Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It all started because Bob was eavesdropping. Well, he wasn’t eavesdropping, really. It was hard to ignore Walker and Ava’s conversation right next to him.

During their first six months living together in the tower, things had slowly but surely settled into a rhythm, each one of them developing a set of habits and even an unspoken schedule. For instance, it was regular for Bob to be lounging on the couch in the common room on a Tuesday morning at 10 am. He had his headphones on and was reading a book, one of those self-help bestsellers that Alexei had lent him (“Life-changing stuff, Bob. Believe me”), but he still looked up from over the pages when he heard Ava and Walker arriving. It was also completely usual for the two of them to pass through the room around that time and go to the open-plan kitchen to get some water, as it was when they always finished their joint training session every Tuesday morning.

And yes, maybe that Bob had developed the habit of lounging on the couch around that time every Tuesday because he knew he would get to watch them both in their tight and revealing training outfits, all flushed and sweaty after sparing together. Sue him. It was not like he was likely to get any action these days, locked in the tower and with a destructive darkness locked inside of him. What was the point of being confined with so many hot people if he couldn’t enjoy the view every once in a while?

But today, Ava and Walker looked a little more agitated than usual. They usually bickered, especially after training together. But today, the rhythm of their conversation felt different. Walker, specifically, looked more … troubled.

“I don’t see why you can’t just admit that it bothers you,” Ava said, opening the fridge to grab two small bottles of water. She threw one at Walker, who caught it without even looking at her.

“Because it doesn’t bother me,” he protested. “At least … not in the way you think.”

“The way I think?” Ava laughed. “Come on, Walker. I know you like to pretend that you’re so cool and tough, but you’re allowed to have feelings, you know?”

Bob took his headphones off. He wasn’t sure if Ava and Walker had noticed him, as the couch he was lounging on wasn’t technically facing the kitchen, and he was practically morphing with the pillows by now. And also they seemed deep into … whatever they were talking about. But they should know that he was always around at that time. So no harm in listening in, right?

“Yeah, well, I know it might be hard to understand for someone as self-centred and petty as you Ava,” Walker continued after a long drink from his bottle, “but I’m actually really happy for her.”

He didn’t sound really happy. And Ava gave him a look that was saying just that.

“I am!” Walker protested. “We’ve been separated for more than a year, the divorce has just been finalised … it’s fine! It’s fine. It’s all completely fine.”

“What’s fine?”

All three heads snapped toward the elevator as the door opened and Yelena strutted in. She didn’t seem to notice Bob either, and moved directly towards the other two. In a swift, easy movement, she jumped to sit on the counter between them and stole Walker’s water to drink from it. The soldier opened his mouth, either to protest or to answer her question, but he didn’t get the chance to do either.

“Walker’s ex-wife is seeing someone,” Ava announced immediately.

Oh. Bob felt his face flushing. He didn’t really know why he was embarrassed, as if he was learning some huge secret. But this felt … intimate. He was somewhat aware of Walker’s personal issue with his wife; it was hard not to be aware of it, honestly. But it wasn’t something that Walker and he talked about. Well, it’s not like Walker and I really talk about anything really, Bob thought. Nothing that matters, anyway. Nothing intimate.

“Oh wow,” Yelena said softly, her voice lacking the usual drip of sarcasm that she reserved for Walker. “That’s … Uh … are you okay?”

The man seemed to want to add something, but simply shrugged instead. Yelena and him were always antagonising each other every chance they had, but it seemed that Walker’s family was the one subject that she wouldn’t touch. She just raised her eyebrows and gave him an inquisitive look.

“I am okay,” Walker immediately said, answering her silent question. “I’m fine. I really am. Liv and I, it’s … it’s done. We’re done. It’s been great, but she… It’s in the past. She deserves to be happy. I hope that she is.”

Despite the fact that he was now intensely focused on his own fingers fidgeting with the cap of the bottle and refusing to look the girls in the eyes as he spoke, he sounded quite sincere. Bob was still discreetly glancing at the trio from the safety of the couch, and he tried to imagine what he would feel in Walker’s place, only to realise that he couldn’t imagine it. Bob had never been in a long-term relationship, let alone a marriage. Scratch that, I’ve never been in a relationship, period. Unless transactional sex counts as a relationship.

“Is the new guy hotter than you?” Yelena suddenly asked. “Is that why you’re so upset?”

“Yelena!” Ava chastised, slapping her arm. “Don’t ask stupid questions. Of course, he is hotter than him.”

Bob tried to cover his chuckle, and the girls laughed loudly. Walker laughed too, with that fake laugh that actually wasn’t that fake, the one from whenever he wanted to pretend that he was way more upset than he actually was.

“Okay, yeah, well, glad to see you all laughing at my misery.” He walked back to the fridge to put the water back in, and Ava grabbed his arm on the way.

“Hey, I thought you said you weren’t miserable?”

“I am multitude Ava. I’m not the same person I was minutes ago.”

“You know what I think?” Yelena said as she jumped off the counter. “I think that this is a great sign for you to move on as well.”

“I have moved on, thank you very much.”

“No, I mean like really move on, Walker. I think it’s time for you to start dating again.”

Dating? Bob slouched some more into the couch, as much as he could while still being able to peek over the cushions. This conversation was taking a turn that he wasn’t sure he was ready for. Walker probably wasn’t ready for it either, judging by the sounds that came out of his mouth as soon as Yelena voiced her suggestion. Something between a scoff, an awkward laugh, and a cough.

“Oh, okay, well I …” he stuttered, a little louder than before. “Okay, yeah, I see how it is … and now you’re just gonna …that’s … that’s real mature of you, Yelena!”

Walker’s skin, which had just started to lose some of its flush after his training, was now back to pink at an impressive speed. Man, I’ve never seen him so flustered before …

“Come on, Walker, I’m serious!” Yelena walked to him and shoved his shoulder. “Okay, maybe you don’t have to like … date right away. I’m not saying that you should get married again, fresh off that divorce. But maybe you should … you know?”

She made a vague hand gesture that probably was very clear in her mind, but the other two just stared at her with confused frowns, and Bob had to bite the inside of his cheeks not to laugh.

“Okay, I think I kind of get what she’s saying.” Ava turned to Walker. “You’re now officially and properly single for the first time in … what, twenty years?”

“Twenty two” Walker mumbled, avoiding her eyes.

“Jesus Christ … well yeah, see that’s what I’m saying,” Ava continued. “You guys met in high school, and you were committed to each other for two decades, but now … well, you can do whatever you want! And whoever you want!”

Yelena nodded eagerly and pointed at Ava with an air that seemed to say, “This is exactly what I was trying to tell you, how did you not get that?” But Walker wasn’t convinced.

“What I want now is to take a shower and forget that this conversation ever happened. Sooooooo … yeah.”

With a turn of heels that screamed I was in the military, don’t you forget it, Walker made his way towards the elevator, and Bob panicked as he realised that he was going to pass right in front of the couch. But before Walker could take two steps, both girls were holding him back, one on each arm.

“Come ooooon, don’t be such a sour puss, Walkeeeer,” Yelena protested, practically climbing his back.

“Let us have this, okay?” Ava laughed. “When Bucky is out of town, we have no dating drama to get invested in. We need this, okay?”

“Oh, I see,” John scoffed. “Even when it comes to gossip and misery, I’m in second place. Second choice even for bullying. I see how it is.”

“Exactly, you get it,” Yelena nodded. “Now, don’t be a bitch and talk to us.”

With combined efforts, they had managed to drag him back to the kitchen counter, and they both leaned against it with their heads in their hands. Walker put both hands on his hips and let out a deep sigh. Bob wasn’t sure why, but he realised that he was kind of curious about his too.

In that little fucked up family of theirs, Walker had always felt like the most normal one in Bob’s eyes. Comparatively speaking, anyway. He had had a normal childhood, brought up in a normal family down south in Georgia, and would never shut up about his past high school exploits and achievements (“champions back to back to back back, go bears” would regularly get stuck in Bob’s head in the middle of the day for no reason). He had married his high school sweetheart, had lived most of his life serving his country, had a son … he was also really handsome. Like … movie star handsome. Classically handsome like the stars from the 50’s with that little bit of roughness from the stars of the ’70s. The type of guy who only seems to exist in movies with piercing blue eyes, dashing smile, squared jawline … broad shoulders … narrow waist. Really just the type to … uh … wait, where was I going with this train of thought? I had a point somewhere. What was I …?

The point was that in many regards, Walker didn’t feel like he should be a part of this group of delinquents (as Ava called them). Or at least, he wouldn’t if it wasn’t for … the rest of him. For that incident when he was Captain America. For that image of the shield covered in blood that was forever printed in everyone’s mind. If it weren’t for the way he would get so angry and frustrated over the simplest things sometimes. If it wasn’t for the way he fought, so furiously, so harshly, throwing himself into combat as if his own life didn’t matter, charging like an angry dog, especially if one of them was in danger. If it wasn’t for the twitches in his face when he fell asleep on the couch, never looking completely relaxed, even when he was supposed to be resting.

And now this … the divorce, and his ex-wife moving on … to Bob, it felt like another fascinating crack in the man’s image. Another scar, another wrinkle, another dark circle under his eyes. So, although it was embarrassing to admit, Bob was a little curious about what a freshly divorced John Walker would look like.

“You can live all of your fantasies now!” Ava teased him, leaning some more across the counter. “Things that your ex-wife would never let you do!”

“Yeah, man, now is the time to date a bunch of nineteen-year-old models,” Yelena added. “Or maybe a bunch of rich seventy-year-old ladies who want to feel young again, if that’s more your type.”

“You are both disgusting, actually,” Walker said with a pointed finger, sounding a lot more like an annoyed dad than anything else. “Is this really what you think of me? You expect me to do all that?”

“I mean, you’re a freshly divorced straight white man in your late thirties sooo … yeah, pretty much, yeah.”

There was always something a little cat-like in Yelena’s smile, especially when she was purposely trying to annoy Walker. But unlike what Bob had expected, the man didn’t take the bait. He didn’t snap back, didn’t snarl, and didn’t even fake laugh. He was just … looking down at his feet, hands still planted on his hips, standing unusually still. Bob was mostly seeing his back from where he was hiding … no, not hiding, lounging … and he could see a stiffness in his broad shoulders.

“Well, I … I don’t want any of that,” he eventually said. “I don’t … I don’t even know if I want anything really. Not yet, anyway. All I ever wanted was Liv … for so long … and now I …”

Walker didn’t finish his sentence. It slowly and ingloriously died in his mouth. He still wouldn’t make eye contact with the two girls in front of him, and even began rubbing his face with both hands, as if he wanted to erase himself from the room.

Bob had never met Olivia, but he had seen footage of Walker and her together. First, years ago, when Walker was all over the news as the world’s new Captain America and their perfect marriage was on display for everyone to admire, and then more recently, in articles and documentaries reporting the man’s fall from grace, this time around using the footage as some sort of dramatic contrast between before and after the incident. Bob tried to avoid those types of stories most of the time, but there was a part of him that was morbidly curious.

Hearing Walker say that he had never wanted anyone else than Olivia was surprising, because Bob knew how men were. But thinking back on the images of them he had seen, on the way Walker would always look at her when they were side by side … suddenly that kind of love and devotion that Bob used to scoff at seemed weirdly plausible.

“Do you still love her?” Ava asked, her voice a lot softer than before, incidentally voicing Bob’s silent question.

Walker seemed to genuinely consider the question before answering it.

“I do,” he eventually said. “But it’s … different. I’ll always love her, but it’s … fuck I don’t know, the love has like … shifted? We’ve been separated for a while now, and it’s like … at first I thought it died out, but I think it just became something else. The care is still here, but the romantic aspect is …” Walker sounded like he was getting gradually more frustrated, as if he was struggling to express what he was feeling properly. From his position, Bob could see a part of his face twitching lightly, his jaw tensing, and his shoulders shifting under the fabric of his t-shirt.

“Look,” Walker sighed. “The point of it all is that Olivia moved on, she’s happy, I’m happy, we are still in each other’s lives… I’m in my son’s life … and for the rest … I don’t know. I didn’t exactly have time to think about it.”

“Man, your romantic drama is a lot more boring than Bucky’s …” Yelena lamented with a yawn. “His situationship with Sam Wilson is a lot more engaging than you just … making peace with your divorce or whatever …”

Walker actually laughed at that. It sounded very genuine. “Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you, Doctor Phil …”

“Let us know whenever you have some hot new flame,” Ava teased. “Lena and I will be delighted to help you pick an outfit and then tell your date exactly why she is too good for you and should run away.”

