Chapter Text
The tower is filled with ghosts hidden in all of its corners. Everywhere she looks, Yelena finds something that isn’t hers. Cross-shaped markings on the ceiling, where arrows met their targets, lichtenberg figures on the wooden cabinet that has been repurposed into Ava’s nightstand, a hook for a shield beside the place where their keys dangle, a ring of fresh concrete where a Hulk-sized fist went through the basement floor.
The renovators must have left these phantoms of the previous team as some sort of honorary act, making sure their history wasn't completely erased, but it just makes Yelena’s mouth sour when she sees an old scar in the foundation. She feels not as a replacement but a parody of the heroes she’s meant to be taking the mantle from. Their existence couldn’t be more of a joke. Two super soldiers, bargain bin Captain America, a British person, and a Russian assassin become the babysitter for an unstable drug addict who doubles as a nuclear bomb that could destroy the universe when he has a bad day.
The Avengers are dead, long live The Avengers.
Everything in the tower is new, from the furniture and gym equipment, down to the kitchen appliances and flooring. The bedroom walls maintain that fresh-paint smell, even months later. Yelena can’t get rid of that new home smell, all cedarwood oil and shitty Yankee Candle plugins. She hates the process of breaking something in; she’d rather buy things used and well-worn so she knows they have already lived a good life.
While Val tells them they have free reign of the refurbished tower, it’s not without monitoring. Yelena notes where every camera is installed, tracks the blind spots for her personal use in the future. There are few, but they are large. Thankfully, she finds none in the bedrooms or the attached bathrooms, but she does tape over the two in the gym. If Val wants to out herself by telling them about Yelena’s tampering, she is welcome to do so.
Yelena hates the tower, and she tries to hate the people living there with her. It’s a universal mockery to have her living in a building that was once her sister’s first true home, pretending that she can be a modicum of the heroine Natasha was. She doesn’t feel like she deserves to be there; she’s haunting an already haunted place, stalking hallways she doesn’t belong in and pretending she doesn’t see the remnants of the heroes who lived there before.
This is not a home, simply a place for her to sleep and eat in between missions, coalesce with these strangers who have barely made it out of her category of enemy.
All except for Bob, of course. He’s a curiosity. The connection between them caught everyone by surprise, especially themselves. There was that initial kinship they found when they blew up the vault and first fell into a memory room, a broken person recognizing a broken person. A wounded bird finding comfort with the maw of a feral cat.
The Void only exposed their cracks further and drew them together, mostly by force, but Yelena wouldn’t have walked into that darkness if she had even an inkling that he would hurt her. She saw something in him that she recognized from within herself, that shitty feeling she tried to swallow down, but could never keep buried. Bob must’ve seen that same darkness, because he let her in.
She has yet to understand what she feels for him, and what it means for who she thought she was before they met. It’s not animosity; it never really was. When first encountering the others, Yelena felt cornered, on guard, like they would kill her or leave her to die because she would do the same in their positions. But with Bob, they skipped being enemies and strangers and landed in something without a label. Friends, perhaps. Maybe even companions. She doesn’t know.
She still doesn’t.
Even when consumed by The Void or under de Fontaine’s influence, she never feared him, but for him. Every mask he put on, she easily saw through. The Sentry, The Void, all of it.
The first weeks in the Watchtower are a trial run, trying to adjust to living together without killing each other. Besides John and Bob, they're all natural lone wolves, often forgetting that the tower isn’t just for them. They have their own pans and cutlery in self-designated cabinets, drawers they’ve silently claimed in the fridge. Bob shares a shelf with John on the top row because they have distinct Southern appetites the others find ridiculous.
Bucky is the only one who still has yet to fully move in, keeping his apartment in the city as some sort of keepsake from his past. He’s polite, though, when he’s around, and often out on whatever business Congressmen are up to on any given Tuesday. Yelena sees him as a grumpy old grandpa who occasionally graces them with his presence between press conferences and failing to get bills passed. She gets excited when he’s around; even with his metal arm and super soldier serum, he’s a great partner to spar with because he doesn’t hold back.
