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Righteousness without power is just an opinion.
Mel enjoys her job, as unusual as it may seem to her friends and family. Sure, she had the same dreams every child has—doctor, veterinarian, firefighter, pop star, etc—but she was young when all this annual-Avengers-level-threat shit started, so her dreams changed. It’s like that saying about your kids growing up in a world different to the one you grew up in. Mel quickly understood that when aliens can just pop up in your city and people can disappear in the blink of an eye, what you expect out of life changes. So, she works for Valentina in the hope that she can do some real good where it matters and as she’s said, she enjoys her job.
Most of the time. She enjoys her job enough.
She’s lucky to be working for someone as clever and ambitious as Valentina, and with the way Valentina goes through personal assistants and staff, Mel thinks it means something that she’s been kept around this long when so many have failed so quickly. She’s even been promoted, in a sense. Her days are a lot less of fetching Valentina coffee—which she still does every time she sees Valentina in person—and a lot more of handling the New Avengers for Valentina.
The New Avengers all live in the Watchtower though some, like Bucky and Yelena, still keep residences of their own somewhere and most will occasionally leave the tower for days at a time to visit what Mel classifies as “loved ones” on the official forms she fills out in their absence. Valentina is pretty uptight about there being unsanctioned team-ups between the New Avengers and the old crowds they ran with but both she and Mel supposed that it would look bad for them to suddenly drop the people who had supported them in the past.
“No one likes a sellout,” Valentina had said.
Mel does have to handle things like the budget and arranging maintenance for the Watchtower’s residential floors but she was an RA in college, and this really isn’t much different. Sure, her current residents have their quirks—some of them collective, like their refusal to call themselves New Avengers outside of the press and their insistence on being called Thunderbolts, which Mel still doesn’t know the story behind—but all in all, they’re alright most of the time.
Bucky and Yelena operate like team leads. Maybe more like a coach and his team captain. Bucky is the most experienced of the team, has a shared history with much of the older hero generation, and has a positive relationship with the global superpower that is Wakanda. He keeps a clean house when he’s around enough to be checking the team’s bad habits and while Mel can tell he has his qualms about their situation, he respects Mel as a coworker. Yelena has the same Red Room training as her sister, stands to inherit the household name of Black Widow, and does well with teamwork. She’s surprisingly emotionally intelligent and empathetic. Everyone on this team has their own area of expertise, their own skillset, but they respect Bucky’s authority and they believe in Yelena’s belief in them. Unfortunately, Yelena is still quicker to fuck with Mel’s plans than Bucky is but Mel would still place them on a similar level of “okay to work with”.
Ghost—Ava, as Mel has been gathering the courage to call her—is competent, and lives and works quietly. As Mel has learned since the New Avengers Initiative went public i.e. since it was created, Ava resents drawing attention to herself, even when she’s struggling. It’s all part of her devil may care, I don’t give a fuck attitude. This is good for Mel’s job but Mel doesn’t want to consider the implications outside of that.
John Walker is also competent, to be fair, and he’s come a long way from the loose cannon he was at the beginning of his work with Valentina but he still lacks finesse at times. He’s like a war hammer: efficient but blunt. Mel still internally winces at much of what he says but he’s got that pack mentality from being in the military and being in a family that has Mel pretty confident he won’t suddenly snap and go rogue.
Alexei Shostakov is hard for Mel to read, in a social sense. She can rarely tell if he’s being serious or not—and she supposes it doesn’t really matter. He’ll say things like oh, you remind me of my wife, you two are so smart, she’s a Mel too, and she isn’t sure if it’s some of his “team dad” method of bonding or if he’s hitting on her. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the effects of the super serum that make him an asset, it’s his morale and his experience being a national hero in the public eye. He’s almost always on board with whatever media stunt Valentina comes up with, though Mel suspects that he’s in it for entirely different reasons. She’ll take what she can get.
Bob is… Bob.
Sure, Mel may sometimes feel like Valentina has abandoned her to these people but she reminds herself to be grateful that she’s trusted with something this complicated.
Grateful. She’s grateful.
