Chapter Text
Bob watches the ping pong ball dart back and forth, back and forth, between Bucky and Yelena, trying to ignore the shadowy fingers pulling at his loose thoughts. He can feel the darkness pushing in on him like a sickness. There is no reason for it, no bad thing that’s happened to make him feel this way. It is simply not a good day.
His sleep schedule is still adjusting to something akin to normal as they all learn to coexist with one another. He struggles to fall asleep as much as he hates waking up. Fortunately for him, the others have responsibilities, leaving him to become accustomed to the tower as his new… home isn't the right word. It’s not a home, not really, but he’s not crashing there either, like most transient places he’s lived in for the last decade. Maybe it could be a home, just not for him.
It’s a matter of time, they all know it, before Bob loses his shit again and Voids half the fucking city. He feels himself walking eggshells around them for their own sake. There is no reasoning with the dark to stay away for long; it always returns at night.
When he relapses, and he will, he fears that they won’t be able to just hug it out next time. Yelena’s kindness saved him, the Thunderbolts’ comfort grounded him from being swallowed by his own misery, but it’s a band-aid on a gunshot wound. The Void will come back, and Bob fears he’ll be just as helpless to stop him when he does.
It makes it easier to cope with what he’s done if he treats The Void as something who isn’t him. This is a monster, he tells himself when the pain gets to be too much, that crawled inside of his skin when he wasn’t looking and dug its claws into his psyche. Something of biblical proportions, heavy and wounded like a lame tiger, hiding in the recesses of his mind until it’s ready to pounce. The Void is all pain and darkness. Literal darkness, too.
Bob, on the other hand, can’t stomach hurting people. He needs to see the best in humanity, and that kind of darkness The Void is made of only draws out the worst from people. It reminds them just how broken they are, broken like Bob, and all it does is carve out new avenues for pain. If Bob isn’t The Void, then there might still be some good left in him, something worth saving.
Yelena catches the ping pong ball between her nimble fingers and looks to Bob, where he sits at the kitchen island, poking at his cold breakfast. “Are you doing alright over there?” she asks.
Her voice alone is enough to soothe his frayed edges, soft and raspy like an old wool sweater. It wraps around him, keeps him warm. Bob sends her a practiced smile and nods, confused by the sudden concern. He hadn’t said a word since waking up and leaving his room.
“You sure, pal?” Bucky points just past Bob’s shoulder. “Cause it looks like you’ve got a shadow.”
Behind him, his silhouette stretches across the floor, far larger than the lamps should make it. Bob still doesn’t know how to pull it back in, keep the darkness inside of him where it belongs. For now, it remains harmless, a physical reaction to his own thoughts.
“Sorry,” he says, and swats at the shadow like that will do anything. “I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
Concern flashes in Bucky’s eyes, but he doesn’t question him further. He gestures to Bob with the paddle in his hand. “Wanna play?”
Yelena balks. “Are you kicking me out because I’m kicking your ass at this child’s game?”
“You suck at ping pong,” Bucky replies.
She flings the ball at his face in retaliation, which he catches with ease. Yelena tosses her paddle to Bob. He fumbles it but maintains a grip.
“I’m going to watch a movie,” she declares, brushing past Bob and stealing a strip of bacon from his plate. “Play nice, boys.”
Although he hadn’t necessarily agreed to play, Bob appreciates the efforts they go through to make him feel included, even if they’re all isolative creatures. The tower feels like a zoo of all lone wolves and one clingy hound that shuffles from sanctuary to sanctuary, searching for a comfort none of them can provide for him. That doesn’t mean he can’t try.
Bucky goes easy on him as they begin, chatting through the first few rounds like they’re old friends. It helps center Bob, gets him to focus on the task at hand. He enjoys keeping his body busy so his mind keeps quiet. If anyone were to understand what it’s like not being able to trust his own thoughts, it’d be the retired Winter Soldier.
