Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They take care of eachother. All of them. After it’s all said and done.

It's strange and unspoken and only after an initial month of near-silence, near-fights over fridge space and who left the burner on, who tracked in mud, who disappeared without a word for two days.

Early on, John had started growling about structure and routines. He would leave post-it note warning signs on the fridge: Label your leftovers and Don’t touch my coffee. In the third week he taped up a calendar in the kitchen. Color-coded it. Yelena wrote “NO” across three entire weeks in permanent red marker. Ava vanished the day the chart went up and didn’t reappear until someone (probably Alexei) had used it as a napkin for hot wings. Bucky was the only one who seemed unfazed, calmly taking it out with the rest of the trash.

Without fail, one of them would push for one reason or another, stubborn as a mule, and everyone else would push back, because Valentina Allegra de Fontaine’s shining New Avengers (lawsuit pending) are half-feral on good days.

And it worked. Settled into…whatever this is. Taking care of eachother, even though it doesn't… necessarily feel like it all the time, at least how he thinks it would. He's sure it wouldn't look like it, not to anyone else, but Bob’s been alone long enough—truly alone—to recognize it for what it is. 

John won't talk about how he checks the tower’s perimeter despite the hundreds of security cameras they've got, even when no one asks him to—especially when no one asks him to. When Ava is too quiet to tease him, or Yelena hasn’t made eye contact all day, he'll say something about needing air, and no one will call him out on that. They won't call him out when he lingers in the common room, pretending to flip through channels or scroll aimlessly on his phone until the last straggler from a late mission drags themselves back in.

And Ava doesn't say much regardless, good or bad unless it's at someone’s expense, but she watches more than any of them. She doesn't ask what's wrong. She just appears. A folded blanket over someone’s shoulders before they've even registered the chill. When John's pacing again, she’ll wordlessly stalk after him, a shadow on the wall that is warm and deliberate and will drag him back in before he loses himself, just as he dragged her back into the safety of Alexei’s limousine… what feels like a lifetime, and not a few months ago.

Saving themselves, Bob thinks, as Bucky drags them all, him included, into quiet training—small exercises, slow breathing, grounding. As Bucky marches into the jaw of the beast that is Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, steady and ready to chip down her demands before the rest of them have to. He’s the wall she runs up against when she presses too hard, on Ava’s record, on John’s optics, on Yelena’s volatility, on Bob…Bob’s everything, really.

And there’s Alexei—who calls them children and moya sem'ya and fools all in the same breath. He brings people food that they didn’t ask for, and on those nights that are too quiet, the wrong kind of quiet that draws them one-by-one out of their rooms and into their commons, he starts talking. Softly, at first. Drifting between broken English and Russian. Stories maybe true, maybe not, but always filled with enough warmth to fill the quiet. And he never expects anyone to answer. He just talks, and keeps talking, until someone finally breathes a laugh, or throws a pillow, or asks for seconds of whatever he had burned and called “dinner.”

And Yelena.

Yelena.

Yelena can make a racket loud enough to shake the heaviness off of any room. Yelena will. Gloating John into wrestling until he snaps out of his brooding, poking at Ava’s quiet like she’s testing the surface of a frozen lake. She will stare down Valentina after Bucky with the same surety she did during her “press conference,” and snap at Alexei’s heels when he gets too lost in nostalgia. Just to remind everyone they’re still alive—that none of this gets to crush them without a fight.

Like a force of nature in her own right. Like someone who is shaking off the daze of being asleep for far too long.

John still slams doors hard enough to rattle the walls, and Yelena still snarls and stalks out on her worst days when she craves the familiarity of alcohol, and Ava still disappears, physically, and Bucky sometimes disappears into himself, and Alexi pokes too much at the open, unspoken wound that is Sentry. 

And what doesn't Bob do? On his worst days, he says something too blunt, too cold, and snaps at Yelena when she reminds him gently and habitually, to take his medication, like she always does, but on those days, he is painfully paranoid of everything: the pills, and the way the hallway lights buzz like they're whispering something he can't quite hear. Or when his withdrawal kicks in, and the urge to take something makes him downright mean.

But they come back, always. In the fallout their bad decisions.

…Just…

Not initially.

Not in that weird first month when they were all still half-feral and tip-toeing around the other, waiting for something to finally break the illusion that this was a team , because no one wanted to be caught caring too much before the others.

(Except for Yelena. She would, unblinking and unflinchingly, tell the others when they were being cowards in a way that wasn’t unkind. Just honest. Someone who had already decided that these people were hers, and dared anyone to tell her differently. She would dare Bob to tell her differently.)

“We stick together from now on.”

They did. For all their... everything, they never left.

And between all that not-leaving, there was Bob. 

Bob, who did not go on missions. Who did not spar or strategize. Who was powerless on these good-days, and…dangerous, on the bad ones.

He had no suit. No combat role. And for a while that was okay. The quiet felt… earned . Until it didn’t , and sitting started to feel decidedly like dead weight, when the others would trail back-in forms missions, bruised and buzzing hot with adrenaline, and he’d still  be there. Still exactly where they left him. He tried not to let the thoughts eat at him, but slowly, it did. This want and force got bigger the longer he ignored it. And he couldn’t stop it.

He didn’t want in —not like that, and describing it as “wanting in” feels too… simply? Strangely childish? Yelena is quick to remind him that he’s “on the team.” Whatever that team is now (Thunderbolts? Or The New Avengers?). But it didn’t feel that, and he still, almost shamefully, wanted to matter, to be part of the mechanism that is this.

So he started small. Very, very small.

Because the Tower is. Well, it’s lived in now, clearly, but by people who may or may not have ever lived with anyone else before. Six people all on one floor, because the rest of the tower is still under construction. People who know how to break into government databases, but forget to rinse out of the coffee pot, and are too scared or frustrated to tell anyone else if it breaks (which it did, twice in one month). Who will spend six hours in reconnaissance, but somehow won’t remember where the clean dish towels go.

So Bob started with the towels. One day, and there is no particular reason for that day, he just folded them neatly and stacked them in the drawer where he thought they’re supposed to live. He didn’t say anything about it. Didn’t even think about it too long.

Towels became washing the dishes, and washing the dishes became wiping down counters. Not because they were filthy—well, sometimes they were—but because the motion settled something in his chest, that restless thrumming in his blood.

(And because one day, Yelena came home from a mission carrying a bag full of the local Thai place down the street, and, without saying a word to him, had made a surprised, happy little sound in the back of her throat at the sight of the kitchen. The dishes were done. The stovetop wiped down. Someone had taken out the trash. Afterwards, she knowingly nudged him one of the takeout containers and said, “Get the dumplings before Alexei eats them all,” and Bob thinks that he’d wipe a million countertops and wash a million dishes to hear that sound again).

October 21st, 2027

“You are not a maid, Bob,” Yelena says one early morning as she watches him fiddle with the coffee machine from the couch.

She is so cozy there. Her voice radiates warmth—her accent thickest like this, when it’s too early and she’s too comfortable to bother with anything but herself, stripped bare.

Bob doesn’t look at her.

“I know,” he says.

She hums, unconvinced. He hears the blanket shifting and feels the steadiness of her gaze.

“It’s just chores,” he tries again. “I’m not trying to—”

Then the coffee machine beeps once. Then it beeps again, and the familiar start-up jingle plays, painfully chipper for four in the morning.

He takes a deep breath and pointedly keeps his focus on the machine.

“Bob.”

It’s just his name, and he always likes the way she says it in any case, but there’s something about it when she says just his name… Like it matters far more than it ever has to anyone else. Like it’s worth being the only thing in a sentence, the only thing that matters to her, even if it’s only for a second.

He finally looks over.

Yelena Belova, world-class assassin, is tucked into a blanket like a burrito. Her hair is a mess, and one sock is halfway off. She is the most beautiful thing in the world.

“I just want to help,” he says, and it comes out far more naked than he means.

“You do help,” Yelena says. “We do not keep you around for your dishwasher hands.”

He huffs something that’s almost a laugh. “Are you sure?”

Yelena rolls her eyes. “I’ve seen you try to fold laundry,” she says. “No one’s keeping you around for that.”

Bob flushes. “I—I’m trying.”

She simply smiles, and Bob feels his chest tighten. This ache that is sudden and warm and settling, precious and steady all at once.

Yelena is fire. She’s momentum. She’s too much and just enough in ways that Bob barely understands. He wants to understand it. More than anything. Because he has never loved anyone like he loves Yelena… in this way that makes him feel invincible and fragile, makes his heart race with hope and his hands tremble with fear.

And Bob?

He is trying very hard not to be a bomb. He’s trying to be small and useful. He’s trying to take care of things, because now he has something worth taking care of.

In short: he’s got the good sense not to blow up the kitchen making coffee.

October 25th, 2027

Once the towels were folded and the fishes stopped piling up in the sink, Bob started to notice something else. He chalks it to coincidence initially. People passing through the kitchen at weird hours, grabbing leftovers cold from the fridge.

For a tower that was so quiet with each other, there was so much overlapping noise: Alexei reheating something in the microwave at 2 a.m, humming an old Soviet lullaby under his breath. Yelena barefoot and eating Kraft mac and cheese from the pot on the counter. John cooking the world’s driest batch of scrambled eggs and scrapping the pan so loudly that it set Bob’s teeth on edge, and God—Bob could count on one hand the amount of time he had actually seen Ava eat.

Without fail, there is a stack of empty take-out-boxes on the counter by Friday. Bob watches them accumulate day after day until someone—usually Bucky, always Bucky—finally takes pity and throws them out. 

And it makes…sense. Technically. Money isn’t a problem. They’ve all got government stipends that hit their accounts like clockwork twice a month with more money than Bob’s ever seen. Where the money’s from, he’s got no idea. It’s probably better not to ask; whatever deal Valentia has struck to find them feels like something that would easily unravel if he poked and prodded too hard at it, and Bob’s done more than enough unraveling for one lifetime, thank you very much.

So: Direct deposit. An empty pantry. A tower credit card that he’s too afraid to use. All things that he just has now.

There are worse things that he could spend his money on, he figures. And leaves it at that, for now. 

November 2nd, 2027

A week later, Bob wakes up with blood thrumming beneath his skin, agitated in a way that is not loud and obvious. More like an undercurrent. Like electricity moving through a wire that is just a little bit too thin, too much momentum. His arms and legs feel jittery.

Before, when he would get...like this, he’d wander off somewhere. Just leave Not note, no plan. He’d vanish into whatever city felt big enough to hold his restless bones for days. Sometimes longer. Hence Malaysia. Hence Tijuana before that. Hence a two month stint in Vegas that he barely remembers. And if it got really bad, he’d find something to burn it through. Something louder and sharper and able to scrape his nerves clean: a rooftop over the city, a fight, sometimes a stranger’s voice. Sometimes drugs. Usually drugs. He just had to let it ride out like a fever. And then he’d come back. Not to anyone, just back…in a different street, maybe. A different bed. A different name, if he felt like it.

But now—

Now there’s nowhere to go. There’s people who would notice. People who might ask, and people like Yelena who definitely would.

So Bob doesn’t leave. He doesn’t want to, not really. He doesn’t know what he wants. He wants to do something more. He knows he can, but his brain is stuck on what the more is. This flicker of motion that’s tugging at his ribs, restless but shapeless and just out of reach.

So Bob doesn’t leave.

He sits on the couch. Feet tucked up underneath him, laptop balancing awkwardly on one thigh. The screen feels bright and anxious. His cart is open. Still ridiculous. Still growing.

—Groceries, was the thought. He can get groceries. He can do , and turn whatever is thrumming in his blood into something warm and editable and good. Instead of disappearing, he can fill the screen with things that don’t go together but might if he lines them up right—

Foundational stuff. Eggs. Milk. Flour. Sugar. Then oil. Then butter–two kinds, unsalted and salted, because Reddit says that makes a difference. All…structural things, with directions printed right on the bag. Things that, in a way, say to him ‘you’ll end up with something that makes sense if you stick with me.’

He’s never baked anything before in his life, but he adds yeast anyway. Doesn’t plan on baking, but maybe. Maybe. He likes the idea of it: something rising in a bowl or slowly warming in the oven, time passing in a way that feels purposeful instead of just happening to him.

And then pasta, because it sounds easy, like instant ramen but with intention. He finds three different kinds, two of which he doesn’t know how to pronounce the names of, but the rigatoni box sas it holds sauce well, which feels like something he should be considering. One says, “bronze cut,” and that sounds meaningful too, so he adds it.

Why are there so many kinds of vinegar, he wonders. But what if he actually needs them? His chest seizes at the thought of a recipe calling for something that he doesn’t have. So he adds all of them: Balsamic, rice, white wine, red wine, champagne—

And then this starts to feel like something else.

He goes back and adds more yeast, and then a thermometer that he’s not sure he needs, and a cast iron skillet that makes his browser crash for a second. There are spices that he’s only ever read about, but he likes the shape of their names on the tongue, and thinks Yelena would laugh if she tried to pronounce them. Dijon mustard. Molasses. Olive oil, the expensive kind. He’s not entirely sure what “cold-pressed” means, so he adds a second, non-cold pressed one. There’s an entire section dedicated to ramen—the real, good stuff, that he knows Ava likes because she always orders it from a place nearby. So he adds a multipack of miso flavor. Then one with shoyu, and one with tonkotsu, because he isn’t sure what either of them mean, much less which one is her favorite.

Faintly, he can see the time slipping through the windows, the sun drawing high over, and then lowering. He can see it. He can know it. But it doesn’t matter. His cart reaches triple digits and he doesn’t notice, God—it feels like he’s on the precipice of something , the restlessness under his skin feeling… controlled, or directed, for once.

He doesn’t hear the ding of the elevator when she comes, but he feels her presence anyway, because Yelena is just like that.  It would be like not noticing the sun, not noticing the sudden warmth on your skin after too long of nothing.

“Oh.” She sounds surprised. “Bob?”

He makes a short sound of acknowledgment, and doesn’t look up from his screen.

“How…” she stretches the word like she’s testing or weighing it, which is a silly thought. Bob switches out a star-shaped silicone mold for one that’s shaped like a little dog, and then he immediately adds the star one back. “How long have you been up here?”

“A while,” he answers honestly. He hears her walking up to him, which he doesn’t mind. She swings around the back of the couch, arms draped over it, leaning down so that she too can peer at the too-small screen. Bob can smell her shampoo, she’s so close: citrus that is sharp and grounding and very addictive. 

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” He feels more than a little breathless. He feels her looking at his face in the corner of her eyes, then back at the screen, and then at him again.

“Bob,” she tries again, but it’s a different shape now. He couldn’t ever hate her saying his name, but this shape makes his skin prickle with something… less pleasant. “This is. A lot .”

“I know. That’s the point.”

She lowers her head onto her arms and tilts it. “I mean are you okay?”

“I’m great,” he says, and he’s aware for a moment how quickly he says it. Reflexive. His jaw tenses. He knows that tone, and judging by the way that she blinks, Yelena does too.

So he adds, steadier, “Really,” and he tries to mean it. Tries to slow his thoughts into something palatable enough to make sense to someone other than himself. Even if all she can hold is the frayed edges of it. “I just had an idea. And I’m—I’m actually doing it. That’s good, right?”

Yelena doesn’t interrupt. That helps. And she doesn’t answer right away. He sees her brows drawn together, something that’s not entirely in judgment, just presence, which makes it easier not to trip over the momentum in his chest.

“I just…I want to do things. Not big things. Not world-ending things. Just… normal ones.”

She waits another moment, probably to see if he’s really finished.

Then, softly, “Okay. That is good. That is…it makes sense.”

Bob lets go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding, as Yelena vaults herself over the back of the couch and settles on it beside him. She folds her legs, criss-cross. When she speaks, her voice is still low, still careful, but gentle in a way that is not condescending. He decidedly tries not to think too much about it.

“Still feel like a lot,” is what she settles on, nudging her chin to him. “Not saying that it’s a bad thing, Bob. Just… you know. A lot , and–”

“You already said that,” The words come out sharper than he intends, meaner than he feels, and catch in his throat all ugly and sour, which doesn’t make sense for how quickly he says them and how quickly they cut through the quiet. 

Yelena stills. She is not dramatically quiet, like she’s recoiling, and that’s worse . She doesn’t look at him like he’s hurt her or like she’s upset. There’s no clear shift in posture, no ‘you crossed a line.’ 

Is that why he doesn’t immediately take it back? No. The words get stuck. Gummed up by the bitter aftertaste of too much, too fast, trying to matter all at once.

He doesn’t say sorry.

He doesn’t say thank you for trying, for reaching out, because ‘we stick together from now on.’

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and neither does she. But she stays. Decidedly, unflinchingly. Not out of stubbornness. Not out of a sense of duty—Bob knows what that kind of silence feels like, but this is different: her legs folded, chin resting loosely in one palm now. She hasn’t told him to fuck off, and that…it’s worse than if she had, for a moment. Because it means that she’s waiting for him to pull back from…wherever he left it .

But his blood is elsewhere right now: burning up strangely beside him, brain already on the next thing that he can add to cart to…to show her something. He can do this. He knows his can. 

His fingers roll over the trackpad again. It’s a lot, she’s not wrong, but the total doesn’t seem…doesn’t seem real, and if it does, it’s perfectly fine. He’s fine. He knows he has enough, and he honestly, truly, knows that he can do this.

He presses ‘checkout’ before he can second guess it.

Yelena shifts beside him, and the sound startles him more than it should. She hasn’t moved far. Her fingers are tapping faintly against her knee, and she hasn’t looked away—still, she doesn’t say anything, still doesn’t look surprised that he went through with it… or annoyed or relieved. She’s just. Sitting there.

“I ordered it,” he says, and he’s startled by how hoarse his voice comes out, but it’s all that he can think to say, really, all that he can get out with his bubbling skin.

Yelena tilts her head. “I figured.” Her voice is very cool. It is not…unkind, but it is detached and careful, and Bob's chest seizes.

He drags a hand down his face, sweaty and gross, and manages, “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yeah,” she says. She doesn’t sound vindicated. 

 The silence feels like it is too much for his moving skin. “I know I shouldn't have said it like that.”

“You shouldn’t have.” Her voice is a little tight now, and it makes Bob want to shrink into himself. He squeezes his arms tighter around himself, the burn under his skin not easing. If anything, it runs sharper. No release after his purchase. Just this… wall.

“I just—” he faults. The right words don’t come, and the wrong words feel like kindling. He says, and he means it, not as some excuse: “I don’t know.” Knowing that doesn’t make the words easier to say, or the lump in his chest lessen.

Yelena shifts closer to him. Not too close. That is good, because Bob doesn’t want his boiling blood to burn her.

“You do not have to know everything right now,” she says, tone still careful, but it’s lost the tightness. It’s closer to softness. Closer to how she usually speaks to him.

“But I know this,” he says quickly. “I really do, Lena. I mean. I’ve never—I don’t cook, but I know I can. If I really want to. And I do—And you’ll get the first pick, when it comes in. I got lots of stuff, okay? Spices. Noodles Uh. Fancy vinegar. Whatever you want.”

Yelena lets out a little breath, one that’s a half-laugh, but not unkind or mocking. Soft still. Bob’s chest tightens—not in a panicked way, but in the strange, aching shape of hope that he still hasn’t learned how to carry yet, doesn’t think he ever will, most days. He feels it expand behind his ribs. It is bright and unbearably delicate. He doesn’t know what to do with it. But he can’t imagine looking away from it, no more than he could imagine turning away from the sun.

He hasn’t ruined it, it says. She’s still here. Still listening. And he doesn’t feel insane for believing so full-heartedly.

“Okay.”

Then, a pause.

“I’m not mad,” she adds. 

“You shouldn’t be,” he says, nodding again, but much slower this time. The small aching this inside of him unclenches until there is just the restlessness that he woke up with. He looks back to the screen, where the order confirmation page is. There’s a notification in the corner that the battery is almost dead. He’ll get to it. “I want to try baking. Not now. But eventually.”

“I’ll taste-test.”

“Even if it’s terrible?”

“Especially if it’s terrible.”

He lets out something like a laugh, small and raw but real. Something almost settles behind his chest. 

But even as the air seems to warm, as Yelena leans back into the couch and lets the moment… ease. Not forgive outright. Just soften. Bob doesn’t start fidgeting. His hand twitches on the trackpad, this restless flick of fingers. His body hasn’t yet caught up to the moment softening, and he feels, just as quickly as it had begun to settle, the thing winding tighter instead of looser.

Yelena watches him. He can faintly see her in the reflection of the screen.

“You’re not done, Bob, are you?”

“Do I have to be?” he answers without thinking. He startles himself, and tries to backtrack, to explain. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not—using. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just—I’m trying, Lena.”

“I know,” she says. Hasn’t she said that already? Bob’s head feels cotton-stuff and strange. Her words make his stomach twist, and he feels like he's been going in circles without knowing it. “You don’t have to be.” She means it, he can tell. But there’s clear caution in the open-ended way that she says it, like a door she’s leaving cracked, in case he’s willing to step back.

But he doesn’t move. His fingers are the only thing that twitch, like a muscle-memory compulse. It’s about the motion. Momentum. Proving something he can’t name. Finishing what he started, or starting something else—he doesn’t know.

“I want to,” he says, barely audible but certain. “I want to do this.”

Yelena exhales. “Just…” She shakes her head slightly, and her voice is like trimming something before it can gray,  “Don’t forget to breathe when it gets here, okay?”

Bob nods once, too quickly. “Yeah,” he says quickly.

And neither of them says anything else. Somewhere in the background, the fridge hums. Bob thinks about the wide quiet of the Tower, and how it will look tomorrow–full of bags and boxes and proof that he’s doing something.

—And then, how none of it has happened yet. There’s just the promise. Just the waiting.

His fingers twitch again.

November 3rd, 2027

Bob wakes up with a headache, sharp behind his right eye leaves him dizzy for an initial, terrifying breath. Something hitches deep and wrong in his gut. Everything, both too heavy and too hollow, as an ache blooms beneath his ribs like a bruise. He flings one arm over his face without thinking, the other wrapping uselessly around his chest, delirious for a moment with the hope that maybe he could hold himself together by pinning his ribs in place, by squeezing that ache out . It doesn’t work. Obviously, and he swallows pitifully around the dryness in his mouth. It scraps his throat like paper, something raw and ugly.

The light is too bright. Or maybe the room is too loud.

Whatever was buzzing through his system yesterday has burned itself out, but not cleanly. His body feels vacant. The restless thrumming under his skin is gone, and the nothingness feels worse somehow. 

He rolls onto his side without thinking, which makes his stomach lurch.

Jesus.