Alexei, well. They’ve lived together before. Even though it’s been decades, and he’s since dropped the habits he had during their rendezvous in Ohio, he still is and acts like her dad. Yelena sometimes will sneak into his room and shuffle through his things for keepsakes she knows he’s kept from their false life. He must know that she does this, but he lets her keep what she finds. It's mostly photos. A ticket stub for a drive-in, a letter Yelena wrote for Santa asking for a pink Schwinn she never got. She never thought she’d enjoy living with him again.
John is clean, thank Christ, and keeps to himself. He’s not as irritating as she would've expected. Yelena should’ve anticipated this kind of militant cleanliness from such an obedient soldier. She thinks it’s him trying to make up for his past, one politely brewed cup of coffee at a time. The only glaringly annoying thing about him is how much he tries to bond. It must be his old army ways, all camaraderie and teamwork building bullshit. What actually sucks is it works. They actually get along better than in the beginning. Yelena will never confess it to him, even though she never hides her joy when she wins as the renegade during an intense game of Bang! He does use it to her advantage, luring her to hang out with the allure of social deduction card games.
Ava has no sense of privacy or shame and will phase into any room no matter what time or what they’re doing. She is quiet, which should be a virtue in a roommate but makes it much worse. Walking into a room is a gamble because she could be lurking in a corner, being half-tangible just for the hell of it. On multiple occasions now, Ava has walked in on Yelena while showering just to steal her shaving cream or nab a tampon from her drawer. Her presence is almost nice, as the only two girls in the tower, but she’s just mean enough that they keep their distance. Yelena wonders—secretly hopes, really, but will deny it if asked—that maybe they could one day be real friends.
While Yelena knows she’s not the best roommate—she and John have gone neck and neck several times for her leaving crumbs in the cream cheese—at least she keeps to herself, lurking in the corners and rejecting any effort for bonding. She hopes to keep it that way.
She doesn’t.
─── ⋆⋅☼⋅⋆ ───
Tonight is their ‘government-mandated bonding time,’ as Bucky calls it, where Alexei forces them to watch a movie to get to know each other better. While it could be going better, these nights together haven't devolved into a massacre. Yet.
Yelena learns far too much about her new companions through their rancid tastes of film. Bucky always chooses pretentious think pieces, which will make Yelena fall asleep halfway through, and John only ever watches military propaganda movies that he defends vehemently when Ava makes fun of him. Alexei refuses to put something on in English, and Ava only picks horror movies. Bob has the most normal taste, which just means he likes everything.
Because she’s never watched films until she was well into her twenties, Yelena did not liken herself to be a movie person, but she’s growing accustomed to sitting down for two hours at a time. She finds that she loves rock musicals, which Bob showed her on a whim, and that means every time her turn comes around the rest are subjected to their third watch of Next To Normal.
Because John chose the movie last week—who the hell willingly watches The General’s Daughter and not just plays it in the background while doing literally anything else—so the duty falls to Ava tonight. She has seen few movies in her time outside of SHIELD’s control, and yet she lands on some romcom Yelena has never heard of because Bucky refuses to watch her first choice: The Exorcist.
The three leather couches surround the large television from all sides, giving them all the space to tolerate each other’s presences. When they first moved in, John claimed the front-facing couch for his own, leaving Ava and Bucky to awkwardly but amicably split the one on the right. Alexei has his own recliner in the corner that he brought from his old apartment that nobody wants to claim. They call it the cuck chair, but nobody has the heart to tell him to his face.
Yelena lies across the couch on the left, torso propped by the cushioned armrest. Bob is on the other end, her feet pressed under his thigh for warmth. It feels like a sleepover forced upon them by annoying parents, but at least there are snacks and decent company.
There is an odd risk being near Bob that she circumvents by doing nothing special. Yelena doesn’t stray from touching him because she no longer fears being thrown into a painful memory. When he is Bob, not that egotistical Sentry or the self-destructive Void, he poses no threat to her. She enjoys his presence, surprisingly enough, which is rare, because she tolerates people at most.
She distracts herself from the boring movie by balancing a box of sour patch kids between her knees and trying to toss them into Bob as accurately as possible in the dark. He weaves towards the candies, catching them only on occasion. The citric acid sprinkles the front of his sweater. Any loose stragglers, he just plucks from the couch and feeds to her every time she opens her mouth expectantly. His fingers linger on her bottom lip, and she tries not to think about it.
