Chapter Text
When John comes out of the elevator into the open space of the 84th floor kitchen there’s a woman there, sitting at the counter.
She’s sitting with her back to him so he can’t see her face but she’s clearly not any of the other Thunderbolts—New Avengers, whatever. She’s got long hair spilling down her back, black on top with the bottom half dyed a vibrant purple. It could be Mel, but he’s seen her only two days earlier and her hair wasn’t dyed then, and besides he’s never not seen her wearing anything else but a suit and this woman is wearing jeans, boots and a leather jacket with rhinestones encrusted on the shoulders. Valentina strikes John as one of those bosses who demand their subordinates be at their beck and call at every hour of the day or night, even outside of conventional working hours on a late Saturday evening such as now, but still if this were work, and this were Mel, she would be wearing a suit.
Ergo, it’s not Mel.
John just came up from the gym, so he’s wearing shorts and sneakers and not his suit, but between his football career, his training with the shield—shields—and the super soldier serum, he has a pretty solid throwing arm and, in a pinch, his steel water bottle will make a good enough projectile if it comes to it.
"Who are you?"
The woman gives a little start and then swivels around on the bar stool to face him. She’s definitely not Mel. She looks about the same age, early to mid twenties, but her skin tone is lighter and she looks...vaguely familiar. Under her leather jacket, she’s wearing a dark top and a spiky necklace. She opens her mouth, closes it, rakes her eyes up and down his body and then blinks, stunned. "Uhhh, U.S. Agent? Didn’t recognize you without—" her eyes dip to his naked chest, widen and then shoot back up to his face, "—the beard."
John resists the urge to scratch his still growing stubble; the stitches from the stab wound to his face came out a while ago, but he had to shave the patchy growth for the gala and he’s still working on growing out his beard to what it used to be. He crosses his arms over his chest, instead, water bottle digging into his armpit.
Yeah so, okay, he ditched his workout clothes in the laundry attached to the gym lockers and only had a pair of clean shorts on hand after his shower, but it’s not like he was expecting company. It’s a Saturday night, everyone is usually out except for him and sometimes Bob, but Bob usually spends his evenings in his room or glued in front of the TV and there’s no one on the sofa right now, so it’s not like John was expecting to see anyone else on his detour to the kitchen for a snack before going back to his room.
He takes a step forward. "I said, who—"
"Kate Bishop is here!" comes Yelena’s voice, immediately followed by Yelena herself. She’s dressed in a sheepskin jacket, a green sequined crop top with a pop artsy drawing of a woman blowing a kiss, jeans and silvery platform boots. Her makeup is neat and glittery, she’s even wearing a deep wine-red lipstick. John doesn’t know of any missions, undercover or otherwise, so she must simply be...going out with this random woman? Something itches at the back of his mind but his attention gets snatched away from that line of thought because as soon as Yelena sees him, she lets out a garbled shout and looks away with a grimace, raising one hand palm up as if to put a physical barrier between the two of them, while the other one flies up to cover her eyes.
She’s wearing green nail polish of the same shade as her top and the charms of several bracelets jingle on her wrist.
"Ew, Walker! No one wants to see you naked!"
John throws up his hands. "I’m not—"
Bob comes into the room right then, eyes wide, as he stumbles and trips on his own feet, almost colliding with Yelena in the process. "Walker is na—" He cuts himself off at the sight of John. He looks him up and down. "Oh," he says, with a frown, then he catches sight of their...guest? and his features light up with a smile. "Hi!"
The Bishop lady jumps down from the stool and walks up to Yelena’s side, who’s still making a big show of looking every which way except at John. "Yelena, you have to stop with the full name, it’s getting weird."
Okay, while his evening snack gained more of an audience than John anticipated and he should perhaps remember to keep a full set of clothes in his gym locker—he doesn’t want to set a precedent for acceptable levels of nudity when Alexei also lives in the tower—enough is enough. "Yelena, who is this?"
Yelena scoffs. "Kate Bishop. I said," she grabs Kate Bishop’s wrist and then with a wave and a smile directed at Bob and a glare and some more mock-gagging noises at John, she drags her friend? Partner in crime? Maybe this Bishop woman is an ex-Widow?—Weren’t they all ex-Soviet? She sounds American—towards the elevator.
"Say bye, Kate Bishop."
Bishop waves back at them with a grin. "Bye U.S. Agent, pleasure to meet you!" Yelena lets out a disgusted noise. "Bye...cute guy?"
"I’m Bob!" Bob says, but by then the elevator doors have already closed on the pair of them.
They’re both left standing there in the semi-darkness.
John shakes himself to get rid of whatever that was. He frowns. "Name sounds familiar." He glances at Bob and finds him already staring at him. When he notices John looking back, he flinches and looks away. Okay, John got the message, no more shirtlessness. What the fuck is everybody’s problem, it’s not he’s actually naked and while he’s certainly not Mr. Universe but he’s not ugly or out of shape or anything either. "Bob?"
"I know about as much as you do. Yelena just said she’d be going out with her friend. It’s like, the third time in a week or so and I’ve only met her right now."
John hangs his head with a sigh. He only wanted to make himself a ham and cheese sandwich or five, now he’s gonna have to look up this Kate Bishop woman. Yelena wouldn’t give her unsupervised access to the tower if she didn’t trust her, but John doesn’t want to be empty handed when Bucky or Valentina will inevitably find out and come bust their asses for it.
