehouse.

They had to think about optics now, that and public likability. Apparently the public was picky about who they wanted to be saved by.

The world could see them now, see them fully, from all angles, up close, even when they least expected it or wanted it to.

Was this what it had been like for Natasha?

Natasha, the performer. Sleek and graceful and unknowable, even to those who loved her most.

There was something to be said about the weight of living up to someone else's potential.

Sometimes Yelena swore she felt her here, this tower like a cruel echo chamber with its zig-zag of steel beams and vibranium-enhanced windows designed to withstand the impact of missiles. How it fortified them from Manhattan’s spiky skyline, from the streets below, teeming with cars and people like blood cells, going places, being alive, pacified by the thought that there was a group of chosen heroes watching over them like gods.

Would things change if they discovered those heroes were nothing but a pack of reformed, rebranded ex-criminals?

Did Natasha have trouble sleeping too? Had she felt the unfathomable weight of responsibility flattening her until she couldn't fucking breathe? Had she snuck to the kitchen at night, sat on the island, and destroyed a whole tub of ice cream, wondering when life would finally slow down?

“The infamous ice cream thief,” a voice said behind her.

Yelena had heard Bob long before he’d stepped into the kitchen, his steady gait that dragged just a little. She thought maybe it was a habit, a remnant of a different time, of rubber strings and spoons over flames. She wondered about when he would be strong enough to fly again. She didn’t like wondering about that.

Not bothering to look up, Yelena scraped as much ice cream as she could, lifting the tub to her mouth to shovel the rest of it down before she’d be forced to share.

“You know, you could've just asked.” Bob said.

“True. But that would eliminate the thrill of stealing,” Yelena mumbled, mouth full.

Valentina had them on a strict “hero diet” as well, meaning all the snacks came from Bob, who had a knack for befriending possibly anyone, and who’d managed to get one of Valentina's assistants to help him stock up on the most god-awful American junk they could smuggle through the door. Alexei had started calling Bob their calorie dealer.

Rounding the island, Bob leaned against the counter opposite from her, backlit by the oily bulbs of the range hood. He was in a T-shirt and sweats, barefoot. His hair had been freshly cut.

Was Valentina getting him ready for the cameras? Already?

Yelena stared at the way his hair swirled gently along his brow, his cheek, soft downy brown. He looked like a long nap, the kind that left you foggy afterwards.

“Good. You didn’t go blonde again. Supremely silly by the way,” Yelena said, earning her a snort and an awkward shuffling of feet.

“No, yeah. I looked like a dollar store Fabio Lanzoni.”

“Who?”

“Oh, he was on, like, books. Book covers. You know, like, romance books—Bodice rippers? Gentle Rogue?”

“Gentle Rogue?” Yelena laughed, trying to imagine Bob on the cover of a romance book. “Very 80’s porno.”

“They were way worse. My aunt had a whole collection. Pretty sure it’s the only reason I learned how to read.” He shook his head. “So, uh—is this an eating alone in the kitchen type situation or do you want company?”

She swallowed, felt stupid for feeling…shy? Was she feeling fucking shy? Around Robert of all people?

“Well,” Yelena said, “seeing I’ve finished the Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Chunk, I’d maybe let you stay if you shared something from your commissary.”

“Oh, it’s sharing now?”

“I’m willing to trade.” She tapped the spoon on the kitchen island, thinking. Then, “I’ll teach you how to use those nunchucks.”

Bob blinked.

“Come on, I saw you take them from the training deck. You’re very bad at stealing.”

"Okay, I didn’t steal them, I—borrowed—”

“What do you do? Do you just whip them around in your room?” Yelena leaned forward, voice low. “Do you watch Youtube tutorials, Bob?”

“What do you want?”

“Cheetos.” She grinned, quite pleased with herself.

He looked at the empty tub of ice cream, snorted again, then stepped closer. A move so fast she wondered if any of them really knew how much of his powers had actually returned. Looming between her parted legs, blotting out the light. An arcane panic swelled within her so quickly she grappled to push it down—until she didn't have to anymore. And she breathed in, and she breathed out, and he smelled like a fresh shower, like deodorant. Lemongrass? The heat of him like this. Fuck. Sometimes, just sometimes she thought of what that heat would feel like if she slipped her finger past the hem of his sweaters, flattened her hand against his naked stomach, the soft trail of fuzz below—

Bob blinked, his eyelids twitching the way they did whenever he got nervous, which was always, always, and he was so fucking sweet when he was nervous. He cleared his throat, averting his gaze before clumsily crouching down between her legs, letting her heart slam up her throat before she had time to realize he was just rummaging through the cupboard below her, shoving pots and pans aside to get to his stash.