“Are you two even paying attention to the movie?” John questions.
They look at each other and snicker like children caught stealing cookies from a jar.
“Obviously not,” Yelena replies coolly. “What if the fiance answered the door instead? Why is he showing up at her house with flowers if he knows she’s engaged?”
“Because he’s in love with her.”
“No, he’s psychotic. That’s stalker behavior. Even when she’s choosing a romcom, Ava ends up putting on a horror movie.”
“I’ve actually never seen this movie before,” Ava adds. “But, you’re right. This is terrifying.”
“It’s romantic!” John defends.
“Of course you’d say that,” she shoots back. “You’re a man.”
John tries to argue with her further, but Bucky chucks the remote control at him as a threat. He reluctantly returns his attention back to the movie. Yelena glances at Bob, whose face burns a pretty embarrassed pink in the television’s glare. She somehow contains her laughter.
Tonight, he’s Bob and nobody else, clumsy and twitchy and gentle when he sets the sour candy in her tongue. She keeps her gaze on him as she chews, grinning at how his eyes follow the movement of her throat when she swallows.
Something about him makes her come back. She shares the couch, she shares her sweets. Her feet stay pressed against him, inching beneath his legs for warmth, and Bob lets her do it. He’ll even let their hands brush together when they walk side by side and he only flinches away half of the time now.
It’s not just a simple kinship of broken things. This is a feeling Yelena has never experienced before, a feeling she has never had to label and refuses to do so now.
When the movie ends, Yelena is the first on her feet, using the excuse of having a press conference in the morning to advocate against Fisk’s anti-vigilante laws so she doesn’t have to spend a second longer with these people she still barely knows. As expected, she hears Bob putter behind her like a lost pet.
“I feel like I’m a duckling,” he told her one night as they drank coffee on the balcony, the air frigid but grounding, “and you’re the person I imprinted on. I don’t know why you keep me around besides having someone to load the dishwasher. It’s not like I’m much use to you guys without the Sentry.”
“You don’t need to be a hero to have a purpose,” she had replied.
She could tell by the face he made that Bob didn’t believe her, but she will repeat it as many times as she has to until he does.
“Thank God it’s your turn next,” Yelena complains as they walk together to their bedrooms. “I never understood romcoms. It’s not comedy enough to make up for the creepy romance. And why are the men always so mediocre but the women are drop dead gorgeous? That doesn’t seem very fair to me. I want a hot man and an ugly woman to fuck on screen.”
Bob laughs. “Well, sorry to say, but I’m putting on Mission Impossible next week.”
“We watched that one last time.”
“There’s seven more movies,” he says. “Get ready, because we are gonna be Tom Cruising through the franchise.”
She rolls her eyes, unable to hold a chuckle back, and shoves his shoulder. “Ugh, stop it with the bad jokes. You’re as bad as Walker.”
“You still laughed.”
“It was a pity laugh.”
They part ways in the hallway but linger in front of their doors. She doesn’t know what she's waiting for, or if she simply struggles with saying goodnight. The funny thing is their rooms are across from each other. Yelena can’t help but think of those cliche sitcoms she watched to forget Natasha’s death, of shared glances in doorways, lovers just a door and a knock away.
She swats at the thoughts like the pests they are.
“Do you want the rest of these?” Yelena asks, holding out her sour patch kids. “I have plenty more in my room.”
“Oh, um, sure,” Bob says. “Thanks.”
His hands are expansive and still tanned from days spent in the sun, his knuckles marred with bandaged cuts from a boxing match with Bucky. They have a perpetual tremble that he blames on all the drugs he’s taken. When his sleeve rides up just an inch up his arm, there are dozens of thin, self-inflicted lines scattered across his inner wrist. Some are old and white, others fresh and aggressively red. She pretends not to see them as she passes him the box of candy.
A current of energy passes when they touch, then a rush of air over her skin. Yelena sees flashes of a childhood bedroom, crayons littered carpet, doing handstands in the yard. When the memories hit, they come all at once, almost like stepping in and out of a dream. She will never get used to the way it makes her feel.
The reputation he has is bad, but not all of the memories are shameful. They make her sad, yes, but most of her life does. Bittersweet is still sweet in a way.