"We just got here and she’s going out with friends already?"
Bob shrugs. "She’s friendly and likeable."
John snorts. "Right."
"And I think she lived here before."
That’s right, she has a place somewhere in Staten Island, with her dog and guinea pig. That’s more like it. Maybe this Bishop lady is a neighbor? Her pet sitter?
It doesn’t take long to figure out, just a google search really, and it all comes back to John: the shared champagne and canapés in that supply closet at the gala, the reluctant heart to heart.
"Holy shit!"
Bob raises his eyebrows and makes a questioning noise as he sips on his beer.
Once the girls left, John outlined his plans for a snack and Bob had eagerly agreed to lend a hand in both the making of and the eating of said snacks. So John wouldn’t have to go all the way up to his room to make himself decent by the newly established tower dress code, he graciously gave him his sweater, which turned out to actually be John’s own sweater that he lent Bob the first day they moved in—he’s been wondering where that had gone to. They then took over the kitchen counter, arranging a wide variety of ingredients all over it, and set out to make sandwiches—BLTs, cheese and pickles and egg and mayo—with the efficiency of an assembly line until they finally ran out of bread.
Once everything was ready, they put away the leftover ingredients, got out a couple of beers and sat down opposite each other to demolish as much as they could of each of the three piles. By now they’re down to the last three sandwiches, one for each type, most of them fell to John’s super soldier serum appetite, but Bob put in a valiant effort and got his fair share.
John pushes his empty plate away and leans across the bar to him, angling his phone screen towards Bob so he can see. The sweater is old, from a time when John was at least fifteen to twenty pounds lighter; at the time it used to just about fit him, but now it’s a little too tight on his arms and shoulders and it pinches under his armpits as he stretches to hand Bob his phone. He tugs the waist up so it has a little more give and the collar loosens and gapes a little, letting free a whiff of Bob’s deodorant and something that must be his sweat underneath that. Bob always says that he runs hot and yet keeps wearing multiple layers even inside where they have a perfectly controlled climate, so he must be sweating constantly. John just had his theory confirmed, he supposes, but at least it’s not an unpleasant smell.
Bob, now in a washed out Evanescence t-shirt that probably went through multiple thrift stores in its lifecycle before reaching his closet, squints down at the video playing on John’s phone. "It’s a video of a Christmas tree...falling?"
"That Kate Bishop woman? She’s Hawkeye. And super rich."
"Wow!" Bob leans back on his stool, one hand on the counter so he doesn’t go toppling all the way over, then he blinks. He frowns. "Wait, isn’t Hawkeye a man?"
In the time it takes John to explain the whole trying to kill Clint Barton and making friends with his protegée debacle, they’ve cleared out the counter and he’s washed the dishes, while Bob took care of the leftovers. He dug out the roll of plastic wrap and carefully packed the sandwiches before putting them away in the fridge. He emerges with two new beers, twists the caps off and hands one to John.
"You think they’re fucking?" He asks just as John takes the first sip.
John gasps and inhales what feels like half the bottle. He’s just quick enough to turn and direct the spray into the sink, bending over and coughing and hacking out what feels like the whole top half of his respiratory tract.
When he looks up he finds Bob staring back with a sheepish look. ’Sorry’, he mouths.
"Jesus, Bob." It comes out as a hoarse whisper, his throat feels like he just gargled sand. It’s not even like Bob doesn’t swear, but he’s usually not that crass, and the question certainly took John by surprise.
Bob comes closer, reaching out with his left hand as if to steady him, but John waves him away. His fingers brush against the outside of his forearm, where he’s rolled the sleeves of his sweater up, before falling to hang from Bob’s side. Even the barely there touch feels like a brand; Bob runs hot, it’s true but sometimes it’s like standing next to a space heater. John only noticed it in the past couple weeks, as Bob gradually became more comfortable in having people in his personal space. There are still days when he wraps himself in layers of clothes and his robe and keeps everyone at arm’s length, shrinking away whenever anyone who’s not Yelena comes close to him, but it’s getting more and more common to see him going around in short sleeves of dubious provenance and taste, like right now.
There haven’t been any incidents of anyone getting astral projected into their own personal hells as far as John knows, so whatever is going on with Bob’s therapy, it seems to be working.
"I meant Yelena and Kate Bishop," Bob says. Oh, so he’s determined to have this conversation. John isn’t above taking part in some low-stakes, light-hearted scuttlebutt every once in a while, but he wouldn’t put it past Yelena to zap his ass until she’s run out of widow’s bites if she finds out he’s been gossiping about her hypothetical love life behind her back. And she will know, Bob probably tells her everything, they have a freakishly close relationship, and it’s not like the the bites would work on him even if Yelena felt inclined to try.
"Yelena said they are friends, but she usually invites me when she’s going out except the last few times. And sometimes—" he cuts himself off and looks away, face reddening.
"What?"
Bob coughs lightly. He takes a sip of his beer, blush deepening. "I wasn’t sure until earlier when Kate was here, but I think I can smell her on Yelena," he mutters, facing away from him.
John gasps. "Bobby!"
