Chapter Text
Because Bob’s powers and Bob himself are still supposed to be a secret, Valentina and her PR team spin the whole thing so that John gets the credit. The home meth lab gets blamed for the ’explosion’ and John supposedly leaped the perp, his teammate and a random firefighter to the safety of a nearby roof.
It’s not quite the wholesome and marketable saving kittens and kissing babies publicity Valentina had initially envisioned for their partnership with the NYFD, but it does make John trend on social media on a positive note for once for a day or two, never mind that it’s all stolen valor as far as he’s concerned, but Valentina’s happy in her Valentina way.
"Congratulations on not fucking that up," she shakes her fists in the air in celebration, eyes widening in an exaggerated impression of cheer. "So let’s quit while we’re ahead."
She finally relented to their new policy and grabbed a guest pass at Reception, and that should’ve probably been their first cue: she’s really not the kind of person to give in without taking something in return. "Robert, we need to keep you under wraps until all this has blown over, so no more of these..." She trails off, snapping her fingers.
"Training seminars?" Mel pipes up from behind her right shoulder. "Refresher courses?"
"...silly enrichment activities. The rest of you are free to keep up with them if you so desire, but not to the detriment of your actual work."
Ava scoffs. "Since when do we take orders from you?"
Valentina aims a condescending smile at her. Even without counting their history so far, it’s truly astounding how she manages to piss off each and everyone of them just by virtue of being in the same room. The guest pass policy isn’t enough, they need to fucking ban her from the tower, or maybe just kill her for good. Looking around at the others, John’s pretty sure Bucky and Yelena are only a wrong word away from jumping over the table and going for her throat. The only ones not openly glaring at her are Bob and Alexei, and Mel of course. Alexei is staring at her with a grin, but in the way chimps grin, probably plotting her death and consequent dismemberment in his head. Next to him, Bob made himself small, hunched over in his chair and looking down at his hands—a stark contrast from earlier that morning when he’d been scrolling through their press and beaming every time John was mentioned ’rescuing’ people on that roof. On the other side, Mel wears her professional PA mask, as usual. For all the times she went behind her boss’s back to help them, she’s still ultimately Valentina’s people. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.
Valentina moves her gaze around the room. "You live in this tower for free, don’t you? Who do you think approves the budget for all your ’improvement seminars’ and your cute little family meals." She shrugs her shoulders and tilts her head, smiling in mock fondness before flapping her hand in a dismissive wave. "Save all that born-again Christian redemption crap and wholesome ’found family’ nonsense for the cameras—"
"Oh! On that note, Netflix has reached out to us for a ’Day in the Life’ style documentary—"
"Yes!" Alexei pumps his fist.
John, Bucky and Ava all shout, "No!" at the same time with the same degree of contempt in their voice.
Yelena rolls her eyes. "I thought we were keeping Bob a secret?"
Mel clears her throat. "I’ll put that down as TBD."
Ava actually stands up and points a threatening finger at her. "You’ll put that down as a no."
Valentina raises her hands and gestures for everyone to calm down, like they’re unruly children. "As I said, I don’t mind spending some of that very generous budget for all the team bonding and personal betterment activities you may want—as long as our dear Robert isn’t publicly associated with you in any official capacity and as long as you keep up with the training simulations."
"The DoDC has sent more data that can be integrated in different scenarios," Mel pipes up. "I’ve e-mailed you all a breakdown of the intel data packet."
"You are Avengers!" Valentina exclaims, throwing her hands out in a ta-dah! gesture. "You shouldn’t concern yourselves with small matters."
John snorts in disbelief. "...like helping people?" He looks around the rooms to the others, but pretty much they’ve all checked out of the conversation.
"Oh, you know what I mean!" She chuckles and waves a hand, dismissively. "You need to train for the next Ultron, the next Thanos, the next space...alien threat. Whatever."
"And in the meantime, what? We stay locked inside this tower, pose for pictures and just fucking sit with our thumbs up our asses?" By the end of it he’s shouting. He swallows the growl that’s been steadily climbing up his throat and exhales through his nose. He realizes he stood up at some point and he’s now leaning on the table with his fingers curled into fists.
Everyone is looking at him. Valentina arches a mocking eyebrow and whatever she’s about to say, John is pretty confident he’s going to want to squeeze the words out of her throat until she can’t say anything anymore.
It’s Yelena who speaks next, instead. "Walker, sit down."
He glances her way and finds her looking back at him with a level stare. Yelena, who was so intent on getting Valentina’s ass for attempting to kill them all and was first in line to rescue and support Bob, that same Yelena is now just fine to have Valentina walk over them because she gets to lead the Avengers when they’re all a bunch of killers and rejects?