Breaking the connection between them, Bob tucks his hands into his body and backs away with an apologetic grimace. She knows he saw it, too. He’s always there when she needs him.
“Good night, Lena,” he says before disappearing into his room.
Lena. He calls her that sometimes, in that soft and apologetic tone that must mean something that she has yet to decipher. Only Alexei has ever called her that before. Yelena wonders what about her compels Bob to say her name like that. She always wonders, never acts.
While she can’t even figure out what it makes her feel, to hear her name spoken like it’s a prayer rather than a wound, she does know it’s not as violent or repulsive as she expected. At one point, she’s sure she decided she liked it, because she hasn’t tried to stop him.
Alone in the hallway, she stares at her fingers where they tingle with Bob’s touch, trying to hold onto the flashes of her life he conjured for a few seconds longer. They are not always bad memories. She will have to tell him that one day. Closing her eyes for a brief moment, she searches for blue eyes and red hair in her mind, but soon the memory is gone, like mist on a lake.
Yelena returns to her own bedroom, only to dream of the ghost of her sister walking the halls of the tower she won’t call home.
─── ⋆⋅☼⋅⋆ ───
Compared to the rest of the New Avengers—god, Yelena hates that name—Bob is an enigma of personality and of strength. Simultaneously, he’s the strongest and most fragile of them all. He is made of so many things at once, like all people, except those facets of himself are constantly exposed like sparking wires of a bomb. There are no limits to what he can do except the ones he unintentionally places on himself.
Bucky once called him the bull and the china shop, and Yelena agrees wholeheartedly. This contradiction of self makes Bob so much more human than the rest of them, and yet he's barely human at all anymore. Val and OXE made sure of that.
In the first couple of weeks, Yelena would often forget that he houses such a terrifying and deadly power because, besides that day she found him downing Hennessy right out of the bottle, he looked almost normal. Bob haunted the halls, church mouse quiet and awkward when interacted with. He refuses to burden them any more than he has to, and Yelena knows he’s still bottling things up, even if he allows some of the pressure to be released with little mentions of a past he hates to speak about. The grief he never was relieved of, the guilt of what he’s done and what he had done to him.
When their adjustment period ended and they all actually started to interact with one another, they soon saw the true extent of his condition. Bob does a good job pretending, too, until he can’t. He pretends he doesn’t slip, but when he does, it’s obvious. Drinking on an empty stomach to counteract his heightened metabolism, barricading himself over the smallest of indiscretions, luring shadows into the rooms he enters. His swings are high and swift.
Normally, he’s quiet and skittish, almost childlike in nature. His hands are always busy with either books or tugging at rubber bands on his wrists. He keeps to himself often, leaves no traces of him behind in any room. But he’s one pendulum swing away from crumbling.
On the bad days, it’s like another person. Yelena can always see it coming. Bob becomes confrontational, sarcastic, that invincible type of man that is so easy to topple. He goads John into sparring just so he can show how much he really holds back when he wants to. That is The Sentry, pressing through the gentle shell of Bob. His mania manifests like the hum of an overwhelmed lightbulb before it short circuits and bursts from being fed too much power. Delusional grandeur, a masquerade, self-induced godhood. It doesn’t help that he truly does have the powers of a god, but they can live with him because his aggression is never physical, only a little mean and self-inflicted.
When he inevitably crashes from the heights he’s climbed, the darkness that comes is nearly impenetrable. His dip into The Void is less of a dive and more of a plummet. While Bob doesn’t ever return to Shrouding-Manhattan-In-Shadow depths of The Void, it doesn’t make those days any more pleasant to deal with. They’re quick to memorize the signs, and the only times the New Avengers get along is to be there to catch him when he falls. While The Void doesn’t make another full appearance, they catch glimpses of him on the bad days. He’s never gone, and he never will be. They learn to live with him, too.
Sometimes, when he has a nightmare, Yelena will appear in his room before any of the others and witness The Void again. A tangle of shadows and light blinking in and out of existence as Bob trembles beneath the sheets. His eyes are like the lights of an empty cityscape under the blanket of midnight. He hates himself when he gets like this and apologizes through the darkness even if he can’t stop it from coming. She isn’t afraid to approach him in this state, having to remind her own instinct that he would never hurt her. Not on purpose, anyway.