Their current mission is simple, just a little breaking and entering into a compound on American soil. They’ve already had a briefing but Mel makes sure to recap details in the jet as they fly over. Bucky and Yelena are the ones to fly them places, which will never not be weird for Mel.
She mostly goes over the details to occupy herself. Illogically, Bob is a nervous flyer and his anxiety is making Mel think of what might happen should he get too in his feelings, making Mel think of the kill switch and his body collapsing to the Watchtower floor and all that happened after—so. Distraction.
“Let’s just hope this one doesn’t come with a furnace,” Walker says.
Bob lets out a high-pitched and nervous-sounding laugh. Mel would be worried if she didn’t think that his laugh sounded like that half the time.
“Oh, come on, she wouldn’t pull the same trick twice,” Bucky calls back from the cockpit. “It’d be far too gauche.”
Mel laughs politely—politely, because she’s not supposed to find that funny—and continues.
“So, Yelena, you’ll go in first and follow the route highlighted here,” Mel says, sending a file to the tablet Yelena is using for this mission. “Once you give us the all-clear, Walker and Ghost will go in, get what we need, and rendezvous with Yelena, after which you three will head towards the south extraction point. Congressman Barnes—”
“I didn’t agree to that codename,” Bucky cuts in. Yelena laughs at him.
“—and the Red Guardian will remain outside patrolling the compound unless they’re needed as back-up, at which point they’ll be cleared for non-lethal engagement—”
Bucky scoffs. Alexei makes a noise of resigned acceptance.
“And Bob will be here with me—”
“I still think he should be with us,” Walker says at the same time that Yelena says, “He could’ve stayed in the tower, instead of you dragging him out here.”
Mel blinks, ignores the looks Yelena and Walker give each other, and focuses on what’s easier to address. “You want Bob in the field with you?” Mel raises an eyebrow at Walker.
Walker looks like he would shrug if it wasn’t unprofessional. “We’ve all seen what he can do. I’m not saying I want a repeat of the whole Sentry-Void situation, but Bobby here should be able to keep up with us. Barnes has been training him. It’s kind of a waste to just keep him sitting around, isn’t it?”
Mel glances at Bob, who is managing to watch everyone intensely while making eye contact with no one.
“It’s too soon,” Yelena says. “He’s only here as a glorified assistant—”
Mel scoffs.
“It’s demeaning!” Yelena insists. “We should trust that Bob will be alright without us looking over his shoulder.”
“Oh, but you don’t trust him to watch your back?”
“Okay!” Mel claps her hands together and smiles. “This sounds like a conversation we’ve been having for a while, so let’s just put a pin in that for later.”
Mel rushes back to her tablet and her work, and if it seems like anyone is disengaged, she ignores it.
When they land and the team stands to finish gearing up, Walker flatly says, “Goooo, Thunderbolts!” while lamely shaking a fist in the air.
Alexei claps him on the shoulder and bellows, “Thunderbolts!” loudly enough to have everyone wincing, not just those with super hearing.
“Still don’t know what that’s about,” Mel mutters to herself.
Alexei loudly says, “What? You don’t know West Chesapeake Valley Thunderbolts?”
Ava cuts in with, “It was Belova’s peewee soccer team, they were awful, she loved it, the name is a joke—” and the words are choked with urgency, like she’s trying to head something off.
What follows is Alexei spouting off anecdotes about Yelena’s childhood, followed by Alexei and Yelena arguing over the team sponsor, and Walker joining in with, “I looked it up and…” while Ava rolls her eyes and Bob looks positively delighted.
“I played soccer,” Mel finds herself saying. Instead of the words getting lost in the noise, they bring about a silence in which the New Avengers turn to look at her. Mel refuses to falter. “I played all through school, even in college for a while before I busted my knee.”
They look surprised to have learned something about her. She can see Bucky, Yelena, and even Walker mentally filing that away while Ava just says, “Interesting,” before moving on. Alexei compliments Mel on her athleticism and how admirable her dedication was, and he gives condolences for her injury and what must have been her promising career as a soccer player.
Bucky is the one to rally them with a, “Time to go, team.”