“Oh fuck yeah, I’ll be sooo excited to meet the future ex-Mrs. Walker!”

Walker laughed again, and for a moment, Bob thought that their conversation had reached its natural conclusion, which was good because he was starting to worry about how much longer he could stay unnoticed like this. And being found out now, after listening in for so long, would probably make him a bit of a creep.

But it seemed like Walker had one last bombshell to drop on them.

The girls were already moving away from the counter when Bob noticed Walker tapping his foot lightly, something he would only do either when he was nervous or when he was about to say something really wild. Often both.

“There’s maybe something actually …”

Yelana and Ava both stopped in their tracks, heads snapping back at Walker, and Bob gripped the fabric of the couch a little more tightly.

“There’s maybe something that I … that I wanted to try but … something that I never …” Walker closed his eyes and pinched his lips, looking like he was immediately regretting opening his mouth, but it was too late. The girls were back by his side like starving critters on a meal. And Bob, embarrassingly, was just as eager to hear what Walker was about to reveal.

The soldier was tenser than ever, and looked like a man who was about to jump from a helicopter with a dubious parachute strapped to his back. He stuck his tongue inside his cheek for a bit. His face was very pink.

“You girls …” Walker began, sounding flustered, “you girls are like … not straight, right?”

An incredulous second passed before the silence was broken by Ava’s scoff and Yelena’s cackle. Bob was thankful for his friend’s loud reaction, because he was pretty sure that he let out a weird, strangled sound as well.

“Wow, Walker,” Ava said, absolute disbelief written all over her face. “Wow.”

“That’s your fantasy?” Yelana was still laughing loudly, barely managing to form proper sentences. “You want to … what? Watch Ava and me make out? You want a threesome? Is that what you could never do with Olivia?”

“Oh my God, no!” If Walker was pink before, he was now crimson. “That’s not … Jesus, that’s not what I meant at all! I’m not … this isn’t …”

“You want to watch us kiss, while you play with your big long gun?” Ava asked, now sounding a lot more amused than angry. “Is that it, soldier?”

“J-Jesus, Ava!”

Ava took a step closer to him with a wink, and Walker stumbled three steps backwards. It was weirdly endearing to see this man, a man that Bob had seen running into burning buildings while bleeding out, backing away from two younger women teasing him suggestively.

“Okay, listen, I’m not …” Walker was speaking so quickly and stumbling over so many words that it was hard to understand what he was trying to say, but eventually, one proper sentence made it out of his mouth unscathed. “I’m only asking because I think I might also not be!”

Wait. What?

Yelena and Ava mirrored Bob’s incredulous reaction. The former was now squinting her eyes and looked like she was trying to solve a particularly complicated math problem, and the latter had a brief air of confusion that quickly turned into an exhilarated smile. And Walker? Walker looked like he had just realised that he had stepped on a landmine.

“That you might not be … what?” Yelena asked, still looking like she couldn’t quite crack what Walker had just thrown at her.

“I … I …” Walker’s hands were flexing by his side as he spoke. “I think that I might also … not be straight. Not completely. Maybe.”

“I fucking knew it!” Ava punched the air and pointed at Walker, looking like she had just won the lottery. “I fucking knew it!”

“You did?” Yelena looked at her, bewildered. “Jesus, I thought he was the straightest man alive!”

“No, no, there were signs. Trust me, Lena.”

“Hey, can you please stop talking like I’m not here? Besides, I don’t … listen, I don’t know, for sure, okay? I just … I know I like women, but maybe … not just women?” Walker rubbed one hand across his face. “It’s just something that I always was curious about, but that I … I never got to explore.”

“Curious?” Ava repeated. “You never experienced? At all? I thought you were in the military for Christ’s sake.”

Walker had a snarky comeback for that one, but Bob couldn’t hear it properly. The blood in his ears was too loud. Here was, on a Tuesday morning, lying on the couch as usual, overhearing John Fucking Walker talking about possibly being into men. Oh, I’m fucked. I’m so fucked. Overhearing Walker talking about his divorce was one thing; overhearing him coming out was another.

“For the longest time, I didn’t even really think about it, you know?” Walker continued, oblivious to Bob losing his mind behind the cushion just a few feet away from him. “Growing up in Georgia and all, my father wasn’t exactly …” Walker smacked his lips. “Anyway, I kind of looked at the other guys sometimes back in high school and didn’t really know what to make of it. And then I met Olivia, and it was just … nothing, and no one else mattered after that, I guess. I could … I could still appreciate other guys, but I …”

It felt like he was expecting either Ava or Yelena to interrupt him with a comment or a joke, but neither of them did, so Walker was forced to continue.

“I feel like … like I was often that weird area, where like … I didn’t know if I was looking at other men with admiration or … something else. And as a teenager, that thought was waaaaaay too scary to even acknowledge it, and by the time I kind of got over that, I was already with Olivia, so it didn’t seem to matter anymore. And now …”

Now what? Bob wished he could ask. But he was still lying down on that damn couch, fidgeting with the corners of the book pressed against his chest, silently listening to a man baring his soul to people who were not him, like some sort of pervert. What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I say something right away? Why did I have to lurk? He is not sharing this with me. He is sharing this with Yelena and Ava because he trusts them and is close with them, not with me.

“And now you’re freshly single and ready to mingle,” Yelena completed for Walker, with a loud snort. “Or whatever it is that they say. Jesus Christ, Walker … this is so fucking funny.”

“Funny?” Walker frowned.

“No, look, listen,” Yelena raised her hand, half like an apology and half like to calm an angry dog. “It’s like … congratulations and all! Welcome to the family!” Her smile seemed quite genuine when she said that last part. “But it is a little funny. Oh man. All these weird alpha male losers trying to reclaim you as their idol are going to lose their shit.”

“Urgh, don’t remind me of them, please …”

“Wow,” Ava smiled. “Bi-con John Walker. He puts the bi in bitch.”

“Okay, but that’s the thing, though, I don’t know!” Walker started gesticulating a little more wildly now. Bob noticed that his hair was getting even more dishevelled. “I don’t know if I’m … if I’m bisexual or just a little more fluid than I thought … or something else. Maybe I’m actually straight and just like … really open-minded?”

“Are you serious right now?” Yelena asked with a deadpan expression.

“I don’t know, Yelena!” Walker opened his arms wide. “I don’t know! Because I never … I never felt like I could … I never had the chance to …” He let out another sigh. “And it’s not like it even matters anyway, because I can’t exactly … it’s cute to figure yourself out when you’re a pretty face in your twenties, not when you’re …”

Another sentence left unfinished. When you’re what? Bob wanted to ask. When you’re a divorced man, almost pushing forty? When you’re famous for fumbling the biggest honour a soldier could possibly receive? When the whole world still thinks of you as the failed Captain America with a bloody shield?

“Last I checked, there are no deadlines for figuring out you might be bi,” Ava said.

“Yeah, actually, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of guys who love to help single dads like you figure themselves out,” Yelena added.

And then, suddenly, a betrayal happened. A treachery so devious and cruel that Bob would remember it for years to come.

Yelena turned towards the couch where Bob was lying and asked loudly: “What do you think, Bob?”

BETRAYAL. TREASON.

In less than a second, Bob was sweating bullets. His first very stupid instinct was to lie further down into the cushions to be swallowed completely. But it was too late. When he looked up again, properly propping himself up this time, he saw the treacherous Yelena looking at him with a satisfied smirk, and Ava with a surprised but pleased smile.

And Walker was staring at him with wide eyes, paler than Bob had ever seen him.

“Since you’ve been listening,” Yelena continued, annoyingly nonchalant, “might as well give us your two cents. How can we help Walker get some dick? Should we get him on apps?”

Walker was still staring at him. The colours were coming back to his face at an alarmingly quick rate; he was going from paler than death to redder than blood in less than a second. Bob felt like he was fucked no matter what happened next, but he somewhat managed to make the whole thing even more awkward by just … fucking waving from behind the couch and croaking a shy: “Hi.”

Walker’s head immediately snapped to Ava, still standing right next to him, and he whispered loudly: “Did you know he was here?”

Ava shrugged. “Well, no, I didn’t see him, but he is usually here on Tuesdays, you know, so …”

Walker took a step back to lean against the counter. He looked both physically exhausted and incredibly tensed, and Bob could tell it was no longer about the aftermath of his training session.

“Great,” Walker mumbled with a dry laugh, no longer looking at Bob, eyes now fixed on the ceiling. “Just fucking great.”

“I’m really sorry,” Bob hurriedly said, stumbling as he quickly got off the couch. “I was just there and you guys didn’t see me and I … I didn’t think … I didn’t want to intrude, but then I …”

Now he was the one blushing; he felt the heat rising to his face and spreading down his neck. Yelena looked like she was enjoying every second of it, but she seemed more pleased by Walker’s distress than Bob’s. He tried to give her an angry look, but when she just smiled and shrugged at him, he realised that he could never be mad at her for too long. Curse her cute smile. Curse her spy training. She probably clocked me as soon as she walked into the room. Fuck I’m so weird … she probably saw me lurking right away and assumed that I would speak up eventually … and then I didn’t, and she had to let them know I was here … fuck I’m so fucking stupid.

Sometimes, focusing on the texture of his sleeves was enough to help him focus and relax. Not this time. Just like his own fingers were gripping the textile of his clothes, he watched as Walker’s gripped the hard and cold texture of the kitchen counter he was still lying against.

“I’m really sorry, Walker,” Bob eventually said. “I should have said something.”

Bob still remembered the Walker from the vault. The one who would snap, bark and bite. The one who would push and tease and shove him against a wall when Bob tried to snap back at him. But it was now mixed with this other Walker that Bob had gotten to know for the past few months. The one who complimented and encouraged Bob whenever they trained together. The one who always cooked for everyone and who always made a plate without celery specifically for Bob because he mentioned that he disliked it once in passing. At first, it was kind of jarring to reconcile the two sides of the man that he was still getting to know.

But in moments like this one? Both seemed to coexist perfectly. Bob looked at Walker, and he could see the tension in his jaw, the frustration, the desire to protect himself by biting and snapping. But he could also see the softness of his eyes, the vulnerability, the willingness to accept Bob’s apology and to trust him.

However, whatever was to come next was interrupted by the arrival of the loudest man in both Russia and America, barging into the room and carrying a bunch of shopping bags in his large arms.

“You are all here? Good! Excellent! I have brought gifts for all!”

In just a few strides of his long legs, Alexei made his way to the kitchen and dropped all of his bags on the counter. “American malls can truly be wonderful if one knows where to look.”

“Oh my God, Dad, you’re messing up the counter!” Yelena protested, moving away from it. “Is there some sauce in there? Why is that bag leaking?”

The two began arguing about respecting common areas and whether or not hot dogs could count as gifts, an argument that Ava was delighted to join just to stir things up. For a brief moment, Bob was amused by this wonderful chaos that he now associated with home, but when his eyes searched for Walker to see if he was laughing too, he just noticed him dashing out of the room.

*

John was not stupid; he knew that Bob wanted to talk to him. He could see his tall, lanky figure in his peripheral vision for most of the day, lingering in doorways between two rooms, clearly torn between walking away or trying to get John’s attention.

But the thing was that, for most of that day, John very much did not want to talk to Bob.

Since that morning, every time the two accidentally made eye contact, John could feel the heat crawling up his neck, the tension rising in his spine, and his fingers twitching, even when he tried to shove them in his pocket. A part of him knew that it was stupid. John still did not know Bob that well, but he could tell that he wasn’t the judgmental type.

So why does the air feel so fucking thick and awkward whenever he looks at me? Why do I feel so … ashamed?

John did not feel like unpacking any of that. As he brooded over it well into the afternoon, he figured that this was the main reason why he was so adamant about avoiding Bob. Because he could tell that Bob wanted to talk about it. It. The thing. The thing that John had talked about this morning, thinking that he was only sharing it with Ava and Yelena. Would he have shared it if he knew that Bob was in the room with them? Was he bothered by Bob hearing it, or by not knowing that Bob was hearing it? Yet another thing that he really didn’t feel like unpacking.

During lunchtime, he and Bob mostly stayed silent, sitting on opposite sides of the table. It could have been awkward if it weren’t for Alexei’s blessed obliviousness to the tension in the air. The man was loudly making plans for his next shopping trip, determined to bring Yelena with him, and their argument occupied everyone for most of their time around the table. John caught himself relaxing just a little, and he even dared a glance at Bob, who was smiling softly, looking at the father and daughter, now fully yelling in Russian.