Yelena thinks of The Void as those broken plates whose fissures are filled with gold. She doesn’t try to fix him because she knows Bob can’t be fixed. The Void isn’t a fracture to be mended but fed. If given care and understanding, she might be able to soothe the edges of his soul so they don’t sharpen.
Today, he doesn’t come out of his room the whole time, not even when Alexei asks if he wants to get pierogies. Yelena worries, but she hides it well.
Sometimes, the crashes come without the rise. They’re softer falls, bad mornings that turn into bad days and worse nights. Bob sleeps those days away, waiting out the sadness. His eyes earn darker shadows under them, and he walks around the Watchtower like a zombie, wearing the same clothes he fell asleep in. He doesn’t eat much, barely speaks. It’s almost as if he’s sleepwalking. Nothing as catastrophic as what has come before ever happens, but it still pains them to see him this way.
Their care for Bob started off as a way to ensure The Sentry and The Void didn’t end up in the hands of someone who would take advantage of how malleable his broken mind was. Bob knew this; he even encouraged it to stay that way.
“The Secret Service doesn’t really become attached to the nuclear codes they guard,” he joked once, though it fell flat.
He wasn’t something to be guarded but protected. One day, he would understand that.
Living with people means seeing every flaw of a person during their most vulnerable moments. It’s near impossible to stay partial in that kind of environment. Eventually, their contractual care became real. Yelena doesn’t know when the shift happened, as she watched the other Avengers slowly come around to actually wanting Bob around, each at their own pace. She hopes he can feel that shift, see the true efforts they're making now.
They can’t always help. That is an unfortunate truth of such mental anguish. His depression isn’t helped by the fact that the rain hasn’t let up in weeks, and whatever new superhuman antidepressants OXE has given him to temper the mood swings are bound to have drastic side effects. Yelena is learning when Bob needs to be held, and when he needs space.
Still. Yelena worries, even if she hides it well.
Her knocks go unanswered, but she enters his bedroom anyway. None of the doors have locks, which makes it easier for her to find him and harder for him to hide. She searches around the room, carefully calling out to him so he’s not startled. Once, she snuck up on him and ended up in a memory of Oksana bleeding out in her arms on the streets of Morocco.
Compared to the others, his bedroom is messy but not filthy, clean but as cluttered as his mind. His laundry basket is stuffed to the brim beside the door to his bathroom. The room looks lived in, like a person actually exists here. Hers is just as barren as the day she moved in. She has no keepsakes, nothing worth keeping. Yelena bets the others are the same.
There are shelves and shelves of secondhand books in his room despite how slow of a reader he is, stored in Ikea bookcases that he built on his own when the others were hunting magical white supremacists through Colorado. He likes self help books, even though Yelena is sure they’re mostly bullshit, but he has a few books of every genre. His favorite author is Matt Haig, a British man who writes sad but fantastical stories, and Bob has every copy of his books.
Those, he rereads on the bad days. Familiarity helps ground him, he explained when they caught him in his third read of The Radleys in as many days. It grants him comfort. Yelena borrowed his copy of How to Stop Time and had to return it because she couldn’t stop crying. She didn’t tell him that.
His large windowsill is lined with tiny green dragon figurines that he’s been collecting since he was little. Pocket dragons, they're called. They were initially his mother’s, he explained to Yelena when she asked, the only good thing he has left of her, his single keepsake from a life he’d rather not revisit. When they go into the city, he’ll enter every antique shop they come across in search of them.
Yelena likes to collect these details of Bob like shards of a picture she plans to reassemble. For instance, he likes western-themed board games and sad movies with happy endings. He’s picky but loves to try new foods, and he eats mangoes like they’re apples because it makes Ava squirm. While he claims not to be religious, he does the sign of the cross when they pass the churches downtown, and he sometimes sings Nearer My God To Thee when he’s trying to calm down.
He’s singing it now, his voice broken and almost frustrated. The mumbled hymnal draws her around his unmade bed. Yelena finds him sitting on the floor with his head bowed between his knees, hands clasped together at the nape of his neck. Bob is shirtless. She can see all of his scars clearly now, and her heart twists in her chest at the sight of them.