He tastes sourness in the back of his throat. He’s frustrated, because there’s nothing clear to blame it on. He was fine just a day before. Better than fine, he was—

Oh shit.

The groceries.

He overdid it. Of course he did.

What was he thinking?

The sudden clarity of it, rushing: groceries, Bob, just groceries. You can be useful, you can do something good, you can fix it—

And Yelena.

She had sat beside him. She was there. She wasn’t patronizing or mean or demanding. She was just…real. Present. And at best? He had ignored her. At worst, he had snapped at her—the memory sharp-edged and slicing in his chest. The way that her expression had gone entirely still… not hurt, not angry, just watching. She was giving him the chance to not make it worse, and he had.

He never apologized. Never said ‘I’m sorry.’ His brain couldn’t… Well, he knew that he could say it, obviously , and he wanted to, but his brain couldn’t connect the words to his mouth. Everything was moving too quickly: his thoughts, his fingers, his want to be something, his knowledge that he could… like this.

It had felt more than right, better than he had in the past few weeks. Back then he was treading water. He had not sunk, but he was not swimming either. But yesterday… it didn’t feel like that at all. He felt like he was really, truly moving forward. There was certainty. The thrumming restlessness in his blood was like a bright threat of I can do this , that ran through every click and thought.

And even now he can still remember how good it felt. Even with the crash hollowing him out from the inside. That matters —and horrifies him, because he can’t trust the feeling anymore. He doesn’t know what was real. The sense of capability? The rush? Was it delusion?

But it also doesn’t matter, not all, because the certainty had burned itself out and left behind only the thick taste of ash on his tongue and in the back of his throat. It doesn’t matter because he never apologized to Yelena.

He couldn’t manage “I’m sorry,” but that's all that he can think now. Over and over. Not even loud. Just a whisper that keeps turning itself over in his mouth.

“God,” he mutters into the pillow, voice cracked and barely audible. His hand scrubs over his face, then rests over his mouth. He presses the heel of his hand against his eye until it hurts.

He doesn’t know for how long he stays like that. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t open his eyes and tries, desperately, not to breathe too deeply. His lungs feel like they’re slowly caving in. Not in a fast, panicky way, but in a slow, hesitant way that feels like coming to a conclusion. That he did this. He fucked up. After weeks of holding it together—Doing better than holding it together.

He hates this more than anything. How quick the highs and the lows can be, after weeks of…normality, or as close as he thinks he can get to it….

Faintly, but unmistakably real, a sleep startles him through his thoughts. Bob’s eyes blink open before he’s ready, dry and gummy and practically burning. He tries to parse it, and eventually, his brain slowly matches the warmth of the air to the kitchen. Someone cooking.

He winces. The smell is loud and sharp and presses right up against the memory of the cart, the total, the checkout screen, and the certainty in his voice: I want to do this.

His embarrassment feels bone-deep. Of course something had already arrived, of course someone had already seen. The thought of anyone—all of them, maybe, because that would be his luck—watching the ridiculous amount of groceries and boxes…star-shaped silicone mold, makes his blood crawl. 

It smells…normal. Not showy. Not like anything he ordered specifically. No spices too fancy. No vinegar he can’t pronounce. Nothing that smells or feels like desperate overcompensation.

Just food.

Just someone eating. Doing what he told himself he could do, while he lies in his bed.

He drags himself upright. The fridge hums in the next room. There are probably boxes stacked in the kitchen, frozen vegetables melting into condensation.

He should check. He should get up. Clean it, organize it. A part of him wants to throw it all out. Just toss the bags, delete the receipts, strip it back to zero. Make it all go away, like he used to do, when it would simply leave whatever place he ruined.

But he can’t, not here. Not to her.

He needs to say something.

He needs to do something.

But then, there’s a knock on the door, loud and certain, rattling Bob's teeth with how much it startles him. He flinches hard, because it doesn’t entirely register as real, but then it comes again, firmer and just as deliberate this time.

“Bob?” Her voice is steady, and it makes the thing in his chest cinch and squirm. “Are you awake?”

Traitorously, a part of Bob wants to stay curled in the containment of his sheets and pretend that he didn’t hear her. If he doesn’t move, maybe none of this can be real… but the part is small, and it is scared, and it aches for the presence of her just as much as the rest of him does.

“Yeah,” he manages hoarsely. “You–you can come in.”

The door’s not locked. He doesn’t remember entirely how he got into his bed, probably dragged himself in and crashed.

Yelena steps inside in a simple oversized t-shirt and basketball shorts. She holds a plate in one hand and a chipped ceramic mug in the other. Her eyes scan him over, nothing invasive or slowly, but enough to make Bob shift.

“I thought you might be hungry,” she says, lifting the plate a little. She steps over his pile of clothes. Bob hears the clink of the fork banging against the bowl that she carries. The sound scraps his ears, and he winces. It feels condemning. Worse than condemning, because condemning would have been so much easier . If she’d yelled or snapped or left… he’d know what to do. He’d know how to brace for it. “It’s almost noon.”

She sets the plate and mug down on his nightstand and nudges a stray sock aside with her foot. There’s just enough light to make it out: sea-shell shaped noodles, he doesn’t remember the name of them, but he remembers adding them to the chart, drenched in creamy cheese sauce. Max and cheese. He can’t remember the last time he’s had that. The smell is warm and familiar in a way that goes straight to something…softer inside of him.

“It’s not Kraft,” she says, finally, “but it’s not poisoned. I made Alexei taste it.”

Bob lets out something between a laugh and a cough, and it unlodges the stubborn thing in his chest. “I’m sorry–God, Lena, I’m sorry,” he says, in what feels like one long exhale. “I was an asshole. Earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t–you didn’t deserve that.”

“No,” she finally says, clear and steady. “I did not.”

Bob nods. He looks away from the plate and back to her, even if she won’t look at him. She doesn’t have to look at him. He has to look at her. “I just—I thought I was doing something good, Lena. Thought I was keeping it together. And it felt good, like I had a handle on it, for a second there. And then you said it was too much and then it felt like—I don’t know, I’m sorry. Like I failed at that, too.”

Yelena doesn’t say anything for a moment. It feels too similar to being on the couch, him not knowing , which is selfish to want after what he said, but it doesn’t stop his chest from twisting.

“Okay,” is what she finally settles on. She runs her hand through her hair, exhaling steadily. “I mean. I know. You are not failing, Bob. You are… trying, and it is hard.”

“But you shouldn’t have to deal with it,” he says. “I panic— and I shut everything down. It’s not about you. It’s never about you.”

Her hand is still in her hair when he nods. “I know.” like it’s some guilty exhale of air at first, but then she swallows and speaks, far more determinedly.“But. I want to. Deal with it I mean… I do not want you to—” she gestures “—to shut me out. But dealing with it… that’s what we promised to do, right? Together.”

Bob slowly nods. “Together,” he echoes. Saying it aloud feels like it makes it more real.

Yelena exhales. Her hand falls from her hair.

“I’m not good at this either,” she admits. “Talking. Feelings. All of it.” 

“Me neither.”

Yelena glances toward the kitchen. “We’ll figure it out,” she says firmly. “Not all at once. Just…” She glances back, meeting his eyes with kind determination. “We’ll start with breakfast.”

Bob nods again. Okay, he thinks. Breakfast.

Chapter Text

November 4th, 2027 (continued)

It does not actually start with breakfast.

(Bob wishes it did, because then he could have that perfect, movie-scene version of a morning that begins and ends cleanly: a full plate, a kitchen that is loud in the right way —mugs clinking, the warm hum of the coffee machine, and someone cursing half-heartedly when the toaster burns. And then polite little sighs of contentment when the last plate is scraped clean…)

But it does not start like that.

Instead, it starts with bags. So many bags.

There are some crowding the counters, and some shoved against the baseboards. Bags of frozen vegetables that have already begun to sweat through their packaging. On top of the fridge, tilted ever so slightly and threatening to avalanche if he so much as breathes wrong, there are two entire tote bags stuffed to the brim with canned goods.

It is well into the evening when Bob finally finds the strength to pull himself out of his bed.

“Okay,” he whispers under his breath, to the cans and the fridge and to himself.

Yelena is in sweats and a well-worn hoodie that Bob vaguely remembers Bucky wearing. Her hair’s up, and she’s holding two empty bins under her arms. She glances at him casually, like this is just another day in the soft haze of the afternoon light, another moment in their long string of un-named quiet ones, and Bob can almost believe that sorting seven hundred dollars’ worth of groceries is a completely normal way to spend a Thursday.

“You want pantry or fridge?” she asks, setting the bins down gently beside the cluttered counter.

Bob blinks, pulling his attention back to the avalanche waiting to happen on top of the fridge. “I-” he starts, and then hesitates. “Um.” The edges of his mind are still fuzzy with the strange residue of this morning, and he wants to say fridge, or pantry, or something definitive and obvious, but the words trip somewhere in his throat.

Yelena doesn’t seem to mind. She once-overs the fridge and the cabinets, humming something underneath her breath. Bob couldn’t name the melody, but he’s heard it before, usually when Yelena is trying to keep her hands busy. It’s perfectly tuneless in a way that feels deliberate and self-steading, in the same way she sometimes clicks her tongue or might rock on her heels.

He likes the sound of it. Very, very much.

“I’ll do the pantry,” she says, not dismissive or impatient, again—like this is no big deal, or at the very least it’s manageable. Like it’s no question, really, but not in a way that makes Bob feel stupid for ever asking himself why she’d help him.

He nods. Everything feels more manageable when she looks at him, speaks to him, exists in the same space as he does. 

So for a long while they work like this. The only sound in the kitchen is the rustling of bags, and Yelena’s easy humming. Like a fuzzy memory, half-mumbled Russian slips in at the edges. Sometimes she cuts herself short when she forgets that she’s doing it, sometimes it’s interrupted by grumblings when she finds a bag that has already split or a dented can.

Of course Bob doesn’t know the words, but it frankly doesn’t matter. It’s not for him, and it doesn’t have to be. What matters is that she hums at all. From what little she’s told him about her life before (which is more than she’s told most, but still not much) he can’t imagine her humming back then, feeling safe enough to let something so small slip out like this. Not in the Red Room. Not in hiding. Not on a mission. Not during all the years that she was alone and every sound might’ve given her away. 

But here, when she doesn’t have to even be here, helping him to pick up the pieces of his mistakes, she hums. The quiet isn’t dangerous or laced with tension. There is only steady motion, the soft thuds of boxes and cans being shifted and moved. 

Bob doesn’t try to speak. He doesn’t want to break it.

Instead, Bob takes the fridge.

He starts by pulling everything out onto the counter, and organizing them left to right, oldest to newest. Anything that’s sticky gets wiped down with a damp towel. Anything expired gets tossed in the trash.

He starts again, this time with all the new food: two dozen eggs, a full sleeve of butter, three different kinds of oat milk (he doesn’t remember ordering that many). Two bags of pre-chopped onions…

It’s a bit like unpacking a strange version of himself that he doesn’t fully recognize… a version that is panicked and convinced that if he bought enough, did enough, filled just enough space, he’d feel full too.

But now it’s just food, and putting it away is really all that he can do. It doesn’t hurt as much as he feared it would. 

There’s a longer than usual bout of silence as Yelena pauses to wash her hands. Then she goes back to the pantry, starting up again, and Bob would bottle the sound if he could. Just to prove it happened. Just to make sure she never forgets it’s allowed.

—

John Walker does not ask Bob if the groceries were his idea, and Bob doesn’t ask John Walker if Yelena threatened him with a fork (or knife, or spoon—she can be very creative) to keep his mouth shut. Some things in this world are just so obviously true that there’s no real point in asking them out loud.

(Most things are not that simple. Bob wishes they were, but they're not. So he makes it a point to appreciate the few that are. It’s for that reason, he thinks, that he likes John as much as he does—even though he’s still a bit of an asshole. Maybe it’s because of that, too? For all his growling and snapping… his rough edges are easy to understand.)

John isn’t the type to hover, so he doesn’t, but he leans in the doorway long enough for Bob to notice, and for Yelena to pause for just a beat and then hum a little louder, like she’s daring him to make it weird. John doesn’t. He crosses his arms, observing with a mixture of vague amusement and resignation, but he doesn’t say anything for a while, until Yelena, not looking up, just says, “There’s one more bin by the door.”

Bob winces. He opens his mouth to tell him something, probably like ‘John, you don’t have to–,’ but his brain is interrupted by the unmistakable sound of John’s heavy boots. Bob glances back at him in a way that he hopes is subtle, and sees him hauling in a bin full of groceries from the entryway. He drops them with the others by the far counter across from the pantry, next to where Bob is. Now Bob can see him from just the corner of his eye: his movements are practiced and methodical, efficient…that vaguely military ghost that he probably couldn't shake even if he wanted to.

“You organizing by food group or by guilt?” John eventually asks, not quite looking up.

“Guilt,” Bob replies. “Definitely guilt. And color.”

John snorts. He falls largely quiet after that, occasionally reading the labels aloud in mild confusion—”What the hell is miso?”—but otherwise he slips into the fold like he’s always been part of this, like he’s strangely… content about it.

Bob thinks about saying thank you, but instead he just passes John a new stack of cans without a word. And John takes them without a word. That feels like enough.

—

“Yelena.”

The sunset filters through the windows, casting shadows where earlier that day, there were dozens of bags. The counters are mostly cleaned now. Not perfect, but better, and it’s so much easier to breathe, easier to speak.

She looks up from where she’s leaning into the pantry. “Mhm?”

“I never…” he swallows. “I don’t think I did a good job. Of apologizing, I mean..”

Yelena blinks once. Her expression is open, not guarded, but not necessarily blank. She straightens slowly with one hand resting lightly on the pantry door. Doesn’t sigh or make a face, or lets the silence stretch out like some sort of punishment. For a second he’s bracing for something—dismissal, deflection, even the flat finality of “I already told you.” But what she says is gentler than any of that.

“Then say it now,” she says.

Bob blinks.

“If it didn’t come out right, say it now.”

Bob shifts his weight. “I’m sorry. For the mess, and for snapping at you. And I’m sorry for saying sorry again. But I think I needed to say it like this. With the light on.”

Yelena considers that. Then she nods, a small and certain thing.

“Okay,” she says. “Then I accept your apology. With the light on.”

That’s it.

And it’s enough.

She lets the pantry door swing closed with a soft click.

November 6th, 2027

Two days later, Bob is able to crack an egg without his hands shaking. The shell splits cleanly under his fingers, fingers that are steady for once. No bits, no mess. For a second he just stares at the yolk as it slips, blessedly free of any sharp little shards or fragments, into the pan.

The sizzle is like static on an old radio tuned just right . Soft and immediate. Bob figures if he’s going to be ridiculous enough to be impressed by being able to crack an egg, the least the universe can do is meet him halfway. The sound feels like a quiet, “Good job, Bob.”

John’s mug clinks softly on the bar counter behind him. He’s perched there like he’s got nowhere better to be. Maybe that’s true, Bob thinks. It probably isn’t. It’s early enough that only the two of them are awake, and he knows that this is when John usually goes to gym.

He can see John partially in the corner of his eye: heel hooked on the rung of the stool hoodie sleeves shoved up to his elbows, watching in that practiced way of someone who is decidedly pretending not to.

Instead, with careful deliberation, Bob stirs the eggs in a slow looping circle, and the sizzle hums on.

Good job, Bob.

John doesn’t say anything. He’s not the worst shadow to keep, Bob thinks. He’s not…entirely sure of if camaraderie is the word for it, because John still growls and glares and talks shit, but he’s been genuine in his presence. Not with speeches or orders (John’s awful at the former, and when he tried the latter, Yelena had laughed so hard that she choked on a grape) but with calendars that they all hated and post-it notes that now one else but he used.

Same as with the groceries. John, for all his…difficulties, is steady as much as he is stubborn. Even if it means sitting completely still and watching like a guard dog. Bob snorts a bit despite himself as the thought. John Walker, bronze retriever at best.

“What’re you laughing at?” John grumbles, but there is no real heat. 

“Nothing.”

John huffs, and Bob huffs too, deliberating matching his tone just a little too closely. For someone who’s, well… a bit like a blunt object, John Walker is surprisingly easy to fluster once you come at him sideways. And surprisingly fun to.

“Don’t start with me.”

“I didn’t start anything.”

“You did the thing. That smug little—” he gestures vaguely in the corner of Bob’s eye.

Bob glances back, raising an eyebrow and deadpan. “This is literally just my face.”

He can see John clearly now. Still in the stool, still sulking, with a perfectly irritated scowl. Not the ‘get-out-of-my-way’ scowl, Bob thinks, amused, but the ‘I’m-annoyed-you-got-me-again-but-I-kind-of-like-it’ scowl. The ‘don’t-tell-anyone’ kind.

Camaraderie? Yes. Now he sees it. The U.S. Agent was a soldier , long before he was Captain America. March together long enough, fight together long enough, tease another long enough…something will come out. That makes sense.

Bob stirs the eggs for longer than he probably should while he thinks. He pokes and prods at it and cuts one of them to make sure that it’s not all undercooked yolk inside.

The pan hisses when Bob turns down the burner. Slowly, deliberately—he doesn't trust himself not to fumble with the spatula, not yet, so he pours them from the pan on a twice-folded over paper towel. They're overcooked and rubbery at the edges, but they're warm and they're his.

John makes a strange sound in the back of his throat. Not quite a cough. Not quite a laugh. Half approval, half disbelief, like he can't decide if he's mildly impressed or mildly horrified.

Bob doesn't look up. "Say it."

"I didn't say anything."

"You made a sound."

"Yeah well...." Like he's testing the weight of them, John draws out the words. He settles on a tone that is surprisingly flat. "...so did the eggs."

Bob doesn't say anything at first. The paper towel is already soaking through the bottom. Still steaming. Still his.

He looks at John, who's eyebrow is tentatively raised and lips parted just enough to suggest another smartass comment, but instead he tilts his head with a little shrug that seems more concession than sarcasm. The phone in his hand is forgotten now. Like this, he's almost approachable, looking just a little bit less like a half-feral dog that might still bite his hand.

Bob looks at his eggs. He looks at John again, and then tears the paper towel in half and slides one portion across the counter.

John blinks down at it like it might be a trap, but he doesn’t say anything. Pinching it between his two fingers, he lifts it and pops it into his mouth.

Chews. Hesitates. Chews again. Swallows.

"Jesus."

Bob lets out a short, surprised laugh. The kind that catches him off guard as much as anyone else. “That bad, huh?”

"Like if you scrambled a shoe,” John says, but he is smirking, not in the arrogant, asshole way. He drops the last bite in his mouth. "Still warm," he muses after a long moment of chewing. "I'll give you that, Bob."

“Warm is something.”

John shrugs. “It’s a start,” he says, leaning back against the chair.

A start. Somehow, that sounds really, really good.

November 9th, 2027

He’s been meaning to finish this book. The pages are soft under his fingertips, well-loved from whoever must have owned it before he did. Yelena found it at some used book-store a few weeks ago. She thought Bob might like it— ”You’re kind of weird,” she had said fondly, and he had glanced at the cover: a silver large dragon, a boy, and “Dragon Rider” in a yellow font that matched the stylized moon behind them.

He’s halfway through the chapter where Ben and Firedrake are flying above the mountains of Scotland. There’s a line about how the stars don’t look so far away when you’re flying that he rereads twice as he traces the corners of the page with his thumb, not ready to turn it just yet. It’s not that he wants to stay in the moment, exactly, but he doesn’t want to lose it too quickly, the way that is tugs slowly and softly like a lingering dream.

What he remembers isn’t the fictional kind of flying. It’s the real kind—the terrifying, weightless, absolutely real kind. He had been frightened and adrenaline sick. He remembers his lungs tightening with a scream that he couldn’t let out because of the force of the wind on his face.

But he also remembers what it felt like once the noise of the soldiers and the helicopters and the gunshots fell away… once the ground was gone, and there was nothing but air. Clouds scattered like torn cotton. Stars prickling through the night like they’d been carefully, lovely, stitched there by hand…and below, so far below that it didn’t feel real, was the world that had been trying to kill him. For just one moment, he hadn’t felt broken or fragile or wrong. He hadn’t felt anything except the cold, sharp clarity of being nowhere.

Finally, he turns the page. The next line in the book says something about how cold the air is, but Ben isn’t scared at all. Bob smiles faintly at that.

It’s a kids book. It’s fantasy. That’s why—and that makes sense, but Bob wonders if maybe that’s why it gets to say things like that, because it’s not real. If sometimes, the only way to make real sense of what’s real and what’s not is to look at it sideways: through dragons and the moons, and boys who are not afraid of the sky.

The kettle clicks off in the kitchen, drawing him gently from the passage. Oh, yeah. He meant to brew chamomile, something warm enough to coax him to sleep. He glances quickly at his phone; it’s long past midnight.

Bob dog-ears the page, following in the indents left by someone else's thumb. He’s careful not to crease most of his books, but this one came clearly worn and loved. Bob strangely likes the thought of himself being just one in a line of people who needed it. 

As he rounds into the kitchen, he can see his faint reflection in the dark floor to ceiling glass. His hair’s a mess. His sweater—something that Yeleva might’ve shrunk in the wash and then passed off to him without comment—is half-slipping off one shoulder, and he’s wearing a mismatched pair of socks. None of that bothers him tonight. The imperfection of the hour is oddly comforting, and he’s happy to just exist. Him, and a book that doesn’t expect anything from him.

He’s rummaging for a mug when the world… stretches. Or pulses, maybe? It’s pulled tight for one very short moment, so short that Bob thinks he might have just imagined it, or it was just some trick of the flickering stovetop light. But when he turns and rounds the corner to the kettle, he nearly slams into Ava.

Silent and still, except for the edges of her arms and legs that are half-flickering. She blinks at him, and he blinks at her. She looks…startled, but not scared, surprised in a way that makes her mouth press flat and her arm—already reaching for the cabinet— twitch, like she’s calculating whether to vanish again or pretend that she never phased through the wall in the first place.

Bob stands there like someone caught in the middle of a very strange, very odd dream. But he does not startle either, too tired and softened by the slow warmth of the story, the night, and the promise of tea. He blinks at her instead and says, dumbly, “You weren’t there.”

“I am now,” she says without missing a beat, like that explains everything…which it kinda does.

Bob is still holding his mug. She eyes it carefully, and he follows her gaze. 

“I was gonna make tea,” he says. “Chamomile.” 

“Ah, yes. Very covert of you.” She sounds vaguely amused. Bob chuckles softly and shrugs.

“Well, you caught me,” he says. A part of him is surprised at how easy the words come, because he still doesn’t entirely know how to exist around Ava. She is not like John, who bites and growls, but is easy to understand. His edges are sharp, but they’re predictable.