Bob whips around and shoves him. John is leaning against the sink, one ankle crossed over the other, and the force of the shove almost sends him sprawling but he manages to catch himself and remains standing. He laughs out loud.
"Shut up."
"Oh my god." Cackling, John dodges another attempted shove and retreats so the kitchen island is now between the two of them, thwarting any further attempts. "Holy shit. Are you jealous?"
Bob pulls a face. "No! I’m not—I don’t think Yelena even likes men. I just—We tell each other stuff and I wish she’d just tell me if..." he trails off with a sigh.
Oookay, this is getting too personal for John’s tastes. Just because everyone knows about him being a failure in just about every field a person can be, it doesn’t mean he wants reciprocity. He already lives full time with three of his teammates—technically at least, they’re all on different floors, there are days when he doesn’t see anyone, even since they’ve unofficially elected the 84th floor as the communal hangout and mess—he doesn’t really want to know more than he already does about their personal lives.
Bob parks himself on the bar stool next to John, slouching forward and leaning over the kitchen island until his upper body is all but sprawled across it. He hangs his head in the cradle of his crossed arms and lets out a groan. There’s a thump as his forehead slips and thunks against the counter surface.
"Look, Bob—"
"Maybe they aren’t." Bob cuts him off. "Maybe they’re just, like, standing close. I smell other people on them too. And drinks. And food. And...dogs? I think." He lets out a deep sigh. "I don’t know. I’m still getting used to all the—enhanced senses." He turns his head to the side so that he’s facing John, but his gaze slips past him to stare off at something just off his right shoulder, brows pinched like he’s concentrating on something really hard. "It’s weird. Sometimes I can hear people at street level even when I’m up here as if they were in front of me. Earlier, I could smell the soap you use after the gym as soon as you came out of the shower. I was with Yelena in her room."
"Wow. That’s—"
"I can’t really control it too well, yet. It’s throwing me off."
That’s fucking insane, it’s a wonder Bob hasn’t gone completely off his rocker. John remembers how disorienting his new enhanced senses had been after he’d just injected himself with the serum and that was nowhere near this level, not even in the same fucking galaxy. Whatever miraculous therapy he’s on, it must be working wonders if Bob’s still able to function normally without the aid of drugs or smashing his head through the wall.
"I had..." he starts and then cuts himself off immediately. He just wanted a fucking midnight snack and now he’s playing unwilling confidante to Bob’s relationship and general fucked up life problems; he doesn’t want to add his own problems to the pile. Bob’s been in his head and he’s been in Bob’s so it feels like it should be a non-issue, but there is a difference between fighting things in the dark and dragging them out into the light where all their ugliness gets exposed and is there for all to see.
It’s too late, though, Bob’s staring at him expectantly, in that laser focused way he has, with his eyes slightly wide and almost unnaturally still as opposed to his usual inability to maintain eye-contact.
John clears his throat and looks down to his hands cradling the beer; he hasn’t even drunk it half-way and it’s lukewarm already. "The same happened with the super soldier serum. For me," He turns the bottle slowly in his hands and starts picking at the label. "Everything was too bright or too loud, I could smell people’s sweat or what they’d had for lunch or where they’d been from across the room. Perfumes and colognes made me sick, it was hell. It took a while to get used to it, but sometimes it’s still overwhelming. Enhanced senses are useful to have in my—in our line of work, once I figured out how to control them." He shrugs. This is what he is now, what he made of himself—he wanted to be better and instead he just became more. It cost him his job and his reputation and wallowing in self-pity about it cost him his family, but if he has to be stuck with being himself in his shitty purest form at least he can try and make this new self of his useful. "What helped was like, picturing a dial in my head."
Bob squints at him. "A dial?"
He nods. "Yeah, like a literal dial. I picture turning it down when I’m living my normal day to day life and then up again when I’m on a mission and I need my senses to be sharper." It was a trick suggested by one of the shrinks the Army threw at him for his psych assessment before the trial, a Dr. Hall. He had pointed out that John already had skills that he tapped into during an op that lay dormant in his everyday life: while he still cases any room he walks into, taking note of points of egress and of all the people inside, but he’s not on high alert when he goes to Dunkin’ for a coffee the way he’d be breaching into some terrorist cell’s hideout. Bob doesn’t really have any military training or combat experience whatsoever so he’s not sure the comparison will hold, but while it was Dr. Hall that had pointed him the right way, John himself had come up with a technique that worked for him, so maybe he can do the same for Bob and let him come up with a solution that works for him.
"A dial," Bob repeats it quietly to himself, then he shakes his head. "That’s stupid."
John sputters, words tumbling from his mouth in an angry jumble. There he is, sharing a piece of himself only to get it thrown back into his face—he knew this was pointless, as soon as Bob started oversharing he should’ve just trusted his instincts and ran off to his room but for a second John forgot that the only reason they work as a team is because they’re all some brand of asshole, even Bob, who is the nicest of them all, can still be shockingly self-absorbed to the point of being a dick.
"Well, okay. Fuck me then, I guess." He takes a sip of his lukewarm beer just to have something to do, but it’s really hard to swallow it down the way his teeth are clenched.
