Chapter Text
John wakes with a start, jerking upright.
The movement makes his ribs protest, but the pain barely registers over the sensory overload flooding his system. He tries to take a breath, but the air is thick and cloying, almost sweet in a way that turns sour halfway down his throat. The medbay comes into focus with it’s familiar bright white lights and assorted supplies, but instead of the sterile atmosphere, it feels like he’s been dropped into a candle shop that’s been set on fire and then sealed shut afterward. It’s too many smells stacked on top of each other, all at once.
He coughs hard, and thankfully there’s no blood.
He wracks his brain for what happened.
They’d been on a mission.
And then—
In his next breath, he’s distracted by the air again.
It’s unbearable.
It’s not even a single thing he can identify.
He can maybe work out there’s something metallic on top of something floral, but there’s also something smoky underneath it all, and then a dozen other faint traces he can’t even begin to categorize because it’s a whole lot of everything. It’s overwhelming in a way that reminds him, with a budding headache, of the ways his enhanced senses were more of a curse than an advantage. He forces another breath in and immediately regrets it. His hand comes up instinctively to his face, scrunching his nose as he tries to push through the sensation, but it only makes it worse. His eyes water slightly.
Around him, John becomes aware of bodies.
His team.
Ava slumped in a chair not far away, arms crossed. Her head is tilted back like she’d been keeping watch and drifted off. Opposite to John, Yelena and Bob are cuddled against each other on one of the other medical beds. Alexei is far too large for the furniture and has fallen asleep on the floor. And Bucky—
Bucky’s awake, watching him.
Ah, John thinks, and remembers the explosion.
He’s got a vague recollection of being trapped in darkness, trying to force his way out from under the rubble. He doesn’t remember succeeding, but clearly he’d been dug out and brought back to recover. How long had he been out? He exhales shakily and tries to settle himself, swallowing back the lingering cough.
“Hey,” he manages, voice rough.
John offers a little wave that Bucky returns with a nod.
The sound breaks the stillness.
Yelena stirs, and Ava’s head lifts at almost the same time.
Both of them look toward him with an immediate alertness that shifts into relief when they realize he’s conscious.
“Idiot,” Yelena tells him, waking Bob as she stands.
John huffs. “Rude.”
Ava stands as well. “You got blown up.”
He opens his mouth to snark back and—
They move in at the same time.
The smell gets worse.
The air had already been thick and concentrated, but the moment they enter his immediate space it feels like the room is closing ranks around him in response. No one else in the room seems affected by it, not even the other super soldiers present. Alexei is still peacefully dozing, and Bucky doesn’t look like he’s choking over the air. But John’s throat locks on his next breath, and he folds over into a coughing fit.
It reminds him of Olivia and her candles.
John had liked them, before everything in his life had fallen apart. She always kept one burning somewhere in the evenings, soft enough to fade into the background, just another comforting part of home. Lavender in the bedroom. Vanilla in the kitchen during winter. Little things he barely consciously noticed except to associate them with her.
Then the serum rewired his senses.
The next time Olivia lit one of the lavender candles, it had been in the aftermath of the shield, the serum, Lemar’s death, his disciplinary hearing, and the public scrutiny chewing him apart until even home stopped feeling fully safe inside his own head. She’d lit one quietly, trying to soften the room into something calming. It had been a nice gesture.
The scent swallowed the room in minutes.
It settled thick in the back of his throat every time he inhaled, lavender turning suffocating under the serum-enhanced intensity of it until his temples started throbbing painfully in time with each attempted inhale. He’d tried to ignore it and adjust, because Olivia liked those candles, and he liked them because she did, and she was trying, and he was becoming too difficult to live with in a hundred other ways.
But, after a few more breaths, John couldn’t do it anymore.
He’d stumbled out onto the porch coughing hard enough to make his ribs ache, cold night air finally cutting through the overwhelming floral scent enough for him to drag in a full breath without feeling like he was choking on it. He remembered apologizing immediately afterward, embarrassed and frustrated all at once, but Olivia had just looked stricken for him rather than angry. She’d blown the candle out, opened every window despite the cold, and dragged a fan into the living room to circulate the air while insisting it was fine, really, she didn’t mind at all.
She had tried very hard to understand him.
It had been the start of many more problems.
The candles were easy to laugh off, even if he missed them.
It had changed once Noah had entered the picture, and it had been clear that John would never fit back into anything resembling normal life. Babies cried, and when their son was born, John’s first reaction had shamefully been to refuse to hold him.
He hadn’t expected the sound to be so piercing.
He knew Noah couldn’t help crying, but John couldn’t stand hearing it. He’d been terrified of causing harm. He’d been careful to regulate his strength with Olivia, but babies were far more fragile. He’d been sick with disgust at himself, and the stricken look on Olivia’s face with Noah in her arms, because John had chosen the serum, and these were the consequences.
It had been so easy to sink into that spiral of self-hate from there.
His mind provided plenty of fuel, and the rest of the world had heaps more. He could block out the noise scrolling along another article telling him what a shitty person he was. It was better to withdraw than risk losing control again, he told himself. He would not survive that. He would not survive seeing his own strength causing harm on someone so small and defenseless.
He’d withdrawn instead; which, in the end, hurt Noah anyway.
Olivia had been right to leave him.
She’d be better off without his deadweight.
His memory fades back into the current moment.
It’s much worse than a singular candle.
It’s like someone had lit an entire store full of them, and left it all burning on top of a pile of car fresheners soaked in essential oils and incense, and then sealed all the windows.
His lungs burn as he coughs again, harder.