“I’ve actually never played ping pong before,” Bob confesses to Bucky when he misses the ball four times in a row. “The closest I’ve gotten was playing badminton when I was backpacking through Indonesia. It’s really popular there, and I have no clue why.”
When he tosses the ball back, Bucky catches it with ease. His hair is long enough to fall into his eyes, dark and sharp like obsidian arrowheads. “I didn’t know you did that.”
There’s a lot you don’t know about me, even if you’ve been inside my head. “Yeah, I mean, I was crashing from a coke binger the first half, but the parts I remember were fun. That’s what your twenties are for, right? Doing stupid shit like walking barefoot through mountains and working under the table for weeks to buy a flight ticket home.”
And snorting an entire eight ball over the course of a few days so he doesn’t ‘waste an ounce’ before his flight to Singapore. Or East Timor. He doesn’t really remember.
“I wouldn’t know.” Bucky lines the ball to his paddle. “I spent my twenties in the thirties, when we had actual cocaine in our sodas.”
The ball clicks against the orange table, and Bob easily taps it back towards Bucky as they regain momentum. “That must've been a hell of a time to grow up in.”
“It would’ve been, without, you know. The war.”
As they fall into the rhythm of the game, neither counting points anymore, Bob realizes there is more to Bucky than the monster he was made into. He likes fantasy novels, ones with heavy worldbuilding and ancient dark prophecies that come with a price. When Bucky earns a point, he cracks a grin, but he cheers when Bob scores. He likes cooking, but is horrible at it, or so he claims. His passion falls into baking, which is good because Bob can’t bake to save his life.
Bucky doesn’t like to talk about his life before the Winter Soldier but speaks fondly of Steve Rogers. It’s not a friendly love but something deeper. The way his voice lulls reminds Bob of the first time he fell in love; he trekked through the Philippines with a local girl who swore she could see ghosts and talk him enough Tagalog to coast through conversations. To call is a fling lessens the strength of their connection, but love implies they knew each other a lot longer than they did. It was only three months, and when he left, Bob promised to send her a postcard from wherever he ended up next. And he did. She never responded.
Bob says without thinking, “Sounds like you really loved him,” which gives Bucky pause. The ball dribbles near the net.
When in his mind, Bob saw a room in an old house, a skinny boy shivering in front of a blazing fireplace, a teenage Bucky holding him as he shook, lips pressed to his cheek like he was checking his temperature. The other parts he remembers, too, the rooms Bucky would have rather not remembered, but Bob pretends like those don't exist for both of their sakes. He wonders what made such a warm memory so painful that it shared doors with the fall of SHIELD and his time under Hydra’s control.
Bucky picks up the ping pong ball again.
“You don’t have to respond,” Bob says. He knows that he’s crossed a line.
“It’s okay.” Bucky’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, and Bob prays he would kill him with that arm so he can stop talking. “I did love him. He was… everything to me. And now he’s gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We all lose people.”
“That doesn’t ever make it easier.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
With his head tipped to the side, almost melancholic, Bucky tosses the ball and starts the game again.
They get faster and faster, the ball becoming a blur of orange and the clacking of it hitting the table and their paddles. Bob can feel himself smiling. When was the last time he smiled so easily? Bucky seems to be having fun as well.
Then Bob hits the ball a little too hard, and it rockets past Bucky’s head like a bullet. The plastic bursts against the far wall that separates the game room from the built-in gun range. He yelps, panic filling him.
No, it’s not panic. It’s… excitement, he thinks. Something golden and giddy, this secret hidden part that hoped his powers were still buried inside of him somewhere.
Separating himself from The Sentry proves to be more difficult because he’s actually useful. The Sentry is invincible, unstoppable. Bullets stop in the air around him, knives shatter against his skin like he’s made of vibranium. Kids could look up to him rather than crossing the streets to avoid him because he looks more dangerous than he is. The Sentry is a hero. No, he’s a god. Bob can be something close to hope for people as broken as him.
But Bob is just the guy who houses this deity in his bones, a fragile vessel to hold in the power of the sun. There is nothing special about him. He wasn’t chosen because he has a good heart or because he was destined for something greater than himself. It was circumstance. Shitty fucking circumstance.