Bob jolts and blinks rapidly. "S-Sorry, I didn’t—I only—I meant it’s different in my case, so it won’t really work I think. It’s not constantly..."on", but it’s—" He lets out a frustrated groan. "It’s...unconscious." He tilts his head to the side, like a confused dog. "Subsconscious? It’s like, maybe I’m sitting here wondering, ’oh, I’d love to get a couple donuts from the place around the corner, I hope there’s not a huge line,’ and then suddenly I’m listening in on people in the queue," he gestures wildly, almost knocking over his beer. "Or if I think about any of you guys, suddenly my sense of smell or my hearing goes crazy trying to find you. It’s like a...switch, but I don’t find it overwhelming. It’s not more, it’s just suddenly...hyperfocused. Everything else just…disappears."
John frowns, recalling how they got to the question in the first place. "So you were...thinking of me and suddenly you could smell me all the way from up here?" He arches an eyebrow. "That happen often?"
He says that as a joke, but Bob jerks up to sit straight, face flaming. "No!" He shakes his head in denial so fast, John only gets an impression of the dark mass of his hair and the white of his widened eyes. "I just—Yelena said she was going out with Kate and without me, I knew Ava and Alexei left earlier so I thought about you as you’d be the only other person left in the tower!" It comes rushing out of him in a single breath. "Well, apart from the night security."
He supposes that’s more reasonable than randomly spying on your roommate while he’s in the shower, so John concedes the point with a nod, then a thought occurs to him. "And what are they doing?" He asks.
He’s not sure they’re gonna run many recon or espionage ops with a public facing enterprise such as the Avengers, but if Bob can learn to reliably turn this thing on and off, it could be an incredibly valuable asset for missions in addition to his invulnerability and exceptional strength. The flying is still pretty much a sore point, especially as they could really use a flyer in their team roster—something that everyone loves pointing out online and in interviews—but it’s still a fantastic loadout that blows the rest of their powers out of the water and all of that without the need for the Sentry to make an appearance. The biggest hurdle is training him to be stealthy and not trip over his own feet, what with Bob’s natural clumsiness.
Bob’s eyes get a sort of distant look and squint, like he’s trying to recall something, and his nostrils flare slightly. "Martin just finished eating a burrito, I think. Sean is—" He tilts his head to the side and then jolts with a gasp, his features twisting in a grimace of disgust. "—watching porn and really enjoying it, oh god." He gags.
"Oh my god, stop listening to the man jack off!"
"You asked me to!" He gestures wildly, knocking into his beer. "Oh, shi—" He tries to recover the tilting bottle and instead just ends up slapping it to the side with enough force to launch it into the fridge, where it shatters on impact, spraying beer and glass in a wide radius. He freezes, then his shoulders fall in a defeated slump. "Oh boy," is his only comment, as he turns back to John and offers him a sheepish smile.
John points with his beer. "I’m not cleaning that up."
Bob’s shoulders slump even further as his arms and upper body slide across the kitchen island like he’s a beached jellyfish rather than a lazy bum of a man. With a groan he finally peels off the counter and pours himself out of the stool, taking a couple of stumbling steps until he’s at the sink. He grabs the kitchen paper roll from the counter and then drops into a crouch next to the fridge, using his bare hands to gather the bigger pieces of glass.
John straightens up. "Be careful!"
Bob freezes. Slowly, he turns to stare at him and then, while maintaining eye-contact with John, he slams a hand down onto the fragments of glass still on the floor. John jolts forward with a startled shout, already halfway around the kitchen island when Bob raises his hand and shows him his palm with dozens of tiny glass splinters dotting it, but no trace of blood. "Invulnerable, remember?" Bob says, almost bored.
John freezes in his tracks. Oh, right. Well, now he feels like an idiot.
Bob stands up and goes to the recycling bin, brushing his hands over it and then tossing the bigger fragments in after. His steps chk chk as he makes his way back to the spill and he grimaces. "It’s sticky."
"I’ll go grab a mop, stop spreading it around."
John ends up being the one mopping the floor, as Bob was just standing there slapping the thing around until he got a puddle, but he did pick up all of the glass using his hands and a hefty wad of kitchen towels, so in the end John calls it teamwork. By the time they’re done it’s well past one in the morning, John should be in bed by now, how did they even get to this point.
Apparently, he mutters that last bit gumpily under his breath.
"It started when I asked you if you thought Yelena and Kate were fucking."
John jolts. Right. Bob has sporadical super hearing apparently and of course right now he’s attuned to him, what with them being the only two Thunderbolts left to hold down the fort. Or maybe just to avoid listening to Sean down in the lobby cranking one out or something. Aaand now John is thinking about it. He shudders.
"Don’t—say it like that."
"Oh, sorry." Bob finishes washing his hands in the sink and shuts off the faucet, before turning to him with a little impish smirk. "I didn’t realize you were such a prude." He raises his eyebrows.
"I’m not a—" He cuts himself off and takes a deep breath. "Whatever. Uhh, Bishop seems a little young for her?" He’s grasping at straws, they’re both obviously grown women, but he can’t think of anything else short of just walking away to shut down this conversation. He should’ve just never come back after he went to put the mop away. "Isn’t Yelena basically my age?"
Bob shrugs. "She got blipped, didn’t she? I don’t think those five years should count."