Ava is… well, not unlike her powers.

Bob thinks that she means to be distant, but questions if she really, truly wants to. If it is just the shape that she’s learned to take, to be not solid enough to be hurt or held. It makes sense. No one can leave you if you’re never fully there to begin with. You cannot be looked at in the wrong way if you’re never fully there. He would have given everything as a child to be able to just…disappear, he's sure. That was all that he did as an adult anyway: disappearing into one city or another, into one substance or another.

Ava’s powers look and seem like escape, but Bob wonders if maybe they feel like being stuck in the space between doors and rooms, never truly inside one or another, for better and for worse. Maybe they feel like nothing at all.

That’s why he doesn’t press—maybe, probably. He doesn’t try to make her stay or explain. He simply pours the tea into two mugs and offers her one. If she needs the distance, he can give it. If she wants to stay, even halfway, he will meet her there.

She looks more surprised at the offer of tea then she initially did at his presence. She glances up at him suspiciously, to which Bob shrugs again.

He says, “There's shortbread cookies in the cabinet, and apples” 

She hesitates for a moment. Bob can see the edges of her arms and legs faintly flickering, but then, almost stubbornly, she grabs the mug. She doesn’t say thank you. She doesn’t need to. Instead, her limbs stabilize, and she cups the steaming mug in both hands as she leans across the opposite counter. 

Bob doesn’t say anything else to her and reaches for the fruit bowl, finding one of the slightly bruised but crisp green ones and a paring knife from the drawer. He begins peeling them slowly. He is wary of how his hands might shake, but they do not, blessedly, and maybe he took off more flesh with the skin than he intended to, but that’s more than fine.

As he works, he doesn’t look at Ava. He doesn’t try to fill the silence with anything unnecessary. The only sound is the soft scrapping of his knife as he cuts the peeled apple into thin silence.

It’s a very nice kind of quiet. And gets better when he starts to hear Ava occasionally sipping behind him.

The slices are uneven. Some are thin enough to fold, others are clumsy and thick. He doesn’t mind that. He reaches up to the cabinet above the sink where someone (probably Alexei) stuck the bottle upside down, still sticky from the last time he used it. He drizzles a little too much in one spot, a little too little in others, but the smell is sweet and grounding. Without ceremony, he sets the plate between them.

Ava eyes it, not suspicious now, just somewhat uncertain.

“You cut the cores weird,” she murmurs and picks up a thick slice.

Bob shrugs for what must be at least the fifth time tonight. “Knife’s dull.”

She huffs and takes a bite. He grabs one too, one of the too-thin ones that is half curled in on itself. The tea is just barely still warm. He takes a bite too, and then drinks the tea slowly, letting the honey in both coat the back of his throat.

The silence isn’t awkward. It stretches, and there is something a little off-kilter about the whole thing, this moment that feels like it shouldn’t exist, not with how guarded Ava usually is and how uncertain Bob always feels in his own skin. But it does. They drink their tea and eat their apples, and everything is good.

After a while, she asks, “You always do this?”

“Make tea and honey apples at 2 in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

Bob considers. “Only when someone else is here to share them,” he finally says. 

Ava doesn’t ask, but she takes another slice, and they lapse into that pleasant almost-silence again.

Eventually though, Ava licks the last of the dipping honey off her knuckle, in such a way that seems strangely determined and deeply at odds with how she normally carries herself.

“Better than the eggs,” she regards. Bob groans.

“John told you about that.”

She nods, grinning. “Yeah, but he sounded almost proud.”

Bob snorts out a half-laugh. In what is like an offering instead of a dismissal, he says, “I’m gonna go finish my book.”

“The one about the dragons?”

Oh. He didn’t know that she knew about it. He nods. “You’re more than welcome to sit–or not.”

She glances down at the plate between them, then up at him. “I’ll put the mugs in the rack when I’m done,” she says, and it is not a rejection entirely… just a ‘this is already a lot,’ from someone who doesn’t stay for takeout with him and Yelena and Alexei.

Bob smiles. “Goodnight, then.”

She nods again. A soft, honest smile is now tugging at her lips. “Good night, Bob.”

The book waits for him on the arm of the couch. The page is still dog-eared. The world inside it is still hanging in the sky between the stars and the clouds and nothingness. He’ll read just a bit more. Then he’ll go to sleep.

Later when Ava leaves, it’s through the hallway. Her feet are solid on the floor, mug rinsed and drying beside his.

—

There is a faint rustling sound. Bob wakes up to gently calloused fingers carding through his hair, not insistent but steady, and a soft voice speaking to him in a mix of Russian and English that is not meant to be understood…half a lullaby, half teasing. He catches only a few words: “solnyshko,” “sleepy-head,” but there is more nonsense than anything. Soft, lazy nonsense that warms in his chest and coaxes him instead of jolting him. It doesn’t feel like waking. Just feels like… a continuation of a dream. Bob’s head, still cotton stuffed, doesn’t try to make sense of it. The words and feelings float around him, pointless to hold onto. Better to just let them settle, where they are lovely and thoughtless. He does not open his eyes. He feels his cheek smushed into something soft…maybe the couch cushion, but he doesn’t remember falling asleep…

The fingers curl, and his hair wraps around them, being tugged so gently that it immediately short-circuits Bob’s brain. Nothing else matters.

“Easy, Solnyshko,” he hears. A voice that is fond and low with early-morning husk.

Bob melts. That’s the only way to describe it. His body forgets how to hold tension. His breath, already slow, slips into something deeper, that settles behind his ribs and expands like sunlight through fog.

The voice laughs. “Not that easy,” it teases. The fingers tug again at his hair, gently, and he feels a bit like a dog being reprimanded. “C’mon, c’mon.”

Bob huffs and finally opens his eyes.

Oh.

Yelena is always pretty. Obviously. Whether back from a mission, sweating and chest heaving with lingering adrenaline, or domestic and lazy on the couch. But right now, she is crouched in front of him. Her blonde hair is half-undone, falling around her face in loose wisps, and she is casually watching him with that look she wears when no one else is around to see it…the one that is soft and a little smug and impossible to look away from, and makes Bob’s chest ache just a little.

“Oh,” Bob repeats, now outloud, in a voice that is scratchy and thick with sleep.

Yelena laughs again. “There you are,” she muses. She is close enough that Bob can smell the coffee on her breath.

He tries to blink again and move, and this time, Yelena softly aids him. Her fingers do not leave his hair.  She uses her other hand to help steady him. Bob’s head tilts forward just slightly, a sunflower to the warmth of her palm. He doesn’t mean to do it. He presses his forward lightly against her shoulder.

“M’sorry,” he mumbles. He thinks he feels Yelena's breath catching, but she quickly huffs amused and maybe found.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You started it.”

She scoffs. “You–” she accuses, jabbing a finger at him, “fell asleep. On the couch.”

“S’that a crime?” he hums back dryly. He is still not entirely sure where sleep ends and morning begins…it all blurs into something hazy and safe.

“No,” she allows, mock-grudging, “But you drooled all over my throw pillow.”

“I didn’t drool.”

“You did.”

He squints blearily up at her. “Liar.”

Yelena huffs and mock-snarls, wolfish and impossibly earnest, tousling his hair again. 

“C'mon,” she says. “Let's get you to bed.”

It's still dark outside from what Bob can see. He shifts again and knocks over his book, which was spine down on the edge of the couch near his head. Yelena effortlessly grabs it before it falls.

“Still half-asleep,” she notes. 

Instead of replying, Bob rubs his eyes and mumbles curiously, “What're you doin’ up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says, like it’s not a big deal, something that just happens and doesn’t mean anything. Which… it kind of is? Not that that’s a good thing. Far from it. But there’s no lack of nightmares between them all. Something that they’re still all trying to live around. Yelena gently dog-ears the page and carefully sets his book down on the coffee table.

“Yeah?”

She hums. “Went to the kitchen. Thought…maybe tea. But you weren’t in your room. The door was still open.”

Bob stares at her for a second too long. Something inside him tightens  and softens all at once. “I didn’t mean to,” he says. “Just… fell asleep reading.”

“I know.” Her voice is quieter now. “I just… didn’t like waking up and not knowing where you were.”

The softness of her words draws at his chest. He has been lost before. He has been invisible and wanted. But never has lost in the sense that there is someone is looking for him, wanting . Not just “oh, he’s gone.”

He still wonders why. Why does Yelena still… far beyond just tolerating him, because plenty of people have tolerated Bob before with polite distance and practiced patience…pitying smiles that say, “You're a burden, but I will not shove you anyway yet.” Yelena doesn’t do that. Yelena looks for him. 

“You should stay then,” he says, genuinely surprising himself. Both in that he says it, and in how he doesn’t feel the awful, strong urge to take it back. It’s not brave. It’s just true.

Yelena’s eyes are so very big, and deep brown without a light source for flecks of gold and green to catch. A very steady and shadowed depth, that does not scare him, not like how a shadow should. She doesn’t say anything for a moment, just watches him with quiet, unreadable affection, her eyes a stillness that he would happily rest in.

Then she smiles, a mix between her earlier wolfish grin, and the sleep-warm softness that he first awoke to.

“You better not steal half the blanket,” she warns.

“I make no promises.”

Yelena rolls her eyes, but she’s already settling beside him like it’s the most obvious thing in the world—and yeah, it kind of is, Bob thinks, sleep having made his mind too soft and honest to overthink it.

The couch isn’t very wide. Her knee bumps into his. Their shoulders brush, and their legs tangle without anywhere else to fit, but Bob’s never felt more like there’s room. She tugs the blanket until it covers them both. One half is decidedly more hers than his—of course, neither of them say anything about that.

“I’ll wake you up if you drool again,” is all that she says. He is already half asleep, and hums something that might be agreement…might be protest (it could never be, not to her)...might just be the sound that his chest makes when it’s full and comfortable and safe.

Her fingers again find his hair after a moment. They don’t card through with purpose or coaxing. They just settle there. Her thumb moves once absently, and Bob barely breathes, leaning in without thinking into the touch.

“Goodnight, Bob,” he thinks he might hear, but he briefly wonders if it’s just a part of the dreamlike haze. And then he decided that that doesn’t really matter at all. The way that he exhales, steady and long, is its own kind of quiet reply.

Sleep comes to the both of them easily after that.

Chapter Text

November 11th, 2027

After that, strangely, the couch settles in something…different.

It’s just a couch. It doesn’t really mean much of anything—and most of the time it still doesn’t, when the whole team packs themselves like canned sardines to a post mission debrief. But when it’s just them …it feels like something else. Somewhere where they can lie together and say nothing or everything at all.

Sometimes he will find Yelena there, curled into a shape that only she could make comfortable. And sometimes she will find him there instead. Wordlessly, they can exist together until it’s impossible to know where one of them begins and the other ends.

–That or, Bob’s just overthinking it. But there are worse things that he can overthink…

“Bob?”

He makes a soft noise of recognition.

“Do you still have the bear?”

“The what?

Today they are together, sprawled like half-dead things on the common-room couch. Bob is reclining with a book blanched precariously on his chest. Yelena is curled beside him. She smells like her shampoo. Something warm and increasingly familiar, something close. Like honey and cedar and the faintest trace of something decidedly...cinnamony? Like her, that’s what matters, and Bob wonders idly if that smell can rub off on him when they sit like this: her shoulder against his, a tangle of limbs.

He likes that thought. He likes it a lot.

The setting sun casts their shadows against the floor. From the corner of his eye, he sees her hair slicked in copper and rich, burnished gold. 

“The bear,” she repeats. She nudges his shin with a sock-clad foot and tilts his chin toward the kitchen. “The plastic one. With the stupid face. Full of honey.”

Oh.

On the table in front of the couch is two mugs of chamomile tea. Lukewarm now—long since, but every so often, one of them will reach for a sip more out of habit than thirst.

Bob turns his head just enough to glance at her. The faintest smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You mean Comrade Bear?”

“Yes,” she says solemnly. Like it’s a matter of great national importance. “I require him.”

She does this sometimes, more than she used to: ask him for simple, ordinary things, like a spoon from the drawer or a soft blanket from the back of the couch. Things that aren’t really about the things at all, he thinks, in the offhand–way that someone might comment on the weather. Sure that it will be done not out of obligation, not because she expects to be served, but because it simply makes sense . 

Of course he will do it. No longer out of the fervent urge to prove something or earn something back, but simply because it is so good to be trusted with small things…

Bob manages a nod and swallows down the dumb, rising heat in this throat, carefully disguised as an almost-silent laugh through his nose. She is so sweetly fascinated by the mundane, and surely there is nothing so mundane as Bob Reynolds. Nothing so mundane as his name, short and forgettable, but when she asks for them, asks for him , he can believe full-heartedly that they matter more than anything in the world. Why not? When she can make even the honey feel wanted?

The couch groans in protest beneath him, but it barely breaks the quiet between them. Walking, he hears the couch creaking gently again. No footsteps. Just the soft sounds of her settling again, maybe adjusting the pillows, maybe pulling the blanket up over her legs.

Easily, he finds the honey bear, fingers steady even though he still feels the phantom echo of her foot against his leg. The plastic thing stares back at him. She's right—it does have a dumb face, but it seems pointedly smug, looking at him.

“There he is,” Yelena says fondly. Bob does turn now, and she is smiling in such a way that her tongue sticks out through her teeth. She stretches one hand towards him and wiggles her fingers expectantly.

He crosses the room in three easy steps. It feels like something out of a dream, quiet and warm and so very still, like the world, just for them, has agreed to hold its breath.

“Comrade Bear,” he repeats, dry but fond. “He answers to no one but you.”

Yelena’s thumb draws over the bear’s plastic grin, and her finger briefly brushes his when he gives it to her. “Obviously,” she says absentmindedly under her breath in what is little more than a puff of air, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. So warm and self-assured, and Bob thinks, yeah , it should be the most natural thing in the world, for her to ask for something small and be given it. No fight. No catch. Just her asking, and him giving. Anything to hear that tone: so amused and just a little too pleased with herself. Simple, mundane things that are hers, exactly as it should be. He would give her a thousand honey bears if it meant he could keep that sound in the room for a little while longer.

“I can reheat it for you,” he offers without thinking. She blinks. He clears his throat, clarifying a little too quickly and pointedly not trying to think about how long he must have stood there staring at her. “The tea. Or—I can make a new batch. Cause it’s gone cold. And it’s not chai. You’re favorite.”

Of course it’s gone cold , he mentally kicks himself. But Yelena is still looking at him. Not with confusion anymore, or judgement. Something much softer. Something that makes him want to do things that are very, very stupid, to keep her looking at him like that.

“You remembered that?” she asks lightly.

Was he not supposed to? He shrugs, but there’s a sudden and slight flush on the back of his neck. “You yelled at John about it once,” he says in lieu.

She blinks again, and the strange look is gone, replaced by something that is just as fond.

“Suppose I did,” she says, leaning back into the blankets. Her smile is soft and almost shy beneath her boldness.

Bob nods. He has gotten better at this. Ava and him both take tea over coffee—her because the caffeine works her up in a way that’s too similar to her atoms phasing, and Bob because it messes with his medication. 

He rolls his sleeves up past his elbows, quietly and unrushed, because the evening is so slow already, and the moment between them is still here , still lazy and sweet like something half-asleep—and willing to stay that way if he doesn’t move too quick. There is a low click when the burner starts. Then the faucet hums in tandem with Yelena on the couch as he fills a clean pot with water. Something tuneless. Maybe a memory, or something that means nothing.

Ginger, peppercorn, cardamom, cloves. He drops them into the water one by one. He had measured and counted them out beforehand and put them in plastic bags by serving-size. The plop they make feels like a punctuation alongside Yelena’s humming, creating, what Bob thinks with a fluttering heart, must be the sound of them living together. Easy and simple. Snapping a cinnamon stick to add into the pot somehow doesn’t feel like an interruption to it, even though the sound is loud and clear. Just like… a continuation. A new note.

“Bayushki, Bayu,” she says softly. Bob makes a soft noise of acknowledgment. He places a separate kettle full of water on the next-burner-over for his own tea: chamomile. The smell of the spices unfurls in the air, and he thinks of Yelena stretching out on the couch. 

“What’s that?”

“Old lullaby,” she hums, almost to herself. Then she snorts out a laugh. “And very Russian. ‘Bayushki, Bayu, don’t lie too close to the edge, the grey wolf will come for you.’”

Bob grimaces. “Comforting.”

“In a way. The wolf always comes. But there’s always someone there to protect you.”

Bob stirs the tea.  The cinnamon’s cracking open now, and the smell is warm and sharp and increasingly familiar. Not the lullaby, not the wolf, not even the idea of someone fighting it off, is what catches in his chest, just the certainty in her voice. The casualness. Of course there’s someone. Of course you’re not alone in the dark.

“Good to know,” he manages eventually. “Just in case the wolf ever shows up.”

Yelena hums again. “Mhm. You’d scare him off.” Her voice is light and teasing, but underneath is the same certainty as when she asked him for the honey.

Bob glances over his shoulder. Her eyes are half-lidded, lashes catching the last bit of light from the sunset. He had left her the bear, and sees how she thumbs idly but gently at its pudgy plastic stomach. If she could be this gentle all the time . If there could never be any reason for her not to be.

They could live a life that is just luke-warm tea and honey shaped bears. They could all do something normal . Yelena can have a normal job, or whatever Bob assumes that normal, successful people do. She can come home to a normal… Bob . Who’d do whatever a normal Bob would do, which is probably just this, he thinks. Have a warm home. Keep it. Make too much tea. Have everything he didn’t as a kid.

He’d like that. Very, very much. Maybe more than anything.

“Bob. The kettle is screaming.”

The sound hits him a second too late. He makes a sharp noise that might be a swear, might just be embarrassment, and quickly lifts it off the burner.

Not ruined, just impatient.

“I was thinking too loud,” he murmurs by way of apology.

“That happens with you,” she says lightly, and not unkind. He glances back, and she is leaning over the back of the couch, head on her crossed arms. “Big thoughts in that giant head of yours.”

Bob huffs a half-laugh. He removes the kettle, and pours some into his mug. Then he pours the milk into the other pot, stirring.

When her Chai is finally done, Bob pours it into another mug. It’s one of John’s, black with a chip on the rim that he never bothered to fix, but Bob has exclusive dishwasher privileges. So it’s his to use whenever he wants.

Yelena makes a pleased sound as he drops her mug on the table. She sits up on the couch, legs crossed, and uncaps the bear-shaped bottle. Her tongue is sticking out in concentration.

The honey threads fall easily into the mug, catching what’s left of the sunset in each drop. She doesn’t stir it right away. For a moment, she just watches the way it sinks slowly, gold into warm brown.

Bob sits back down beside her. He doesn’t look up his book again.

Then she stirs it around. She takes a sip. “Perfect,” she says simply. No fanfare. Just that.

They don’t say much for a while. She settles against the back of the couch, socked toes tucked underneath his thigh. She cradles the mug loosely in her hands. The steam curls upward, soft and slow in such a way that it catches the light: wisping gently around her face, curling at her jaw, catching on the ends of her lashes, and disappearing into her hair like breath exhaled in the cold. The weight of her warmth settles into him like gravity, something earned and steady.

Outside, the last of the sun slips below the horizon, and the room goes dusky and still.

The wolf won’t get far if it comes tonight. Not with this.

November 13th, 2027

Bob stands above the stove with his sleeves pushed up, stirring half-cooked pasta in the largest pot that he could find in the kitchen.

He’s not really cooking anything complicated. It’s just spaghetti: store-bought pasta and a red sauce that he’s let simmer for too long on purpose. But it feels bigger. Or just…more good. Easier than the eggs somehow, even though he’s managing more pots and pans, because he’s not worried about undercooking the inside of the noodles. He can clearly see and feel the pasta soften as he stirs. The steady, tactile reassurance is oddly grounding.

The door swings open behind him, and immediately the noise level in the Tower  triples.

“You tripped me,” John snaps.

“You tripped over your own foot,” Ava shoots back, breathless and amused. “I saw it. Bucky saw it.”

“Bullshit!”

Bob doesn’t need to turn around. He can hear the affront in John’s voice, and the grin in Ava’s, and Bucky’s exasperated, long-suffering sigh.

This, he’s learned, is the usual aftermath of a training spat. The circling. The buzzing of too-hot energy, reckless and aimless that hasn’t quite settled. Ava pokes and prods because she wants to, and John swats at her teasing with the flustered indignation of someone who secretly enjoys being messed with. They aren’t really mad. Just wired. Still shaking off the leftover adrenaline.

Bob stirs the pasta again, slowly, anchoring himself to the sound of boiling water and their bickering.

“You’re just mad I had you on the ground in thirty seconds,” John is saying now.

Ava scoffs. “Oh please. I let you.”

Bob lifts the pasta spoon and watches a few of the noodles slide off, checking the texture just as he saw in TikTok. Almost ready.

Ava is still talking somewhere behind him. Bob can practically map their movement by sound alone now—or by Stockholm Syndrome. 

“I let you,” she repeats, louder now, probably tucked on the couch’s arm. “Because you were already wheezing and I felt bad. ”

Puffing, “I was strategizing, ” John fires back, indignant. Probably pacing

And Bucky… he’s probably already halfway into a kitchen chair, arms crossed, waiting this out like he always does—with the air of a man who’s fought actual wars and now babysits half-feral superheroes. 

Bob drains the pasta carefully, and then adds the noodles to the saucepan. The heat folds them together, everything slowly melting. Sure enough, he hears the bar chair drag against the wooden floor closer to the kitchen.

“Smells good,” Bucky remarks, pointedly ignoring the other two’s bickering.

Bob smiles. “Thanks.”

Behind him, Ava lets out a dramatic groan. “I did let you,” she insists, and Bob hears the soft thwap of a pillow connecting with something—probably John’s face.

John, predictably, explodes. “You did not ! You were down . Flat. On. Your. Back.”

“Out of mercy,” she replies sweetly.

“Out of losing!”

Bucky exhales through his nose. Bob glances at him, quickly and sympathetically. He grabs the ladle, scoops a generous portion of pasta, and turns around, gently dropping it in front of Bucky. He can see John and Ava now. They’re sprawled on opposite ends of the couch. John is upright and slouched, his arms crossed.

Ava’s got one leg slung over the armrest. Her hair is a little damp and her cheeks are flushed, looking very pleased with herself—until, in a blink, she isn't. Bob turns back to the stove. She’s standing directly beside him now, half-phased through the kitchen island.

For his credit, Bob is proud of himself for not startling. His breathing stills for half a beat and then resumes. John, on the other hand, yelps, and mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

Her hand rests on the countertop—through the countertop–fingers ghosted half an inch into solid marble. “Looks almost edible,” she says.