He slams his fists on the table, cracking the surface and storms off before he says something he can’t take back.
Their meeting was taking place in the open area of their command center, so he can’t even slam the door on his way out and rather than wait like an idiot in front of the elevator in plain view of everyone, he bursts through the door to the stairs. He was quick to put some distance between himself and the others but even so, he still catches Valentina’s, "Sheesh, who pissed in his cereals?" before the door slams shut behind him.
He bounds down the stairs. Valentina sprang the debrief on them right as they were having breakfast, so John is wearing his usual lounge wear of sweatpants and a tee, so maybe he can go to the gym or out for a jog. He already went out earlier that morning, but his body is buzzing with adrenaline and his head is a jumbled mess so he needs the extra exercise.
Above him, the door to the stairs opens and then closes again. He barely hears any steps, which means it’s either Yelena or Ava and as no one manifests out of thin air two inches from his face, he’s gonna bet on the former.
His suspicions are confirmed when he hears her call out his name. When he looks up, her face is peeking down at him from three flights above him.
He groans and sits down on the bottom step to wait, chin resting on his closed fist. When she reaches him, she steps over him and then positions herself in front of him, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, one eyebrow raised like she’s expecting him to say something.
"What." He grinds out.
Now both eyebrows go up and she looks sideways. "So, that went not great."
He barks out a laugh. "You’re telling me. So now we’re good with Valentina calling the shots?"
Yelena’s features instantly lose all the playfulness and her face evens out in a serious expression. She even sits up straighter. "She’s right—" John opens his mouth but she stops him in his tracks with a glare. "You guys live in her tower and she’s got her hands on the money purse. We need her resources and her contacts to do this job."
"So when you said we owned her, you actually meant she owned us."
How quickly they bowed back under her say so, but then again they’ve all been property one way or another for most of their lives, except for arguably Alexei, so maybe they just can’t help it to go back to what feels familiar. Even Bob sold himself off to be a test subject. If John had a therapist, they’d probably spend the next ten years unpacking that shit, but he trashed all the business cards he got from Olivia and he keeps shoving the ones he gets from Bucky and Yelena and, on one memorably embarrassing occasion, Sam at the back of his bedside table drawer. Bob swears therapy is helping him a lot, but he has no choice really, not when his depressive episodes risk sending everyone to their own personalized hell and meds don’t really work on his new body chemistry.
John knows exactly what’s wrong with him, he doesn’t need someone with a degree in picking through people’s brains to tell him. As Yelena put so eloquently, he’s a piece of trash and there’s not much he can do about that, except try and use his training and his experience and his body to protect people. He had started to think that this New Avengers thing would be a step in that direction after the unmitigated disaster that have been the last three years of his life, but now he’s not so sure anymore. He’ll give Valentina another month or two before she starts sending them all out on black ops disguised as taking down terrorist threats or some shit. And the way she looks at Bob, sometimes...with fear, yes, as she should, but also something cold and calculating underneath.
Yelena lets out a deep sigh. "Walker, Walker, Walker," she clicks her tongue. "You’re not listening to me. Why you act so dumb, I don’t know. Sure, you’re dumb a lot of times, but you’re smart also. Sometimes." She pinches her thumb and forefinger so there’s barely a half inch distance between them. "A liiiitle bit."
He stares at her, unimpressed. "Right."
"Who are we, Walker? Just losers, right? Well, maybe except Bucky, but he’s also a bit of a loser or he’d be hanging out with his bff." Or maybe he’s just biding his time and keeping an eye on all of them until he can subpoena them all into testifying against Valentina. At this point, John would probably just air out all of the shit she had him do without even asking for immunity. "Point is, we don’t have money," She starts counting on her fingers, "we don’t have friends, we have some contacts, but only low level ones, yes?"
"Bucky is a literal congressman."
She grimaces, shaking her head. "Well, not a very...ah, ’politically gifted’ one," she points out. "But yes, he’s working that side."
He frowns, brought up short. "What do you mean?"
"Valentina is smart and cagey bitch, yes?" That’s a pretty good assessment. John nods. "So we have to be smarter and cagier. So you see, Bucky is in Washington making nice with all the politicians, even the ones he doesn’t like, because everyone hates Valentina because she has something on all of them, yes?"
"The enemy of my enemy, et cetera."
She points a finger at him. "Exactly!"
"So he’s working the, what, the reputation and the money angle?" He frowns. "And you’re gathering resources and making acquaintances on the down low, away from prying eyes. In your office. In the East Village."