"Still, that Bishop lady must be like..." He grabs his phone from where he left it on the kitchen island and fires up a quick google search. She’s a public figure, probably was one even before the Hawkeye gig, what with being old New York money, her date of birth might be public. "Wow, she’s twenty-five." Okay, so she’s young, but not creepy young and she’s been going around being Hawkeye for a few years now. His fingers hover over the search bar, but he knows he won’t find much about Bob. There are probably plenty of Robert Reynolds, it’s a common enough name, but juvie records are usually sealed and as far as he knows Valentina scrubbed the rest of his Internet footprint. "How old are you, Bob?"
Bob blinks. He tilts his head to the side with a thoughtful frown and then looks down at his hands. He starts counting on his fingers. "Uhh, thirty-two," he replies, finally.
"You get blipped?"
He shakes his head. "Uh-huh. But I watched it happen to a guy in front of me."
"Shit man, that’s rough."
John had been on leave and having lunch at home with Olivia at the time. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, until Lemar had called in a panic to check in on them. He had been in a briefing and out of all the twenty people in the room only him and a sergeant had remained.
"Oh, it’s okay," Bob shrugs, "he was like, mugging me." He looks at John, eyes wide and lips pressed into a thin line as he’s trying to suppress an amused smile. "And I was suuuuper high," He snorts, half amused, half deprecating. "The whole thing almost freaked me straight out into sobriety, but when I realized the scale of what happened being high all the time didn’t seem like such a bad thing, after all."
John hums in acknowledgement, because what’s there to say to that? He hopes that’s the end of it. There’s been a lot of sharing—and oversharing—in the past couple of hours or so and it’s time to go to bed to try and forget all about this, but Bob isn’t done apparently.
"Both my parents got blipped, though," he says, his voice an even tone. He shuffles his socked feet, now sans slides as he took them off earlier because the stickiness was bothering him. "They must have been driving somewhere or something, because after the—after, they reappeared in the middle of the road and got run over by a truck." He slaps his hands together, one palm skidding off the other as if to simulate the collision.
The sound jolts John out of his silence. "Jesus."
Bob jerks and swivels his head to blink at John as if he’s just realized he’s still there. He gives him a tight-lipped smile and nods slowly. "I found out when some lawyer tracked me down while I was in jail to sort out the inheritance. I always thought they disowned me as soon as I left home, but I guess they assumed I’d be dead before them and so they never bothered." He shrugs. "They didn’t have much to be honest, but I did get the house. I went to check it out after I was out, but it was..." He sniffs and swallows audibly, his breath ragged. It echoes strangely in the utter silence of the kitchen, as if he were right next to John’s ear instead of at the other end of the counter. "I wanted to burn it down, but I would’ve probably ended up locked up again and I got into this rehab program inside and at the time I thought—well, anyway." What the fuck is even this conversation. John wants to yell at him to stop, that he doesn’t need to know this, he doesn’t want to, but instead he stands there, frozen, listening to every word being quietly put out there in the open. "So I sold it instead, got myself a passport and decided to travel the world for a bit with the money from the sale." He finally looks up: his eyes are dark and watery, but there’s no sadness there, just a bottomless abyss staring at John from across the room and a wobbly half-hearted smile. "And here I am."
John tastes the bitterness of the beer and the bile in the back of his throat and he swallows, throat clicking. "I—I’m going to bed," he manages to squeeze out. "Good night."
He spins on his feet and hurries to the elevator as fast as he can without outright breaking into a run. He hears Bob calling out his name, sounding confused, like he didn’t just—like John left in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation. He picks up his pace and starts stabbing the button for his floor even before he’s fully inside the elevator. It’s only two floors, he could have probably taken the stairs and been there already.
Date or not, Yelena isn’t allowed to leave Bob behind anymore, he can be their third wheel or maybe Bishop has a friend and they can do double dates or whatever as long as John isn’t left alone picking up her slack as emotional support or friend or—they’re roommates and okay, John has risked his life or at least an eternity in the Shame Rooms for Bob and Yelena as much as the city, but that’s what you do for your team and anyway Bob did it for them first at the Vault so in a way John was only paying him back. He hasn’t signed up to sit in a circle and spill their deepest, darkest secrets to each other and then sing kumbaya—though now he thinks about it, they kinda went through metaphysical rooms upon rooms of their deepest, darkest secrets and then had a group hug about it.
Fuck.
He finally reaches his room, bursting in and slamming the door shut behind him. He leans back against it, forcing himself to take slow and deep breaths.
There’s a knock at the door.
Motherfucker must’ve taken the stairs.
"I can hear you in there, Walker."
John groans and thumps his head back against the door.
"Walker?"
He thumps his head again and then pushes himself off, before flinging it open and catching Bob in the middle of another knock. He immediately drops his hand, rocking back on his feet with the motion and then he stands there, hands twisting together and looking sheepish like he’s got something to feel guilty about.
If he apologizes—Bob apologizes for everything, once John heard him apologize to a chair when he accidentally bumped into it while he was walking around too engrossed in the book he was reading to pay attention to his surroundings—John is going to yell at him, which will make Bob and possibly John too feel like shit, which will then make the rest of the team angry or disappointed at John, which will make Yelena fry his ass with her widow’s bites thus definitely ending up with John feeling like shit. He hates getting electrocuted.