Bob doesn’t look up. “That’s the goal.”

 “You’re getting too good at this,” she continues. “Be careful, or we’ll start expecting things.”

Bob huffs a quiet laugh, just under his breath. “God forbid.”

Bob dishes out another portion for her, neat and even, the way he’s started doing without thinking, and she takes it with a smile that is sharp and soft at the same time. She doesn’t go far. Just leans against the corner beside Bucky,  plate balanced one-handed, fork spinning lazily through the noodles. There’s a kind of stillness to her now that she’s not in motion and no longer buzzing or fraying at the edges.

“Not bad,” she says after a fork-full. Then she glances over her shoulder at John, who is still sulking on the couch, and lifts her fork, “For whenever you get over yourself.”

Bob snorts, but he dishes out John’s plate without comment and sets it on the counter. She’s right. But Bob kind of gets it, that too-loud heartbeat of someone who doesn’t know how to come down gently. John always runs hot after sparring. But Ava’s voice is softer now, still teasing, but in a way that loosens John’s shoulders just a little. 

“I’m over myself,” he mutters finally, and pushes up to standing like it pains him.

“Wow,” Ava deadpans, still leaning against the fridge. “That sounded sincere.”

John huffs, but he nods when he takes the plate and mutters an honest, “Thanks, Bob.”

He watches John retreat to the couch, plate in hand, and collapse into the cushions with his usual clunky grace. Ava bumps her shoulder lightly into Bucky’s on her way to sit down beside him, and Bucky—stoic, unbothered—lets it happen. And just like that: the room settles, until the only sounds are of forks scraping gently against plates. Someone sighs. Someone else kicks their feet up. 

Bob leans back against the counter and exhales slowly, letting the warmth from the stove press into his spine. The pot on the burner is still half-full—he made too much, probably, still worried about burning it or messing it up. But it doesn’t feel like a mistake. If anything, it feels right, like his hands knew before he did.

Because of course they’d all show up, eventually. Of course they’d be hungry and loud and tired and whole. They always are.

Bob glances down at the pot again and smiles, small and real.

He’s glad he made so much.

He’s glad they’re here to eat it.

November 14th, 2027

“It’s not the worst idea,” Yelena says slowly, which means that it’s… bad , but it won’t kill them all. Probably. At least not outright, which is good news. That’s the kind of thing that the Thunderbolts take as a victory.

Alexei grins, clearly pleased with himself. “Yes, yes, see? We make snacks. Something simple, but big. And good, yes?”

“You mean Bob makes snacks?” Yelena asks dryly. And then she glances at Bob under her lashes, who has been silently nursing a milkshake from the place across the street, with a knowing smile that makes something in his chest flutter. He lowers the cup just enough to offer one shrugged shoulder.

Alexei waves a hand. “Details. Details. We will all contribute. Bob cooks, Yelena chooses movie, I... supervise.”

It is early. The sky is still gently grey-edged in the way that late afternoons are when they’re on the cusp of evening. Not quite night yet. Not quite done—case in point, John and Ava’s absence on some P.R. stunt that Valentina set up.

Yelena is leaning back against the kitchen island. Her arms are crossed loosely, and her expression is gently amused with a single eyebrow arched, not in real skepticism, but in an idle play of it, with nothing better for any of them to do. The kitchen overhead light flickers faintly above her. Her skin is golden-warm underneath it.

Alexei, across from her, looks triumphant. One hand braced on the counter, the other waving dramatically as he continues laying out his vision, as if they were strategizing for battle rather than trying to figure out whether there’s enough popcorn for six.

They are both right in a way, Bob thinks. Rarely ever do they ever…sit together, all of them. With all their different schedules—again, “courtesy” of Valentina—and the kind of lives that they’ve lived…it’s not like anyone’s ever taught them how to just…be around eachother. It’s the sort of thing they’ve had to learn to do. A movie doesn’t sound that bad. With no mission or objective or a time limit ticking in the background. If they can get through it without killing each other. Hell, late night they managed that with John and Ava…partially, with a pillow being the only casualty.

He takes another slow sip from his milkshake, letting the straw linger between his fingers until condensation dampening his knuckles. The hum in his chest—the rare kind that doesn’t hurt—is louder than usual today.

“We still have some popcorn kernels, right?” he asks Yelena. She blinks with a certain amused expression. Surely knowing that he would cave, he thinks, but he only smiles back a little sheepishly.

Alexei rubs his hands together. “Yes, yes. The good ones?”

“Define ‘good.’”

“The ones that go boom,” Alexei declares, miming an explosion with both hands. “And not the sad kind that just… sits there.”

“You mean the kernels that actually pop,” Yelena deadpans.

“Yes! This is what I said.”

She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Yeah.”

Bob leaves his milkshake on the counter moves without needing to think much about it, already cataloging what he needs. Butter. Salt. The giant mixing bowl that barely fits in the sink. It’s probably more than a little ridiculous how easily he slips into motion for this, how willingly. But maybe it’s not ridiculous at all.

“We could make cookies too,” he suggests offhandedly.

Alexei nods furiously. “See, Lena?”

Bob opens the fridge and pulls out the familiar blue tube of Pillsbury cookie dough, already scored into perfect portions. He holds it up like a peace offering, to which Yelena raises an eyebrow again.

“Have you even used the oven before, Bob?” she asks, not unkindly, but with an amused tilt to her voice.

“Um.” No. Definitely not. Instead he says, “It does most of the cooking for you, right?” and doesn’t mean for it to come out like a question as much as it does.

Yelena snorts. She grabs the tube from his hands with practiced ease “Yes. It mostly does,” she says. “That’s the point. It’s foolproof.”

She puts it down on the counter next to the oven, and starts fiddling with the dials.

“Wonderful!” Alexei says, clasping his hands. “I go find White Sun of the Desert!” 

Bob blinks confused, but Yelena is quick to cut in, not even glancing up.

 “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Alexei presses. “A true masterpiece. Soviet epic. A man, the desert, his rifle—honor, poetry, mustache–”

“No.” 

He throws up his hands. “You did not let me finish!”

“Something light,” she says, more to Bob than to her father. “Funny. Not depressing. No war, no sad dogs, no trauma. Something very stupid.”

Alexei huffs and throws his hands into the air, but otherwise does not argue, and marches off it to the living room.

Yelena snorts under her breath. Her smile is fond when she glances at him and nudges his shoulder.

“Should get working on the popcorn while this preheats,” she says, and Bob nods. He thinks about last night, the same thought process:

He’s glad he’s the one who gets to make the snacks.

He’s glad he made too much before, and he’ll probably make too much again tonight.

-

Soon the living room is half-rearranged. Alexei has dragged the couch a solid foot closer to the TV, and there are several throw blankets and pillows tangled at the base of them.

The whole floor smells of chocolate and melted butter. Yelena makes a tisk sound under her breath as she opens the oven to check the baking cookies, sending a rich plume of smell and hot air that makes Bob's mouth water instinctively.

“They don't smell burnt,” he says from the couch, where he is trying to make the popcorn bowl look…more impressive, somehow. But it’s still just popcorn.

“Do not look burnt,” Yelena says. She sounds only a little bit surprised, but very much smug.

He glances at her, and it makes something strange and warm tug at his chest, to see her wearing too big oven mitts and grinning beneath flour dusted cheeks.

“Not bad, Bob,” she says, resting the tray on the counter beside the oven.

He nods more than a little dumbly. She doesn’t seem to mind or notice, and starts digging through the dish cabinet for a big enough plate or bowl.

It is then that the elevator door dings, loud and sharp, and Bob is glad that Yelena is the one handling the cookies, because he jolts, bad enough for her to glance questionably at him.

“Sorry,” he says quickly.  “I just uh—got caught up in it.”

Yelena huffs goodnaturedly, just as Alexei shouts, “Winter Soldier!”

Bucky does not look confused or startled by the state of the room, which feels like either a testament to the WatchTower’s idea of “normalcy,” or Bucky Barnes’ tolerance after a lifetime of nonsense. He steps into the lounge and barely glances at the half-rearranged furniture and the food piled onto the counter. 

“You’re late,” Yelena tisks almost singsongingly, not looking up from the cabinets.

“...To?...”

“Movie night!” Alexei exclaims just as Yelena finds a suitable plate.

“You missed voting, Congressman,” she continues. “We’re watching something stupid. You don’t get a say.”

Bucky exhales through his nose, the smallest shake of his head giving away that quiet, familiar sort of resignation—less why is this happening and more of course it’s happening. He steps further into the lounge and shrugs off his jacket, folding it neatly over the back of a bar stool without being asked.

Drly, he notes, “Not very democratic of you.”

She waves him off, laughing in a way that is impossibly good , Bob thinks. The sound has a texture. It cuts through the warm sugar-thick air that’s almost hazy, and settles somewhere steady in his chest.

He doesn’t know how to hold it. Not really. So he focuses on the popcorn instead: fluffing it a little with his fingers and straightening the bowl just so on the coffee table.

The couch creaks as Alexei settles beside him. He reaches forward to steal a handful of popcorn, then gestures vaguely toward the kitchen, where Yelena is still fussing over the plate of cookies.

“You know,” he says, lowering his voice just a little, “In Ohio, Yelena had this phase. Every time we go to store, she pick out something sugary, something ridiculous.  Snack cakes. Marshmallow cereal. Boxes with cartoons on front. Da?”

“I was six ,” Yelena mutters, but she doesn’t stop arranging the cookies in a some-what neat spiral on the plate.

Alexei continues proudly, not missing a beat: “She always knew when I touched it. Like hawk, I swear! One time—I eat one little cake, just one!—next morning, she puts hot sauce in my tea!”

Yelena doesn’t look up, but the corners of her mouth twitch. “You deserved it.”

“She hid them,” Alexei tells Bob, tapping a finger to his temple. “Always in new place. Under sink. In box of rice. Inside bad cereal.”

Bob huffs a laugh, quiet but real. “Sounds like you were a menace.”

“I was strategic,” Yelena corrects, plucking a cookie off the tray and testing the bottom for crispness.

Bob’s still smiling when he takes one of the warm cookies for himself. It burns his fingers a little, but he doesn't care. He just likes the smell, the heat, the chatter, the way the space feels like it’s always been meant for them.

Bucky has joined the rest of them by now, standing behind the couch with one hand braced on the back, eyeing the cookie plate with cool skepticism.

“Are they safe?” he asks dryly.

“No poison,” Yelena promises, which is not technically a yes.

Bucky grunts, but takes one away.

“See?” Yelena says smugly. “Trust.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, but mutters a gruff, “thanks,” then, asking Yelena,

“Walker and Starr?”

“PR. Valentina’s orders.”

“But they should be done soon,” Bob pipes up. He thinks he’s the only one that ever reads the schedules. “Some donor dinner.”

“Fancy,” Alexei says with a whistle, at the same time that Yelena makes a mock-retching sound.

“Well…” Bucky gestures to the plate of cookies. “They might be pissed enough to stay.”

“Of course they stay!” Alexei says. “Cookies! And Bonding!”

Yelena rolls her eyes, glancing over at Bob with a sure and easy smile, and it is warmer than anything Bob expected, far warmer than the cookies.

—

Sure enough: vaguely windblown and vaguely annoyed, Ava is still in her all-black gear when the elevator door opens. Her hood is down. Her hair disheveled in that way that looks like she tried to take it down from whatever style that Valentina forced it in. A single stubborn lock of hair is plastered to her cheek. She doesn’t bother brushing it away as she walks into the lounge, shoulders clipped, John behind her looking with a ticked jaw.

Yelena is sprawled on the couch. She looks up from the mess of throw blankets, one hand elbowed behind her head, and clocking them instantly. “That bad, huh?”

Ava huffs. “What is this?” she asks. She still looks annoyed, but her voice is genuinely curious, if surprised.

“We are bonding,” Alexei announces proudly. “There will be cookies, and popcorn.”

“Movie night,” Bob says quickly, helpfully he hopes, from the other end of the couch beside Yelena, but the words trail off, and he's unsure if it sounds sane when said out loud, especially when Ava and John are looking like that .

Ava squints at him for a second like she’s trying to determine whether he’s joking. 

John however, still jaw-tight and clearly wound from whatever PR hellscape Valentina had thrown them into, gave the room a quick once over: the half-rearranged furniture, the tangle of blankets and pillows, the bowl of popcorn on and plate full of cookies on the coffee table.

He does not say anything. He just unzips his jacket with a sharp tug and tosses it onto the back of one the bar chairs. Then—still wordlessly—he crosses the length of the room in four quick strides and plops onto the far side of the couch.

 “She threatened to phase through a podium,” he says finally, to no one in particular. “Middle of some donor’s speech.”

Ava doesn’t even link. “I didn’t say it.”

“No,” John agrees. “You just…looked at it. And he froze. Right in the middle of talking about…tax incentives, or something.”

Yelena lets out a short, delighted laugh. She rolls onto her back. “Did he piss himself?”

“Almost,” John says, and he sounds half-way proud. 

Bob snorts into his cookie. Crumbs catch at the corner of his mouth. He wipes them away with the sleeve of his hoodie, which makes Yelena chuckle.

Ava doesn’t respond to that immediately. She looks exhausted—not in the way that she does after a fight—but in the tell-tale way of someone who's been stared at and talked at and asked to smile. She says, “Valentina’s going to send me a memo. Again.”

“We’ll frame it,” Yelena tells her without missing a beat.

Ava huffs a breath that’s half a laugh and half a sigh. Her head tips closer to Yelena’s voice, and Bob doesn’t know if either of them are aware of that at all. Neither of them seem to be, at least outright, but Bob notices how her gaze drifts to the way that the others have settled in.

Without speaking then, she steps around the coffee table and drops down onto the end of the couch beside John. Not carefully. She falls more than she sits, a bit like how John did, but far more gracefully. She doesn’t take off her boots. Doesn’t even bother trying to straighten out the blanket that she lands half-on top of.

John looks content with that, but then facing the black screen, he bridges: “So…Top Gun?”

Ava sighs, and Yelena ‘boos’ dramatically. She leans up for the first time since she settles onto the couch to lob a piece of popcorn in John's general direction, which is also Ava's general direction, but Ava phases just long enough for it to go through her and hit John in his side.

“What? It's a classic!”

“You're so predictable,” Ava teases, with no real heat.

John raises his hands in mock surrender. A crooked grin is tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Predictable? Please. I have range. I like… other classics. Like Die Hard —” Another groan from Yelena “—and The Rock .”

“Jesus, no, no.” Yelena nudges Bob with her shin, “Save us, please.”

Bob blinks, more than a little surprised, having been quietly, contently, watching most of the exchange. He glances around at all of them…their limbs tangled in blankets, the popcorn bowl and cookies already half-demolished, the couch pulled too close to the screen, and no one seeming to mind.

Alexei is sprawled out on the loveseat, taking up the whole thing and looking entirely at peace. Bucky has taken the armchair without question. He is smiling, faintly, if just content. John has one arm slung behind Ava on the back of the couch, which she’s pretending not to notice, curled like a cat but with the same ever-watchful eyes. And Yelena is beside him, her head cushioned under a nest of blankets. She nudges his shin again, gentler this time, and watches him expectantly with one raised eyebrow and a smirk like she already knows he’s going to say something ridiculous.

There’s a lightness in the room. Not the kind that floats away if you breathe too hard, but the kind that settles. Stays. It tugs something loose in his chest…

“The Princess Bride.”

The rest of them glance back at him with various puzzled expressions, except for Bucky, who chuckles, "That's a good one."

 “The…what now?” Ava asks.

Bob swallows and tries again. “It’s a movie,” he says, a smile tugging at his lips when John mutters, “no shit,” under his breath. “It’s…kind of everything: adventure, romance, comedy.”

“Sounds like a mess,” Yelena cuts, arching an eyebrow. But her voice is not unkind, and her smile is still there.

“It’s not, I swear.  It’s got sword fights, giants, and a princess.”

John makes a face. “So. A fairytale?”

Ava glances up at him and gently taps his arm with a quick light fist. Nothing harsh, just enough to catch his attention. “Not everything has to be about explosions and muscles,” she mutters, to which he huffs, looking half amused and half caught off guard.

“There's…other things. A revenge plot. Miracle Max—and uh–” he wiggles his fingers, “six fingers.”

“…Is that real?” John asks, brow furrowing.

“Very real,” Bucky says, solemn as anything, which makes Bob chuckle.

Yelena lets out a delighted, startled laugh. “You are not making this up.”

“I’m really not.”

Alexei stirs from the loveseat then, voice drowsy but interested: “Are there sword fights?”

“Yes.”

“Are there good sword fights?”

“Some of the best. No powers, just… skill. Style.”

Alexei nods once.  “Alright. I am in.”

Ava is still looking at him funny. “This sounds…strange,” she says, and she doesn’t mean it as an insult.

Yelena shifts under her blanket and leans back against Bob’s shoulder. “Strange is fine. We do strange.”

“We are strange,” John adds, almost under his breath, and Ava bumps him again with her elbow.

—

“Alright, Bob. That one was good.”

It is well past…probably midnight, if Bob had to guess. The sky outside is pitch black, deep and dark, lit only by the scatter of city lights far below them. Inside, it is just him and Yelena. The television screen is still playing the DVD menu on loop, casting lazy flickers of warm light.

Bob glances down at her. She’s curled deep into the couch now, head half on the cushion, and half on his thigh. There’s a smear of chocolate on her mouth that she hasn’t noticed…and Bob wants to kiss her, more than anything —watching the rise and fall of her chest, watching the way that the credits dance faintly across her face. Her sharp lines are still sharp, but the tension between them is smoothed out. Her brow is relaxed. Her mouth is parted slightly. Just enough that he can see where the aforementioned smear rests, beside the occasional flash of her tongue.

Bob stays very still. Not because he’s afraid she’ll move, because she looks comfortable and smug there, but because he doesn’t want the hazy moment of this to end. This quiet , punctuated by only the muffled noise of the city, and the sleep-sounds of the others: someone–Alexei, probably—is snoring faintly. Bucky mumbles something unintelligible in his sleep.

He doesn’t kiss her. He won’t.

“Yeah?” he says quietly, like if he’s too loud it’ll undo it.

She hums. “Mm. I get it now. Why it’s your favorite.” And then, as if sensing his train of thought, shift just-enough to glance at the others, not enough to get off of him. Bob follows her gaze.

Ava and John are on the far side of the couch, tangled in a strange knot together that doesn't look comfortable, but must be , since they haven't stirred at all in the past half hour: John's arm is still thrown over the couch and his head is leaning back with it, but he’s brought his leg half-way up, and Ava’s cheek is pressed into his thigh.

“They’re asleep?” Bob whispers.

“Dead asleep,” Yelena confirms, her voice pleasantly husky. She is smiling, soft and knowing. “They always crash like that after missions. They’ll deny it, obviously. But that’s their thing.”

Bob thinks about the two of them squabbling a day beforehand. That…makes sense, he figures, and has to bite back a laugh.

“Alexei and Bucky are out too,” Yelena continues to note. Sure enough, Bob can hear Alexei’s snoring, and the faint, steady rhythm of Bucky’s breathing.

Bob shifts just a little and lets his eyes drift back to the window. The city lights are distant and steady, like the heartbeat of a world that keeps turning no matter how messy things get inside this Tower. Strangely comforting.

“Congratulations, Bob,” Yelena says after a moment of silence. “No casualties, no food poisoning. Little early, to call it a ‘Christmas Miracle,’ but eh.”

Bob chuckles softly. He is still careful not to jostle her.

And then, softly: “This was a good idea.”

Bob swallows. Doesn’t say anything. Just reaches down, and without thinking too hard about it, gently brushes the edge of his sleeve over the chocolate smear at the corner of her mouth.

Yelena doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t tease him. Just sighs again, long and content, and lets her eyes fall closed.

“I’m tired,” he says.

“Mmhm.” She lets the quiet stretch again before adding, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

And they let it be. Two more bodies folded into the room’s hush, with the tangled, unshakable comfort of being exactly where they’re meant to be.

Chapter Text

November 15, 2027

Bob wakes up to the sound of breathing. Not his own, but someone else's: steady, close and rhythmic.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He didn’t mean to wake up either. The couch is still warm and sleep-heavy in a lived-in way: crumbs in the blankets, the faint echo of last night’s laughter and teasing. It smells faintly like popcorn and chocolate. Like the memory of something sweet that hasn’t gone completely stale.

He keeps his eyes shut. Not out of fear, just habit, because in this in-between state, nothing too sharp has found him yet. He can feel Yelena’s weight strewn across his lap. He wonders faintly who must have moved closer…him or her; her cheek is pressed firmly into the junction between his thigh and his stomach, the bend of her arm draped carelessly over his hip.

It should be awkward, is his second thought. Something too much and too fast and too close that he shies away from–but it isn’t. It’s just warm. The weight of her across him feels like gravity adjusted itself slightly in the night and forgot to fix it. And maybe that’s fine.

He thinks maybe he could drift off again. He probably could.

But then he hears a faint rustle of fabric. One of the cushions giving. And then a voice, 

“...you know that, right?”

John's voice. There is no early morning husk to it, so he must have been talking for a while. Watching the ceiling maybe.

Ava is…resigned. And careful. “Yeah.” That doesn’t mean yes , not entirely. It means I hear you . Bob knows that tone. He’s used it himself, he’s heard it in therapist offices and debrief rooms, in places that smell like antiseptic and coffee gone cold.

“I mean it,” John says. Not unkindly or demanding, just certain. “It’s bullshit that they put you up there.”

“Could’ve been worse.”

The couch gives a muted creak. “Yeah. Could’ve been me.”

Ava huffs, but there is that rare, dry thread of amusement in her voice, flickering like light under a closed door. “You would’ve thrown a chair,” she says, “or bit someone.”

John grunts, unapologetic “Damn right.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Valentina thinks so too,” he says, almost proudly.

Ava hums low in her throat, like she might laugh again. It’s a very nice sound. Bob likes it. It’s sort of…strange, and unsure, in a way, like she doesn’t entirely know how to enjoy it, hasn’t laughed enough to fully know how to when it's not guarded and teasing. Like this, it’s honest and more than a little vulnerable.

The silence that settles is gentle. Ava and John aren’t in any hurry to get up, it seems, and neither is Bob. Faintly behind the lids of his eyes, Bob can see soft golden light. It must be morning then. The real kind: sunlight catching through the common room windows, warm and feathering along the walls, but not just the artificial flow of the paused TV screen. 

“You ever think about what you’d be doing, if none of this had happened?”

Bob has never heard John’s voice so soft before, raw like he had been turning the thought over in his head. That is honestly more startling than the question.