“Just need to—” His shoulder bumped her ankle. “Sorry.”

When he emerged with the requested bag of Cheetos, he shot her a dopey smile, shaking it in the air. “Deal?”

She slid down the kitchen island, making a show of landing fluidly on her feet. The drop in height made her flounder a little. Tilting her head up, she snatched the bag too fast for him to register, fingers grazing his, and she had to clear her throat before she spoke: “Deal.”

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

“So what was it this time?” Bob asked.

They were sitting on the floor of the freshly renovated lounge, by the windows separating them from the nasty cold of a New York winter.

Everything still smelled new and leathery beneath the loom of the giant light fixture that hung like a planet in the dark. It was a space meant for important people, doing important things. She found solace in the fact that Bob seemed to feel just as uncomfortable being in it as she did, when the lights were on and another party was thrown, and servers whizzed around with trays of tiny food she’d scarf down in two bites and skinny flutes of champagne she couldn’t drink.

It was surprisingly peaceful when it was empty. Yelena liked the tower at night. Liminal. An eerie kind of nostalgia she couldn’t quite place.

After tossing a Cheeto in the air and catching it in her mouth, she turned towards Bob, chewing. “Hm?”

“What kept you up this time?” he repeated.

“Just, you know,” she shrugged, “imposter syndrome…and the burden of mortal stewardship…and, like, the fear of insufficiency…and also the weight of the responsibility of keeping a whole country safe from the intergalactic threat of literally anything. You know. The usual.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s, that’s pretty…weighty.” Bob nodded.

She didn’t want to tell him that it was Natasha who kept her tossing and turning most nights. But her sister was a ghost she couldn’t face completely, and especially not with him.

Clearing her throat, she pointed a Cheeto at him, aiming. She tossed it. He missed tremendously. “You?” she asked.

“Uh—” Bob shrugged, picking up the Cheeto from the floor, looking at it for a moment. “I just really fucking miss being high.”

Yelena laughed like a gunshot, tipping her head back with the force of it. She liked when he was honest. She liked when he said fuck. She was like a child endlessly thrilled by others' deviousness. And Bob, surprisingly, had been quite devious.

“Trying to ride it out.” He shrugged. “Distraction helps.”

“Okay,” Yelena coughed, nodded, lifting another Cheeto and tossing it at his mouth. He caught it this time, chewing on it triumphantly. “Let’s distract you then. Tell me more about your voyages.”

“Voyages?” Now Bob laughed. He always laughed when Yelena said it like that. Do you mean my meth-fueled meandering?

He didn’t see them as voyages or adventures. But they were to Yelena. Bob, the unlikely wayfarer of a psychedelic trek across the globe, with nothing but a donkey-eared passport in his pocket. He had a very peculiar talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow not dying.

“What about yours?” he countered.

“Mine? Mine are just—mission go. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Knee to the face. Bomb. Mission complete.” She pantomimed someone choking to death. “At least yours are super weird.”

“Oh, good to know. Thought you enjoyed them for the ethical quandary.”

“Tell me about Phnom Pen. You didn’t finish last time.”

He snorted. She liked his snorts. “You mean the chicken race?”

“Yeah, of course I mean the chicken race, Bob. It’s a chicken race. You think I’d forget about the chicken race?" She lifted her brows. "Super weird!"

Yelena knew Bob thought of his time before the Sentry Project as pretty miserable, but his stories weren’t all bad, speckled with moments where he hadn’t been so high he couldn’t remember, small audacious moments that had taken him by surprise. As if even now, he had trouble accepting that life hadn't always been out to punish him.

He’d told her of the places and the people he’d met, people like him, people not like him at all, people from all over. He'd told her the longest time he’d ever been sober was in Cambodia, riding out the bouts of withdrawal on an air-mattress in a garage, taken in by a farmer’s son who’d found him face-down in the rice paddies, half-coherent after a two-week stint in Battambang. I stayed in town for a while. Won some cash gambling and I bought them a new fridge. Learned how to make the best red curry you'll ever eat in your life.