That respite was short-lived lived however. As soon as the meal was over, Bob applied himself to dish duties, a task that John would occasionally help him with by drying the plates after he washed them. But this time around, he bolted out of the room toward the gymnasium, feeling Bob’s eyes following him the entire time.

This is so fucking stupid … John thought as he punched the bag a little harder than usual. It wasn’t a habit of his to hit the gym two times in a day, unless they all had to prep for a mission. But it served the double duty of helping to think and to keep evading Bob for a bit longer. I can’t exactly keep avoiding him like this, not when we are literally living together. He hit the bag with a mean left hook, cursing himself as he pictured Bob sheepishly looking at him with those huge wet eyes. Besides, the poor guy is going to bite his nails all the way down to his knuckles if we don’t talk soon.

Yeah, that was it. This wasn’t about him. This was about Bob. It was Bob, who felt terrible about overhearing a private conversation, it was Bob who needed reassurance, and it was Bob who was nervous and embarrassed and ashamed … and it was John’s responsibility to break the ice and soothe him, partially to avoid another incident involving a giant shadow figure taking over New York. Of course, yeah. As always, I’ve got to be the bigger man. I’ve got to help him out.

An opportunity presented itself later in the evening. As always, John was on cooking duty. Because I’ve got to do everything around here … well, other members of the team sometimes offered to take over, but John couldn’t exactly let that happen, could he? I don’t trust them to cook any vegetables. Besides, what if they mess up my good knife? Or if they burn my good pan? I’ve got to do everything, I swear. If boxing helped him to think, cooking often helped him to relax, which was why he wasn’t as tense as before when he recognised Bob’s slow footstep entering the room.

“Did you need something?” John immediately asked without looking behind him. He needed to be the first one to speak for some reason. It would make things easier, it would give the upper hand … whatever that meant.

“I … well … I thought …” Bob was clearly taken aback, not expecting John to address him after he had ignored him for so much of the day. John dared a quick look over his shoulder and found himself surprisingly endeared by the sight.

Bob was standing a few feet behind him, swaying lightly from one foot to another, not daring to look at John directly. He wore sweatpants and a tight black t-shirt that was barely visible under the large navy cardigan that covered his frame, and he was fidgeting with the hem sleeves. A nervous habit that John had noticed before.

After a few seconds, Bob let out a shaky laugh. “I honestly did not think I would get this far. I was pretty sure that you would avoid me for a few more days.”

If you were so sure, why did you keep trying to talk to me? John unclenched his jaw and turned fully to Bob.

“Wanna help me out?” he suggested before he could stop himself. Once again, he felt the compulsory need to be the one leading this conversation.

“With … with the cooking?” Bob asked, incredulous, his eyes widening in an almost comic manner. “I’m not so sure about that. It feels like a recipe for disaster …” He closed his eyes and wrinkled his nose. “I did not mean that as a pun, I promise.”

John’s breathing briefly hitched. He had to fight the smile growing on his face and stuck his tongue inside his cheek.

“I could use some help cutting the vegetables.”

“You’d trust me with a knife?”

“Oh my god, don’t be so fucking dramatic. I’ll show you.”

A few minutes later, they were both sitting at the counter, facing each other, both intensely focused on the chopping duty. Well, Bob was focused anyway. John’s eyes were oscillating between his hands and Bob’s, silently monitoring the younger man’s progress.

“You’re doing well,” he eventually said after a few more minutes of silence.

Bob briefly looked up, as if to confirm that he had heard John’s compliment correctly. When he focused back on his task, a shy smile enlightened his features. For a minute, John thought that he was going to get away with it. That this moment was enough of a peace offering between them, and that this morning’s incident wouldn’t have to be addressed ever again.

But of course, Bob had other plans.

“Walker,” he said softly. “About … about this morning …”

“It’s fine, Bob,” John interrupted.

“Yeah, but you see, you say it like that and I can hear that it’s not fine.”

“Stop gesticulating with the knife.”

“And you’re right, it’s not fine. You were having a private conversation with Ava and Yelena, and I could tell that this was a private issue, and I still stayed, and I was silent, and I was …”

John reached for Bob’s right wrist over the counter to stop him from moving the knife around as he talked. It seemed to briefly distract Bob as the rhythm of his speech faltered for a second, eyes dropping to John’s calloused hand against his slender wrist.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

John removed his hand with a quick twitchy motion, feeling that familiar shame creeping up his neck to colour his skin. Stay focused. Keep talking. Regain control of the conversation.

“It’s fine, Bob, I …” John tried to collect himself. Stay focused. Stay focused. Focused. “I was just surprised. I thought I was talking to two people, but it turned out I was talking to three. No big deal.”

Bob started biting his lips, and he ran his fingers against the blade that he was still holding. John felt his own hands twitching as he wanted to reach out and get the knife away from Bob, before remembering that, as sharp as it was, it wouldn’t be able to break his indestructible skin.

“You weren’t just talking, though,” Bob continued, eyes gazing around the room to avoid John’s. “You were sharing some pretty private stuff.”

Once again, John felt like his entire body was all wound up, and a part of him wanted to just flip the table over, stab his own hand with a knife, anything to distract Bob, to completely shift the course of the conversation and make him forget about the whole thing. But instead, John maintained eye contact and said:

“It was nothing that I don’t feel comfortable with you knowing. I swear.”

That was what finally made Bob look up. There was something in what John had just said that seemed to be stronger than the fear and anxiety that so often plagued the younger man’s mind. Yelena was usually the one who was good at untying those knots, so John was surprised and a little proud to see Bob’s expression relax in real time right in front of him.

“Yeah?” he simply asked.

“Yeah,” John nodded.

Fuck this is so embarrassing. I’m not good at this … now that Bob was holding his gaze, John was the one who wanted to look away. Fortunately, the tomatoes still waiting to be chopped right in front of him were the perfect excuse to focus on something else without admitting defeat.

“Besides, it’s not like I know for sure,” he continued for some reason. “It’s like I said, I never felt the need to explore this when I was with Olivia, and never really … got the chance, when I was younger and still living with my parents.” Why the fuck am I still talking about this? Abort, Walker, fucking abort! “So now it’s … this weird grey area where I still think about it, but I don’t know anything about it, and I can’t exactly … fuck around and find out, you know? Not when I’ve got the whole world’s eyes on me, just waiting for me to just fuck up all over again.” FUCKING ABORT JOHN!

“Walker!”

Bob interrupted him too late. John had been chopping the tomatoes faster and faster as he spoke, and now, he applied the blade with too much force, and the last tomato pretty much exploded in his hand as the knife dug itself into the wooden board. In front of him, Bob was still staring. His eyes were worried, but John could see the shadow of a smile growing on his lips, and in turn, John couldn’t stop the dry laugh that escaped him.

“Motherfucker …” he mumbled, trying to wipe the seeds and the juice from his grey t-shirt.

Bob reached for the napkins and handed them to John, the little shit clearly biting the inside of his cheeks to suppress a laugh. But it weirdly relaxed John to see him amused. Sometimes, he feared that Bob was still on edge around him. Admittedly, John had given him reason to be. When they all started to live together in the tower months ago, cohabitation hadn’t immediately been natural to them. Almost everyone in this fucked up group of theirs had been living alone for at least two years, if not more, and there had been a few cases of … frictions, to say the least. John thought he would do best out of them all after living with Olivia for two decades, but as it turned out, there was a difference between sharing a house with the woman of your dream and being crammed in a cold tower with a bunch of messy, short-tempered ex-criminals.

John knew that he could be loud. He knew that he could be tense and twitchy. He knew that he could snap like a rubber band tensed to its absolute limit over the stupidest things. He knew that sometimes, insults and sarcasms left his mouth before he could even properly taste them in his mouth. And the others knew too.

So this? Bob quietly holding back a laugh, but still smiling as he handed him a napkin to clean the mess? This was nice. Really nice.

“See?” John said as he walked to the sink to get some water over the stains. “There was no need for you to be nervous about cooking. I’m the one who messed up in the end.”

“Crushing one tomato when you prepare food for all six of us every night is hardly messing up Walker.”

“Yeah, well …”

John had no intention of finishing this sentence whatsoever. Instead, he stayed focused on cleaning his shirt even when the stains were long gone, and even when he heard Bob walking by his side, and even when he felt his presence right next to him by the sink.

“There’s something I want to tell you.”

It was said so softly, even if someone else had been in the room with them, it would have been for John’s ears only. But the man refused to look up, eyes focused on his soaked and clean shirt, desperately looking for something else to clean, anything to give him an excuse. Bob waited a second next to him, maybe expecting some form of response or maybe just putting himself together before speaking.

And then, suddenly: “I’m also … not.”

This stopped John and had him look up, because what the hell? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Bob was looking at him anxiously, as if he had just confessed to a murder. But John still couldn’t process what he meant, so he just held his gaze with insistence, eyes going just a little wide and nodding expectantly. After a few seconds, Bob seemed to connect the dots, as he frowned, blushed, and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“Oh right, shit, right, fuck … uhhhh … that’s not clear.”

“No, it isn’t,” John laughed.

“I’m also not straight.”

John stopped laughing.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

John was used to feeling hot these days. Used to feeling heat creeping up his neck and blooming on his cheeks whenever Ava teased him, whenever Yelena corrected his pronunciation on a Russian word, whenever Alexei held him so tightly that he picked him off the floor, whenever Bucky simply nodded at him and said “nice one, Walker” during a job. But right now? That wasn’t heat that he was feeling. It was electricity.

Like he had been struck by a goddamn lightning. The heat wasn’t slowly creeping up his body; it was violently and intensely overcoming him, so quickly that it was disorienting. All his muscles tensed at once, immediately straightening his posture before he could even think about it. For a second, it almost felt like his ears were ringing.

Bob is also not straight. Alright. Great. This is very normal information to receive and to assimilate. So normal. So simple. So casual. I can be casual.

“So you’re like … gay, or something?”

Fuck.

While John was internally chastising himself, Bob, weirdly enough, seemed to relax a little. John knew that he was no poker player, and he could feel his face doing his own thing as he tried to swallow back that weird comment. Bob laughed while looking at him.

“Well, I’m bisexual actually,” he simply said with a shrug, leaning a little against the counter and swaying his head to the side. “I’m more into men to be honest, but I’ve been with women before.”

“Right,” was all that John could say. Immediately, he felt his fingers tapping against the kitchen counter, and he did his best to hold Bob’s gaze.

“So you know,” Bob continued. “It doesn’t change anything about me, but it felt right to tell you after I …”

“Hey, wait,” John interrupted. “I hope it’s not something where you think like owe me this or whatever, right? It’s like I said, I don’t even know if I’m actually bisexual, so it’s …”

“What?” Bob looked genuinely dumbfounded. “Oh, no, no. Walker, this isn’t … this isn’t why I’m telling you. This isn’t what this is about! I was just …”

Just like that, Bob was back to fidgeting with his sleeves. He looked away from John, his dark hair falling across his face and hiding his expression for a moment, before turning back to him with a newfound confident look in his eyes.

“I was thinking about what you said this morning. Not just about questioning your sexuality, but about feeling like you couldn’t do it before. And feeling you still can’t do it now.”

John started to feel like he might need to sit down, but it also seemed like he was experiencing some sort of muscle paralysis right now, and the only thing he could do was to stand as straight as possible while listening to what Bob had to say.

“I didn’t … well, I guess you know I didn’t have an ideal childhood.” Bob was still holding John’s gaze, but he was nervously twisting a curl of his hair as he spoke. “I never really had a safe place to, uh, explore my sexuality growing up. I mean, I did explore, but not exactly safely. As soon as my dad had like … an inkling of me maybe not fully being straight, that was just … and then even when I left the house, I didn’t really care who I was with as long as it wasn’t home, so I made a lot of very stupid decisions.” A shy smile grew on his face. “Well, maybe none as stupid as selling my body in Malaysia for some dubious human experimentations, but, you know … still.”

John’s fingers were no longer tapping the counter. They were balled into a tight fist, kept still by the very last bit of self-control in John’s body. Whenever he thought about Bob in Malaysia for too long, he got angry. At first, he had figured that he was just projecting his own issues onto Bob. The promise of a serum that could make him a better man than he could ever dream of being, only to crash and burn … yeah, he could relate. But now, as he got to know Bob more and more, he realised that he was just … angry that someone like Bob had to go through it. Someone with no training, no support system, and no one to look for him when he went missing. His jaw was clenching just thinking about it.