“Define ‘this,’” Ava responds dryly.

John huffs. “You know what I mean.”

She scoffs, but does not say anything for a long moment. Bob can hear her thinking. And maybe he should turn over, open his eyes, and let them know that he’s… here. But he doesn’t. Like a radio half-tuned in the dark… it feels like eavesdropping, but not in a cruel way.

Then: “No,” she says.

Just that. Not necessarily defensive or bitter, just tired , Bob thinks. There’s another shift on the couch—someone adjusting a leg, or crossing arms over their chest. Bob can’t tell. “I try not to, anyway,” she continues in a lower voice. “It doesn’t help. Thinking about it.”

“M’not asking if it helps ,” John grunted. “I’m asking if you do .”

Ava lets out a dry, tired breath of a laugh, one that is… not as kind, bitter and sharp. “Oh, piss off,” she says. Bob flinches, because her voice is not entirely loud or angry. More exhausted than anything. 

And then he hears the creak of the couch and the low scrap of heels against the floor as John mutters, “Was just trying to talk. You don’t have to bite my head off.”

“You’re always trying to talk,” she says through a slow exhale of her nose. “You ever try listening?”

“I am listening. You’re not just saying anything.”

“Because I don’t know what to say,” Ava hisses. Her voice is still carefully quiet. “You asked if I think about it. The answer’s still no. Because there’s no different, John. There’s no—” She cuts herself off with a frustrated sound, low and guttural. “I was a kid when the accident happened. I haven’t had a normal life since then. I don’t remember normal. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how to imagine wanting something I’ve never had.”

John’s response is quiet at first, clearly caught off guard by the sharpness of it. “Okay,” he says, after a beat. It’s not dismissive. Just… acknowledging. Like he knows better than to try and argue with that. “Okay. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ava mutters. “I’m just—god.” She laughs, brittle and self-directed. “I’m not mad, John. I’m just tired. I don’t know.”

“I’m trying,” he says, and this time, it lands differently. There’s no defense in it. Just a quiet edge of frustration—maybe with himself, maybe with the whole world.

“I know.”

“Doesn’t matter though,” he echos.

Bob doesn’t move. He couldn’t if he tried. The weight of them is pressed into the air, soft and tired and real in a way that stings under the ribs. He thinks maybe they’ve both forgotten everyone else is still in here, still asleep, or maybe they haven’t, and they just don’t care.

Either way, it feels like something fragile.

He never knows what to do with the ever-present ache in his chest. The ache is not always bad. It’s more like… an extreme extension of any given emotion: despair from sadness, euphoria from happiness, shame from the smallest of mistakes. Sometimes it feels like being made of exposed wire. He feels stretched thin across other’s pain, like he’s holding his breath for a person who doesn’t entirely know how too.

He doesn’t know if this is empathy or recognition or something that came long before either, and just never really went away.

But he thinks that it’s probably why he hasn’t moved. Because whatever this is— it hurts, yes —but it’s real. Ava and John are real. And it makes him feel real too: heavy and tired and pinned by the weight of Yelena’s breath, the scrape of Ava’s voice, and the dull thud of John’s stubborn compassion.

Not heralding a collapse or catastrophe… the ache right now is just the quiet echo of everything in the room. It comes from being present, even if it’s to musing about impossible pipe dreams. Ava deserves to have them, Bob thinks. Even if she can’t imagine what they look like yet.

He doesn’t know if she feels the same, when she whispers to John, “No, it does,” but she says it. And that feels like something important. “That you’re trying,”

“Yeah. Well, it’s all we got left.”

The ache softens just a little. Bob breathes in the quiet. They’re both right: none of them are any good at this . It's scary and strangely comforting all at once. And trying is all that they got. Regardless of if they’re any good at it, maybe because they’re not any good at it, because they’re trying at all.

It’s real, Bob thinks with certainty, as Ava and John’s talking grows more muffled and lost, and the faint drowsiness that he woke up with grows tenfold. That matters.

—

When Bob wakes up (for real this time), the common room is cleared out. No quiet breathing tucked against his side. Not soft rustling of blankets, or creaking couches as someone adjusts to get more comfortable.

But it is not empty : The popcorn bucket and the plate of cookies are still there—what’s left of them, that is. There’s a half-eaten one balancing precariously on the rim of the plate. The throw blankets are strewn about. Not a single one has been folded.

The couch cushion next to him is caved in. The imprint of someone's weight is still there , shallow but sure. Someone sat beside him. Stayed long enough to sink into the fabric.

Yelena.

He’s the only one left in the room, but he doesn’t feel abandoned . Nothing in here has been in. Everything that’s left is just proof that the night happened. That they were here, together.

—The morning as well, or what he thinks must have been very, very early morning. That wasn’t a dream. He remembers the weight of Yelena’s arm flung over his lap. Ava and John’s voices in the dark. He remembers wanting to stay very still so they wouldn’t stop. And they hadn’t. They had tried .

Bob runs a hand through his hair. He thinks about the way that Ava had sounded. He thinks about John’s stubborn try at kindness. How neither of them had said the right thing, but that wasn’t the point.

That mattered.

Then he feels the warm divot on the couch. Still there. Still hers. That had mattered too.

He pulls himself up to his feet with that thought, steadying himself with a hand on the back of the couch. His legs still feel half-asleep and slow, but not in an unpleasant way, more like he’s caught in a soft afterglow. Bob takes a moment to breathe. The ache hasn’t left, but it isn’t pulling him under either. Not entirely. He thinks maybe this is what okay feels like—not all at once, but in pieces.

He holds. And the room holds. He takes one last glance around, enjoying the late-morning light from the windows.

Then it’s into… whatever comes after the trying, Bob guesses. Which, he decides, is breakfast.

He rounds the couch into the kitchen. There’s a half-empty pot of coffee waiting for him, John probably. He digs in the fridge for orange juice instead.  Coffee makes him too jittery, and Ava—she hasn't said why outloud, but she never drinks it, and Bob can only imagine how the caffeine-buzz must feel to someone's who's atoms are perpetually unfixed. So he's made sure that the orange juice and milk are always put back in one of the door shelves for the both of them.

He pours himself a glass and decides on oatmeal. There's a hand of bananas on the counter, and he swears he bought strawberries and brown sugar. 

Sure enough, he finds the strawberries tucked behind a jar of pickles. The brown sugar’s in the usual place: top cabinet, slightly too high for easy reach unless you’re Bucky or John, which is why someone’s left the step stool half-folded by the pantry. He doesn’t bother with the stool this morning. He just stretches, gets it, and tries not to spill sugar across the counter.

The strawberries are soft around the edges and a little too ripe, but they’re still sweet. He sets the water to boil too. It’s quiet in the kitchen, warm from the late-morning sun hitting the floor tiles just right. Bob doesn’t mind the silence. Not today.

Which is (probably) why he hears the echo of Alexei’s voice before he hears the elevator ding .

“… It is not a proper meal unless there are potatoes, ” Alexei is saying, his voice already mid-rant.

Bob huffs softly into his glass of orange juice, not quite laughing, not quite exasperated. Just—expecting it. Like the inevitability of gravity or Alexei’s deeply held opinions on… everything really.

“—Because listen, if a man cannot wake up and fry something in oil, is he really alive? No, no, do not answer, it is rhetorical, but also the answer is no—!”

“...Right,” comes  a small voice, and the sound of hesitant heels scraping the title. Definitely not Yelena. Or anyone else. Bob glances up just as the elevator door opens.

Mel.

Valentina’s assistant. Well-dressed. Usually, caught somewhere between over-caffeinated and exhausted.

Mel.

Bob has seen her exactly twice. The second time was when she was standing beside Valentina’s podium during their impromptu “press conference” (if one can even call it that). The first time—well, he hasn’t exactly seen her, but the point is: it’s that , and when she… killed him.

The kitchen doesn’t blur or tilt, so that’s something. But the thought is still there—immediate, factual, not cruel: she killed me. 

The second thought, coming almost immediately, is that he doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t even feel afraid, exactly. Just... aware. A strange, sharp-edged memory that he had to claw at and fight with his own brain to remember after the fact. 

Her blazer looks freshly steamed, crisp against the chaos of the Tower. She clutches a canvas tote too tightly. There’s a silver stylus clipped to her lapel and a notepad sticking out of the bag. Her eyes are scanning everything— cataloging, he thinks. A habit. A job.

“—And they tell me, ‘Alexei, no frying at 7 a.m.,’ and I say, ‘But what about 9 a.m.?’ and they say ‘Still no,’ and I say, then why are we here?! ”

Mel laughs, tight and reflex and very much fake, but Alexei doesn’t seem to notice—or probably, doesn’t mind.

“Bob!” He greets, then glances back down at Mel. “He sleep like bear, you know. You throw one little blanket on him and poof —gone until spring.”

Mel gives another thin and polite smile. Her fingers tighten on the tote strap like it’s a lifeline. Bob can see the tension crawling up her forearm, knotted into her shoulder.

He doesn’t say anything, not at first. Just finishes pouring the oats in the pot and starts slicing the fruit slowly and deliberately. The knife is dull. He doesn’t mind.

She hasn’t looked at him again.

Not really.

She’s looking around him. At the cabinets, the mugs, the messy pile of reusable bags tucked behind the toaster. Cataloging the scene like a field agent, or someone trying very hard not to notice that the man she killed is casually stirring brown sugar into breakfast.

Alexei, cheerfully oblivious or perfectly aware, opens the fridge with unnecessary force and mutters about… something, or another that’s probably still potato related.

“Hi,” Bob finally says, maybe more than a little strangely.

Mel startles  just barely, just the tiniest twitch of her fingers where they grip the tote, like she forgot for a moment that he could speak. That he might .

“Hi,” she echoes, too quickly. Then, after a pause: “Sorry. I didn’t mean to… interrupt.”

“You didn’t,” Bob tells her.  The brown sugar melts into the oats, thickening them.

“Valentina sent me,” she continues, fiddling with the folder. “There’s a draft schedule and a rotating compliance report. Something about a secondary psych eval for Walker and Starr.”

Bob has no idea what any of that means (the psych eval part makes his stomach flip a good bit), but he nods anyway.

“I’ll–uh. Get those. To Yelena or Bucky.”

Mel nods, a short little dip of her chin like she’s grateful not to be the one who has to explain it further.

“Thanks,” she says, voice still clipped but less brittle than before. “It’s all in the folder. Mostly just… logistics. Timing windows. Check-ins.”

Mel’s gaze skims past him again: reused grocery bags, the not-quite-washed coffee mugs in the sink. Her expression softens almost imperceptibly, though maybe that’s just a trick of the morning light. She shifts her weights. Open her mouth. Closes it.

Then, finally, as if coming to some conclusion, she presses her lips together. She doesn’t cry. She looks like someone who has trained herself not to cry, Bob thinks, even when she probably should.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she says, abruptly.

Bob raises an eyebrow.

“Here,” she clarifies. “Now. Not the… the other one. The Void. Or whatever.”

Bob doesn’t smile. Not exactly. But he nods.

“I am too,” he says.

Mel lingers like she might say more—but then she straightens her jacket, picks up her folder, and heads for the elevator. The door opens almost immediately.

“Strange girl,” Alexei notes. He closes the fridge with his foot, carrying a water bottle. “She needs drink, no?”

Bob huffs. “She needs a vacation.”

Alexei waves his hand. “Bah!” he dismisses, “And miss out on heroism?”’

Bob doesn’t answer that, He’s busy slicing strawberries with slow, steady hands, and thinking, not about heroism, but, ‘I’m glad it's you.’ Not an… apology… just something else.

“She is like Yelena, yes?”

Bob blinks out of his stupor, genuinely confused. “Mel?” he asks, and he cannot hide the slight tilt in his voice. Surprise, or maybe concern, that Alexei’s about to say something wildly off-kilter.

But Alexei just laughs at his confusion, big and easy. He waves one hand vaguely, “No, no, not really. But, you know…”

Bob still looks skeptical, but he’s listening now. Carefully. The knife he’d been using is still in his hand, forgotten above a half-sliced strawberry.

“They are not same,” Alexei continues after a moment, “of course not. Yelena is small bomb. Mel is... rules and lists. Very tense shoulders.” He pantomimes the stiffness with a shrug and a grumble. “But both. You see in eyes. That look, from before.”

Bob is still… confused. “What do you mean?” he presses.

Alexei exhales, not quite sighing. He sits down on one of the bar chairs. It creaks under him, suddenly so loud in the silence.

“Yelena,” he starts, “She is–she has been through… much. We all have, yes yes, of course. But Malyshka—my daughter—” His voice softens at the word, and he gestures vaguely. “Yelena means bright. Shining. Light that leads, like torch.”

Oh. The thought had never crossed his mind to ask, not because he didn’t care, but because Yelena just meant… Yelena to him. Lovely and fixed and immutable. She didn’t need to mean anything—she was.

…But light . It borders on ache, how fitting that is.

Alexei continues, “She used to run ahead. When she says little. Never walked. Always running. Always had to—to see what was next before anyone else. We go to supermarket, and I say, say by me, Malyshka, stay close , but no, never.”

Bob chuckles. He can see it easily. A little flash of her barreling down fluorescent aisles, burning bright in everything that he does.

“But that light,” Alexei says. “...dimmed. After–” he swallows, and Bob thinks about the girl in the snow, how both Yelenas—young and old—had flinched in tandem with the gunshot. “Bah,” Alexei waves his hand off again. “This team, Bob. Brought my Malyshka's light back. I–Mel, has that…before, dimmer light.”

That… makes sense, somehow.

Bob doesn’t say out loud. But he nods, eyes drifting to the elevator doors. He thinks about Mel’s ramrod straight posture, her shoulders pulled tight, and her voice. He thinks about how she said “I’m glad it’s you” without quite being able to meet his eyes. About how she didn’t flinch when he stirred the oatmeal, but she didn’t quite breathe either.

“She doesn’t have a team,” he finally says. Alexei hums loudly in agreement, leaning back on the creaking chair and lazily reaching for an apple from the fruit bowl. “Just… Valentina.”

He's never seen her with anyone else.

It makes his skin crawl, makes his stomach churn with something… strange, that he doesn't know how to name. He doesn't want her to be afraid of him. He doesn't want anyone to ever be afraid of him—he swore that, when he was little and saw too much of his father's hair and jaw in the mirror.

He doesn't think that Mel's afraid of him. But he thinks that she doesn't know how to… be around him. Which is fair. It still upsets him. For that same reason, he can only assume that he never wants to frighten anyone. And Mel had done that because she was scared.

“She could stay,” he says quietly, so quiet that he doesn't know if Alexei hears him. “For breakfast, I mean. Next time.”

He doesn't know if she will. She probably won't. He wants to ask anyway.

Alexei defaults back to his boisterous demeanor, seemingly relieved by Bob understanding him. “Yes, yes,” he agrees. “We are bad at many things, but this?”

This, they’re not good at either, Bob thinks. But they could be worse. They could… not try, which feels impossible, because there’s not a world where he can look at this team—this strange, aching, mess of people—and not try 

November 17, 2027

Trying.

The word feels bitter in his mouth now, teasing almost, or as vaguely frustrated as he is.

It is late enough that the tower is quiet. The only sounds are the distant hum of the tower’s AC unit, the faint bustling of the city below him, and the kitchen’s single overhead light flickering on as Bob fumbles open a packet of instant ramen. His hands are too shaky, too cold, and the plastic tears wrong, splitting halfway down the side.

“Jesus,” he mutters.

Immediately the smell of dried noodles hits him as they land in the pot of boiling water. He knows how to make these by muscle memory. 10 cents a pack, back when he was in middle school at least. Can be eaten room-temp if need-be, with water from gas station bathroom sinks or the crusty water fountain outside a library. They were perfect for when the house was too quiet or too loud, and no one noticed if you ate or didn’t.

Or now, when there’s a fuzzy tiny behind his eyes and everything feels a little bit off-kilter.

Bob is frustrated more than anything. He doesn’t feel any chest-gripping panic and adrenaline, or a ‘low’ so deep that his chest feels hollowed out and empty.

There’s just a vague dissatisfaction, deep in his bones in a way that frustrates him just enough to make his skin tingle, just enough to make it impossible to sleep.

There’s nothing really wrong, and that’s somehow worse. No excuse. No trigger. No monster in the closet.

Just… off. Just wrong. Just tonight, apparently.

He wants to blame it on the ‘high’ of the past few days, but that wasn’t a ‘high,’

There was no manic rush. He doesn’t remember any false euphoria…just a quiet, steady rhythm that he fell into without realizing. The presence of warm bodies that don't demand anything. And the ache within him felt more than manageable.

It wasn’t even that anything had changed. The tower was still here. The coffee pot was probably still half-full. The couch still smelled faintly like butter and fabric softener and someone else’s shampoo.

But Yelena was gone. Just for a night. Out late with Ava on some mission. He knows that. He knows that.

Still, her absence registers like a chill in the corners of the room, like the slight hum of something off-frequency. It makes everything feel… thinner, maybe. Not bad, just less .

Bob stirs the noodles absently with a fork that he forgot to clean. They’re done before he’s hungry, but maybe he was never hungry to begin with. It doesn’t stop him from pouring them into a chipped mug. He sits at the kitchen counter, slumped.

They taste like salt and cardboard. He eats them anyway.

For a while, that’s all it is. The ache in his chest doesn’t crescendo or collapse. It just hums, like static. Bob closes his eyes. Breathes in through his nose. Out through his mouth.

He’s fine.

He’s not unraveling.

He’s just—

“—Jesus,” a voice mutters behind him. “Smells awful.”

Bob doesn’t jump. Secretly, he thinks that it’s impossible for him to really be startled by anything anymore in the Tower, what with Ava’s penchant for phasing in and out of the kitchen growing since that night that they shared apples and chamomile. 

So he doesn’t jump when Bucky speaks. He just blinks slowly, finishes chewing, and hoarsely says, “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” Busky responds casually. “Didn’t really sleep.”

Bob hums. Of course he didn’t. They all pretend to have normal sleep cycles. They don’t: someone’s always prowling around the halls at 2 a.m. Someone else is rummaging through the cabinets and 5. It’s more like a rotation.

He hears the faint creak of a cabinet door, and then a soft thunk as a glass is pulled down. The fridge makes a funny sound when someone uses the water dispenser. It’s a strangely domestic noise, Bob thinks. But it’s only for a moment, and then he hears Bucky drinking.

“You mind?” he asks. Bob glances up from his noodles to where Bucky’s hand is resting on the chair on the opposite corner of the table.

“No.” Bob is momentarily surprised by his honesty, and how easily it comes out. He doesn’t know why . He does not know Bucky. Not like the rest of him. He remembers the faint surprise that he had felt first seeing him with the rest of the team when he first donned the Sentry suit. The man that he only knew in history books.

Is that why it’s easy to accept his company? Because talking to him… Bob feels like he's on some strange, neutral ground. One that won’t coddle him, or demand that he feels whatever they want him to.

Eventually though, Bucky bridges, “You gonna be okay?”

Bob swallows.  “I don’t even know why I’m up,” he says. He sets the mug down and runs a hand through his face “I just felt—off.”

“Off’s a hell of a feeling,” Bucky hums.

Bob nods. ”Not a bad night. Not a good one either.” He feels more than a little dumb, saying that, but Bob just chuckles dryly.

“Those are the worst kind.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Can’t blame them on anything.”

Bob glances up at him—truly, for the first time that night—and for a second, there’s something like understanding . Not sympathy. Not pity. Just… recognition. And Bob quietly wonders to himself how many times Bucky must have woken up feeling like the world is tilted a degree… too many times, he can only think, remembering bits and pieces from history classes: The Winter Soldier. Project Hydra. The Smithsonian plaque that glossed over what couldn’t be said. The old photos and sketches that didn’t show the aftermath, not entirely.

More myth than man, in a way—certainly in Bob’s brain a year ago. But Bucky Barnes is just sitting across from him now, looking tired and old in a way that has nothing to do with sleep or his technical age. Just.. drinking water. Existing.

Being known that way, by the world… does it feel like being haunted while still alive? Existing in a permanent off-kilter state? On the margins of… something?

“You ever do that thing,” Bob says slowly, “where everything feels fine, but you still feel like—like static in a room that used to have music in it?”

Bucky doesn’t blink. Just hums, “Yeah.”

That’s all,” Bob says. “Nothing dramatic.”

Bucky takes a long sip from his cup. He exhales through his nose in a way that’s not quite a sigh. “You waiting for it to get dramatic?”

Bob considers that. Maybe longer than he should. He looks down at the remnants of his noodles. His spoon clinks against the inside of the mug, and he answers, “Not on purpose.”

He doesn’t mean to be cryptic or vague, but he feels so… strange. Slow. In some fog that makes his mouth feel thick and his thoughts sluggish. It’s like typing to speak underwater: the words catch on the edges of his tongue, refusing to come out clear or sharp. It’s not that he wants to hide anything. If anything, he wants to be understood . But the off-kilter haze around his mind blurs everything. His emotions. hIs memories. His fears. They swirl together, thick and impossible to separate, let alone explain.

But he tries : “I think just—just trying to beat it to the punch,” he says, gesturing. “Outpace it. Or something.”

Bucky does that exhale laugh again. It doesn’t feel demeaning. “It’s exhausting.”

‘It’s exhausting .’ Not, ‘ that sounds exhausting .’ Bob notices the distinction, feels it settle somewhere beside the ache. It doesn’t feel like sunlight, but his chest feels a little less hollow at it. A little less alone.

He nods again. Barely. His fingers curl around the now-lukewarm mug like it’s something to hold onto, even if it doesn’t offer much.

“Does it ever—” slipping out quieter than he means to, nearly lost to the hum of the fridge. He swallows, and repeats, “Does it ever get easier?’

He is thirty-two. Probably too old to be asking like this. No, definitely , but he does anyway. Maybe because Bucky Barnes is… a hundred and something? And right now he’s just here . Bob figures, if anyone would know—

“Not really,” Bucky says, in a voice that is not cruel. Bob’s throat tightens, not from surprise, but from something closer to relief. That it’s not just him. That someone else has lived with the same gnawing ache and is still breathing. It didn’t kill either of them for Bucky to say it.

“But you get better,” he continued. “At carrying it—or dragging it. Doesn’t mean it’s fair or gets lighter, or anything like that.  Just… you stop expecting it to disappear.”

“That’s something I guess.”

“Doesn’t feel like it most days, but it is,” Bucky agrees.

Bob traces the rim of his mug with a fingertip, then huffs a small, crooked sort of smile. “You’re better at this than people probably think.”

“At what?”

He gestures vaguely. “This. Talking. Being... human.”