A swiss army knife lies between Bob’s feet, the blade retracted and bent into a V. His leg is bouncing frantically. The air around him glows with shields of heat. It almost looks like he’s praying.
Her mind goes on alert. Is this Bob, or is this The Sentry? She still has a hard time telling. Sometimes, when he has a bad day, his powers will show themselves without him knowing. He can control it in small doses, minor mendings of broken cups or heating his coffee with his hands when it gets cold. But other times, it’s like his powers have their own consciousness, working against him. Another manifestation of his self-destructive nature that he masks as being helpful.
Yelena stops for a moment at his side, waiting for him to recognize her presence. When he finally looks up, bulbous tears are rolling down his cheeks. He looks like a wounded child. Bob looks away. He hates when people see him cry.
She sits beside him, cross-legged, and tosses the swiss army knife across the room.
“Have you been here all day?” she asks.
He nods, hiccups as a sob gets caught in his throat. His head drops again in shame.
“It didn’t fucking work,” he murmurs breathlessly. “I don’t know why I thought it would. I’m invincible. I can’t be hurt. But I had to try. I can’t, I fucking can’t.”
“Why is that a problem?” she asks, but as soon as the words leave her lips, she understands. She eyes the knife. “Bob, were you trying to hurt yourself?”
“No,” he says, so quick and deflective that they both know it’s a lie. His head drops again. “I mean… I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I just… I needed relief. I needed something I could control.”
“And you can control this?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Bob says. “That it feels… not good but… like a release. It’s like drugs, I guess. Addicting in a different way.”
She doesn’t understand, but she does. That’s what alcohol does for her. Yelena remembers what it means to be overwhelmed to the point that the only thing that calms her down is pain. When she first escaped the Red Room and was still searching for her sister in Budapest, she’d dig her thumb into the thigh gash where her tracker was to remind her how to breathe. It was the only thing that could keep her from going insane those few, terrible days.
“And I deserve this,” he continues, “for what I’ve done.”
Yelena shakes her head. “That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is.”
His irises flash with that golden glimmer before he closes his eyes, fingers drumming fervently against the base of his spine. Bob is unharmed, thank God, but the shadows being cast from the sunlight drag his shadows across the room like an imposing figure. This must be The Void, then. A softer darkness that is controlled but still present.
“Why the hell am I crying? I’m not even sad,” he says and he’s laughing in a way that raises the hairs on her arm. “I’m pissed. I don’t know why I cry when I’m angry.”
Unsure what to do, Yelena simply sits with him. She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t speak. She sits, and hopes her presence is enough.
Bob’s breathing gradually returns to normal, and he begins to unwind his limbs. She wraps an arm around him. At first, he hesitates, like he expects the touch to hurt, but quickly sinks into her side. He presses his face into her shoulder. His folded legs lie halfway into her lap, arms wound around his stomach. Yelena rests her chin on top of his head, listening to his fragile breathing.
“I’m not gonna get all dark and spooky, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” he says. “At least, I don’t think I am.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why?”
She presses her cheek into his hair. He smells like her stolen shampoo. “Because I want to be. And because it seems like you need a friend right now. Am I right?”
He inhales shakily and nods. Bob’s upper half lies across her lap, his head against her thigh. Yelena curls around him, like if she holds him tight enough, he’ll never have to hurt again. If only that’s how it worked.
“I woke up and remembered what I did to the little girl that your dad saved,” he whispers. “She was young, so her worst memory was losing her toy rabbit on a roller coaster, but still. Sending a kid into the nightmare realm is… that’s gotta be unforgivable, right?”
“I’ve done much worse,” she says.
“I don’t think you have.”
“You don’t know half of what I’ve done.”
Yelena has slaughtered so many people. She has cheated and stolen and contributed to the Red Room by training the girls who were meant to inherit her title. And those are the things she can just barely handle remembering. There are memories she must leave untouched for her own sanity.
“You had no choice,” Bob says. “You were under some sexist’s, like, ultra creepy chemical mind control for most of your life. I was just really sad.”
“Manipulation is manipulation. Valentina took advantage of you when you were vulnerable.”
Bob hums in disagreement, but says nothing else.