While Mel monitors the team’s journey through the compound and what’s being said over comms, Bob keeps trying to nervously chat with her. He does most things nervously when it comes to these missions, especially when he has to sit back at the Watchtower and wait for everyone to return—wait to see if everyone would return. That’s why Mel thought things may be better if he was closer to the action without actually being in the action.
Besides, Valentina has this idea about everyone pulling their weight and since the Sentry is out of commission, they decided to try having Bob on the back end of things. After all, he already knows what the rest of the team does. It’s not like they would have to bring in someone new who didn’t have the full picture.
Mel decides to throw Bob a bone. “Are Walker and Alexei still mad at each other?”
She’s referring to what happened on Monday, when Mel had been at the Watchtower to supervise some maintenance on the water pipes and had then been offered some of the takeout Yelena and Bucky had gotten for everyone. Mel accepted because she really was hungry and had missed her lunch break because she’d had to help Valentina rearrange her schedule for two weeks from now because of some hearing or business meeting—it doesn’t really matter.
Mel was sitting and eating takeout with the New Avengers when it became clear that at one end of the table, Alexei was trying to give Walker advice about his failed marriage by talking about his own marriage—his fake marriage to Melina Vostokoff, a former Black Widow operative, when they were undercover in the States back in the 90s—and everyone but Alexei could see that it was not going very well. It took Yelena giving her father the heads up of, “Dad, John is about to punch you,” for the idea of it to get through Alexei’s head.
“No, he’s not!” Alexei had said. Then he took a good look at Walker’s face and threw his hands up. “I say too much. Apologies.”
Now with Bob sitting in the copilot’s seat of the jet, his eyes tracking every dot on the map representing an Avenger, he looks at her with confusion and then says, “Oh, yeah, no, they’re good,” almost like it would be silly for them to still be upset.
God only knows how things carry on in that tower.
Mel doesn’t hold it against him though. She likes Bob, sometimes. He has the brownest blue eyes she’s ever seen; he almost took out the whole of New York City. He’s the only one that caught the Bryce Tankthrust reference Mel made when talking about Valentina and he’d lit up like a Christmas tree when he caught it. She supposes friendships have been built on less.
Not that any of these people are her friends.
The sound of heavy gunfire comes through the comms. Bob’s eyes widen and Mel immediately calls out, “Status report.”
Ava is the one to report back, stating that they ran into some security guards. There was some comment about Walker’s shield, which was still bent because Bob hadn’t figured out how to fix it. Bob watches Mel as Ava speaks and once Ava is done, Bob asks, “How can I help?” in a helplessly earnest and urgent tone.
Mel hesitates, trying to think of something he could do that wouldn’t get in her way. Something that would help but not interrupt.
“Pull up the blueprints,” she says. “Help guide Ava and Walker somewhere they can lose the guards. Tell Yelena where the breakers are.”
“Blowing things up is not always the solution!” Walker says over the comms, slightly out of breath.
“It’s what you people are good at!” Mel says, more than a little of her frustration bleeding through. “Get it together, people.”
She can see Bob side-eyeing her but she doesn’t have to answer to him or his doubt.
As Mel monitors Bucky and Alexei’s path into the compound as well as where Yelena is reporting seeing more security while demanding to find out why this is happening, Bob and Walker get into a back-and-forth she can’t really keep track of. However, she remembers the HR meetings she had to lead in the first few days of the New Avengers, when they were all trying to work out the team dynamics and had to address some of the spats they’d all had in the bunker, and how Yelena had the impression that Walker was ganging up on Bob.
Mel elbows Bob and says, “Ignore him, and do what you need to do.”
He looks surprised at her but he complies.
No matter what, things can always get worse.
“Uh, Mel?”
“Yes, Bob?” Mel turns to him when he doesn’t answer immediately.
Bob is leaning with his nose about an inch away from the monitor where they’ve pulled up the security feeds. “Is it just me or does that look like they’re coming over here?”
He points at two people in tactical gear who are making their way down one of the trails leading out to where they’ve stowed the jet in a clearing among some trees.
“Shit.” Mel takes account of the team’s progress. “Okay. I’ll head towards here,” she says, pointing at a spot on the trail map they have, “so that I can intercept them if the others don’t make it back to the jet in time.”