"Yes!" She pats his cheek a couple of times. "See? You are sometimes smart."
"Right. So the rest of us are supposed to do what? Just suck it up and play along?"
"Weeeell. You, Alexei and Bob aren’t exactly masters of subtlety," she shrugs. "Ava, I’m sending to her West Coast friends with my business card and a couple of proposals next week."
Objectively it does make sense. As Yelena said, they realistically don’t have the resources to run the whole enterprise on their own, wouldn’t even know where to begin from. Here they are, what, three weeks in already and Bob still doesn’t have a valid ID, Yelena has three fake American passports but no real green card, Ava has no concrete legal footprint anywhere they could find, John owes six months rent to his former housing company and a sum as yet to be determined in child support to Olivia and IRS is after Alexei’s limo business to the surprise of absolutely no one. They’ve been going on missions under someone else’s orders for most of their lives and John and Alexei—Alexei—are the only ones with some experience being official superheroes.
They’re not ready to go independent on this Avengers shit.
"But you’re telling me now."
"Eh, between you and Bucky I can only take so much grouchy grunting." She rolls her eyes. "Seriously, every time I go to gym after you guys, it smells like manly angst."
"And the others? I get not wanting to tell Alexei, but you have to tell Bob, you saw how he was in there," She has the decency of looking a little chastised at that at least. "And with those two...guys he’s got locked in his head, it’s best we keep him happy. Which reminds me, by the way, what the fuck was that thing with the flying?"
She leans back at his sudden vehemence, her features scrunching up in a confused frown. "What thing with the flying? You mean Bob?"
"Yes, I fucking mean Bob!" He shoots up and starts pacing his single step, but immediately feels ridiculous so he stops. "You treat him with kid gloves, he’s never even had an active role in training scenarios—"
"Except that time he played bad guy and got you killed." She snorts. "Hah! That was hilarious."
"That barely even counts and I killed him first!" He throws up his arms. "Whatever! That’s not the point."
"Then what is the point, Walker?"
"He’s not trained, he’s not ready for any kind of—of live scenario and you had him risk our lives on a fucking whim?"
She stands up slowly, unfolding her legs and then straightening up from a crouch in a single, sinuous movement. With deceptive nonchalance, she leans against the handrail with one elbow and crosses her leg over the other at the ankle. She regards him in silence for a long moment. "What makes you think that it was on a whim?" She raises her eyebrows. "You don’t train with Bob anymore, how do you know what he’s capable of?"
Well, she’s got him there but she doesn’t have to say it like that. He crosses his arms over his chest and tries to ignore the way his face feels hot all of a sudden.
"You’ve seen how she acts with him, yes?" She doesn’t need to specify who ’she’ is. John has certainly noticed, yes, and if he has, so has Yelena who watches over Bob like a hawk. "She’s like baba yaga, she says she wants to help make him superhero and is ever so helpful but then she puts him down and sometimes I see her look at him like she wants to eat him."
Okay, so Yelena has definitely noticed and apparently has had enough time to sit with it that she’s built a whole mythology around it. John doesn’t know much about the baba yaga except that there’s a hut with chicken legs at some point and that she’s an old witch. No chicken legs on the Watchtower for sure, but Valentina is definitely a witch.
"Bob needs to figure out his powers and the Sentry thing before she gets all," she claws at the air on the sides of her face and grimaces, "in there again."
Keeping her away from the tower seems to have done the trick so far, but if she’s banning Bob from team activities, then she must be cooking up something and is only waiting for the right moment to snatch him up and well, certainly not eat him, but maybe she’s got another dye job and a golden suit ready to go.
"So you’re training him to use his powers," he concludes for her.
She nods. "He’s really strong," her eyes pop out comically, "like really strong and now he can hover a little bit, but I am busy woman, what with being team co-leader and all."
"Okay, fine, I’ll see if I can take some hours off your hands, but maybe let’s leave the flying out, huh? The guy is afraid of heights."
She pinches her chin and hums. "Maybe we work on that, push him off the landing pad."
"I was thinking more like some cardio and breathing exercises and maybe run some stress scenarios in the training room to help with his control issues."
Yelena dismisses him with a wave of her hand. "Whatever, as long as you don’t infect him with your manly angst."
He grimaces. "I’ll try not to."
"Good. And then we steal Mel away and put Valentina in prison for the rest of her life." She tilts her head to the side and shrugs. "Or kill her, I am not picky."
Yeah, he’s not picky there either. "Sounds like a plan."