Bob thinks, because Ava—half existing, half not… she hasn’t been. Not entirely. He wonders if that’s the space between doors and rooms that he thought about a week ago. And he doubts that John knows for certain where John Walker, the man, ends and where John Walker, the soldier begins. Does Alexei know either? Or has nostalgia blurred those lines for him so deeply too?  

They do not know how to be human. Not entirely.

But if Bucky Barnes is still breathing, if he has found himself somehow —maybe there’s hope for the rest of them.

“The Princess Bride,” is what Bob says without thinking, without any normal consequor. “You’ve seen it before?”

If Bucky looks surprised by his change in subject, it doesn’t show it on face. “Yeah. Read it.”

Bob snorts at that. Genuinely. And he only feels a little bad about it when Bucky saints.

“Contrary to popular belief. I do know how to read.”

“It’s not that,” Bob says, hiding his smile behind his mug. “It’s just—I don’t know. I didn’t expect—” he gestures vaguely to Bucky without thinking. “You, I mean.”

“I read the Hobbit when it came out.”

“Jesus. You are old. And a nerd.”

Bucky rolls his eyes and huffs out an annoyed half-laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Sam got a kick out of that too.”

“Kind of wish I could’ve seen that,” he says.

Bucky shrugs, but he’s not looking away. “You’re seeing the better part.”

And somehow, Bob believes him, as the city hums on outside.

Chapter Text

November 24, 2027

Things change more. After that movie night.

Bob doesn’t know how to explain it. He wonders if it’s the only one who notices it entirely. Maybe because he's always… just there —walking through the hallways, half-asleep on the common room couch, in the kitchen, leaning over the balcony.

It's not because he's forgotten about in a room, it's because, just maybe, he makes it… soft enough somehow. Less threatening to exist in. Every time that Yelena and him lie together on the couch simultaneously sprawled and tangled, so much so that it's almost impossible to tell where one of them ends and the other begins. Or when Ava, instead of phasing right in front of the fridge to grab something and disappear just as quickly as she appeared, phases into one of the kitchen chairs instead, and eyes him expectantly for their nightly tea. 

Things like that… it makes him wonder, or hope? Or wish, with surprising want for that to be the case. He had never wanted this before, because he didn't think it was possible. Not with his childhood home being… what it was. And everywhere else that he had lived was either just as loud, or quiet—not in a comfortable, peaceful way—too many people in too small a place, barely living in between desperately chasing for the next high.

Just having this … a home that actually feels like a home, where he feels safe and comfortable and endlessly confused by the daily nonsense that they all drag in. That alone is already absurd to him (in the best way possible). But him being the reason for that? Not just a person who happens to be here and somehow hasn't ruined it all yet?

Bob still doesn't know what to do with the feeling that stirs in him: warm and hopeful and more than a little scared.

But what he does know, does notice is this change: that Ava and Bucky exist in companionable silence far more than they don’t.

In quiet, blink-and-you-miss-it things. Ava doesn’t flinch when Bucky’s shadow brushes hers or when he stands close. She doesn’t glance up at him immediately when he enters whatever room she's in with an unspoken ‘what do you want?’

They all like each other a lot more now, Bob is sure of. Or at least they can tolerate each other now. But he doesn’t entirely know how to describe how Ava and Bucky works specifically, almost like extensions of the other—in the way that only two trained, horribly fine-tuned weapons can be.

Maybe that's why they don't demand anything of each other, even if it's just speaking, when it's just the two of them.

Ava needs both, Bob decides: a John who stumbles and barges clumsily into every open-wire emotion, stubbornly confronting them. And a Bucky who will sit on the other side of the room and exist without a word between them for hours.

Maybe they all need that. Maybe that's why their awful team works.

But they also need lunch, Bob decides.

It’s quiet in the kitchen. The midday sun slants through the high windows, catching on the dust. There’s a half-loaf of bread someone forgot to put away, and a few slightly bruised apples in the bowl. 

Ava is perched on the arm of the couch, watching something on her tablet with that practiced stillness that makes her look like she might flicker out at any second. But she doesn’t. And Bucky is half asleep on the armchair, his chip dipped into his crossed arms. 

Bucky stirs a little when Bob ticks the ocean on, but he doesn’t open his eyes. Ava glances over. Bob smiles, more than a little awkwardly.

“I’m making sandwiches. BLTs. Or, uh, LT, if you want them without the B.”

Because, pointedly, he remembers watching Ava shrug off the bacon that he hastily served for her and John with eggs earlier that morning when they had surprised him after their training sessions. John had looked genuinely offended until she dumped it on his plate. Then he shut up.

Bob never asked why she didn’t eat it. He just remembered… and he’s found that he likes quietly remembering those sorts of things. Compiling them all under a list in his brain: that John prefers his eggs scrambled hard, not soft; that Alexei always takes his coffee black; that Yelena won’t touch anything with mushrooms, no matter how hungry she is. It feels useful and kind. He knows that there are much worse things to memorize.

“I think we, uh, still have ham. Or turkey,” he continues.

Ava doesn’t look up for a moment, but at the word turkey , her eyes flick up.

“Turkey’s fine,” she says.

Bob gives a small nod. No bacon. No ham. Turkey probably okay. It’s like another piece falling into place beside Bucky only eats toast in the morning–dry, no butter, no jam , and Yelena pretends not to like sweet things, but always steals the last bite of anything chocolate if no one’s watching. Small details, he thinks. Editable little truths about the people he’s come to care about. Things he can get right.

Bucky stirs again, this time with a soft grunt. His eyes crack open, not fully, just enough to show a thin slice of blue in the dim morning light.

“If you’re already makin’ stuff.” he mutters. His voice is gravel-deep from sleep.

And Bucky… he hadn’t thought about it before, because from the outside onset, he had seemed well-adjusted, in the way that the rest of them clearly weren’t. But it strangely makes sense, that he would find something in Ava too. Because again, similar situations, and all that. He doesn’t treat her with suspicion or like a crackling live wire. 

It must be something to be able to just… exist with someone without them treating you so wearily. Someone who doesn't treat you like an unloaded gun, because they understand what that's like.

Bob swallows. “Sounds good,” he manages, chestful of a strange emotion that stirs and beats, pleasant and somewhat raw.

November 25 2027

And another change. Maybe the funniest. Is whatever John Walker thinks he’s doing today.

Arms crossed and chin tucked, stiff in the kitchen doorway. He’s trying very hard to not look like he’s here on purpose—which is exactly why Bob knows that he is. 

But he also knows, and it’s almost odd, that John will eventually ask. He’ll grumble about it, of course. He has to circle around the thing first, like a wild animal that might bite him if he’s not careful enough. Maybe pretend he wandered in for something else, but he will. It's hard to play entirely nonchalant, Bob guesses, when you were knocked out on the couch together in a glorified cuddle pile.

So now he’s here. Standing in the doorway like he’s lost, which he absolutely is not.

Bob doesn’t look up right away. Today, it’s overnight oats, slow in crockpot and just about ready. 

The pot itself is old and scratched up. More than a little faded, with a few stubborn burn marks that refused to come out no matter how many times Bob scrubbed or buffed it. It was Alexei’s from the house that he was renting before they all moved into the tower. He hasn’t exactly taken care of it—Yelena told him, hushed and after Alexei had left the kitchen, that she’s pretty sure he just forgot that he had until he and Yelena went and cleaned the place out—but Bob appreciated it nonetheless. There’s a kind of quiet pride in getting something that still has a life left in it…so long as someone’s willing to be gentle with it, he thinks.

Or maybe Yelena’s just rubbed off on him, and now he likes taking care of things. Having something, however simple and small, to be gentle with.

So over the course of the past week, he’s coaxed it back to life. Cleaned it. Figured out what buttons did what. And it has rewarded him tenfold with food that could cook itself while he did whatever else needed doing—which wasn’t much around here to be honest, but it’s nice enough to be just sit on the couch and read and be comforted in how the smell slowly wafted from room to room, until the tower smelt… cared for.

John shifts behind him, making a sound that gently draws Bob out of his thoughts. The question must not be too scary now. He clears his throat once.

“Ever make cobbler?” John asks finally, like the thought just occurred to him.

Huh.

Bob’s heart does a little trip. His hand stills just briefly at the edge of the counter.

Peach cobbler.

It was his father’s favorite, and Bob doesn’t know that for any good reason. Not because having it was a good reason. Just something he picked up by proximity, when his mother would make it over the hot, Florida summer, and not because she loved it, but because he did. Because there was always that hope , that maybe if the peaches were sweet enough, and the crust came out just right, the night wouldn’t end in yelling if they were already on that verge of tipping too far. A peace offering.

The food itself was too sweet and too sticky. Bob never liked it. It tasted too much like it was trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. He hasn’t thought about it in years…

He blinks. Swallows. The kitchen is quiet, except for the hum of the crock pot and the faint bubbling of that oats. John is still standing there in the doorway, 6’2 feet of hesitation. He’s awkward but open. Not quite fidgeting, but holding himself like he might start , wound in ways that he doesn’t fully understand. He can’t. Bob never speaks about his father, and no one ever asks. Not even Yelena. And Bob thinks John would be the last one to. Which it feels like it means something directed at him , even when Bob knows it can’t be. John can’t know that.

 But.

John Walker is six foot two, tall and strong and capable, and a voice : loud, clipped, mean sometimes, when he doesn’t necessarily mean it, when he’s tired or cornered or just hasn’t figured out how to say what he actually means. Bob knows that it’s not intentionally cruel. It’s just unpracticed . And this morning, is it just shy of startling by how… not like that, it is. Not exactly gentle, but gentler than need be. This voice in the room asking about cobbler. It doesn’t remind him of his father.

It could have. All the ingredients are there: the height, the poster, the military edge, the food. On paper it’s too close. But John, flawed, blunt, and trying isn’t his father.

Bob’s trips in his chest, and his hands go still. But he is not… afraid.

“Jesus. You can just say no.”

John is looking away from him, arms suddenly crossed. The words come a little too quick. Bob imagines them sitting on the edge of John’s tongue the whole time.

“No, s-sorry,” he says, just quickly. “It just… caught me off guard.”

John’s still learning out the door frame, like he’s debating whether to leave altogether. He nods once. “Didn’t mean to pry.”

“You didn’t,” Bob says, firmly this time. “And no, I haven’t, but I’m good at figuring things out. Peach, right?”

John’s jaw ticks, and he nods again. “Yeah. Thought maybe it’d be a… I don’t know. Good thing to have around.”

It’s the tailend of November. Bob can feel New York’s winter chill through the Watertower’s seams. Peach Cobbler is a summer desert, from what he remembers.

He won’t say any of that aloud. Nor will he say anything about how, if John brought it here it must’ve meant something. John Walker, who growls and snaps and sulks through half of their mornings, might just be the kind of man who remembers the smell of cobbler on a summer stove and thinks: that can help .

Instead, Bob clears his through and warns, “No promises that it won’t be a disaster.”

John makes a noncommittal grunt, something that sounds like, yeah, figures .

“Eat first,” Bob continues. He gestures to the crockpot. “And I’ll find a recipe.”

John’s brow is twitching like he might argue out of habit.

“...Yeah. Okay,” he says instead, which makes Bob snort, and he turns back to the pantry before John can glare at him.

He knows that they have flour, sugar, butter, milk and baking powder—all things that sound like they belong in cobbler, or at the very least something vaguely cobbler-adjacent. He lines them all up on the counter. Behind him, he can hear John eating, the clink of his spoon against the bowl.

“Gotten good at this,” John murmurs around a mouthful.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Then; “Don’t get cocky.”

Bob snorts again, softer this time. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He opens the spice cabinet above. In his mentally assembled list, he adds a start next to vanilla and a question mark beside cinnamon .

“Beside,” John continues, scraping the bottom of the bowl. “You’re the only one in this place who actually knows how to use the kitchen.

“Yelena can cook.”

“She can survive ,” John counters, deadpan. “Barely. That’s different.”

And yeah . Bob’s seen her all but burn water.

“She makes popcorn just fine.”

“Microwaving popcorn is not cooking,” John replies like a man deeply offended by the implication. “And she always burns half the bag.”

“She says the burnt pieces taste smoky.”

“She says a lot of things.”

Bob writes cobbler attempt #1 across the top of a notepad that’s pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet. He lists everything that he put on the counter, plus the cinnamon and vanilla with their appropriate question marks.

He glances once more at John, who’s still hunched over his bowl. Bob doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.

They’ve got time.

—

Bob finds a recipe and double-checks it with John, who looks confused at that until Bob explains that he never watched his mother when she would make it.  So he doesn’t know what all goes into it. Just wants to make sure that it’s the one John thinks he remembers, since he doesn’t have a recipe either.

“Did she, uh.” John looks more than a little out of his depths. “Did she make it a lot?”

Bob’s hands are still busy swiping through the recipe, double checking that they have the right ingredients (thank God that, in his strange grocery shopping rush, he bought canned peaches, for some dumb reason that probably only made sense to him when he was like that). He mutters the amounts aloud under his breath, nodding slightly as he goes, tapping the screen once, then again.

He’s not avoiding the question, just thinking. And eventually he nods.

“Not all the time,” he says. “But enough, I guess. She only made it when he was home.”

John doesn’t ask who he is. He doesn’t have to. 

“My best friend,” he starts instead. “Lamar. His mom would make it. A big tray of it.” And then he huffs. “She called it, uh–her bribe for good behavior. Lamar used to steal a spoon before it cooled and burned the hell out of his mouth every time. I never stopped him.”

Bob snorts. “You would,” he teases, to which John cracks a grin.

“Yeah yeah. She said if she kept the kitchen full, maybe we wouldn’t try to launch ourselves off a roof or something.”

“Did it work?”

“God no. We were so stupid. And bored. And someone was probably drunk.” John shrugs. “High school.”

Bob pointedly does not tell him that he made it exactly half a year,  too high or too ashamed to look anyone in the eye. Instead, he tells him. “We’re gonna need a dish big enough. Might not be bribe for good behavior size , but close, I think.”

John grunts and motions to the cabinet above the fridge. “Alexei’s got that massive glass one.”

Bob leaves his phone on the counter. Sure enough, when he slides the cabinet open it’s there: thick glass, stained slightly on the corners. It feels like the proper thing to bake a memory in.

“Get to it then,” he says, and hears John make a half-startled sound.

“I thought you were the one making this thing.”

“You asked for it. That means you get to help.”

John mutters something under his breath, but when Bob glances back, he sees that he’s already rolling up his sleeves. His expression is somewhere funny between resigned and weirdly focused and serious. It’s like the thought of messing up a peach cobbler, of all things, somehow offends him on a very personal level.

Bob watches him for a moment longer than he probably means to, but then he turns back to the cabinet and the mess of mixed-match dishes to hide the smile at the edge of his mouth.

“You’re taking this pretty seriously,” he says lightly.

John shrugs one shoulder without looking up. “I’m from Georgia. It matters if we fuck this up.”

They both stare at the screen for another long moment, neither moving. It’s just a recipe. Simple and pulled from some random food blog that apologized for the author’s dead grandmother before it got the point. But it’s also not. Not really.

John’s the one to break it. “So, we doing this or what?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

—

Yelena and Alexei have found them by the time the cobbler makes it into the oven.

Bob hears Alexei come in because it’s impossible not to: a loud sigh, louder footsteps. There’s a distinct clatter fridge rummaging, punctuated by a baffled, " Where is salami? Who moved my salami? " like it’s a national emergency.

John doesn’t look up. They are both on the couch.  “Nobody moved your salami, man.”

“I had it. In the door. Hidden behind the mustard. It was genius placement. Who did this?”

There’s another shuffle, the unmistakable thunk of something being knocked off a shelf and then put back.

Yelena is like a shadow behind her father, light on her feet and so silent that if Bob did not hear her voice he might not have known she was there at all.

“You,” she says. “Are you responsible for all this?”

Her voice is playfully accusatory, and it makes Bob’s cheeks flush pink.

“Some of it,” John answers for him.

Bob sits up on the couch to see her better. She is leaning over the kitchen counter at him. Her eyes narrow, but there is no real fire behind it. Just that spark of curiosity, almost cat-like, Bob thinks, the particular brand of amusement that she saves for when someone has surprised her and she’s still trying to decide if she likes it or not.

It’s fair that she inspects the kitchen like a crime scene. It can’t look too far off: open flour bag on the counter, canned peach juice pooling on the cutting board. But it smells nice. Even she would have to admit that, that warm sugar and cinnamon smell that even he can’t bring himself to hate, memories of it regardless

Eventually, she says, “You’re a bad influence, Walker.”

John grunts like that’s the most obvious thing in the world.  “Yeah, well. I’m not the one who opened three cans of peaches with a screwdriver.”

Bob shrugs, a little embarrassed. “We didn’t have a can opener.” How on Earth he had forgotten that , and not canned peaches in the middle of Winter?

Alexei interrupts them, swinging the fridge door shut. “This I approve,” he declares. All is apparently forgiven. “South, yes?”

John looks vaguely surprised. “Uh yeah. Didn’t know you knew that.”

Yelena does too. “You’ve never been to the South,” she raises.

Alexei puffs up. He seems too proud to be offended by either of them. “I have seen many films,” he says. “And many American delicacies. South is very distinctive. It is the butter and—what is the word— soul. ” He points at John. “You have put soul in this, yes?”

‘I just told him how we used to make it,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. H’es making a face like he’s not sure if he’s being complimented or accused.

“You followed a recipe then?”

Bob nods sheepishly. “Mostly.”

“Didn’t ask me,” Alexei notes.  He’s already rustling in the pantry like a bear looking for honey. “Next time we make borscht. Then you know real tradition.”

Yelena smirks. “Next time he’ll remember a can opener.”

Bob’s gaze stays on Yelena as Alexei rambles on. She’s still leaning on the counter. She’s looking at her father with half teasing and half affectionate amusement.

In the soft glow of the kitchen light, with the warm scent of baking slowly filling the air, Bob’s heart tugs toward her, steady and certain. It’s quiet but unmistakable. This feeling that roots him here among the mess, around her , the sun to him.

He does not say it aloud. But he loves her. And how much he loves her—how she is that sun, and her presence, this undeniable home , in the strange, imperfect moment with all of them here and safe and messy and alive.

November 26 2027

Bob isn’t a virgin.

He’s kissed people before–he knows what that’s like, and what it’s like to want to kiss someone, because they are real and warm beneath your hands, and you are both just people : horny, and stupid, and fumbling with each other's jean buckles, laughing into each other's mouths because you’re both high off drugs and nerves.

He knows what lust is. He knows when someone is pretty, and there is the expressed, mutual understanding and desire between you and another person, that you’re going to hook up. Probably soon. Probably clumsily. And that’s fine. It’s not supposed to be perfect. It’s supposed to burn quick and hot, an instinct that overrides everything else.

You don’t look too closely at it. Not because you are ashamed, but because that’s… that was just the nature of his past hooks-up. The whole point was not to think, to be reckless and weightless and briefly wanted. And then you would leave. Or they would. To another town, another city, another country… always moving.

But there’s a clear and clean end to it, before either of you are sober enough to catch feelings. No awkward goodbyes. No messy feelings. Just a closing door and laughter echoing after it.

That is what Bob knows of love.

But Bob does not want that with Yelena.

And he didn’t… he didn’t even, and still doesn’t, consider those hook-ups as bad or anything. They were what they were: moments of connection on an endless road (and drug trip) to nowhere.

But he can’t imagine that with Yelena. He can’t… “we stick together from now on.” It’s everything to him, she is everything to him: this impossibly bright light, just as Alexei had explained. 

Bob wants to stay. He wants to be here when she returns from missions, some solid, immovable force bearing something warm and homemade.

He wants her to come through the door and find the world already softened for her. The edges blunted. The noise quieted. A space where she doesn’t have to be sharp or fast or clever or dangerous.

Just Yelena.

Just Yelena. Sleepy-eyed and sore, maybe limping a little. Maybe silent. Maybe angry. Maybe scraped raw from whatever Valentina and the world asked of her this time.

And him—waiting. 

But the point is: there’s not a moment where Yelena isn’t… beautiful. It sneaks up on Bob in the most mundane of ways. In the most mundane of settings. He cannot predict when. Maybe it’s the way that the late morning light tends to hit her face right as she leans against the doorway when she wakes up, wearing just a too-long sleep shirt—probably, definitely his—and Walker’s gym shorts tied to keep them from slipping. Or how, after a mission, her face will be flushed a lovely pink, and her chest will heave, drenched in sweat and left-over adrenaline—and Bob will pointedly look away and not be a creep, thank you very much. He’ll busy himself with something extremely important, like wiping down a counter that’s already clean or reorganizing the silverware drawer for the fifth time this week.

Because right now, he is trying to make cookies—nothing fancy, but not store-bought for once. The cobbler not burning has got him on some sweet-tooth kick—and Yelena is sprawled on the couch. Her sweater is riding up. She has always been toned, and he used to seeing every part of this: muscles when she stretches or flexes her arm at John to tease him in-between training. But the patch of skin that he sees is.. Soft. Healthy, he realizes, sort of without thinking.

The soft curve of her ribs, the way her skin catches the sunlight, the slight rise and fall of her breath… it's different now. She is still Yelena. Still deadly and sharp-tongued and capable of dismantling a man with a butter knife. But lately, there’s a fullness to her. She’s been eating more, sleeping more. Not always consistently and certainly not without setbacks… but just more .

She shifts on the couch and groans softly, a barely-awake, sore muscle kind of sound—and Bob almost forgets to finish folding the sugar into the butter.

How she exists in the room… How she’s started to leave things behind. How she takes up space now, without apology. 

There’s a smudge of flour on her cheek from when she tried to steal some cookie dough before it was ready. She had laughed, unguarded and smug, when he caught her and batted her away with a spatula. And then she’d flopped, arms spread-eagle onto the couch like a housecat in a sunbeam. Utterly, undeniably, pleased with herself.

He glances back over at her. She’s dozing now, mouth parted just slightly and snoring. There’s a small crease between her brows that hasn’t quite smoothed out.

He wants to kiss it. Just because he wants her to feel peaceful . Safe in a way that asks nothing of her but what she already is.

He has to tell her.

Even if his voice shakes. Even if she laughs. Even if she doesn’t say it back. Not because he’s afraid of losing her—although, god, he is—but because it feels dishonest not to. Like some disservice, almost. To the part of him that that only she’s ever made real .

“I love you.”

She doesn’t stir. Just exhales, slow and even, her mouth still parted. There’s sugar in the air, and something like relief in his lungs.

He’ll tell her again, later. When she’s listening. When she’s awake, when he can see her eyes and know if he’s just made things worse or not.

