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Out of all the Thunderbolts, Yelena is John’s favorite sparring partner.
You’d probably have to waterboard him to get him to admit to it, but even then it’d be a fifty-fifty chance that he’d still manage to take it to his grave.
She’s the smallest of them and he’s so much stronger than her, but that’s true for nearly every opponent she’s had to fight in her career so her set of moves is aimed at using her opponent’s own strength and momentum against them. She fights smart and tactically, on par with Bucky who’s got decades of experience on her, and she’s so quick to adapt to any new situation that she’s able to keep up with his super soldier reflexes. And those widow stings pack a punch.
His sessions with Bucky or Alexei usually leave him the sorest and most exhausted, but that is not to say that his sparring sessions with Yelena are less of a workout, it’s just that he has so much fun that his bruises buzz under his skin and instead of feeling tired or drained, he leaves each session with adrenaline singing in his veins.
Yelena can never know.
Bucky feels the most...familiar, for lack of a better word. The hand to hand from his army days is mostly gone and anyway it’s decades behind John’s own, but if nothing else Hydra trained him well and whatever he picked up since he got free of them made him even more formidable. He’s not above using dirty tricks when he needs them, but he seems to prefer a more ’formal’ style of combat when he spars with John in pure hand to hand, no shield or weapons involved.
It’s more challenging in a way, having to win while abiding by the rules. Though Bucky is probably stronger than him they’re evenly matched in speed and, while John is an excellent fighter, Bucky has years of experience on him as well as a vibranium arm.
So, more often than not, it’s John who has to tap out, but Bucky always offers him a hand up or a friendly nod and a gruff, "Good match, Walker" after each session, so he must be getting something useful out of it.
They do go all out sometimes. John with his shield and Bucky armed with batons or a training knife. Bucky doesn’t hold back, going for hits where he knows John is still sore from a previous session or a mission, and taking advantage of the fact that he still isn’t used to his shield in its current state. John has his own tricks, though. The current shape of his shield is excellent for deflecting blows rather than tanking them and it also makes it a weapon much better suited for close combat, allowing John to slip past Bucky’s attacks and break into his guard. John is also really, really good at taking hits and keep himself going, working through his pain. So much so that it’s Bucky who calls a stop several times when John tanks powerful hits just to get into a position to counter them. He cracks a few ribs and gets his nose broken once, but he comes out on top so it’s clearly a winning strategy, no matter what Bucky says—can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and the injuries fade away quickly anyway.
Then, one day, Bucky slams him against the wall, his left arm a cold and unyielding band right below his throat while his right pushes against his shield arm, fingers like a vise around his wrist. John tries to shove him away, but his right arm is pinned by Bucky’s left elbow pressing down on his shoulder joint and he can’t get any leverage with his legs the way Bucky is kneeling on them and the pressure against John’s arm keeps mounting and mounting, caught between the wall and the shield on one side and Bucky pushing on the other, there’s nowhere to go and if he keeps pushing—He smells Bucky’s sweat and his own combined, but there’s a sharper underline underneath, the acidic scent he’s come to associate to fear and adrenaline.
He thinks Bucky says something but there’s blood rushing in his ears and he can’t make out the words. In a desperate attempt, he tries headbutting him, but the arm against his throat is virtually unmovable and he manages nothing more than jerking his head in a nod.
He can’t breathe, but it’s not Bucky’s arm, there’s something wrong with his chest, it’s like it can’t expand properly. Maybe Bucky did break a rib when he elbowed him earlier?
And then suddenly all pressure is gone and Bucky scrambles back and up to his feet.
John gasps a huge breath and reaches for the shield straps. With two sharp tugs he releases the shield, paying it no mind when it falls to the floor. He feels up and down his arm, but it’s fine, it’s still in one piece, no fractures, no bones poking through the skin. He cradles it against his stomach and curls protectively around it. His heart feels like it’s trying to break through his chest the way it’s beating against his ribs.
After that, it’s a long time before Bucky suggests a no holds barred match again.
