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She found him in the living room of the Avengers Tower, which she guessed was technically the Watchtower now, though no one was ever going to call it that.
He was curled up in his favorite chair near the window overlooking the city, a lamp positioned over him, shining down on the book propped open in his lap. At her approach, he glanced up, then looked down again, smiling while avoiding eye contact. “Hi.”
“Hey.” She lingered just inside the doorway. “Can’t sleep?”
“Yeah.” He gave an awkward, one-shouldered shrug. “You know.”
“Yeah. I know.” The taste of vodka still filled her mouth and burned in the back of her throat. She’d had too much, but it hadn’t been enough. Despite the fuzziness in her head, the memories were still there. Not that they ever really went away.
Things were better than they had been. There was no doubt about that. She had a purpose now, and friends, and a father who was part of her life again. Despair loved an empty space. When your life was full of people and things that mattered, the darkness had fewer places to put in roots and grow. But it was never really gone. It lurked around the edges, in the cracks. Every day she looked at the faces around her and thought, They’re here now, but they won’t always be. People disappear. All the time. She knew, because she had made many people disappear.
She knew it was that way for all of them. For Bob, too. They’d known each other for a few months now. There were nights like this. They didn’t need to explain anything to each other.
Yelena cleared her throat. “Anyway. I was just…wandering. I’ll let you get back to your reading.”
“Stay.” He said it immediately, with surprising force. After a few seconds, he mumbled, “I mean…if you want to.”
She approached slowly, pulled up another chair, and sat.
Bob was wearing loose, drawstring pajama pants and an oversized, long-sleeved cotton shirt. He seemed to favor baggy clothes. She was similarly dressed in faded pants and a Pussy Riot t-shirt.
“What book is it?” she asked.
He held it up. A tattered copy of Watership Down.
“Oh. With the bunnies?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw the movie once. Years ago. There was a song. It went like—” she paused, then started to hum the melody.
He sang along: “Is it a kind of dream, floating out on the tide?”
“Yes. That one.” He had a nice voice, she thought. Not that he was a good singer, exactly—he was a little off-key, and his voice wobbled. But she liked the sound of it anyway.
Bob smiled, but it faded quickly. His eyes were a little red, the skin around them a little puffy. Might’ve just been fatigue. But she said, “Bob? Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” he said in his scratchy little voice, “Sure.”
She waited.
His gaze wandered to the window. Slowly, he closed the book and set it aside. “After the whole…thing…the suicide hotlines got flooded with calls,” he said. “I read about it. I guess that’s not surprising, is it? I still don’t remember what I did, and I know it wasn’t exactly me doing it. But it happened because of me. Everyone suddenly stuck in their worst memories, and no one really knew what was happening. People were—they were really scared.” His voice cracked. “The ones who already had mental health problems were hit the hardest.”
“No one died,” she reminded him. “It was a bad dream. They all woke up. And it’s over now.”
“Is it?”
She didn’t quite know how to answer that. She wanted to say there had been no lasting harm, but she didn’t know that. Had the actual suicide rate gone up? She wasn't sure she wanted to know. Of course, no one except the New Avengers knew that Bob (or rather, his alter ego) had been responsible for the events of that day, but that probably wasn't much comfort for him. He knew.
“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“We’ve all hurt people,” she said quietly.
He picked up the book and turned it over in his hands. "I know. I just..." His head tipped down so his brown hair fell like a curtain around his face. “I don’t want it to happen again. But I know that as long as I’m alive, it could happen again.”
“Bob.”
“I know. I know it doesn’t do any good to think like this or talk like this. I'm trying not to.”
“Are you thinking about…doing anything? To yourself?”
He hesitated only briefly before replying, “I wouldn’t. Not after you guys saved me. I wouldn’t do that to you."
Was death even an option for him, now? Bullets couldn't pierce him, falls wouldn't put a scratch on him, but he still needed food, water, oxygen. Didn't he?
He gripped the book like a lifeline. "You know, I start thinking 'I wish I had never signed up for those trials,' but then I wouldn't have met you. Any of you. I guess I just wish there was a way to get rid of these powers. It’s not like I can actually use them to do anything good. Right now, that part of me is kind of asleep. But if it starts waking up, it might come back.”
Was there really an it? Even if he didn’t always remember the things he did, Bob, Sentry and the Void were all part of the same person. Or…was it that simple? Was there actually someone, something else living inside him, something with its own will and goals? Did Bob himself even know for sure?
After a brief pause, she reached out and put a hand on his arm. He twitched, but didn’t pull away. “If that happens, we will deal with it,” she said. “All of us. Together. Like we did before.”
He looked down at her hand. His lips moved silently for a moment, then pressed together. She let her hand linger a few seconds longer, then pulled back.
“Why are you all so nice to me?” he whispered.
