Archive of Our Own

When Yelena said ’we stick together from now on’ she apparently meant all of them.

John finds this out around an hour later when they’ve managed to ditch the press conference Valentina had sprung on them. They’re all back at Bucky’s van, beyond a line of OXE agents blocking access to the tower to all but the six of them. John was happy enough to follow everyone in here so he could hide away from the journalists and the cameras, but now Bucky and Alexei are climbing into the front of the van while the others all pile up in the back and he’s just standing there feeling little awkward as he tries to figure out the best way to ask to exchange phone numbers on the off chance the whole Avengers thing is real and not Valentina’s latest scheme, without making it sound like he’s the unpopular kid in class trying to coordinate a group project.

Yelena pokes her head out. "What are you doing standing there like fish, Walker? Get in," she says, like he’s the idiot for not getting on with a program that everyone except him seems to have gotten and then she disappears back inside.

"Fish don’t st—Whatever." He climbs in and drops to sit on the floor next to Ava. Yelena draws the sliding door closed and then slams her fist twice on the wall separating them from the front of the van and then she sits back down next to Bob.

The van lurches back, metal squealing as its front comes free of the scaffolding and construction materials, and then reverses back into traffic and off they go through the streets of Manhattan, leaving a trail of plaster and pieces of walls.

"So," Bob asks. "What happened?"

Bob is understandably freaked out by the news that he turned into the personification of depression and disappeared all of the people in Manhattan, which freaks them all in response in case they are about to witness another blackout which as a consequence agitates Bob even further and pretty soon they’re locked in feedback loop of freaking out, with John screaming at Bob to calm down, Yelena screaming at John to stop screaming, Bob looking on the verge of tears and Ava like she’s one second away from phasing through the van’s wall and taking her chances with New York City traffic.

The van comes to an abrupt stop with a screech of tires among a chorus of aggressive honking.

John, being the closest to it, slams into the wall separating them from the front of the van and then everybody slams into him immediately after. He gets elbowed in the face by Yelena, the square butt of Ava’s suit just about misses his nuts but still digs painfully into his hip and he thinks he might have kicked Bob in the leg or something because the reinforced tip of his boot hits something dense but yielding at the same time, but no one actually cries out in pain.

Above John’s head, the panel in the wall slides open and Bucky’s face pokes in. He doesn’t say anything, just scowls down at all of them each in turn and then he disappears back in the front, then the small window slams shut.

They disentangle with some effort and sit back up.

Yelena loops an arm around Bob’s shoulder and he leans into her side, somehow making himself small despite their significant size difference. They’re both careful not to touch where anywhere there’s exposed skin, John notices.

The rest of the drive is spent in silence.

They stop at an isolated property somewhere in Westchester.

It’s a compact, two story house, in the shade of a copse of trees with the closest neighbor a couple miles away. The blinds are rolled down and when they get in through the back door—there’s a numeric padlock where Bucky inserts an absurdly long combination—the curtains are closed. It smells stale and dusty inside, prompting a series of sneezes from Bob.

A chorus of ’bless you’s in English and Russian rises after each one, but by the third time they’ve all grown bored with it and it’s devolved into indistinct muttering.

"Nice place," says Ava as she comes back down the stairs after completing a tour of the house. "Yours?"

"A friend’s," Bucky says as he moves a curtain aside and takes a peek through the blinds. "Valentina probably doesn’t know about it."

"We weren’t exactly the height of espionage leaving the city," John points out. "She probably had us followed here."

Bucky concedes the point with a nod. "But she won’t have known to bug the place in advance." Seemingly satisfied with whatever he sees or doesn’t see outside, he steps away from the window and turns to them. "I figure we got some time to discuss things." He looks down at himself and pulls a face. "And maybe take a shower."

Half an hour and two heavily used bathrooms later they’re all mostly clean and dressed in borrowed clothing—except for Bob, whose change of clothes and dyeing of hair courtesy of his inner fight against depression or whatever apparently came with a shower as well: under the faint sharp residue of anxiety, he smells pleasantly of cucumber and green tea. Bucky’s mysterious friend apparently has a stash of clothing in many different sizes enough to accommodate most of them, plus an assortment of male and female underwear. Sitting and standing around the living room dressed in sweats and lounge wear they look like roommates discussing house rules.

"So we’re doing this," Bucky says between a statement and a question.

Alexei barely lets him finish before yelling out an enthusiastic "YES!" and literally jumping out of his armchair to strike a pose.

Ava shrugs in an affectation of nonchalance, but John catches her fingers twisting in the couch cushion. "Sure, don’t really have much planned anyway." She shoots a look across the room at Yelena, who’s sitting on the floor next to Bob in gray sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s two sizes too big and proclaims her the ’Alpha Male’.

"We help people and ruin Valentina’s plans. I’m good with that." Yelena raises a fist. "Go team."

Bucky nods. No one says anything for a moment and then John finds himself the subject of four stares: Yelena widens her eyes and gestures emphatically with her head, Ava arches an eyebrow, Bucky’s raises both and Alexei waggles his as his grin spreads impossibly wide across his face.

Bob is the only one not looking at John, so John looks at him instead. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor head down, staring at his hands in his lap, palms up as if he’s trying to divine some kind of answer in them. He still looks dazed from their disjointed recounting of the events. To John, whose worst screw ups are forever etched in his memory, the forgetting sounds like a blessing in disguise.

"What about you, Bob?" Bucky’s voice jolts both Bob and John out of their thoughts and they look up.

Bob’s face pinches up like he’s in pain. "This...’Sentry’ guy sounds powerful," he says in the understatement of the century. "But I’m not—I don’t want to risk unleashing the other guy. It’d be a nightmare."

Understatement of the millennium, but even without taking the shadow guy into account it’s not like they’d have any hopes of containing Sentry either; the guy played with them like toys, bent John’s shield and almost vaporised Bucky’s vibranium arm. John is all in favor of keeping him locked safely inside Bob until he can control that side of him, if that’s even possible. Maybe they can send him to some monastery in Tibet to find himself or something. In the meantime, he can hang out with Yelena or sign up for meditation course, John doesn’t care much as long as he doesn’t get treated to another Greatest Hits of Jonathan F. Walker’s Fuck Ups.

Keeping him close and under scrutiny is the smart thing to do, and if they need to find something for him to do maybe he could do the laundry or something. From the little he heard him say and the things he’s seen inside his head, though, he doesn’t really strike John as someone who’s ever had their life together enough to even learn how to use a washing machine. Who knows how long he had even been in that box—Huh.

"Hey, Bobby—Bob." All the eyes in the room snap to John. He sits up straighter, clears his throat. Bob blinks up at him. He looks tired and dejected, but in a kind of resigned way that makes John feel actually a little guilty for thinking him lucky for his memory issues earlier. "Do you remember the Vault, when you got shot to shit? Or is that gone too?"

Bob frowns, puzzled. "No, I remember, I think. I was very high—like, in the sky, not on drugs—and then falling and I woke up in a nice bed, but there were no windows and Valentina was there." He trails off, his frown deepening and his eyes staring off into nothing. A few seconds pass, then he shakes his head and focuses back on John. "That’s about it, really."

"Okay. And was that Bob-you or Sentry-you?"

"Oh! Just me, I think. I was very scared. When I was flying, I mean." He looks away and chuckles softly, embarrassed. "I don’t really like heights."

John remembers him mentioning something about that as they were going up the elevator shaft.

"Not of the firing squad?" Ava asks, one eyebrow raised in amusement. Bob shakes his head. "Well, I suppose I’d rate it higher than the incinerator, too."

Bob laughs softly if a little unsteadily. At Bucky’s questioning frown, John shakes his head. "Bob has opinions about the ways he’d want to die."

By the looks of it, his explanation doesn’t reassure Bucky at all, but it tears a chuckle out of Ava and Bob and an eyeroll out of Yelena. Christ, he’s known these people for what, three days? and they have morbid inside jokes now. What was even his fucking point? Right. "Okay so, invulnerability and you can fly," he counts them off his fingers. "That already puts you in Top Tier Avenger territory, and I’m talking the real Avengers."

"We are real Avengers!" Alexei protests."There were cameras and microphones and everything. I take pictures with fans!"

John rolls his eyes. "Whatever, you know what I mean."

"You think I could learn to control it?" Bob’s looking at Yelena when he asks that, but then he darts his eyes around the room to all of them.

Bucky nods. "We can work on it. If nothing works I know a nice place in East Africa where you can put your head down for a bit and Valentina won’t be able to touch you."

"Oh. Okay."

"Ok, so that’s Bob down, I guess?" Bucky trails off waiting for confirmation, which Bob provides nodding with at least some conviction. "How about you, Walker?"

Yeah, what about John?

Wanting to help people to the best of his abilities had always been his driving force. He joined up because his brother had joined up and Mike was the best brother and his hero, so it must be what heroes do. Steve Rogers had joined up too, can’t get more heroic than him; John knows that one very intimately. And then the serum, because he just wasn’t enough, and then the rest of his screw ups and yet now here he is presented with a second chance—third, really, if one counts Valentina’s offer—to go back to being something more than he is.

Is he worthy of it, though?

He almost destroyed the legacy of the hero he swore to uphold, Lemar is gone forever, Olivia and his son may still be around somewhere in Georgia, but they’re still out of his reach. The only thing he’s got going for himself is his bootleg super soldier serum and there’s already two other super soldiers in the team. John doesn’t even have a proper shield anymore.

"Walker?"

Fuck.

John pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes, like he can physically push those thoughts out, but they’re firmly lodged in there and now his eyeballs hurt and he’s got spots in his vision. When he finally emerges from behind his palms everyone is once again staring at him. Great, what is he supposed to even say, here.

"People aren’t gonna be happy seeing me calling myself an Avenger."

Ava snorts. "People can shove it."

Yelena gets his attention by kicking him in the shin. She has to stretch so much to reach him from her position, her body’s lying half under the coffee table. She looks ridiculous. She’s wearing fuzzy socks instead of combat boots, too, so it’s not even painful, just annoying. "Get over yourself, Walker. We’re all fuck ups. People are gonna hate us anyway, so they can go suck a bag of dicks."

"Eat."

"What?"

"It’s either ’eat a bag of dicks’ or ’suck a dick’."

"Whatever, dick expert," she rolls her eyes. "Are you in or not?"

"I’m not a—" He cuts himself off with a sigh. "I just mean, maybe we should stick with Thunderbolts as a name."

Yelena buzzts him and makes an X with her arms. "Too late. The cameras, the microphones." She gestures with her hand.

"The fans!" Alexei says.

Ava points at him. "The fans."

"So, Walker is in?"

John shrugs. It’s not like he doesn’t want to be in the Avengers, that would be stupid.

"I’m sure Valentina has a PR team that can work on our rep—" Bucky cuts himself off and glances towards the windows on the west wall on the side of the main entrance, likely hearing the same thing as John: a car engine approaching from the south. Alexei perks up too.

Yelena sits up and reaches for the holster and gun she left lying on the coffee table. "What is it?"

"Car."

It’s closer now, if it turns into the gravel path it’s either Valentina’s people that have found them or Bucky’s friend coming home. Bucky takes position by the window closest to the door, lowering a slat in the blinds so he can peek through it. The others gather their weapons and crouch by the windows, while Alexei disappears into the kitchen to cover the back door. John takes position by the front door as he doesn’t have a ranged weapon anymore since his gun got vaporized by the Sentry. Even warped as it is now his shield is still more than ten pounds of solid metal and he’s more than willing to shove all of them into one of Valentina’s goons’ face if Bucky gives him the all clear.

"Er, what do I do, guys?"

Bob is standing in the middle of the living room looking around, lost, with his arms hovering at the sides of his body like he’s afraid to touch anything.

The car is closer now, close enough for the others to hear it, and the crunch of gravel means it’s definitely coming up to the house.

John slashes the air with his free hand. "Just hide behind the fucking sofa!"

Yelena pelts him in the head with a slipper. "Be nice to Bob!"

He glares at Yelena and makes sure to overenunciate each word as he corrects himself, "Get behind the fucking sofa, please, Bob." Yelena pelts him with a second slipper. "Hey!"

Bucky lets out a weary sign, like he’s suddenly feeling the weight of all his hundred years.

The car stops and the engine cuts off, but Bob is finally hiding behind the sofa, so John puts his back to the wall and widens his stance a little, bending his knees slightly so he’s ready to spring into action the moment the door opens.

A car door opens, then closes; there’s the crunch of steps on the gravel.

Bucky drops his fingers from the blinds and straightens up, the tension leaving his body all at once leaving behind only a puzzled frown. John relaxes his own stance in response, but his grip on the shield doesn’t ease up.

"It’s Mel," Bucky says.

John opens the door and, sure enough, there she is, standing in the doorway fist raised just about to knock. She’s quick to recover, looking at John up and down, eyes lingering with a frown on his borrowed novelty t-shirt and the boldly proclaimed "Free Hugs!" but then she shakes the bemusement away and aims a practiced PR smile at him.

"So, would you like to take a tour of your new Headquarters?"

Their ’new Headquarters’ is the Watchtower, as it turns out. So they went all the way to Westchester and burned one of Bucky’s safehouses just for a change of clothes of dubious taste and a heart to heart, when they could’ve just gone back up to the penthouse suites.

Mel leads them out of the elevator to the dilapidated remains of their sound defeat against Sentry. "The penthouse will need to be, ah, renovated. Again. Obviously." She looks around at the partially torn up bar counter, the shattered window and the pieces of furniture strewn all over.

John peeks down at some of the bottles and lets out an impressed whistle. There’s some real top shelf pretentious stuff there—or there was.

"Sorry." Bob mutters as he takes in the carnage on the floor, then the impact crater where John and Bucky got slammed in the wall by the shockwave of bullets Sentry had pushed back at them. They had hit John’s shield with such force it felt as if they had been shot by a gun. He wanders up to the wide floor to ceiling windows and stares down at a spot on the floor with a puzzled frown.

Mel loudly clears her throat and pulls all the attention back to her. "As I was saying, the penthouse will need some renovations, but the other floors are ready for the most part. They’re putting the finishing touches to the command center, but you can already move into the living quarters."

John knew that the previous iteration of the Avengers had rooms in Stark Tower for all those members who weren’t local, but it hadn’t really occurred to him until now that it would apply to them as well. When Olivia left and got her own place back in Georgia, their house got too big for him alone so John got an apartment in Alexandria to be closer to work in DC, but he supposes after being almost literally fired from OXE, it might be time to cancel the lease and move closer to his new job.

He’s not sure he wants to live with these people, though, they barely know each other and at least four of them have attempted to either kill or incapacitate him up until six hours before.

Each of the rooms is bigger than John’s apartment. They all come with an ensuite bathroom that’s about the size of his living room back in Alexandria. The walk-in closet is bigger than his garage allotment.

The rooms have the bare minimum in terms of furniture, but it’s still an impressive minimum: a bed big enough for four people, designer bedside tables that look like they could exceed the speed of sound despite the fact that they’re obviously stationary, the comfiest sofa John’s ass has ever touched and a glass sofa table that’s a gruesome accident waiting to happen. Oh, and a giant TV affixed to the wall.