Chapter Text

November 30 2027

Yelena has a pet guinea pig. Her name is Strelka.

Bob only knows this because Yelena said it once before, offhandedly, over a breakfast of sourdough toast and the cardboard-stiff cereal that only John likes. Like a footnote in between bites. Strelka , like of course that’s her name. Of course she has a guinea pig— ”A big lab rat,” she had corrected fondly. “Very anxious. But very brave. Bit me after I saved her. A lot like you, Bob.”

Bob remembers blinking, truly caught off guard by the comparison, but she had just shrugged. This was another one of her obvious immovable truths.

Later, he had learned that Strelka was one of the Soviet space dogs. She was one of the first to make it back alive.

—Yelena had called her Zvezda too. “Star” in Russia: “She is not the brightest star, but she is mine. ”— 

The idea of a small, stubborn star, flickering imperfectly. Feels like a lot for a guinea pig.

Yelena had explained that she was with a friend, a “Kate Bishop , ” spoken sing-songingly, with that vocal tilt that only she could pull off.

“With Fanny.”

“Fanny?”

“Dog.”

“You have a dog?”

Yelena is a patchwork of these facts, he has learned. Not a puzzle, because puzzles have that clear, finished product on the box that you’re supposed to arrive at.

No. Yelena is strange scraps and uneven seams, and colors that don’t match but still fit, somehow. And he supposes that this is just one of those things too.

He stores these scraps even though he’s not entirely sure what he’s building with them:

A guinea pig named after a Soviet space dog. A dog named Fanny for no reason other than she liked the way it comes out with her accent— ”No. You cannot say it like me, Bob. The ‘-ny’ must bite at the end.” And Kate Bishop.

—

The eggs are almost done when he hears the elevator door ding , followed by the familiar blur of noise: scuffed boots, but then the shuffle-thump of something being dragged that…probably shouldn’t be. And something clicking .

Bob tentatively lowers the heat on the skillet.

It’s six in the morning. Everyone who is supposed to be asleep is asleep. Which means….that this noise can only belong to someone who doesn’t really care what time it is, or never noticed in the first place.

Sure enough, he hears Yelena’s voice before he sees her.

“Fanny,” she tisks . “You were so helpful five minutes ago. Do not—Bob? You’re awake? You are about to be very happy.”

He turns slightly, spatula still in hand, and Yelena appears backing into the kitchen half a second later. She’s dragging something in front of her: an old, metal rolling crate, Bob assumes must be from the supply level of the WatchTower. The wheels screech in protest every few feet. Inside it, obscured almost entirely by a thick knit blanket and what looked suspiciously like one of John’s old hoodies, is a plastic pet carrier.

The clicking noise is clear now: A dog’s nails on tile as she trots proudly beside Yelena, tail wagging, tongue lolling, wholly unbothered by the hour.

Bob stares at the whole scene  as if it might suddenly rearrange into something normal if he just blinks hard enough. Of course it doesn’t. But it makes Yelena—who looks…so tired? Her smile seemingly stretched too wide somehow—soften into a more genuine shape.

“You’re making breakfast, Bob?” she asks.

“...Yeah.”

She brushes a stray lock from her face. “Good.” Her voice is softer than before. More honest. “Because you’re going to need your strength.”

“For what?” Bob asks, raising an eyebrow. Yelena snorts and lifts the blanket a little, enough for him to see the tiny nose twitching inside the carrier.

“That,” she says with a tired grin. “Is Strelka.”

The dog wuffs. She settles at Yelena’s feet, tail thumping lazily on the tile.

“Yes, yes.” She reaches down to ruffle the dog’s ears with one hand while adjusting the blanket with the other. Under her lidded eyes, she glanced back up to Bob. “And Fanny.” She looks back at her dog—Fanny. “You are also very brave. And very helpful. Except when you're not.”

Fanny lets out a satisfied huff, content with the attention and entirely oblivious to Yelena’s words.

It’s…it’s different, sure. But also, not really? This clutter of motion and noise and tenderness that is barely holding itself together. This is kind of what she does, isn't it? What she is. A mission. A guinea pig. A dog. A history. Hers, or someone else’s. Doesn’t matter.

That alone wouldn’t…it wouldn’t be entirely too odd. But it’s not right . When she prods or gloats one of them into something , usually because they’re wallowing in their own whatevers, it feels like a game of sharp edges and quick moves and, you are mine . Like she is confidently staking a claim.

But this ? It is a soft tether, buried underneath the sure grin that she is attempting to wear. She is trying to hold it tight. She is trying to…

Bob shifts his weight, eyes flicking between the two animals, then back to Yelena. He takes a deep breath that he hopes is subtle, and steps away from the stove for a better look . Strelka, still mostly concealed in shadows and hoodie fabric, emits a quiet, suspicious squeak. Her tiny nose twitches like it’s trying to assess the room for danger. Or breakfast. Possibly both.

Crouching slightly, he doesn’t get too close. “Does she, uh… bite?”

“Only if she likes you.”

There’s a beat of shared silence. Fanny shifts, tail thumping once against tile. Strelka emits a slow, suspicious squeak from under the hoodie, twitching.

“I think she’s judging me,” Bob says, deadpan.

Yelena snorts. “She judges everyone. It’s how she says hello.”

Bob tries to smile, but he just knows that it doesn't land quite right: mouth too thin or odd, though he’s trying to pass it off, as her jaw tenses with not-anger. He’s seen her do that in the sparring room, in the middle of an argument with John. But it feels worse now, when he can’t understand it, and he doesn’t know how to help.

“…Yelena?”

She doesn’t answer right away. She’s focused on brushing a bit of lint off the corner of the hoodie draped over the crate, fingers moving with that too-careful deliberateness he’s come to recognize as Not About the Lint—and it’s that that itches at the edge of his thoughts, off-kilter and strange.

He tries again. “Are..?”

He doesn’t finish the question. Because truthfully, he doesn’t know what he’s asking. Are they staying? Are you ? Is something wrong?

 “Are you—bringing them here? Like…to live here?”

Yelena straightens a little too quickly. “Of course.”

“…When were you going to tell anyone?”

She scoffs. “I didn’t think I’d be bringing them today , Bob. But—” she cuts herself off, vaguely gesturing half-heartedly, as if that would explain something, but she falters halfway. Her fingers twitch without anything else to do, then she pointedly adjusts the blanket over Strekla’s cage and smoothes it with more care than necessary. Whatever else she was going to say, she loses in something half-affectionate, half-scolding under her breath to her guinea pig. Her words are too quiet for Bob to catch. His chest tightens regardless, something feeling distinctly strained between them, in a way that he hadn’t felt since…since Sentry . And he feels so confused .

She’s still here. She’s right here, in front of him. Her boots are planted on the same kitchen tile as his. Her coat is thrown on the same counter as his plate is. But she’s also not . There’s a step off in the rhythm that is Yelena. He thinks that she too must be confused . Because she’s in this…half faltered state: something has happened, clearly , but she’s still standing, she’s still moving . So is the rest of the world; outside, a morning dove coos, Bob sees it fly off into the distance through the window.

Tentatively, he tries, “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says quickly, reflexivity almost, and for a very brief moment Bob sees a flicker of the sharpness that she bore in the vault, when she had told him: “you stuff it all the way down.”

But just as quickly, honestly before Bob can truly register it, it’s gone. And it is not that she looks fragile now—she never does. Even now, there’s the stubborn set to her jaw, square and so very, very Yelena .

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean—sorry, Bob.”

“It’s alright,” he tells her. “Of course they can stay.” And then, more than a little dumbly, “I’ve never had a pet before. I’m, uh. Glad you brought them.”

—He doesn’t know why he says that last part. Maybe because he is glad, in that odd, twisty way, that something unexpected and strange can feel like a sign that the world is still moving forward. Or maybe it’s the look on Yelena’s face, the way she is holding still and tensed like something inside her is braced –

Fanny, who has been standing dutifully beside Yelena, wuffs curiously. Bob glances down at her. Her eyes perk up at her attention, tail giving a single, questioning thumb against the floor.

“She is good,” Yelena says. “She listens. Mostly. And if she doesn’t, she still listens to me.”

Fanny wuffs again, wiggling a bit on her haunches. 

“She used to be fierce,” she goes on. Her usual spark is kindling again with fond and warm mockery. “Now look at her. Kate Bishop, she has made you very soft.”

Tongue lolling, Fanny is unbothered. She presses the side of her face into Yelena's leg. Yelena mockingly scoffs, but she quickly scruffs her chin.

“Strelka pulled her weight. Strelka did not fall asleep in the elevator, did she?”

Bob chuckles. “The guinea pig?”

“Strelka ,” Yelena pointedly stresses.  She fixes him with a look that dares him to laugh again, although of course, there’s no real heat in it. Just the strange tiredness that she walked in with, undercut with the familiar spark of pride that she never bothers to hide, that is Yelena.

Bob raises his hands in surrender, still smiling. “Right. Strelka.”

Yelena seems satisfied with that, and quietly, some of the tension bleeds out of her shoulder. Exhaling, slow and full.

“I’ll–” she tries., then frowns slightly, like the word’s on the tip of her tongue but keeps shifting before she can catch it.

“After breakfast?” he offers.

Yelena hesitates. For a moment, her hand stills on Fanny’s head, her fingers curled in her soft fur. She looks at Bob. Really look at him, maybe for the first time that she stepped inside, without the calculated glance that she uses to gauge danger, or maybe dodge feelings…but now she is so much…she is not that. 

“Yeah. After breakfast.”

—

Bob quickly scrambles another egg for Yelena, putting a slice of sourdough bread—her favorite, he knows—into the toaster even though she didn’t ask for one. Yelena checks on her phone whether or not a dog and a guinea pig can even have eggs: the answer is ‘yes, in moderation,’ and ‘that’s a herbivore—what do you think?’ Bob and her both pretend that they knew that.

“Vegetables for you, Zvezda ,” she says.

Strelka twitches her noise curiously, barely visible beneath the soft wool blanket. Bob watches them from the sink as he washes a head of lettuce, and tears off the crispest of leaves into a shallow bowl.

She still seems…shaken up, in this odd way. Not trembling. Still smiling, almost stubbornly, but it’s offkilter , in the way that he all too clearly understands. How her hands are steady and precise, even gentle, as she pets Strelka. And how she fondly nudges Fanny with her ankle, so quietly tense.

Because she’s trying . Not in the visible desperate flailing way. But quietly. Trying not to shove him away entirely, shove whatever is eating at her away. She could , but she doesn’t , because they promised each other, right?

Bob, not even a year ago…he thinks he would have done that too.

Instead, he slides the finished plate in front of her wordlessly: scrambled eggs, toast, and a few roasted tomatoes he found in the back of the fridge. She glances at it, then at him, then back again like she’s trying not to smile.

–

Dishes scraped clean, Bob rinses them off—this includes his and Yelena plate, the shallow bowl that he put Strelka’s vegetables in, and the bowl that they definitely shouldn’t have, but did ) throw a pack of cooked ground beef in for Fanny.

(He washes that last one very carefully).

Yelena doesn’t move from the table. Strelka, nestled quietly beneath the blanket, twitches her nose at the sound of water running. Fanny rests his head on the floor beside Yelena’s feet.

So.

It’s After Breakfast.

He glances back at her and he puts the dishes to dry. She’s on her phone ordering actual pet supplies. He watches the way that her fingers scroll the screen, the way that her brow furrows slightly. Focused. Protective.

He doesn’t—he won’t rush her. That’s not what this is . He does not want to know what is wrong because…because he’s nosey , or he thinks that he deserves it by some means. He doesn't. He knows that.

But…he thinks that they do not owe each other and themselves anything other than their best. She’s only ever done that for him, that trying , and it’s the least that she deserves? For him to do that too? Even if it’s…if he’s not any good at it, not like how she is.

(But maybe she’s so good at it, in his eyes, because it’s her . That “we stick together from now on.’ So maybe…maybe as long as he says, as long as they both stick together? Can that help?)

Before he can speak, Yelena exhales and puts her phone down on the table. Entirely oblivious to whatever he was thinking—why wouldn’t she be? He has to stop…doing that, not talking and just awkwardly standing there thinking.

“We didn’t fight,” she says. And then she snorts, like a laugh that got caught somewhere behind her teeth, and surprises her as much as it does him. “She invited me over for dinner.”

Oh okay. We are doing this.

She is looking at Bob sidelong now, bracing for something: judgment, misunderstanding, maybe just silence. There's a strange weight for something so simple and almost silly.

When he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t judge her or demand anything , she straightens somewhat, and starts again, properly, maybe: “Three years ago—” in this clipped-edge voice, that sounds strictly and oddly detached. “—I was sent to kill Clint Barton. A job…” she trails off, one hand lifting  in a vague, circling gesture, as if even now, the specifics aren’t worth it. “Long story, Bob.”

Bob watches her, very quiet and still. He doesn’t shift or flinch—not even at kill, not even at Clint Barton : Archer. Avenger. Blip-saver. 

“She was all I had,” Yelena adds, voice quiet now. “My sister. My only… thing that was mine. And she died saving the world she didn’t even get to live in. Clint Barton got to come home. He got to have… Christmas.” A bitter edge creeps into her voice before she swallows it down. “I wanted to kill him.”

“That’d mess me up too.”

She glances at him, surprised by the lack of argument.

Sometimes, Bob wonders if she truly thinks that he's this good person. If he has seemed so meek and scrawny and useless in the vault. Because she has only known the vault and the experiment. The Void…he remembers, faintly and only after weeks of trying so hard to…he had called the Void something else. Him, he. Not me . Even though Bob knows, deep down, that there’s no difference. Not really. There is no magic, dividing line, that says: This is his fault.

He’s hurt people. For drugs. For money that was—usually—for drugs.

If he was strong like she is…and he had had someone who was his . Someone who was taken from him, and some else, who had done it…

“I understand,” he says. And he does.

Yelena’s eyes narrow just a little, as if weighing his words, trying to decide if they’re true or just something he says to fill the silence. 

Shrugging, he adds, “I don’t know him. Just know the name. He helped save everything.”

Yelena nods after a moment. She still looks somewhat hesitant, but still, she eventually, almost coincidingly, tells him, “He was just a man with a bow. And a family. And he tried his best.”

Bob nods slowly. There is something raw and unspoken in the way she talks about Clint Barton, beyond just anger or grief. Like the lingering aftertaste of…something bitter, like jealousy, but not as simple. Tangled with respect, with reluctant admiration. Or just understanding.

‘Beside the point,” Yelena says, glancing away. “Kate Bishop, she was training under him, or something. Mini-Hawkeye. So very, very annoying, Bob—You'd like her.”

Bob laughs breathlessly, more than a little caught off guard by that. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” she snorts. She gently nudges him with her shoulder. “You’re both very stubborn.” And that feels like a compliment, truly. “Over and over again, kept trying to stop me. So annoying. Of course, she wasn’t strong enough to beat me—” Bob snorts “—But enough to get in the way.”

She sounds so unbelievably fond at that, but then her jaw tightens. The smile fades. Shadowed by something heavier: regret, he knows what that looks like on her face now. Hates it.

“...She’s joining another team,” she says finally. It’s soft. Not angry. Not quite. “Some new girl, Ms. Marvel—” she huffs faintly at that, like the same alone unsettles her not because it’s wrong, but because it’s unfamiliar. “Maybe they'll get their own gear and codename and T-shirts or whatever.”

Bob blinks. “T-shirts?”

“You know what I mean,” she snaps, and then scrubs her hand down her face. “They’re going to be a team, Bob. Not ours.”

He feels more than a little bad for reflexively asking about T-shirts, but at least now the rest of it, of this , makes sense. Doesn’t make it easier . But he feels relieved, in a way, having a name to put to the shape of her ache. Of her . The patchwork. Just so that he can understand her better, just to be a better presence—because this is what they are now.

He adds these things then: The dog, that is hers. The Guinea pig, that is hers. Kate Bishop, that is hers too, but in the way that some people, Bob has learned, just leave marks on you, are yours because they really see you. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t…that things can’t happen .

Tentatively, he eventually asks, “And she didn’t tell you before?”

“I think she wanted to. But I wasn’t—around.”

She doesn’t sound guilty or impassioned at that, just resigned . Like not being around , whatever that meant, mentally or physically, was just a quiet, unchangeable part of this story that she must have told herself too many times.

“We weren’t anything,” she continued. “I knew that. We had fun. I tried to kill her—kill her Clint Barton, and she—” she trails off once more, and again, Bob can see that frustration and agitation, something that she can’t shake out, at least not yet when she’s still trying to pick through the words.

Eventually though, she just slouches her shoulders. “It's a good gig, Bob. She said it was. And I’m not. It’s not jealousy, or—”  She snorts. Her jaw works for a long moment.

“It’s not like I thought she would wait, or ask me to come. I wouldn’t have said yes. I couldn’t have. Seriously, Bob—I’m—I’m good here. Really good.”

“I know,” he says. And he does. In the way that the rest of them—this whole strange, mess of something —tighten around her, orbit her, rely on her. “You don’t have to convince me.”

Still, there is something in the way that she says it, like she’s declaring it out loud in case anyone, including herself, might forget.

Yelena tips her head. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The tightness in her shoulders unwind by a notch. She leans back slightly in her chair. Fanny is curled beneath her, half-asleep, head twitching with some dream.

“Okay. Good. Because this isn’t about… missing what I had. It’s not like that. It’s more like—more like… I look over there and I see the life she has now. And it happened. It happened without me even knowing. She gets to have people. Gets to be a person. Have a dog and a doorbell and a new set of friends who dont—”

She exhales through her nose. “That’s good. That’s what I wanted for her.” But almost like a confession, which is so strange to Bob, she admits, “I just didn’t think it would happen so fast. I didn’t she I’d blink and she’d be…”

When her voice trails off, Bob doesn’t say anything at first. There’s nothing to fix here or to argue with, because, yeah. 

That it’s not fair? That she should have gotten more time? That she deserves more time? He thinks of all that, but he doesn’t…he doesn’t know if that’s what he’s supposed to say. None of it helps right now. So instead he sits.

“I haven’t talked to her since…” she scoffs faintly at her own phrasing. “Since I tried to kill Barton. Which, you know, Bob. Great foundation for friendship.”

Yeah . 

“But then I started taking more missions. Valentina kept calling and I kept answering. I didn’t want to, not always. But—it didn’t matter. I had to. So I dumped Fanny on her. With a stupid note, just: ‘ Take care of her, Kate Bishop. Don’t let her get into chocolate.’ Like I was being reasonable.”

Bob makes a small sound, not quite a laugh. Just listening.

“And then,” she continues, with a wry twist of her mouth, “I drop a guinea pig on her doorstep. No heads-up. No food. Just—poof. New responsibility. Congratulations, Bishop. Surprise rodent. I…I didn’t exactly call to warn her. Or check in.”

She hesitates, drumming her fingers in a slow rhythm of the table. “I couldn’t promise I’d be around to take care of them. I couldn’t promise that I’d be around to…take care of myself.”

Bob’s hand rests lightly on the table near hers. Close enough to offer something steady, but not to crowd.

“I get that,” he finally says.

She looks up at him, eyes searching.

He adds, “Not just… coming back from the missions, right?”

She swallows. “Right,” and it comes out  a bit like an exhale. “Not just the missions.”

She is not drumming anymore. And after a moment, she gently…doesn’t hold his hand, but puts hers close enough to brush her pinky finger against his.

“She saw the press conference," Yelena continues. “She was? Happy? Proud?” Then she snorts. “Pissed, because I ghosted her. She said, ‘You can come back whenever. You don’t have to explain. Just… come back when you can.”

Bob nods once. “That’s a good friend.”

“She’s too good,” Yelena replies, with that same fond-but-almost-incredulous voice. “And I think that’s why I left. Because if she’s good, and I’m not, then—” She cuts herself off with a tight shake of her head. “Anyway.”

“Lena, you still have time,” is what he tells her, because truly, that is the first thing that he is sure of…of meaning and doing something. He needs her to know. “To–for her. For anyone else.”

“I’m not good at time,” she says. “I let it…go. I lose track. I waste it. I hurt people with it.”

“Who hasn’t?” Bob offers. “It shouldn’t…Yelena, you’re more than that, that wasting. That’s what you did, right? But it's not you. You wouldn’t…you wouldn’t let me think that of myself?”

Yelena looks almost a little startled. “Low blow,” she huffs, but then, almost concedingly she says, “No. Of course not. I wouldn’t let you.”, 

“Then don’t let me let you.”

Her mouth quirks like she’s trying not to smile, like the words have caught her off guard in a way that both stings and soothes.

After another beat of silence, this one so much calmer and comfortable: “I think she’d still want to hear from you again,” Bob says. “Even if the timing’s messy.”

“It is messy,” she agrees. “I might cry.”

“Okay.”

“I might not say the right thing.”

“Also okay.”

“I might disappear again.”

Bob hesitates, but only for a moment. “Then come back. Again.”

“You sound very sure of all this,” she murmurs.

“I’m not,” he admits. “But I want it to be true. For both of us.”

Yelena nods, a little firmer this time.

She leaves her pinky exactly where it is.

Chapter Text

November 30, 2027 (continued)

No one complains about Fanny or Stelka.

(Or rather, no one dares too. Bucky comes in an hour or so after their breakfast, and regards the dog and the guinea pig with a largely indifferent shrug. When John drags himself back in from a run, sweating, but trailing behind Ava, who Bob can only assume slipped out when he wasn’t looking, he looks…more jealous than anything, which makes Bob smile behind his mug of orange juice).

“Neighbor had a Retriever,” he tells Ava. “Used to chase me off his lawn.”

Ava is peeling an orange on the couch, perched on its arm. Her voice is all dry interest and she doesn’t look up. Although, Bob had noticed her snort when she saw Strelka peeking out from her cage. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing,” he says reflectively. Fanny lets out an annoyed whine when he pauses petting her. She seems to like him. It’s sweet, and the jealousy that he had walked in with has faded into something… childish doesn’t feel right, but softer. His smile is small, and he probably doesn’t even know that he's doing it, but it’s honest, without the usual cynicism that most of them wear by default. “Maybe knocked over the mailbox. Once or twice. I was eight. It was a plastic mailbox. It bounced.”

 Bucky, on the other end of the couch, raises an eyebrow. “You broke a mailbox that ‘bounced’?”

“It bounced the first time .”

Fanny huffs. Disinterested, she trots over to where Alexei is digging through the fridge for his own breakfast. Yelena had warned him that Kate Bishop had fed her too much human food apparently, Fanny and her actual dog, Lucky, and she’s always eager for scraps.

"You are too soft. In my day, dogs chased me because they feared me.” Alevei says. Fanny wuffs, making him chuckle.