The guilt over his own excitement crashes him back to reality. Bob drops the paddle and backs away from the table.
“Sorry, I was—I get pretty competitive with games.”
Bucky doesn’t look mad. He’s grinning. Why is he grinning? He should be scared. Did they forget what he did, too? Don’t they see what a monster he is? Bob’s hands are shaking.
“Did you do sports as a kid?”
He hadn’t expected that question. “Uh, yeah. Junior league baseball. I did it mostly so I had an excuse to be out of the house. I quit after my car accident.”
“Makes sense. You’ve got quite an arm there, pal.” Bucky must mean it to sound like a compliment, but it’s just another dagger in his gut.
“I forget sometimes,” Bob says apologetically, “that I’m… more than this. It sneaks up on me. I’ll learn to control it.”
“I get it,” Bucky says, and Bob actually believes him. “Being a super soldier means I always have to pull my punches, even when I’m in a fight that I know I can win. It’s good to know your limits so you know how far to push yourself.”
“I guess.”
“Most people expect me to use the metal arm at all times, but I’m actually right-handed.”
Bob cracks a nervous smile. “Seriously?”
“I know, it surprises everyone.” Bucky switches the paddle to his left hand and manifests another ping pong ball from under the table. “There. Now we’re even. C’mon, let’s play. And don’t hold back on me, because I won’t either.”
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Before Bob landed as a subject of the Sentry Project, he’d tried killing himself several times over, never being able to fully commit before freaking out and trying to stop himself. At first, it was an accidental threat to his own life through reckless behavior. Drugs, drinking, even his adventures through countries where he didn’t know the language and one wrong turn would result in him probably being shot. Slowly, though, it became deliberate. Box cutters that dig too deep and heavy traffic swerving away from him. Tall buildings he was afraid of and his mother’s empty medicine bottles. The only reason he didn’t blow his brains out at sixteen was because he didn’t know how to load a gun properly.
But he does now.
Everyone living in the tower has guns, as expected of the world's most elusive assassins, but Yelena’s room is parallel to his, and she wouldn’t notice one of them missing. He waits, patiently, until they’re called to Chicago to deal with the cosmic threat of sentient lava.
As he expects, he’s left behind.
Don’t worry, they say. Sentient lava isn’t even that interesting. Once he can control The Sentry and The Void, he’ll be out there alongside them, kicking ass like the hero they know he can be.
They talk to Bob as if he’s a child prone to breaking things. In a way, he supposes he is. He wants to believe that they truly care about him, this adolescent need for affection he never grew out of pulling him towards these strangers who have become almost friends, but he knows the only reason he’s kept around is because he’s too unstable to be anywhere else. Here, with this charade of family, he can remain calm and maybe even learn to control it so he’s not completely useless.
And, if things go wrong— when things go wrong, it’s only a matter of time, that voice tells him before he swats it away—he hopes they wouldn’t be afraid to hit the kill switch.
Because he’s not an Avenger, but an Avenger’s level threat. A toddler with the power of a god who needs to be coddled so he doesn’t blast New York back into the nightmare realm again.
It wouldn’t hurt anyone to stop the pain before it starts again. If anything, he’s doing something heroic. He’s a threat, the villain with the Bob finds one of Yelena’s pistols in the nightstand and checks the chamber, satisfied to see a bullet there. He doesn’t want to go through her things to hunt for a magazine. He’s already invading her space enough.
The tower has various areas hidden from the cameras. Val, as chronically type-A as she is, doesn’t have the same paranoia as Tony Stark. She installed the security haphazardly, no doubt relying on the Thunderbolts to be enough to slow Bob down in case something happened. Yelena found the blind spots within a week of moving in and shared them with him for “when he’s getting a little dark” and doesn’t want to get swatted for it.
“I live with trained killers,” he told her then. “If I become a problem, I’d hope you’d be the one to put me down.”