He sees Bob open his mouth, so he goes for a pre-emptive, "What?" pushed through gritted teeth with as much disdain as he can muster up, just to remind Bob that he’s an asshole and he shouldn’t waste his time apologizing to assholes.
Bob snaps his mouth shut, looking more taken aback than intimidated and just stands there, lips pressed together into almost non-existence and cheeks bulging slightly, like a bewildered human-sized hamster. He looks him up and down and John doesn’t know what he sees, but he can imagine he looks a bit agitated. Whatever Bob wanted to say, his face goes blank for a moment before smoothing out in a lazy grin.
Somehow, that’s more alarming than a sad, apologetic Bob.
"I want my sweater back."
It’s a perfectly logical sentence, but it takes a moment for John to parse its meaning. He looks down at his sweater that he’s wearing and then back up at Bob, who stares back at him expectantly.
"This is my sweater that I lent you last month."
Bob looks from the sweater in question back up to John, a confused frown cutting a divot in between his eyebrows. "Really? Are you sure?"
"Yes, I’m fucking sure."
There’s a discolored patch on the right cuff where he tried and failed multiple times to get rid of a ketchup or barbecue sauce or something stain, it’s been so long he’s forgotten what it was in the first place; what the hell is all this gaslighting.
Bob waves his hand in a circle, gesturing to John’s upper body as a whole. "Only it looks like it’s a little too small for you."
John’s had it since he was eighteen or nineteen and while, sure, he used to play football, he only really bulked up after joining the military and even more after the serum so yes, it sits a little tight now, but he resists the urge to tug down on the sleeves so they don’t pinch as much under his armpits.
"We’re basically the same size." With his right hands, he draws an imaginary line from his forehead to Bob’s; he’s still wearing shoes and Bob is only in his socks, but even so the height difference really isn’t that much.
"Don’t you have like fifty pounds of muscle on me?"
That’s true, but John still opens his mouth to retort with something, then he realizes how familiar the words sound and snaps it shut opting for a glare, instead. Bob just stands there, wide-eyed and hands behind his back, the perfect picture of innocence.
"You know what? Speaking of your belongings, I still got your shit that you left here."
Bob draws his head back, blinking at him in genuine confusion. "I’ve never been to your room."
"You—Of course you have."
Blink, blink go Bob’s eyes, uncomprehendingly. He remembers enough to throw John’s own words back into his face but not the events that followed right after? Fuck, did he have another one of his black outs? John can’t recall any incidents occurring around that time, but maybe something happened when they—or John—weren’t looking. "When I gave you this sweater?" He pinches the collar and pulls at it. Fuck, it really is kind of tight. "And those pants that you also still haven’t given back, by the way."
The stupid novelty t-shirt he can keep, as far as John is concerned. It’s not even his, anyway. He wonders if Bucky’s friend came back home to find all that clothing and half the shower gel and shampoo gone, like a modern version of the Goldilocks story.
Bob leans closer and closer, to the point that John has to jerk himself to the side against the doorjamb to avoid him, and pokes his head just inside the threshold to his room. John’s ’dialed down’ but this close he can still smell the beer and the dish detergent he used to wash his hands and underneath, the sharp, earthy scent of his sweat, though that might just be a residue from the twice borrowed sweater.
He’s seized by a moment of self-consciousness trying to picture his room as Bob’s eyes might be seeing it, but it’s gone almost immediately. It’s probably not that different from that first day, though now all of his clothes are inside the drawers or hanging in the closet. He sometimes keeps the odd book or a report on his bedside table, but otherwise there usually isn’t much else that’s left lying around out of place. Bob has a quick look and then retreats without comment, steadying himself with one hand on John’s upper arm. It’s a fleeting touch but even through the material of the sweater, he can feel the warmth of Bob’s skin.
Bob takes a couple of steps back, putting more distance between them and nods. "Right right," he mutters to himself, then his expression freezes and he looks up at John, sheepishly. "I, uh, I spilled some bleach on those pants. Sorry."
"What were you even doing with—" He raises a hand. "Forget it."
Whatever. Who cares about the pants, he’s got more tracksuit bottoms or he can buy new ones, he just wants Bob and his weird mood to go away so John and his weird mood can go to bed. Except Bob is still standing in front of his door, but now at least he’s backed up enough that if John were to close the door he wouldn’t be literally slamming it into his face.
John’s kind of trying not to be a dick, though, so he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, exhales and then attempts a polite, close-mouthed smile that stretches his lips thin and makes his right eye twitch. "Bob?" He prompts.
Bob bounces on the balls of his feet. "Sooo...The sweater?"
Well, no one can say John hasn’t tried.
"Fine!" He snarls. He pulls on the left sleeve, wiggling his arm free with some difficulty because yes, the sweater is indeed a little tight on him, but after that the other sleeve slides off easily and then John tears the whole thing off his shoulders, balls it up and launches it at Bob’s head. "Here’s your fucking sweater!"
"Thanks, Walker!" Even though his voice is muffled by the extra layers, it’s plain to hear Bob’s smile coloring it. "Smells like your gym soap."
John’s breath hitches at the back of his throat and he chokes on the sarcastic ’you’re welcome’ that was already on its way out. Bob pulls the sweater off his face and emerges from under it looking like a strange feral creature, hair all over the place and a grin curling his lips at the corners, his nostrils flaring and eyes big and round and blinking rapidly.