"There’s a communal kitchen on each of the living quarters floors," Mel explains, "but if you want you can request a kitchenette installed in your room, plus any extra furniture you might want of course. You can simply order it here." She hands out tablets to all of them. "Just mark down your choice of room on the plan and what you need." She scrolls down her own tablet to show them how it works. "Starting next week there’ll be a team of chefs coming in regularly. They’ll work closely with our dieticians to provide each of you with a balanced diet according to your needs, but if you have any dietary issues or preferences you can note it down here," she points at the relevant section on John and Ava’s tablets, the closest to her.

"I’m hungry now," Alexei says and John suddenly notices that he’s hungry too. He hasn’t really eaten anything beyond a couple of MREs on the flight over from the vault and before that there had been only those cactus fruits in the desert.

Mel swipes back on her tablet and then turns it around to show it to them. "You can order groceries or take out at any time and the reception staff will bring it to you."

"I want pizza," Bob pipes up.

Yelena lets out a string of curses in Russian, startling everybody. Mel clutches the tablet to her chest, Bob actually yelps and does a little jump. "What what?"

"The dog!" Yelena cries out as if that explains anything at all and then she starts frantically patting herself down. "Where is my phone?!"

Her phone is probably in the duffel where she put all of her gear when she changed earlier, the only things she kept are the gun belt and her gun.

"What dog?"

"My dog!" She says, like John is an idiot for not knowing about the dog. "Fanny."

Bob frowns. "Is it a big dog?" He asks, sounding worried like maybe they don’t have enough rooms to give the dog its own room.

Ava makes a face. "You named your dog Fanny?!"

"Quite big," Yelena measures a couple of feet from the floor. "I have a guinea pig also. Rescued him from a lab." She frowns at Bob. "Your lab."

A dog and a lab experiment—well, two, counting Bob; seems Yelena likes collecting strays.

Ava snorts, "And what’s that one called? Ballsack?"

"What? No—" Yelena’s confused expression turns into a triumphant one as she finally extracts her phone from one of the pouches on her gun belt. "Ah-ha! Pepperoni for me with extra hot sauce," she adds before hurrying away. Just before reaching the end of the hallway, she turns back and yells down at them. "Extra hot sauce, remember!" She shakes a finger at them and then disappears behind the corner.

Alexei nods solemnly. "She’s not joking," he says. "All the hot sauce. So much hot sauce the pizza place will be put on trial for chemical warfare.’’

Yelena does get her war crime pizza, Alexei also gets pepperoni but with extra ranch and minus the war crimes, Bob gets mushrooms and ham and John gets his own bacon and red onion pie as well as some beers, but the others end up ordering an excessive amount of Chinese food from a place nearby that Bucky knows. John doesn’t linger, just grabs his order when it arrives and then takes the elevator to a random floor, enters a random room and locks the door behind himself.

He’s so hungry he rolls up the pizza like a burrito and devours it in a few bites while sitting on the bed. He got the largest pie available on the menu but he’s still ravenous. He should’ve gotten another or stolen something from the Chinese order. He could probably still go and the others wouldn’t mind that much beyond some teasing, but right now the idea of spending even just a moment more in anyone else’s presence makes his skin crawl.

He cracks open one of the three beers and drains it in a few gulps, then he opens a second one. He can’t really get drunk anymore, not with anything he’s tried so far at least. Maybe he can ask Bucky or Alexei if they have any wisdom they can impart on the subject; they seem the type to have gone on a bender once or twice post-serum. Even putting him under for medical procedures has been a challenge, he found out the hard way when they had to realign his bones after Bucky and Wilson shattered his arm.

The second can joins the other empty one on the floor and John is left with one beer, a hole in his stomach and no food. And a maddening itch under his skin.

The five—six?—of them a team, imagine that. And not only any superhero team, the Avengers. Judging by the limo, the things he said and some of Yelena’s remarks, Alexei hasn’t been in the field for years—decades; possibly not since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yelena might have been a team player when she was a widow but as far as John knows she’s been a lone agent for years, Ava probably has never worked in a team either and Bob is a civilian who can’t even control his powers. Bucky was an Avenger at some point or worked with them at any rate, but he’s also probably used to working alone, unless one counts Captain America—either of them, but crucially, not John.

John is the only one used to work in a unit, but even so he hasn’t been for a while and the last time he tried to build a team, Wilson and Bucky pretty much spat in his face and Lemar died, so it’s not like he’s a great, shining example of a team player, either.

So this New Avengers endeavour is shaping up to be a disaster from the get go. Even the catastrophe from which they saved everyone was caused by one of them to begin with. Some heroes. And yet everyone seems so on board with the plan it feels like John is the dumb one. Is there something he’s missing? Something he’s not seeing? Even Ava, who seems to be least enthusiastic of all of the others, is still more enthusiastic than John—unless that’s just her being British.

On the other hand, what are his alternatives? Go back to doing Valentina’s dirty work? Even if she’s allowed to keep leading OXE unsupervised it’s not like John is raring to go back to that life, regardless of how well it paid, not when he’d be coming back to an empty house at the end of the day.

As a sanctioned super hero he can help people. He had forgotten that feeling, of being of service to a higher purpose. The moment he put himself between that civilian and that slab of concrete had been the best he’d felt in weeks, maybe months. He hadn’t even cared when the weight started to become overwhelming even for his enhanced strength, he had been the right person in the right place at the right time to help that woman and it seemed like it was all that mattered right then, even if it killed him.

And then the others had joined in and helped and so he hadn’t died a hero after all.

He drains the last beer and lies down across the bed.

After the two—three?—days he’s had he’s exhausted and, despite the hunger still clawing at him, he falls asleep on top of the covers, still dressed.

He sleeps for twelve hours and wakes up well after noon to the sound of his stomach trying to digest itself.

He leaves the tower without running into any of the others. He doesn’t know if they spent the night there after all and even if they did, there are enough empty floors they could’ve taken one each and avoided each other entirely. After a short stop to buy enough food to feed a family of five—or a very hungry super soldier—he rents a car and drives back to his place in Alexandria.

It’s late afternoon by the time he gets there. He swaps his burner phone for his private one and grabs a beer from the fridge—pretty much the only thing he’s got in there these days, what with Valentina sending him all over the world at the drop of a hat. Used to send him, now—and sits on his lumpy armchair to check his messages.

As usual, he hasn’t missed much. He had lots of acquaintances and buddies from his army days, but it’s hard to cultivate any lasting relationship when you move around a lot, so his circle of friends has always been pretty much a triangle, with Lemar and Olivia at the other two points, but it’s not like he can really speak much to either of them these days.

There’s an e-mail from Olivia asking if they can set up a meeting next time she’s in the area. It’s only a few lines, reading very sterile and business-like, but she’s also attached a couple of pictures of their son to soften the blow perhaps, but even the mere glimpse hits him like a punch to his solar plexus.

John’s current agenda is pretty much a blank slate so he agrees to meet whenever. The pictures he saves to his phone for another day, when his eyes don’t burn and the knot in his throat doesn’t feel like it’s gonna strangle him.

There’s another series of messages from several numbers he doesn’t recognize. Investigating them, he finds out he’s been added to a group on Signal with four other people, including Bucky, who is the only one for which he has the number saved.

There are only two messages in the group. One is a screenshot cropped from twitter that one of the unknown numbers posted depicting a photo of John taken from a fair distance away as he was leaving the tower earlier today. He’s carrying his warped shield in his left hand and wearing that stupid "Free Hugs!" t-shirt. It’s not a good look, made even worse by the caption which reads, ’is he rebranding AGAIN bro’s desperate like???’

The second message is also from the same unknown number. It just commented, "lol" before leaving the group.

No other activity except all the other members also leaving one by one, leaving John as the sole remainder. The timestamps place the whole thing happening around two hours before he got in. John brings up twitter and looks through his various hashtags, sorting by latest. He finds the original post quoted a few times with several people commenting about his fucked up shield—which, fair enough—but most of the chatter is about the previous day’s announcement. #NewAvengers is trending world-wide.

As he’s come to expect any time he surfaces in the news, half of the comments call him a blood-thirsty maniac who lists war crimes under his hobbies, while the other half herald him as a hero who was brave enough to go against the leftist ideology and get rid of terrorist scum and got punished for it because of ’woke’ or some shit. He honestly doesn’t know which side is worse.

There’s plenty of disparaging comments and memes on the team as whole, so at least he’s not alone. Lots of ’we got the Avengers at home/the Avengers at home:’ memes, many people wondering who the fuck Ava, Yelena and Alexei are, some even mentioning Bob. Valentina is getting torn to shreds too, which he approves of in principle but can’t really enjoy as she’s now unfortunately associated with them.

Someone retweeted a picture of Bucky commenting with ’captain america when barnes comes home tonight’ and a picture of the ’WELCOME HOME CHEATER’ banner. That does tear a snort out of him, so John screenshots it and sends it to Bucky.

He also finds a shaky video of Manhattan being devoured by unnatural darkness taken by someone who was on the the Staten Island ferry at the time. Despite the shitty quality of the video, the utter wrongness of it is unmistakable: it spreads like ink but it’s very clearly an absence, like a tear in the fabric of reality. A Void. Even in 480p quality, it hurts John’s brain to look at it, like it’s reaching out of the screen to swallow him whole.

The phone vibrates in his hand, startling him. His thumb slips and the video disappears.

Bucky’s name appears at the top of the screen. He accepts the call.

"Where are you?"

Not even a hello, John sits up immediately. He’s been away like, five hours, what the hell’s happened now to send Bucky’s on high alert. "I’m home."

"Home," Bucky says, like the very concept of it is confusing to him. "Home where?"

"What do you mean ’home where’?! My home, in Virginia."

There’s a pause and then Bucky’s voice sounds further away, like he’s turned away from the phone, but with his enhanced hearing John still hears him clearly say, "He says he’s in Virginia." followed by several exclamations of surprise.

"Tell him Yelena says ’get your butt back here’."

John pinches the bridge of his nose. "I can hear her."

"He says he can hear you."

"Good!" Yelena raises her voice, "then he can get his butt back here."

"No, seriously, get back here Walker, there’s things to discuss. Valentina is sending a car tomorrow morning at 10."

So that’s how John shoves a few changes of clothing, his burner phone and his unopened mail into a duffel bag and then drives all the way back to New York.

It’s well into the night when he parks his car in the vast, largely empty, parking garage under the Watchtower. He takes the elevator directly to the 86th floor and finds it dark and completely silent when he emerges. He makes his way back to the room he had claimed the previous night and finds it pretty much how he left it, down to the wrinkled sheets. He tosses the duffel bag on the floor at the foot of the bed, strips down to his underwear and this time actually manages to slip under the covers before falling asleep.

The morning after he finds he’s been once again added to a Signal group against his will, called ’La Casa de los Vengadores’ for some unfathomable reason.

There’s only one message so far, from twenty minutes earlier. It reads, ’breakfast buffet on 84’ and there’s three thumbs up reactions. It’s barely even 9 am, he could stay in bed until he absolutely has to, then take a shower and be ready by 10 without seeing anyone.

He’s really hungry, though, and he would kill or at least seriously maim someone for a coffee.

He stares at that single message mocking him.

He reacts with a thumbs up and lets the phone drop on his chest.

Turns out everyone has staked their claim on a different floor, except Bob and Yelena who are both on the 84th, though only Alexei, Bob and Ava seem to have made the tower their primary residence so far. John knows Bucky has a place in Brooklyn and apparently Yelena has one somewhere in an ’undisclosed location’, where presumably her dog and her guinea pig are living in the lap of luxury with the whole place to themselves.

Ava informs him of this fact as he comes into the common kitchen. She’s sitting at the kitchen island countertop with Bob next to her, with all the food spread in front of them. They’re both wearing the same clothes as the previous day, Bob’s looking a little rumpled like he slept in them, while Ava is in her suit.

The ’breakfast buffet’ is indeed a buffet frankenstained out of takeout from at least three different places from what John can tell by looking at the variety of food and containers.

He helps himself to three breakfast bagels, several spoonfuls of shakshuka and two açaí bowls. The higher calorie intake required by the serum-enhanced metabolism means he gets most of his daily fuel from shakes and dietary supplements unless he wants to spend the better part of his day either eating or preparing food to eat, but he tries to keep a regular meal schedule anyway and it would be a waste not to take advantage of the banquet sprawling across the counter, courtesy of Valentina’s seemingly bottomless pockets.

He takes the nearest vacant seat which puts him opposite Ava and Bob, who watch in amazement as he piles up his plate and then shovels everything in his mouth, chasing it down with two cups of coffee.

"Wow," is Bob’s verdict. Anyone else would have sounded mocking or disgusted, but he sounds genuinely impressed.

"Super serum makes for good appetite!" Alexei booms, coming in right then. He’s also wearing the same clothes as the previous day, a gray ’President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site’ t-shirt with tracksuit bottoms in a violent acid yellow shade.

He grabs a plate and, as if trying to outdo John, he stacks at least one piece of everything that’s on offer, creating a mound of food of dubious structural integrity, before finally taking the seat next to John.

Yelena is the next to arrive, skin flushed and hair still damp from a shower. John almost doesn’t recognize her in civilian clothing: fresh make up, jeans, a crop top with a print of Marilyn Monroe’s face and a light brown blazer. She looks like she wouldn’t be out of place walking around Manhattan on her way to her job at a bullshit startup, the only thing she’s missing is the Air Pods and a travel mug.

When Ava sees her, she lets out a frustrated groan. "Ugh. Lucky you, I only got a toothbrush and some underwear from the safehouse in Westchester."

Yelena bypasses the fresh food and instead reaches inside one of the cupboards for a bowl. She fills it with Cheerios from a box someone left on the counter and then grabs milk from the fridge. She finds a spoon and uses it to point at Ava. "We can go shopping later, I know a couple of places." She leans against the kitchen counter and starts eating her cereal while standing up.

"My style is bespoke," Ava gestures at her suit. "I have a spare, but it’s at my safehouse on the West Coast. And my travel bag is somewhere in Utah but the motel I was staying at probably got rid of it by now. But sure, we could have a look."

John only vaguely knows what’s the deal there, nothing beyond a need to know a fellow (or enemy) operative’s skills and field of expertise, but even after the rest of them changed back at Bucky’s safe house, she had put her suit back on after her shower, only giving it a perfunctory clean. If what she said in the vault is true and she can’t really be without for long periods then that would make sense. John can’t really imagine it; despite their superficial similarities, his current suit is more comfortable than the Captain America one used to be as it doesn’t require as much armor and padding now that he’s got enhanced healing and higher resilience thanks to the serum, but it still chafes and gets unpleasantly warm when worn for long periods. She must be spending a fortune in baby powder and anti chafing creams. He doesn’t know how it works, but now that she’s in a government funded superhero team she might be able to get someone to have a look and see if they can come up with a better solution.

"Maybe you can get something more practical," he points out. Ava arches an eyebrow at him. "I mean, you’re an Avenger now, Valentina has scientists on her payroll, they can probably figure something out. For, you know, your...situation."