“Come on, tell me about the racing chickens,” Yelena said, her head slumped against the window. She blinked expectantly. And so Bob told her about the chicken race, and he told her about what happened after the chicken race, and what happened after that and then after that, until he couldn’t remember. Or didn’t want to.

They were quiet for a while, staring out the window, the sheet of lights that seemed to spill out forever.

"What if we’d met back then?” Yelena said, a little woozy from sleepiness. She felt younger like this. She didn't remember the last time she'd felt like this around someone.

“You wouldn’t have wanted that. Trust me,” he said.

“I do,” she said. Trust you. Is that a bad thing?

“Still.” Her leg slid towards him. “I think I would’ve liked to have known you sooner.”

It wasn’t true, not completely.

She meant another version of her meeting another version of him in another version of life, where all they worried about was what hostel to stay at next, how to scrounge up enough money for a flight back home, where they met at a dive bar on a beach or a hiking trail to some ancient monastery where all the white backpackers went to feel better about the choices they’d made.

But in this version of life, this version of her pressed her socked foot against this version of him. And he wasn’t Sentry, and he wasn’t the Void, not right now and not for this. He was warm, and the city lights painted him in faint, vaporous lines, and his chest was broad when he wasn’t slouching, his hands big and sure and smooth, a little clammy at times but she didn’t mind. I don’t mind. And his face, his open face so full of things.

This time, it wasn’t a thought she spotted there; it was a feeling so unmistakable, trembling from its own heat:

Yearning

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Yelena Belova was Russian after all.

Here was a feeling she knew like no other.

Next Chapter

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fudgebuggyy · 3 months ago

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H E L L I C O N I A S P R I N G

Pairing: Thunderbolts!Bob x Thunderbolts!Yelena

Tags: Post-Canon, Thunderbolts Team Members Live in the Watchtower, Mutual Pining, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort

Warnings: Thunderbolts SPOILERS contained!, Implied/Referenced Past Drug Addiction, Sexual Themes

Word count: 4.052k

Chapters: 2/4

Previous Chapter ✢ Next Chapter

And then there's the Bob thing. And the Bob thing is super fucking complicated.

✢ Chapter 2 ✢

Bob told Yelena about the only person who had ever loved him from start to finish. He said it like that too, from start to finish. Like it was some grand, unbelievable gesture bestowed upon only the most deserving; like the Pope, or the son of “The Crocodile Hunter”.

Bob’s aunt had been one of those old-school hippies whose biggest achievement had been performing in a shoegaze band at Woodstock. She’d worn fringe vests and clunky crystal earrings and laced her coffee with turmeric powder. In summer, she'd rage against the cicadas by playing the guitar on her porch, her yellow bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac, with the crooked eaves and the sun catchers that scattered the loveliest light.

Her favorite movie was The Man Who Fell to Earth starring David Bowie.

She spent most of his childhood fleeing the suburbs for beautiful places; Jaipur, the Sinai Peninsula, sending postcards from the Yellow Mountains in Anhui that Bob hid from his mother, who always thought of her sister as "dangerously progressive". Off and on, she reappeared on the porch of her little bungalow, the adventurer returned home, bestowing upon him riches from countries so far away they felt huge and cartoonish in his head at thirteen.

She taught Bob chess and how to roll a cigarette, and every once in a while, she taught him some dusty dance in her backyard—disco fox, Viennese waltz—her ditzy laughter, and her breath bloated with alcohol.

Like her sister, she had a bad taste in men. She forever fell for the lead singer, and they forever did something horrible that chased her out the country. That’s why you go for the drummers, Robbie. You go for the compass, the pulse of the group. They’re worth their weight in gold.

She died of lung cancer. Bob was nineteen. He spent months crashing in his dealer’s trailer at the edge of town, trying to get so high he’d forget or maybe die, but each time he came to, he was spit out into a world without her.

Bob had spoken about his aunt only once and then never again.

Yelena wondered if you could piece someone together based on the people they’d loved, or further even, if you could love someone based on who they were loved by. She wasn’t sure yet. She wasn’t sure about a lot of things.

But, bit by bit, she’d piece Bob together, a patchwork of tossed-aside comments and strange stories and extraordinary mistakes and the sun tattooed in the dip below his right ankle, and by the time the fourth month rolled around, whatever had been coming for her, came for her all at once.

It felt more like a reckoning than a realization.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Being in a room with Bob made every part of her tilt towards him.

