Chapter Text
Bob regrets all the time he’d wasted over the past year.
His family is dead, and it’s all his fault. He’d had the past fourteen months to learn how to properly wield the godly powers that had come with Sentry, and he’d squandered every second of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Void is laughing. You will always be alone. It will always be just us, it is saying, and Bob is trying to ignore the mangled corpses of Yelena and Ava and John and Bucky and Alexei, because they wouldn’t leave him.
Not so soon. Not like this.
Yelena had told him we’ll stick together from now on, and they had. They’d stayed, and loved him, and never forced him onto the field. Bob had stuck to comms, and indulged in the peace of the Watchtower, and had been so so stupid to believe that domesticity could last forever. They’re dead now, and Sentry could have saved them, if Bob had known how to control that side of him. But Sentry was a manifestation of his highs, and Bob was sinking into the dark depths of his lows, surrounded by blood.
Somewhere above, Doom stands triumphant.
“I was told you possessed a secret weapon,” muses Doom, and there is a toddler whimpering in his arms. “My expectations were quite high. They fought so hard to protect you– and this is all you amount to? I’m not impressed.”
Bob is surrounded by carnage, and he is empty. He is hollow, he is carved out, he is nothing. He is a manifestation of anguish, and rage, and grief, and he is shaking, and there is a darkness creeping over his arms, his legs, his torso; and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much—
“You will regret this.”
Doom laughs. “I doubt it.”
The Void consumes him, and it lashes out.
It could not bring his family back. It could share his pain.
Bob had never feared death before. He’d expected to die of an overdose before he reached adulthood, or certainly sometime through his twenties. Then he’d survived a culling that had turned half the world to dust, and was somehow still around when they’d been brought back too. He’d been grateful to still be around when he’d found the Thunderbolts, when they’d all found each other, and it had been a budding fear in the back of his mind that, one day, he’d have to go on without them. He’d rather die.
He was utterly terrified that the Sentry Project had made him immortal.
He’d been killed during the experimentation, and woken in an incinerator. He’d been killed at the press of a button, and woken emerging out of darkness. He’d been targeted under a hail of bullets and came out unscathed. He’d been shoved into a new body, one that so many would envy, and felt inhuman in it. No one could kill him as Sentry. He could not die in the Void. He feared that the sweet embrace of death would never greet him. That he’d be forever separated from his family across the boundary of life-and-death.
Bob watches his family die, over and over and over again.
He can’t save them, though he tries, desperately, fervently, and the failure is always waiting for him at the end of every path. Sometimes he reaches Yelena first. Sometimes he throws himself in front of the blast meant for Ava. Sometimes he gets John and Alexei out of the line of fire. Sometimes Bucky is dragged out of a hit that would have been fatal.
It never matters. The room reshapes itself around his hope and then crushes it into shame beneath its heel. Every possibility ends in blood. Every variation ends with corpses still at his feet and Doom standing above them, untouched and victorious. Bob is kneeling in a battlefield drenched in red, clutching at ghosts that dissolve between his fingers. He knows this isn’t real. He knows the Shame Rooms are only memories.
But this one is open and bleeding and raw.
The pain is real. The grief is real. The horror is real.
The darkness around him trembles, violent and wrathful.
It drags Doom in with him. Into him.
The darkness is a prison, and they are trapped together.
It will always be just us, the Void says.
It hurts, and Bob refuses to suffer alone.
He’s screaming. They are screaming.
Bob wants it to end. Bob wants an end to it all.
The darkness reaches to devour everything—
***
Bob aches against bright lights and solid ground.
He stumbles onto unsteady bare feet, past a stack of crates.
At once, he is the new target of the others in the present company.
Bob has never been so happy to see three guns pointed at him.
“Who the hell are you?” John demands. “And what are you smiling about?”
What a dick. Bob loves him dearly.
“Just missed your face,” Bob says, and can feel his helpless grin widening as he speaks. The responding look in John’s eyes is intense, and Bob likes it so much better than the glassy emptiness that had been staring out of his unmoving corpse. “You’d look better with a beret, by the way.”
John bristles, and looks ready to shoot him.
A normal person probably wouldn’t be comforted by how quickly John’s expression had twisted into outrage, but Bob has long since given up on normalcy, and is more than happy to bask in it. His gun remains trained squarely on Bob, but there is life in his eyes. No recognition, but Bob will gratefully accept all the annoyance and confusion and irritation if it means he’s still breathing. For one horrible stretch of eternity, John had been nothing more than a corpse in the dirt, blood soaking into the ground beneath him while Bob screamed his name until his throat tore itself raw.
Now John is standing here, alive and glaring at him.
Yelena and Ava are here too; alive, alive, alive.
Bob thinks he could cry.
Yelena notices, or she must, because there is a crease between her brows that wasn’t there before she raised her weapon. One that speaks of confusion rather than hostility. Bob remembers watching her die. Remembers blackened armor, shattered concrete, blood spilling from the corner of her mouth as she tried to smile at him one final time. She’d met his eyes with a look that was entirely blameless. She knew of the power of the Sentry, knew that power could have matched up to Doom, yet spent her last moments trying to convey that it wasn’t his fault.