Her mouth twitches but then her features smooth into a neutral expression he can’t quite read. "Maybe," she says in a clipped tone. Has John said something wrong? With his luck, the suit is some sort of sacred family heirloom that she keeps around for sentimental reasons and he just came off as an asshole without intending to again.

Yelena’s quiet "Bob?" has him glance up at the man in question. He’s sitting quietly, staring down at his half-eaten waffle with a thoughtful expression.

Yelena walks around the counter so she can go and sit next to him. She nudges him with her elbow. "What?" she asks around a mouthful of milk and cereal. It’s fucking gross. John makes a face and sits back in case spittle and pieces of Cheerios start flying around.

Bob shakes his head, but Yelena pokes him again and this time he offers her a lopsided smile. He looks like the personification of a sad mutt abandoned by the side of the road. "Ah, I just realized that I don’t have anything. I didn’t have much to begin with, but they took my clothes, my phone, my passport and my wallet in Malaysia and that was..." he frowns, mouthing something, "Uuhh, a year and a half ago?"

John lets out a whistle. "You were in a box for more than a year?"

Bob shakes his head. "I don’t think so, I was in a lab and then I think something happened," he darts his eyes around at them, "with the, uh, other guy, you know. I don’t remember much. But well, I don’t even have a toothbrush. I only have these clothes." He pulls at the hem of his sweater. "I don’t even know where they came from, it’s not really my style." He frowns. "Did Valentina dress me in this?"

In his peripheral view, John notices Yelena going suddenly still. She sits frozen, with the spoon raised just out of the milk, her left cheek still bulging slightly with the previous mouthful of cereal. She places spoon and bowl carefully on the bar and swallows before clearing her throat. "That’s what you were wearing when I found you," she places a hand just below the crook of his arm, like she’s anticipating having to calm him down. "When you were...hiding."

Does Bob remember what happened now? Or does he simply know because the others told him? They must have fully debriefed him while John was in his room or on the way to Alexandria. Debriefing without the full team there doesn’t sit well with him, but he can’t say he’s not at least a little relieved at being excluded, not when there was a chance they might have asked about his—what did Yelena call them—Shame Rooms. He goes through that shit plenty in his dreams, he doesn’t need to invite other people in. Shit, did Bob see any of that? He keeps saying he doesn’t remember anything much after his ’episodes’, but when it happened in the vault he wasn’t Sentry or that other guy, just plain old Bob.

"I see," Bob slides off his stool and stands up to check out his outfit. "My mom always dressed me in long sleeves and pants even when it was hot outside. I guess so people wouldn’t ask questions if they saw the bruises."

John chokes on his coffee and starts coughing. Alexei slaps his back so hard that instead of helping, he causes him to almost swallow his tongue. He pushes him away and stumbles to his feet, coughing fit starting all anew. Once he’s stopped gasping he looks up and finds that everyone is staring at him. "Jesus Christ, Bob," his voice comes out hoarse and he tries to clear his throat, but it feels like he just gargled some gravel. "Warn a guy next time."

"Oh, sorry," the apology starts off sounding meek, but then Bob rolls his eyes. "Sorry my shitty childhood ruined your breakfast."

"That’s not—ugh." He dumps his unfinished coffee in the sink and rinses the mug. He hits the tap lever with a little too much force and almost slaps it off, so instead he grabs the edge of the sink and leans down on it. He takes a deep breath so he doesn’t come out with one of his usual tone-deaf responses that make him sound like an asshole, like for example, how everyone in the room’s probably had a shitty childhood—though that’s not true, John’s was fairly normal up until Mike died. When the moment’s passed, he turns around. Yelena and Alexei are back to eating their breakfast, but Bob is still staring expectantly, probably waiting for an apology.

"Look, I packed some clothes, you can borrow a shirt or something, if you want," he shrugs. Not an apology, but it’ll have to do. Now it’s Yelena’s turn to choke. Alexei leans over the counter to slap her on the back, but she evades him deftly without even spilling anything. Ava barely manages to suppress a surprised gasp by turning it into a cough, while Bob stands there like an idiot, blinking owlishly at him. John frowns. Was that something stupid to say? As far as he’s concerned, they need to keep Bob as calm and positive as possible and if the clothes he’s wearing are giving him PTSD or whatever, John can temporarily give up a shirt and some pants for the cause.

Yelena snickers. "I bet all he has are flannel shirts and henleys."

John frowns, crossing his arms over his chest. "No, I don’t." While he is currently wearing a henley and he did pack a flannel shirt, he also has other stuff. He can feel the tips of his ears heat.

"Thanks, Walker," Bob smiles, then he glances between the two of them. "I guess that makes sense, we’re about the same size."

John snorts. "Yeah, right. Give or take fifty pounds of muscles."

"I have muscles now, too!" Bob exclaims and to demonstrate it, he lifts up his sweater and undershirt to show off a row of abs so Men’s Health perfect they look fucking photoshopped.

"Holy shit, Bob!" Yelena lets out an impressed whistle. "Look at that! It’s like a turtle on your belly!" She pokes him with the handle of the spoon as Bob tries to squirm away. She changes tactics then and goes to slap his stomach with the back of her hand. "Hard as rocks!" She announces. "Abs of steel!"

John’s own abs have lost their definition under a healthy layer of fat. He heals quickly and is more resilient, but getting hit still hurts and losing the extra armor with the Captain America suit meant he needed some extra padding but he supposes that’s not much of a worry when you’re invulnerable like Bob apparently is.

He checks his watch, only ten minutes till the car Valentina is supposedly sending will be there and Bucky has yet to arrive. He still doesn’t know where they’re going, but at this point he’d feel foolish to ask. He gestures at Bob, "So you want them now, or..."

Bob smooths down the front of his shirt. "Oh, right! Yes, please! Lead the way."

Five minutes later, they’re both in John’s room with all of his clothes laid out on the bed as Bob carefully considers them while John watches from the doorway, arms crossed over his chest and feeling strangely vulnerable with all of his shit out there in the open. It’s stupid, it’s not like there’s even anything embarrassing, just monochrome underwear and socks and pretty nondescript, neutral clothing befitting a forty year old, divorced veteran. All solid colors, mostly dark or gray with a few shades of blue thrown in, except for the ’Free Hugs!’ t-shirt that he must have shoved in the duffel with the rest of his stuff by accident.

Fuck, it does look pretty boring, but he’s never been one for fashion. When they wanted to do something fancy, he usually just got dressed by Olivia, waiting patiently in his underwear and socks as she assembled an outfit for him. He supposes it’s a good thing that most of his stuff is in neutral colors, fewer chances to fuck it up without her there to choose for him.

Bob holds up his flannel shirt—it’s his favorite, the blue one, John really hopes he doesn’t take that one, but it’s not like he can take back the offer now and underneath all that meek, unassuming look he knows there’s a little bastard hiding, so he wouldn’t put it past Bob to take the shirt if he knew how much John likes it. But Bob just looks from the shirt to John, raises one eyebrow and then puts it back down. John hunches his shoulders.

In the end, Bob picks his dark blue tracksuit bottoms, a gray sweater that fits a little too tight on John anyway and the ’Free Hugs!’ t-shirt.

"I haven’t washed that."

Bob shrugs and starts pulling off his own sweater and undershirt. "It’s fine." It comes out muffled under all the fabric. He emerges with his hair in a wild tangle and tosses the whole bundle of clothes on the floor.

"Hey!"

John grabs the balled up mess and separates sweater and undershirt before folding them and dropping them on top of the dresser. By the time he’s done and turned back, Bob has kicked off his cords and is pulling John’s pants up his legs. When he notices John looking, Bob bends to pick up the discarded trousers and hands them to him. "Here."

"I’m not your fucking maid."

"Okay." Bob shrugs and lets the cords drop to the floor again.

Fucking grown man who can’t pick up after himself.

All changed up and with his shoes back on, Bob ties the sweater around his waist and turns to John, arms out as if showing off his outfit.

"You look like a third year college kid hoping to score at a dorm party."

Bob tilts his head to one side. "That’s very specific." He looks down at himself. "Why third year?"

"Low effort. By then, they don’t usually give a fuck how they look, just there to drink."

Bob hums, nods slowly. "Hoping to score?"

John gestures at the bright pink ’Free Hugs!’.

"Ah."

When they get back to the others, it’s a few minutes past 10 and Bucky’s finally arrived. He looks from Bob’s t-shirt to John and then turns to the others. "Did I miss something?"

Ava sighs. "We all need to do some shopping, apparently."

"That’ll have to wait, we’re late for the photoshoot."

John stumbles on his way to the elevator. "The what?"

Mel is waiting by the limo as they come out the elevator into the parking garage. She hands John, Alexei and Yelena duffel bags containing their suits, washed and patched up and then waves them all inside the car. She shoots Bob a funny look when he too climbs into the car, but beyond that she doesn’t comment on his presence.

She hands out their schedule for the day: the studio is booked until 1900 hours, with nine one-hour slots allowing for a meet and greet, a lunch break as well as a slot for each of them plus one for team pictures. John’s gone through all that already when he got recruited as Captain America, so he’s familiar with the whole process, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.

The non-supersoldiers of the team are still nursing cuts and bruises and, despite the repairs, their suits are in less than optimal shape, not to mention Bucky’s whole lack of a marketable look beyond his leather jacket. So as soon as they exit the vehicle at their destination, about forty minutes later, a whole army of make up artists and what feels like the entire costume department of a high budget sci-fi TV series descends upon them and makes them presentable for an eight-hour shooting session so gruelling that by hour four John is ready to shoot himself and everyone in the room, not necessarily in that order.

Ava and Yelena start off a little awkwardly, but then get into the swing of things quite easily, smoldering at the cameras and trying to one up each other at every turn. Alexei fucking loves it of course, striking poses and trying to rope all of them into ’dynamic team pictures’ whatever he means by that. As for John, even though his career as Captain America had been a short one, he certainly doesn’t miss the feeling of being prodded and posed while people take pictures of him like he’s a zoo animal.

At least Bucky seems to be hating it as much as John, if not more.

Bob, who tagged along allegedly for moral support, grins at them from behind the photographers, gives them thumbs up and raids the catering tables while people shoot him confused looks, wondering who the random guy in the stupid shirt is.

They get back to the tower well past 9 in the evening. They order more food to be brought up to them and this time John eats with them.

The morning after, John is greeted by an e-mail from Olivia containing several links to online articles reporting on the formation of a new Avengers team with reactions ranging from mildly disapproving and confused to cautiously optimistic. Other than the links, her only contribution to the body of the e-mail is a string of question marks. Not even a signature, not even a simple ’O.’, just the usual ’sent from my iPhone’ below it.

Before his brain reminds him it’s a stupid idea—at least he deleted his twitter account after that latest fiasco—he checks a few news aggregator sites. It becomes immediately apparent that Olivia only sent him the most favorable articles she could find, the rest of the press is eviscerating them. John’s fuck ups are once again splattered all over the Internet, with helpfully provided links to previous articles on the subject in case the readers wanted a refresher on Captain Crash Out, but the others aren’t extempt either. There’s not much about Yelena’s past, beyond her links to Natalia Romanoff, but she’s been identified as the woman who tore through New York around Christmas 2024 and almost killed Clint Barton. Alexei is presented as either a has-been C-tier enhanced loser or an ex-Soviet superweapon aiming to infiltrate American society to destabilize it. No one has apparently been able to dig up anything on Ava yet, so all they have on her is what Valentine’s PR team has come up with: former SHIELD operative, born in Argentina from British parents. Together with her powers, they’ve all—correctly—come to the conclusion that she must have been doing all sorts of wetwork and spec ops shit and is therefore not hero material. As for Bucky, they call into question his credibility as a congressman as he was among those spearheading the impeachment against Valentina—which is fair, honestly. John is by no means an expert, but chasing your potential witnesses down with disc grenades and abducting them doesn’t exactly scream due process. At the same time, he suspects that the top detractor of Congressman Barnes’s credibility is Congressman Barnes himself. An article even mentions Bob, not by name of course, but they do wonder who the random normal-looking guy is. They’ve even helpfully drawn a red circle around his blurry, dopey face as he hovers at the edge of their impromptu press conference.

All in all, the consensus seems that even if they saved a few people from falling debris and an inky smudge that made you feel sad, three foreigners of dubious moral fiber and ambiguous alliances, a disgraced home-grown fuck up and a washed up politician and former assassin all under the wing of an obviously corrupt ex CIA director aren’t superhero material, much less worthy of carrying on the Avengers’ legacy.

And the thing is, they’re right.

John lies in bed and stares at his ceiling. He blinks and finds out that four hours have gone by.

Even as a kid, he hardly ever sat still, there was always something to do, just running or biking around with Lemar and later with Olivia too, then the football and the parties in high school, then the army. He always had a sense of purpose spurring him on, but then Lemar died and John fucked up all of his best chances and all that was left was sit and wait for OXE’s next mission, away from the public eye as much as possible. Olivia had her job and John’s wasn’t on a regular schedule at all, so he ended up being a stay at home husband for the most part. It was good, at first, but their house was small and they both are clean and tidy people, so there were only so many times you could deep clean every room as well as the garage before your wife started eyeing you with a mix of pity and worry. The IVF process and then Olivia finally getting pregnant and then the baby had done a lot to occupy his free days, but now wife and son are both gone and there’s no next mission planned for John and the tower has its own cleaning staff, so there he is again.

When he checks his phone, he finds that a few more messages popped up in the group chat while he was lost in thought. One announced yet another breakfast buffet and then, a few hours later, another mentioned a lunch buffet.

John chugs around one third of his daily regimen in protein powders and supplements and goes to find the gym, bypassing the common kitchen on the 84th altogether.

The gym is spacious and fully equipped for baseline and enhanced humans. John runs a half marathon, bench presses and squats his personal best and punches and kicks the shit out of a punching bag until he physically can’t stand anymore.

Afterwards, when his muscles are numb and his head pleasantly empty from the fatigue, he takes an unusually indulgent shower. He doesn’t know how long he stands under the jet of water, but his bruised knuckles have stopped aching when he steps out.

He has his second shake of the day while sitting on a bench in the also fully equipped gym locker room, towel wrapped around his hips and not one thought in his head.

The outside world comes calling soon enough in the form of Bucky. He comes in wearing workout gear and carrying a small gym bag. His steps falter when he notices John, who must be a strange sight admittedly, sitting there in his towel, skin red from the shower and hair all over the place as he drinks his jumbo sized protein shake while staring unseeing at the wall.

He recovers quickly and grunts at John in greeting.

John grunts back.

A locker slams open, there’s a shuffle of fabric as Bucky shoves his bag inside and then the locker slams shut, then silence. Nothing moves. John gulps down more of his shake. It’s horrible, it tastes like sawdust. Usually he adds some fruits or high protein yogurt or sometimes ice cream when he feels adventurous, but that would’ve needed making a stop at the kitchen on 84th and so John is having sawdust shake instead. He shudders. It truly tastes like ass.

"Are you staying here, then?"