Yelena imagined herself living the rest of her life always standing at an angle, like the shadow of a very defective, very useless sundial. Pivoting every time Bob moved from bedroom to common area to kitchen to couch to gym to therapy to the helipad to everywhere else. Pivoting even when the pivoting meant it would earn her a hunting knife to the arm.

It had happened on the last day of a two-week mission to shut down some black-market biotech ring dabbling in interdimensional manipulation (which was a mouthful). In Svalbard of all places (which was super awful). Because of course international super villains never tried to dismantle the fabric of reality from some cushy beach villa in the Bahamas.

And of course Yelena had been too busy wondering about Bob back at the tower, wondering if he’d woken up yet, if his hair was stringy and curling from his shower, if he’d made himself a cup of coffee yet, and how ridiculous it was that he always added a spoon to it even when he skipped the milk, and how she’d asked him once, and how he’d said he’d only had Folgers instant coffee growing up, and how he’d gotten used to grinding down those tough little kernels—

“Alright, count to three because this is gonna hurt like a motherfucker,” Bucky warned her on their flight back, lifting a field stapler to her bleeding arm and pressing down.

He wasn’t kidding.

The clarity barely lasted a minute. Before, hunched in her seat trying not to scream, she thought about the only thing she’d been thinking about for days: Are you reading in the den? Are you watching The French Chef without me? Are you out for a smoke? Are you letting Valentina talk you into that horrific supersuit again? Yellow’s not your color. Are you bored? Do you miss me? Are you thinking of me? Do you ever just sit there and think and think and think and think and think of me—

“—I’m just saying, I’d appreciate it if I were utilized more. It’s always: Ghost, run through that wall! Ghost! Disappear!”

Walker groaned. “That’s what you do.”

“Case in point, you fucking moron.”

They were a clump of bloodied, beaten cretins by the time they slopped into the tower, dragging themselves to the common area like a funeral procession.

Ava and John had been at each other’s throats since takeoff, and the endless flight from Svalbard’s base had made Yelena ponder ripping the staples out of her arm to let herself bleed to death.

“Bucky, why don’t you jot this very serious issue down so we can discuss it with HR," John said, grinning when he was met with Bucky's vibranium middle finger.

“Just because mass casualty is off the table, doesn’t mean I have to be shoved aside to pick locks,” Ava swung her arm towards John, “while Captain Cuck over here gets to spray his bullets around like he’s Tony Montana.”

“Oh, that’s good one, Ava. Very funny.” Dragging his fractured leg, Alexei howled the way he always did. He had a real pervert’s laugh, and it was loud and bellowing enough to smack even Yelena out of her stupor.

She rolled her eyes. “Not that I enjoy jumping to his defense, but they had us cornered.”

Vindicated, John waved at her. “Thank you—”

"What was he supposed to do?” she cut him off, “smack them with his hat?”

“For the last time, it’s a beret.”

“You gave your hat a name?” Alexei scrunched his brows.

“No, that’s the—You know what, screw all of you. It tested well with the focus groups. Plus, my kid likes it.”

“Didn't know god-awful taste is genetic," Ava mumbled.

Judging by the look on John’s face, she wouldn’t have made it to the kitchen in one piece if Bob hadn’t kicked the door open, wielding a baking dish filled with blistering, bubbling cheese.

“Welcome back,” he said, like a mother in a 50’s sitcom, all frazzle-haired and oven-mittened and wonderful.

Something in Yelena sagged with so much relief she wanted to crawl towards him on her hands and knees and wrap herself into a ball at his feet.

He looked just the way they’d left him.

“You made your lasagna?” she croaked. She sounded like someone who’d had their arm stapled shut on a ten-hour flight from a frozen tundra at the end of the world.

“I made four.”

Satisfied groans from all around.

“Come here.” Alexei was already climbing over John and Bucky to grab Bob by the face.

“That won’t be necessary.” Caught in a chokehold, Bob’s cheeks ripened with a brilliant flush. “Thank you—Oh. Okay. Please…stop—”

“We missed you, Bobby boy.”

“You’re just saying that ‘cause I made you food that isn’t poached.”

Alexei grumbled another one of his dirty-old-man laughs before giving Bob’s head a silly smooch.

And as they spread across the counters and dug into heaps of Lasagna alla Bolognese in exhausted silence, Bob watched over them like a mother hen counting all of her chicks, and then counting them twice.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

After a long visit to the med bay and an even longer shower, Yelena lay sprawled on the couch in the den, lumped under so many blankets and throw pillows she’d have to be exhumed. Loafy-warm and liquefied and aching, she struggled to keep her eyes on the projector screen: The French Chef, season two, episode four: "Coq au Vin".

