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It only took 10 minutes for John’s arm to be buried cleanly through the punching bag.
With a huff, he pulls his arm back, watching impassively as sand trickles onto the floor, a dull ache rattling across his chest. There is stinging pain across his knuckles, and he focuses on it, letting it ground him back to the present. He had been replaying the conversation at dinner over and over again, cursing at himself for being such a fuck up.
He roughly palms his face, turning to the left wall of the gym, where he had tossed his water bottle earlier. He doesn’t grab it. Instead, he sinks onto the floor, tucking his head between his knees.
He doesn’t know how long he stays in that position before he hears a voice near the door. “Are you done punching your feelings out now?” Yelena.
He hadn’t heard her come in, but that wasn’t a surprise. Her childhood in the Red Room had afforded her feather-light footsteps, as what is necessary for a child assassin. Plus, John probably wouldn’t have even noticed if Alexei came in with the ringing that’s in his ears.
“Are you here to beat me up for being mean to Bob?” He asks dryly, unable to stop himself from acting like a dick.
“No.” She strides forward, casually plopping herself on the bench diagonal to John, “I already know you feel guilty. And that you are probably going to make his favorite foods for the next week to make it up to him.”
John looks up at her. Her face is impassive, neither forgiving or condemning. Not for the first time, John is struck by how similar Yelena sometimes is to Lemar. She cuts right through John’s bullshit the same way his best friend used to.
“Yeah, I do feel guilty. It was a terrible thing to say.” John says, staring at his palms.
“He forgave you right away.” John can’t help but scoff. He hears her sigh.
“He forgave you because he understands that only some personal trauma shit would make you say something like that.”
It had already been a bad day. One of those days where John could feel his threadbare control humming underneath his skin, threatening to snap. He had tried to avoid everyone until his brain would stop screaming at him, but wasn’t able to skip their mandatory family dinner. (It had been instituted by Alexei when they first became a team to “instill deep bonds with each other as comrades” and easily grew from something they reluctantly participated in to something they all looked forward to). He mostly spent dinner brooding into his food, barely answering the few light questions that were tossed his way.
But then, Bob had launched into a story about an awkward conversation he had at the grocery store, ending it with,“ugh, I am going to kill myself.” And John’s immediate response was, “suicide is for fucking cowards.”
The silence had been loud. And John hadn’t stuck around to see everyone’s reaction, not willing to see the reproach on their faces. Because he knew that was a fucking awful thing to say. He was there during that one late night when Bob had told the team just how “low” his lows had actually gotten. And considering everyone’s shitty personal histories, it was a horrific thing to say with any one of them in the room, much less all of them.
And that’s how John found himself in the gym, whaling on what he is pretty sure is a super soldier-equipped punching bag. Because of course he immediately gets pissed off the second he fucks up.
Yelena’s voice brings him back to the present, “I know you have your weird macho-masculine ‘I don’t like to talk about my feelings’ thing. But it does help you know. Talking about things.”
He doesn’t want to talk. He is content to never talk about his feelings ever, actually. But he knows that he owes her something after what happened.
“I had a brother who died.” He starts, slowly. He hasn’t talked about him in years. Refused to.
“Lemar?” She asks hesitantly, likely having heard from Bucky how touchy John is about him.
John shakes his head, “no, though he was basically my brother. I loved him like one.” John feels a lump in his throat, “no, I am talking about my real brother. Mike. Micheal.” He looks back up at Yelena, but quickly looks away, unable to handle the weight of her gaze.
“He was older than me. Almost a decade. So of course, I thought he was the coolest person in the whole world. I wanted to be just like him.” John lets out a laugh that is anything but amused, “When he graduated high school, he went into the military. And then he was dead. ‘Fell in battle’ my parents told me.”
Yelena catches on immediately to what he is not saying. “He committed suicide.”
John nods, “yeah. My parents never told me, but I figured it out after seeing the paperwork that came with his body. Shot himself a year into service.”
John’s parents had refused to accept it, even after he had found out what really happened. They continued to live with the delusional fantasy that their eldest son was a war hero, and used it to berate John to become a “good man like your brother.” Every time he tried to bring up the truth, he would immediately be screamed at to stop spreading lies. But he couldn’t help himself, when his parents went on and on about the good that Mike did for his country. The only good Mike did was fertilze the soil with his fucking brain matter.
It got to the point where even John questioned once or twice whether or not Mike had actually killed himself. He eventually learned to keep quiet about it, but his relationship with his parents had never really recovered. He ended up finding any and all excuses to stay over the Hoskins’ when he could to avoid having to live in the shadow of his dead older brother.
“You know I tried to tell myself that all my bullshit was because of what happened when I was Captain America. Or maybe because of the shit I had to see and do in the military. But it's not. I was an angry, fucked up person, long before then.” John says, feeling himself get worked up again, “Because I hate him for it. I hate my brother for blowing his brains out. How messed up is that?”
There. Any of the miniscule goodwill Yelena had left for him has surely left with swiftness.
He feels himself slump over, anger quickly turning into exhaustion.
“At first, when Natasha died, I wasn’t sad.” Yelena says, after a moment of silence. John looks up, startled. Yelena was just as reluctant to talk about Natasha as John was to talk about Lemar. She was no longer looking at him, but rather out towards the room, “I was angry. So angry that we had finally reconciled–became sisters again after twenty years, and then she had to go and die on me. I was so mad. She left me alone.”
Yelena looks back at John, and they lock eyes, “because at least if I was mad at her, I could feel something other than broken.”
Her words sink into him, connecting with something inside him that he had never been able to articulate. Not even to Lemar. Though he suspects his best friend, who had been significantly more emotionally intelligent than him, had known what John had been feeling all these years even without John ever being able to explain it.
John clutches at his chest, feeling his insides tighten. His eyes were suddenly stinging and his breath was becoming labored. He watches as Yelena lithely rises from the bench and slides down to join him on the floor.
“You are not fucked up for feeling angry about being left behind,” She says softly, “You don’t hate him. You have never hated him. You just feel grief. About losing him.” He lets her grab one of his hands and hold it between hers.
“I am sorry about your sister.” He whispers, knowing his voice will crack if he tries to say it any louder.
“I am sorry about your brother.” She responds, voice equally quiet.
As they sit there, on the gross floor of the Watchtower’s gym, he feels something in him slowly start to settle.