“So I guess what I’m saying is …” Bob hesitated for a moment, his eyes briefly twitching. “What I’m saying is that I had some of the worst years of my life trying to figure myself out on my own, but it doesn’t have to be like this. Not for you.”

John’s breathing almost stopped. “Bob, what are you saying?”

“Look, I know I’m not like …” he gesticulated aimlessly for a bit, “I’m not exactly a role model for this kind of thing, but I can still help you. If you ever want to talk.”

Once again, John simply did not know how to respond to this. He just kept staring at Bob with what he was sure was a very stupid, dumbfounded look.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Walker,” he laughed nervously. “Look, it doesn’t have to be weird; it doesn’t have to be anything. But I know how fucking terrifying it can be to figure that stuff out on your own. I don’t even know if I can give you any good advice considering my track record, but I can listen. And I guess that I can also tell you what not to do.”

Another painfully nervous laugh escaped his lips, and John remained quiet. The silence was only on the surface, however, as his inner voice was kicking and screaming like a drowning man, just begging him to fucking say something already.

After another few seconds of silence, Bob’s shoulders slouched. “Look, forget it, I didn’t want to make things weird.” He was about to walk away when John finally snapped out of himself and blurred out a loud and awkward: “Thank you!”

Bob stopped in his tracks to look at him, and so John felt like he had no choice but to keep talking. “Thank you for this. Thank you. And sorry for me. For me, being weird, I mean, I just … I’m not good at …” he gestured at the space between Bob and him. “But I’m not good at this, but I think I’d like to be. So I … yeah, thank for offering.” He winced at his own phrasing and closed his eyes, missing the way Bob’s cheek turned pink. “I think I would like to … talk about it. At some point. In the future. If that’s okay.”

When he opened his eyes again, Bob was smiling at him. Not shyly, not holding it back. Just smiling. “It’s more than okay, Walker. That’s why I’m … offering.”

“Yeah, okay,” John laughed. “Okay.”

Dinner was pretty good after that, even with one less tomato added to the mix.

*

Bob didn’t expect Walker to take him up on his offer so soon. In fact, he didn’t expect him to take him up on his offer at all if he was being honest.

He had meant every word he had said in that kitchen the night before. But the way that Walker’s body had remained tense the entire time, like a dog pulling hard on his leash, had just convinced him that he would try to forget this conversation as soon as he could. There was something about Walker that sometimes reminded Bob of a tiger pacing in its cage. If the image had been scary at first, these days it was … sad. The cage no longer felt like something built to around Walker to protect the others from him, but more like something that he had built around himself to … what? To protect himself? From what?

Walker was, in Bob’s opinion, a pretty complicated person disguised as a very simple one. At first glance, he seemed like the type of man who constantly spoke his mind and wore every emotion on his sleeve. But Bob was starting to realise that there was a lot about Walker that he didn’t know or understand. Walker, for better and for worse, always knew how to surprise him.

And he did surprise him, two nights after their conversation in the kitchen, when he knocked on Bob’s bedroom door.

It was almost midnight. It had been a day like many others at the tower, with all of them messing around, arguing, laughing, and figuring things out. Bob was enjoying his time with the group while he could, before Val would inevitably send them on another mission for days, if not weeks.

Bob did his best not to let anyone know, but he really disliked those days alone in the tower.

But he had been pleased to see that things seemed to be mostly back to normal between Walker and him. Dinner had been nice. They had even done the dishes together. And now, after they all said goodnight, Bob was lying in bed, already in pyjamas, trying to finish Alexei’s book, when John Fucking Walker knocked on his door.

“Hi,” the man simply said when Bob opened the door and stared at him.

Walker was an early riser, so Bob almost never saw him in his sleeping clothes. By the time Bob got out of bed, John was usually fully dressed and cooking breakfast or back from a run. He looked … unguarded like this. With some pyjama pants and a t-shirt that seemed to be from a college football team that Bob did not know. Also, his hair was a little messier than usual.

“Hi,” Bob answered, suddenly feeling self-conscious about his own bed hair. Whenever he lay in bed for just a few minutes, his curls were immediately a mess. “Uh, did you, did you need something?”

Walker smacked his lips and looked away for a second. Everyone was in bed by now, and the corridors were completely deserted. It was mostly dark, except for the soft light coming from inside Bob’s bedroom and the faint city lights through the tower’s massive windows.

“I was, uh, I was hoping we could talk?”

Embarrassingly, it took Bob a minute to figure out what this was about. And then, it hit him like a train.

“Oh, yes, right of course!” he blurted out, awkwardly stepping away to open the door and let Walker inside. “Come on in, I, uh … yeah, come in.”

Fuck. If I knew he was coming tonight, I would have cleaned up the mess a little. With his foot, Bob tried to discreetly push some of the dirty clothes on the floor under his bed as he guided Walker inside. “Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t exactly expecting any visitors. I don’t really get visitors. Well, no, actually, Lena shows up unannounced sometimes, but she’s pretty messy as well, so she doesn’t mind. But I know you …”

“Bob?”

Bob went quiet.

“Relax.”

And he did. Or he tried. It was really weird to have Walker in his bedroom. Looking at him in this space was like looking at those superimposed pictures you get by mixing two normal photos together for a surreal result. Bob’s eyes were darting all over the room, actively searching for the most embarrassing thing that Walker could possibly come across. Fortunately, Bucky had asked him to clean up the old snacks and crumbs a few days ago, so there were no dirty plates or leftovers in sight. The drawing kit recently gifted by Ava was still lying around, with pencils and felt pens scattered everywhere, but that wasn’t too bad. No, the worst thing was definitely the dirty laundry all over the floor.

But weirdly enough, Walker didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he just didn’t mind, but Bob found it hard to believe, considering that the man had proved himself to be a little bit of a maniac when it came to keeping the tower cleaned and ordered. He just wasn’t really looking around much. His blue eyes were fixated on Bob. Oh great.

“Look, I didn’t want to bother you so late,” Walker suddenly said, fingers clenching and unclenching by his side, "but I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, and I think that I do want to talk, actually, but I don’t really know how? And I also don’t really want to talk in front of everyone else, so I was trying to find a moment today, but even when we were alone, I always worried about someone just walking in, and I … I don’t know, this just felt like the best moment, but uh … maybe I should have texted you or something. To ask. Just to see if …”

“Walker?”

“Hm?”

“Relax.”

There was a brief pause, and then Walker laughed. It was the opposite of a relaxed laugh, but it was better than nothing, Bob decided. The older man began rubbing his face with both hands, just like Bob had seen him do a few days prior when he was talking to Yelena and Ava. Once again, it felt like he was trying to erase himself from the room.

“Hey, look, why don’t we … why don’t we both sit down, hmm?” Bob suggested, gesturing towards his bed, thankfully not as messy as it had been a few days prior. “And then we’ll just …” what? We’ll just what? “… We’ll just see where this goes, yeah?” Jesus fucking Christ.

Once they were both seated on the bed –Bob with his back against the headboard and knees against his chest, and Walker on the edge with his posture as straight as ever– the tension in the air seemed to dissipate just a little.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

Walker immediately winced at his own awkward phrasing, but it only made Bob chuckle. He lightly shook his head, messing his curls some more. What a fucking surreal night this ended up being.

“Walker, I’m not a fucking guidance counsellor. And thank God for that, who knows how many poor souls I would just completely fuck up beyond repair. Look, I just … I just want you to be able to share the stuff that’s on your mind, okay? I don’t know if I’ll have any answers for you, but … I don’t know. But it’s like Yelena said. We stick together from now on.”

Walker nodded slowly, looking at Bob very intently. So intently, in fact, that it started to feel like a physical itch against his skin, something warm but also unfamiliar and strange. Walker had this capacity to just lock in whenever he had something in mind, to put his entire focus on a single point or person. Being that person always left Bob feeling a little lightheaded.

“How did you first know you were into guys?” Walker asked in a disarmingly casual manner. Bob was taken aback for a second before remembering that, yeah, this was pretty much why he was here in the first place. “You don’t have to tell me,” Walker quickly added, misinterpreting Bob’s surprised silence for discomfort. “I just don’t really know … I don’t know how to be sure. I guess I know how I feel, but I don’t know if it’s how I should feel.”

There was something about that phrasing that was so … so clearly and distinctively Walker. A quest for definitive answers with no room for doubts or ambiguity, questions about what he should or shouldn’t feel. Bob hadn’t known many military guys in his life, and he wondered if they were all like this or if Walker was one of a kind.

“I didn’t really have a light bulb moment,” Bob said truthfully. “But looking back now, I think it … I think it started with sports, of all things.”

“Sports? Are you serious?”

“My father and I we … well, we didn’t really get along.” Bob marked a pause to swallow the enormity of that understatement. It was already weird to know that Valentina had a whole file with information about his past and his family; he didn’t really feel like having to go through that conversation again with someone else if he could avoid it. “He really liked sports, especially football. Something about those grown men knocking each other out on TV must have really been working for him. But sometimes he would fall asleep while watching a game on TV, and I … I kind of liked to watch with him. I did not like to watch with him, but whenever the game was on, he was … calmer. Almost relaxed. Usually drunk as well. He would fall asleep watching, and I just kind of sat there with him … watching as well.” Bob started biting his thumb before continuing. He hadn’t thought about this in a long time. “I don’t know if he even noticed I was there most of the time, but when he did, he didn’t seem mad at me for once. Maybe he thought that watching sports would finally make me more of a man.”

Bob couldn’t stop the laugh that escaped him next. Even he could tell that it sounded a little off, a little too sudden and agitated. But it really was very funny in retrospect. Next to him, Walker didn’t flinch. Just kept that tingling stare focused on him.

“But it kind of backfired,” Bob continued, still laughing. “Because all I remember now is just … how hot all these guys were. Like when they were taking off their helmets during the breaks, and I could see their sweaty, messy hair and their flushed cheeks? When the camera focused on their arms or when they just … fucking grabbed each other and rolled on the ground? That was just like watching a girl taking off her dress.”

It was a weird feeling. Bob didn’t like to reminisce. In fact, he had spent most of his adult life trying to find ways to free himself from the painful memories of his childhood, most of them involving different ways to just … not think about anything at all. Ways to barely exist as a person, to be without any past or history. Even now, none of these memories was especially fond, because these moments of sexual awakening and self-discovery were irrevocably tied with the memories of his father’s reaction once he had found out.

But right now? Retelling these parts of his adolescence from the safety and comfort of his new home, while watching the former Captain America blush like a schoolgirl and turning his pink face away from him? That wasn’t too bad.

“I didn’t take you for such a prude, Walker,” Bob teased, leaning forward to try to catch a glimpse of the man’s flustered expression.

“I’ve literally only ever been with one woman,” Walker snapped, but his tone was too shaky to be intimidating. “I don’t understand why everyone in this God damn tower thinks I’m some sort of … of sex addict who must have been with a thousand women before Olivia and who is going to be with a thousand more now that I’m divorced.”

Bob didn’t say anything, but his smile grew a little wider. It was still surreal to him that Walker only ever had Olivia in his life. He didn’t doubt him, but it just felt so … unlike what Bob would have expected when they first met. For some reason, yeah, Bob would have expected Walker to have been with a thousand women. That was just what good-looking men like him did in his experience. Another surprise.

But then, Walker focused on him once more, with a completely different expression.

“Your father …”

Oh hell no. Now it was Bob’s turn to tense up. He could feel his body go rigid, all muscles all at once, in real time. His knees were pressed so tightly to his chest that they blocked his breathing for a second.

“Your father did he …” Walker continued, hesitantly. “What did he do when he …”

“We’re not here to talk about my father.”

Bob knew that his tone left no room for discussion or debate. Thankfully, Walker seemed to understand it too. “Right, yeah, no, you’re right. Sorry.”

The ease with which the topic was dropped helped Bob relax again; the wave of relief that washed over him almost made him feel euphoric. Next to him, Walker scooted just a little closer on the bed. This too, helped Bob to relax.

“It’s funny, you know,” the man said, rubbing the back of his neck. “The first time I ever started to, uh, think about guys like that … well, it was when I was playing football in high school.”

Bob’s eyes and smile went wide. “Shut the fuck up …”

“I’m serious!” Walker continued, sounding like he was genuinely trying to convince him. “Well, retrospectively, I think there were … other signs, before that. But yeah, being on that football team was the first time that I really … realised that something was different.” He started to press his fingers against the inside of his palm. Bob noticed a few faded scars on his hands for the first time. “It was the first time that I really thought about it. The first time that I properly questioned myself.” A fond smile appeared on his face, and it made him look a little younger. “But around that time, I also met Olivia. And I was so … so crazy for her. So head over heels in love that … that the rest didn’t seem to matter anymore.”