"I can—I can wash it?" John offers stupidly and then immediately feels himself flush in embarrassment. It’s his fucking sweater that Bob seems so intent on stealing, he can fucking wash it if he finds the smell of his cheap 3-in-1 from the corner store so offensive.
Bob shakes his head. "I don’t mind," he says and then he keeps on standing there, staring at John expectantly instead of leaving now that he got what he wanted. It’s not cold by any means, but now that he’s half naked again it’s certainly colder and the hairs on his arms are standing on end and his skin feels like it’s buzzing with static electricity and Bob is still standing there staring at him like—he doesn’t know what.
"Okay, well!" Bob exclaims suddenly, a little too loud in the deserted hallway, causing both of them to jump. His eyes widen a fraction and he stutters, "Sor—I mean, good night!" His voice comes out higher than his usual low rumble, a little strangled.
Then he actually waves John goodbye before jerking his body around and shuffling his way down the corridor with a weird hobbled gait, John’s gray sweater bundled up under his arm.
Right. No wait. His clothes. His clothes that he left there when he borrowed John’s. John’s just told him he had them, of course he was waiting—
"Wait!"
Bob comes to a halt so fast, his socked feet skid on the floor almost flying out from under him, but he windmills his arms and manages to keep his balance. Instead of turning around fully, though, he twists his torso in what looks like an uncomfortable position and stands there in the middle of the corridor, looking back at John over his left shoulder, eyebrows raised in mild surprise and mouth curved in a slight smile, overall conveying an aura of eagerness that takes John aback for a moment.
"Y-Yes?"
John points a finger at him. "Wait," he repeats, then he whips around and crosses the room to his dresser.
He was tired of keeping the clothes on top of it gathering dust, so he stashed them inside a drawer and then of course forgot all about them until five minutes ago and then almost forgot them all over again. He pulls out the neatly folded blue sweater and the cords, makes his way back to the door, balling them up and tying them up in a more viable shape and then, like he’s back in high school playing football, he draws his arm back and throws the whole bundle.
Even balled up, a bunch of fabric isn’t as aerodynamic as a football so it’s far from even his seasonal average, but he still gets the satisfaction to see Bob’s eyes widen in realization and then hear his indignant squawk as a pant leg slaps him dead-on in the face.
Bob fumbles in an attempt to grab the clothes and instead he drops everything including John’s sweater.
"Pick up your shit!" John yells down at him and then slams the door shut.
There’s a muffled shout of, "Asshole!" and then nothing else.
Fifteen minutes later, John’s in bed, staring up at the darkness hiding his ceiling.
"Hey," he whispers. "Hey, can you hear me, Bobby?"
He feels like an idiot as soon as the words are out. He rolls on his side, face burning against the cool pillow case, and stares out in the darkness at where his phone is lying on the bedside table.
The screen remains dark.
He wakes up a little later than his usual time on the following morning with a general feeling of unease still lingering from the night before. His skin feels like it doesn’t quite fit him anymore, like it’s stretched too thin in places. He checks out of habit, but since his latest blanket deactivation of all social media there are no notifications on his phone beyond a low battery warning. No messages or calls of note and nothing from Bob, either, and in the light of the day he feels like a fool ten times over.
He leaves the phone to charge and goes for a jog in Central Park. By the time he’s back, his phone is blowing up with messages in the group chat. Ava and Alexei are back and both independently brought breakfast so the resulting buffet is an abomination of nice, healthy options clashing the greasiest eggs and bacon known to man as well as a whole tray of cinnamon rolls. There are several pictures posted as proof, with a dazed-looking Bob lying down on the kitchen island next to it ’for scale’.
Yelena and Bucky aren’t back yet, but they messaged that they will drop by at some point later in the day or first thing on Monday.
John himself has been tagged several times regarding the breakfast buffet, but the latest timestamp was from almost an hour earlier, so he figures answering now would be pointless. He’s hungry, but also vaguely nauseous, so instead he mixes some of his meal replacement powder with water from the bathroom sink tap and drinks it while staring out at the city from his bedroom window.
It’s a nice day, with only a few clouds in the sky, so he takes a shower and goes out again and stays out the whole day, doing boring tourist shit.
He takes the Staten Island Ferry and watches as a family of Filipino tourists in matching I ❤︎ NY t-shirts take a selfie with the Statue of Liberty in the background as he sips the coffee he got right outside the terminal. It’s quite possibly the worst coffee he’s had in his life and he’s been to several warzones.
On Liberty Island, hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets and New York Yankees baseball cap pulled down on his head as far as it will go, he weaves his way through the throngs of tourists who stop to take selfies and pictures every five steps; he photobombs at least a dozen of them by accidentally or uncaringly walking into frame. His own phone he left back at the tower even though it was charged back to full once he came back from his jog, but it’s not like anyone’s likely to call him or message him anyway, and in case there’s any Avengers business that requires his attention he’s got his burner that’s by now become his de facto work phone with him.
He’s back at Battery Park that’s only a little after lunch and so he takes the Q to Coney Island and wanders aimlessly along the boardwalks. He buys a pair of sunglasses with a thick, white plastic frame and eats his fill of plastic-tasting hot dogs, expertly dodging the occasional divebombing seagull and photobombing a few more pictures.