It was a joke, but it just made her frown. She doesn’t seem to understand how dangerous he is. Yelena sees too much good in him. Her misplaced faith makes this so much harder.
Hiding the gun in his clothes, Bob crams himself into the corner of the hall between the laundry room and the stairs and slumps to the floor, just out of sight of the camera’s evil eye. If he aims correctly, it won’t even catch the blood splatter. He fears who will find him, but they’ve all seen carnage worse than what he’ll leave behind.
Excuses, excuses, the voice says, and he knows the taunt is only out of fear.
Yelena’s pistol has a nice weight to it, sleek black with scratch marks along the sharp edges. Most of the furniture and weapons are new in the tower, meaning it all needs to be broken in. This must be an old one she snuck in from her life before the tower.
After confessing to her that most of his previous fighting experience, if it could be called that, came from picking methed-out fistfights with customers and making a name for himself in juvenile detention, Yelena offered to teach Bob how to fight. She offered him a gun, too, but he rejected it, too aware of what he would do with such easy access.
She started training him the next day because, until he could rely on The Sentry and The Void, Bob needed to protect himself. Maybe, if this damaged dog could be trained, he would stop biting.
Bob wonders if she’s killed anyone with this gun before, or if his life will be its first victim. He clicks off the safety, stares down the empty hall, and presses the barrel to his mouth. Black shadows fill the corners of his vision. A dull panic rises up his throat like a scream and stays planted there as he breathes through his nose. Heat presses into his cheeks.
Don’t cry, he tells himself. Boys don’t cry, boys don’t cry, boys don’t cry.
Bob closes his eyes. It’s easier to do it if he can’t see. The barrel is heavy in his mouth and tastes metallic, almost sour. His finger quivers where it rests on the trigger. He thought this would be easier. It should be. By taking himself off the board, he’s doing the universe a favor.
So why is he hesitating?
Despite his initial reservations, Bucky knew the hopelessness that came with losing control, and knowing one day it would happen again. It was just a matter of time. But he still went out of his way to help Bob, give him healthy distractions, pull his thoughts to something other than the darkness lurking within. If Bob tried, maybe it could work.
Like everything else in his life, Bob stumbled into this fate and found himself trapped in a role he was unable to fill. Because The Sentry is inseparable from The Void. He is just as much Sentry and Void as he is himself. There is no controlling them because he will never be strong enough to confront himself.
When he finally finds the strength to fire, he doesn’t feel the pain. The loud shot startles him, echoing through his skull and causing his ears to ring. A bloom of heat fills his mouth, but he doesn’t feel pain. The gun slips from his lips and falls into his lap, his hand still holding down the trigger.
A flattened bullet rolls off his tongue and hits the floor with a clink. He coughs.
There is no blood, no shattered skull. When he checks in the bathroom mirror, he finds not even a bruise on the inside of his throat. He watches a trickle of smoke escape his nose. Behind him, black, translucent hands rest on his shoulders, hiding just out of sight from his vision.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” his shadow asks. “Are you that dense to think a little bullet will stop you?”
“I was hoping it would.” Bob knows acknowledging it will only make things worse, will start to open doors he should keep closed. “Why didn’t it? We’re not—I’m not… am I?”
His eyes are wrong. They glow like reflective metal, and Bob flinches away from the bathroom sink.
“I’m as much you as you are him, and he is me, and so on. Just because you treat me like something else doesn’t change my nature.”
The Void sounds sleepy, a deep murmur in the back of Bob’s thoughts. It’s almost like a lullaby. His hands slip off Bob’s shoulders, and although he disappears, his voice remains.
“I don’t care what you are,” Bob says, his words wavering. “I want you gone.”
“Why else would you use her gun and not somebody else’s?”
Bob looks down at his hands. He’s still holding Yelena’s gun.
Ignoring The Void does nothing. Acknowledging it does nothing. There is no compromise to find when he's holding in God and the Devil.
He returns the pistol to Yelena’s nightstand and hides the crumpled bullet in a drawer in his dresser.