For a split second, it was as if the features of an eighteen-year-old John Walker passed across the current Walker’s face, just like a car light briefly illuminating a landscape in the middle of the night. And something tightened in Bob’s chest.

“She must have been a really special woman,” he said softly.

“She still is,” Walker said, his smile widening for a quick second before slowly faltering. “And I’m sure that she will continue to be for many, many, many years.”

There was another moment of silence, but it was a comfortable one. Walker had had the tact to not press Bob about his father, and so Bob wouldn’t press him about Olivia. Not for the first time, he tried to imagine what this kind of love could possibly be like. The certainty. The evidence. To love someone so completely and so easily that no fears or doubts could ever compete with it. What it would be like to be loved like this.

“But yeah,” Walker continued. “I had some … very intense male friendship in high school. And all the things that you just described? The helmet hair? Being tackled to the ground by a guy who is just beaming at you and pressing himself against you? Yeah, that was pretty big for me too.”

“Except you got to experience it first hand and not just through a screen,” Bob pointed out. Now it was his turn to scoot a little closer. “I’m pretty jealous, honestly.”

“Eh, don’t be.” Walker shrugged. “During my Freshman Year, there was this Junior Year guy that I was obsessed with. Richie Ford. He was everything that I wanted to be. But it was one of these Do I want to be him or do I want to be with him type of scenario, you know? I thought he really liked me. I was … what, fifteen maybe? And he was seventeen. Anyway, one day, around the end of the year, I got hard during a practice game. It was so stupid. Fucking teenage hormones. He was just teasing me all day, and when we went at it during the game, he pinned me down, and I got a little too worked up. Most of the team just laughed at me without a clue, but Richie … he figured out what happened. What really happened. He waited for me after practice and beat me up.”

Bob’s mouth fell open, and Walker just shrugged once more.

“Walker, that’s …” He didn’t know what to say. The casualness of Walker’s tone was disarming. If it weren’t for the brief twitch of his shoulders, it would have looked like memory wasn’t upsetting him at all.

“Yeah, well, you know what teenage boys are like.”

The worst part was that Bob did know. A few names and faces immediately came to him, like Jeremy Pace from middle school, a boy twice his size who had once seen Bob’s mother having a manic episode while she was in line at the pharmacy. After that day, he kept asking Bob about his “crazy mom” and if he was crazy too. Whenever Bob had tried to push back against him, his face had been pushed into the sewer train outside their school.

“Did you ever tell anyone?” Bob asked. “Before telling the girls and, uh … telling me?”

“What, in high school? Hell no.” Walker scoffed. “I learned my lesson. I assumed it was just a fluke. Something that I would grow out of.” His callous hand began rubbing his beard, and something shifted in his gaze. A brief hesitation before he continued. “But I didn’t. I didn’t grow out of it. Not really, anyway. It became easier to ignore because I was with Olivia and she was all I needed, but I never really stopped … thinking about it. So I told her.”

“Olivia?” Bob asked, trying not to sound as surprised as he actually was. “You told her?”

“I didn’t exactly tell her, not in the way you think. But we talked about it. A couple of years after our wedding, I just … I don’t even remember how I brought it up, really. I think I just asked her if she had ever questioned her sexuality. But she knew me. Better than I knew myself most of the time. She figured out what I was really asking.”

Walker stayed silent for a long time after that, and Bob didn’t really know how to keep the conversation going, or even if he should keep the conversation going. He began feeling guilty. He was the one who had encouraged Walker to talk to him, and he had done it sincerely. To this day, he could still feel in his bones the overwhelming … loneliness that had been crushing him as a teenager and young adult. A loneliness that he had wanted to escape so desperately that he had thrown himself at the first persons who would have him, no matter the conditions, no matter the cost, no matter the circumstances. And he couldn’t let anyone, especially not someone he knew and cared for, risk making the same mistakes.

Back then, all he ever truly needed was someone, anyone, listening to him and telling him, “You are not alone”. Bob had found that person in Yelena. And the others. Now, if he could be, he wanted to be that person for Walker. He wanted to listen.

So how come every time he mentions his ex-wife, my brain fucking shuts down?

A part of him could relate to Walker, but every time he talked about Olivia, about how much he loved her, about how everything felt safe and easy with her, whatever kind of connection was established between them seemed to be severed completely. As if Walker was suddenly speaking a completely different language.

“Did it change anything?” Bob eventually asked.

“Between us? Of course not.” There was that smile again, the one full of fondness and longing, the one that made Walker look ten years younger. “But now looking back … I wish I had told her. Properly told her. I knew that she knew, and that she still loved me, and I decided that it was enough. But it wasn’t.”

There was another pause, another hesitation, before Walker continued. “I also … I also told Lamar.”

Oh. Bob knew about Lamar. Or at least, he knew what the general public knew. He had seen pictures of him, footage of Walker and him together, and of course, he knew about his death and everything that had come with it. For a brief moment, the fondness on Walker’s face remained before slowly changing into something else, an emotion that Bob didn’t recognise right away. It was only when the rest of his body stiffened, and when he turned away to fix an invisible point ahead of him, that Bob figured it out. Pain. Just raw controlled pain.

“But we’re not here to talk about Lamar,” Walker said.

But Bob wanted to talk about Lamar. In fact, Bob had wanted to ask about Lamar for a couple of months now. He wasn’t even sure of why; it had just been a thought in the back of his mind, a little seed of curiosity growing a little more each day. Maybe he just wanted to go beyond the story he had seen on the news, to hear about Lamar from Walker himself. But tonight, pressing the subject would have been just as cruel as pushing his hand inside an open wound.

“Okay,” Bob simply said, before immediately changing the subject. “Did you ever have a wet dream about a guy? Like, a celebrity?”

That pivot in the conversation was so abrupt that it could have easily been a disaster, but miraculously, it wasn’t. After a brief stunned silence, Walker just started laughing. And it was the most relaxed he had sounded all evening.

“Okay, I’m about to share something with you,” he said, and Bob marvelled when he saw the man’s features relax and his face light up in real time. “But this is something that can never leave this room, you hear? You cannot tell anyone. Not even Yelena. Fuck, especially not Yelena, she would never let me live this down.”

“Okay, you’re really building this up; this better be good.”

“If you ever tell anyone, I will have to have to kill you.”

“You couldn’t. But go ahead.”

Walker bit his lower lip and let out a shaky laugh. It was the same kind of laugh that had gotten Bob in trouble before, except that this time, no insults or shoving around came. “Fuck, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. Okay, so it might not be super surprising for you to learn that I was super obsessed with World War II as I kid. Like, I was a real nerd about it.”

Bob’s eyes immediately widened in delight, and he leaned closer to Walker without even thinking about it. “I knew it! You had a crush on Steve Rogers, didn’t you? Oh man, this is … don’t get mad, but this is kind of hilarious.”

Walker smiled in return, but lightly shook his head. “Not on Rogers, no. This is … this worst actually. Considering our current employment.”

It took Bob a minute. Then the penny dropped.

“Shut the fuck up. Bucky? Our Bucky?”

Walker smacked his lips. “Yep. The very same.”

“Oh my god, this is … this is fucking crazy. Holy shit.”

“This can never leave this room. You hear me? I was fifteen and I got over it after a year or two. But yeah, meeting him was still … weird. At first. Especially since he fucking hates me.”

“He really doesn’t, you know.”

Walker didn’t say anything, just shrugged, clearly not convinced. “I wouldn’t blame him. But yeah, it’s … I don’t know. It’s weird to be thirty-eight, single for pretty much the first time in your life, with the whole world watching you, and also the guy you had a confusing wet dream about as a teenager is sitting next to you on the couch, eating cereals.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I had a weird crush on Tony Stark when I was in my early twenties.”

“For real?”

“Yeah. I would get really high and fantasise about being his controversially younger boy toy. Once I had, uh … I had an episode, off my meds and all that … and I convinced myself that we were meant to be, and I tried to contact him. Like, on the phone. I reached out to his staff, tried to get his personal number, an email address, anything. In the end, I tried to break into one of his residences and I got arrested. He wasn’t even there. Probably off saving the world somewhere.”

Walker stared at Bob with that ever-so-focused gaze. Oh … oh, this is … this is probably way too much information. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He was only trying to make Walker feel better by sharing an embarrassing memory of his own, but it dawned on him a little late that having to work with a former childhood crush and admitting to breaking into a celebrity’s house during a manic episode were not on the same level. He could already feel himself starting to sweat, and he was trying to find a way to play it off when he realised that Walker was still smiling at him.

“And look at you now,” Walker said softly. “You live in the Stark tower, with your own room and your own bed. Took you a few years, but you got there in the end.”

Oh fuck, this is … oh. Bob chuckled awkwardly. “I guess. I’m a little late, though; I don’t get to be the hot billionaire’s boy toy.”

“Eh … he wasn’t that hot anyway. If you ask me, you’re too good for him.”

Don’t say anything weird, Bob. This is a nice moment. Don’t say anything weird, I swear to fucking God.

“I don’t know … I always had a thing for cocky assholes with hearts of gold.”

FUCK.

Bob began nervously scratching his wrist, and he could feel all the muscles of his face just … doing their own thing. Next to him, Walker frowned, but his smile didn’t falter.

“Uh, I’m pretty sure his heart was made of metal,” he said, clearly teasing. “That was actually one of the most well-known facts about him. Fake fan.”

It was Bob’s turn to let out a shaky laugh. He didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed that Walker had so easily glossed over his comment. No, no, no. This is a good thing. I don’t want him to have any more reason to fucking hate me. If I could just … just stop being fucking weird for one god damn minute. This is going well for some crazy reason. Don’t fuck it up. The truth was that he hadn’t expected Walker to be so … easy to talk to. It messed with his head a little.

“It’s getting late,” Walker said, abruptly getting up. “Yelena told me that you’re actually sleeping a little better these days. I don’t want to keep you up any longer.”

“I really don’t mind, it’s fine,” Bob said quickly, immediately embarrassed by how needy he sounded. But Walker’s weight being so suddenly off his bed was jarring.

“Nah, we should both get some sleep, really. Besides, it’s, uh, it’s enough for tonight, I think. But it … it was nice. Good, even.”

“Oh. Okay. Great. I’m glad, I just don’t feel like I did anything to actually help you.”

Walker was already at the door, hand on the doorknob, when he quietly mumbled. “It was nice. That’s all.”

Bob didn’t feel in control of his body when he got up to join the other man by the door.

“My door is always open. We can do this any time you want.”

Walker nodded slowly, taking his time to process this information. And there was something just so … devastatingly vulnerable in his eyes when he looked at Bob again and said: “Maybe we should. Just to see.”

“Just to see?” Bob repeated with a smile.

“Yeah. To see.”

And with that, Walker was out. Now left alone, the image of the blond man in his suit, with dirt all over his face and blood all over his hand, throwing punches that could crack a man’s skull, came to Bob. And he tried to juxtapose it with the man who was quietly sitting on his bed with blush on his cheeks just seconds ago.

*

John felt weird. It was like waking up after a night of too much drinking, except without the headache or the sickness, only with the worry and regrets.

Was I weird last night? Did I come off too strong? Did I talk too much? Did I freak him out? Did he even want to talk to me? I don’t even remember all the things I said. I talked about high school, didn’t I? I complained too much. How can I complain so much about my childhood when he was-

“Walker, watch out!”

Ava grabbed his elbow, pulling him out of his thoughts and away from the road. The car only missed John by a few inches, and the loud, angry honking had a bunch of bystanders staring at them.

“Fuck you too!” John yelled at the car already blocks away. “Who the fuck drives this close to the sidewalk? I’ll send your ass back to driving school!”

“Walker, stop! People are staring!” Ava grabbed his arm once more to force him to keep moving. “Besides, you were the one about to cross at a red light.”

Around them, most of the people went back to their business, heads down and eyes focused ahead like true New Yorkers. But a few kept staring, exchanging glances and whispering to each other, pointing at the duo with a curious spark in their eyes. John cursed once again, but under his breath this time.

He knew that this was a stupid idea. He had warned Ava that this was too late in the day to go for a run, that the streets would be too busy, that people would recognise them. But she had insisted, because it was raining this morning and now the sun was out, and she was going to go crazy locked in that tower when the weather was so good outside. And John couldn’t say no, really, not when she looked at him with a pout. So here they were now, leaving Central Park and running back to the tower with stupid caps and sunglasses on, as if such half-assed disguises were going to protect their identity.