“Why do you sing that song?” she asks. “Is it a church song?”
“Yeah, it's the only hymn I remembered growing up.” He’s still crying, though less so than before. “I dunno why, but it calms me down.”
Yelena dries his tears with her thumb. “You’re Catholic?”
“I was raised Catholic. Trust me, there’s a difference.”
“I never understood religion,” she says. “Granted, I was raised by assassins, so I didn’t know what kind of pressure your culture has when it comes to God. But I don’t know if I could find comfort in something so divisive, knowing someone else will use God’s words against who they see as an enemy.”
Kate Bishop had told her something once, after they kissed for the first time, about how if God didn’t want her to fall in love with girls then he should’ve struck her down before she met Yelena. She remembers the looks they got at diners, sharing milkshakes and holding hands under the booth.
“You’d be surprised how much our lives are about God, even when He’s just used to excuse some bullshit people do.” Bob sounds lighter, calmer. “Florida is technically the South, but it’s also its own beast. There’s the Bible Belt influence without really being part of it. We get all the religious restrictions without the Southern charm. But most devout Catholics actually get married before having their bastard child.”
Yelena is surprised by his cold tone, even if it’s not directed at her. “Bastard child?”
He’s quiet for a moment, eyelashes fluttering against her thigh like feathers. “I was born out of wedlock. Not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was for my mom’s side. I was almost not allowed to be baptised, but my mom insisted.”
“And your… your father’s?”
“I don’t know. I never met any of his family. Not like I wanted to, judging by how shitty he was.” He lifts his head from her shoulder, and she immediately misses the weight of him. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be just dumping all of this on you.”
“Don’t ever apologize for sharing things with me. I like listening to you. You always have such interesting things to talk about.”
“You guys are so nice to me,” he whispers, “and I still don’t understand why.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shivers a bit as the heat waves around them ebb away. Yelena wonders if it’s meant to be a comforting gesture, like the warmth of a hug he’s never had.
“I’ve been to lots of places, and it’s always weird to see these strangers going out of their way to help others when they don’t even know someone. Once, I broke my ankle trying to—anyway, I was stuck on the train tracks and some guy in a suit jumped down to help me. I never learned his name. Stranger’s kindness reminds me that not everyone is so cruel. Most people aren’t. But my dad’s shadow is so big. It clouds everything.”
“Do you see yourself as cruel?” Yelena asks.
Bob hesitates, then shakes his head. “I don’t think so. At least, I try my best not to be. But I’ve done so many things I just can’t shake. The memories from when I was… The Void, they sneak up on me on these calm, boring days. I can’t run from it forever.”
“You don’t have to.”
Still shrunken in on himself, but Bob looks up at her through watery lashes. His eyes are this dark thallasic blue she’s only ever seen in the deepest parts of the ocean. Looking at him is diving into the end of the world, where there is no shore to be seen, only endless water in every direction. She could stare at him for hours and still discover something new.
“I don’t want to be like this,” he says. “I’m the fucking Sentry and I’m sitting here crying before I couldn’t… I was chosen. That’s what Val said. I’m special. All of those failed experiments, and I somehow survived. I could be something so much bigger than this.”
His eyes earn that glimmer of gold again, irises reflecting the light from the window. Yelena hates to hear Valentina’s name on his lips with that lingering bit of hope. The delusions she fed him for her own sake were just so she could stay out of federal prison, but it is not an easy thing to shake. She remembers that misgiven hope from when she first started taking contracted jobs for Val, trying to make a change.
Because Bob is as fragile as he is kind, as strong as he is unstable. He is so susceptible to what people think. In the wrong hands, he could be violent. Yelena hates to think of him this way, as a thing that has to be medicated and controlled, but she has to on these days where he is delicate.
The light dies, and he closes his eyes. “But right now, I just feel like all I’ll ever be is wasted potential.”
“That’s not you. At all.” With him still in her lap, Yelena hears his stomach growl with protest. “Have you eaten today?”
“No. I barely had the strength to get out of bed.”
She stands and brings him up with her. “Do you want to get burgers from Mad Cow?”
His eyes light up, and he nods eagerly.
“Get some shoes on, then. We’re stealing Walker’s motorcycle.”