There’s a hand pounding on his back.
“Jesus,” he rasps. “Can we open a window? It’s stuffy in here.”
Yelena’s hand stills on his back, as she dryly informs him, “There are no windows in here.”
“It’s a figure of speech. Get a fan or something.” John drags in another breath through his mouth instead of his nose, and it’s better, but not by much. His face involuntarily scrunches up. God, he can taste the smell. “It stinks.”
When no one moves except to exchange a look with each other, John decides he’s just got to do it himself. “I’m gonna get some air.”
He waves Yelena’s hand away, pushing himself upright, trying not to visibly wince at his aching muscles reminding him that he is still very much not fully recovered yet. The movement is slower than he wants it to be, more effort than it should be, and it irritates him on principle alone.
Bucky is in front of him before he can take a step, a hand catches him firmly at the shoulder and redirects him back toward the bed. “You’ll fall.”
John immediately resists on instinct. “I’m fine.”
“You’ll fall,” Bucky repeats.
His tone is edged with that familiar you’re being an idiot exasperation that creeps into his voice whenever any of them end up in the medbay. John exhales through his nose, annoyed, but the effort of arguing feels less important than it should. He lets himself sink back onto the edge of the bed with a reluctant shift.
“Fine,” he mutters. “Happy?”
“Thrilled,” Bucky replies, flatly.
The smell is still suffocating in the room.
John doesn’t know how to bring it up a third time when no one else looks bothered. With Bucky in front of him, there’s something that John recognizes as leather, except the man isn’t wearing his jacket right now. Is it cologne? Is everyone wearing some kind of perfume today? How long was he unconscious? Did Valentina have them go to some fancy gala and they only recently got back? Is that why everyone was in cozy clothes and asleep?
John frowns a bit, considering the plausibility of it all.
Bucky is frowning too, as he leans right into John’s neck and—
“What the hell, Bucky?”
“You smell…strange.”
Huh? John smells strange?
“What is that supposed to—?” John starts to ask, before Yelena, from beside him, sniffs him too? He doesn’t shove her away, but, “What is going on?”
“I don’t smell your rain,” Yelena says.
He stares at her for a long moment. “Yeah, well,” he offers a half-shrug. “I didn’t exactly get a chance to shower while knocked out, thanks.”
Urgh. Speaking of, he’d really like to get out of his uniform now.
He’d very much like to wash off all the blood and grime he’d been laying in.
Bucky’s frown deepens. “No, I—”
He’s interrupted by a circle of orange sparks.
Everyone snaps into alert immediately.
Then, Wong steps through, and they all ease up.
“Oi, we have a door,” Ava says.
“My apologies. My monitoring spells detected an anomaly.”
John immediately feels that weight of attention shift onto him again.
He resists the urge to step back, mostly because he is already sitting, and also because moving feels like it would make the overwhelming sensory input worse, not better. The medbay air is still thick in a way that makes his head feel slightly unfocused, every scent layered wrong on top of the last one like a badly mixed chemical spill.
“Hey, I’ve been out of it for—what?”
He glances at the others, and Bucky supplies, “A day.”
“A day,” John repeats. “I couldn’t have tripped any of your spell stuff.”
Wong raises a hand, and a circular pattern of gold forms in front of John, hovering midair as it spins slowly, the lines within it spiraling in different shapes and lines.
John leans back slightly on instinct. “What is that supposed to be?”
“Dimensional resonance mapping,” Wong says calmly.
“That answers nothing.”
Wong continues, “The anomaly activated the day prior. I began narrowing its origin.” The light pulses once, then goes still. “And it has been traced to you.”
John blinks, confused. “Why?”
“Was it from the explosion?” Yelena asks.
Wong nods once. “Yes. It appears to have caused a dimensional rift.”
Bucky asks, “What does that mean?”
Wong’s gaze remains fixed on John as he answers, and that alone is starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable. “It seems your teammate has been swapped with his counterpart from a different universe.”
At once, every head turns toward John.
Yelena’s eyes narrow slightly. Ava looks openly curious. Bob looks like he’s trying to decide if this is real or a prank. Alexei just looks confused. Bucky’s expression goes entirely blank, with an intensity in his eyes that reminds him of when they’d first met, and Bucky had been glaring him down in the jeep.
What the hell, he thinks.
“What the hell,” he says out loud, too.
This is supposedly a different universe?
His mind latches onto the possibility. Maybe Lemar is alive here, in some version of the world where John had been better. Maybe Olivia never left. Maybe this is a life that doesn’t carry the same weight of all of John’s accumulated mistakes. But logic catches up immediately after. No, if he’s still with the Thunderbolts, then he must have fucked up his life here too. He wouldn’t have met any of them if he hadn’t been in the OXE vault, and he wouldn’t have been there if he wasn’t one of Valentina’s disposable weapons.
“Nothing looks different,” John says finally.
“Perhaps not on the surface,” Wong says.
“Can you cut the vagueness and just tell us what’s different?”
Wong answers, evenly, “I do not know yet. I will need time to narrow down your universe of origin in order to return you to yours and bring your counterpart back here.”
Frustration and unease tangles together.
Fucking magic. Typical.
Wong continues, “In the meantime, I suggest you remain within the confines of this area.”
And then, just as abruptly as he arrived, Wong waves his hands to open a new circle of orange light and takes his leave.
The portal seals shut behind him.
“So…” Bob says, to the ensuing awkward silence. “If nothing seems different, did you also get exploded yesterday?”
“Fuck you,” John replies.
Yelena smacks him with a pillow.