“What is the matter with you anyway?” Ava continued, trying to ignore the stares still directed at them. “You’ve been distracted all day. You barely frowned when I yelled Keep up, old man earlier.”

“I told you that I don’t like going out when the streets are this crowded.”

“Not my best idea, I’ll admit,” she sighed. “But that’s not all there is. You were being weird this morning as well. Is this about Bob?”

John cursed his excellent cardio. He couldn’t pretend that the sudden heat on his face was because of their run.

“Why would you think that?”

“You’ve been staring at him all breakfast, without saying a word.”

Shit.

“Is this about what happened the other day? I thought you guys had talked it through.”

John was thinking about just how much he wanted to share with Ava about what was going on between him and Bob, and, realising he didn’t even know what the hell was going on between him and Bob, when a woman approached them. She seemed to be in her late forties, with unnaturally blond hair and a jacket that looked like it cost more money than John’s father used to make in a year. She planted herself in front of John, looking pissed as hell.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” John asked, trying to cool down and to sound approachable.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said, pointing a finger way too close to his face. “How dare you show yourself like this? Out in the streets, on magazine covers … do you think we’re stupid? Do you think we all forgot what you did? New Avenger, my ass! Shame on you!”

Before John even had the chance to think of a reply, her hand landed across his cheek. It didn’t hurt at all. He barely would have felt it if it weren’t for the rings on her fingers. But the sound of that slap seemed to echo all over New York City. The very next second, he felt Ava phasing through him as she positioned herself between him and the woman.

“If you touch him again, I’ll break you in half,” she said, her voice shaking with contained fury.

The woman’s expression changes completely. If she was bold enough to slap a super soldier in public, there was something about the much smaller woman now in front of her that seemed to terrify her. I guess seeing someone phase through another person can be a little jarring if you’re not used to it. John couldn’t see Ava’s face right now, but he knew first-hand how terrifying she could be when she was mad. After a few more seconds of hesitation, the blond woman walked away, nervously looking behind her shoulder until she was out of sight.

Ava immediately turned back to him, and the genuine worry on her face shook John just a little. It made him feel bad and good at the same time.

“John, are you okay?”

It was always a little jarring whenever the others used his first name. He was somewhat used to it with Bucky, who switched between first and last name depending on how pissed he was, but it always came as a shock when he heard John coming out of Ava's or Yelena’s mouth. Bob never calls me John; he briefly thought before forcing a smile back on his face.

“I’m fine,” he said, and when Ava frowned in disbelief, he added, “I tend to have this effect on women anyway.”

Ava rolled her eyes, but John could see the corner of her lips twitching.

“See?” he pointed out. “Now you want to slap me, too.”

“You’re such an idiot,” she scoffed, but with a smile.

What could have been a nice moment was ruined by a flash of light right next to them. If people were coyly glancing at them before, that little scene just now officially had the entire sidewalk staring at them, even with some phones out to take pictures. Shit. John felt a familiar twitching sensation running up his back to his neck. Next to him, Ava looked terrified.

“Hey, back off, will you?” John shouted at the young man who had taken the picture and was still aiming his phone at them. “And who the fuck uses their flash in the middle of the day? Jesus Christ …”

Predictably, that intervention had absolutely no effect on the situation. As even more phones were pulled out of pockets, Ava grabbed John’s arm, almost hiding herself behind his taller frame.

“Let’s go back to the tower,” she pleaded softly, flinching as another flash went off next to her.

Don’t need to tell me twice. Still trying to hide themselves as much as they could behind their hats and sunglasses, they swiftly walked straight ahead, both mentally counting how many steps were separating them from home. But the crowd followed them, eyes staring, fingers pointing, and even more god damn phones filming them. Some were even bold enough to try to get in their way, yelling stupid questions at them.

There was one specific guy in the crowd that they just couldn’t get rid of. A white guy in his early twenties with a poorly styled undercut, who was almost running to keep up with them.

“So what’s the deal with this New Avengers thing?” he asked Walker directly. “Are you back to being Captain America now, Walker? Does Sam Wilson know about this? Who would win in a fight?”

He was so close to them by now that they were both forced to slow down their pace, but John made a point to keep moving, with Ava still close to him.

“Kid, I’m gonna need you to back off a little,” he said between clenched teeth. Stay calm, John, you’re almost there. Almost back home. Just don’t engage, don’t listen to him, and it will be fine. He’s trying to get a reaction. Don’t give it to him.

But all that resolve crumbled when the guy switched targets and focused on Ava.

“I saw you go through him earlier; that was pretty crazy!” There was something vile in his eyes when he asked. “Can you go through me next? I bet it must feel reaaaaaal good.”

Oh, he was definitely too close now. Ava glared at him with cold rage, but that wasn’t enough to deter him.

“I need you to back off,” John repeated. “This is my final warning.”

The rest all happens in just a few seconds.

“Come ooooon, let me try,” the guy demanded, and reached to grab Ava’s arm.

Before he could even think about it, John shoved him off, his large hand flat against his chest, pushing him back so roughly that the guy lost his balance and fell back against the crowd. Ava gasped, and so did most of the people around them. But John could barely hear it, the blood too loud in his ears.

“What the hell, man?!” the guy yelled, quickly back on his feet, and moving even quicker back towards John and Ava. “She shouldn’t have shown off like that if she didn’t want people to notice! She was really asking for-”

That sentence remained unfinished; John made himself taller before head-butting that guy with all the strength he could muster. This time, he went down so fast that no one in the crowd had the time to even think about catching him.

And it was all too familiar, really. The rush of adrenaline still running through him, the heat that just kept spreading all over his skin, the sound of his beating heart so loud that it was deafening, and the spasms. The jerks. The twitches. The shudders overcoming him as if he had just been electrocuted, as if someone else was controlling his body. And on the ground, at his feet, the guy was still moving, gesticulating wildly even. But his nose was bleeding profusely, and for what felt like a really long time, that bright red colour was the only thing that John could focus on. Until …

“John!”

Just like minutes ago, Ava was pulling at his arm, bringing him back to the present. And suddenly it wasn’t just the blood he was seeing. It was a dozen of phones aimed at him, filming the whole scene.

Fuck.

Fuck. No no no no no. No fuck no please no.

How can I be so fucking stupid?

Ava pulled his arm once more. “John, come on! Let’s go. Let’s go back. Come with me, please.”

The elevator ride back up felt interminable. John and Ava were silent for most of it, still in their stupid running clothes, their stupid disguises neglectfully dropped on the floor. John couldn’t bear to look at her. He also couldn’t stop shaking, no matter how hard he was trying, no matter how much he tried to clench his body to keep it still. With a shaky sigh, he brought both hands to his face, and when he felt Ava’s hand on his shoulder, he almost jumped out of his skin.

“I’m sorry that I wanted to go out,” she whispered, and it was so soft, so vulnerable, that John found the strength to look at her and hold her gaze.

“Don’t you dare,” he said with a low voice. “This is not your fault, do you hear me?”

“It’s just that it was so sunny,” she continued, looking at him with tired eyes. “And sometimes I feel like … I feel like I’m just going crazy locked in this tower. Only ever going out to be Val’s trained monkey during a press conference, or to go on missions.”

“Ava, it’s okay. It was a good idea. You’re not the reason that … that any of this happened.”

“It’s just so stupid, really.” She was gripping his shirt tightly now, a sad smile slowly growing on her lips. “I just keep thinking that this … this whole thing. This Avengers thing. It can be a new start, a way to be part of the world, for real this time. But it’s not that easy, is it?”

John sighed and gently reached his arm around her shoulder to press her side against his.

“No. No, it’s not that easy. But we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

When they walked into the living room, Bob and Yelena were both lying on the couch facing each other, their legs tangled together, one reading a book and the other petting the guinea pig lying on her chest. They both looked up, a smile on their faces and a joke on the tip of their tongues, but everything faded when they saw their friends’ expressions.

“Oh, geez,” Yelena cringed. “Who died?”

“Are you guys okay?” Bob asked, immediately getting up. “I thought you were just going for a run. What happened?”

John and Ava exchanged a look, both looking like they had aged five years between this morning and now. John didn’t want Ava blaming herself any more, and so he was thinking of a way of explaining things that would leave her out of it as much as possible. But he couldn’t even say a word before Yelena’s ringtone echoed through the room. She reached for he phone inside her dark hoodie, and grimaced when she read the name appearing on the screen.

“Should I be worried?” she asked John and Ava, showing it to them.

Valentina.

Oh fuck.

Ava mumbled a soft shit under her breath and looked at him, her eyes wide with worry. John felt like he needed to lie down, but he couldn’t exactly do that right now, so instead, he leaned forward with his hands on his knees. It wasn’t like he was nauseous or anything, but he was starting to feel dizzy. Once again, he felt a soft hand on his right shoulder. But then, another hand, a little larger on his right. When he looked up, he saw Ava gently touching him like before. And he saw Bob, holding him on the other side.

Yelena moved away from them, her phone against her ear. “Valentinaaaa, hiiiii!” It sounded so fake that it almost made John smile for a second. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Almost like clockwork, as soon as Yelena was out of the room, Alexei walked in holding a tablet, an uneasy expression on his face.

“Uh, guys?” His tone was softer than usual, a little hesitant. “I was playing Angry Birds when uh … well … I think Bucky is trying to call us.”

He showed them the screen, with the name Bucky Barnes shining in bright white letters. John felt the last few remains of heat and adrenaline leaving his body. Ava and Bob both squeezed his shoulders a little tighter.

Fifteen minutes later, Yelena was back in the living room, also looking like that phone call with Valentina had aged her five years, and once she was done arguing with Alexei about how to transfer Bucky’s video call to the room’s TV, a very annoyed super soldier appeared on the giant screen for all of them to see.

“I just had a very, very, very exhausting phone call with Valentina,” he said before any of them had the chance to open their mouths.

“She called you before calling me?” Yelena gasped, indignant, crossing her arms. “That is such bullshit, man, you’re not even in New York right now!”

“How is DC by the way?” Alexei asked. To anyone else, it might have sounded like he was trying to change the subject, but John understood him well enough by now to know that he was the kind of man who just said whatever crossed his mind. “Are you staying with Sam Wilson again? Tell him we say hi!”

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. It was an expression that their group knew all too well by now, the one that said: this is my circus … and these are my monkeys …

“If she called you,” Bucky continued after that break, addressing Yelena directly, “I trust that you know why I’m calling, no? In fact …” He shifted his focus to John and Ava, both still standing awkwardly behind the couch, “I trust that these two also know why.”

The silence that followed was heavy, but quickly broken by Bob, who was still standing close to John, as he shyly raised his hand. “Uuuuh … I don’t. I don’t know why you’re calling.”

Bucky touched a few buttons from his side of the screen, and within seconds, a video appeared on the giant TV for everyone in the room to see. John didn’t need to look. He knew exactly what scene was about to unfold in front of everybody’s eyes. But he looked anyway. In fact, it seemed that he couldn’t look away, as the seven-second clips of him pushing and head-butting a young man in public looped again, and again, and again.

“Oh wow,” Yelena laughed. It wasn’t happy or mocking. It was a sound that John had heard her make before when she was nervous. “He really went down. Like, holy shit.”

“This is such bullshit!” Ava yelled, moving away from John to step closer to the screen. She was back to the cold fury that John knew so well, the one she had displayed earlier when she had confronted that blond woman. “They tried to cut it, but you can still clearly see this guy grabbing my arm at the beginning! John was only trying to protect me!”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if it were just the shoving,” Bucky agreed, as his face repapered on the screen. “But you have to admit that the heat-butting was unnecessary, Ava.”

“Like hell it was!” she continued. “You weren’t there, Bucky! This guy was coming back for more! He just wouldn’t let us be! We were … we were surrounded.”

“I understand that crowds can be overwhelming,” Bucky said, sounding more and more tired with each word. “And I know that public relationships can be … tough, for people like us. Honestly, I kind of agree that this guy had it coming. But the fact is that now, we have another video of Walker losing his temper in a crowd of civilians going viral online.”

“Oh come on, Bucky,” Bob interjected, voice a little shaky, but confident. He was still standing close to John. So close that he could feel the heat of his body radiating against him. “You can’t … you can’t compare the two incidents. It’s not even remotely the same thing!”

“I agree,” Bucky nodded, sounding a little softer than before. “I’m not saying that it is. But I’m saying that this will look familiar to many. Valentina read me a lot of the comments already going around online; I’ll spare you the agony.” His eyes focused on John once more. “The image of the shield splattered with blood is never really far away from people’s minds, and you know it.”