"Fuck no."

He came back when called, he posed for the pictures, he’s in the fucking group chat; he’s staying as long as he’s got changes of clothes and then he’s going back to his apartment in Alexandria. If this Avengers or Thunderbolts or whatever they call it ends up sticking, he might close the lease on the apartment and find one in New York, but he’s not fucking moving in the Avengers tower like they’re fucking college roommates or—What? A family?

"I called someone to check this place for bugs," is what Bucky says instead of acknowledging his reply.

Fuck, he hadn’t even thought about that, but who knows how much surveillance Valentina has scattered around the place. For all they know she might have installed cameras in the lockers too. He runs a cursory glance around the room but doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

"I hope she got my good angle."

"You have one?"

John rolls his eyes. "Har har. As long as I don’t end up on CelebrityNudes.Com or some shit."

"Is that a thing?" Bucky’s tone has a strange quality to it, almost worried. When John glances up at him, his face is twisted in a deep frown of concern.

"Have you been sending nudes on the apps, old man?" Bucky shoots him a flat look. "You’re a politician Bucky, you gotta watch out for that crap."

But Bucky’s gone already, door slamming shut behind him.

John is back in his room, chilling—well, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling as he waits for dinnertime while trying to resist the temptation to look up more articles about the team—when an alarm suddenly blares out followed by a disembodied artificial voice announcing: "Unauthorized access, breach in progress on 93th floor landing pad. Repeat—"

John didn’t even know they had a voiced alarm but he’s out of the bed, armed with shield and gun and halfway down the hall before the message has finished repeating.

He bypasses the elevator in case whoever the intruder is expects a frontal assault and heads for the stairs, taking multiple steps at a time, thighs screaming from his abusing them in the gym earlier. He doesn’t know who of the others is in the building, if any at all, and since he left his phone in his room he doesn’t have any way to communicate with them. They apparently have some sort of AI or smart home situation who might be able to tell where the people in the tower are, but he doesn’t want to risk giving away their position in case these announcements go out throughout all the floors. It’s safer to assume he’s on his own, without his suit and barefoot, which isn’t ideal, but he’s spent some time studying the layout of the tower so at least he’s got the home advantage.

The penthouse is three floors in one, with the landing pad connected to the lowest part which is currently under renovations after the fight with Sentry, so there’s a chance the ’intruder’ might actually be one of the contractors outside of work hours for whatever reason, or maybe a bird that got in through the scaffolding, but he can’t take any chances.

The staircase is encased in the same area as the central elevator shaft, but its access is tucked into its side, hiding the door from view of the main area of the penthouse. He uses his access card to unlock it and pulls it open slowly so it makes no noise. He can’t hear anything of note, but the doors to the landing pad are noise dampening so it doesn’t mean much.

He peeks around the corner and gets a more or less unrestricted view of the area outside. He can see the silhouettes of two men standing outside, one is clearly Bucky judging by the reflective metal arm and the other—Well, turns out it is a bird after all.

The ’someone’ Bucky called to swipe the tower for bugs is Joaquín Torres, apparently.

John slumps against the wall of the stairwell entrance and sighs, adrenaline and tension leaving his body all at once in a disorienting wave. The alarm blares again on its new cycle and startles him into straightening up, so he finally comes out of his hiding place and makes his way to them. Outside, the air is chilly due to the wind, but the concrete under his bare feet is warm from an afternoon of interrupted sunlight.

Torres greets him with a wave and a smile while Bocky arches an eyebrow at his appearance but doesn’t comment. The intruder alert comes through muffled due to the noise dampening glass, even with enhanced hearing, but it’s still audible. John gestures back to the penthouse.

Bucky grimaces. "Yeah, I’ve tried telling it to shut up, but nothing worked."

Just then, Ava appears next to John startling the shit out of him. "Just so you know, Alexei is in the armory, suiting up." She looks at John up and down, taking in his undershirt and bare feet. Her lips curl into a smile. "Hey there, John McClane."

It takes them a good ten minutes to figure out how to deactivate the alarm. Asking Mel might have been faster but John figures Bucky doesn’t want to explain the reason for Torres’s presence to her. Alexei showed up around minute three, indeed suited up and brandishing Bucky’s disc grenade launcher. He was visibly crushed that he wouldn’t get to blow up or beat up anyone, but he was soon charmed by their ’guest’. Torres must have some kind of mind power—or maybe it’s pheromones or something—there’s no way a normal, non-enhanced human is that immediately likeable. He even works in intelligence, no one likes those guys: they’re either boring analysts or creeps spying on every little thing. Regardless, Torres remains unpunched and the grenades unlaunched and no new holes or structural damage get added to the penthouse floor.

Torres pokes around for a couple of hours, tells Bucky he’ll have a report for him in a day or two and then leaves from where he came from, jumping off the landing pad. By then, Yelena and Bob are back, laden with bags and boxes and accompanied by a Husky mix who instantly jumps on the couch and settles down to nap.

"We went shopping!" Bob announces, as if John and the others hadn’t come to that conclusion from all the bags and the boxes. "I got clothes and a phone! And a toothbrush!"

"Congratulations on becoming a real boy, Bob."

When Bob beams at him like he took the comment at face value, John’s sarcastic tone sounds more assholish than usual even to John’s own ears.

Turns out, Bob dresses like he’s going to audition for a Linkin Park biopic, all early 2000s oversized t-shirts and bermudas. The clothes that John lent him aren’t mentioned or returned and by the third day, they have other things to worry about.

Whatever shit Torres found must be serious because he’s back at the tower two days later to deliver the report in person. "As far as I can tell, it’s everywhere," he says.

"Even the bathrooms?" Ava asks, horrified.

"And in our rooms?" Bob says in a strange, detached tone.

John catches Bucky’s eyes and raises his eyebrows. "Probably the gym lockers too..."

"The labs!" Alexei gasps.

John turns away from Bucky’s thunderous scowl to frown at him. Of all the places to have surveillance in a skyscraper housing superheroes and several million dollars worth of tech, the labs sound actually like a pretty sensible choice all in all.

Yelena twists around in her chair to look at her father. She contemplates him in silence for a moment, eyes narrowing to slits. "Why? What are you doing in the labs, dad?"

"Nothing!" he says in the least believable way possible, immediately undermining it by pushing off the wall and rushing out of the room.

The sound of a throat clearing draws their attention back to Torres. "It’s not exactly surveillance, at least not an active one. It’s more like a smart home, if your smart home was also Fort Knox. There are cameras at all the accesses, including inside the elevators, plus on all the uh...’business’ floors, such as the labs, the armory, and so on. The living quarters and private areas don’t have cameras as such, but rather they have sensors attuned to some sort of identification? I couldn’t really figure out what that would be exactly, though." He looks at Bucky for confirmation, who nods and produces his access card. Torres’s expression clears instantly. "Yeah, probably, that would make sense. Together with sound and vibration sensors, they can monitor who, how many and where the people are in the whole building."

There’s a long moment of silence as they take all that information in. John’s skin itches and he squeezes his hands that he’s got clutched in his lap so that he doesn’t give in to the temptation of scratching his arms bloody. "Does," he croaks, then clears his throat and tries again. "Does Valentina have access to..." he gestures at the laptop Torres has opened and turned towards them, "...all this?"

Torres shrugs, but then his face cracks open into a grin. "Do you want me to lock her out and rescind all her accesses?"

It’s by no means a small, petty victory, but John still enjoys it immensely when the next time they have a meeting with Valentina she schedules it over video conference so she doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of signing up for a guest pass at reception. She instead appears as a giant face in the largest screen they have in the meeting room, so much so that Bob starts calling her Big Sister, but at least they can mute her whenever they want, so it’s not the worst.

Torres has also made them all admins in the system and revoked all other existing privileges.

Okay so, the guy is actually really likable, John can admit it in the privacy of his own mind.

The inquiry into the ’Void Incident’ yields inconclusive findings, but the consensus is that a dimensional rift is to blame—which John supposes is close enough to the truth—but the heated debate is in the cause of it all. The prevailing theory is that there was something in the former Avengers tower that got disturbed during the renovations, though mysteriously none of the surveillance data from the incident seems to have survived. Their new admin access isn’t of much help there either; they can see that someone wiped the data, but there’s nothing to recover as it’s simply not there.

"I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything," is Bucky’s comment, delivered with a grim look.

They all exchange looks and then glance at Bob, who’s sitting in his armchair at the other end of the room, blissfully ignorant as he reads. He found a ’100 books to read before you die’ list and, armed with a library card and a lot of free time, he’s been steadily plowing through them. He’s already on number two.

"We should tell him," Yelena says. She was the only one who opposed excluding Bob from the debriefing and only relented once Bucky promised that they would tell him after they knew what the report contained. As a matter of principle rather than actually taking a side in that argument, John had pointed out that if the official government inquiry had found out that Bob was the cause of the ’dimensional rift’ they’d have people from the DODC kicking their door down and whisking him away to their fancy prison instead of five thick folders and hours of congressional hearing recordings. Not that any prison would be able to contain Bob if he decided to Void or Sentry out.

Bucky had been adamant, though. "If the files contain the reason why Bob changed into whatever that was, I want to know before we might accidentally trigger it again," had been his justification and even Yelena had nothing to say to that and so they spent a couple of hours going through all the reports and the findings, or lack thereof, while Bob was chilling.

"Sooo, now we tell Bob we don’t have anything to tell him." John huffs and pushes the file away causing some sheets to slide out and scatter haphazardly across the table. With a frustrated groan, he stands up and starts collecting the spilled sheets, sticking them back into the folders randomly.

"Well, no one seems to be aware of his involvement." Ava shrugs. "Or really, even his existence at all. I’d say that’s good news."

"The most powerful man the world has never known," John muses and then snorts at his own pun. When he glances up at the others, they’re all leveling unimpressed looks at him, except Alexei who grins at him from the other side of the table.

"Good news, Bob! No one thinks you matter at all." He grumbles and then rolls his eyes, "Yeah, that’s gonna go well."

Yelena jabs an elbow into his side, sharp and right between his ribs. "We’re not phrasing it like that."

"You know I can hear you guys, right?"

They all jump at Bob’s sudden appearance at that vague border where the open plan kitchen ends and the living room area begins. They opted to go through the files in the common area on the 84th rather than in one of the meeting rooms, partly to give Bob the impression they had nothing to hide from him even though they had, and partly because they wanted no interruptions from Valentina’s giant head on the screens. And now the subject of that briefing is standing about ten feet from them, The Great Gatbsy hanging from his right hand as he keeps his place with his pointer finger stuck in between the pages.

John feels his whole face flush. Great fucking going, Walker, just kick the guy with the world ending self-worth issues down like they didn’t just have a whole group hug about it just a week earlier. "I, uh, I didn’t mean—" He stumbles over his words as his tongue gets stuck to the suddenly very dry roof of his mouth.

Bob rolls his eyes and huffs. "I can take a stupid joke, Walker. I’m not that unstable." John clamps his mouth shut and looks away, ears burning.

"You’re not unstable, Bob," Yelena tells him with an exasperated sigh, like this is an old argument that they’re having regularly. "Just a little—"

"—fucked up," they finish at the same time, grinning at each other like it’s an in joke just between the two of them. On the outside, looking in, John feels like he’s intruding on something private and almost intimate. Maybe they’re fucking, maybe they’re not, but if they’re fucking, it’s not just fucking.

"Phrasing aside," Bucky gives John a pointed stare there, "no one has connected you to the event, Bob. We have been...issued with an official version of the facts and we’re gonna stick to that in any kind of communication or conversation with people outside this room, with the exception of Valentina and Mel and those who have been disclosed. Their names and designations are in the files, so I suggest you all study them thoroughly and commit them to memory." Bob raises his hand like he’s in school. "And yes, that includes you, Bob." Bob lowers his hand. "Any questions?"

John raises his own hand.

Bucky sighs like he’s carrying an impossible weight and levels a glare at him like he’s trying to warn him off asking his question, when he’s the one who asked for them in the first place. "Yes, Walker?"

"Does that mean you’re not gonna tell Wilson, either?"

The next few days are a blur of debriefings and meetings and debriefings for the meetings they have as they discuss and set up policies both with official government authorities and among themselves. Bucky and Yelena have assumed de-facto joint leadership of the team, with Yelena being the public face and Bucky using all of his political connections to set up deals. Admittedly, he doesn’t have many, having been a congressman for barely half a term so far, but it’s still more than the rest of them combined. John used to have friends in the military, but no one wants to be associated with him since he was discharged.

While the two of them are busy kissing up to the public and the politicians, the rest of them get together with Mel to set up the more practical aspects of being a team.

Like the last time she was at the tower, she seems overly intimidated by Bob, always keeping her distance and at least one other person between the two of them. No one brings it up, but they’ve all noticed, including Bob who keeps to himself and acts subdued and smaller in a way that’s reminiscent of his behavior inside the Shame Rooms. It doesn’t sit well with John, like a stone at the pit of his stomach, but he can’t blame Mel either—she’s young, but she works for Valentina, who knows the shit she’s seen and feels ashamed for and what she saw when Bob turned her into a projected shadow.

Honestly, if it were up to John, she wouldn’t even be in any of the meetings, but she knows most if not all the resources at Valentina’s disposal and she doesn’t hold any back.

In a couple of days, John and Alexei have come up with a working draft of a training program for all team members—Bob included. Mel has it typed up all nice and proper, including the proposed schedule, and sent to Bucky and Yelena for their input, should they have any, and their final approval.

Bob points out that, as heroes, their main focus should be helping people more than pre-emptively eliminating threats and that, while they have significant experience in the latter, they mostly lack it for the former. Mel makes a note of it and the day after she shows up with a plethora of pamphlets, brochures, resources and links for several programs and seminars ranging from basic to advanced first aid, disaster relief, crisis de-escalation, hostage negotiation and so on. Bob reads through them all and proposes they all sign up for them.

Because they’re a supportive team and they value Bob’s input despite the fact that he’s not officially on the roster, they agree.

It’s a good idea, really, and Bob is right that they need to be more pro-active with the heroism and if John has learned anything from his years in the Army is that the only way to develop a reflex is to train for it day in and day out. They may not be hero material right now, but they can fake it till they make it and if they have to sit through hours-long training courses for the rest of their lives, then maybe one day it’ll stick. Once John receives their schedule, ’rest of their lives’ looks like an actual possibility; there’s a chance Bob has signed them up for all the options Mel presented and then some more that he’s dug up on his own.

Ava doesn’t say much during their meetings, beyond some input here and there when he and Alexei were coming up with the training regimen. However, on day four of the whole circus, she shoots John a look and then turns to Mel and asks how well equipped are the labs in the tower.

"Well, I’m no scientist, but it looks like there’s a lot of stuff. Valentina brought people back in for project Sen—" she darts her eyes to Bob and goes pale. "—you know." She clears her throat and composes herself. "Well, we have the space and the possibly the people—"

"I want my people, not Valentina’s."

Mel frowns and tilts her head to the side, but after a moment her face clears up in understanding and she nods. "Oh right, you mean Doctor..." she trails off and taps a few things on her tablet. "Forrest? Ah no, Fo—"

"Foster. Bill Foster."