(Bob hadn’t watched without her.)

It turned out, he’d spent most evenings in the den, hints of him lazily scattered about; his AirPods on the coffee table, a forgotten mug, a notebook and pen, a tattered paperback with a strange bird on the cover and a title Yelena couldn’t decipher from afar.

The faint smell of his deodorant. Clean lemongrass.

Every once in a while, her attention drifted towards Bob, who was the only one awake enough to join her. (Also, the only one who was willing to sit through an hour of Julia Child explaining how to properly chop chives.) Sitting on the blankets next to her, his hand so close she could touch him if she just flexed her pinkie far enough.

Something about this made her feel young, like she was back in Ohio having returned from a sweltering summer afternoon out on the block, lolling on the couch with the television on while Natasha braided her hair in slow measured strokes.

Yelena didn’t know when returning to the tower had started to feel like returning home. This bastioned mountain filling a space in her mind that had been kept vacant for a reason. Now, home was a military-grade security system and steel beams and tinted glass and the loose collars of Bob’s pale blue sweaters that dipped just so, and dipped so sweetly sometimes she could spot the space between his collar bones, begging for her thumb to be pressed to it.

What did you do without us around? Did you wonder about me? Did you think of me, ever? Did you miss me? Were you so miserable with the missing of me?

“Were you okay?” She asked this carefully, checking in like she was checking for a fever.

Bob gave one of his silly Bob-snorts. In her head, she could eat them. “You know,” he arched a brow, “contrary to popular belief, I’m able to survive in a glorified luxury bunker without talking to a volleyball…or like, I don’t know, hanging myself in a closet.”

“That’s not funny, Bob.”

“It’s a little funny,” he mumbled, smiling. She wanted to touch his eyelashes. “It was fine. Boring, but uh—you know. I think I spent way more time in therapy just to have someone to talk to. Umm…practiced with the nunchucks. Still terrible at it. Oh, and I tried making a soufflé.”

Her slow tired smile. “From season one, episode twenty-nine?”

He snorted again, endlessly amused by her knowing each episode's name and number by heart. Outdated American references stored tidily in her head, relics from her time spent strapped in front of television screens leeching on this country’s culture like a tick.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Apparently, I’m worse at making soufflés than using nunchucks, so do with that what you will.” He picked at the blankets. “I taught Mel how to play chess. We did a whole tournament-type thing.”

“Did you win?”

“Oh, she beat me, like, immediately. And then she let me win the last round because she felt bad.”

Yelena huffed a laugh. “How would you know? Maybe you’re better at chess than making soufflés and using nunchucks.”

“No, she made sure to tell me. Multiple times.” Bob snorted again.

“I feel like Mel could secretly beat the shit out of me.”

“We should probably keep an eye on her.”

“Make sure she doesn’t cause global annihilation."

"Yeah."

"Yup."

He smiled, then took a breath, then looked up. “What about you? Were you okay?”

Yelena swallowed.

Anywhere else, with anyone else, her answer might’ve been different. She might’ve skipped over those long agonizing nights staking out in the hull of a cargo ship, or the young Interpol agent who’d been caught in their crossfire, his body going limp in her arms. She might've scoured through herself looking for the right box to push it into, push it away.

But this was Bob, and she was so tired.

“No,” she said.

Shifting, he turned towards her fully.

His eyes looked darker like this, darker even when his attention zeroed in on her bandaged arm. It happened sometimes, this disquieting panic that felt instinctual, old, swelling inside of her, reminding her of the day his black shape rose over New York. A gaping pit of nothing, its never-ending tunnels to places unfathomable.

She wanted to hold his face in her hands and tell him that she was fine, she was okay, I’m okay like this, I’m okay now. But she was tired. She’d missed him. She’d been so miserable with the missing of him.

With every ounce of energy she had left, she arched her pinkie towards his—just a little, inch by inch—until, finally, the tip of her nail grazed the tip of his.

She knew the shape of this feeling by heart.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Yelena had spent most of her life doling out punishment for people who believed they had the right to lord over those who deserved it and those who didn’t.