He did. He really fucking did. It also occurred to him that he hadn’t said a word since he had made it back to the living room, and that was maybe why everyone, including Bucky, was now staring at him.

Say something. Just fucking say something already. You did this. You fucking did this. Own it. Own it. Be a fucking man for once in your life and own you fucking mistake.

“I … I just didn’t want him to hurt Ava. I’m sorry.”

For what felt like the hundredth time in just a few minutes, Bucky sighed deeply.

“I know John,” he simply said. “I know. Just … just keep a low profile for a while, okay? I won’t be back in New York until next week, but I’ll see what I can do from where I am, okay? Valentina will probably reach out later; she’ll have you make a statement or something. I don’t know. I think there’s some footage from another angle where we really see the guy trying to go for Ava, maybe we’ll use that.”

He pinched his nose once more, before adding: “But this is on you, okay? Jesus, you can’t just … head-butt civilians in the streets. Even when they’re dicks.”

“That’s some bullshit rule, but okay, I guess,” Yelena muttered under her breath, but loud enough for John to catch it.

“There is no need to worry!” Alexei exclaimed. “You can sleep on your two ears, Senator Barnes. We will keep close eye on Walker over here until you come back!” The man’s large hand collapsed against John’s back, right between his shoulder blades. “He is a little feisty, but he means well.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said with a scoff that sounded dangerously like a laugh. “I know.”

And with that, he cut the communication. There was a brief moment of chaos and confusion while Yelena and Alexei argued about how to disconnect the tablet from the TV, and John used it to leave the room as fast as he could. He seemed to go mostly unnoticed, except by Ava, who was herself the champion of leaving the room without being seen. She gently grabbed John as he passed near her and said:

“Thank you for today. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, this guy had it coming.”

And then she simply let him go and walked away, presumably to get a shower and some rest. John left the other way, wanting to stay as far away from the group as possible.

Ava’s words got stuck in his head, and they felt itchy. He knew that she meant well. And if he was honest with himself, a part of him surged with pride at her words. I’ve protected her today. Someone wanted to hurt, to touch her without consent, and I defended her, and I let everyone know what happens if they try to get to her. But another part of him was scared. Scared of that feeling. Scared of how easy it had been for the switch the flip in his mind when he saw that guy coming at them. Instead of a head-butt, he could have grabbed the guy’s hand to twist it and break his fingers. He could have shoved him again, but grabbing him by the throat this time.

Fuck shit fuck fuck fuck shit. Stop. Fucking stop.

As he walked through the tower's corridors, John began hitting his forehead with the palm of his hand, as if he could physically push those intrusive thoughts away. He also realised that he didn’t really know where to go or what to do. The next regular course of action would have been to go take a shower, but he didn’t want to go to his bedroom right now, where people could easily find him. He thought about the gym. Working out always helped him to clear his head.

But working out was something rewarding. The opposite of what he needed right now.

Another thought crossed his mind. I know I left a pack of cigarettes lying around somewhere. It took him little time to find it, shoved inside the pocket of one of his jackets, negligently left hanging across one of the armchairs in the billiards room a few days ago. And the lighter with it, thank god. Walking at a quick pace, he made it to the rooftop, the small balcony just a floor above the large landing pad.

The first breath of fresh air was delicious, and the second of nicotine was even better. John leaned against the guardrail, hollowing his cheeks to inhale the smoke, and watched the streets and the people below.

He tried to relax. He really did. But the woman’s words from earlier were now ringing loudly in his ears.

How dare you show yourself like this? Out in the streets, on magazine covers … do you think we’re stupid? Do you think we all forgot what you did?

The more he thought about these words, the more they got tangled with what Bucky had told him just minutes ago.

The image of the shield splattered with blood is never really far away from people’s minds, and you know it.

Of course, John knew it. How could it not? It was never far from his mind either.

As he focused on the view, he heard the security door opening behind him, and a few awkward steps walking closer to him. His first reflex was to stomp the cigarette, to throw it away, to hide it, but he stopped himself. How ridiculous can I be? Do I really think that this matters? I was filmed attacking a civilian in the streets, and I’m worried about being caught smoking? Besides … John was now familiar with that specific cadence of steps. And he wasn’t surprised when he heard Bob’s low drawl next to him.

“Didn’t take you for a smoker …” he simply said, leaning against the guardrail on his right.

John glanced at him. He was wearing one of those large jumpers that always made him look smaller than he actually was, and well-worn jeans that had clearly seen better days. His dark curls were gently flowing in the wind, covering most of his left eye. But John could still see the … the fucking gentleness in those dark blue eyes. And he had to take a particularly long puff of his cigarette to deal with that.

“I was, and then I wasn’t,” he said, observing the little piece of paper and tobacco between his forefinger and his middle finger. “I started fairly young as a teen, but then stopped when I got serious about football. Didn’t touch one cigarette during my whole time in the army or when Olivia and I started talking about having kids. But I got back into it … uh, recently.”

John kind of hated that he didn’t have to explain why and when he started smoking again, hated that it was obvious that Bob just knew.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked, taking another drag.

“I didn’t,” Bob simply said with a shrug. “I went to your room first, then the gym, then the kitchen … and then, eventually, here.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why were you looking for me?”

The gentleness in Bob’s eyes didn’t falter for a second, but it now made room for worry and apprehension. He shifted his gaze from John to his shoes.

“I can leave. If you want.”

“I don’t.”

The words slipped out of John’s mouth before he could stop them, before he could even hesitate or think about them. He didn’t even know if it was true, if he really wanted Bob to stay and see him wallowing in his misery. When Bob looked at him again, John really focused on his eyes, searching for any hint of pity in them. And he was distraught when he found none.

“I ran into Ava while I was looking for you,” Bob segued not so smoothly. “She told me more about what happened. The whole thing.”

“The whole thing is all over the internet, Bob,” John scoffed, shifting his gaze back to the view of the city.

“She told me about the woman,” Bob continued, moving a little closer to John against the guardrail. “She told me how it all started because this woman walked up to you and just … fucking attacked you, in public.”

“Jesus Christ, she didn’t attack me. She slapped me. I barely felt it.”

“It’s an aggression, Walker!”

“I’m a super soldier, and she was a forty-year-old woman who never lifted anything in her life!” John ran his free hand through his hair, still messy and dirty from his run and everything that came afterwards. “Besides, it didn’t start with her. It started because I didn’t look where I was going and almost got run over by a car because I was too … because I was thinking …”

Instead of finishing his sentence, John took another drag and came close to biting his cigarette in half.

“I think I just never realised how bad it could be for you guys,” Bob said after a few seconds of hesitation. “Out there, I mean. I thought you were beloved. You saved the city for fuck’s sake! You saved it from …”

Yet another sentence left unfinished on that rooftop. Bob held onto the guardrail a little tighter, and John could see the muscles of his jaw and neck tensing. The weird thing was that John had never thought about what had happened six months ago as saving the city from Bob. If anything, they had saved the city and Bob from The Void. Although John knew that Bob and The Void were one and the same, it was difficult for him to keep that in mind when he had literally seen the two of them side by side and beating each other up when they were all trapped in the shame rooms.

“Yeah, well,” John sighed, “Bucky is probably the most popular out of all of us, and he still gets harassed in the streets about all the things he did as The Winter Soldier. It’s just … something that we have to accept once we made the choice to become public figures. We have to be good. We have to be better, because we chose this.” He marked a pause and really thought about what he was saying before continuing. “Honestly, that’s not even true. Ava didn’t choose this life; she was forced into it. Same for Bucky, he never chose to become the Winter Soldier. And Yelena was just a kid when they trained her to become a widow.” He turned back to Bob. “And you … you didn’t choose this life either. When you think about it, Alexei and I are the only ones who really chose this. I mean, I know I did.” And look what I’ve done with it.

He didn’t know what kind of reaction he expected from Bob, but a chuckle definitely wasn’t on his bingo card.

“Don’t be so self-centred, Walker,” he said, laughing softly. It reminded John of the way he had laughed back in the Vault, mere minutes after their first meeting, just before calling him an asshole. “You’re not the only one who chose this life, okay? Yelena didn’t choose to become a widow, but she wanted this new public life, she told me herself. And me? Jesus fucking Christ, Walker … I volunteered as a human subject for a serum that was supposed to make me better. Of course, I couldn’t predict everything that would happen after that, but I still made my choice. They didn’t force me to join this project. I chose this.”

“That’s different,” John snapped, stubbing his cigarette against the wall. “You were taken advantage of. You were alone and vulnerable and …”

“And still a grown ass man making my own choices!” Bob exclaimed, lifting his arm up in the air. “I willingly joined the Sentry project, John. I don’t know why it’s so hard for the rest of you to remember it. I don’t know why you all still think I’m some sort of innocent victim in all of this when I chose this.”

Sometimes Bob was an open book. A stumbling, blushing mess with no poker face who wore every emotion on his sleeves. Other times, he was surprisingly hard to read. Right now, John couldn’t tell if he was angry, sad, or something else entirely. And as he kept looking at him, he still saw that fucking gentleness in his eyes that was starting to drive him crazy.

“Trust me, John,” Bob continued, his tone more collected but still firm. “If there’s one thing that I’m good at, it’s making terrible choices and fucking myself over. Project Sentry is not a misstep for me. It’s a pattern. Do you think it was the first time I sold my body for drugs?”

Oh. Back to being an open book, I see. Bob’s expression changed completely when that last sentence escaped him. His breathing hitched, his face flushed, and he bit his lips as if he could swallow back the words somehow.

“I should get back inside …” he said softly, with another hollow chuckle. “I’m sorry I … shit, I came out here to try to make you feel better, but I just made things worse.”

John’s hand was on Bob’s arm before he could even move away from the guardrail. This gesture, much like the head-butt earlier, was one of pure impulse. And for a moment, John wondered how it was going to be received, if Bob was going to use his super strength to free himself and push him away. But he didn’t. He just stopped moving and looked at him.

“We can …” John began his sentence without knowing how it would end. “We can talk about it. If you want. Sometimes.”

Fuck. This was so weird. John had no idea what he was doing, what he was offering. As he said these words, he realised that he was just mimicking Bob a few days ago. Bob, who had heard him being way too unguarded and vulnerable, Bob, who had still reached out to him, and Bob, who had offered him, instead of judgment or pity, compassion and acceptance. John had no idea what he was doing. But Bob had helped him, so maybe he could help him too.

“You’d listen?”

John was not prepared for how soft and low Bob’s voice was when he asked that question.

“You’d listen to me talk about … Jesus, about letting strangers fuck me raw in back alleys just to get my fix? About sucking dicks just to get high? About being so fucking out of it for days that’d sometimes wake up with someone inside of me without … without even knowing who he was or where I was?”

“I … I would.” John was taken aback for a second, not expecting this level of detail, but he didn’t waver. “For God’s sake, Bob, you know who I am, right? You saw me. You saw what I did two years ago. Hell, you saw what I did this morning.”

John felt like he needed another cigarette right now. But he couldn’t move to reach the pack in his pocket. It was as if holding Bob’s sheepish yet hopeful gaze was taking a hundred per cent of his focus and energy.

“And you saw me in the vault too,” he continued. “You saw me so fucking stressed and scared that for a moment I was willing to leave you behind just because you were an unknown variable in an already fucked up situation, and it was driving me crazy. And yet you just … just keep being so fucking nice to me all the time. And it’s driving me crazy too.”

For a moment, John thought he had fucked this over too. Bob stayed silent for a second, and his mind immediately ran wild. Shit. Shit shit shit. Too much. Back off, John. Shut the fuck up for once. But then … Bob smiled.

“Is it good crazy or bad crazy?” he asked with a crooked grin.

John’s heart skipped a beat. But he returned the smile nonetheless.

“I don’t know. Jury’s still out.”

There was a moment of silence, but a more comfortable one. John reached for his pack of cigarettes, lit another one, and without thinking, handed one to Bob.

“Wait, shit, can you smoke?” he suddenly asked. “With the whole … uh, recovery thing?”

“Nicotine is the lesser evil in my case,” Bob smiled, grabbing the cigarette. “Besides, to be honest, I don’t think that … it’s weird, but I feel like the Sentry serum kind of messes with all of that? It’s like my body just … cleans itself somehow.”

“Yeah … my serum is kind of similar. I can’t get drunk anymore.”