Around 5 p.m. he takes the Q back to Manhattan and an hour or so later he’s standing in line for donuts at the place just outside the Grand Central Terminal trying to recall anything from the previous hours and only coming up with that Filipino family huddling together, all bright smiles and excited chittering, and a recollection of postcard views from movies and TV shows instead of his own memory.
The phone in his pocket starts ringing with an incoming call, causing John to instantly snap to attention, spine straightened and shoulders squared.
The thirty-something man ahead of him in the line shoots him a glance over his shoulder and raises an eyebrow when John fishes the brickphone from his pocket. It’s got a rugged frame, it’s waterproof and it’s got an actual keyboard, a shitty camera and a battery that can easily last up to twenty days on standby. Once, it fell from the 6th floor of a building onto the street below and scattered into three pieces, but still worked fine once John reassembled it.
There are five numbers saved on it, labelled 1 through 5. One each for Bucky, Yelena and Ava’s own burners, one for the Avengers command center secure line and then the old one he used to call to report to Valentina—which is not in use anymore. The number on the screen is none of those and in fact he doesn’t recognize it.
He accepts the call and barks out, "How did you get this number?" as soon as it connects.
"Uh...Ava gave it to me," says Bob on the other end.
He doesn’t sound scared or anxious, only mildly confused if anything, but something must have happened if Ava can’t contact John directly. He glances up at the Watchtower looming over him as he sprints across the street, almost bowling over three people and just about avoiding getting run over by a delivery van and a bike messenger. "What’s the situation?"
"Well, we were thinking maybe a dozen? Your pick of flavors as long as there’s one with coffee cream glazing. Oh, and Ava wants the red velvet with the icing, if they have them."
John comes to an abrupt halt in the middle of the plaza, a woman talking at her phone walks into his back and then gets all passive aggressive about it to her friend or whoever she’s videochatting to. He glares at her and then flips her the bird once he remembers he’s wearing sunglasses and a cap and therefore can probably get away with it without getting recognized immediately, then he goes back to the call. "What the hell are you talking about?"
There’s a long silence and then a very unsure, "...donuts?"
"What?"
"Well, aren’t you outside the donut shop at Grand Central?" There’s a shuffle of fabric and then a grunt. "Oh, where did you go?"
"Where did I—You can see me from up there?" He squints up at the dark glass shape of the tower as if he could see anything from ground level.
"Well, not anymore," Bob mutters. "I was checking how long the line was before deciding if I wanted to bother coming all the way down or just call in an order, but then I saw you standing in line, so."
Okay so Bob can see and recognize people from eighty-something stories up and uses his powers because he’s too fucking lazy to drag his ass to an elevator and even then, instead of picking up his phone to call an order in, he burned John’s secure line on a whim.
"Walker?"
"I will kill you."
There’s a hum, like Bob is considering it seriously. "Eh, you probably can’t."
"I can certainly try."
John hangs up before he can make any more actionable threats that will get to Yelena and therefore result in John getting electrocuted. Now for the second time in six weeks, John’s gonna have to put in a request for a new, clean number and exchange it again with the others and when he’s inevitably asked for the reason why he had to change it John is gonna be blamed for leaving his personal phone behind like an idiot instead of Bob burning his secure line. The first time it was kind of John’s fault, but he had been stranded all the way down in Massachusetts because of an inept student wizard, but donuts?! Before these two accidents his burner had lasted him years.
He presses his face into his hands in a silent scream. He’s still clutching his phone and one of the corners of its rugged covering dislodges his sunglasses and pokes into his right eye. He takes a deep breath, resettles his sunglasses and calls Bob back.
It rings four times before the call connects and even then there’s a long moment of silence before a hesitant, "W-Walker?" whispered on the other side of the call.
"Who else?" He snaps. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath. "A dozen, you said?"
"Oh! Y-Yes."
"Coffee glaze and a red velvet?"
"I’ll pay you back!"
"With what money?"
The Avengers are technically classified as government contractors and while the pay isn’t as high as when he was running off the books ops for OXE, John isn’t a big spender and without a rent to pay it’s more than enough for his needs, even with the money he sends off to Olivia every month for child support—no court mandated amount yet, because there hasn’t been any custody agreement beyond Olivia walking out with their kid and John coming to the conclusion that it’s probably the best for two thirds of the people involved—but as much as Bob is a Thunderbolt, he still isn’t an actual Avenger, and only the second position comes with a salary as far as he knows. John had assumed he was just a freeloader, but he does leave the tower on his own sometimes and all the money for his Door Dashing must be coming from somewhere—his orders alone must account for ten percent of their revenue in Manhattan.
"Valentina had me declared dead after the failed experiment in Malaysia, so I don’t have whatever’s left from selling my parents’ house anymore, but I got a loan from Yelena until that gets sorted out."
Jesus Christ, it’s an endless roller coaster of lore drops with this guy.
So apparently that lady that walked into him was some kind of famous Tik Toker or some shit and now there’s a picture of John giving her the finger that’s become an instant meme. There are worse pictures of him circulating online he supposes, but with the sunglasses, the baseball cap and his nose reddened by the day spent out in the sun he looks like a fucking tourist.
Yelena instantly shares it in the group chat and then makes it his contact picture.