From where he’s sitting, John can’t see the screen clearly, but he can make out the face of a man with brown skin and a goatee, in his mid to late 60s. It’s barely a glimpse before Mel scrolls down to read through whatever’s written in the file. It looks like scans of personnel files and reports, with parts censored out, but John recognizes the SHIELD’s logo on several of the pages.

"A couple of outstanding warrants but nothing too controversial." She taps out some notes and then offers Ava a polite smile, all business. "I’m sure we can work something out."

The chefs that Mel mentioned arrive around mid morning each day and prepare enough food to feed an army, or three super soldiers, two more or less normal humans and whatever Bob is. They serve lunch in the kitchen on the 84th floor and then leave vacuum sealed food containers with meals for the rest of the day, labeled with their names and clear instructions on how to re-heat them if needed. Someone must have told them their room arrangements, because the fridge on 84th only has Yelena and Bob’s food and John finds his in the kitchen on the 86th.

When he adds up all the calories, he comes pretty close to his daily needs even taking into account his training schedule, but it’s still a lot of food to get through in one day if he doesn’t want to feel too full to do any other activity, so on the third day he tells one of the chefs to only prep half the food for him and he goes back to his shakes. He’s running out, though, having only brought enough for a week or so from home. He’s running out of clean clothes too and while they have washing machines and dryers available in the tower, using them means delaying the inevitable return back to his apartment more than he feels necessary.

Then one early afternoon, he receives Olivia’s e-mail confirming her arrival into Dulles International by 11 a.m. the following day and realizes he never really specified where they should meet up. He packs up his dirty and clean clothes all together, shoots a message to the group chat and then takes the elevator down to the underground garage.

He loads the washing machine as soon as he comes in, trashes all the take out menus he got in the mail box and then he sits on the sofa to wait for the laundry to be done. He cycles through all the available channels on TV and settles on one that’s showing sports highlights from the past week and watches each one go by without really seeing it. He canceled all the streaming services he had as he’s hardly ever had a free moment since Olivia left.

For the past eight days, he spent almost every single waking moment with or around at least one other member of the Thunderbolts. Each day’s schedule was packed with team training, team meetings or team lunches, so this is really the first time in days that he’s had a chance to stop and be on his own. The volume on the TV is set on low, barely audible even for his enhanced hearing and apart from that and the droning of the washing machine coming in from the kitchen, there’s no other sound in the apartment.

He checks the time. Olivia’s arrival is more than twelve hours away still.

He stands up and starts pacing, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Despite the busy days, he’s been keeping as regular as he can sleep schedule, so he’s not tired in the least. He thinks there might be a couple of books lying around if he looks hard enough, but he probably wouldn’t be able to focus on much of anything. He drops and starts counting push ups, stopping only when he’s in danger of overheating in his long sleeved shirt, but the proximity to the ground showed him some dust that had accumulated in his absence, so he gives up on exercising and sets to dusting the place and then vacuuming, quiet hours be damned. His most immediate neighbor, Mr. Abrams, is almost deaf and a piece of shit racist anyway, so if he has any complaints he can go fuck himself.

Once he’s done vacuuming, he moves to the kitchen and cleans the fridge and icebox; not that there’s much anyway, as he emptied it before leaving for New York—just a few beers and half full bottle of ketchup. He fixes himself a large shake after that, sawdust-flavored once again as he didn’t think to stop for groceries before driving home and it’s now too late for any of the places close by and anyway he’s still got the laundry on.

As if on cue, the washing machine finishes right as he’s done with the shake, so he transfers everything to the dryer and goes back to veg on the sofa with a beer.

He loses track of time, but at some point he must have fallen asleep because he startles awake, sitting on the sofa, three empty cans of beer lined up on the coffee table.

When he goes to check the time on his phone, he finds out it’s 5 a.m. but the phone dies on him immediately after. He goes hunting around the flat for a charging cable when he realizes he left his in New York. He doesn’t find any spares, so he takes a shower, grabs some clean clothes from the dryer and drives to the nearest open store. In addition to the charging cable, he gets some groceries and a bottle of wine he remembers Olivia liking and then he drives back home to wait.

Once his phone comes back to life, several notifications pop up on screen, one from Oliva confirming her time of arrival and several from the Thunderbolts. In addition to the usual messages regarding the presence of food in the kitchen on the 84th floor in the group chat, there are several reminders from Bucky to check their work e-mails—which reminds John that he also left the laptop he’s been issued specifically for that purpose in his bedroom in New York—a picture of Bob asleep on a recliner on the landing pad with a seagull perched on his head followed by a blurry picture of Bob being startled awake by the seagull formerly perched on his head, which does make him chuckle so he adds his own laughing emoji reaction to the ones already present.

Bucky has also sent him a direct message, confirming that John has been put on personal leave for the next couple of days and that, barring any emergencies, he should enjoy the time off while still keeping an eye on team communications in case they need his input. John isn’t sure what kind of input he and Yelena could possibly be interested in from him—if it’s about the training regiment, they can ask Alexei—but other than that historically neither of them has ever been interested in his opinion.

Just in case, he shoots a message to Bob, who’s still the only one other than Bucky for whom he has the number saved, asking for any updates.

Bob replies two hours later with a, ’Finished Great Gatsby, started this one’ attached to a picture of the cover of Bulgakov’s ’The Master and Margarita’.

A little past 11, Olivia messages him with a time and a place in D.C. Even with traffic, he’s got plenty of time, so he takes another shower, trims his beard and wears the cologne and clothes he knows she likes. He’s been eating well and, though busy, sleeping plenty and he cleans up nice, but even so he can’t quite meet his own eyes in the mirror.

The problem, of course, is that her physical attraction to him isn’t the issue. They’d had incredible sex the night before she packed everything up and left. John remembers a kind of desperation in the way she squeezed his hands, their fingers interlaced, in the way she rode him, hard and fast; and a sadness, in the way she kissed him after before turning her back to him to go to sleep. At the time, he’d attributed it to the fact that he was scheduled to leave on a week-long assignment the day after, but when he came back to an empty house, he understood it had been a goodbye.

He grabs his fully charged phone, his keys and leaves.

He arrives thirty minutes before the appointed time, so he finds a parking spot and waits in his car until it’s five to.

Olivia arrives only a few minutes after him, perfectly on time. He didn’t expect her to bring their son, but there’s still the cold claw of disappointment squeezing his stomach when she shows up alone. He never had any delusions he’d be a great father and maybe that should’ve stopped them, but Olivia clearly wanted a kid and at the time John would’ve done anything to make her happy, to make up for all the shit he’d rained upon them. Maybe that hadn’t been a good enough reason to add to their family, but in the end it ended up not changing much: a unit of two, Olivia and her—their son and John jettisoned hundreds of miles away. He hadn’t felt like a father even when they were all together under one roof; he’d read so many books, went to all the prenatal courses with Olivia and yet he’d felt too awkward, too inadequate, so he never thought he’d love him that much more than maybe the idea of him—that’s what was expected of him: an illustrious army career, a wife, a child, maybe two. Now, of course, he has nothing. He hasn’t seen his son in person in more than a year—hasn’t heard his voice, hasn’t smelled him or felt the tight curls of his hair tickle his lips as he bent to kiss him on the head. It’s like someone carved a piece out of him and walked away with it. He misses him, he misses them.

Olivia is there in person and yet he misses her. She looks good, effortlessly beautiful as she always does. She’s wearing her hair up in a bun with the curIs that are too short and escaped it framing her face. She’s wearing little or no make up and she looks smart in her dark red blazer, the shirt underneath so white it almost glows.

There’s no ring on her finger.

John stood up to greet her but now he doesn’t know what to do. A hug feels like maybe he’d be presuming too much, but a handshake would feel ridiculous, so instead he just stands there stiffly like an idiot.

"Hey," he croaks.

Now he thinks about it, he hasn’t seen her in person in more than a year either, though it feels different with her. They’ve spoken over the phone and kept in contact fairly regularly, but of course he missed all the things that don’t translate over text or call: the brush of her hair on his face when they kissed or stood close together, how her voice sounded grumpy first thing in the morning, the scent of her skin. She’s not wearing perfume, he can tell even at this distance, probably just deodorant—if he hugged her, he’d feel her hair, smell her scent.

The serum had made everything more intense, the first time Olivia had seen him burying his face into the armpit of the pj top she had just discarded, she’d teasingly called him a pervert. He hadn’t been able to help himself though, it smelled like her, like the two of them together after a full night of sleep and then he’d realized he was instantly and painfully hard. Olivia called him a pervert again but with a delighted trill in her voice and then they’d had very intense morning sex and she’d been late for work.

"John," she says, and he’s pulled back to the present.

Instead of a hug or a handshake, he settles for a sharp nod and sits back down.

"How are you?" she asks, then. Her tone is neutral as are her features, but it feels like a genuine question. John has known her for more than twenty years, since they were kids, she’s asking because she wants to know about John. He supposes not even his shitty conduct as a husband and father in the last few years could completely erase the years of love and caring she’s had for him. It should feel like a chance to maybe mend the distance, to grow something from the roots that perhaps are still there, but it settles around John’s neck like a consolation prize.

He finds it in himself to smile at her, though he’s not sure how convincingly. He shrugs. "I’m fine."

Her face falls, something stuttering behind her eyes and then settling into a neutral nothingness. It’s like a shutter has come down and she’s looking at him, not coldly, but almost politely. Business-like.

The waitress chooses that moment to come take their orders.

John hasn’t looked at the menu and doesn’t really listen as she lists the specials. He’s not sure he could stomach anything right now, anyway, not when his mouth tastes like ashes. He orders a beer and a burger—they must have at least one burger on the menu, he missed Olivia’s order. She jots down both their orders and leaves them to it.

To what, John isn’t quite sure. Olivia only said she wanted to meet up and it’s not like John was in any position to refuse.

She sighs. "You always do this, John." Great. He’s not even said five words and somehow he’s fucked up already. "You say you’re fine, but you’re not."

"What do you want me to say, Olivia?"

"How are you?" she asks again.

Like a switch has been flipped; he’s angry. What the fuck is she asking that for. She fucking left. She made vows to stick by his side, she was the only friend he’d left and she abandoned him to drown. "What do you think?!" he growls. She hides it well, but since the serum all of John’s senses have sharpened so he notices the way her eyes widen slightly, how her fingers twitch as they grip her napkin. She’s scared. It’s only a second, but it’s there. It takes all the fight out of him, all the heat of the anger is quenched into cold dread that settles like an impossibly heavy weight on his stomach. "I-I’m sorry, I—"

"Here you go!" The waitress sets their drinks down, startling a gasp out of both of them.

John jerks away from the table, leaning back against his chair as far as he can go, while Olivia hunches over her hands twisting on the edge of the tabletop.

"Food will be along shortly!"

Olivia answers her smile with an unconvincing one, but the waitress doesn’t seem to notice, or care.

John clears his throat. "I’m sorry," he repeats. "I’m—keeping busy with this new—" he lowers his voice and glances around the place, but there’s not many people and none close to them, anyway. "—Avengers thing, you know. I’m—fine." He grimaces and takes a swig of his beer before he can say something else that makes Olivia look at him like he’s a stranger.

"Busy, huh?" she snorts. "So that’s another thing you’re still doing. I thought maybe you could’ve used this time to, I don’t know...relax a little? Or at least get your shit together."

"What are you talking about?"

"I left you the cards for a couple of therapists..."

Ah yes, nothing says ’it’s not me, it’s you’ like coming home tired and bruised after a week away to an empty house, a letter explaining that she’d gone to stay with her parents and the business cards of several therapists. He should’ve done everyone a favor and gotten killed on that mission: Olivia and his son would’ve gotten a nice little pension, she would’ve been left with bittersweet what ifs instead of the confirmation without a shadow of a doubt that her husband was a fuck up and John would have finally been free of everyone fucking hating him and cheerily letting him know. But no, it had been a relatively easy task, just tedious and time consuming and the bruised ribs had come from John misjudging the length of a jump and landing badly on top of a roof.

"It’s like sometimes...sometimes your body is here, but you’re not. Like you don’t even exist anymore." He swallows more of his beer just to have something to do. "It’s like you’re just...this tool that people get to pick up and use and then put back." She means weapon. He’s a weapon, he was built to be one, first in the army, and then he finally sealed his fate when he took the serum. They discharged him, but Valentina must have already arranged something with them or they would have never let him go, not when he was the only—the last super soldier available to them. "It’s like you’re not even a person anymore. I—" She breathes in sharply, blinking rapidly.

Fuck.

She’s trying not to cry. In all their years together, he’s never made her cry, not that he knows of. She’s been plenty angry at him, or lately more disappointed than angry, but he never—

"I thought it started after you got discharged, or maybe when Lemar died or when you got the serum. That it was yet another way that it changed you, but I’ve had a lot of time to look back at our relationship and I think maybe it started even before then, after your first tour or—" she cuts herself off abruptly and shoots him a stricken look.

"Or what?"

She takes a deep breath to settle herself, dabs at her eyes with the napkin.

"Or what, Olivia?"

"I remembered—At your brother’s wake, your father—"

Their waitress seems to be perfectly attuned to them so that she manifests exactly at the worst possible moment because right then she appears at their table and sets Olivia’s order in front of her. "Hummus and falafel salad for the lady," she announces cheerfully and then places John’s in front of him, "and house burger and fries for the gentleman."

"Thank you," Olivia squeaks.

"Any dips for those fries, sir? We got all the usual suspects of course, but we also have chili or garlic mayo, remoulade—"

He grits his teeth. "Please leave."

The waitress huffs in amusement. "Oookay."

John watches her go and once she’s out of earshot, he pushes aside his burger and leans in closer, planting his elbows onto the table. "He was mourning his son." He hisses. "Whatever he said, it was the grief talking."

"John—"

"Look, it’s like you said, I was too much in my head. The Captain America assignment, the serum and Lemar..." Olivia’s been poking at her food, unconvinced, but at that she snorts. "What?"

She drops her fork on the plate and leans back against her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. Her features twitch, like she’s barely keeping herself from sneering. "You weren’t the only one who lost Lemar, he was my friend too! And you never talked about it—we never talk about him anymore!" She stops just as her voice rises and takes a few deep breaths. When she resumes, the tremble in her voice is gone and she speaks in a much calmer tone. "I lost him too, John, and you left me alone to grieve. You just...weren’t there with me."

Olivia stops and stares at him like she’s waiting for him to say something, maybe deny it, but she’s been by his side the whole time except the few times when she wasn’t—during his tours and the year since she left. In the army, he had Lemar, but then after Lemar died—it just had never occurred to him that it wasn’t him who stopped having her, but rather she who stopped having John.

His eyes are burning, he’s not sure if it’s the tears threatening to fall or the shame. "That’s—That’s different,"

"Different how? Because you knew him longer? It was only a few years. Because he served with you? I don’t—"

"Because it was my fault!"