(Of course, it was. He always made things worse.)
Yelena lowers her gun. “I think he’s just a civilian.”
“Love you too, Lena.”
She makes a confused frown at his response.
John does not let up. “Then how’d he get in here?”
“I was in the box,” Bob answers, helpfully.
“You were in the box,” John echoes, flat and skeptical.
Bob nods. “I died, then Valentina threw me out.”
“Riiiight…” Ava says. Her mask is still obscuring her face, but Bob knows her well enough to feel her exasperated eye-roll behind it. “Well. You lot have fun with Mr Boxed Zombie,” and promptly phases into invisibility.
The sound cannons activate at the same moment.
Bob doubles over instinctively, hands flying to his ears, unable to think past the noise piercing through the entire room. Around him, everyone else is similarly disoriented, weapons lowering as they stumble and curse and try to figure out what the hell is happening. Somewhere in the chaos, heavy metal doors slam shut one after another, sealing every exit with a series of crashes that might have been deafening, if not for the ear-splitting shrieking drowning everything else out.
Once it stops, Ava is in his face, accusing, “Did you do that?”
Her mask is up now, and she looks aggravated.
He remembers that same look on her as she’d died, expression pinched from the pain she was in. He’d reached her through clouds of dust and smoke, begging his powers for a miracle as her heartbeat faded beneath his hands. She’s so alive right now, and Bob gives in to the desire to throw himself at her in a hug. Ava doesn’t phase out of his arms, and Bob can pretend for a moment that’s because she wants to be hugged, and not because that her last attempt to phase away had incapacitated them all.
She shoves him off physically two seconds after.
“Sorry,” Bob says. “You look very huggable.”
“Are you mental?” she asks.
Bob laughs before he can stop himself. “Probably.”
Some of the suspicion on her face turns to skeptical confusion, and she stares at him for a long moment, as though trying to determine whether he’s dangerous, insane, or some unique combination of both. Given Bob’s recent track record, all three are probably fair possibilities. And really, what kind of explanation could he give that doesn’t sound completely insane?
He can’t exactly tell them: I watched you die. I lost my mind when I lost you all. I screamed until the universe broke around me. I dragged a cosmic villain into my grief and let my darkness consume everything that remained. I’m back where it all began, and I already know you all. We’re family, I swear. You just don’t know it yet. We will be. We are.
They would think he was making it all up. Honestly, Bob isn’t entirely convinced he isn’t. Maybe this is just another trick. Another layer of the Void. Another Shame Room designed to give him hope before ripping it away. Part of him is terrified that admitting anything aloud will break the illusion. That the darkness will hear him. That it will come rushing back. That this will all dissolve, and Bob will wake up, alive and surrounded by corpses.
Bob pulls himself back to the present situation.
“Those,” he adds, and waves vaguely at the ceiling, “were also Valentina.”
John straightens, trying to collect himself. “You’re an enemy of Val, then.”
“Yeah, but she sucks. Especially for trapping us all here.”
“I’m not trapped,” John scoffs, but Bob’s learned to read all the ways he covers up his uncertainty. “I have a mission.”
“Ooooh,” Yelena mocks. “Big important mission man.”
“Don’t pretend you’ve got any high ground, Widow. You broke in here to steal from OXE.”
Yelena frowns. “I’m not stealing,” she says, and points to Ava, “she’s the one who’s– oh.” She looks back to Bob, and there is something like dawning trust in her eyes. “This is a trap. We were all sent here on a lie.”
Bob sees Ava’s expression go slack as she glances back to Antonia’s body, before she activates her mask to obscure it again. He remembers Yelena telling them all about Taskmaster, Dreykov’s daughter, and how they’d known each other. That she’d been a victim her entire life, and its abrupt end here. Bob had found Ava on some nights, still stewing in the guilt of being the only one to complete their mission.
Ava tries to leave again, but her phasing activates the sound again.
Another round of disorientation later, acceptance has settled in.
John complains, “Jesus, can you stop that?”
“Your whining is just as piercing,” Ava counters. “Why don’t you shut up?”
“Oh my godddd,” Yelena says.
It’s such a familiar scene, not for this particular argument, but because it fits so neatly into the rhythms they’d developed over the months together. Bob is sure that John and Ava could argue over the color of the sky if left unsupervised for more than five minutes, and Yelena would inevitably throw fuel into that fire for her own entertainment. It sounded hostile on the surface, but all of them knew it was built on love, even if they’d never gone and clarified as much aloud.
They didn’t need to, and none of them were the sort to sit around talking about their feelings, though they were trying to get better about it. More often, affection was expressed through actions. It looked like John grumbling while making more than enough food for everyone. It looked like Ava phasing into their rooms every night to check if they were alright. It looked like Yelena stealing food off other people’s plates because she knew exactly how much she could get away with before someone complained.
But they are not there yet.
They are still strangers, and this is not the Watchtower.
And they’ve really got to get out of the vault since—
“Oh yeah,” Bob pipes up. “This is an incinerator.”