Fighting Alexei is like taking on a freight train. No finesse, unbridled power and god help you if you are in its tracks as it comes at you. He’s rusty when it comes to technique, though, between his years in prison and the inactivity since he established his dubious limo service, and John is faster than him, so his main strategy against him is to strafe around him just out of reach and stay on the defensive, only going in for strikes when Alexei comes for him.
Of course, the problem of fighting defensively is that you have to wait for your opponent to attack and John is not that much faster than Alexei, so a few hits are inevitable and John’s been hit by trucks that packed less of a punch than him. He’s also quite fond of flipping him and wrestling him down to the mat—must be all that sambo training in the Soviet Army.
After one particularly hard take down, he keeps John lying there with a knee between his shoulder blades and his shield arm flat to the mat with a boot crushing his wrist painfully. "Ah, Walker, you make me feel young again." He taps a couple of condescending pats on the top of John’s head. At least he sounds a little out of breath. "This reminds me of when I used to tussle with Captain America back in the day."
John groans. He’s heard this story a hundred times and every time the details get more outrageous and distanced from reality with every retelling. "Oh, yeah?" he grunts.
Another pat. "And now another Captain America. Maybe I should go three for three and fight Sam Wilson."
John finally stops resisting and slumps to the ground as much as Alexei’s hold on him allows. "I’m not Captain America," he mutters.
"You’re good as any, Walker," one last pat and then Alexei’s weight lifts off his back. "I think steak for dinner tonight, yes?"
Fighting Ava is an exercise in frustration.
She’s impossible to pin down when she’s phasing and John can only rely on his reflexes to act once she manifests back to strike at him. In a real world situation, they’d both rely on guns as their primary weapon, so the fight would be over the moment one of them landed a hit and, as the vault showed, that would be pretty much down to luck as much as their individual abilities.
They take up using rubber bullets—John can shrug off their effects in a couple of days and Ava can train herself to phase through them in lieu of real bullets without fearing permanent injury, so that’s what their sparring pivots to: just the two of them shooting at each other.
She tells him it’s reminiscent of her training while she was a SHIELD operative, but that he’s much faster than any of her trainers back then ever were. So while John doesn’t get that much out of it except for some live target training, he doesn’t mind all that much, not when he can help her increase her chances of survival.
A few weeks into their sparring regiment, however, he realizes that he sometimes can tell when and where she’s about to manifest if it’s going to happen close enough to him. It takes a few times before he’s fully conscious he’s doing it, and it’s not always during training. One day, she phases through the wall of the shared kitchen on 84th and John is the only who doesn’t get startled when she reappears next to him, almost right in his face, probably just to cast some British-accented scathing judgement on his choice of meal—a cookies and cream flavored powder shake with some extra blueberries and bananas added in for flavor.
Behind him, Yelena and Bob yelp and jump followed by the sound of something smashing to the ground, but John simply sidesteps and keeps Ava at bay with an elbow. She clearly doesn’t expect it by the indignant squawk she lets out.
It’s the hum of her suit’s power supply, he realizes, which becomes audible a fraction of a second before she fully reappears.
Bob is his least favorite sparring partner, if what they do can even be defined as sparring.
The few times they actually tried to have a go at it, Bob has shit form, which is to be expected for a civilian whose only experience fighting is beating people up while high and dressed as a chicken. That would be fine in itself, but the issue is that John can’t train him or show him anything really, not even the most basic of self-defense, because every time they try to practice any sort of block or dodge, Bob flinches as soon as something moves fast near him.
John mocks a blow to his chest or face and Bob’s eyes go wide and his scent gets muddied with the acrid scent of fear and John understands that’s it’s not personal—he knows, even if Bob doesn’t know he knows and tries to mask it and visibly forces himself to resist the urge—but it still makes him feel like shit.
So he gives up after a couple of times and reschedules all of their sessions so that it’s Yelena who’ll take care of combat and self-defense training. She’s watched some of their short lived sparring sessions, so she doesn’t ask and takes her newly doubled schedule in stride.