She snaps her mouth shut and stares at him, eyes flashing with barely restrained anger. He used to make her laugh and now they can’t even spend ten minutes together after a whole year apart without him making her either sad or angry. Has he changed that much? His circumstances couldn’t be more different obviously, but he fundamentally feels like the same old John he’s always been—confident and on mission when it comes to the job, though some have said arrogant and reckless, and fairly useless when he doesn’t have a goal or anything to do, to strive for. The difference is that he’s always had Lemar and then Olivia and Lemar to guide him and keep him on course, but Lemar’s death precipitated a cascade of events where he lost every purpose he had, with the Captain America gig, and then the Army and then as a husband and a father, and whether he’s a weapon or a tool, he’s of no use to anybody if there’s no one left who knows how to use him properly.

"John." She’s been saying his name for a while, he finally notices. He blinks out of his thoughts and focuses back on her. Her frown smooths out in—relief? And then she smiles, halfway between teasing and bitter. "I say this with love, there are many things that went to shit in our lives because of you and the choices you made, but Lemar’s death wasn’t your fault."

She reaches across the table and touches his hand. It’s barely a contact at all, just her fingers brushing his as they settle on his wedding band, but it’s like being hit by a bolt of lightning. He jolts away with a gasp.

"You weren’t there, you don’t know—"

Olivia curls her hand in a fist. "Because you never told me!" She shakes her head with a groan. "We were supposed to be partners, John, that’s what a marriage is. That’s—"

"Everything all right with your food?"

Olivia jerks her hand back, almost knocking over her glass. The waitress just blinks at them in serene or willful ignorance—it’s really hard to say at this point. Their plates haven’t been touched, even if she didn’t hear them, John’s sure their body language gave away the tension between them, she cannot possibly be this clueless.

"Would you please fuck off?"

There’s a sharp intake of breath from Olivia’s side of the table, while the woman—barely in her twenties by the looks of it, her name tag says Laura—takes a step back, eyes widening in fear. Great. Fucking fantastic. With his luck, she recognized him and will drag his ass on tiktok or snapchat or whatever social media Gen Z uses these days. He raises his hands, palms out and takes a deep breath to steady himself. "Please—Laura, is it?" She jolts like she’s surprised he knows her name and nods a little too quickly. "Now is not a good time. I swear I’ll give you a 100 bucks tip if you leave us alone until we call you for the check."

She brightens immediately. She relaxes her shoulders and offers him the whitest, straightest smile he’s seen outside of toothpaste commercials. "Sure thing!" She says, pertly, and then bounces away, ponytail swinging with each step.

John watches her go in disbelief, then he turns back to Olivia, trying to gather the lost threads of whatever conversation they were having or were about to have. They used to always be in sync, but John lost a few steps along the way and now he finds himself lagging behind, trying to keep up when she’s skipped ahead a few paragraphs.

"John," she says, like an apology.

She slides something across the table to him. It’s another business card, but not a therapist this time. There’s a name and an address in Atlanta, but it all blurs out of focus until the only thing John can read is ’Divorce Attorney’.

Turns out, they’re in different books now.

John doesn’t remember getting back to his apartment, but suddenly he blinks and he’s standing in the entrance with his keys in hand, the door still open behind him.

He tears through his wardrobe and drawers and empties everything into his duffel bag and, when that’s full, he shoves the rest in a couple of trash bags. He almost tears the door off the mirror cabinet in the bathroom when he goes to retrieve the few things he’s got in there—just his electric shaver, his comb, toothpaste and electric toothbrush and a first aid kit badly in need of refilling. His shoes and his back up uniform also end up in trashbags. Next up, he unmounts his gun safe from the wall and puts it together with his other things next to the door.

From the cupboards in the kitchen he retrieves all the bags of protein powder and dietary supplements he’s got left, enough to last him until the end of the month, maybe more now he has a team of chefs and seemingly infinite take out money to tide him over whenever he might need.

He clears the fridge, throwing away the groceries he bought just a few hours earlier and drinking the rest of his six pack, one can after the other, while standing there in front of the fridge, door open and ignoring the alarm screaming at him all the while.

He contemplates the bottle of wine he left in there to chill. Olivia used to buy the odd fancy bottle now and then, serving it with their Sunday dinners. John usually liked what she picked, though he’s always been a bourbon and beer man himself; uncomplicated, simple. His father used to say that wine was for women, faggots and the French, so they never had any in the house growing up.

He empties the bottle down the drain.

In a way that’s starting to feel familiar, he gets back to the tower in the middle of the night. He checks with their AI or smart home or surveillance software or whatever it is where the others are just in case as none of them keep regular sleep schedules, but those who are in are in their rooms, so he makes his way to his floor undisturbed.

He e-mails the housing company that let him his apartment asking to cancel the lease. He’s still got six months to go, but he asks them if they have any places in New York City, so maybe they can figure something out. Next, he looks up divorce attorneys in the area, but as the map fills up with pins, he tastes the bile at the back of his throat and has to rush to the bathroom. He makes it to the toilet, but nothing comes up beside saliva and stomach acids. The only thing he had were the beers more than six hours earlier and he’d pissed them all out when he had to stop to refuel when he was about halfway back to New York.

He half sits, half sprawls on the tiles, next to the toilet and contemplates the ring he still wears on his fingers. He twists once, twice clockwise and then back. Half a turn left and then back right. Left. Right. He’s worn it ever since Olivia put it on him, never took it off, not even when he went on missions for OXE and Valentina. It was his anchor, he only had to feel its weight and know he had a place, a home, someone to come back to at the end of the day.

For such a small thing, it’s so heavy.

For such a heavy weight, it’s so easy to slide it off.

His fingers spasm and it slips from his grasp, clinking onto the tiles and then rolling away from him. It draws a wide curve and then spins on itself and starts to wobble like a spinning top that’s losing its energy until it finally tips and falls on its side with a final, quiet tink and then it lies there, inert.

Instead of going to bed, he puts away all his stuff. His spare charger goes inside the bedside table, next to his original charger that he forgot there. The toiletries and first aid kit he shoves into the bathroom cabinet, next to the cheap plastic toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste he got from a bodega within walking distance after he woke up with a horrible cotton mouth after his first night in the tower. All his clothes and shoes fit into the comically vast walk-in closet with space to spare, so he places his gun safe in there too.

As he goes to fill the first drawer of his dresser with his underwear and socks, he notices the blue striped sweater and the brown cords neatly folded on top of it.

How many fucking times does one need to be told to pick their shit up?

Before he can think better on it, he snaps a picture and sends it to Bob and then, in case it’s not clear, he shoots him a message right afterwards that leaves no room for interpretation: "Pick. Your. Shit. Up."

It’s almost 2 am, but Bob replies almost instantly because no one fucking sleeps in this place.

"not mine technically, i think the void came up with it from a memory of my mom"

And then a moment later: "welcome back"

John tosses his phone on the bed and slams the drawer closed.

No one comments on his missing ring, though they’ve all noticed. He catches Ava glancing at his hand as he’s drinking his coffee the next morning and they’re all being very accomodating to his shitty mood, ignoring or laughing off his harsh comments, which in turn makes him even angrier and more likely to lash out with said abrasive comments. They’re not fucking friends, they shouldn’t be treating him with kids gloves. He’s an asshole and a deadbeat dad, soon to be a divorced asshole and deadbeat dad and all he wants is to make someone angry enough that they’d fight him.

You’d think it’d be easier when he rubs elbows daily with two other super soldiers, an assassin and a former SHIELD operative. Bob would probably obliterate him in a second or trap him in an endless sequence of Shame Rooms, depending on which of his alternative selves he’d trigger, so it wouldn’t be very satisfying to provoke a reaction out of him, but he can be a shit to him to get a reaction out of Yelena.

It’s Alexei who snaps, of all people.

It’s during their scheduled training session. John is younger than him and more technically competent, especially after Alexei’s years in prison, but he’s not fighting to spar and he’s not fighting to win and Alexei still has sheer size on his side. John leaves his guard open enough so that Alexei goes for a punch to his abdomen and he lets it land, right below the edge of his ribcage. The pain is sharp and clean—he might have cracked a rib after all—but he was counting on it and, lightning quick, he traps Alexei’s arm against his body and brings his knee up to smash against it, but right then Alexei’s other hand hooks up under his leg in a clumsy but effective move and John’s flipped so fast he feels his stomach slam into his throat. One second he’s staring at the ceiling and the next at the floor as he’s slammed to the mat so hard all the air rushes out of his lungs. He lands weird on his wrist and Alexei’s arm that’s still trapped under him presses unpleasantly right under his solar plexus.

A hand closes around the back of his neck, clamping down with enough force that even with John’s enhanced resilience it’s uncomfortably close to being painful. "Are we done with bitchy mood?" Alexei asks, in a patient tone that’s at odds with the steel hold he’s got on John’s neck.

"I don’t—" The hand on his neck pulls his head up and slams it back down hard enough his vision whitens for a second. "We’re done."

"Good!" Alexei lets him go, pats him on the shoulder and then shifts his weight from his back. He doesn’t stand up though, he just rolls over to sit next to him. He stretches his arms up, popping his back. He lets out a groan. "It was like wrestling drunk bear. I think I pulled a muscle."

John breathes evenly, face down resting against the mat. It’s wet with his sweat now and it feels unpleasant. "I think I sprained my wrist."

His wrist isn’t sprained, just bruised, which is just as well, because the next day Valentina by way of Mel, books them on The Tonight Show. They receive new or updated versions of their suits, but as they’re going to a studio, they leave all their weapons behind, which means John’s tacoed shield gets left behind, but he has to wear the beret.

There’s a small hiccup when the costume department asks them if they could maybe wear something more colorful, to look more ’heroic’ as they put it, but in the end they arrange Alexei in his red suit in the middle and give the rest of them more red accents by way of accessorizing with belts and pouches and boot laces. The interview is scripted, of course, with Yelena and Bucky carrying most of the conversation as the now official co-leaders of this new iteration of the Avengers. John has more press training and experience than all of them combined, but no one really wants to hear him speak, including himself, so he just shuts up and smiles for the cameras, blinded by the studio lights.

Apparently, he can’t even do that correctly without looking like a ’smug asshole’ according to a sizable sample of Internet reactions once the interview is broadcasted. Mel assures him that it’s a much lower percentage than when he was announced as part of the team. Small victories.

Bob, who was left behind at the tower and wasn’t even given a seat in the audience—allegedly Valentina wants to avoid anyone seeing him and associating him with the team before he’s ’suit-ready’, Yelena called bullshit on that and so did the rest of them, but Bob assured them it was fine—gets very excited the night it’s set to air. He pops enough corn for a whole movie theater and uses his forced exile to guilt-trip and cajole them all to watch the episode with him on the giant TV in the living room area on floor 84, which has by now become the designated unofficial communal hang out.

They do look grim, dressed in mostly black and dark grays on that sofa, and John can admit that he does look like a smug asshole smiling like that, but they also look put together and competent and Yelena hit it off with Jimmy Fallon and it translates well on camera, so all in all it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

John finds a divorce lawyer with an affordable rate and at least 3.5 stars on Google, forwards Olivia’s attorney’s credentials to her and tells her to agree to all their demands, though he mentions the desire to see his son sometimes before he turns 18 if at all possible.

The housing company answers his e-mail with a list of properties in New York City. There are four in Long Island that are within his price range so he arranges to visit them. The first appointment he misses because he, Alexei and Yelena are called to answer to an armed robbery. Well, technically the whole team is called, but Bucky is in D.C. and Ava is on the West Coast, so it’s just the three of them.

It goes poorly.

Well, it goes okay, really. The would be robbers are apprehended alive, none of the hostages are injured beyond shock and some minor cuts and bruises and the property damage is kept to a relative minimum, though it’s a very generous minimum as the Red Guardian is involved and the bank marble flooring will need replacing in several places.

The problem is them, their teamwork—or lack thereof. They opted for an approach from above, with Yelena breaching first, quick and silent, with John and Alexei set to follow in after her. The initial approach went fine, but they were made as soon as they came in, with John on the right and Alexei on the left and so, when Alexei had dived to the right to get to cover and John had raised his shield to protect Yelena, Alexei had run into his shield arm and John didn’t get to Yelena in time and thank fuck for her quick reflexes because she only got a graze instead of a full hit to the arm or, worse, her center mass.

So yeah, mission objective accomplished, but points docked for the shitty execution, so it’s back to the drawing board with their training, with a focus on team strategy.

Yelena slaps his upper arm hard, shaking him out of his thoughts. "Walker!"

"Ow! What?!"

"What is that face, huh?" She scrunches up her features into a grotesque grimace and growls for good measure even though John definitely didn’t make any sound beyond perhaps some light teeth gnashing.

"I don’t look like that."

Alexei shoots him a look over Yelena’s head from her other side and shrugs. "You look a bit like that."

The elevator doors open on floor 79th, which is the section of the labs that has a medbay. Yelena’s wound is light enough that she can skip the trip to the hospital, but she’ll need stitches and some meds, which they have inhouse.

John called ahead, so there’s people waiting for them when they get there, a doctor and a nurse that lead Yelena away to an examination room and then two more doctors and nurses presumably to attend to John and Alexei, but they wave them away on account of not being injured beyond some scrapes that mostly healed on the way over.

The whole floor is furnished and set up like their very own state of the art private clinic, including a waiting room where he and Alexei sit down and wait for Yelena to be done. A few minutes after they get there, the elevator dings and out rushes Bob looking rumpled and worried, his hair a mess on one side and flattened on the other, like he fell asleep somewhere and just woke up.

"How’s Yele—" He yelps as he trips on the loose belt of his robe and almost wipes out right as he comes out of the elevator. "Oh shit!" He throws his arms out for balance as he slides to a stop in front of them, like a surfer ripping through a tube. He stumbles and finally catches himself with one on the wall next to John’s head and the other pressed to his chest. "Woah, that was close."

John squints up at him. "You about done there, Bobby?"

Bob scrunches up his nose at the nickname, but he sits down next to him, hands twisting in his lap. His eyes dart between him and Alexei, huge and worried. "How’s Yelena?"

"She’s fine Bob, just a scratch."

On John’s other side, Alexei booms out a laugh and slaps his thigh. "It takes more than common robber with a gun to take down my little Yelena, Bob."

John sighs and leans his head back against the wall, closes his eyes and starts composing the post-mission report in his head. What must be less than half an hour later, he hears a door open and then Yelena’s soft steps approaching.

"Hello, Bob. What’s with everyone making faces today?" He hears her come to a stop in front of them. "Is Walker asleep?"

He finally remembers about the appointment later when he recovers his private phone from his bedside table and sees all the missed calls from the estate agent.

The second appointment he makes, but he’s coming from the post-attempted robbery press conference so he’s still in uniform. The woman from the housing company—a Ms. Di Stefano—takes a look at him, eyes wide, and turns coldly professional, a far cry from the affable estate agent he’s been talking to on the phone.

He wouldn’t mind it that much, but the apartment is small, even for his limited needs, and it’s located at center of the building with no escape paths unless one is willing to jump out the window and even with the super soldier serum on his side, taking a dive from the 9th floor is a little ambitious.