She was twenty-seven by the time she’d destroyed the last trace of the Red Room. People intentionally had kids at twenty-seven, they went on their last backpacking trip before settling for a career, they had cars that didn’t have to be shitty, they had a place of their own where they could afford the furniture. They were in relationships and went on dates and had sex and went out and complained about how they couldn’t drink the way they used.

At twenty-seven, the first thing Yelena had ever gotten herself was a tactical vest (with pockets), followed by a vinyl she couldn’t play (Dusty Springfield), and a gay porno on VHS that she’d watched in a motel in Arkansas (Saving Ryan’s Privates).

She supposed at that point, sex had been an alien thing, only to be whispered about in the bunk beds of the Red Room, a lecherous thrilling secret, oh, the things to be felt, Yelena! Have you tried it with a showerhead? Even kissing had been alien—kissing was for jewelry commercials and rom-coms about witty men meeting witty women in rainy cities, it was for Italian frescoes and horny poets and the horny chain-smoking Frenchmen in Bob’s New Wave movies.

The first person Yelena had ever kissed was Kate Bishop, and it had been as terrifying as it had been perfect, this trembling thing that unspooled inside of her, how the needing of it had surprised her so completely she could’ve begged for it on hands and knees. She’d concluded that kissing was as much for jewelry commercials and horny poets—as it was for the Kate Bishops of the world.

But then Kate had broken her heart, and Yelena had stumbled through the rest of her life wondering if she was meant for kissing too, or if all she was good for was assembling a gun.

And then there was sex.

And sex was something she didn’t know how to have sober. (Even with the Kate Bishops of the world.)

It wasn’t a thing she thought or worried about much. It existed mysteriously in the periphery of her life; along with dating and backpacking trips, and whatever average customs and crises plagued the people her age. But then sometimes, just sometimes, every once in a while during moments so minute...Bob stretched and the hem of his sweater skimmed up his skin…Sometimes he brushed past her in the kitchen, and his hand grazed her waist so tenderly it must’ve been by accident…Sometimes she felt his breath blast down the back of her neck, her elbow in his ribs, his knee sinking into the meat of her thigh—

“—faster. You’re dragging.” With a shove backward, Yelena unhooked Bob from herself, and he went tumbling onto the training mat. “You can’t second-guess yourself. You don’t have time for that when you’re fighting for—”

“—for your life, I know. I know.”

“Then move like it.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do? And that’s a rhetorical question, please don’t answer that.” Bob fell to his back, his T-shirt shucked up to reveal the taut planes of his stomach.

Swallowing, Yelena looked away. She leaned forward to catch her breath, wiping away the sweat stinging her eyes. The stitches in her arm had popped; she could feel it.

Bob sat up, completely dry and breathing normally. “Do you want to take a break?”

“I’m fine.”

“Yelena—”

“I said I’m fine, Bob.”

His concern shouldn’t have bothered her the way it did. Neither should his sweat-less-ness.

Sure, he fought like someone who’d avoided fighting his whole life, stiff and unsure, and more stiff and unsure than he usually was on the mat. But he was far stronger than he had been a month ago, faster too, and Yelena knew what that meant. Soon, the only people he could train with were those able to survive a super-serum-induced punch with the blowback of a sonic boom. Yelena was for the regulars, the humans with their breakable bones and woundable flesh, and here she was sparring with a man who had the potential to be the most cataclysmic force on planet earth.

The very least she wanted to do for him was teach him how to fight when fists were the last resort: Hand-to-hand, face-to-face, bound, gagged, feral, with nothing to lose. She’d been doing this long enough to know that even gods and super-humans met their match eventually.

She needed Bob to pack a nasty uppercut once the time came.

Nudging him with her foot, she said, “Come on, get up.”

“Yelena…”

“Again.“

He sighed. She cocked a brow. He relented. Again, they circled each other. And again, his movements dragged, almost as if it were deliberate. Yelena was so fucking tired of being held back on. Sliding her foot between his legs, she managed to unbalance him, aiming at his ribs in a series of quick cruel jabs, his breath close and damp enough she felt it spill below her ear. She pushed. He tumbled.

Again, she demanded. Again. Again. “Again, Bob.”

“Yel—”

“Again. “

And so they returned to the same sequence of movements—elbow hook, low sweep, slip and circle—again and again, until finally, Bob, like an ancient colossus exhausted from defending himself from some mortal’s fickle weaponry, grabbed her by the waist and hurled her onto the mat so hard her breath spewed out in one vicious blow. The pain in her arm wrecked through the rest of her body. Teeth clenched to keep herself from yelling. Dizzy, reeling through the whiplash, a body shoved above hers, head stooped low, shrouded in dark as it crowded out the light.