Suddenly, Bob leaned his face a little closer to John’s, and the man felt his entire body tensing before he realised what was happening. Oh right. A light. John brought his lighter to the cigarette hanging on Bob’s lips. It was pretty fucking windy out there, and it took them a minute to successfully light the damn thing. John was completely focused on the task, and so he was surprised to see Bob completely focused on him instead, once he pulled away.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” John was mostly joking, but for one uncomfortable and terrifying second, he wondered if he had gotten some blood on his face when he head-butted the guy earlier.

But Bob was still just smiling at him. And John watched the way his cheeks hollowed, accentuating his cheekbones, and the way his brow lightly furrowed when he took a smoke.

“You’re surprising, you know?” Bob simply said, as if this meant anything. John was thinking of a sarcastic comment when Bob added. “I like people who are surprising.”

In some extent, John always knew that he was susceptible to praise. It wasn’t something he was very comfortable admitting or even acknowledging, but deep down, he knew that nothing in the world motivated him like the confirmation that he did something good. Hearing a superior, a colleague, a friend, or even a lover tell him “Good job, John” could sustain and motivate him for an embarrassingly long time. And he knew the symptoms all too well, his body heating up, the flush on his cheeks, the way his heart would beat just a little louder …

But in John’s book, “surprising” was not a praise. Surprising meant unpredictable, unusual, impulsive … all the things that he dreaded the most in life, and all the things that he hated the most about himself. So why does it feel so fucking good when he says it?

“You’re surprising too,” John said. “Quite possibly the most surprising person I ever met.”

It was only when the sentence was out that he realised that he truly and genuinely meant it as a compliment. Despite all the things he knew about himself, he also knew that Bob was the one person on earth who just kept surprising day by day, minute by minute. From the strange man waking up in a box in the vault, to the man who had survived thousands of bullets before flying off the ground. From the man who had stood up to the embodiment of all the pain and loneliness in the world, to the man who had gently opened his door to him when John needed someone to talk.

“Why are you so nice to me?” John asked before he could stop himself.

“I don’t know,” Bob replied without missing a beat. “Why are you so nice to me?”

“Cut the crap, Bob, I’m not nice to you.”

“Well, okay, maybe not at first, but … you’ve been pretty nice lately. You’re being nice right now. You’ve been nice ever since … ever since I almost destroyed the city. For some reason.”

Bob’s eyes drifted to Manhattan down below, watching the busy streets, full of people who were always so quick to get back to their normal lives these days, no matter what happened to them. John just stared at him. A thought had been eating him away for a few days now. It had been in the back of his mind for weeks, really, but it only truly began to bother him when Bob came to him to apologise for eavesdropping on his conversation with Ava and Yelena.

“Hey Bob … how much do you remember? About what happened that day? Like, none of it? Nothing at all?”

Bob took another drag without detaching his eyes from the view, but John noticed that his hand was lightly shaking when he brought the cigarette to his lips.

“Nothing clear, no. The last thing I remember is uh, shoving Valentina against the wall. I think I was trying to kill her.” Another drag, longer this time. “And then a throbbing pain in the back of my head. And it all went black. And then, next thing I know, I’m waking up on the ground with all of you holding me.” He tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very convincing.

“And nothing in between?” John insisted, somewhat hesitantly. He didn’t want to push Bob too much, but … he also really wanted to know.

“I had … feelings, if that makes sense? I woke up exhausted and aching, as if I had been fighting. Which, uh, I guess had been fighting you guys earlier that day. But it wasn’t … it wasn’t very hard, so I don’t think … fuck, I’m so sorry, Walker. I can’t believe I was fighting you, I can’t believe I was listening to Valentina and …”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay …” John said softly, leaning a little closer to Bob. So close in fact, that their shoulders were now touching. “You didn’t hurt us. Not really. You could have slaughtered us if you wanted to, but you didn’t. In fact, if I remember correctly, Val wanted you to kill us. But you didn’t do it. And now we’re all okay.”

Oh God, I suck at this … I’m really not good at this. I wish Yelena were here …

But against all odds, John’s words seemed to genuinely calm Bob. His breathing slowed down, and his body stopped shaking. John didn’t realise it right away, but he also felt the young man leaning a little more against him.

“Yeah,” he simply said with a small smile. “I guess you’re right. But for the rest I … sorry, I just don’t really remember what happened.”

“Didn’t Yelena tell you?”

“She told me some of it. She told me that … that I became this Void. That I started to turn everyone in the city into shadows. That I dragged everyone into these … shame rooms, she called them. And then she told me that you all willingly came to those rooms to find me and that you helped me to defeat the Void. But that’s … that’s pretty much all she said. Not many details. I still ask her about it sometimes, but she tends to avoid the subject these days.” Bob began biting the nails of his free hands, while the cigarette was slowly burning away in the other. “I think she’s trying to protect me. In her own way.”

“And do you want to be protected in that way?”

Bob turned his head so quickly that it looked like he could have snapped his own neck. John bit his lips, suddenly a little uneasy under Bob’s intense gaze. Was he making a mistake? Was Yelena correct in hiding the details? Would it be triggering for Bob to hear about everything that went down in those rooms? To hear about all the things that they saw? Because this was the thing that was truly eating away at John’s mind. We all saw his shame rooms. We saw his trauma and his fears, and we saw him at his most vulnerable. And he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t remember it. That’s not fair. He should get to choose at least.

“Do you want to know Bob? Do you want to know what … what we saw, when we were in there? What we did? All of us?”

Bob didn’t answer right away. John let him take his time. Let him think. Let him choose. And when Bob slowly nodded, John was ready. He took a deep breath and shifted his body to fully face Bob.

“When we found you, you were in an attic. I didn’t realise it immediately at the time, but then I figured out that it was your childhood home.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Yelena told me that she saw you as a child with your parents. I didn’t see that part, but, uh, I technically met your dad a little later, when we tried to get you out of the house.”

Every colour suddenly disappeared from Bob’s face. His body tensed so suddenly that his hands twitched and he dropped what was left of the cigarette over the guardrail. It would crash somewhere on the helicopter pad below.

“Oh god,” Bob shuddered, and for a second, it sounded like he was about to throw up. “Oh fuck, oh shit, John … you … you saw my dad in there?”

“Yeah, I, uh … I knocked him out.”

Bob stopped trembling just as suddenly as he had started.

“Excuse me?” he asked, his voice still a little shaky. “You … you what? You knocked him out?”

“Yeah. With the shield that you bent.”

“You knocked my father out? With your shield?”

“Well, actually, in the moment, I didn’t even realise that it was your father. I just saw this angry man running at you with … clear violent intent, so I didn’t really think. I just took him out. Yelena told me who it was a few days later.”

Bob’s eyes and mouth were wide open. For a moment, John thought about that man rushing towards him and Ava earlier that day, and although he would feel bad about this realisation later, he understood that if he could go back in time, he would do it all over again. And I certainly wouldn’t mind having another go at Bob’s father. Would knock him twice as hard now that I know.

“Holy shit,” Bob whispered softly. “Fuck, I’m so mad that I can’t remember that.”

“Wait, really?”

“Are you kidding, Walker? I would give a kidney to see you punch the ever-living shit out of my father! I can’t believe I missed that. That would have been so healing in so many ways.” Bob ran his hand through his hair and started laughing. It wasn’t quite relaxed, and a little unhinged, but it was music to John’s ears. “Oh fuck Walker, that’s … that’s … that’s …”

John never learned what it was. Because Bob’s energy seemed to have shifted, and he leaned a little closer to John.

“I want to know the rest.”

“The rest isn’t as fun, Bob.”

“I know. I mean, I figured. But I want to know what happened. What else did you see?”

John took a deep breath. “We saw the lab.”

And Bob let out a deep exhale. “Yeah, that … that makes sense. It would be there.”

“We didn’t see much of what happened there, but … I mean, we went there because Yelena encouraged you to take us to the worst room. She figured it was the only way out, the only true way out. And she was right. As usual. Don’t tell her I said that.”

The shadow of a smile passed on Bob’s face, and he mimed a key locking up his lips. “What did you see in there?”

“Well, we … we saw him. You. The other you. The Void.” John’s cigarette was long gone by now, and he didn’t know what to do with his hands. For a moment, his eyes naturally went to Bob’s hands, still tightly holding onto the guardrail. But he didn’t move. “And what Yelena told you is true, Bob. You fought him, with our help, and we won. You won because you let us help you. I know you say that he’s still there, that you can still feel him sometimes, but we faced him and we won. I’m sure we can do it again. If we must.”

“Not much of a victory if he’s still there, lurking. I think that as long as I exist, he exists too.”

“If that’s the case, then I’m fine with him lurking forever.”

Bob frowned at him, confused. Fuck.

“Shit, that came out wrong. That’s not … what I meant to say is that … I’m happy that you … oh shit.” John began rubbing his face with both hands so hard that it hurt. He only stopped when he heard Bob laughing.

“I know what you meant, Walker.” John peeked from between his hands. Bob was no longer looking at him, his focus back on the city below, but he was smiling. Smiling more genuinely than John had seen him do all day. “I’m sorry if I made a weird face, I just … I wasn’t expecting it. Thank you.”

“Oh. Well. No problem, man.”

It was starting to get cold up there. It was really windy, John was still in his running clothes, and all the dry sweat on his body was giving him goose bumps. I guess I need to get back down there. Take a shower. Eat something. Maybe talk to others, too. He was feeling weird right now. He had no idea if his talk with Bob had made him feel better or worse. Just like with Ava, it was a little worrying how … okay, Bob seemed to be about John’s violent impulses. But he was glad that he could talk to Bob about the Void and the shame rooms. Hopefully, this discussion wouldn’t blow up in their faces a few days later; hopefully, Bob wouldn’t have nightmares and panic attacks about the things that John had told him. But for no, the young looked relieved of all things. Just a little bit lighter on his feet.

“I should really go back inside and take a shower,” John said, moving away from the guardrail and stretching his arms.

“Yeah, I wasn’t gonna say anything, but you stink, man,” Bob said with a smirk as they walked back together.

“Oh, okay, well I’d like to see your ass in the gym or out for a run one of these days. Then we’ll see how you smell.”

“I’m the Sentry. I don’t need training.”

“Well, if I remember correctly, for now you can’t be the Sentry without being the Void as well, so we’ll see how you do with twenty push-ups. I also remember you struggling to climb that elevator by the way, so Sentry or not, you could use a few training sessions.”

“Are you offering?”

John laughed it off. But as they climbed down the stairs and made their way back to the common area, John stopped in his tracks, and Bob stopped with him.

“Everything okay, Walker?”

“I was just thinking … I know it’s probably weird that I’m thinking about that right now with everything that happened today, but … uh … would it still be okay if we talked? Like we did like time, I mean. Would you be cool with that?”

“Of course! Why on earth wouldn’t I be cool with that? I’m the one who offered, remember?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Of course, yeah, I just figured … I just wanted to check. I just wanted to see.”

I wanted to check if you’d still let me. I wanted to be sure that you still felt safe with me. I wanted to know if you still wanted to talk to me and to know me after what I did today, and after all the things that I’ve done before. I know it’s stupid of me to ask when you still keep looking at me with such fucking gentleness every time, but I needed to hear you say it. To be sure. To make it real.

“And I meant what I said earlier. If you ever want to talk about … your stuff, I’d be happy to listen. Well, maybe not happy because I feel like I would get pissed at a lot of people, but I would listen, okay? Just so you know.”

“We’ll see,” was all that Bob said.

See. It seemed to be the keyword to whatever the hell they had going on. John was talking to Bob, just to see. To see if it helped him to figure his shit out. To see if he was really attracted to men after all. To see if he felt comfortable opening up to someone again after losing both Lamar and Olivia. So yeah, John figure. I can wait, Bob. I can wait to see if you want to talk to me.

*

“Are you seeing this shit right now?”

“Yeah, I see them.”

Ava turned to Yelena, sitting next to her on the couch. The blond was back to feeding her guinea pig as if nothing had happened. But Ava couldn’t understand how she could sound so detached when something so juicy was happening in the background.

“And you don’t think there’s something going on?” Ava tried to keep her voice low now that Bob and John were back inside. “John won’t talk to any of us when he gets in his own head, but today Bob follows him outside and they talk for half an hour?”

“We don’t know if they talked for sure,” Yelena said without looking up. “Maybe they just stared at each other awkwardly for thirty minutes like the two emotionally constipated men that they are.”

Ava slouched back on the couch with a pout. “You’re no fun today. Why won’t you gossip with me?”

“Because there’s nothing to gossip about yet”, Yelena sighed. “People can just be friends, you know? Actually, I think it would be good for both of them.”

“Hmmm, but you said yet. So you agree that this could become something worth gossiping about?”

Yelena smiled. “We’ll see.”