To Ms. Di Stefano’s credit, she calls him back the day after to ask if he’s interested. He tells her no and that he’ll call back.

Unfortunately, Ava chooses that exact moment to phase through the wall.

"Ooh! Got a hot date, Walker?"

"Jesus Christ!" He just about manages to keep himself from throwing his phone at her, then the words register. He scowls. "No! It’s an estate agent."

"Mr. Walker?" comes Ms. Di Stefano’s alarmed voice, tinny over the phone.

"An estate agent." Ava raises her eyebrows. "You’re looking for a flat?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Walker? Are you alright?"

"I—Yes, ma’am. One moment, please." He taps the mute button and shoos Ava off with his other hand. "You mind?!"

She de-materializes away from his shooing and reappears behind him, which is cheating frankly.

"Why?" She asks.

"Why what?"

Ms. Di Stefano says his name a couple of times.

"Why are you looking for a flat?"

"Because." He unmutes the call and brings the phone up to his ear. "Sorry, I’m back. As I was saying, I’m not interested in the apartment in Brooklyn—"

"—But we’ll be happy to see what’s next up on offer!" Ava manifests next to him and yells cheerfully into the phone.

John winces and pushes her away, but she phases out of reach again grinning like it’s fucking Christmas morning.

"Great!" Ms. Di Stefano chirps, suspiciously not so put out by his identity anymore. "I’ll send you the information, have a nice day!"

His phone buzzes barely even thirty seconds after she hangs up. It’s an e-mail with an appointment set up for the end of the week as well as an info package for the property, a house in Plainview. It’s the most expensive of the bunch, barely within John’s means. With the commissions, Ms. Di Stefano stands to get quite the sum if he takes the house. Her earlier cheerfulness is thus explained.

"So, when are we going?" Ava asks from the other side of the kitchen counter as she fills the kettle for her tea. John suggested heating up the water in the microwave once as it was quicker and she had chucked a mug at his head.

He frowns. "We?"

She shrugs. "Got nothing better to do."

So, Saturday morning, he and Ava go check the house in Plainview together. If she’s surprised by her presence, Ms. Di Stefano doesn’t show it. She introduces herself with a winning smile and then asks, "Will you be moving in together? Mr. Walker didn’t mention, but if you’re planning to start a family we have other properties available in the area that are better suited—"

Her mouth keeps moving but John can’t hear anything anymore past the blood rushing past his ears. His right hand hurts and his lungs burn like there’s not enough air in the room. He shakes his head in an attempt to clear it, but he still can’t hear properly, like he’s under water. Maybe that’s why he can’t breathe—but no, he’s at a house viewing in Plainview, so why can’t he—

A car horn blares outside and the air rushes back into his lungs leaving him gasping, his ears pop and suddenly he can hear again.

"Could you give us a minute?" It’s Ava, quiet and urgent, and then Ava again, much closer and almost gentle, "Breathe, Walker. Come on, breathe with me." She inhales and exhales in an exaggerated manner like she’s teaching someone who’s never done it before.

He glares at her. "I can fucking breathe," he growls, but even to his own ears he does sound out of breath.

"Jesus Christ, Walker," she says, horror creeping into her tone.

He rolls his eyes. "I’m fine." He is. Mostly. His hand is still a little bit sore from clenching his fist too hard, but whatever that...attack was, he’s back to breathing normally now.

"You’re bleeding on the bloody carpet."

"What?"

Turns out he was clenching his car keys so hard, he fucking stabbed them into the meat of his thumb and now he’s dripping onto the nice living room rug. The nice white rug.

"Fuck."

"Are you gonna take her offer?"

"What? No. This place is too big and too expensive. There’s a jacuzzi in one of the bathrooms. The hell am I gonna do with two bathrooms and a jacuzzi?"

"Not have any bloody fun at all, I guess," she mutters. "But okay, whatever."

She gives John some tissues to staunch the blood and then they rearrange some of the furniture to hide the evidence. When they’re done, he clenches the wad of tissues in his fist and shoves his hands into his pockets, while Ava calls Ms. Di Stefano back in.

She smiles a nervous smile at them, then looks about the room with a confused frown like she’s trying to figure something out. John comes away from the lamp they moved half a foot to the right and the armchair they dragged a couple of inches to the left and circles back so that he’s standing on the opposite side, closer to the entrance.

Ms. Di Stefano shakes her head and plasters her business smile back on. "I shouldn’t tell you this, Mr. Walker, but this is by far the best property on offer with your specific parameters. The second bathroom has a jacu—"

"I’m not interested."

That immediately takes the wind out of her sails. "Oh." She looks from John to Ava like maybe she can get her to talk some sense into him. "But the jacuzzi..."

Ava shakes her head, her face set into a grim expression. "He hates fun. It’s a terminal condition."

"I don’t—" He stops, takes a deep breath. "Why did you even come?"

Ava shrugs. "Just wanted to see why you’d want to move somewhere else. We have a nice place, no jacuzzi though," she tells Ms. Di Stefano in a stage whisper like she’s letting her in on a secret. "A gym and a sauna, sure, but no jacuzzi."

"Stop saying jacuzzi, I don’t care about the goddamned jacuzzi!"

Ava lets out a long sigh, shaking her head in dismay. "Tragically."

Ms. Di Stefano blinks confusedly and starts flipping through the papers in her folder. "My apologies, my understanding was that you moved from one of our properties and needed a new one urgently..."

"Oh, not so urgently. We have a place in the middle of Manhattan."

Ms. Di Stefano freezes. She looks from Ava to John, all professionalism gone and replaced by genuine surprise. "You have an apartment in the middle of Manhattan with a gym and sauna included? Why are you looking for places in Long Island? You don’t even care about the jacuzzi."

Jesus Christ, he’s gonna drown himself in the fucking jacuzzi. He grits his teeth. "It’s a flatshare situation."

Ms. Di Stefano hums in understanding. "I guess at some point there is such a thing as being too old for roommates, even in this economy."

John stares at her in disbelief.

Ava shakes her head. "Uh-huh. He’s got his own floor."

Ms. Di Stefano gapes like a fish. She starts blinking so fast there’s a distinct possibility her fake lashes might come off with all the activity. "Oh!" She squeaks. "Oh well, the rent here is certainly more affordable..." she trails off, grasping at straws.

"Oh no, we live there for free."

"Stop fucking helping, Starr," he hisses.

She gives him a sunny smile. "Who says I am?"

Ms. Di Stefano clears her throat. "Mr. Walker, I’ve been nothing but professional so I’d appreciate you not wasting my time."

"I’m not!"

"You can live in a penthouse in Manhattan for free, why are you looking to rent in Long Island?"

"You know," Ava tells her, "I asked him the same thing."

That evening, John e-mails Ms. Di Stefano to tell her that he’s not interested in looking at other properties for the moment.

At the beginning of the fourth week since Valentina announced the Avengers reformed, dinosaurs take over Lower Manhattan.

Bucky shakes his head in disbelief. "Come again?"

On the giant TV in the meeting room where they’re all assembled Valentina rolls her eyes. "Am I muted again? Dinosaurs, Barnes. Some interdimensional nonsense or other." She waves her hand.

Mel appears in the frame, hovering behind Valentina’s right shoulder. "We’re receiving updates in real time and will coordinate with the New York Sanctum. You’re on crowd control and—" Valentina leans back in her chair and gives her a pointed look. Mel stutters to a halt. "Oh! Go ahead, Val. Entina. Valentina!" She coughs politely.

Valentina clutches her chest and widens her eyes and mouth in mock surprise, letting out a breathy, "Why, thank you," then she immediately drops the whole pantomime and turns back to look at them through the camera. Behind her, Mel flinches. "You’re on clean up, boys and girls. Divert citizens to safety and the dinosaurs to the wizards."

"There are wizards too?" Bob mutters to himself, looking dazed.

"It’s just like that movie, what is called?" Alexei snaps his fingers. "The movie with the wizards and the dinosaur."

Ava frowns. "Dungeons & Dragons?

"Wouldn’t that be dragons?" Bob says.

Yelena nods. "It’s right there in the name."

"Game of Thrones?" John suggests.

Bob taps his chin, brow furrowed deep in thought. "I only watched a bit, but I don’t remember any wizards. And again, dragons."

"Also not a film," Yelena points out.

A loud throat clearing brings the discussion to an abrupt halt and they look up to see both Valentina and Bucky staring at them with twin unimpressed glares.

Valentina claps her hand together. "Far be it from me to interrupt such delightful philosophical disquisitions, but the innocent citizens of New York are in need of some rescuing by Earth’s might—" She lets out a sigh. "Yes, Robert?"

Bob lowers the hand he’s just raised. "Can I go too?"

Next to John, Yelena sits up. He watches her exchange a series of looks with Bucky, which end in a noncommittal shrug on his part. She turns to Bob and lays a hand on his arm. "Are you sure?"

Bob shrugs. "I’ve learned a lot from the firefighters and the first aid courses, I think I can help. Even if it’s just to direct people to safety." He’s looking at Yelena with his best pathetic-but-not-so-pathetic-that-it-makes-me-look-useless face, all rumpled curls, hunched shoulders and wide, shining eyes. Yelena prides herself in having an unshakable will, but John knows—and Bob too, evidently—that she’s powerless when presented with Bob at his most adorably pathetic and John watches her resolve crumble in real time. "Dinosaurs, Lena. Dinosaurs."

"And wizards!" Alexei reminds them.

Yelena groans. "Okay, sure. You can wear one of the spare overalls and a hi-vis or something."

Bob pumps his arm. "Yes!"

As the dinosaurs in question seem to be all fairly large, with the smallest being about the length of a small car, civilians are guided to take shelter inside subway stations. Their job is to drive the dinos away from the civilians and straight to the wizards’ orange portals that will allegedly take them back to where they came from. John never really tried to get too deep into all that magic business; as far as he’s concerned, magic bullshit isn’t for the purview of common nor enhanced mortals such as he is and so far he’s lived his life ignoring it.

Their skillset isn’t that useful against animals—sure, they can shoot them and probably he, Bucky and Alexei could hold their own against some of them should they get in a direct confrontation and if Bob had reliable access to Sentry without the drawback of sucking them all into a joyless void, he could probably just disintegrate them back into extinction—but they can certainly coordinate rescue efforts, especially after a few weeks of training with first responders. Plus, if they want to build a good reputation, there’s no denying that being seen helping civilians instead of unloading a machine gun into a dangerous, but admittedly very cool animal is probably the way to go, even if that animal has seven inches claws and sharp teeth—Peta alone would have a field day with them if they went in armed to the teeth.

So they left their heavier duty weapons back at the tower and armed themselves with stunning charges, canned air horns and flares. These dinosaurs might be big and scary and back at the top of the food chain, but they’re still fundamentally animals and animals are usually scared of big noises, flashing lights and things that look like fire. Each of them picked a subway station in Greenwich Village and started clearing a path for first responders from the stations outwardly, driving dinos away and collecting civilians on the way.

John is heading east from 14th Street when he finds his first real trouble. The streets are mostly empty of people—with the last few stragglers hurrying towards the direction he’s coming from prompted by the emergency alerts— and full of cars that have been abandoned during the evacuation. They’re all still lined up in traffic, eerily looking as if their occupants have been suddenly raptured, with the exception of a single car—a beaten up mid 2010s white Toyota Corolla that must have cut through the intersection and then swerved to avoid another vehicle, panicked citizens or an angry dinosaurs, only to end up crashing right into the corner of a building. On its journey there it struck a hydrant, flattened a newspaper stand and knocked down a whole row of Lime e-scooter. The Toyota is still in one piece and there’s no smoke or fire that he can see, but the most immediate danger is in the form of a seven feet tall bipedal dinosaur clawing and biting at the sides of the car. It reminds John of the velociraptors in the original Jurassic Park.

John’s about fifty meters away, but he can see people moving inside the car and he certainly can hear the screaming. He takes off running, lighting a flare as he goes. Once he’s closed about half the distance, he chucks the lit flare at the raptor and then bursts forward and leaps, bringing his left arm up so that he hits the beast shield-first. It hisses in pain and stumbles away, its tail whipping John’s right calf painfully as it flails. He risks a glance into the car and catches sight of a woman in the driver’s seat, eyes wide in terror and brown hair in disarray, and a boy in the backseat, maybe nine or ten, pushed against the opposite door and then, beyond the window, on the other side of the car, the pale, shocked face of an older kid, maybe in his late teens, wearing the red robe of the wizards.

"Get them out of the car!" is all he has time to say before the dinosaur rears up and charges at him.

It springs in the air and comes at John with the sharp claws on its hind limbs. He raises the shield again and manages to block the blows, stepping back to keep the distance, conscious of the fact that with its current shape the shield can’t protect as wide an area and he doesn’t feel like testing his kevlar suit and enhanced healing against those nasty 7-inch long curved claws.

The claws scrape against the metal with a screech and John grunts under the impact—this thing is strong—and rolls with it, directing the momentum of the dino away from the car and causing it to crash to the ground. John sidesteps to the left so that he’s fully between it and the car now and takes the opportunity to check on the progress of the rescue efforts.

The kid wizard is pulling desperately at the car doors while the woman is trying to kick it open from the inside, but the crash must have bent the sheet metal so that now it’s stuck. "Hey, Harry Potter! Can’t you do some magic or something?"

"My name is Stjepan, actually," the kid says in a slightly accented voice, "and I’m just an apprentice, my control isn’t...great."

Fantastic, he got stuck with the fucking intern wizard and the lizard is charging again. He steps aside at the last second so that it slams into the car, getting temporarily dazed, but he wastes no time, letting go of the shield to grab its tail with both hands. For its relatively small size, barely more than a person, the thing’s heavy—must be the tail—but it’s still not a match for his strength. He drags it away from the car, grunting with the effort as it tries to claw away from him. It hisses and rears back, jaws snapping a few scant inches from his face. John heaves and then twists, pivoting on his left leg and then executing a full turn before letting go like he’s competing in the hammer throw at the Olympics. The dinosaur soars through the air for about twenty meters before landing on the hood of a parked Chevy with a garbled cry.

John hurries back to the car, tries the passenger door and finds it closed. He taps on the glass to grab the woman’s attention and gestures for her to unlock the car. "Hey, Esteban—"

"Stjepan."

"Stjepan, whatever, can you do that teleport thing?"

"I—I think so?"

"Terrific. That’s exactly the brand of confidence I’m looking for."

"R-Really?"

"No!"

Inside the car, the woman turns the keys in the ignition and then slaps at something on the center console. With a click, the centralized locks disengage. John tries the handle again and this time it works, so he flings the door open for the woman and then moves to open the backseat for the boy, too. He hears movement behind him, the frantic scraping of metal and then a thud as the lizard presumably slid off the hood.

"Okay, wizard boy, your show now. I need you to open a portal for the civilians. How far can you teleport them?"

He bends to retrieve the shield off the ground and sees that the dinosaur is also stumbling back to its feet. Jesus it’s like a freaking Terminator lizard.

"How accurate do you need me to be? I can do close and accurate or far and uh, unpredictable."