The panic this time was strange. Thicker. Hot. Something primal that dug through her skin. She felt it vibrate in her hands as she reached for him. An impulse so ingrained it was muscle memory. Grabbing hold of his head, she tugged him close, and when he turned his face…light pooled along the smooth valleys of it.

He blinked. He softened, his head bumping puppy-like and clumsy against hers.

“Shit,” he ground out. “I didn’t mean to, I’m—sorry. Sorry. Are you—”

“I don’t break that easy.”

He was so close his face was a pale blur. “I’m sorry," he said again.

Her fingers tightened in his hair, then loosened. “Don’t apologize.”

The heat of him like this. Her feet ground into the mat. Her chest swelling with air, and his breath, and the smell of his deodorant, clouding her over in a haze thick enough to chew on, Oh, the things to be felt, Yelena—and what a horrible fucking time to be feeling them.

“You won't always be able to depend on your powers, Bob,” she said this so quietly she was afraid he hadn’t heard.

“They’re designed to be dependable.”

“Everything in this building is designed to be dependable until it isn’t. When people are able to do the things you can do, relying on anything is conditional.” He was still so close. How was he still so close. “Trust me.”

“I do,” he said without hesitation. “But, I just—I need these powers to be dependable, because if they’re not…” he trailed off. She didn't want him to finish that sentence.

Whatever spell had pinned her to the mat, unpinned her. She released him. As if on cue, everything inside of her lost its balance.

“Because if they’re not, you’ll be left with a shit right hook.” She cut him off before he said something stupid he couldn’t take back, and rolled out from under him. “Get up. We’ll take a break in a bit.”

She wanted to say more but stopped when the gym came back into focus. The dumbbells weren’t where they were supposed to be, nor were the keg rings or the weapons on the racks. Her eyes tracked as half the room floated in the air, spinning in slow circles like comets.

“Bob—”

“It’s okay,” he said, and then he said it again, and before Yelena could protest, her body loosened itself from the ground.

She never expected weightlessness to devastate her.

“I wanted to tell you. But it just never...I don’t know, it just—” He shook his head. “I’ve been able to do a lot since you guys left for Svalbard.”

“That’s a long time, Bob.” Trying not to panic, she bobbed upside-down, before a warm invisible pressure tipped her upright and kept her steady.

“I know," he said.

Was he devastated too?

In another version of this very moment, Yelena might’ve cackled with her head tipped back. She might've let Bob pinwheel her between floating barbells and training dummies until her head bonked against the ceiling. She might’ve told him to show her more, show her everything.

In this version though, she stared at Bob rooted in the center of the gym like a planet around which everything spun. And when he rose, slowly, slowly, she thought he looked nothing like that day; lit from above, he fit into his body in ways she’d never seen before.

The benevolent titan carrying the world in his orbit.

“Sometimes it almost feels like it did back then," he said, and she didn't like the way it sounded.

“Does Valentina know?”

Bob's eyes flicked to something behind her shoulder, but Yelena was too busy trying to keep her balance to check what it was. “I’m not worried about her,” he said. A breath, then, “This doesn't change anything.”

“It’s already changing."

He was floating above her now, power rippling all around, his hair and clothes flowing in a tide she couldn’t feel but wanted to so frantically the wanting of it surged through her, from top to bottom, and how she could’ve arched towards him then, her body like a pebble knocked loose in a current.

Two weeks she’d spent in a frozen tundra, obsessed with the thought of Bob safely tucked away in a glass box, endlessly looking forward to returning to him.

How had Natasha done this? Any of this? Had she expected the people she cared about most to stay put if she'd just expected it hard enough? Did she have someone back then? And did she expect that someone to always be the thing waiting for her in the tower, waiting to be returned to. Had she wanted to stand between them and life itself? Breakable bones and woundable flesh and fickle mortal weaponry and all?

How did you live like this?

Yelena tossed that question onto the pile of other questions she’d never get to ask her sister.

Staring up at Bob, his powers lowering her gently to the ground, she thought of the first time she’d ever seen him fall from the sky. A solar flare over Utah. She thought of his aunt. She thought of that movie with David Bowie.

Robert Reynolds wasn’t Sentry, he wasn’t the Void—but he had been. It was only a matter of time until he would be again.

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