“She is strong, see? Cunning. What is word?—scrappy! Little general.”

He tosses a packet of deli meat on the table, and leans down to scruff Fanny behind the ears with both hands. Fanny snorts happily and rears up a bit, leaning all her weight onto him.

“Or,” John says, “You smell like beef jerky.”

Alexei retorts, “I smell like experience . She knows warrior when she sees one.”

Back against the island counter, Bob watches them as his and Yelena’s dishes air dry. Next to him, Strelka is out of her cage and nestled snugly in the definitely–no–John’s hoodie, which Bob has folded upon itself into a mountain of sorts for her to burrow comfortably in. Her tiny head pokes out just enough to survey the room. She’s done that all morning. Just watching. Nose twitching every so often, but she doesn’t seem startled ever, even when Alexei of John’s voices rise.

Yelena is beside him. Her hair is damp from the shower that she left him in the kitchen to quickly take. She smells like her shampoo: vanilla, so warm and comforting as New York's autumn chill turns to proper winter outside.

“She likes the noise,” she stage-whispers, gesturing with a thumb to the others. “Movement. She likes watching—” She pointedly raises her voice “—Dumb boys arguing about who smells more like beef jerky.”

As if on cue Alexei and John began to speak over each other from across the room, much louder and overlapping. Ava sighs and threatens to throw her orange peel at them.

Bob glances back down at Strelka again as they do, much more carefully. Her ears twitch. Her eyes are tracking John and Alexei’s every gesture with…a surprising amount of focus, he thinks.

Yelena continues, “She would scream if the window was closed, Kate Bishop said. Lived for street drama: Cars. Dogs. Nosy neighbors.”

Bob nods slowly. Alexei is now attempting to teach Fanny something—Bob had missed it, talking to Yelena, but he chuckles thinking that Strelka didn’t—by holding a piece of jerky above her head. Fanny wuffs . Her tail thumps.

“Smirno stoyat! Like proud solider, comrade!”

Fanny cocks her head. Yelena snorts, and Bob glances back at her, catching her mouthing what he thinks might be ‘ridiculous.’

“She listens. Mostly. And if she doesn’t, she still listen to me.”

“Look!” Alexei exclaims, seemingly tired of waiting for Fanny and raising her paw triumphantly in the air. “She salutes now. Tiny officer!”

“She’s licking her own paw,” Bucky says without looking up from his coffee.

Alexei gasps, affronted. “She is modest!”

Clearly enjoying the attention, her tail thumps louder. And sure enough, when Bob looks back at Strelka, she is still looking, just as alert and focused as before. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t glance away.

“She is judging all of us,” he says. He doesn't mean for it to come out as seriously and full of blatant awe, but Yelena just laughs, the sound ringing in his ears like a bellchime for hours later.

—

He waits for her after she leaves for dinner at Kate Bishops’ apartment. 

Of course he does. He can’t imagine a world where he doesn’t wait for her, not for anything.

It’s dark by the time that he hears the elevator ding , and Fanny’s nails clicking against the floor. To his surprise though he hears John's voice too.

“—Half the mind to bite her head off.”

Yelena chuckles, and Fanny wuffs lowly. Bob rubs the sleep from his eyes and sits up on the couch, glancing behind him.

Yelena’s hair is a little messier than usual. There's a faint flush on her cheeks, like she’s been out longer than she expected.

Her fashion sense is another thing that he loves about her. He never had one: not as a kid, and definitely not when he was buming off thrift stores and stealing from the other half-conscious tweakers he'd come across (he feels awful about that, really.) Everything was based entirely on how warm something was, how many days he could wear them before they started to smell, and—for shoes—whatever fit well enough that he could run in them.

But Yelena? 

She wears so many different and interesting things. And she wears them so confidently.

(She wore her hair slicked back one day with loosely-fitting sweats and silver rings, multiple on each finger—and Bob had immediately clocked her as ‘handsome’ without much thought. Two days later, she had painted her nails a shimmering blush pink and spotted the inner corners of her eyes with silver glitter shadow. Pretty . 

Handsome and pretty…Bob had never thought of anyone as both of those things, but Yelena is. Very much so).

“Bob,” she greets, sounding…not entirely surprised. Resigned but in a fond way, and Bob smiles sheepishly, because of course she knew that he'd be waiting for her. “It’s late.”

“Mhm.”

John scoffs, and Bob pointedly glares at him (although he can't imagine that he looks threatening at all, hair tousled from sleeping).

“It's late,” Bob echos to him. Yelena snorts.

John throws his hands up in mock-surrender. “Night run,” he says.

John does not run at night. 

He is not sweating at all. 

He is also a very, very bad liar—but neither of them say anything about that ; Yelena rolls her eyes instead and mutters something about him needing a shower, to which he makes a face.

“You deal with her,” he tells Bob, but there is no real heat behind his words. His shoulders are loose and relaxed. Bob watches him leave down the hall to their rooms, the sound of his boots fading into the soft hum of the Watchtower. Yelena throws herself over the back of the couch beside him. 

“He's wearing the wrong shoes,” she says idly. Her eyes are still trained on John’s shrinking shadow. “Awful liar.”

“It’s sweet,” Bob argues. She just rolls her eyes again and rolls over so that her back is on the couch, and she can look at him upside down from the corner of her eyes.

“Sweet is for your tea, Solnyshko. That was pathetic.”

“Pathetic’s a kind of sweet,” he says. “Just…less refined.”

She pokes him with her finger. “Don’t make excuses for him.”

Bob pokes her back, laughing softly as she scrunches her nose.

“If it makes you feel better, he does that with all of you when you're out late.”

“So we should all be feeling patronized? Is that it?”

“No.” And none of them are, not really, but Yelena mutters under her breath. Behind him, Bob can hear Fanny sniffing about, but he's looking at Yelena. Yelena, and the soft smile that she's worn since she walked in—John's antics notwithstanding.

“It went well?” He raises after a moment of silence.

Yelena's smile is beautiful on its own, Bob thinks, but it is especially beautiful when it's growing, not in a cynical, dry smile, but one that is honest.

“Went well,” she tells him. “I came in and out through the front door, like a normal person.”

“Wow.”

“I know right?” She pulls herself up by bracing her arms, and then swings over onto the couch, landing with a quiet thump.  “I’m practically domesticated.”

Bob watches her kick off her sneakers onto the rug.

“Clearly,” he notes dryly, but his smile betrays him. 

“Mhm.” She lingers on the ‘m’ sound, then mockingly accuses, “What have you done to me, Bob Reynolds?”

He shrugs, because that is easier than saying all the things that he wants to be to her. All the things and everything. Before he could, anyway, Fanny rounds about the couch and jumps up, landing half on the couch and half on Yelena's lap.

“And you, mily,” she cooes, scuffing her face with both hands, just as her father had. “You were very good.”

“Was she?”

Yelena eyes him with mock suspension. “Of course. She is always good. Except when she isn't. Which she never is.”

Like now, Bob assumes. They never talked about dogs on the couch, but that means there's no rule against it. So she is being good. Technically.

“We were both very well behaved,” Yelena concludes. “And only threw one knife. Kate Bishop called it a party trick.”

She says ‘party trick’ with an air of amused disbelief, enough to startle Bob into laughing.

“I’m serious, Bob!” She leans forward, eyes widening like she’s letting him in on something deeply scandalous. “She clapped. Like this—” Yelena gives two slow, deliberate pats, mimicking Kate’s mock applause.

Bob’s laughter only grows, warm and unguarded. Fanny, disturbed by their jousling, harrumphs  and resettles fully on Yelena’s lap.

“And then—then—she asked me to teach her.”

“You’re the best there is,” Bob agrees, to which she makes a face. 

“Of course I am. But, Bob, terrible aim, with anything other than that bow of hers. If she wants to learn, she will learn. But she will never beat me.”

Bob leans back into the couch. “You sound very sure of that.”

“ I am sure of that,” Yelena says, and flicks invisible lint from Fanny’s ear.

There is a…certain way that her voice gets. Bob doesn't entirely know how to describe it, but he knows it. When she talks about Fanny and Strelka. In the warm, looping-DVD-menu afterglow of the television, when the rest of the team was asleep and sprawled around the common room after their Princess Bride movie night. 

When she talks about the team, too: Alexei and Ava and John and Bucky, even if she's complaining about them— especially when she's complaining about all their odd quirks, and how they're always stepping over each other's toes in one ridiculous way or another.

And in this too. This especially . 

Bob thinks that this is when she is the most beautiful. Outside, of course (she is always beautiful), but more importantly, it's the honest joy. Quiet, sure. Subtle. Just an unspoken… oh , I get this. I have this now.

Movie nights and cookies and people who get on each other's nerves. And now party tricks .

He grins, small and more than a little helpless, he’s sure. She’s still talking: about Kate’s ridiculous apartment, about how Lucky— her dog, Bob, more spoiled than Fanny, can you believe that? —had eaten half a pizza, and Kate hadn’t just let him, she actively encouraged it. And then, about how they had watched Ocean’s Eleven , and Yelena was fascinated by every over-the-top scheme that somehow worked.

—But Bob’s not really following the words anymore.

He is following the sound of her voice. Settling, like a pulse of the room, steady and slow. It’s softened but insistent, drawing him deeper into her. More than any conversation about dogs or movie plots ever could

Without effort, his eyes find hers. They catch the light of the room in the prettiest of ways, he thinks, and her lips curve when she smiles mid-story.

“You are not listening,” she says.

“I am.”

“Mhm. You’re a bad liar.” She tilts her head, watching him now with amused suspicion. “Worse than John.”

“That’s low.”

He watches her lean back and rearranger herself, so that her head rests closer beside his.

“Lucky for you,” she says, “I like bad liars.”

Bob laughs under his breath, because that’s lucky for him in ways she doesn’t even know.

December 9, 2027 

Bob doesn’t know how long Yelena has been leaning on the couch, knees on the cushion and arms braced on the head of it, before she speaks. He’s halfway through reorganizing the canned goods—again—and stuck on the fact that someone (probably, most definitely Alexei) had shoved a can of mandarin oranges between two kinds of beans.

“Bob,” he hears. Sing-songy, almost. He didn’t think it possible to make his name sound so…so not horrible. But on Yelena’s tongue…Well, she says it enough. Often. Probably unnecessary, but not like it’s a joke, just like it’s worth remembering and worth saying. Like she’s said it a hundred times in her head before saying it out loud. 

He glances back. She must have been there a while. He doesn’t feel startled, but his cheeks flush anyway.

“You okay?” he asks, because he’s never sure if he’s missed something. Things have a habit of moving very fast here.

Yelena shrugs one shoulder and wrinkles her nose. “You bored?” she asks, dodging it casually and humorously, in that way that makes Bob know that she’s not really deflecting. Just straight to the point about something. 

“No,” Bob says.  He lines the black beans back into place and steps back to eye the shelf. He’ll redo it. The mandarin oranges have ruined everything.

Then, after a beat, “Maybe.”

She claps her hands once. “Perfect, Bob. Because I have a mission.”

Mission. The word still does something strange in her chest and his gut. He knows what it means, for them at least. Valentina’s orders. Never anything too dangerous, she’s told him before, but still. PR and training and low-stake operatives. He hates them.

But Yelena is smiling. Not the kind of smile he knows that she gives before she’s running into something dangerous, but loose and crooked. Saved for when she’s already decided it’s going to be fine.

“Relax,” she says. “Not Valentina’s thing. My thing. Well—my thing and Ava’s. And Fanny. And Strelka and Belka.”

Belka is the newest, newest member of the New Avengers (still lawsuit pending. Don’t tell anyone, but Bob vastly prefers The Thunderbolts.) On account of Yelena learning that guinea pigs are very social animals, and greatly benefit from a friend or two, she decided that Strelka needed a friend.

Which was how Bob found himself and Yelena aboard the subway in the worst disguises he has ever seen. Hers, a knit hat pulled low enough to nearly blind her, and his, a pair of too-big sunglasses that reminded him of the pushing-sixty vacation retirees in Florida. She said they were “low profile.” He said nothing, because the woman in the seat across from them was already staring.

She picked Belka in less than two minutes. A small fluff ball with an expression Bob didn't think guinea pigs were capable of: mild disdain.

Leaning her hip against the counter, she explains, “Me and Ava are having girls’ night. Tonight. Pajamas. Something terrible on TV. Maybe face masks and nail polish if I can convince her not to bite my head off.”

Oh.

Bob snorts instinctively. It's funny. Not in a funny “laughing-at-you” way, of course, but…it's something else.  Resigned? But in a way that is so incredibly fond, because that is just the kind of mission that makes sense.

He shakes his head. His shoulders lift, shrugging, making his too-big sweatshirt slide further down one arm. It’s John’s. He’s seen him in it and never asked for it back. “Nothing,” he says. “Just…you and Ava and face masks. It sounds good.”

“It is good.”

“Does Ava know?”

Yelena waves that detail away. “She will,” she says confidently. 

Bob hums low in his throat, not with doubt exactly. He adjusts the apples again even though they don’t need it. One is a little bruised, and his fingers pause on it.

“She’s…not always in the mood,” he says, careful not to make it sound like judgment.

“Neither am I,” Yelena snorts. There’s no real bite to it. “But…” and then she trails off. She drums her fingers once on the counter, with the hand that she wasn’t waving. Then again. Then she stops. Bob doesn’t rush her.

“But I want her there,” she says finally. “Even if she just sits and rolls her eyes the whole time and doesn’t talk.” And then she clears her throat, before Bob can think to say something to that, “and she won’t say no to you cooking dinner.”

Bob blinks, caught off guard by that last part. Cooking dinner. Him. For them.

Which feels…somewhat stupid. Because technically he knows that he has cooked for people, but also, it never—it has never felt that explicit. That’s the thing. It was always him cooking something on his own, and someone else—or a lot of someone elses—dragging themselves in. It never felt planned. He’s sure, or at least he hopes, that the…I made this for you was implied and came across right. But it also just happened. Like most things here do.

She’s explicitly asking him though. Like the last few weeks of whatever this has met something, really. Enough where it’s just what he does now, what everyone else—or at least just Yelena and Ava—knows that he does, knows him for. 

She’s not assuming, not waiting for him to spiral his way into it or pace around the edges until it happens. With intent and trust, like she genuinely believes he’ll say yes, and more than that, like she believes he wants to.

Because, yeah: Of course he’d make something for them. He’d love to.

The idea that this isn’t just coping anymore. That maybe it’s care. That maybe he’s not a problem being managed, but a person being included. In something as simple as girls' night.

He nods once. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Yelena grins, all the teeth. 

—

It is easier said than done.

Most things are, he knows. He also knows that it'd probably be best to just…be normal about the whole thing. Because Yelena had asked him like it was normal. And, he'd probably do better if he wasn't weird about it.

But he is anyway. And he figures that he'll have more than enough time to beat himself up for it after dinner.

There is broth bubbling on the stove, and a grab-bag of sauces and seasonings that sound vaguely ramen-y. He found a simplified recipe for Miso—Ava’s favorite, he knows now, because she actually eats enough at the table or on the couch to leave her recipes (the fact that she does the former makes up for the latter, he decides). At least past-Bob had remembered that she likes ramen when he was on that shopping-spree; he’s got everything he needs.

—and there is Fanny too, of course. She watches him curiously on the couch, chewing idly on a tennis ball (no one knows where it's from or where she found it, but no one dares to take it from her).

She must like the smell of the roasting pork belly in the oven. She's not much of a people watcher, he's learned. Not like how Strelka is.

Which is why her ears perk a half-second before the footsteps even hit the tile. Not much of a spy like Yelena either.

Still, it’s enough for Bob to glance back at the entryway just as Bucky steps in. With unhurried, deliberate weight, his shoulder’s loose. Like he’s vaguely sizing up the room without meaning to. His gaze sweeps from the oven to the simmering pot, and Bob feels—ridiculously—like he’s been caught.

“Smells good,” he notes casually.

Bob ducks his head, smiling a little sheepishly. “It's the good stuff this time.”

“Whats the occasion?”

“Girls Night.”

Bucky snorts. It's not patronizing though—it sounds even a bit approving , when he nods, and matches Bob's seriousness, saying, “Instant won't do then.”

“It's not that bad.” It is, sometimes, but Bob will defend it anyway. At least, he feels strangely compelled to. Not always good , but always better than nothing—and he's been in more situations where it's better than nothing than it's bad .

“Glorfied war ration,” Bucky argues dryly. Bob grimaces because, yeah , unfortunately he would be the only one to know that.

Fanny barks and trots over to them with her tail wagging, tennis ball forgone for Bucky, who has somehow become Fanny's second favorite behind Yelena.

“She agrees with me.”

Bob rolls his eyes. “And so would Ava, hence—”

“The good stuff?”

Fanny wuffs, sparing Bob the need to respond. Bucky scratches her absentmindedly

“You’re making enough for them and not the rest of us, huh?”

Bob huffs quietly.. “You weren’t invited.”

“Wouldn’t wanna crash Girls Night anyway,” Bucky says, but there is the faintest tug of a smirk there. “But if you leave leftovers…”

“Noted,” Bob replies. He turns back to the broth. Steam rolls up, softening the edges of his hair. “But I'm making no promises. Ava might just eat it all.”

“She’s had to beat Yelena to it.” Bob can’t tell if it’s meant as a joke or a fact.

The oven timer tickets down. Fanny noses at Bucky’s boot. Bob measures out another scoop of miso paste. Somewhere down the hall there’s a muffled voice—Yelena, probably– and the everconstant sounds of the WatchTower: pipes groaning faintly in the walls, the low hum of the elevator shaft, someone’s music bleeding faintly through their door…famailar enough now that he notices more when it’s quiet than when it’s loud.

—

Yelena is all teeth again, her pajama pants tucked into mismatched socks, hoodie strings knotted at her chin. She holds Stelka and Belka gently in her arms. Like tiny, disgruntled furballs, they are nestled together.

“We’re here!” she announces. Like there is any chance that Bob could have missed the sound of—probably Ava’s—door slamming, or Yelena’s smug laughter bouncing down the hall.

Behind her, Ava’s hands are buried in the sleeve of a loose flannel. Her expression is flat, in a way that Bob knows is more habit than mood.

“Smells good,” she unintentionally repeats. Bucky had left an hour or so ago. Bob snorts, despite himself, and waves off the mildly confused glance that they both give him.

“Sit,” he says, and jerks his chin towards the couch. “It’ll be ready soon.”

“Perfect. Gives me time to set up the terrible movie marathon.”

Ava makes a show of rolling her eyes, but she is smiling however faintly. Bob turns back to the stove and counter to finish plating. Behind him, he can hear them settingly down, and Fanny’s happily-surprised wuff as she wakes up from her nap on the couch.

“What color nail polish, Ava?”

There’s a pause, the sound of something rustling. “Surprise me,” she says. Her voice is dry but warm.

“That’s dangerous,” Yelena warns, to the thump of what are probably blankets and pillows being arranged, and then rearranged. The telltale creak of the coffee table being pulled closer echoes, just as it did when her father set-up the room for movie night. Without turning around he can almost see it: Yelena cross-legged, nail polish bottles lined up, and Ava sitting and letting herself be fussed over despite her expression—which, Bob thinks with sobering realization, he can’t imagine happening before. Not with everything that he knows about her life.

He can’t imagine that she’s been fussed over. SHIELD…that was who she said, right? Bob tries to wrack his brain for any memories of it…but it’s difficult enough remembering things with how high he was, and that’s for the big things. He can’t remember hearing about it in passing before.

The thought nags at him—how little has she actually…has she had? He doesn’t want to patronize or pity her—he doesn’t know much, but he knows that she’s hate that. But still . He sneaks a glance while ladling the ramen noodles into the two bowls.

Sure enough, Yelena is cross-legged with Fanny sprawled half-over her lap. She is holding Ava’s hand in one hand and cycling through nail polish bottles with the other, holding them up to, Bob guesses, find the best match to Ava’s skin tone.

And Ava is letting her, with only the occasional huffing and rolling her eyes. She’s half-focused on scrolling through one of their streaming services, a suspiciously Strelka-sized lump on her lap.

Yeah , Bob thinks, this…this is good .

“Purple?” Yelenea suggests.

Ava glances briefly at the bottle, then black to the screen. Her voice is low and not dismissive, “Sure.”

“Matte or sparkle or glitter?”

She furrows her brow. “There’s a…difference?”

“Matte is flat—not shine, just color. Sparkle’s got little flecks that catch the light. And glitter is—” she pauses, and mimics a firework exploding with her fingers “—well, you can see it. You’d look good with, maybe one glitter, this one, if you think the rest is too much—or no, this and the thumb, druzhishe .”

“What does that mean?”

Yelena, blinks, already onto the next bottle of polish. “What does what mean?”

“That word. The Droo…whatever.”

“Druzhishe.” Yelena pronounces it slower this time, leaning into the soft zh sound. “It means… little friend. Kind of. Not little like you’re small—” she waves the bottle vaguely in Ava’s direction—“but little like… someone I like to keep close.”

Ava stares at her for a second longer, as if weighing whether to file that away or ignore it entirely. Then, without much else, she turns back to the screen.

“Weird word,” she says after a moment. Bob glances back to his plate, hearing her hum in a way that could mean anything—agreement, dismissal, or that she’s finally found something half-decent to watch.

“Purple it is then. And the thumb, and the ring, silver—Bob!”

He doesn’t jolt. “I’m going.” Lost in overhearing them—he’d feel bad, maybe, but he doesn’t, the warm of druzhishe still lingering in his chest and he sprinkles chopped-up green onions over both bowls.

“Are you staying?” Ava asks.

“Wouldn’t be much of a girls night.”

Holding one bowl, he walks over the coffee table.Ava shifts her knee off the coffee table to make room, her eyes flickering to meet his for the briefest of moments.

“Honorary girl,” she says eventually. “You can stay if you want.”

He could.

But he smiles gracefully and shakes his head. “Thanks,” he says. “But this one’s yours yeah?”

There’s a ghost of a smile on his lips. She shrugs, but it’s kind, really. “Fair.”

Yelena adds, “if there’s any left, it’s yours, Bob.”

“Bucky already called it.”

“Boo.”

Bob snorts, walks the length back to the counter, and returns with the second bowl: Yelena’s. He scruffs Fanny’s head once and glances at Belka and Strelka ( he hopes it comes off as vaguely affectionate. Belka is fiercely protective of Strelka, and has already bit John for trying to pet her).

“Goodnight,” he calls.

He lingers for what is probably too long. The soft murmur of their voices blends with the TV’s hum. By the the time he reaches his room’s door, the sound has dulled to nothing but a muffled comfort, and he slips inside, letting it close with a muted click .