The woman takes the boy into her arms and shoots John an alarmed look.

"Let’s go with accurate, shall we?" He tells the student sorcerer and then he turns to reassure the woman. He lays a hand on her shoulder and tries to convey the most confidence he’s had to channel since his Captain America days. "Everything will be alright, ma’am."

Her gaze slips past his shoulder and focuses, eyes widening in fear. It’s that goddamn lizard again, isn’t it. He turns and, sure enough, it’s back on its feet and making its way back to them. It seems to have learned its lesson after a few rounds of getting its ass kicked, though, and instead of charging in like it did previously, it approaches slowly and cautiously, moving its head up and down like it’s sizing John up.

"Sometime before the velociraptor eats us all, kid."

"One second! I’m doing complex math in my head!"

"Actually, that’s not a velociraptor," the boy says with a snooty tone that borders on condescension, "I don’t think it’s even a real dinosaur."

The woman groans. "Oh my god, Kevin! Now’s not the time."

"But mom!"

"Stjepan!"

"I got it! I got it!"

A shower of golden sparkles materializes just to John’s left. With a metallic sound like a circular saw ramping up in speed, the sparkles widen into a circle just barely big enough for an adult to squeeze through. John grabs the woman’s arm and steers her towards it. "There’s a subway station around two blocks that way," he points west. "You’ll be safe there. Go!" He pushes her gently and she steps through the portal.

And reappears barely fifty meters down the road.

"What the hell, Stjepan! They could’ve walked that!"

"You said you wanted accurate!"

Movement in his periphery grabs his attention and he whips around, bringing his shield up instinctively to find that the dinosaur has taken advantage of John’s temporary distraction to finally mount a charge. It’s fast, eating the distance between them in long strides, tail whipping wildly behind it.

"I have an idea!" Stjepan the teenage witch cries out.

The portal next to John stays open, but the landscape beyond it changes to a view of the street as seen from above; it makes him slightly dizzy, staring at that impossible angle so he looks away and finds a new portal suspended about fifty meters above them and to the left. Gotta give it to the kid, it’s a pretty good idea if they do pull it off.

To manage it, John steps fully in front of the portal to act as bait just as the lizard closes the last of the distance between them. It adjusts its momentum with a sharp tail swish, correcting its trajectory and coming straight at him, jaws wide, showing off two rows of long, sharp teeth. John jumps at the last possible second, vaulting over the dinosaur’s head and twisting in mid air to dropkick it through the portal.

There’s an indignant squawk, then the whoosh of something falling through the air and finally the wet thud of something heavy landing really hard about ten meters from him and then nothing more.

John approaches the mass of broken bones and twisted flesh that used to be a definitely-not-a-velociraptor according to dinosaur expert Kevin, but there’s no way that thing is ever getting up. It barely even resembles something that used to be bipedal. So much for a nonviolent method of capture, but the thing was relentless and there was no one around to witness its very sudden and graphic demise, so whatever. John’s just gonna blame it on the wizard if Bucky complains about it.

Stjepan emerges from behind the Toyota on unsteady legs and looking white as a sheet. It’s the first time John gets a good look at him: he’s a scrawny kid, but tall and long limbed. He looks like a scarecrow in red pajamas.

"Is—is it dead?"

John snorts. "Oh, yeah. Couldn’t be deader. Good job, Stjepan." He offers him a thumbs up.

The kid’s face spasms into a bewildered smile, like his muscles aren’t quite sure how to do it. "Thank you! Uhm..." he takes in John’s suit, with the red and white stripes and the helmet, and then his eyes fall on his bent shield. "Captain...America...?"

"That’s not—"

All of John’s breath gets punched out of him as something heavy lands on his upper back and shoulders and then clamps down and jerks and he’s suddenly pulled up so roughly it feels like his stomach is trying for a violent and explosive escape via his throat. He tries to bite at some air, but manages nothing more than a gasp as he can’t fully expand his lungs. Below his boots, the ground is disappearing at an alarming speed.

There are long powerful talons digging into his shoulders and upper chest and he follows them up to a leathery belly, a wide wingspan and finally the elongated head and the razor-sharp looking beak of a giant flying dinosaur—a pterodactyl? Kevin would probably know, but that doesn’t really fucking help him.

"I’ll save you, Cap!" comes Stjepan’s cry from far, far down below.

He has to get out before the kid does something stupid or ill-advised, but his upper body is all but immobilized the way he’s being held. The grip on his shoulders hurt, he doesn’t think the talons have actually punctured his suit, much less his skin, but still it’s like being held in a vise. When he tries swinging his legs, the dino-bird jolts and plunges a few meters before leveling off again. It feels like the worst turbulence he’s ever experienced; John’s stomach knocks at the back of his throat and his mouth fills with bile.

The only consolation is that even if he pukes all over himself, it’ll be really hard to tell the vomit from the rest of his bits when they go to scrape his body off the streets below.

There’s a shower of sparks and then a strangled yelp and the pterodactyl jolts again and starts plummeting for real. The beast cries out and abruptly lets go of John. He flails for a grip, landing one on one of its legs. Burdened once more, the thing pitches down revealing Stjepan’s form clinging to its back, his eyes so wide and terrified, John can only see the white of them.

The dino-bird jerks its leg, trying to shake John off as its glide path grows more and more erratic. They’re too heavy and either the beast will shake both of them off or all three will crash to the ground or into the side of a building.

If he’s lucky and times it well, John might be able to aim his body and control his fall enough to smash through the windows of a high-rise and potentially survive being reduced to a patriotic smear in the streets below.

He looks up at Stjepan. "Save yourself, kid."

He lets go.

"No, wait!"

John barely hears the scream over the air whistling past his ears, then a shower of sparks widens into an impossible window right below him. He sees trees and water and then there’s the unsettling sensation of falling the wrong way. The sky is suddenly on his left as the momentum carries him through the portal and he’s now falling horizontally. He skips once across the surface of the water, flips in mid air and then plunges in, head first.

The water is cold and wholly unexpected and the shock of it makes him gasp in surprise so he inhales a mouthful before his training takes over and he wills himself to calm down and get his bearings. The water is clear enough and the sun is shining so John aims for the glittering surface and kicks his feet. He breaches with a gasp, coughing the water out of his lungs.

After a few deep breaths he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning anymore and he takes a look around. He seems to be in a lake of some kind, fairly big with at least a couple of islands scattered around that he can see. Most of the surrounding land, islands included, is covered in trees.

He’s fairly confident he’s not in New York anymore. No dinosaurs that he can see, though, so at least there’s that.

The water is cold though and his gear weighs him down so he needs to get out. About two or three hundred meters to the east he sees a long strip of sandy shoreline. There are also three figures standing there—two men and a kid by the looks of it—staring out at him.

He raises his hand in greeting.

He emerges from the water about ten meters from the trio—two men who look around John’s age and a boy of about 14 or 15 years of age. They’ve got chairs, a portable cooler and three fishing rods between them and they’re also wearing hats and t-shirts with various fishing-related puns, so their presence there is easily explained.

John nods at them. "Catch anything good?" he asks by way of greeting.

The two men furrow their brows and move closer together to form a defensive wall in front of the kid who, to give him credit, doesn’t seem at all phased at seeing an armed strange man come out the lake in a combat suit. Instead, he takes his phone out of his pocket, snaps a picture from behind the adults and then starts typing furiously.

The two men are still staring at him suspiciously and haven’t said anything yet. There’s some kind of family resemblance between the shorter man and the kid—same light brown skin, same nose, same black curly hair—so John deems them father and son engaged in the ancient ritual of bonding via fishing together. The other guy is almost as tall as John, red headed and clean shaven, a smear of white suncream across the bridge of his nose and his freckled cheeks. Probably a family friend or something.

"Ah, I’m John. I’m with—with the Avengers." He grimaces. The name still feels alien and almost...illicit, like he doesn’t have a right to it. This is the first time he’s actually said it that he remembers, at least to a civilian and he almost said ’Thunderbolts’ anyway. He loosens the strap of his helmet and takes it off. The hair underneath is only damp as opposed to fully soaked like the rest of him and he pats it down and then he finger combs into his usual style, hoping to convey an air of ’competent superhero’ rather than ’lost wet man’, but the kid has probably already plastered that picture all over social media.

The father frowns, head tilted to the side in confusion. "Aren’t the Avengers in New York?"

"Look, dad, he really is an Avenger," the kid shoves his phone between the two men, who squint down at the tiny screen in the telltale manner of two middle-aged men who’ll be needing reading glasses soon. From the tinny audio coming out of the speakers, John immediately recognizes the video as that of the ’press conference’ Valentina sprung on them right after they emerged, fully reformed, from Bob’s mind.

"See? That’s him, that former Captain America loser—" the kid cuts himself off and looks up at John in alarm. "Uhh..."

He forces a smile out through his gritted teeth. "It’s U.S. Agent, these days," he says. The PR team came up with catchphrases for all of them, but his codename is dumb enough without adding all that bullshit on top and John is too tired, wet and sore to care about whatever tags the kid’s gonna use when he posts about this online. He offers his right hand. "Walker, John Walker."

The two men look from the video, to John, to his hand. When even after a few moments neither of them makes a move to shake it, he drops it and wipes it nervously on his thigh. His suit is still dripping with water so he only succeeds in making it wetter.

"Right." He clears his throat. "Er, where are we?"

Quabbin Reservoir is where they are, apparently; about 90 miles west of Boston.

Stjepan really wasn’t kidding about that accuracy vs. distance ratio. He supposes he should count himself lucky he wasn’t dropped in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or something.

After a couple of stilted attempts at a conversation and some clarification about the area, John left the two men and the kid alone—much to their obvious relief—and went to stand by himself twenty or so meters away from them, right at the edge of the shore. His work phone—really a cheap burner he got for the sole purpose of receiving calls from Valentina—survived the unscheduled swim as it was inside one of the sealed pouches on his belt, but the number he has saved for Valentina has been deactivated, probably as part of her effort to get rid of all evidence the previous month, and he doesn’t really have any other numbers saved on this phone.

However, he’s been staring at several numbers in the team group chat since it got created and it takes almost no effort at all to close his eyes and picture the digits in his mind. He tries all three numbers, but they either ring without answer or he gets an automated voice saying they’re not available. It makes sense, the others must still be dealing with the dinosaur crisis in New York and much like him, they must have left their personal phones behind at the tower. Old habits die hard and no serious, self-respecting operative would bring anything personal on a mission. Bob might have his phone with him, but John hasn’t his number memorized.

He could probably ask the three civilians for the local non-emergency rescue line, but an Avenger—especially him—needing to be rescued is really not a good look when they’re still fighting for legitimization in the public eye.

All he can do is sit tight and wait for them to get back to base and hope that everything goes well in New York in the meantime. They’re capable people and hardened survivors—okay, maybe not Stjepan, kid might be dead actually—and it’s a relatively easy mission, but John is used to be on the frontline, to be the frontline, and waiting on the sidelines like this without any way to know how they’re faring makes his skin itch and ties his stomach into knots.

He tries each number every couple of minutes, cutting a groove in the sand as he paces back and forth, but he only manages to work himself up even more. There’s a moderate wind blowing that chills him in his wet clothes which doesn’t help his mood any.

He must look about as miserable as he feels, because the fishing trio seems to get over their mistrust enough to shout over at him asking if he wants a towel.

He stips off the top of his suit and then his undershirt and towels himself dry as much as he can. He catches both men staring at him a couple of times, before darting their eyes away. The paler of the two reddens the same color as his hair when John catches him.

Ah. Family friend, indeed.

The kid seems to notice too, his features scrunching up in a pained expression. When he catches John looking, he tilts his head towards the other two men and rolls his eyes in that put upon way teenagers do when they can’t believe just how uncool their parents are.

The unintentional show gets him a beer at least, and he doesn’t feel as cold anymore, standing with the towel draped around his shoulders while his suit jacket is set out to dry out in the sun.

A call finally connects, a couple of hours later. He hasn’t felt this light and elated in months, maybe years, as when he hears Ava answering the phone with a low, almost growled, "Who are you and how did you get this number?"

"Starr."

"Walker!" She practically screams in his ear, then her voice sounds like she’s turned away from the mic, "it’s Walker! Hang on, I’ll put you on speaker—" she’s barely finished the sentence when there’s a cacophony of people yelling his name and hurling insults at him.

He tears the phone away from his ear and stumbles back a step, causing the family of three—the redhead’s name is Harry, the other man is Diego and the kid’s Juan-but-I-go-by-JJ—to glance back at him in concern. He waves it away and turns his back to them, putting some distance between them and pitching his voice lower for as much privacy as he can. "Is—Is everyone okay?"

There’s no immediate answer, probably just because they’re all busy talking over each other to notice he’s asked a question, and even then it’s only a few seconds, hardly even a moment but still something lodges in his throat forming a lump that’s hard to breathe around in the time it takes them to reply.

"We’re all fine!" Yelena yells. "A T-Rex almost ran off with Bucky’s arm, though! Pretty hilarious."

"It really wasn’t," comes Bucky’s muttered comment.

"Bucky hit it with a manhole cover," Ava says. "I guess he learned some tricks from Captain America."

"How are you, Walker?" pipes up Bob, his voice now as close as Ava’s.

"I’m fine."

"Of course he is!" Alexei booms. "I said!"

"You also said the kid maybe sent him to Siberia to be eaten by bears, dad."

John’s smiling so much his face hurts. "Is—" The knot in his throat has loosened, but his voice comes out a little strangled still. He coughs. "Is Stjepan okay?"

"Who?"

"The wizard intern kid. When I, uh, left, he was riding a pterodactyl."

"Ahhh, is that what happened?" Yelena says. "Was hard to tell, he was crying so much. Kept saying, ’I lost Captain America I lost Captain America’," Yelena pitches her voice higher and shrillier like a child wailing and then goes back to recount the events in her usual deadpan gravelly accented voice, "Bucky called Sam Wilson and he wasn’t lost at all, so we were all very confused for a while, but then we found your shield but not you and we sort of pieced it together."

"We’re really glad you’re okay, Walker!" Bob yells, now even closer.

Yelena yells ’Bob!’ and then there’s a series of confused sounds, clothes rustling, a yelp and then some muttered curses in Russian. In the background, Ava yells, "Stop fighting over the phone, he’s on speaker!"

"He really was crying a lot," Yelena says, followed by the others piping in with a chorus of confirmations. "Snot everywhere. Yuck. We weren’t worried for a second. So anyway," she clears her throat. "Where are you?"

An hour or so later, John bids farewell to Harry, Diego and JJ, suits back up in his by now only slightly damp compression shirt and kevlar jacket and hikes his way to the firebreak cutting through the forest, the closest gap in the trees big enough for a helicopter to land.

He watches as the unmarked H175 touches down and then hurries over, head bent low against the downwash. He gets a two fingered salute from Yelena in the pilot seat, while Bucky unbuckles from co-pilot and leans out the cockpit to open the door for him. He offers his hand and hauls John in as soon as he grasps it.

"Ready to go home?"

"Fuck yes."