A lump rose to her throat. She wanted to hug him. But it felt somehow like too much, in that moment. He seemed so delicate, so raw. A mass of exposed nerves. She understood, because she felt the same. Touch—connection—brought the possibility of deeper hurts. It was risky. But living without it was intolerable. It could be exhausting, at times, trying to navigate a balance.
She thought about just touching his arm again. Instead, on impulse, she leaned back in her chair, lifted up one leg and laid it across his knees as though he were a footrest. He looked down at her pajama-clad leg with an unreadable expression. She was wearing fuzzy blue socks.
“It’s normal for people to be nice to their friends. Yes? Well...unless it's John. For him, 'being nice' is being slightly less of an asshole.” She smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “We've saved each other’s lives. We’ve all been in each other’s heads.”
He sniffled. “Yeah.” He gave her a small, fleeting smile in return. His hand settled onto her ankle, gave it a gentle squeeze.
They remained that way for a few minutes, her leg resting across his legs, neither of them speaking. Her gaze flicked over the cover of the book, which was propped on the arm of the chair. She’d never seen it before tonight. She wondered where he’d gotten it. Ordered it online, maybe. Bob almost never left the Tower. She'd coaxed him out a few times, taken him on shopping excursions or out to eat, but he never quite shed his jumpiness. Always furtively glancing around like he expected to be ambushed. No wonder that he was drawn to a story about rabbits.
She’d never read Watership Down herself, and she'd forgotten many details from the movie. Aside from the song, what she remembered mostly was the image of the rabbits’ god of death—a hovering, long-eared shadow with pale eyes. Eerie, yet also strangely nonthreatening. In the end, it had come to the main character as an old friend. You’ve been tired. Come with me. And the rabbit, weary and old, had laid down on the grass and his spirit had sat up and bounded away alongside the shadow-rabbit.
The death she’d brought to others, over the years, had not been so peaceful. Still. There was something comforting in the reminder that death could be that way. Something natural, even friendly.
She had been ready, in that moment, hadn’t she? When she’d looked up and seen that black silhouette hovering in the sky, cape streaming behind it. Those eyes, shining like points of pale fire in a bottomless void. She’d seen the shadows reaching, spreading, devouring everything in their path, and she had walked into them, not knowing what would happen, knowing it might mean simple oblivion. A snap and then a blank eternity. She had been able to help him only because she’d been fully prepared to let go and face that nothing. It had seemed fair. It had seemed right. A bringer of death could not expect to die cozy in bed at the age of ninety. Natasha had faced this, had crossed this bridge before her. Vanishing into him, she'd thought, was probably the best she could hope for.
And yet here she still was. Here they both were.
Once you had accepted death in your heart, invited it in, every day was something extra—a bonus, a surprise. Not a gift, exactly, since it had not been given. It simply was. When she found herself getting caught up in old patterns of dull, ugly shame, walking the same circular pathways in her head, she thought back to that moment, facing the wall of blackness, and was astonished anew at her own existence, at the rareness and beauty and briefness of being something instead of nothing, at the knowledge that you could step into that darkness and come out the other side. Not unchanged or unscathed, exactly, but still whole, still you.
Outside the window, a dim glow lay in the east. The dawn was coming, painting a slowly brightening streak of molten silver across the sky. His hand was warm against her ankle. She could feel the shape of his fingers even through the fabric of her sock.
“It’s late,” she said. “Or…early, I guess. Should we try to get some sleep, or just start our day?”
“I don’t think I want to sleep.”
“Me neither.” After a pause, she lifted her leg from his knees and stood. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“That sounds nice.”
She paused, then leaned down and kissed his cheek. She could feel the tickle of stubble against her lips. His eyelids flickered in surprise, and his breath caught in his throat. She straightened and pulled back, feeling a reflexive surge of embarrassment—was she being too sappy? No. Life was too short and fragile to avoid sappy things.
Their gazes met. His eyes were wide, dark, all-devouring. A warm, velvet blackness. It had a pull, a gravity. But there was light inside, a dim-bright glow around the edges of his pupils. Eclipse eyes. Then he ducked his head, hiding behind the curtain of his hair again, his breathing unsteady.
She went to find the coffee maker. There was one stashed behind the bar. As she spooned grounds in, Bob remained curled in his chair. He always sat like that, his body language inward drawn, as though he were trying to take up as little space as possible, as though he were silently apologizing for the inconvenience of his existence. It would take time to unlearn that, and he might never fully lose the habit. But as she watched, he uncurled just a little.
There’d been so many subjects in those experimental drug trials. Anyone at all could have ended up with his reality-defying powers. Would a more stable, a more "normal" person have been better? Hard to say. Someone else might have been more tempted by the power. Even as Sentry, flush with delusions of grandeur, he had refused to harm his friends. Even as Void, the embodiment of despair and loneliness, he had not permanently erased anything. It had still been bad, yes; to say no harm done would be naive. But it could have been so much worse.
She believed in no gods, yet she said a silent prayer of thanks that it had been him.