“Intercept them and do what?”
“Play some kind of official and stall. If they’re heading out here, they already know we have the jet. I’ll just try to come up with a really good reason for why it would be out here that won’t get us in hot water.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Bob, you think I got this job and I don’t know how to act my ass off? My boss is a politician. Besides, I doubt anything is going to happen.”
“What on earth happened to you two?” Yelena demands.
They’d all made it back to the jet somehow—in Mel’s case, this unfortunately meant being scooped up by Alexei on Yelena’s order as they ran past her—and now that they were in the air, coasting on autopilot, they were hashing out what exactly had gone down tonight.
“What happened in the compound?” Mel returns. “You said we were in the clear. Being chased by no less than ten guards doesn’t exactly sound clear to me.”
“To the best of my knowledge, we were.”
“This is your best?”
“Oh, come on,” Alexei says placatingly. “It was honest mistake.”
“Besides, no one asked you to get yourself in front of two security guards,” Walker says, eating a protein bar he’d stashed somewhere on the jet, getting crumbs on the floor.
“Is that s’mores-flavored?” Bob asks.
Walker shrugs.
“I was buying time,” Mel says.
“You shot them in the knees,” Bob says. His gaze darts away when they make eye contact.
“To buy time. You think I shot them by accident?”
“No one thinks that,” Bucky interjects. “You know what I think? I think we all just need to cool down. At the end of the day, this was a success.”
Mel scoffs as she witnesses them all devolve into cracking jokes. A part of her knows that this is for the better, that there’s no use in field agents who can’t let go of something gone wrong, but there is a spectrum and the other end of it isn’t that great either.
“Uh, Mel?”
“What, Bob?”
He points to her phone, which has just let a call from Valentina ring out. There’s a moment of stillness that continues because Valentina doesn’t call her back. Bob looks a little pale.
Yelena and Walker’s voices rise as they bicker and Alexei bellows with laughter at the sight of them.
Mel turns to them without thinking and says, “Can you shut up?”
The silence in the rest of the jet comes quickly. Mel tries not to balk. This is what she wanted after all, isn’t it?
“What happened today,” Mel says, “can’t happen again, okay? The New Avengers haven’t been around for very long and we’re all working double-time to do anything that will improve your image, give you credibility. You need to take this seriously. This isn’t shadow ops anymore.”
“Okay, Mel,” Yelena says, her arms crossed as she sits sprawled in her seat.
Mel frowns. “I’m not Valentina but I am still your boss… one of your bosses, and you all need to respect that.”
“Yeah, we know that, Mel,” Walker says, scoffing.
Mel can’t tell if this is his usual brand of bullshit or not.
“You’re a lot less to deal with than Valentina,” Ava concedes. “Far from the worst I’ve had to deal with, even back when I was with SHIELD.”
The rest of the team all mumble their agreement. She thinks she can hear Bucky mutter “Hydra” under his breath. Mel wonders if she’s going crazy, if this is all something that she’s blown up in her head.
Then, she thinks, No, I’m definitely not the crazy one here.
Back at the Watchtower, Mel gets off the phone with Valentina and walks out to see the New Avengers all gathered in the living room.
“Everything okay?” Bucky asks.
Mel swallows and nods. “Yeah, everything is good. Valentina has some words about the clean-up but tonight was a success, so… go Thunderbolts, I guess? I don’t know.”
Alexei cackles in delight while Yelena and Bob indulge Mel with some small cheers and applause. Walker joins in on the clapping.
“This calls for a meal, yes?” Alexei suggests. “To celebrate our glorious victory over the enemies of today.”
Bob and Ava call out suggestions. Bucky is quick to veto some of their suggestions.
Bob asks, “Is Mel coming?”
“Do you want to come, Mel?” Walker asks, turning to look at her.
Mel considers it. She hasn’t eaten dinner yet and she likely won’t until after her commute home. This option does seem faster and maybe it’ll allow her to pick up some more details from tonight’s happenings to include in her official report to Valentina later.
Mel shrugs. “Why not?”